Avoid US 'occupation' of Iraq

Avoid US 'occupation' of Iraq

US Army chief, General Ray Odierno, warned against creating the impression of an American "occupation" of Iraq by leaving too many troops in the country after a year-end deadline to withdraw.Odierno told reporters the United States had to carefully balance how many troops were needed to assist Iraqi forces while scaling back the American profile in a country where anti-US sentiment still runs high.

"I will say when I was leaving Iraq a year ago, I always felt we had to be careful about leaving too many people in Iraq," said Odierno, who took over as Army chief of staff on Wednesday."The larger the force that we leave behind ...(the more) comments of 'occupation force' remain. And we get away from why we are really there -- to help them to continue to develop," he added.

Odierno commanded US forces in Iraq until last year and was one of the senior officers who spearheaded the troop "surge" in 2007, which the military believes turned the tide in the war and reduced sectarian violence.He spoke amid a debate in Washington over the scale of a possible future US military mission in Iraq and after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta endorsed a tentative plan for a force of 3,000-4,000 troops.

Some US lawmakers have criticized that number of soldiers and say senior officers favor a larger force of at least 10,000, which would include a unit deployed in northern Iraq to defuse Arab-Kurdish tensions.Odierno's intervention carries weight given his battlefield experience in Iraq -- he spent a total of 56 months there -- and his reputation previously for cautioning against dramatic reductions in the American troop presence.

He said that the final decision about the size of a post-2011 US force would be up to Iraq's government, American leaders and military commanders."I'm not saying 3-5,000 is the right number," said Odierno, but "there comes a time...when it (US presence) becomes counter-productive.""I'm not quite sure what the right number is, but there?s a number there somewhere that is -- you?ve got be careful about," he added.

As commander in Iraq, Odierno -- whose son was badly wounded in the war -- successfully lobbied President Barack Obama to slow the pace of a planned withdrawal.The current security agreement between Washington and Baghdad calls for all American troops to pull out by the end of the year. Any future US military role in the country depends on negotiations under way with the Iraqi government.

Odierno has warned that territorial disputes between Kurdish and Iraqi government forces in the north pose the greatest threat to Iraq's stability and credited the US presence with helping to calm tensions.But he said Thursday that it was possible that a 5,000-strong US force in the north, in which he played a pivotal role in bringing into force, would no longer be necessary amid recent progress.

"I've heard some discussion, 'well we need 5,000 people to work the Arab-Kurd issue,'" he said. "I've read some things lately that we think they're starting to handle that. There's been some progress made and the forces that we've developed, they feel can handle that for example."If that's the case, then we don't need those 5,000 (troops in the north)."US officials are looking at shifting some tasks currently performed by American troops in Iraq to private contractors.

About 46,000 US forces remain in Iraq in a mainly advisory role, though the Americans used attack helicopters to strike at Iranian-backed militia in recent months.Odierno also predicted that there would "probably" be a US military base in Iraq in the future, although it would be located "outside of Baghdad."

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.

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Report Details British Abuses in Iraq

Avoid US 'occupation' of Iraq Tony-blair-in-action

A major inquiry into the most notorious case of detainee abuse by British soldiers in Iraq described “a very great stain on the reputation of the army” in its report issued Thursday, detailing a series of gruesome abuses by servicemen in a regiment with a 300-year history of battle honors abroad.

It concluded that one Iraqi, a 26-year-old hotel worker in Basra, died from “an appalling episode of serious gratuitous violence.”The report on the 2003 case was among the most serious blows the British Army has suffered to its reputation from its troubled involvement in the Iraq war, where its combat role, among foreign forces, was second only to that of the United States.

Prime Minister David Cameron spoke to reporters shortly after the findings were released, condemning the “truly shocking and appalling abuse” uncovered by the inquiry and saying it “should never be allowed to happen again.” The defense minister, Liam Fox, described the findings as “deplorable, shocking and shameful.”

The British inquiry, led by one of Britain’s most senior retired judges, spanned three years and cost $20 million. It was begun only after the Defense Ministry lost a four-year court battle to block it. British commanders say that steps already taken to tighten oversight of detainee operations have minimized the risk of any occurrence in Afghanistan, where British forces have also been deployed in numbers second only to the United States in the international coalition.

