Go straight here. This is a Sy Hersh piece in the latest New Yorker in which the very well-informed Hersh tells us that the escalatory, made-in-Israel tactics that we’ve seen the US forces using recently in Iraq are only a foretaste of what is yet to come.:
- The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.
The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls ‘Manhunts’-a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. ‘Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,’ a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers–again, in secret–when full-field operations begin…
Hersh reports that the US planners have found an innovative way to deal with their present huge problems in gaining usable intel on the insurgency: “they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on.”
He reported that one of his many ex-CIA sources had identified one of the key players on the new US-Iraqi intel team as:
- Farouq Hijazi, a Saddam loyalist who served for many years as the director of external operations for the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. He has been in custody since late April. The C.I.A. man said that over the past few months Hijazi ‘has cut a deal,’ and American officials ‘are using him to reactivate the old Iraqi intelligence network.’
On the US side, he says one of the big new players is Stephen Cambone, the Under-Sec of Defense for Intelligence, whose star, Hersh says, has been rising as Doug Feith’s has apparently been dropping.
Cambone is the big sponsor of General William (“Onward Christian Soldiers”) Boykin…
Anyway, the Hersh story has lots of really great details that I can’t go into here. He makes great analogies between the kinds of manhunts being planned for Iraq and the infamous “Operation Pheonix” pursued during the US-Vietnamese war.
The one big point he does not make with sufficient clarity is that–in addition to being incredibly immoral and illegal–the Israelis’ use of these tactics of escalation, massive repression, and colonial-style “pacification” has not ‘worked’, at the strategic level, by forcing the Palestinians to bend to Israel’s will. That was the point I made in this post, that I put up here on Sunday.
(And then, by an amazing coincidence, I used many of the same ideas in a CSM column that’s coming out Thursday.)
Hersh did however quote a former Israeli military-intel officer as telling him:
- ‘Israel has, in many ways, been too successful, and has killed or captured so many mid-ranking facilitators on the operational level in the West Bank that Hamas now consists largely of isolated cells that carry out terrorist attacks against Israel on their own.’ He went on, ‘There is no central control over many of the suicide bombers. We’re trying to tell the Americans that they don’t want to eliminate the center. The key is not to have freelancers out there.’
I believe we absolutely need to say out loud and clear that–in addition to the fact that the Israeli Ur-plan on which the plan as reported would build has not won for Israelis the political goals that they have sought–this scheme as reported by Hersh is immoral and quite illegal. The very idea of employing Saddam’s former Mukhabarat chief in this way is one that ought to stick in the gullet of any decent person, inside the Bush administration or outside it.
In addition the scheme as reported sounds completely cock-a-mamie at a lower-than-strategic level, too.
First, it seems to assume that most of the problems from the current unrest come from reorganizing Baathists rather than from other disaffected sectors of the population. Probably not a correct assumption.
Second, it assumes that this Farouq Hijazi and his former (Ba’thist!) allies will be (1) motivated enough to take the Americans’ dime, and turn on and turn in their former comrades-in-arms, and (2) able to “crack into” the networks of said former comrades-in-arms, even though Hijazi and maybe many of the others have been out of touch with those people for some months now.
And so, in the name of some chimera of a “decisive military victory” over the insurgency, much, much new violence is to visited on Iraqi communities; thousands of suspects no doubt will be arrested and have applied to them the kind of (im-)”moderate physical pressure” that IDF Israeli security services use in order to “turn” prisoners into becoming informants for them; distrust and violence will be sown systematically on a large scale inside Iraqi society…
Turn back from this disastrous course, turn back!
A great link that Juan Cole refers to on his site makes for a stunning companion piece to Sy Hersh’s article. If you read the two side by side, you begin to wonder if Ivo Daalder is right — there is no satisfactory conclusion to the Iraq mess.
How do you distinguish between “infiltrating Baathist networks, exposing them, and getting the members eliminated” and “asserting control over Baathist networks, exposing those competing with you for control, and getting rivals eliminated”?
Bah!
– Henry
As I am familiar with the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and with the “opposition” amongst some Iraqi medical graduates, some of whom did their studies in Eastern Europe and others their residencies in America (others are still here in constant contact with families back home), I can tell you that there is NO comparison possible of that with our plans for Iraq. In Vietnam, family ties were exploited at occaisionally, but were ultimately the target of the Viet Cong, which in Stalinist and Maoist orthodoxy, considered the family as a counter-revolutionary force. Family ties were the target of the Maoist land reforms in both Vietnam and China.
