General Sanchez's Speech

Baghdad Patrols, July 2003

I'm just a bit late on this story, I didn't read about it until I came back from London. But what a story - especially since I served under General Sanchez and remember him well. Lt General Ricardo Sanchez was the commander of the 1st Armored Division when we were sent to Iraq at the very beginning of the war, and soon was promoted to the Commander of V Corps, which morphed into CJTF-7 (Combined Joint Task Force 7), the military command essentially in control of the entire country.

On Oct 12, the now retired general spoke before a group of reporters in Washington DC, verbally lashing out at everyone, from President Bush, to Congress, to the media (full text available here).

Now, out of those three targets, exactly which one can you guess the media focused on the most - and which one the least? You guessed it. Bush the most, themselves the least.

The New York Times's coverage was typical:

the former top American commander called the Bush administration’s handling of the war incompetent and warned that the United States was “living a nightmare with no end in sight.”

But somehow, they decided to completely ignore to the far greater bulk of the speech that was critical of the media. Here is just a sample of what they left out:

Let me review some of the descriptive phrases that have been used by some of you [the media] that have made my personal interfaces with the press corps difficult: "dictatorial and somewhat dense", "not a strategic thought", "liar", "does not get it" and "the most inexperienced LTG". In some cases I have never even met you, yet you feel qualified to make character judgements that are communicated to the world. My experience is not unique...

The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our servicemen who are at war. My assessment is that your profession, to some extent, has strayed from these ethical standards and allowed external agendas to manipulate what the American public sees on TV, what they read in our newspapers and what they see on the web. For some of you, just like some politicians, the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your preconceived notions, biases and agendas.

So what was the Washington Post's headline? "Ex-Commander In Iraq Faults War Strategy - 'No End in Sight,' Says Retired General Sanchez", which ironically proved his point about them.

At least one reporter agreed:

But the unwillingness of the journalists who covered his speech to report his criticisms of them lends credence to LtGen. Sanchez's charge that journalists slant or omit facts in order to serve their political and personal agendas.

And as Captain's quarters reports:

Yes, obviously Sanchez ripped the Bush administration -- the media had no trouble reporting that part of the speech. He also ripped the Democrats for playing partisan games and making it impossible to generate the kind of strategy needed to win in Iraq. The media didn't bother to report much of that, and it didn't report his primary focus in the speech on the media themselves for reporting the war dishonestly from the beginning

This kind of blatantly biased reporting affects the troops as well. After hearing these skewed reports on the speech, an awful lot of soldiers were upset and let themselves be known. Their concerns were on the front page of today's Stars & Stripes newspaper, but it's unlikely you will find them in the mainstream media. Mostly, they wonder why, if Gen. Sanchez was not happy with the way the war was conducted, why didn't he speak up sooner? This is a valid point, and I discuss it further below.

I agree completely with his remarks regarding the media. There was literally no "bad news" story from the war that they wouldn't exaggerate further, and no "good news" story that they wouldn't either bury or slant as much as possible. Even during the incredibly successful initial invasion, I can hardly count the number of times I heard the words "bogged down" on television. All this does is embolden our enemies, who rely very heavily on western media outlets and wire services for their news.

But I disagree sharply with some points, especially when he says:

This endeavor has further been hampered by a coalition effort that can be characterized as hasty, un-resourced and often uncoordinated and unmanaged. Desperately needed, but essentially ignored, were the political and economic coalitions that were the key to victory and stability in the immediate aftermath of the conventional war. The military coalition which was hastily put together in the Summer of 2003 was problematic given the multitude of national caveats, inadequate rules of engagement and other restrictions on the forces deployed.

So where does the buck stop?? Not only was Gen. Sanchez there, and part of this effort, but he was probably the single most powerful man in the country to shape it! So why didn't he speak up then, or do something about it? He can't disobey the President's orders, but he can certainly advise him - and in fact, he is expected to do so. Anything less than that is dereliction of duty.

But the truth is, some of our current problems in Iraq are directly due to Gen. Sanchez's policies early in the war. Above he mentioned the Summer of 2003. Let me go a little further back to April of that year. The bulk of the 1st Armored Division was holed up in Camp Udairi, Kuwait (now called Camp Buehring). Even though the temperatures were running about 110 every day (and getting hotter), on Gen. Sanchez's orders, for many weeks we had to walk around in full combat gear everywhere - to the latrine, to the post office, to the dining hall. This consisted of long-sleeved uniform, body armor, armor plates, helmet, gas mask, and of course weapon, which was brutal in the heat. And we were the only Division doing this in Kuwait. Even soldiers in Iraq were not dressed this way unless they were outside of a military base, and I'm assuming that's where Gen. Sanchez was, since I never saw him at Udairi.

Walking around in full "battle rattle" while inside a friendly allied nation might seem a bit silly. So why did we do this? I think part of the problem was 1) Gen. Sanchez wanted the Division to look really hardcore, and 2) it's part of the "training mindset", in which you do everything as hard as possible, to make training more valuable. This does make sense during actual training exercises, but in April 2003 we were in a real-world situation, and we were running out of real water, sweating it out for no practical reason at all. It wasn't until a couple months or so after we arrived in Iraq that we had to stop rationing the bottled water.

Even after we arrived in Baghdad, the Division still acted as if we were setting up for a training exercise. We performed combat patrols like professionals, but, at first, we were slow to reach out to Iraqis and give them easy ways to contact us to provide information or to report acts of terrorism. We also spent the bulk of our time and money "digging in", setting up huge barriers to protect ourselves, but it took resources away from the fight and further isolated us from the very communities were were supposed to be governing (there was no Iraqi government or police force at all in West Baghdad when we arrived). And all of this was not Bush or Rumsfeld's doings - while they are ultimately responsible for everything that happened, the practical matter is that they didn't run the day to day operations, and they weren't there. This was entirely on General Sanchez's watch.

So while I greatly admire Gen. Sanchez's courage, tenacity, and willingness to "straight talk" the issues, I also greatly disagreed with his strategy early in the war, and he should realize he bears responsibility for this. However, the media played their part in this mess too, and they are just as unwilling to recognize this as Gen. Sanchez is. At least Gen. Sanchez listens to the media - they didn't listen to him at all except for the few bits that they wanted to hear. It is, indeed, almost impossible to have a rational discussion on the war in this kind of political environment.





Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed