Petraeus: Iraq 'Challenges' to Last for Years
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 18, 2007; A11

Conditions in Iraq will not improve sufficiently by September to justify a drawdown of U.S. military forces, the top commander in Iraq said yesterday.

Asked whether he thought the job assigned to an additional 30,000 troops deployed as the centerpiece of President Bush's new war strategy would be completed by then, Gen. David H. Petraeus replied: "I do not, no. I think that we have a lot of heavy lifting to do."

Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, his diplomatic counterpart in Baghdad, said a key report they will deliver to Washington in September will include what Crocker called "an assessment of what the consequences might be if we pursue other directions." Noting the "unhelpful roles" being played by Iran and Syria in Iraq, Crocker said: "We've got to consider what could happen."

Comments by Petraeus on "Fox News Sunday" and Crocker on NBC's "Meet the Press" were an indication of the administration's evolving strategy for confronting rising congressional demands to begin planning troop withdrawals. In addition to warning about the possible regional consequences of withdrawal, both men emphasized a "mixed" picture on the ground, citing successes while acknowledging the difficulty of the task ahead.

Asserting steady, albeit slow, military and political progress, Petraeus said that the "many, many challenges" would not be resolved "in a year or even two years." Similar counterinsurgency operations, he said, citing Britain's experience in Northern Ireland, "have gone at least nine or 10 years." He said he and Crocker would make "some recommendations on the way ahead" to Congress, and that it was realistic to assume "some form of long-term security arrangement" with Iraq.

Democrats failed last month to impose a withdrawal timetable in war-funding legislation. But the enacted measure mandated assessments of military, political and economic progress from Petraeus and Crocker -- rather than from Washington-based administration and military officials -- by Sept. 15.

A growing number of prominent Republicans who last month rejected any mention of withdrawal now say they view the September report as a crossroads.

"I think everybody anticipates that there's going to be a new strategy in the fall," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I don't think we'll have the same level of troops, in all likelihood, that we have now," totaling more than 150,000. "The time to properly evaluate that, it strikes me, is in September."

On the Iraqi political front, McConnell said, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been "a big disappointment. They have not done the things that they know they need to do to hold their country together -- things like the new oil law, things like local elections, things like finishing the de-Baathification process."

In announcing his new strategy in January, Bush said the troop increase would diminish sectarian violence in Baghdad and break Sunni insurgent control in Anbar province, a stronghold of the group al-Qaeda in Iraq. The ensuing calm, the administration said, would give the Shiite-dominated Maliki government time and space to reconcile with the minority Sunni and Kurdish communities, and build a unified administration that Iraqis -- including many now involved in violence -- would support.

But since the deployment of five additional U.S. combat brigades began in early spring, the overall level of violence has not abated and in some respects has increased, according to a Pentagon report issued last week. Little progress has been reported in achieving the political benchmarks spelled out in the funding legislation as well as a revision of the Iraqi constitution to provide a better balance of regional and sectarian factions in the government.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in Baghdad on Saturday that he had told the Iraqi government "that our troops are buying them time to pursue reconciliation, that frankly we are disappointed by the progress so far." The same message, he said, had been conveyed by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and Adm. William J. Fallon, head of the U.S. military's Central Command, during Iraq visits last week.

In an interview posted on its Web site Saturday, Newsweek magazine quoted Maliki as criticizing administration statements that appeared to be "dictating to the Iraqi government." He said he had told U.S. officials that words such as "pressure" and "timetables . . . do not help."

Contradicting reports of difficulties in reaching agreement among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, Maliki reportedly said that draft laws on oil, de-Baathification and provincial elections "are all ready and will be submitted to the parliament next week."

Petraeus and Crocker took issue with the portrayal of last week's Pentagon report as overwhelmingly negative, and cited successes in Anbar and in some Baghdad neighborhoods. They acknowledged that as U.S. and Iraqi troops had concentrated on those areas, insurgent activity had sharply increased elsewhere, mainly in the southern belt of Baghdad's suburbs and in Diyala province, northeast of the capital.

But Petraeus said that the arrival last week of the last of the newly deployed brigades had allowed a shift in U.S. strategy, "enabling us now to launch operations into sanctuaries, areas in which we have had very little coalition force presence other than raids in recent years."

Asked about the recent comment by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) that Petraeus's optimistic assessment of security in Baghdad indicated that the general "isn't in touch with what's going on," Petraeus said that he has tried "not to pull punches" and to "present both the good and the bad." His report in September, he said, "will be a forthright assessment of what we've achieved and what we haven't achieved."

