The caudillo of Samarra

This article by Peter Maass in today’s NYT magazine is really worth reading. It’s about some extremely thuggish ex-Baathists in Iraq whom Allawi’s Interior Minister, Falah Naqib, put in charge of something called the Special Police Commandos.
They have US “advisors” working with them. Naturally. Maass, who knows his way around the world of US Special Thug Forces around the world says many of these guys had extensive experience in the US-backed and very violent rightist movements in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America.
(Negroponte’s fingerprints, most likely.)
In Salvador, as Maass reminds us, more than 70,000 people from the 6 million population were killed during that rightist-fueled terror in the twelve-year period 1980-92.
Anyway, this little extract gives some of the flavor of Maass’s latest piece. It’s about an SPC squad who were working unde the “advice” of Capt. Jeff Bennett of the 3rd Infantry Division:

The officer in charge of the raid — a Major Falah — now made it clear that he believed the detainee had led them on a wild-goose chase. The detainee was sitting at the side of a commando truck; I was 10 feet away, beside Bennett and four G.I.’s. One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. The blows continued for a minute or so.
Bennett had seen the likes of this before, and he had worked out his own guidelines for dealing with such situations. ”If I think they’re going to shoot somebody or cut his finger off or do any sort of permanent damage, I will immediately stop them,” he explained. ”As Americans, we will not let that happen. In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.”

Or how about this:

That evening, as I was eating dinner in the mess hall at Olsen base, I overheard a G.I. saying that he had seen the Syrian at the detention center, hanging from the ceiling by his arms and legs like an animal being hauled back from a hunt. When I struck up a conversation with the soldier, he refused to say anything more. Later, I spoke with an Iraqi interpreter who works for the U.S. military and has access to the detention center; when I asked whether the Syrian, like the Saudi, was cooperating, the interpreter smiled and said, ”Not yet, but he will.”
One afternoon as I was standing near City Hall, I heard a gunshot from within or behind the detention center. In previous days, I saw or heard, on several occasions, accidental shots by commandos — their weapons discipline was far from perfect — so I assumed it was another negligent discharge. But within a minute or so, there was another shot from the same place — inside or behind the detention center.
It was impossible to determine what was happening at the detention center, but there was certainly cause to worry. A State Department report released last month noted that Iraqi authorities have been accused of ”arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions — particularly in pretrial detention facilities — and arbitrary arrest and detention.” A report by Human Rights Watch in January went further, claiming that ”unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace.”

Look, if this sort of thing is going on in places where the local commanders (both US and Iraqi) know there is a US reporter at work– can you imagine what goes on in places where they think no-one is looking?
It occurs to me that these kinds of activities were most likely the main reason Rumsfeld made that special trip to Iraq ten days ago– the one in which he publicly warned that the new government’s calls for extensive “De-Baathification” should absolutely not be met.
Reading these kinds of reports of phyiscal brutality always make me feel sick to my stomach. But such behavior is not only grossly inhumane and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. It is also, over the medium term if not the short term, extremely counter-productive.
There is no way, no way whatsoever, that even with the most massive amounts of thuggishness and brutality, the US can ever hope to hang on to Iraq against the will of the country’s people.
But the use of violence like this will only complicate the task of bringing about a relatively orderly handover of power.
Iraqis of all kinds will become increasingly traumatized, and most of them will become increasingly opposed to the US forces who– once again, after an interlude of some 15 years– are hand in glove with the Baathists.
Will the Jaafari government be able to end this regime of terror that has been carried out by forces who are–nominally, at least– under the command of the “Iraqi Transitional Government”? Can he find a better way to deal with Iraqi Sunnis, rather than having to rely on the most thuggish, most Baathified elements of the Sunni community?
He doesn’t seem to have been able to do anything in either of these regards yet. But if he can’t do them– and soon!– then I see no hope that his government can gain any effectiveness or political legitimacy at all.