Outnumbered, exhausted and in over our heads

Rohan Pearce

"Somewhere down the line, we became an occupation force in [Iraqi] eyes. We don't feel like heroes any more... We are outnumbered. We are exhausted. We are in over our heads." — a website posting by Isaac Kindblade, a US Army private stationed in Iraq, quoted in a August 10, 2003, British Observer article.

In Iraq, the Pentagon has found itself trapped between a rocket-propelled grenade and a hard place. On one hand, the hostility of most of the Iraqi population. On the other, the steady disintegration of the fighting effectiveness of the occupation troops.

An unending mission, seemingly without purpose now that Saddam Hussein is captured, the WMD lies have been exposed and the Iraqis have resisted their "liberation", has led to plummeting morale among US troops.

"For the last six months I have participated in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom... I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies" — Tim Predmore, a soldier on active duty in Iraq with the US 101st Airborne Division, in an article he wrote for the Illinois Peoria Journal Star in October 2003.

As of early October 2003, at least 50 US troops had gone AWOL. Soldiers' rights groups, such as the GI Rights Hotline, have been flooded with calls from both soldiers stationed in Iraq who want to come home and those who don't want to leave the US to serve in the occupation forces.

On February 2, Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas, whose son died in Iraq on November 2 when the Chinook helicopter he was piloting crashed, sent a letter to US President George Bush. She wrote: "Finders keepers, losers weepers. While we who have lost our loved ones have only tears to fill the empty space where love and laughter lived, you and your Halliburton cronies have found the oil wells and will undoubtedly keep your blood stained gains. Our sorrow, your gain."

From Green Left Weekly, March 17, 2004.

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From GLW issue 575