June 17, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Boycott Built on Bias

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Two weeks ago I took part in commencement for this year’s doctoral candidates at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The ceremony was held in the amphitheater on Mount Scopus, which faces out onto the Dead Sea and the Mountains of Moab. The setting sun framed the graduate students in a reddish-orange glow against a spectacular biblical backdrop.

Before I describe the ceremony, though, I have to note that it coincided with the news that Britain’s University and College Union had called on its members to consider a boycott of Israeli universities, accusing them of being complicit in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Anyway, as the Hebrew U. doctoral candidates each had their names called out and rose to receive their diplomas from the university’s leadership, I followed along in the program. The Israeli names rolled by: “Moshe Nahmany, Irit Nowik, Yuval Ofir. But then every so often I heard an Arab name, like Nuha Hijazi or Rifat Azam or Taleb Mokari.

Since the program listed everyone’s degrees and advisers, I looked them up. Rifat got his doctorate in law. His thesis was about “International Taxation of Electronic Commerce.” His adviser was “Prof. D. Gliksberg.” Nuha got her doctorate in biochemistry. Her adviser was “Prof. R. Gabizon.” Taleb had an asterisk by his name. So I looked at the bottom of the page. It said: “Summa Cum Laude.” His chemistry thesis was about “Semiconductor-Metal Interfaces,” and his adviser was “Prof. U. Banin.”

These were Israeli Arab doctoral students — many of them women and one of whom accepted her degree wearing a tight veil over her head. Funny — she could receive her degree wearing a veil from the Hebrew University, but could not do so in France, where the veil is banned in public schools. Arab families cheered unabashedly when their sons and daughters received their Hebrew U. Ph.D. diplomas, just like the Jewish parents.

How crazy is this, I thought. Israel’s premier university is giving Ph.D.’s to Arab students, two of whom were from East Jerusalem — i.e. the occupied territories — supervised by Jewish Israeli professors, all while some far-left British academics are calling for a boycott of Israeli universities.

I tell this story to underscore the obvious : that the reality here is so much more morally complex than the outside meddlers present it. Have no doubt, I have long opposed Israel’s post-1967 settlements. They have squandered billions and degraded the Israeli Army by making it an army of occupation to protect the settlers and their roads. And that web of settlements and roads has carved up the West Bank in an ugly and brutal manner — much uglier than Israel’s friends abroad ever admit. Indeed, their silence, particularly American Jewish leaders, enabled the settlement lunacy.

But you’d have to be a blind, deaf and dumb visitor to Israel today not to see that the vast majority of Israelis recognize this historic mistake, and they not only approved Ariel Sharon’s unilateral uprooting of Israeli settlements in Gaza to help remedy it, but elected Ehud Olmert precisely to do the same in the West Bank. The fact that it is not happening now is hardly Israel’s fault alone. The Palestinians are in turmoil.

So to single out Israeli universities alone for a punitive boycott is rank anti-Semitism. Let’s see, Syria is being investigated by the United Nations for murdering Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Syrian agents are suspected of killing the finest freedom-loving Lebanese journalists, Gibran Tueni and Samir Kassir. But none of that moves the far left to call for a boycott of Syrian universities. Why? Sudan is engaged in genocide in Darfur. Why no boycott of Sudan? Why?

If the far-left academics driving this boycott actually cared about Palestinians they would call on every British university to accept 20 Palestinian students on full scholarships to help them with what they need most — building the skills to run a modern state and economy. And they would call on every British university to dispatch visiting professors to every Palestinian university to help upgrade their academic offerings. And they would challenge every Israeli university that already offers Ph.D.’s to Israeli Arabs to do even more. And they would challenge every Arab university the same way.

That’s what people who actually care about Palestinians would do. But just singling out Israeli universities for a boycott, in the face of all the other madness in the Middle East — that’s what anti-Semites would do.

U.S. Strategy on Sunnis Questioned
Loyalties at Issue in New Partnerships Against Al-Qaeda in Iraq
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 18, 2007; A11

BAGHDAD, July 17 -- Shiite and Kurdish officials expressed deep reservations on Sunday about the new U.S. military strategy of partnering with Sunni Arab groups to help defeat the militant organization al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"They are trusting terrorists," said Ali al-Adeeb, a prominent Shiite lawmaker who was among many to question the loyalty of the Sunni groups. "They are trusting people who have previously attacked American forces and innocent people. They are trusting people who are loyal to the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Throughout Iraq, a growing number of Sunni groups profess to have turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq because of its indiscriminate killing and repressive version of Islam. In some areas, these groups have provided information to Americans about al-Qaeda in Iraq members or deadly explosives used to target soldiers.

