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One day in Iraq: the background The logs for 17 October 2006 find the US military struggling at a time when Congress is about to change hands. James Meek sets them in contextOctober 2006 was not the worst month in Iraq for Iraqi or US casualties, but it was one of the worst for both. There was no hiding from the world the scale of the carnage then – but only now, when it is possible for the first time for a non-military outsider to peer into the classified fine grain of a day in the life of the war, is it apparent quite how hideous the attrition was becoming, hour by hour, minute by minute.We chose 17 October as one of the days when the US military lost the most men. It wasn't one of those days when a gigantic bomb killed scores of civilians. Sure enough, the next morning the headlines focused on American casualties: "US loses 10 killed in Iraq."When you look at the war logs, however, the American deaths are only scattered reports in a numbing sequence of corpses found scattered in the streets of Iraq like fallen leaves. In all, 136 Iraqis died or were found dead on this day – 97 civilians, 19 members of the security forces and 10 suspected insurgents. Really there were two wars going on, both triggered by the US-British invasion: a war between US-led uniformed forces and Iraqi insurgents, and a shadowy civil war, a war for power, territory and revenge between Iraq's dominant sects, the Sunni and the Shia. Both wars were going badly for the US and its British junior partner.Rumours of Shia death squads operating within the police were widely believed, and on this very day, not mentioned in the logs, the Shia-dominated Iraqi government sacked its two most senior police commanders. In this civil war US forces didn't know whether to intervene or stand aside; in the days leading up to 17 October US troops did nothing while the town of Balad was torn apart by an intercommunal bloodbath.In Anbar province, the town of Ramadi remained a full-on war zone for US troops. New insurgent tactics, particularly the use of a new kind of homemade bomb, the "explosively formed penetrator", had the US commanders worried.From the perspective of 2010 we can see that October 2006 was a critical turning point in the Bush-Blair wars. The two conflicts in Iraq were gaining in intensity just as Washington and London were ramping up their engagement in Afghanistan. Commentators were describing the Iraq insurgency as a new Tet offensive, referring to the Vietnamese attacks on US troops in 1968 that caused the American public to lose heart in that war. The midterm congressional elections in the US were two weeks away and the Democrats were winning support with attack ads showing footage of the horror the Iraq invasion had led to.Short of troops, the generals were shuffling their brigades around Iraq like hucksters in a shell game. To make matters worse the bloody autumn of 2006 came at the time of the annual troop rotation. US soldiers and marines were either hanging on, hoping to end their tours without getting injured, or were newly arrived. Brave, trained and well equipped they might have been, but you can't help wondering if the 24th Regiment of Marines, whose soldiers have ordinary careers and normally only train at weekends, deserved to be hurled fresh into the cauldron of Falluja to do a job that tested full-time troops to the limits.This was the season in Iraq that ended Donald Rumsfeld's career, brought the Democrats to power in Congress and forced the US to start sending more troops to Iraq for the "surge" three months later.The war logs record more than 400 separate incidents for 17 October 2006, only half of which we detail here. Omitted are the dozens of IEDs that were found before they went off or didn't injure anyone; numerous small-time shellings and shootings; and discoveries of arms caches by US forces, none of which was large.The war logs themselves are incomplete and contain duplicate entries, not all of which we have necessarily been able to weed out. Many stories, particularly those involving the deaths of civilians, are left unfinished. Some events reported elsewhere are puzzlingly left out.The 10 US deaths recorded for 17 October 2006 include one road accident. But there was a 10th combat death the log doesn't mention: that of 53-year-old Ronald Paulsen, a civil affairs sergeant and warehouse loadman in civilian life who, according to a Pentagon release a week later, died on 17 October in Tarmiya when a bomb went off near his vehicle.Iraq: The war logsIraqJames Meekguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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