Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Washington Post
March 19, 2008
Pg. 10
By Josh White et al.
A soldier's mother
When Peggy Buryj sent her son off to war, she was in favor of the mission but was "scared to death" for Jesse. She knew that soldiers were dying but also that her son felt a deep responsibility to defend his country.
"He would have been pissed off if there wasn't a war to go fight," said Buryj, of Canton, Ohio. "He was a warrior."
Buryj's worst fears were realized on May 5, 2004. A panicked Iraqi drove his dump truck through a military checkpoint in Karbala, eliciting gunfire from U.S. and Polish soldiers. Pfc. Jesse Buryj was shot in the back. The Army at first ruled it a car accident but months later acknowledged it was a case of friendly fire.
Peggy Buryj remains committed to the conflict nonetheless.
"Yes, I am frustrated beyond belief with this war, but I still think it's the right thing to be doing," she said. "People think I have to justify this war just because my son died in it. That's not the case. I think we must secure that area of the world and make it stable, otherwise my grandson is going to be over there."
"We have to eradicate our enemies," she said. "That's where the terrorists are."
A young man, who knew her son well, recently asked Buryj whether he should go to fight in Iraq.
"You have to do what you're called to do," she told him. "My son stood for the honor and the dignity that should have been given him in his death. I would never stop anyone from going, because down deep inside I know my son did the right thing."
-- Josh White
***
A student protester
He could have gone to Cabo San Lucas as some of his classmates did, or even just home to Long Island. Instead, sophomore Robby Diesu stayed in his near-empty Catholic University dorm over spring break to paint banners, update a Web site listing protest locations and put his "body into the war machine to stop it, really get in there and mess with its sprockets."
Diesu, 19, helps lead "Our Spring Break," activities designed to encourage students to spend their vacation in Washington on "spring break to end the war."
He was just a freshman in high school when the conflict began. Now, after falling "in love with the peace movement," he's fluent in Iraq civilian death statistics, mounting war cost figures and the number of Iraqi refugees. "If I believe in something, I want to make sure I know what I'm talking about," he said.
Last week, Diesu and fellow spring breakers were parked in front of the Senate's Hart building, issuing "stop-loss" orders to Congress. ("We decided since Congress refuses to stop the war, we're going to tell them not to leave until they do.") The group of more than 20 students, standing in the street with coffins draped with American flags, was arrested for "incommoding -- basically stopping traffic," he said.
It's sometimes hard to get his classmates to listen, but he's still pressing others to join him for action. "We're youth; we have the most free time ever.
"This is our movement, too," he said. "It's not just for old white women."
-- Rachel Dry
***
A disillusioned soldier
Army Capt. Derek Bennett was among the first soldiers to enter liberated Iraq in April 2003. His battalion of the 1st Armored Division was told that its deployment would last about 90 days.
"We were just going to do some peacekeeping, do some patrolling, and then we'd be going home," Bennett said. "At the 90-day mark that summer, we were told it was looking more like six months. . . . About six weeks later, they finally published an order that said, 'Okay, it's 365.' . . . An entire year. It's difficult to wrap your mind around."
When it was over and his bags were packed, Bennett was extended again. The year became 15 months. This week, after finishing his second tour, he will leave the Army for good.
A small-town Michigan boy, he was the first in his family to finish college. West Point, Class of 2000. Now, as he ends his military career at Fort Bliss, Tex., he isn't sure what to do next. Maybe business school or a corporate job, or perhaps work on Capitol Hill.
He is 30 years old and single. "It's hard to meet somebody and spend a couple of months and then say, 'I'll be gone for a year, but don't worry, I'll have e-mail.' "
Many of his soldier buddies think he has let them down. "In Army culture, if you're not wearing boots until you die, you've cheated the country," he says. "If you get out at the five-year mark . . . you're just about a terrorist. If you get out at 20, you're just a communist or a traitor."
In a plum job for much of last year on the staff of Gen. David H. Petraeus, "I got the opportunity to see every career path available to me 30 years down the road," Bennett said. If he continued in the Army, "I was going to spend a lot of it in Iraq" or "making PowerPoint slides."