The collaboration has progressed furthest in the western province of Anbar, where U.S. military commanders enlisted the help of Sunni tribal leaders to funnel their kinsmen into the police force by the thousands. In other areas, Sunnis have not been fully incorporated into the security services and exist for the time being as local militias.

Some of these groups, believed to be affiliated with such organizations as the Islamic Army or the 1920 Revolution Brigades, have received weapons and ammunition, usually through the Iraqi military, as well as transportation, food, handcuffs and direct assistance from U.S. soldiers. In Baghdad's Amiriyah neighborhood, a local group of Sunnis who call themselves the Baghdad Patriots were driven around earlier this month in American and Iraqi vehicles and given approval by U.S. forces to arrest suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq members.

One of the main unanswered questions for American commanders leading these efforts has been to what degree the Iraqi government would support their plans to fashion local Sunnis into these neighborhood defense forces.

In an interview Friday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told Newsweek that some American field commanders "make mistakes since they do not know the facts about the people they deal with." Maliki went on to say that arming the tribes is appropriate in certain circumstances "but on the condition that we should be well aware of the tribe's background and sure that it is not connected with terror."

Other Shiite politicians are openly opposing the strategy.

"We cannot take weapons from certain insurgents and militias and then create other militias," said Abbas Bayati, a Turkmen Shiite lawmaker who is part of the majority bloc in parliament. "You need to open recruiting centers and provide training; now what is going on is giving weapons and money to the tribes and individuals."

Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator, acknowledged the potential benefits of reducing the strength of al-Qaeda in Iraq but said of Sunni Arab groups: "They take arms, they take money, and in the future they will be a problem. Politically, they are still against the Americans and the Iraqi government."

One senior Iraqi government official described the American military policy of partnering with local Sunni groups as "nonsense."

"Every three months they have a new strategy. This is not only a distracting way to conduct policy, it is creating insecurity for all. I don't think these strategies have been thought through deeply. It is all about convenience," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"In reality, they are forcing the Iraqi government and the Shia and the Kurds to reconcile with the Saddamists," the official added. "This is similar to going to the South in 1865 and forcing the Confederates to reconcile immediately with the Northerners. And this is not going to happen."

American military commanders involved in the partnerships with Sunnis say they intend to quickly train and register them under the aegis of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police force. In Anbar province, tribesmen have received training and become policemen, and receive salaries from the Interior Ministry, according to U.S. military officials. The officials have said that as long as the Sunni groups are watched closely and kept from mistreating people, the intelligence they provide about al-Qaeda in Iraq makes them valuable partners.

Mithal Alusi, a secular Sunni lawmaker, said he supported the U.S. military efforts because "al-Qaeda is danger No. 1 in Iraq."

"The prime minister has to understand this is not a one-man show," Alusi said. "We cannot trust the government to deal with al-Qaeda, to play this game alone. We are very thankful for the American process and the American point of view."

Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser to Maliki, said the government would like to absorb anyone who wants to decrease violence as long as they accept the political process and are recruited in a systematic way to ensure that they are not using their newly official status for nefarious purposes.

Meanwhile Sunday, a car bomb exploded west of Baiji in northern Iraq, targeting an Iraqi military convoy, said Capt. Raad al-Janabi of the Siniyah police. The blast killed four people, including two soldiers, and wounded 12 others, he said.

A suicide attacker blew himself up in a crowd near Fallujah, killing six people and injuring 14, according to Lt. Mohammad al-Dulaimi of the Fallujah police. Mohammed Ismael of Fallujah General Hospital said many of the injured were in critical condition and the death toll could rise.

The U.S. military said three American soldiers were killed on Saturday by explosions, two in Baghdad province and one in the northern province surrounding Kirkuk. Another soldier was wounded in the Baghdad attack.

Also over the weekend, U.S.-led forces killed 10 suspected insurgents and detained 20 others while finding bomb-making materials during a series of missions targeting al-Qaeda in Iraq in Baghdad, Mosul, Anbar province and elsewhere, the U.S. military said.

In one operation targeting a suspected Libyan militant near Karmah, west of Baghdad, U.S. troops took fire from seven people in a building, then responded by killing six and wounding the other, the military said.

Special correspondents Dalya Hassan and K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.

