My Reaction to the End of Combat in Iraq

Tonight, President Barack Obama announced that combat operations in Iraq have ended for the United States, to which I say, as a veteran of the conflict, it's about time.

I was happy to hear the President acknowledge that through the hard work of America's military men and women, our nation succeeded in its missions, affording Iraq the opportunity to pursue a prosperous future. The President was also clear to note that the American commitment will continue in a variety of ways.

When I was called to serve in Iraq in 2003, we were told that our mission was regime change in an effort to bring stability to a country ruled by a maniacal tyrant. With Saddam Hussein deposed, tried, and executed; his sons killed in battle; al-Qaeda in Iraq marginalized; and a new constitution in place, what more do American combat forces really have to offer? In my view, we have more than kept our promise to the people of Iraq. Now it's their turn.

While in Iraq, I remember speaking with a middle-aged Iraqi businessman who was very candid about the Coalition mission in Iraq. The man told me that he and his family were eternally grateful for freeing Iraq from Saddam. However, he cautioned that Iraqis were a proud people who yearned to make decisions for themselves--after all, prior to Hussein seizing power, the secular nation had capably taken care of its affairs. He warned that many would grow weary of a foreign presence in their country.

Unfortunately, the imminent power vacuum in Iraq was conducive to other outside entities influencing the course of Iraq. Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Iranian influences attempted to subvert American and Iraqi efforts, leading to a spike in violence. Thankfully, American military leaders--including President George W. Bush--had the foresight to retake control of the situation. Through the troop surge, Iraqis were given the space to continue their business developing the country. Proud Iraqis then turned on al-Qaeda leaders after scores of brutal attacks on on their fellow countrymen, recognizing that the terrorists' empty promises were no viable way forward.

Critics have pointed to President Obama's finite deadline as a capitulation to the forces that sought to destabilize Iraq. To me, this is bunk. At some point the Iraqis need to know that America will leave them to their own devices--whatever they may be. Short of colonization (which would be a completely absurd proposition) there's no realistic way for the United States to make an open-ended commitment to Iraq. To me, the brave men and women of the U.S. military have done more than enough.

The Iraqis I know and am proud to call friends simply want what we want here in America. They want to go to work, provide for their families, and give their children better lives than they had. This is why I'm confident Iraq will succeed when left to make decisions on their own fate.

That being said, I must criticize those who view the drawdown in Iraq as a stalemate or an admission of American defeat. On a strategic level, the U.S. military accomplished its objective of regime change long ago. WMDs or no WMDs, at no time in the future will Saddam Hussein or his murdering sons usurp control of an Iraqi state now free to determine its own course. Whatever the new government becomes over the years may not be exactly what American political leaders envision, but we could never realistically have control of that outcome, as an outside player.

Of my time in Iraq and the subsequent years that some of those closest to me spent in the desert, I must say I'm proud of what we accomplished. We projected American power and succeeded in every objective with professionalism and pride. Those who made the ultimate sacrifice made it in the name of the ideals we cherish as Americans, and a grateful American nation and a grateful Iraq will never forget.

Though the President stressed that we must now focus on our nation's pressing issues, such as the economy, I was proud to hear that he also stressed a continued responsibility to prosecute the Global War on Terror (Osama Bin Laden is still at large), project American power and continue to serve the needs of our nation's veterans.

Though we have seen tremendous improvements in veterans' benefits over the last few years, ranging from advance VA appropriations, to the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill, family caregiver, and unified VA/DoD health records, much more needs to be done. The commitment to our veterans must go beyond the immediate needs. Our nation must be committed to its veterans long after the conflicts end.

We must fix the claims backlog, meet the needs of our female veterans, better serve our rural and remote veterans communities, stymie the causes of homelessness, and ensure that veterans have viable employment options after the military.

Personally, I'm eager to see what happens now that Americans have transferred authority and I have confidence that Iraq will prosper in the long run.

-Ryan

(Image: Then-Spc. Ryan Gallucci, alongside Moldovan soldiers, smoking a cigar the day Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq, December 2003. Photo by Ryan Moniz.)

I Will Never Forget: My personal 9/11 story

I was an undergraduate at the University of Rhode Island on Sept. 11, 2001. I was dating a girl, Kerry, at the time and she happened to stay over my dorm room in Fayerweather the night before. My roommate, Danny, had to be up early for an 8 a.m. class.