His first night back for his second tour, in the fall of 2006, the 120-soldier company he commanded went on an after-dark mission in Mosul. They had four uparmored Humvees, were short of weapons and ammunition, and their radios didn't work. "It's that little ankle-biter that saps at your confidence, when you don't even have ammunition."
Later, "I started looking around and talking to Iraqis and realized that since I left in July '04 -- I'm not blaming anybody -- the same problems remained. The same shortages of electricity and fuel and arms for the Iraqis. They still had trash and sewage in the street. You just wonder: What have we been doing?
"This isn't like World War II. There's no VJ Day, no sailor kissing a girl when he comes home. This is somebody saying that trend lines indicate a sustainable level of violence. That's not a great feeling."
-- Karen DeYoung
***
An adviser
Meghan O'Sullivan wasn't fooling herself when she helped President Bush craft a new strategy for Iraq that became known as the "surge." The war was going badly, and the idea of sending more troops and shifting focus to civilian security seemed dicey. But at least it offered a chance for success. "All the other options," she recalled, "were about managing defeat."
Few have been more closely involved in the Iraq project than O'Sullivan. At 33, the Oxford graduate headed to Baghdad to serve in the original occupation authority and helped write the transitional law that led to a new constitution. Shunning security, she slipped out of the Green Zone beneath a head scarf to check conditions and to meet Iraq's emerging leaders before returning to Washington as Bush's deputy national security adviser.
With violence down, "cautious optimism" has returned, she said. "In 2006, a lot of Iraqis did not have a lot of hope. And what I'm hearing now is they're getting that hope back."
She acknowledges enormous challenges and costly lessons: "There are many, many lessons. The experience has been very sobering for all of us involved. . . . I've learned there are no easy choices with Iraq. . . . Every choice has serious downsides. They've all got complex consequences and unintended ramifications."
Among the lessons she has drawn: The United States must devote enough troops and civilian resources to match its ambitions. And, she said, "there's no substitute for security. We figured that out the hard way."
O'Sullivan left the White House last fall to teach at Harvard and now sorts through her thoughts in the cloistered environs of Cambridge, Mass. She has not returned to Iraq since September, but it is never far away. "It's hard for me to imagine in my life that a day will go by that I don't think about it," she said.
-- Peter Baker
***
A culture warrior
BAGHDAD -- The images he has seen influence his art.
The severed leg in the garden of the Iraqi Artists Union. The bullet hole in his 17-year-old son's bedroom window. The tall concrete walls that surround his Baghdad art gallery. But these days, Qasim Sebti is thinking about the books.
In the early days after the invasion, he saw the looting and burning at the Fine Arts Institute, and a man standing on a stack of art books to steal a fluorescent light bulb. Sebti, 55, now makes collages out of the spines and covers of torn and dirty books, scraps that "you would kick if you saw it in the street."
Sebti, who owns the Dialogue Gallery, has lost count of how many friends have fled the country or stayed and died. He has let go all but one gallery employee. But he will not leave Iraq or close his gallery.
"This is the last castle to defend," he said. "I'm the last man of the Mohicans. I'm the leader. I must stay. I can help the others do the art, away from the religious styles, away from the political. I'm fighting by my own special way. I'm fighting by culture and art."
He shudders to think about the new Iraqi government -- "50 percent Iranians," he said -- and what he considers its disregard for culture and its lack of interest in anything but artistic homage to Islam.
"The blue, the black, the red. These three colors entered our lives," he said. The red is the blood. The black represents the women cloaked head-to-toe in abayas, as though in perpetual mourning. "The blue is the sadness inside the people. This is the new Iraqi palette for the artists."
He adds: "Can I ask my President Bush -- your president and my president -- can I ask him something before he leaves Iraq? Read our history well, and apologize."
-- Joshua Partlow
***
An infantry officer
Paul Rieckhoff spent nearly a year walking patrols as an infantry officer in Baghdad. He saw soldiers dying, his squad leader lost his legs, and he witnessed problems with missing supplies. But when he returned to the United States in 2004, the biggest news story was that Janet Jackson's breast was exposed during the Super Bowl halftime show.