June 17, 2007
Sarkozy’s Party Wins Smaller Majority Than Expected in French Assembly

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, June 17 — The conservative party of President Nicolas Sarkozy won a solid victory in French parliamentary elections on Sunday, but it failed to secure the rout of the left that polls had predicted.

In a sign that the left is still alive in France, three polling institutes estimated late Sunday night that Mr. Sarkozy’s governing Union for a Popular Movement would win between 314 to 328 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. The polling groups projected that the Socialists would win between 206 to 212 seats.

That outcome reflected a net gain of seats for the left and a net loss for the right. Mr. Sarkozy’s party had 359 seats in the outgoing Parliament, while the Socialists had 149.

In the most high-stakes contest, Alain Juppé, Mr. Sarkozy’s minister of a new high-profile ministry for the environment, transportation and energy and the mayor of Bordeaux, lost to a Socialist. He announced that he will step down as minister, a humiliating setback for the Sarkozy government.

In a less important but symbolic defeat for the governing party, Jean-Louis Bruguière, who as France’s leading antiterrorist investigative magistrate earned a global reputation over the years, also lost to a Socialist.

Still, the overall win by Mr. Sarkozy’s center-right party marked the first time in 29 years that a governing party has retained its majority in the lower house of Parliament.

Both the left and the right claimed victory.

“Through their vote, the French wanted to give meaning to the republic, a democratic freedom with a real force of constructive opposition,” said Ségolène Royal, the Socialist who lost the presidential race to Mr. Sarkozy in May.

But Prime Minister François Fillon congratulated French voters for their “clear and coherent choice, which will allow the president of the republic to implement his project.”

Certainly, the outcome gives Mr. Sarkozy the mandate to push through his ambitious program to cut taxes, reinvigorate the economy, ease some labor restrictions, slash unemployment, impose curbs on immigration and make France more competitive globally. But psychologically, the Sarkozy government could lose some of its momentum.

The French Parliament, consisting of a National Assembly and a largely symbolic Senate, does not enjoy nearly the same authority as does the American Congress in serving as a counterweight to the presidency. In the run-up to the vote, the Socialists and other parties of the left warned that a consolidation of power behind Mr. Sarkozy would be potentially dangerous for democracy in France.

The Socialist Party’s leader, François Hollande credited the stronger-than-expected showing of the left to what he called the “first unfair measures of the government.” He cited a much-criticized proposal to increase the value-added tax to reduce the burden of French social security payments on companies.

In separate comments, Former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who belongs to Mr. Sarkozy’s party, acknowledged that popular fear of the extra tax had cost some votes.

In his one month since assuming office, Mr. Sarkozy has shown signs of wanting to expand the power of the presidency, taking over some of the usual duties of the prime minister.

He has ordered a special summer session of the new parliament (when much of the country is on vacation and not inclined to protest in the streets) to consider his first set of bills on taxes, labor rules, universities, immigration and crime.

In foreign affairs, Mr. Sarkozy offered a number of proposals, including those for the crisis in Darfur, the moribund European Constitution, the fate of Kosovo, climate change and a new Mediterranean union. At the recent summit meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized countries in Germany, he appeared confident, even cocky in meetings with other heads of state, lecturing outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair about why he was not more popular and musing with President Bush about the 2008 presidential race in the United States.

The new Democrat Movement party of Françcois Bayrou, the centrist who came in third place with nearly 19 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections, was estimated to have won received only four seats, down from 29 seats and insufficient to form his own parliamentary group.

The Communist Party which in the 1970s had as many as 86 seats and currently has 21, was estimated to have won 12 to 19 seats. The Greens were estimated at four seats. Under the peculiarities of French electoral law, the far-right National Front won no seats.

The right was projected to win a bigger majority. In a first round of voting a week ago, Mr. Sarkozy’s party and two other parties of the right won 109 seats outright under a system that requires a winner to take more than 50 percent of the vote; the Socialists took only one seat. The remaining seats were decided in Sunday’s run-off.

Voter turnout estimated at about 60 percent, relatively low by French standards, reflecting both certainty that Mr. Sarkozy’s party inevitably would prevail and voter fatigue after presidential and parliamentary elections that made Sunday’s election the fourth national poll in two months. By contrast, voter turnout in the presidential election runoff in May exceeded 84 percent.

This is a strange moment in French politics. Jacques Chirac’s departure from the presidency after 12 years as coincided with his sudden fall from grace. His immunity from prosecution expired Saturday, one month after moving out of the presidential Élysée Palace.

