Ex-army officer: troops are dying in Iraq for a 'doomed project'

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A former captain in the Scots Guards who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq describes both operations as a political and military shambles in a book to be published next week.

Leo Docherty, 30, was formally reprimanded six months ago for breaking the Army's code of silence by criticising the top brass for a catalogue of failures in both countries. He left the Army disillusioned and under a cloud in September, but now risks further ire from his former masters by publishing an account of his time in Iraq and Afghanistan, called Desert of Death.

Mr Docherty, who speaks five languages, including Arabic and Pashto, became a captain in 2001 and was deployed to Basra in Iraq in November 2004. "None of us in the officers' mess believed in the weapons of mass destruction nonsense - we all saw that as a kind of pretext," he said.

But things started to go wrong quickly, and Mr Docherty began to feel that Operation Telic was causing as many problems for the population as it solved.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2432462.ece

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1. More and more military folks are speaking out

and they will continue to do so as they find themselves and their fellows redeployed again and again. They say that on the battlefield, a soldier doesn't think of his country first-he thinks of protecting his buddies. That's what we're seeing starting to happen--the troops realize they are in the midst of a never-ending battle and are standing up to help their buddies.