WASHINGTON - To hear retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez explain it, the mistakes of the Iraq war that happened while he was in command there weren't his fault. Not Abu Ghraib, not the birth of the insurgency, not the decision to let rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr survive.

Sanchez was a soldier, and according to him, a general's job is to give advice. What the civilian leaders decide after that is out of a general's hands.

"It's our responsibility to provide the best judgment we can," Sanchez said in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers. "But when those decisions are made, if they are not illegal or immoral, civilian control of the military dictates that we comply."

His explanation is part of an ongoing debate within the military, triggered by the Iraq quagmire: What is the role of a soldier?

Sanchez argues that crafting a strategy wasn't his responsibility, even as the top commander in Iraq. That fell to the civilian leaders, such as the secretary of defense and the president.

But as part of the military's emerging counterinsurgency strategy, commanders now are calling their soldiers "strategic corporals." That is, every soldier's decision is part of the broader strategy.

Captains serving in outposts throughout Iraq now are leading fiefdoms alongside local Iraqi leaders, deciding things such as who should protect the community and how local funds should be spent. Commanders now stress to corporals and captains stationed in those outposts that their decisions are part of the broader strategy.

"It's all well and good for a general to say 'I am not responsible for grand strategy,' " said retired Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan. "But corporals can be strategic. They can make things happen."

Sanchez leans on the Uniform Code of Military Justice for his defense. Indeed, the regulations haven't changed since the military adopted counterinsurgency tactics. So far, the regulations don't define when a corporal making on-the-ground decisions has violated the rules, leaving corporals and generals to interpret old rules in new situations.

Sanchez's comments were part of a series of interviews he's given recently to promote his new autobiography, "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story." In his book, Sanchez repeatedly spells out instances in which civilian leaders made decisions that countered his recommendations.

Sanchez said the key window for the United States to turn the situation around in Iraq opened with the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003.

It closed the following April, he said, when the U.S. made two key mistakes: It launched its first major offensive into Fallujah and decided not to capture al-Sadr, whose Shiite militia has since grown into one of Iraq's most powerful forces.

Sanchez said he advised President Bush not to go into Fallujah in April 2004 after four private security contractors were taken hostage and killed. Their burned bodies were hung from a bridge as Iraqis celebrated beneath them.

Sanchez said he feared that proponents of attacking Fallujah were being driven by a knee-jerk reaction to the photos that were circulated and not by consideration of the difficulty of moving into the city, which had been a bastion of anti-American insurgents since U.S. troops toppled Saddam.

He said he advised against the offensive. The president "appreciated our caution but then ordered us to attack," Sanchez wrote.

That battle ended in failure less than a month later and signaled to the insurgency that the U.S. would walk away from a major fight.

That same month, the U.S. could have arrested al-Sadr, but Sanchez said that L. Paul Bremer, then the head of the Coalition Provincial Authority, called off the operation. Al-Sadr has been haunting U.S. efforts in Iraq since.