The final 1,400-page report found that a pattern of “violent and cowardly assaults” by “a large number of soldiers” from a unit of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had resulted in 93 separate injuries that fatally weakened the hotel worker, Baha Mousa, a single father of two. Mr. Mousa ultimately died on the floor of an abandoned toilet stall. It also criticized a military doctor and a Roman Catholic chaplain for not reporting the abuses after they had seen the injuries to Mr. Mousa.

The abuses chronicled in the report included hooding with burlap sacks, requiring detainees to stand or crouch in stressful positions for hours, depriving them of sleep for extended periods, and a practice that British soldiers call harshing — shouting loudly at detainees from distances of six inches or less. The Basra detainees also reported being deprived of food, having fingers pressed into their eye sockets, and being kicked in the genitals and kidneys.

The report said that the final assault on Mr. Mousa, involving a flurry of punches while he remained handcuffed, occurred shortly before he died.

The report’s author, Sir William Gage, said there had been a “corporate failure” in Britain’s Defense Ministry over abusive interrogation methods, including the hooding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, which had all been banned in 1972 by Prime Minister Edward Heath after a scandal over detainee abuses in Northern Ireland.

Although the abuse in Basra was carried out by a group of soldiers led by a corporal, Sir William said that senior officers bore a “heavy responsibility” for not halting the assaults.The Defense Ministry had previously disciplined a number of the officers and soldiers involved, dismissing several from the military. On Thursday, it said it would immediately suspend any of those still serving, pending further review of their cases.

Six men were acquitted in a court-martial in 2007. A seventh, Cpl. Donald Payne, whom Thursday’s report referred to as “a violent bully,” drew a one-year prison term for subjecting Mr. Mousa to inhumane treatment. Mr. Fox, the defense minister, told Parliament on Thursday that he had instructed officials to “see if more can’t be done to bring those responsible to justice.” Mr. Mousa’s lawyers demanded that those involved be tried in civilian courts.

The parallels between the cases in Basra and the American abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison — including the similar techniques used and the difficulty of holding senior officers to account — have haunted many in Britain. Both involved the abuse of civilian detainees in military custody, and they occurred at roughly the same time, a few months after the 2003 invasion. During that period, American and British troops had begun to face sustained attacks by Iraqi insurgents that resulted in mounting military casualties.

At the time, British commanders in southern Iraq were often outspoken in comparing what they described to visiting reporters as their troops’ restrained and population-friendly tactics with American practices farther north. Citing Britain’s long colonial history, they said their troops understood better than American forces the counterproductive results of aggressive tactics against indigenous people.

Britain withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq in 2009, leaving American troops as the only substantial foreign military presence there. Many analysts in Britain, and some retired officers, described the six-year involvement in Iraq as a dismal failure, mostly centered on the British failure to prevent Shiite militias from gaining effective control of parts of Basra and other cities.

The report found no evidence that Mr. Mousa or other detainees were sexually abused, an obtrusive element in the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib, although allegations of that kind have been frequent, according to lawyers representing Mr. Mousa’s family, in 150 other cases of alleged detainee abuse by British soldiers in Iraq between 2003 and the end of British detainee operations in 2008. The lawyers said those cases would be pursued with renewed vigor in British courts.

The Defense Ministry fought for years against calls for an independent inquiry into Mr. Mousa’s death, finally losing when the House of Lords ruled that the European Charter of Human Rights, enshrined in British law in 1998, applied to Mr. Mousa when he was in British military custody in Iraq. In 2007, the Defense Ministry agreed to pay $5.4 million in compensation to Mr. Mousa’s family, including his father, who had served as a police colonel under Saddam Hussein.

Attempts to reach Mr. Mousa’s family were not successful. After the compensation was paid by Britain, they left Basra. A BBC interviewer spoke to Mr. Mousa’s father, Daoud, on Thursday in Cairo, where he welcomed the British report, but said his family would never recover from his son’s death.

The Basra report included 73 recommendations to eliminate future abuses. Mr. Fox, the defense minister, told the House of Commons that the government had accepted all but one: banning of certain “verbal and non-physical techniques” long used by army interrogators to obtain information from detainees. He did not specify those techniques, but he said that he had asked Britain’s top military officer, Gen. Sir David Richards, to redraft the rules so that only “defined people in defined circumstances” could use them.

By JOHN F. BURNS, The New York Times