There are five separate investigations involving Mr. Chirac, a 74-year-old career politician, although his most serious vulnerability is an investigation of an illegal fund-raising effort that dates back more than a decade ago to when he was mayor of Paris.

It resulted in a series of prosecutions of senior members of Mr. Chirac’s former party, including Mr. Juppé, his former prime minister, who received a suspended jail term, was barred from holding public office for a year and received another humiliating defeat on Sunday.

The outcome of Sunday’s election was expected to give a boost to the Socialist Party, which since the presidential election, has been internal divided over strategy and public squabbling between Ms. Royal and Mr. Hollande, her partner and father of their four children.

The parliamentary campaign was displayed dramatic moments of Socialist Party desperation. Ms. Royal, who did not run for re-election to Parliament, confessed she would have been ready to take over the party reins from Mr. Hollande. “If he would have quit, I would have been the candidate,” she said bluntly during a trip to northern France in early June. “That’s his choice.”

After the party’s dismal showing in the first round of voting last Sunday, Ms. Royal reached out for support to Mr. Bayrou, who spurned her proposal for an alliance against the right.

Mr. Hollande was apparently infuriated by her overture, telling the French newspaper Le Monde, “She has a personal contact with François Bayrou. I don’t.”

Le Monde called their bickering a “vaudeville act.”

A deep and divisive debate over whether the Socialist Party, which essentially has upheld the same leftist positions since its creation in 1971, should remain on the left or move to the center has also contributed to the sense of disarray.

Socialist leaders and candidates struggled until the end of the parliamentary campaign to warn voters of the dangers of consolidating so much power behind Mr. Sarkozy and urging their supporters to get over their disappointment over the presidential election outcome and turn out at the polls.

Mr. Sarkozy and his lieutenants, meanwhile, told voters that it was their duty to give the governing party an overwhelming mandate to push through a platform of change.

The War Inside
Troops Are Returning From the Battlefield With Psychological Wounds, But the Mental-Health System That Serves Them Makes Healing Difficult
By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 17, 2007; A01

Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.

In public, the former Army scout stood tall for the cameras and marched in the parades. In private, he slashed his forearms to provoke the pain and adrenaline of combat. He heard voices and smelled stale blood. Soon the offers of help evaporated and he found himself estranged and alone, struggling with financial collapse and a darkening depression.

At a low point, he went to the local Department of Veterans Affairs medical center for help. One VA psychologist diagnosed Cruz with post-traumatic stress disorder. His condition was labeled "severe and chronic." In a letter supporting his request for PTSD-related disability pay, the psychologist wrote that Cruz was "in need of major help" and that he had provided "more than enough evidence" to back up his PTSD claim. His combat experiences, the letter said, "have been well documented."

None of that seemed to matter when his case reached VA disability evaluators. They turned him down flat, ruling that he deserved no compensation because his psychological problems existed before he joined the Army. They also said that Cruz had not proved he was ever in combat. "The available evidence is insufficient to confirm that you actually engaged in combat," his rejection letter stated.

Yet abundant evidence of his year in combat with the 4th Infantry Division covers his family's living-room wall. The Army Commendation Medal With Valor for "meritorious actions . . . during strategic combat operations" to capture Hussein hangs not far from the combat spurs awarded for his work with the 10th Cavalry "Eye Deep" scouts, attached to an elite unit that caught the Iraqi leader on Dec. 13, 2003, at Ad Dawr.

Veterans Affairs will spend $2.8 billion this year on mental health. But the best it could offer Cruz was group therapy at the Bronx VA medical center. Not a single session is held on the weekends or late enough at night for him to attend. At age 25, Cruz is barely keeping his life together. He supports his disabled parents and 4-year-old son and cannot afford to take time off from his job repairing boilers. The rough, dirty work, with its heat and loud noises, gives him panic attacks and flesh burns but puts $96 in his pocket each day.

Once celebrated by his government, Cruz feels defeated by its bureaucracy. He no longer has the stamina to appeal the VA decision, or to make the Army correct the sloppy errors in his medical records or amend his personnel file so it actually lists his combat awards.

"I'm pushing the mental limits as it is," Cruz said, standing outside the bullet-pocked steel door of the New York City housing project on Webster Avenue where he grew up and still lives with his family. "My experience so far is, you ask for something and they deny, deny, deny. After a while you just give up."

An Old and Growing Problem
Jeans Cruz and his contemporaries in the military were never supposed to suffer in the shadows the way veterans of the last long, controversial war did. One of the bitter legacies of Vietnam was the inadequate treatment of troops when they came back. Tens of thousands endured psychological disorders in silence, and too many ended up homeless, alcoholic, drug-addicted, imprisoned or dead before the government acknowledged their conditions and in 1980 officially recognized PTSD as a medical diagnosis.