Shortly before nine, our phones started to ring. We thought nothing of it, let them go to voicemail, and rolled back over. But they both kept going off. Kerry and I were getting annoyed. After all, we had been up late the night before and neither of us had class until the afternoon.

Finally, I answered. It was Danny. He told us to turn on the TV. His mother in Hoboken, N.J. had just called frantic, saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

I was worried, but I quickly thought back to the 1994 attacks and how benign they seemed at the time. Regardless, I turned on the TV and saw the smoke billowing from the north tower. I was stirred, but not shocked--I still had no concept of what was actually happening. The shock came when the second plane slammed into the south tower as we watched live. Speculation over whether or not this was an accident could immediately be thrown out the window.

I turned to Kerry and said, "well, the shit hit the fan."

I had joined the Army Reserve just after graduating from high school in 1999, and we often used that phrase to describe the most unlikely of doomsday scenarios under which we could all be instantly called to go to war. I was now watching this unlikely scenario unfold right in front of me.

As the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 rolled on, the gravity of the situation became apparent. News came in that a third plane had struck the Pentagon and another was hijacked somewhere over western Pennsylvania. This was the real deal. How many planes were hijacked? America was clearly under attack, but on what scale? Were we even safe in Middle-of-Nowhere, R.I.?

Kerry and I were glued to the TV as innocent people jumped from the towers to avoid the horrors of burning alive. We heard reports from the ground that police and firefighters were running into the building and other first responders were thinking of ways to possibly evacuate those stranded above the points of impact.

This was all for naught. As reporters struggled for words to describe the situation that was unfolding, the south tower gave way, plummeting to the street below.

Smoke and dust quickly swallowed up downtown Manhattan and nobody could say for sure what just happened. Then came confirmation that the south tower had collapsed. What now? How many people were inside? How many people got out alive? Could the north tower possibly be saved?

The grim answer to that last question came a mere 29 minutes later when the top floors succumbed to the burning jet fuel, leading to another chain reaction as the north tower's internal support structure buckled, collapsing to the ground with thousands more innocent civilians and first responders trapped inside.

Danny finally returned from class and the three of us did our best to sort through what we had just seen. Danny, Kerry, and our other friends from the New York metro area scrambled to try and contact loved ones potentially caught in the mess. Cell phone lines were clogged and many of my friends were left wondering what exactly had happened to their families. Later in the day, we learned that Danny's mother had watched the towers fall from her office window across the Hudson River.

In an effort to calm down, Kerry and I retired to her sorority house and talked for the rest of the morning about what we had witnessed. Class was an afterthought. She finally managed to get a hold of her mother in northern New Jersey and her father on Long Island. Though they were never really in danger, it was comforting to know they were safe. That night, as expected, I received the dreaded call from my Reserve unit. They had put together a security roster and were calling us in for overnight rotations.

Upon hearing the news, I called my friend Rish, a member of the Rhode Island National Guard at the time. He had received a similar call. We talked outside of my dorm for about an hour amid the eerie calm of empty skies. I would get off easy at the time. I only had to pull about a week of overnight guard shifts at my Reserve center before they formally activated some of my fellow soldiers for 90 days of duty. Rish was not so lucky. He was put on orders from the National Guard to pull similar shifts at his unit, eventually forcing him to withdraw for the semester.

After 9/11, the fall semester was by far my worst at URI. With the war ramping up in Afghanistan, my friends working around the clock, and Reserve training kicking up about 10 notches, it was hard to focus on anything else. Eventually, I turned it around in the spring, but now Iraq was closing in our radar.

Fall 2002 I made the dean's list, but in late December my Reserve unit was put on alert. We were going to Iraq. I quickly withdrew from URI, made arrangements to move out of my house, and basically packed up my life for a year to go serve my country.

The moment the two planes hit the towers has now come to define the subsequent eight years of my life and great deal of my personal character--a week of balancing overnight armed guard duty at my Reserve unit while juggling fall classes, my year-long deployment to Iraq, my subsequent motivation to graduate upon returning home, my work at the Naval War College, my move to Washington, D.C., and my work today for AMVETS and American Veteran magazine.

As the war in Afghanistan continues to heat up, I implore all Americans to remember the mission at hand: Holding those responsible for the 9/11 attacks accountable for their actions. Osama Bin Laden remains at large, Al-Qaeda continues to carry out attacks on our allies around the world, and the Taliban continues to inflict harm on Americans looking to bring stability to Afghanistan.