To Rieckhoff, 33, an Amherst College graduate who joined the Army Reserves in 1998, the contrast highlighted one of the biggest problems of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: The American public was largely disengaged, while a small set of soldiers and families bore the burdens of combat.
"The lack of involvement on the part of the American people is unprecedented," said Rieckhoff, who volunteered for active duty after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and went to Iraq as a National Guardsman, with the Third Infantry Division in April 2003. "And it's my biggest criticism of the president: He has never asked the American people to do anything."
Rieckhoff created Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), which he said now has about 85,000 members and an annual budget of about $2 million. It focuses on improving mental health care and conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, obtaining a new GI bill and resolving the fate of thousands of Iraqi interpreters now targeted by insurgents.
"We saw firsthand that these Iraqi interpreters were our eyes and ears on the battlefield," he said. "These folks stood up to help us, and now we are leaving them hanging."
Rieckhoff, a former Wall Street analyst and high school football coach, remains in the National Guard. "I have friends who have been there three times, four times," he said. "I am in danger of going back, but that is nothing [like what] my buddies are facing. That toll on their families is nothing the American people face."
-- Michael Abramowitz
***
An Iraqi politician
BAGHDAD -- Adel Abdul Mahdi began his life in the new Iraq with a gag in his mouth.
The man who would become one of Iraq's vice presidents was captured by U.S. troops less than a month after the invasion, as he left a meeting in the Republican Palace with other returning exiles. He was shoved, insulted, handcuffed and held for nearly 24 hours, he recalled.
The next five years would bring moments much worse for the Shiite leader, who considers himself less a politician than a fighter for Iraq's freedom. He says he has survived an average of four assassination attempts per year.
A prominent figure in the Shiite political party now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Mahdi was a leading candidate to become prime minister until Nouri al-Maliki seized the post. After the second bombing of the holy Shiite shrine in Samarra last June, and amid the sectarian violence paralyzing the Iraqi government, Mahdi resigned, but ultimately held onto his job.
"Everything blew up in 2003," he said. "Nothing was in place."
"We went to the climax of things. And a radical change took place," he added. "Now people are sitting in the same room around the same table discussing very difficult issues such as federalism, such as democracy."
What Iraq needs now, he said, is an infusion of new ideas -- ways to keep the lights on, pump oil from the ground, build up the Iraqi army to take over for the American soldiers.
"We are trying to accommodate ourselves to a new situation, and this will only be done by time. Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Turkmen trying to work together, that was a dream in Iraq, now it's real," he said. "So now we are talking. . . . It is not efficient. We agree. But things are getting much better. One year ago, people were fighting. Now, well, they are fighting in words. This is much better than fighting."
-- Joshua Partlow
***
A U.S. diplomat
BAGHDAD -- For U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, any measure of the American enterprise in Iraq must include the potential price of a "traumatically failed" state. "The cost of that would be so immense for all of us. It is very important that we do all we reasonably can to see that that is not where this comes out."
Crocker said it is possible that Iraq will emerge as an "anchor of stability" in the Middle East, reiterating one prior rationale for the invasion.
The top U.S. envoy to Iraq since March 2007, Crocker, 58, now detects a "virtuous spiral" in which the political climate "does not favor violence." Even so, his assessment of whether politicians here can achieve stability is hedged: "We may have reached a point where we can expect to see Iraq's leaders grapple with increasingly complex issues; that's what they say they can do, it's certainly the way we're pushing them."
The potential remains for large-scale sectarian strife, the widening of the war and a resurgence of Sunni extremists. "With issues of this magnitude, it's probably more a question of what you're unable to imagine than what you are."
In July, after the extra U.S. troops sent to Iraq last year have gone home, Crocker wants "some consolidation and reflection." This period would mean a temporary freeze in U.S. withdrawals, and he can't say how long it should last. "It's not simply assessing what the conditions are," he said. "You have to try and think through 'How does it all change when we're not there?' " he added. "Our absence can be as substantial as our presence."
