- Tucked away in the recent Iraqi appropriation was $3
billion for a new paramilitary unit. Close students of Vietnam may see
similarities.
-
- With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public
concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration's
hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA's
Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America's death squads
or Israel's official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists,
the results are likely to look chillingly familiar.
-
- The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion
in new fundsótucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that
Congress approved in early Novemberówill go toward the creation
of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi
exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings,
not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S.
occupation and thousands of civilian Baathistsóup to 120,000 of
the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq.
-
- "They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like
things, like they did in Vietnam," says Vincent Cannistraro, former
CIA chief of counterterrorism. Ironically, he says, the U.S. forces in
Iraq are working with key members of Saddam Hussein's now-defunct intelligence
agency to set the program in motion. "They're setting up little teams
of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who
were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things,"
Cannistraro says.
-
- The plan is part of a last-ditch effort to win the war
before time runs out politically. Driving the effort are U.S. neoconservatives
and their allies in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office,
who are clearly worried about America's inability to put down the Iraqi
insurgency with time to spare before November. They are concerned that
President Bush's political advisers will overrule the national-security
team and persuade the president to pull the plug on Iraq. So, going for
broke, they've decided to launch an intensified military effort combined
with a radical new counterinsurgency program.
-
- The hidden $3 billion will fund covert ("black")
operations disguised as an Air Force classified program. According to John
Pike, an expert on classified military budgets at globalsecurity.org, the
cash, spread over three years, is likely being funneled directly to the
CIA, boosting that agency's estimated $4 billion a year budget by fully
25 percent. Operations in Iraq will get the bulk of it, with some money
going to Afghanistan. The number of CIA officers in Iraq, now 275, will
increase significantly, supplemented by large numbers of the U.S. military's
elite counterinsurgency forces. A chunk of those secret funds, according
to Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst, will to go to restive tribal sheikhs,
especially in Sunni-dominated central Iraq. "I assume there are CIA
people going around with bags of cash," says Goodman.
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- But the bulk of the covert money will support U.S. efforts
to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force. "The
big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate
the resistance," says Pike. "And it has to be politically loyal
to the United States."
-
- Unable to quell the resistance to the U.S. occupation,
the Pentagon is revamping its intelligence and special-operations task
force in Iraq, a classified unit commanded by an Air Force brigadier general.
It's also pouring money into the creation of an Iraqi secret police staffed
mainly by gunmen associated with members of the puppet Iraqi Governing
Council. Those militiamen are linked to Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National
Congress (inc), the Kurdish peshmerga ("facing death") forces
and Shiite paramilitary units, especially those of the Iran-backed Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Technically illegal, these armed
forces have been tolerated, even encouraged, by the Pentagon. Some of these
militias openly patrol Baghdad and other cities, and in the south of Iraq,
scores of Islamic-oriented paramilitary parties, with names like Revenge
of God, are mobilized.
-
- Because the militiamen who will make up the paramilitary
force are largely from former Iraqi exile political groups, many have personal
scores to settle. They will be armed with detailed lists, seized from government
files, of Iraqi Baathists. Sporadic but persistent revenge killings against
Hussein loyalists have already plagued Iraq. In Baghdad, Basra, and scores
of smaller cities and towns, hundreds of former Iraqi officials and members
of the Arab Baath Socialist Party have been gunned down, and the murderers
have not been arrested or, in most cases, even pursued. Virtually signaling
open season on ex-Baathists, Maj. Ian Poole, spokesman for the British
forces controlling Basra, told The New York Times: "The fact is, these
are former Baath Party officials. That makes it hard to protect them."
-
- Chalabi's INC is promising to use its own intelligence
teams to act forcefully against opponents of the United States. Chalabi,
the darling of U.S. neoconservatives and the Pentagon's choice to be Iraq's
first prime minister, is leading the charge for the "de-Baathification"
of Iraq. When elements of the U.S. Army in Iraq seek to enlist the support
of mid- and low-level Baath officials in trying to put a national bureaucracy
back into place, Chalabi objects, often clashing with U.S. Army officers
overseeing civil affairs.