Today, I hope we each pause to not only remember the victims at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pa., but also the 2.5 million brave men and women who answered the call to serve our nation in the wake of 9/11--especially those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

To me, Afghanistan is a war worth winning--something that we must never forget, even in the wake of discouraging polls about the "value" of our involvement.

I will never forget and I will continue to support all the brave men and women serving in harm's way. This is my personal story of 9/11 and how it has affected me. We're eager to hear your personal stories on this blog.

-Ryan

(Photo: The World Trade Center towers burning on Sept. 11, 2001 with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground. National Parks Service photo, released.)

An open letter to the ACLU

Dear ACLU,

I just finished reading your attorneys' commentary on CNN.com regarding President Obama's decision to fight the ill-conceived release of additional detainee mistreatment photos.

In your commentary, you attempted to berate the current President and the previous administration for, "widespread and systemic" abuse. As a veteran who served in Iraq and handled detainees from time to time, this couldn't be further from the truth.

While my unit trained at Ft. Bragg and upon our arrival in Kuwait, we were briefed repeatedly on the rules of engagement, our general orders, and the laws of war to ensure that we would know how to responsibly handle enemy combatants and detainees once they were neutralized on the battlefield. Unfortunately, we had to put our training into practice our first day after crossing the berm.

We encountered about 50 military-aged men looting weapons from an Iraqi military installation in Taji, just north of Baghdad. The unit I was attached to managed to gain control of the situation, took possession of the arms, and built a cordon around the detainees near one of the facility's perimeter walls. We would now need to wait for military police and intelligence units to join up with us to properly vet and process the detainees.

As nightfall rolled in, my teammates and I entered into the equation to pull security on the group. Once Intelligence was on site, they began to speak with each detainee individually. The conversations were often brief and even-tempered. Most of the men were immediately released. However, a handful of the answers didn't satisfy the interrogators, and these men remained in our custody.

Only having a vague knowledge of how to handle detainees from our earlier briefings, the intelligence soldiers pulled us aside and gave us another hasty--albeit critical--briefing on how we needed to handle these men. Time and again they reiterated that we could only use proportional force to ensure they stayed put, until the unit commander decided the best next course of action.

"Proportional" meant that we were only authorized to keep watch over the men and ensure they didn't try to escape or, worse, attack us. Intelligence was very clear that the ONLY circumstances under which we could draw our weapons is if we were in imminent danger of personal harm, meaning that the men somehow gained control of a weapon and turned to use it on us.

Next, we were obligated under international law to feed them, provide them with water, allow them to sleep, and render medical aide, if necessary. We were a little taken aback, since our rations were now on the line to ensure that these potential criminals were treated properly. But we did it. We field stripped a box of MREs, took the matches, hot sauce, and heaters, then demonstrated how to properly eat them with the help of our interpreter.

Contrary to popular belief, we weren't instructed to beat, harass, or otherwise "screw" with the detainees. In fact, Intelligence made it clear that we would face dire consequences if we even thought of mistreating them. The night came and went, the detainees stayed put, and we handed them off to another unit the next day.

We carried the lessons of that day with us throughout the deployment and dozens of other encounters with detainees. Does this sound like "widespread and systemic" patterns of abuse?

Over the years, stories have come to light regarding overseas rendition camps and detainee abuse incidents from troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither I nor the Pentagon seek to refute incidents of abuse, but the mischaracterization of the actions of all American troops is what troubles me. As I pointed out in my last posting on this issue, enemy combatants will always choose American custody over their local criminal justice system, or the killing houses of Al Qaeda. This should serve as a testament to the professionalism of our troops tasked with handling enemy combatants today.

Unfortunately, from your commentary I've gathered that you believe American troops are actually trained to harass and mistreat detainees as a matter of policy, which is patently false. The Pentagon (especially under the new Administration) has been very candid in its responses to illicit detainee abuse incidents. Today, very stringent measures are in place to assure that detainees are treated equitably, as evidenced by numerous independent reports on American detention facilities, which is why Obama has decided to fight the photos' release.

The Pentagon has taken corrective action. Dated photos from incidents for which justice has been meted out will not provide anything of value to the public discourse.

In your commentary, you also purported that the President's directive lacked a "limiting principle," meaning that blocking the release of these photos would only further the presumption that the Executive enjoys the ability to censor information at will.

The limiting principle to this decision is obvious: These particular, old, subpoenaed detainee photos, which have been used in old investigations that have since been closed do not need to be released publicly. To me, this seems like a clear limit. The Administration has already demonstrated considerable consideration for transparency, even lifting the decades-old ban on filming flag-draped coffins returning from the battlefield. In this individual case the President has chosen national security and the safety of our troops over your voyeuristic desires.