-- Cameron W. Barr
March 19, 2008
Pg. 10
By Josh White et al.
A soldier's mother
When Peggy Buryj sent her son off to war, she was in favor of the mission but was "scared to death" for Jesse. She knew that soldiers were dying but also that her son felt a deep responsibility to defend his country.
"He would have been pissed off if there wasn't a war to go fight," said Buryj, of Canton, Ohio. "He was a warrior."
Buryj's worst fears were realized on May 5, 2004. A panicked Iraqi drove his dump truck through a military checkpoint in Karbala, eliciting gunfire from U.S. and Polish soldiers. Pfc. Jesse Buryj was shot in the back. The Army at first ruled it a car accident but months later acknowledged it was a case of friendly fire.
Peggy Buryj remains committed to the conflict nonetheless.
"Yes, I am frustrated beyond belief with this war, but I still think it's the right thing to be doing," she said. "People think I have to justify this war just because my son died in it. That's not the case. I think we must secure that area of the world and make it stable, otherwise my grandson is going to be over there."
"We have to eradicate our enemies," she said. "That's where the terrorists are."
A young man, who knew her son well, recently asked Buryj whether he should go to fight in Iraq.
"You have to do what you're called to do," she told him. "My son stood for the honor and the dignity that should have been given him in his death. I would never stop anyone from going, because down deep inside I know my son did the right thing."
-- Josh White
***
A student protester
He could have gone to Cabo San Lucas as some of his classmates did, or even just home to Long Island. Instead, sophomore Robby Diesu stayed in his near-empty Catholic University dorm over spring break to paint banners, update a Web site listing protest locations and put his "body into the war machine to stop it, really get in there and mess with its sprockets."
Diesu, 19, helps lead "Our Spring Break," activities designed to encourage students to spend their vacation in Washington on "spring break to end the war."
He was just a freshman in high school when the conflict began. Now, after falling "in love with the peace movement," he's fluent in Iraq civilian death statistics, mounting war cost figures and the number of Iraqi refugees. "If I believe in something, I want to make sure I know what I'm talking about," he said.
Last week, Diesu and fellow spring breakers were parked in front of the Senate's Hart building, issuing "stop-loss" orders to Congress. ("We decided since Congress refuses to stop the war, we're going to tell them not to leave until they do.") The group of more than 20 students, standing in the street with coffins draped with American flags, was arrested for "incommoding -- basically stopping traffic," he said.
It's sometimes hard to get his classmates to listen, but he's still pressing others to join him for action. "We're youth; we have the most free time ever.
"This is our movement, too," he said. "It's not just for old white women."
-- Rachel Dry
***
A disillusioned soldier
Army Capt. Derek Bennett was among the first soldiers to enter liberated Iraq in April 2003. His battalion of the 1st Armored Division was told that its deployment would last about 90 days.
"We were just going to do some peacekeeping, do some patrolling, and then we'd be going home," Bennett said. "At the 90-day mark that summer, we were told it was looking more like six months. . . . About six weeks later, they finally published an order that said, 'Okay, it's 365.' . . . An entire year. It's difficult to wrap your mind around."
When it was over and his bags were packed, Bennett was extended again. The year became 15 months. This week, after finishing his second tour, he will leave the Army for good.
A small-town Michigan boy, he was the first in his family to finish college. West Point, Class of 2000. Now, as he ends his military career at Fort Bliss, Tex., he isn't sure what to do next. Maybe business school or a corporate job, or perhaps work on Capitol Hill.
He is 30 years old and single. "It's hard to meet somebody and spend a couple of months and then say, 'I'll be gone for a year, but don't worry, I'll have e-mail.' "
Many of his soldier buddies think he has let them down. "In Army culture, if you're not wearing boots until you die, you've cheated the country," he says. "If you get out at the five-year mark . . . you're just about a terrorist. If you get out at 20, you're just a communist or a traitor."
In a plum job for much of last year on the staff of Gen. David H. Petraeus, "I got the opportunity to see every career path available to me 30 years down the road," Bennett said. If he continued in the Army, "I was going to spend a lot of it in Iraq" or "making PowerPoint slides."