-
- Echoing Chalabi are various U.S. hawks and neocons. "The
Kurds and the Iraqi National Congress have excellent intelligence operations
that we should allow them to exploit," read a Wall Street Journal
editorial. "Especially to conduct counterinsurgency in the Sunni Triangle."
More explicitly citing similar U.S. operations during the Vietnam War were
Tom Donnelly, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI),
and Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American
Century. Schmitt wrote a paper calling for a counterinsurgency effort modeled
on the so-called COORDS program in Vietnam, an umbrella effort that included
the notorious Phoenix assassinations. And, over lunch at a Washington eatery,
I asked a neoconservative strategist how to deal with Iraq. "It's
time for 'no more Mr. Nice Guy,'" he said. "All those people
shouting, 'Down with America!' and dancing in the street when Americans
are attacked? We have to kill them."
-
- The U.S. occupation of Iraq is beginning to resemble
Vietnam in more ways than one. American forces under attack are reportedly
responding with indiscriminate fire, often killing combatants and innocents
alike. Body counts are disputed, including one prominent instance in Samarra
when U.S. forces claimed 54 Iraqi rebels killed but angry townspeople said
that the dead numbered less than a dozen (and included women and children).
Houses of suspected insurgents are being blown up. The wife and child of
Izzat Ibrahim, a fugitive Iraqi official thought to be coordinating the
insurgency, were seized and held hostage. The entire village of Auja, Hussein's
hometown near Tikrit, was surrounded by barbed wire and turned into a strategic
hamlet, with ID cards issued by U.S. forces needed to enter and exit it.
-
- In early November, the Pentagon civilians ordered the
U.S. military in Iraq to launch a heavily armed offensive against suspected
strongholds of the resistance, using fighter bombers, laser-guided missiles,
gunships and helicopters against targets of questionable importance, such
as empty factories and warehouses. "It's an absolutely insane strategy,"
says Bob Boorstin, who oversees national-security policy for the Center
for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
-
- Until the offensive was launched, U.S. Army officers
had been attempting, with uneven success, to rally local populations and
adopt a hearts-and-minds approach. But in accordance with the neocons'
policy of no more Mr. Nice Guy, the Pentagon ordered the aggressive new
stance that took shape as Operation Ivy Cyclone and Operation Iron Hammer.
"I was astounded by the warmth and fuzziness of our generals,"
says Danielle Pletka, AEI vice president for foreign- and defense-policy
studies, who just returned from a visit to Iraq. "Well, they got orders:
'You need to fight, and fight hard.' And it suddenly dawned on them that
these were bad people, and maybe we need to go out and whomp the crap out
of them."
-
- Yet "whomping" is hardly a strategy, and in
Iraq the United States is clearly flailing, with a trial-and-error approach
that seems haphazard and rudderless. Underlying the neocons' worry is a
nagging concern that Bush, who sided with the neocons by launching the
global war on terrorism and by going into Iraq, could abandon them for
some form of cut-and-run strategy in order to protect his re-election efforts.
Some say openly that the White House is "going wobbly," while
others, like the AEI's Donnelly, believe in Bush's steadfastness but admit
to having second thoughts. "For a neocon like me, having a member
of the Bush family carrying the banner is a bit unnerving," says Donnelly,
wryly.
-
- But Boorstin, and many others in Washington, believe
that Karl Rove, the White House's political guru, is losing patience with
the bungled situation in Iraq. "I have no doubt that Karl Rove is
ready to cut and run," says Boorstin. That sentiment is virtually
seconded by Pletka, who maintains close contact with White House and Pentagon
officials. "Some of the people around the president do want to cut
and run," she says, "but not his foreign-policy advisers."
-
- The latest offensives, combined with the counterinsurgency
efforts, seem partly aimed at convincing Rove that there's no choice but
to continue to gamble that the Iraqi venture will pay off. "This is
an unusual president," says Richard Perle, an AEI fellow, member of
the Defense Policy Board and perhaps the chief architect of U.S. Iraq policy.
"He risked his presidency to do this in Iraq." But Perle is worried
that politics could trump policy. "I hope it doesn't become a political
issue, because that would encourage all of those who want us to fail, all
of those arrayed against us," he says. "If we were to retreat,
I shudder to think of the wave of terrorism it would unleash.
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- Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.
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- http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/1/dreyfuss-r.html
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