Some have argued that releasing the photos would demonstrate that the United States has changed its "old habits," somehow ensuring that the extremists we're fighting would see it as an olive branch from which we can move forward. We already know this is not true. No sooner had Obama been elected that Al Qaeda released an inflammatory statement seeking to defame him and the nation he now represents. Al Qaeda and its operatives will not respond to symbolic gestures.

However, Al Qaeda will seize on opportunities to use our own transparency against, as we've seen in the past. When the Abu Ghraib incident came to light, violence in Iraq spiked dramatically--from 52 U.S. deaths in March 2004 to 135 U.S. deaths in April 2004 after "60 Minutes" aired the photos.

In the commentary you noted that, "To give the government the power to suppress information because it might anger an unidentified set of people in an unspecified part of the world and ultimately endanger an ill-defined group of U.S. personnel would be to invest it with a virtually unlimited censorial power."

I have already refuted the "unlimited censorship" idea, now I want to refute your remaining ambiguous assertions. The "unidentified set of people" is Al Qaeda and its network of operatives. The "unspecified part of the world" is Southwest Asia, particularly Iraq, Afghanistan and the Peshwar region of Pakistan. Finally, the "ill-defined group of U.S. personnel" is the more than 300,000 American military men and women who have selflessly volunteered to serve in harm's way across the aforementioned regions, as our lives go on tonight. Your argument is not salient, and, as a veteran, I take offense to being labeled as an "ill-defined group of U.S. personnel."

I guess I just don't understand why you want to possess these photos so badly. To generate more hits for your Web sites and blogs? To set in motion a complete reversal of all progress in Iraq? To compromise our latest surge of forces in Afghanistan? To further malign the selfless acts of our military men and women?

I'm appalled and offended by the proposition of releasing these photos, and I'm happy to see that Obama has listened to his top military minds on this issue. I hope these photos never see the light of day, giving our enemies another opportunity to kill or maim Americans fighting to keep us safe.

-Ryan

(Photo: Members of my unit discussing what to do with military-aged Iraqi men caught looting a military installation north of Baghdad in 2003. I am the second soldier from the right, pulling security. Photo courtesy of Ryan Gallucci.)

Obama fights to keep detainee photos secure

Yesterday, President Barack Obama took a strong stance against the ACLU, which is demanding the release of alleged detainee abuse photos from Iraq and Afghanistan.

After speaking with his generals on the ground, Obama decided that releasing the photos would only embolden our enemies, endangering American troops around the world.

Obama noted that there was nothing particularly compelling in the new images, and that it would only provide fodder to our enemies at a time when we have made tremendous strides in Iraq and during a pivotal transition period in Afghanistan.

Personally, I applaud the President's decision to keep our troops' best interest in mind.

Today, our men and women in uniform are fighting against a brutal enemy that has never demonstrated consideration for international law or compassion for battlefield detainees.

To the contrary, our troops have shown considerable care and compassion for enemy combatants. Troops who have served in the combat zone know first-hand that Iraqis and Afghanis caught up in the fighting would rather spend some time in an American detention facility with three hots and a cot, than be turned over to the local criminal justice system, or worse, Al Qaeda.

Naturally, there have been flaws in our system, as we saw through the Abu Ghraib debacle. Fortunately, troops and leaders who have violated our standards of conduct have been held accountable. Releasing these photos would not serve the public interest. Rather, it would be dangerous for our troops on the ground. The President has made a responsible decision to fight their release.

Al Qaeda and its global network of extremists are surely chomping at the bit for the U.S. government to release more photos of someone defacing the Koran or verbally dressing down a detainee. We should not seek to satisfy their need for increased propaganda against our troops.

I am proud of the stand President Obama has decided to take and his reasoning behind it. Our military has made tremendous progress over the last couple of years in our global contingency operations. Why would we jeopardize that progress and the safety of our volunteer forces to placate the ACLU?

-Ryan

(Media: Video: President Barack Obama addresses U.S. troops on a recent visit to Iraq. Official White House video. Photos, Middle: Detainees at a detention facility i Iraq participate in voluntary religious discussions with an Iraqi Imam. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Michael V. May, released. Bottom: A detainee receives medical care at a hospital in Guantanamo Bay. U.S. Army photo by 1st Lt. Sarah Cleveland, released.)