Yet nearly three decades later, the government still has not mastered the basics: how best to detect the disorder, the most effective ways to treat it, and the fairest means of compensating young men and women who served their country and returned unable to lead normal lives.

Cruz's case illustrates these broader problems at a time when the number of suffering veterans is the largest and fastest-growing in decades, and when many of them are back at home with no monitoring or care. Between 1999 and 2004, VA disability pay for PTSD among veterans jumped 150 percent, to $4.2 billion.

By this spring, the number of vets from Afghanistan and Iraq who had sought help for post-traumatic stress would fill four Army divisions, some 45,000 in all.

They occupy every rank, uniform and corner of the country. People such as Army Lt. Sylvia Blackwood, who was admitted to a locked-down psychiatric ward in Washington after trying to hide her distress for a year and a half [story, A13]; and Army Pfc. Joshua Calloway, who spent eight months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and left barely changed from when he arrived from Iraq in handcuffs; and retired Marine Lance Cpl. Jim Roberts, who struggles to keep his sanity in suburban New York with the help of once-a-week therapy and a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs; and the scores of Marines in California who were denied treatment for PTSD because the head psychiatrist on their base thought the diagnosis was overused.

They represent the first wave in what experts say is a coming deluge.

As many as one-quarter of all soldiers and Marines returning from Iraq are psychologically wounded, according to a recent American Psychological Association report. Twenty percent of the soldiers in Iraq screened positive for anxiety, depression and acute stress, an Army study found.

But numbers are only part of the problem. The Institute of Medicine reported last month that Veterans Affairs' methods for deciding compensation for PTSD and other emotional disorders had little basis in science and that the evaluation process varied greatly. And as they try to work their way through a confounding disability process, already-troubled vets enter a VA system that chronically loses records and sags with a backlog of 400,000 claims of all kinds.

The disability process has come to symbolize the bureaucratic confusion over PTSD. To qualify for compensation, troops and veterans are required to prove that they witnessed at least one traumatic event, such as the death of a fellow soldier or an attack from a roadside bomb, or IED. That standard has been used to deny thousands of claims. But many experts now say that debilitating stress can result from accumulated trauma as well as from one significant event.

In an interview, even VA's chief of mental health questioned whether the single-event standard is a valid way to measure PTSD. "One of the things I puzzle about is, what if someone hasn't been exposed to an IED but lives in dread of exposure to one for a month?" said Ira R. Katz, a psychiatrist. "According to the formal definition, they don't qualify."

The military is also battling a crisis in mental-health care. Licensed psychologists are leaving at a far faster rate than they are being replaced. Their ranks have dwindled from 450 to 350 in recent years. Many said they left because they could not handle the stress of facing such pained soldiers. Inexperienced counselors muddle through, using therapies better suited for alcoholics or marriage counseling.

A new report by the Defense Department's Mental Health Task Force says the problems are even deeper. Providers of mental-health care are "not sufficiently accessible" to service members and are inadequately trained, it says, and evidence-based treatments are not used. The task force recommends an overhaul of the military's mental-health system, according to a draft of the report.

Another report, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in the wake of the Walter Reed outpatient scandal, found similar problems: "There is not a coordinated effort to provide the training required to identify and treat these non-visible injuries, nor adequate research in order to develop the required training and refine the treatment plans."

But the Army is unlikely to do more significant research anytime soon. "We are at war, and to do good research takes writing up grants, it takes placebo control trials, it takes control groups," said Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist. "I don't think that that's our primary mission."

In attempting to deal with increasing mental-health needs, the military regularly launches Web sites and promotes self-help guides for soldiers. Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the Army's acting surgeon general, believes that doubling the number of mental-health professionals and boosting the pay of psychiatrists would help.

But there is another obstacle that those steps could not overcome. "One of my great concerns is the stigma" of mental illness, Pollock said. "That, to me, is an even bigger challenge. I think that in the Army, and in the nation, we have a long way to go." The task force found that stigma in the military remains "pervasive" and is a "significant barrier to care."

Surveys underline the problem. Only 40 percent of the troops who screened positive for serious emotional problems sought help, a recent Army survey found. Nearly 60 percent of soldiers said they would not seek help for mental-health problems because they felt their unit leaders would treat them differently; 55 percent thought they would be seen as weak, and the same percentage believed that soldiers in their units would have less confidence in them.