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein followed a Stalinist model, as best he could with Romanian advice, in the ordering of the Ba’athist Party and the control of the top of his regime. Locally, he followed traditional clan and tribal links– something the Europeans warned us about when we thought that we could use our Phoenix lessons on Iraq. This plan Hersh talks about is STILL under debate and, this time, old Seymour rushed to judgement with only one source. Our biggest problem is that, while in Vietnam– amongst the “Sudistes”– even French was useful; while in Iraq, our heroic “special” units are rather clumsy, disoriented and language BLIND– hence the nervous shoot first, scare first, and punch first tendency of victor over looser. Thus, we are turning people away in fear of the concequences to discrete collaboration (and great fear for concequences of incorrect or dated info on the informers themselves). Hersh, alas, feels pressure to produce, once he is such a bright star, and gets far more ahead of himself than when he did in the start, establishing his bona fides. Right now DoD is a mess. Uniform and civies are at war with eachother and old Rumsfeld realized that the JINSA “neocons” do not have the power to bring him to the presidency. Bush, it seems, has been given a full CIA, DIA and DoS briefings at Powell’s urging (he proved a most skillful and willy bureaucratic operator against neocons). For Bush, who realizes how Sharon, Mossad and Shin Bet BS-ed him (see Gen. Brom’s article in another post) and US intellgence’s lazy desk jockeys that lost sight of the motto: “confirm, confirm, confirm,” now has accepted the old saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Hence, Sharon is bracing himself for a morphing in the next term of Bush Jr into Bush Sr. The “Rummy snowflakes” are melting these days under Conndy Rice’s hot glare before they get to do a snowjob on Bush. This Hersh failled to note in his article, making it seem that Rummy has a role in the future…not really certain. Of course, no one should believe what some anonymous me from nowhere says. But I suggest a great journalist like you, Helena, look into it.
DE– some great points you make there. I wish I had my journalistic gumshoes on the job right now but alas find myself enroute to a conference in Beijing. (Also, I find it hard to work in DC because so much of the atmosphere is so toxically neoconned these days…)
Oh Helena, if you only knew how painful it is here in NYC. I supported Bush but now realize that he is “wingging” the Presidency like he wingged college– AND doing none of the things HIMSELF for which we elected him and pay him. Below is a sum of how I end this year determined that I am too old to now fight the very neocons that I struggled side by side with against communism (I gues it’s true: be careful what you wish for). So, I plan to leave the US and go to Europe, where at least they know that you can’t think simple and survive, or at least do any good. I am enclosing my comment on h-mideast-politics on this point HOPING that you will at some point– when not too busy– to read and comment on it. Have a good trip and avoid the recurrence of SARDS…We are helpless when it comes to virulent viruses and we need people like you to keep our moral eye fixed on ourselves…Seasons Greetings and the best of the New Year:
Perhaps this is not the proper place to look at what
has happened to this nation, at least, since 2000.
After all, whatever may be happening to us because of
and/or to cause American to get involved so deeply in
Mideast politics is of our own making more than that
of the Middle Easterners. After all, except for
Israel, no one else has the technical knowhow to build
ICBMs tipped with WMDs that they can shoot at us– and
Israel would have to buy the rocket fuel from us
anyway (rather get it as a gift in homage to our “long
standing cultural and ideological unity,” per the late
Israeli Foreign Minister Aba Eban. Otherwise, unless
terrorists exploit our penny pinching laxity in
security, as in the past, they can’t touch us. So, the
danger directly to us in nowhere near as “imminent” as
some would have us believe.
When we attacked Iraq, with open options on Iran and
Syria (extension to the latter two nations, an early
short lived pipe dream of the JINSA neocons in this
administration) we were not chasing terrorists or
weapons of mass destruction but rather a head of state
that just a few decades ago served as our mad dog with
which we would put the Iranian ayatollahs in their
place. As to why we did what we did when we did it,
the issue is still under *classified* scrutiny, to be
“leaked” conveniently once who are the two
Presidential candidates is made clear. Then the
Democrats will tell us everything the Republicans in
power do not want us to know and the Republicans will
exploit that by accusing them of playing partisan
politics with national security. It will get very
dirty and I predict a reactive very low voter turnout.
I would here like to blame our nation’s sorry state,
in part, on the Mideast academics. That is because
unlike the rabid neocons in the Bush Administration
and the violently anti-US hegemony youths, they are
the only ones with the option of choosing whether they
get involved or not. They could have done an end run
around Perle, Rumsfeld, Libby and the other
intellectually mediocre neocons (just read their
simplistic C+ papers on the JINSA website)by simply
asking: what ever happened to *complexity*?