His first night back for his second tour, in the fall of 2006, the 120-soldier company he commanded went on an after-dark mission in Mosul. They had four uparmored Humvees, were short of weapons and ammunition, and their radios didn't work. "It's that little ankle-biter that saps at your confidence, when you don't even have ammunition."
Later, "I started looking around and talking to Iraqis and realized that since I left in July '04 -- I'm not blaming anybody -- the same problems remained. The same shortages of electricity and fuel and arms for the Iraqis. They still had trash and sewage in the street. You just wonder: What have we been doing?
"This isn't like World War II. There's no VJ Day, no sailor kissing a girl when he comes home. This is somebody saying that trend lines indicate a sustainable level of violence. That's not a great feeling."
-- Karen DeYoung
***
An adviser
Meghan O'Sullivan wasn't fooling herself when she helped President Bush craft a new strategy for Iraq that became known as the "surge." The war was going badly, and the idea of sending more troops and shifting focus to civilian security seemed dicey. But at least it offered a chance for success. "All the other options," she recalled, "were about managing defeat."
Few have been more closely involved in the Iraq project than O'Sullivan. At 33, the Oxford graduate headed to Baghdad to serve in the original occupation authority and helped write the transitional law that led to a new constitution. Shunning security, she slipped out of the Green Zone beneath a head scarf to check conditions and to meet Iraq's emerging leaders before returning to Washington as Bush's deputy national security adviser.
With violence down, "cautious optimism" has returned, she said. "In 2006, a lot of Iraqis did not have a lot of hope. And what I'm hearing now is they're getting that hope back."
She acknowledges enormous challenges and costly lessons: "There are many, many lessons. The experience has been very sobering for all of us involved. . . . I've learned there are no easy choices with Iraq. . . . Every choice has serious downsides. They've all got complex consequences and unintended ramifications."
Among the lessons she has drawn: The United States must devote enough troops and civilian resources to match its ambitions. And, she said, "there's no substitute for security. We figured that out the hard way."
O'Sullivan left the White House last fall to teach at Harvard and now sorts through her thoughts in the cloistered environs of Cambridge, Mass. She has not returned to Iraq since September, but it is never far away. "It's hard for me to imagine in my life that a day will go by that I don't think about it," she said.
-- Peter Baker
***
A culture warrior
BAGHDAD -- The images he has seen influence his art.
The severed leg in the garden of the Iraqi Artists Union. The bullet hole in his 17-year-old son's bedroom window. The tall concrete walls that surround his Baghdad art gallery. But these days, Qasim Sebti is thinking about the books.
In the early days after the invasion, he saw the looting and burning at the Fine Arts Institute, and a man standing on a stack of art books to steal a fluorescent light bulb. Sebti, 55, now makes collages out of the spines and covers of torn and dirty books, scraps that "you would kick if you saw it in the street."
Sebti, who owns the Dialogue Gallery, has lost count of how many friends have fled the country or stayed and died. He has let go all but one gallery employee. But he will not leave Iraq or close his gallery.
"This is the last castle to defend," he said. "I'm the last man of the Mohicans. I'm the leader. I must stay. I can help the others do the art, away from the religious styles, away from the political. I'm fighting by my own special way. I'm fighting by culture and art."
He shudders to think about the new Iraqi government -- "50 percent Iranians," he said -- and what he considers its disregard for culture and its lack of interest in anything but artistic homage to Islam.
"The blue, the black, the red. These three colors entered our lives," he said. The red is the blood. The black represents the women cloaked head-to-toe in abayas, as though in perpetual mourning. "The blue is the sadness inside the people. This is the new Iraqi palette for the artists."
He adds: "Can I ask my President Bush -- your president and my president -- can I ask him something before he leaves Iraq? Read our history well, and apologize."
-- Joshua Partlow
***
An infantry officer
Paul Rieckhoff spent nearly a year walking patrols as an infantry officer in Baghdad. He saw soldiers dying, his squad leader lost his legs, and he witnessed problems with missing supplies. But when he returned to the United States in 2004, the biggest news story was that Janet Jackson's breast was exposed during the Super Bowl halftime show.
