A few weeks before he died, a depressed Spc. Patrick Ryan McCaffrey called his father from Iraq and told him that he had just been fired upon by the Iraqi troops he was helping to train."They were on night patrol, and they had been fired upon by what they thought were 12 insurgents. They killed several of them, and three surrendered," said Bob McCaffrey on Tuesday in a phone interview with The Chronicle. "Some of the dead ones were part of the group that they had been training for a week, and the survivors were also part of that group."
McCaffrey said that his 34-year-old son notified his commanding officer but "was told to keep his mouth shut." A month later, on June 22, 2004, his son was dead. The Army said his unit was ambushed by enemy forces on a patrol near Balad, Iraq.
On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman said that the Army's Criminal Investigation Command has concluded that McCaffrey, from Tracy, and 2nd Lt. Andre Demetrius Tyson, 33, of Riverside, were killed by Iraqi soldiers who were patrolling alongside the U.S. soldiers.
As fierce fighting erupted in parts of Iraq in early April, the U.S.-led coalition tried to deploy U.S.-trained Iraqi units to quell the fighting. The results were disastrous: During the violence, many Iraqi police and civil defense personnel abandoned their posts, or joined Shiite militants loyal to renegade cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. What’s more, some soldiers of the first U.S.-trained battalion of the New Iraqi Army (NIA) deserted their unit or refused to follow orders.[...]
“The American officers did not reveal anything about the nature of the task they wanted us to accomplish, and we didn’t even know where we were going,” says Zubaidy, a Shiite.
[...]
Zubaidy said that his U.S. officers ordered Iraqi soldiers to open fire on the angry crowd in Shulla. “The American officers hysterically ordered us to shoot the 'traitors',” he recalls, “We were not asked beforehand to go fight our people in Shulla. If we had been….we would have resigned at the camp right away.”
Many Iraqi soldiers refused to fire, abandoned their weapons and fled from the scene, says Zubaidy. Another soldier from the battalion, Hamid Tamimi from Dijeil district in Salahuddin province, says some Iraqi troops even turned against the Americans and opened fire on U.S. personnel while chanting slogans and songs glorifying Sadr and his late father.
And the issue of the trustworthiness of the Iraqi troops is certainly not something new in the fiasco that has been the U.S. creation of an Iraqi army.
Aqil al-Saffar, as aide to interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, said that as many as 5 percent of the Iraqi government's troops were insurgents or sympathizers, The New York Times reported. Some experts suggest the number may be higher. "Penetration of Iraqi security and military forces may be the rule, not the exception," Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Security International Studies, said in a January report. Some U.S. commanders agree.[...]
Though the Pentagon does not provide specific numbers, news reports indicate that dozens of Iraqi police and military personnel, including some high-ranking commanders, have been dismissed on suspicion they provided information or other assistance to insurgents. "Subversion of the government and armed forces is the bread and butter of an insurgency," Bruce Hoffman, a RAND Corporation counterinsurgency expert, recently told the Associated Press.
The best Iraqi units -- perhaps a few thousand personnel out of more than 200,000 -- are nearly on par with the coalition units that coached them. The worst are not only poorly trained and ill-equipped but also suspected of actively contributing to Iraq's unrest.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, according to Newsweek. The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces "from top to bottom," a senior Iraqi official tells Newsweek in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine, "from decision making to the lower levels."This is a particularly troubling development for the U.S. military, as it prepares to launch an all-out assault on the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, since U.S. Marines were counting on the newly trained Iraqi forces to assist in the assault. Newsweek reports that "American military trainers have been frantically trying to assemble sufficient Iraqi troops" to fight alongside them and that they are "praying that the soldiers perform better than last April, when two battalions of poorly trained Iraqi Army soldiers refused to fight."
Which is not to say we don’t have our own problems with new recruits as a result of this international nightmare:
Recruiters, having failed to meet their enlistment targets, are now being authorized to pursue high-school dropouts and (not to mince words) stupid people.
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The U.S. Army recruited more than 2,600 soldiers under new lower aptitude standards this year, helping the service beat its goal of 80,000 recruits in the throes of an unpopular war and mounting casualties.[...]
About 17% of the first-time recruits, or about 13,600, were accepted under waivers for various medical, moral or criminal problems.
[...]
Thirty-eight percent were for medical reasons and 7% were drug and alcohol problems, including those who may have failed a drug test or acknowledged they had used drugs.
In 2003, the Army allowed 459 enlistees with felony arrests and convictions into the service compared to 1,620 this past year.
Faced with higher recruiting goals, the Pentagon is quietly looking for ways to make it easier for people with minor criminal records to join the military, The Associated Press has learned.The review, in its early stages, comes as the number of Army recruits needing waivers for bad behavior — such as trying drugs, stealing, carrying weapons on school grounds and fighting — rose from 15 percent in 2006 to 18 percent this year. And it reflects the services' growing use of criminal, health and other waivers to build their ranks.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Update 1/7/08: A Little Different Story
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