War And Peace
In the five months since President Bush declared major combat over in Iraq, at least 173 GIs have been killed and more than 800 wounded. But the GIs are fighting on, and Mr. Bush is asking for $72 billion to finish the job.
What's the bottom line on Iraq today? Correspondent Scott Pelley spent last month traveling the country to find out.
He talked with American GIs and an Iraqi fighter who want to kill them. He went to places where the war goes on, but also found places well on their way to peace.
Sixty miles west of Baghdad, in the city of Ramadi, Platoon Sgt. Arthur Wells rolls up on the first enemy ambush of the day: two vehicles are burning and two Americans are wounded after being hit by a bomb or rocket propelled grenades.
"Get the squads over here," says Wells. "Move out. Move out."
Wells' men are first on the scene, hunting the attackers. The First Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment are Florida National Guardsmen – and most have civilian jobs back home.
But for the past four months, they've been fighting in Ramadi, a town of 450,000 people, mostly Sunni Muslims, Saddam's religious sect. During the war, two divisions of Saddam's Republican Guard vanished around here. But some are fighting on.
"We usually wake up with a boom, around 6-7 o'clock in the morning. That's when they like to hit us the most, early in the morning because they know we go on patrol. It seems like every day, but it's every other day. It's sad how much it happens, how often," says Wells, who orders his team to search the area since the attacker must still be in the neighborhood.
"It's actually kind of sad that we're over here, trying to help these people, and all they want to do it blow us up and kill us. You know, it's kinda demoralizing."
Wells orders one Iraqi to come down here. "Down. Barudi," he says.
The word "barudi" means gun, and it's used in a question, as in, "Are you armed?" Language is a constant barrier here and Wells doesn't have enough translators, so it's hard to gather intelligence – let alone win hearts and minds.
"He didn't hear anything, he didn't see anything, just like everybody else. If they pretty much go ahead and snitch on them, the guys who did this will come back and kill them," says Wells.
"They either help us out and they get killed, or they don't and then we rough them up and make them sit out here in the hot sun for two or three hours. These people might all be innocent, but we got to treat them like they're not, and when we leave here, if we piss them off, we just made 20-30 enemies."
Night falls on Ramadi and Wells may have a break. Intelligence says there's a bomb factory in a machine shop. The platoon is closing in, but before they get there, a bomb hits their ambulance on the far side of the building. This time, no one is hurt.
The platoon moves on to hit the machine shop, and soldiers are looking for bomb-making materials, explosives and detonators. But Intelligence is wrong, again.
But there are plenty of bombs still out there, and the soldiers say they're creating a lot of havoc.
Who's building these bombs? Who is Sgt. Wells chasing? Well, one man says he's one of them. He's a Fedayeen soldier that 60 Minutes II met through contacts in the Iraqi resistance.
He laughed at the thought that the war was over: "The truth is that there is always American soldiers being killed in Iraq. When there is no American soldier being killed in Iraq [the war is over]. We should wash our honor with the blood. That's what the American people should understand. The war didn't end. Saddam still free and still fighting. The war continues."
If it's important to know what the enemy thinks, listen to what he says about the occupation.
"I wish that I have missiles that could bomb you in America, to kill you as your sons killed our sons and our families, just like this and you'll be all in hell," says the Fedayeen soldier. "If I get some of your children from the American army, I will cut off his head and I am not sorry. I would be too pleasure with this. I could be so happy with this."
He brought his weapons: grenades and a launcher. And he told our reporter, Jeff Newton, that he took part in four ambushes.
He said he is defending his faith: "The American people want to destroy the Muslim, want to force on us their values. I cannot be a Muslim, that's the whole problem between me and the American people. If I am a Muslim, then I am a terrorist and I am not a terrorist."
But that's not the way Paul Bremer, the top American civilian in charge of Iraq, sees it.
"You didn't arrest him? You could have turned him over to me. I'd arrest him," says Bremer to Pelley after discovering that 60 Minutes II interviewed the young Fedayeen fighter. "I'm responsible for security, so next time you run into one of these guys, let me know."
Bremer told Pelley that the soldier was correct when he said that Americans were trying to force their values on them: "There's truth in that. If he's a Fedayeen, there's some truth in that. If he's Fedayeen, he believes in a totalitarian system that kills people, that did not respect human rights, that did not respect civil liberties - that tortured people, raped women, cut people's ears off and tongues out. He's absolutely right we don't accept his values. Correct."
What about the folks at home? What should they believe when they hear about another American soldier being killed every day or every couple of days?
"When you got 130,000 troops here and you've got a couple of thousand renegades from the old regime trying to kill them, you're going to take casualties," says Bremer.
From Baghdad to Tikrit and down to Sgt. Wells in Ramadi, this triangle of Saddam support is the danger zone and the center of the news. But leave the triangle, and you find a different Iraq.
60 Minutes II went north to the region run by the Army's 101st Airborne Division. The Black Hawks of the 101st Division range over the northern third of the country, covering about a quarter of the population.
Lt. Col. Joe Buche wouldn't recognize Sgt. Wells' Iraq. Buche's battalion recently went three months without firing a shot.
"The security in my AO is really pretty stable. A lot of it has to do working hand in hand with the people that are here," says Buche.
"There's a whole potpourri of folks that live there. I've got a bunch of Kurdish people. I've also got some Arabs, mostly the Shamer and Jehesh tribes. Further south, there is a Yesiddi population. I've also got a few folks who are of Turkomen heritage."
They live across a vast stretch of desert and farmland. Saddam persecuted many of them. They don't like the occupation, but for now, they find they have common interests with the 101st Division.
The best example of that is the remarkable thing the Americans found buried under this pile of rocks. Buche took us to the heart of it, in a cable car that crawls down a long sloping tunnel.
More than 100 feet under the water, you will find an immense water station that should have been irrigating crops for hundreds of miles. But after the war, the pumps were down, and the harvest was on its way to disaster. That's when the 101st switched from swords to plowshares.
"We were in late July, the tomato crop was in the ground, potatoes need water about the third week of August, and if worst came to worst, we had to have it for the wheat in September," says Buche, who ordered Sgt. Sean Driscoll to get the pumps running.
And this is just one of the projects the 101st is running. Its soldiers have trained more than 1,400 police recruits, they're repairing refineries and pipelines, and they've held local elections well before the rest of the country.