US Officer: "Why I Disagree With Bush’s War For Oil"

by Pip Hinman

Brayden joined the US army not thinking he’d ever be sent to war. He certainly hadn’t entertained the idea that he would turn against a war.

He served as a commissioned officer, rising to the rank of captain, from June 2000 to November 2004. Originally part of an Air Defence Artillary combat unit based in Germany, Brayden was sent to Iraq in May 2003 and spent 14 months there.

His company of 125 soldiers, one of six that made up the 1st Armored Division’s Main Support Battalion, led re-supply convoy missions all over the city from its base at the Baghdad International Airport.

Brayden was in charge of planning and supervising the supply needs, which included water, food, packaged petroleum products, uniforms, weapons and medical equipment to more than 30,000 soldiers.

But soon after arriving in Iraq, Brayden began to have his doubts about the reasons for being there. Below, he talks to Green Left Weekly’s Pip Hinman about his time in Iraq.

What was your impression of how ordinary Iraqis viewed the US military?

The only Iraqis I was able to talk to were those who worked for the US-led coalition, who are admittedly not a representative sample. However, after the fall of Saddam’s government I witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of locals lined up for work with the US army and coalition forces. These men and women came looking for work as interpreters and manual labourers for tasks such as cooking, waste disposal and laundry services. My own battalion employed a few dozen Iraqis to work sorting parts and goods in our warehouses, and we contracted through a local sheik for a “platoon” of 25 Iraqi truck drivers to drive 40-foot trailers to augment our transportation capabilities.

All of the Iraqis I met rejoiced in the fall of Saddam and his regime; they each had a personal story about how Saddam’s government had murdered, tortured or abused someone close to them.

Was there a specific episode which made you doubt your participation in this war?

The specific moment came in April 2004, with the start of the Shiite uprising led by Moqtada al Sadr. Lieutenant Paul Bremer, the American viceroy and director of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, ordered the closure of al Sadr’s printing press. This provided a rallying point and battle cry for al Sadr’s forces, and began the Shiite uprising that the US forces had been fearing since we arrived in Iraq.

Moqtada al Sadr had been calling for Iraqis to expel the infidels since the fall of Saddam; his newspaper had published polemics calling for death to US and coalition forces until we had left his country. It was because of these repeated messages that Bremer ordered a one-month shut-down of al Sadr’s press.

The irony of a US administration, which ostensibly came to Iraq to spread free speech and democracy, shutting down a printing press because we did not like what it was saying caused me a great deal of reflection.

Suddenly, we were facing an entirely new war; al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” seemed to materialise out of thin air, wearing black uniforms with yellow armbands. Rather than battling the underground remnants of Saddam’s regime and some foreign insurgents that had crossed over the border, we were now facing a group that represented the overwhelming majority of Iraqis.

My division, the 1st Armored Division, had in that first week of April already completed the Transfer of Authority to our replacements from the 1st Cavalry Division. My own unit was scheduled to leave Baghdad on April 15. Some of our division’s battalions had already made their way to the port in Kuwait to return to Germany. Those units were told to come back, and our Main Support Battalion was told to stay put. The 1st Armored Division received orders extending us in Baghdad for an additional three months, breaking a promise that we would only be deployed for 365 days.

US intelligence then went into full attack mode; the intelligence briefings we received every morning started referring to the Mahdi Army, along with the rest of the insurgents struggling against us, as “anti-Iraqi forces”. This brilliant bit of Pentagon propaganda made me laugh, since these forces were, clearly, homegrown Iraqis.

I asked how could they be “anti-Iraqi” if they were, in fact, Iraqis themselves? Of course, what the Coalition meant is that these forces were arrayed against us, and since we know what is best for Iraqis everyone against us is, therefore, anti-Iraqi.

We also received new “rules of engagement”, which stated that we could fire on an entire crowd of civilians if we could identify them harbouring a member of al Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

These rules were later amended, but the damage to our cause was done.

We came to Iraq to take out Saddam and, we were told, to free the Iraqi people from tyranny. Now, we were fighting the same people that we had come to help, and my feelings only intensified as I soon saw US troops fighting in the holy Shiite city of Najaf.

But my opposition to the war had been building as early as May 2003 when we hit the ground.

What were the triggers to this?

From a purely military standpoint, the piss-poor planning. For instance, the entire 1st Armored Division was deployed to Iraq with green woodland-camouflaged vehicles, rather than the desert-camouflaged tanks and HMMWVs used by other units.

My own battalion did not receive the complete bullet-proof body armour set used by the Infantry until late August 2003. None of our wheeled vehicles had any sort of “up-armor” protection plates either, and would not until we were well past half-way into our deployment. I wondered why, if we were going to start a war with a country, we did not wait until our own forces were better prepared for the undertaking.

While leading convoys all over the Baghdad city grid, I was initially shocked at the dearth of US and coalition troops guarding the roads. I expected that under an occupation, I would see a tank on every corner, and an US patrol walking every city block. Instead I was greeted by mostly empty highways, meaning that our 16-truck-long supply convoys were mostly unsecured from the moment we left our base to our arrival at another base 30 to 45 minutes later.

This lack of troops directly contributed to the strength of the insurgency that continues to this day. The Bush administration cavalierly disregarded the advice of some like former Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, who testified before Congress in 2002 that an Iraq occupation would require several hundred thousand troops, and yet we invaded with a force of just 120,000 soldiers.