To Rieckhoff, 33, an Amherst College graduate who joined the Army Reserves in 1998, the contrast highlighted one of the biggest problems of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: The American public was largely disengaged, while a small set of soldiers and families bore the burdens of combat.
"The lack of involvement on the part of the American people is unprecedented," said Rieckhoff, who volunteered for active duty after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and went to Iraq as a National Guardsman, with the Third Infantry Division in April 2003. "And it's my biggest criticism of the president: He has never asked the American people to do anything."
Rieckhoff created Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), which he said now has about 85,000 members and an annual budget of about $2 million. It focuses on improving mental health care and conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, obtaining a new GI bill and resolving the fate of thousands of Iraqi interpreters now targeted by insurgents.
"We saw firsthand that these Iraqi interpreters were our eyes and ears on the battlefield," he said. "These folks stood up to help us, and now we are leaving them hanging."
Rieckhoff, a former Wall Street analyst and high school football coach, remains in the National Guard. "I have friends who have been there three times, four times," he said. "I am in danger of going back, but that is nothing [like what] my buddies are facing. That toll on their families is nothing the American people face."
-- Michael Abramowitz
***
An Iraqi politician
BAGHDAD -- Adel Abdul Mahdi began his life in the new Iraq with a gag in his mouth.
The man who would become one of Iraq's vice presidents was captured by U.S. troops less than a month after the invasion, as he left a meeting in the Republican Palace with other returning exiles. He was shoved, insulted, handcuffed and held for nearly 24 hours, he recalled.
The next five years would bring moments much worse for the Shiite leader, who considers himself less a politician than a fighter for Iraq's freedom. He says he has survived an average of four assassination attempts per year.
A prominent figure in the Shiite political party now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Mahdi was a leading candidate to become prime minister until Nouri al-Maliki seized the post. After the second bombing of the holy Shiite shrine in Samarra last June, and amid the sectarian violence paralyzing the Iraqi government, Mahdi resigned, but ultimately held onto his job.
"Everything blew up in 2003," he said. "Nothing was in place."
"We went to the climax of things. And a radical change took place," he added. "Now people are sitting in the same room around the same table discussing very difficult issues such as federalism, such as democracy."
What Iraq needs now, he said, is an infusion of new ideas -- ways to keep the lights on, pump oil from the ground, build up the Iraqi army to take over for the American soldiers.
"We are trying to accommodate ourselves to a new situation, and this will only be done by time. Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Turkmen trying to work together, that was a dream in Iraq, now it's real," he said. "So now we are talking. . . . It is not efficient. We agree. But things are getting much better. One year ago, people were fighting. Now, well, they are fighting in words. This is much better than fighting."
-- Joshua Partlow
***
A U.S. diplomat
BAGHDAD -- For U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, any measure of the American enterprise in Iraq must include the potential price of a "traumatically failed" state. "The cost of that would be so immense for all of us. It is very important that we do all we reasonably can to see that that is not where this comes out."
Crocker said it is possible that Iraq will emerge as an "anchor of stability" in the Middle East, reiterating one prior rationale for the invasion.
The top U.S. envoy to Iraq since March 2007, Crocker, 58, now detects a "virtuous spiral" in which the political climate "does not favor violence." Even so, his assessment of whether politicians here can achieve stability is hedged: "We may have reached a point where we can expect to see Iraq's leaders grapple with increasingly complex issues; that's what they say they can do, it's certainly the way we're pushing them."
The potential remains for large-scale sectarian strife, the widening of the war and a resurgence of Sunni extremists. "With issues of this magnitude, it's probably more a question of what you're unable to imagine than what you are."
In July, after the extra U.S. troops sent to Iraq last year have gone home, Crocker wants "some consolidation and reflection." This period would mean a temporary freeze in U.S. withdrawals, and he can't say how long it should last. "It's not simply assessing what the conditions are," he said. "You have to try and think through 'How does it all change when we're not there?' " he added. "Our absence can be as substantial as our presence."
-- Cameron W. Barr