That is the issue. I see it in medicine every day: the
best minds taken from college, reduced to look up
tables of signs and symptoms, diseases, tests,
diagnostic index of suspicion and treatments and, oh
yes, reimbursement schedules. The interactive
mechanisms operating in between the data in these
tables is left for esoteric pathologists to discuss at
their meetings or for young PhDs obsessed with the
genetic causes of everything. This is exemplified by
an experience I had in a hospital’s medical library. I
settled down to a monograph of Medical Clinics of
North America, full of cutting edge real-science
articles on mechanisms of heart failure and
treatments, only to discover that, though this book
had been in the library three months, I was the first
to crack its binding! Across the table from me was one
of the attending physicians working on charts (not
reading up on medicine). I exclaimed in amazement:
“three months on the shelf, and this book dealing with
our hospital’s bread and butter disease has not once
been touched.” Not realizing that I was referring to
our overworked residents, he looked up and, in a
defensive tone, said to me: “They don’t pay me to
read.” True, Medicare and the HMOs don’t pay one to
read. But if one has a single drop of the intellect we
health care providers are said to posses, one would
have looked into this disease, where little hope
exists clinically with standard treatment but daily
advances are made that portend at least a maintenance
breakthrough; so I though to myself before just going
back to reading. Ironically, everyone in medicine from
year #1 of med school starts to put aside articles
that he/she swears to get to as soon as a free moment
becomes available. But the work load is so incredible
that one ends up only squirreling away a mountain that
one never quite gets to. Academics should take a look
at the productivity standards the rest of America has
to keep up with and the dire accountability, should
one faultier– no tenure there. As a result America
has dumbed down. People are either on the toilet, in
bed or in a ceaseless rat race to be “productive.”
They do not get to say: I won’t go to the office
because I do my best work at home, as academics
constantly tell the Chronicle of Higher Education.
America is, therefore, doing without thinking
citizens, too busy or too tired. In our work we begin
by planning some project and then stampede to get it
done before the next guy beats us to it and we join
the unemployment line. So, one is either right from
the git-go or one goes off the cliff in the stampede,
Western cattle style.
9/11 brought us all to a halt, temporarily. We lost
confidence in our most basic moorings. While Bush and
Julianni were desperately trying to get us all back to
business as usual (including taking in dumb Broadway
musicals) we did our bit, returning to the mindless
rat race of the “productive.” Bush promised that he
would take care of things and we need not worry.
Meanwhile, professors of this and that, saw a
desperate need for their intellect and boned up on
Islam and the Middle East laying aside business as
usual in order to allay the fears of students and
people who simply showed up to listen, by making sense
of all this. As one who chronically suffers of
academia- disdain, I was so proud and pleased to see
these, our national psychotherapists, allay our fears
with rational and factual explanations that made us
realize that we are not helpless dumb fish in a barrel
and are not dealing with a universal reverse-crusade,
a Jihad from those “crazy, suicidal Aaaarabs” on whom
we so depend to make our SUVs run. I suddenly felt the
same wowed admiration I had felt when I first came to
college in America. These acads seemed to me like
intellectual giants that had laid in hiding (disguised
as profs) until a tragedy like 9/11 brought them out
to heal us all. Though I had been permanently
traumatized by my personal experience at the World
Trade Center– on crutches there on 9/11 to pick up a
book I had ordered from the beautiful Borders’
bookshop there– the academics’ teach-ins were the
best medicine possible for me, with 40 years of
involvement with the Middle East behind me.
But then, after we attacked Afghanistan, all this
suddenly stopped. Academia went back to its shrill
cry: “Hegemony, hegemony, hegemony,” or to total
silence (that is, until h-mideast-politics came into
existence). That left the field open for the JINSA
neocons and the up and coming young sharks swimming
in their Wash DC think-tanks; species: PhDitus
hussleris sycophanus. The Defense Dept. had decided to
drop its in-house intellectuals (except, of course for
Perle and his gang of JINSA neocons) and contract out
all other on paper think-experiments to the sycophant
tanks in Wash DC.
What of President Bush, one might ask. Well, you saw
him in action, he “delegates” to the point of not
realizing that it is HIM, not the JINSA neocons, that
we elected (sort of). Obviously, from hearing him give
speeches, it is clear that he has his hands full
memorizing what his speech writers put before him. It
is very telling that “speech writer” and “policy
maker” is a blurred distinction in this
Administration. Even Connzie Rice at times delivers
speeches she first read on the podium as she speaks,
according to some staffers. The point is that this
Administration was until recently the monopoly of the
JINSA neocons. Of course, by now, the back-tracking
comes a little late–though that’s exactly what the
non-neocon Bush re-elect gang is now imposing on
policy (a very interesting Charlie Rose Show on this
very issue last night on PBSTV is worth paying $7 for
the transcript if you want to know details of how our
Iraq-in-reverse policy is unfolding).