Another sad decision came in May 2003 when US viceroy Paul Bremer famously dissolved the Iraqi Army. Under the plan of Bremer’s predecessor, a retired American Lieutenant General named Jay Garner, the Coalition of the Willing would employ the 400,000-strong Iraqi Army in helping secure the country.

Indeed, many US generals in Iraq - most famously the commander of the 101st Airborne Division Major General David Petraeus - had begun to work closely with their Iraqi counterparts. The coalition had also continued to pay the salaries of the Iraqi officers and troops, until Bremer’s decision to dissolve the army and start from scratch. This decision sent hundreds of thousands of angry Iraqi men with guns home and forced them to find other means of providing for their families.

The Iraqi people I met want the same thing for their children and themselves as we do: safe streets, good schools, clean drinking water, and a healthy economy. I learnt from my time in Iraq that while the locals initially rejoiced in Saddam’s fall, eventually they came to blame us for bringing the foreign terrorists into Iraq.

Did you talk about your growing concerns with your friends?

By and large the attitude was that we all have a job to do, and we should just focus on doing it. Moreover, we are trained not to bring political opinions into calculations.

However, one of my close officer friends was completely against the war, and felt that it was purely driven by economics and a desire to control Iraq’s oil.

Another officer friend, hailing from “red-state America”, completely supported the US president and the Iraq war. He was a typical “true-believer”. In May 2004, when sarin gas was found in the unexploded shell of one of the road-side bombs, this friend said it was evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and justification for our presence in the country.

Do you think there’s a growing sentiment inside the army in Iraq that it should leave?

Yes, though not for the reasons you might expect. There is a strong sentiment among the rank and file that the Iraqi people are just not worth the blood of US boys and girls, that the Iraqis are lazy and corrupt. This is not my opinion. I don’t think we should be there.

What is your assessment of the recent Iraqi elections?

The paternalistic [belief] that the Iraqis cannot govern themselves without US and coalition forces is a fallacy. The Kurds in the north, of course, have enjoyed a de facto independence and have had self-government for over a decade. That Kurdish independence was hard-earned, and their pershmega would defend it to the death against any designs from Sunni or Shiite.

But one really needs look only as far as Moqtada al Sadr’s uniformed “Mahdi Army” militia to see that the Shiites are just as capable of organisation. We may not particularly like how they are organised, but I’m sure the British did not really like George Washington’s upstart colonial militiamen either. Suffice to say, the nascent United States did fine once left to its own devices, and so too would the Iraqi people.

What the Coalition wants, however, is a democracy that looks like our own, and they are terrified that the majority Shiites will set-up an Iran-style theocracy in Iraq. This fear is unfounded; the conditions in Iraq are very different to those which produced the Iranian revolution of 1979. And in the final analysis, if that is the government the Iraqis desire, it is not our place to tell them no.

What do you think should happen to those responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere?

What offends me about the Abu Ghraib torture is that the US army and Bush administration have made scapegoats of the lower enlisted soldiers, all of whom have testified that they were following orders. No officer or person of any consequence has been held accountable for what went on in that dark prison.

Since the Nuremberg trials, the world has rejected the “just following orders” defence, and rightfully so. Yet in the military, the lower enlisted are ingrained not to ever question authority until they have a position from which to do so. It is the officers and non-commissioned officers who are responsible for what happens under their noses.

To my knowledge, the army has tried and convicted only two non-commissioned officers, a sergeant and staff sergeant, for their roles in the prison scandal. The other five that the army is holding accountable are all of the rank of specialist or below; four pled guilty, and two are awaiting trial.

Beyond that, the army has relieved some officers and senior non-commissioned officers from their commands, most famously the female Brigadier General that was in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade that ran Abu Ghraib. But none have been tried in a court of law and held accountable, and as far as I know the army has no plans to do so.

As a former officer, I find this disgraceful. The officers at the top only have the job of supervision - you have to “inspect what you expect”, as one of my old first sergeants used to say. If officers are doing their jobs, talking to the troops, walking the grounds, seeing things with their own eyes, keeping their ears open, there is no way the tortures that occurred at Abu Ghraib could have happened without their knowledge, and they are guilty, at the very least, of complicity.

The US Army is not like the British Army, with its separate messes for officers and enlisted. Ours is a much more egalitarian system, where the officer is expected to associate with his soldiers.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were so horrendous I find it beyond belief that soldiers would not talk about it over dinner at the mess hall or while working on their vehicles. “Hey man, I shoved a nightstick up a haji’s ass while forcing him to masturbate in front of a barking dog!” Any officer worth his salt should have heard those things, and gone to check them out. If these officers were truly unaware of what went on, then they are incompetent and should be tried for dereliction of duty.

What do you make of the so-called "war on terror"?

The current “war on terror” has started its descent into a war on civil liberties and thrown good sense out the window. The US seems to have forgotten the lessons of the 1960s when the administration and FBI shamefully obtained wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr. by labelling him a communist and an enemy of the state.

We should never forget that what separates Western democracies from other forms of government. In our system, the individual does not exist to serve the state; rather the state exists to serve its citizens, and derives its power from the consent of the governed. But when the current US administration argues that it can lock people up and hold them without trial just because it says so, then we have fallen a long way from the ideals of our founders.

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