Moment of Truth in Iraq - Chapter One

May 15, 2008 | By PA Pundits |

Moment of Truth in Iraq

C H A P T E R O N E

Be Not Afraid

You shall cross the barren desert, but you shall not die of thirst.
You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way.
You shall speak your words in foreign lands and all will understand.
You shall see the face of God and live.
Be not afraid. I go before you always;
Come follow me, and I will give you rest.

FROM A PRAYER CARD I FOUND ON A BASE IN ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

• Baqubah, Iraq, June 19, 2007 •

Thoughts flow on the eve of a great battle. By the time you read these words, we will be in combat. Few ears have heard even rumors of this battle, and fewer still are the eyes that will see its full scope. Even now-for the battle has already begun for some-little news of it reaches home. I have known of the plans for a month, but have remained silent.

This campaign, a series of carefully orchestrated battalion- and brigade-sized operations, is collectively the largest battle since “major hostilities” ended more than four years ago. Even the media here on the ground do not seem to have sensed its scale.

Al Qaeda and associates had little or no presence in Iraq before the current war. But we made huge mistakes early on and now we pump blood and gold into the desert to pay for those blunders.We failed to secure the streets and we sowed doubt and mistrust.We disbanded the government and the army and we created a vacuum. We tolerated corruption and ineptitude and mostly local talent filled the ranks of an insurgency. But when we flattened parts of Fallujah not once but twice in response to the murders of four of our people,we helped create a spectacle of injustice and chaos. Al Qaeda took entrée while militias and insurgency groups began to thrive. The magnitude of true injustices was magnified line by line, hair by hair, by a frenzied media. But it wasn’t the media’s fault; the media did not flatten Fallujah or rape and torture the prisoners.We did that all by ourselves.

We walked into a dry, cracked land, along the two arteries of Mesopotamia that have long pulsed water and blood into the sea. In a place where everything that is not desert is tinder; sparks make fire.

When we devastated Fallujah, al Qaeda grew like a tumor. Before al Qaeda we faced a bewildering complex of insurgent groups with conflicting ideologies and goals, along with opportunistic thugs.The amalgam of men (and women) with guns was so diverse and the affiliations so dynamic that it was hard to track who was responsible for what atrocity. Each attack spawned reprisals that demanded yet another round of revenge. Al Qaeda had been trying to ignite a civil war here for several years; chaos and brutality would become its fuel.

Today al Qaeda is strong, but their welcome grows cold.The Coalition was not alone in failing to keep its promises. Iraqis love to say “America put a man on the moon but cannot turn on our lights,” and the implication was we really didn’t care. In so many ways we lost the moral high ground……………..

Please click here > Moment of Truth in Iraq to read and/or download the entire first chapter. At the end of the first chapter we have placed the handout for bookstore managers, librarians, or military exchanges. Please feel free to copy the first chapter as is and the handout.