Lt. Gen. John Vines, who led the 18th Airborne Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan, said countless officers keep quiet out of fear of being mislabeled. "All of us who were in command of soldiers killed or wounded in combat have emotional scars from it," said Vines, who recently retired. "No one I know has sought out care from mental-health specialists, and part of that is a lack of confidence that the system would recognize it as 'normal' in a time of war. This is a systemic problem."

Officers and senior enlisted troops, Vines added, were concerned that they would have trouble getting security clearances if they sought psychological help. They did not trust, he said, that "a faceless, nameless agency or process, that doesn't know them personally, won't penalize them for a perceived lack of mental or emotional toughness."

Overdiagnosed or Overlooked?
For the past 2 1/2 years, the counseling center at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif., was a difficult place for Marines seeking help for post-traumatic stress. Navy Cmdr. Louis Valbracht, head of mental health at the center's outpatient hospital, often refused to accept counselors' views that some Marines who were drinking heavily or using drugs had PTSD, according to three counselors and another staff member who worked with him.

"Valbracht didn't believe in it. He'd say there's no such thing as PTSD," said David Roman, who was a substance abuse counselor at Twentynine Palms until he quit six months ago.

"We were all appalled," said Mary Jo Thornton, another counselor who left last year.

A third counselor estimated that perhaps half of the 3,000 Marines he has counseled in the past five years showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress. "They would change the diagnosis right in front of you, put a line through it," said the counselor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works there.

"I want to see my Marines being taken care of," said Roman, who is now a substance-abuse counselor at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, N.C.

In an interview, Valbracht denied he ever told counselors that PTSD does not exist. But he did say "it is overused" as a diagnosis these days, just as "everyone on the East Coast now has a bipolar disorder." He said this "devalues the severity of someone who actually has PTSD," adding: "Nowadays it's like you have a hangnail. Someone comes in and says 'I have PTSD,' " and counselors want to give them that diagnosis without specific symptoms.

Valbracht, an aerospace medicine specialist, reviewed and signed off on cases at the counseling center. He said some counselors diagnosed Marines with PTSD before determining whether the symptoms persisted for 30 days, the military recommendation. Valbracht often talked to the counselors about his father, a Marine on Iwo Jima who overcame the stress of that battle and wrote an article called "They Even Laughed on Iwo." Counselors found it outdated and offensive. Valbracht said it showed the resilience of the mind.

Valbracht retired recently because, he said, he "was burned out" after working seven days a week as the only psychiatrist available to about 10,000 Marines in his 180-mile territory. "We could have used two or three more psychiatrists," he said, to ease the caseload and ensure that people were not being overlooked.

Former Lance Cpl. Jim Roberts's underlying mental condition was overlooked by the Marine Corps and successive health-care professionals for more than 30 years, as his temper and alcohol use plunged him into deeper trouble. Only in May 2005 did VA begin treating the Vietnam vet for PTSD. Three out of 10 of his compatriots from Vietnam have received diagnoses of PTSD. Half of those have been arrested at least once. Veterans groups say thousands have killed themselves.

To control his emotions now, Roberts attends group therapy once a week and swallows a handful of pills from his VA doctors: Zoloft, Neurontin, Lisinopril, Seroquel, Ambien, hydroxyzine, "enough medicine to kill a mule," he said.

Roberts desperately wants to persuade Iraq veterans not to take the route he traveled. "The Iraq guys, it's going to take them five to 10 years to become one of us," he said, seated at his kitchen table in Yonkers with his vet friends Nicky, Lenny, Frenchie, Ray and John nodding in agreement. "It's all about the forgotten vets, then and now. The guys from Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to get these guys in here with us."

"In here" can mean different things. It can mean a 1960s-style vet center such as the one where Roberts hangs out, with faded photographs of Huey helicopters and paintings of soldiers skulking through shoulder-high elephant grass. It can mean group therapy at a VA outpatient clinic during work hours, or more comprehensive treatment at a residential clinic. In a crisis, it can mean the locked-down psych ward at the local VA hospital.

"Out there," with no care at all, is a lonesome hell.

Losing a Bureaucratic Battle
Not long after Jeans Cruz returned from Iraq to Fort Hood, Tex., in 2004, his counselor, a low-ranking specialist, suggested that someone should "explore symptoms of PTSD." But there is no indication in Cruz's medical files, which he gave to The Washington Post, that anyone ever responded to that early suggestion.