One can only ask, how could this great American ship
of state have been allowed to pitch and yaw in such
pendular fashion over the last three years?
The answer is that had academia forced itself on the
White House and politely said: Mr. President, it’s not
so simple, think of the consequences, he might well
have given academia a hearing. From there on in, the
outcome would have been quite different, his
high-and-mighty speeches notwithstanding. For, though
I attack academia for its behavior, I surely recognize
its cognitive largeness and knowledge richness, ie.
its far far far superior intellect to the mediocre
JINSA neocons that spent their whole lives conning
American Conservatives and Christian extremists.
In her first year in office, Dr. Rice sent out NSC and
CIA operatives to seek out academia. All it got was
rhetoric directed to “an election thief” instead of
fatherly advice for a President that has still got a
lot of growing up to do. Any academic worth his salt,
in my view, after seeing President Bush in his very
first press conference, should have concluded: this
boy needs help; I’ll go and offer to tutor him with my
pedagogic skills. No, instead they made jokes about
him and noted his vulnerabilities for a 2004 revenge
for Florida. From his part, well, he’s a Texan and he
doesn’t beg. Perhaps, having graduated from Yale
without knowing anything, he might have thought that
he could similarly “wing” the Presidency. But he soon
learned that he was wrong. Without academic response
to his desperate but subtle plea, he let Rumsfeld and
the JINSA neocons take over. Suddenly he was buried
under “Rummy snowflakes” making war with
Iraq–>Syria—>Iran seem not only inevitable but a
damn good thing. Meanwhile academia turned hostile
instead of tutorial. The teach-ins were long gone and
the lone Sec. of State Powell could not hold back the
neocons.
Now Saddam, looking like someone you could pull off a
New York City subway on any night, is in custody and
undergoing “pressured” interrogation. In the meantime,
our goals in Iraq are being scaled down and down and
down in time for Nov. 2004. The dead don’t vote, so
it’s not making their sacrifice mean something that’s
important, only getting the rest of us to appreciate
Bush for bringing back our surviving weekend soldiers.
What harm we did to the Middle East, what harm we can
STILL do and what harm, no matter what we do, we are
likely to produce, no one in academia seems to be
discussing with President Bush and the public. Only
Fagami gets to join the retired military and
“embedded” journalists on talking heads TV. That’s
because now he comes across like an “as you like it”
intellectual, no longer the feisty contrarian of the
1980s. Otherwise, the rich platform available to
academics during the Vietnam War has disappeared.
People now talk in terms of Nov. 2004 and nothing
else.
Perhaps now is the time for academia to redeem itself
by reminding its fellow Americans that the Middle East
is not just a place where you garnish Jewish votes for
Nov. 2004, but a critical spot on the globe where
lives a great variety of peoples are at stake– making
for COMPLEXITY– a word missing from the lexicon of
President Bush and the now-out-of-favor JINSA neocons.
Season’s greetings to you all and may the new year
bring us all hapiness, health and wisdom.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Perhaps this is not the proper place to look at what
has happened to this nation, at least, since 2000.
After all, whatever may be happening to us because of
and/or to cause American to get involved so deeply in
Mideast politics is of our own making more than that
of the Middle Easterners. After all, except for
Israel, no one else has the technical knowhow to build
ICBMs tipped with WMDs that they can shoot at us– and
Israel would have to buy the rocket fuel from us
anyway (rather get it as a gift in homage to our “long
standing cultural and ideological unity,” per the late
Israeli Foreign Minister Aba Eban. Otherwise, unless
terrorists exploit our penny pinching laxity in
security, as in the past, they can’t touch us. So, the
danger directly to us in nowhere near as “imminent” as
some would have us believe.
When we attacked Iraq, with open options on Iran and
Syria (extension to the latter two nations, an early
short lived pipe dream of the JINSA neocons in this
administration) we were not chasing terrorists or
weapons of mass destruction but rather a head of state
that just a few decades ago served as our mad dog with
which we would put the Iranian ayatollahs in their
place. As to why we did what we did when we did it,
the issue is still under *classified* scrutiny, to be
“leaked” conveniently once who are the two
Presidential candidates is made clear. Then the
Democrats will tell us everything the Republicans in
power do not want us to know and the Republicans will
exploit that by accusing them of playing partisan
politics with national security. It will get very
dirty and I predict a reactive very low voter turnout.