When he met with counselors while he was on active duty, Cruz recalled, they would take notes about his troubled past, including that he had been treated for depression before he entered the Army. But they did not seem interested in his battlefield experiences. "I've shot kids. I've had to kill kids. Sometimes I look at my son and like, I've killed a kid his age," Cruz said. "At times we had to drop a shell into somebody's house. When you go clean up the mess, you had three, four, five, six different kids in there. You had to move their bodies."

When he tried to talk about the war, he said, his counselors "would just sit back and say, 'Uh-huh, uh-huh.' When I told them about the unit I was with and Saddam Hussein, they'd just say, 'Oh, yeah, right.' "

He occasionally saw a psychiatrist, who described him as depressed and anxious. He talked about burning himself with cigarettes and exhibited "anger from Iraq, nightmares, flashbacks," one counselor wrote in his file. "Watched friend die in Iraq. Cuts, bruises himself to relieve anger and frustration." They prescribed Zoloft and trazodone to control his depression and ease his nightmares. They gave him Ambien for sleep, which he declined for a while for fear of missing morning formation.

Counselors at Fort Hood grew concerned enough about Cruz to have him sign what is known as a Life Maintenance Agreement. It stated: "I, Jeans Cruz, agree not to harm myself or anyone else. I will first contact either a member of my direct Chain of Command . . . or immediately go to the emergency room." That was in October 2004. The next month he signed another one.

Two weeks later, Cruz reenlisted. He says the Army gave him a $10,000 bonus.

His problems worsened. Three months after he reenlisted, a counselor wrote in his medical file: "MAJOR depression." After that: "He sees himself in his dreams killing or strangling people. . . . He is worried about controlling his stress level. Stated that he is starting to drink earlier in the day." A division psychologist, noting Cruz's depression, said that he "did improve when taking medication but has degenerated since stopping medication due to long work hours."

Seven months after his reenlistment ceremony, the Army gave him an honorable discharge, asserting that he had a "personality disorder" that made him unfit for military service. This determination implied that all his psychological problems existed before his first enlistment. It also disqualified him from receiving combat-related disability pay.

There was little attempt to tie his condition to his experience in Iraq. Nor did the Army see an obvious contradiction in its handling of him: He was encouraged to reenlist even though his psychological problems had already been documented.

Cruz's records are riddled with obvious errors, including a psychological rating of "normal" on the same physical exam the Army used to discharge him for a psychological disorder. His record omits his combat spurs award and his Army Commendation Medal With Valor. These omissions contributed to the VA decision that he had not proved he had been in combat. To straighten out those errors, Cruz would have had to deal with a chaotic and contradictory paper trail and bureaucracy -- a daunting task for an expert lawyer, let alone a stressed-out young veteran.

In the Aug. 16, 2006, VA letter denying Cruz disability pay because he had not provided evidence of combat, evaluators directed him to the U.S. Armed Services Center for Research of Unit Records. But such a place no longer exists. It changed its name to the U.S. Army and Joint Services Records Research Center and moved from one Virginia suburb, Springfield, to another, Alexandria, three years ago. It has a 10-month waiting list for processing requests.

To speed things up, staff members often advise troops to write to the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland. But that agency has no records from the Iraq war, a spokeswoman said. That would send Cruz back to Fort Hood, whose soldiers have deployed to Iraq twice, leaving few staff members to hunt down records.

But Cruz has given up on the records. Life at the Daniel Webster Houses is tough enough.

After he left the Army and came home to the Bronx, he rode a bus and the subway 45 minutes after work to attend group sessions at the local VA facility. He always arrived late and left frustrated. Listening to the traumas of other veterans only made him feel worse, he said: "It made me more aggravated. I had to get up and leave." Experts say people such as Cruz need individual and occupational therapy.

Medications were easy to come by, but some made him sick. "They made me so slow I didn't want to do nothing with my son or manage my family," he said. After a few months, he stopped taking them, a dangerous step for someone so severely depressed. His drinking became heavier.

To calm himself now, he goes outside and hits a handball against the wall of the housing project. "My son's out of control. There are family problems," he said, shaking his head. "I start seeing these faces. It goes back to flashbacks, anxiety. Sometimes I've got to leave my house because I'm afraid I'm going to hit my son or somebody else."

Because of his family responsibilities, he does not want to be hospitalized. He doesn't think a residential program would work, either, for the same reason.

His needs are more basic. "Why can't I have a counselor with a phone number? I'd like someone to call."

Or some help from all those people who stuck their business cards in his palm during the glory days of his return from Iraq. "I have plaques on my wall -- but nothing more than that."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.