I would here like to blame our nation’s sorry state,
in part, on the Mideast academics. That is because
unlike the rabid neocons in the Bush Administration
and the violently anti-US hegemony youths, they are
the only ones with the option of choosing whether they
get involved or not. They could have done an end run
around Perle, Rumsfeld, Libby and the other
intellectually mediocre neocons (just read their
simplistic C+ papers on the JINSA website)by simply
asking: what ever happened to *complexity*?
That is the issue. I see it in medicine every day: the
best minds taken from college, reduced to look up
tables of signs and symptoms, diseases, tests,
diagnostic index of suspicion and treatments and, oh
yes, reimbursement schedules. The interactive
mechanisms operating in between the data in these
tables is left for esoteric pathologists to discuss at
their meetings or for young PhDs obsessed with the
genetic causes of everything. This is exemplified by
an experience I had in a hospital’s medical library. I
settled down to a monograph of Medical Clinics of
North America, full of cutting edge real-science
articles on mechanisms of heart failure and
treatments, only to discover that, though this book
had been in the library three months, I was the first
to crack its binding! Across the table from me was one
of the attending physicians working on charts (not
reading up on medicine). I exclaimed in amazement:
“three months on the shelf, and this book dealing with
our hospital’s bread and butter disease has not once
been touched.” Not realizing that I was referring to
our overworked residents, he looked up and, in a
defensive tone, said to me: “They don’t pay me to
read.” True, Medicare and the HMOs don’t pay one to
read. But if one has a single drop of the intellect we
health care providers are said to posses, one would
have looked into this disease, where little hope
exists clinically with standard treatment but daily
advances are made that portend at least a maintenance
breakthrough; so I though to myself before just going
back to reading. Ironically, everyone in medicine from
year #1 of med school starts to put aside articles
that he/she swears to get to as soon as a free moment
becomes available. But the work load is so incredible
that one ends up only squirreling away a mountain that
one never quite gets to. Academics should take a look
at the productivity standards the rest of America has
to keep up with and the dire accountability, should
one faultier– no tenure there. As a result America
has dumbed down. People are either on the toilet, in
bed or in a ceaseless rat race to be “productive.”
They do not get to say: I won’t go to the office
because I do my best work at home, as academics
constantly tell the Chronicle of Higher Education.
America is, therefore, doing without thinking
citizens, too busy or too tired. In our work we begin
by planning some project and then stampede to get it
done before the next guy beats us to it and we join
the unemployment line. So, one is either right from
the git-go or one goes off the cliff in the stampede,
Western cattle style.
9/11 brought us all to a halt, temporarily. We lost
confidence in our most basic moorings. While Bush and
Julianni were desperately trying to get us all back to
business as usual (including taking in dumb Broadway
musicals) we did our bit, returning to the mindless
rat race of the “productive.” Bush promised that he
would take care of things and we need not worry.
Meanwhile, professors of this and that, saw a
desperate need for their intellect and boned up on
Islam and the Middle East laying aside business as
usual in order to allay the fears of students and
people who simply showed up to listen, by making sense
of all this. As one who chronically suffers of
academia- disdain, I was so proud and pleased to see
these, our national psychotherapists, allay our fears
with rational and factual explanations that made us
realize that we are not helpless dumb fish in a barrel
and are not dealing with a universal reverse-crusade,
a Jihad from those “crazy, suicidal Aaaarabs” on whom
we so depend to make our SUVs run. I suddenly felt the
same wowed admiration I had felt when I first came to
college in America. These acads seemed to me like
intellectual giants that had laid in hiding (disguised
as profs) until a tragedy like 9/11 brought them out
to heal us all. Though I had been permanently
traumatized by my personal experience at the World
Trade Center– on crutches there on 9/11 to pick up a
book I had ordered from the beautiful Borders’
bookshop there– the academics’ teach-ins were the
best medicine possible for me, with 40 years of
involvement with the Middle East behind me.
But then, after we attacked Afghanistan, all this
suddenly stopped. Academia went back to its shrill
cry: “Hegemony, hegemony, hegemony,” or to total
silence (that is, until h-mideast-politics came into
existence). That left the field open for the JINSA
neocons and the up and coming young sharks swimming
in their Wash DC think-tanks; species: PhDitus
hussleris sycophanus. The Defense Dept. had decided to
drop its in-house intellectuals (except, of course for
Perle and his gang of JINSA neocons) and contract out
all other on paper think-experiments to the sycophant
tanks in Wash DC.
What of President Bush, one might ask. Well, you saw
him in action, he “delegates” to the point of not
realizing that it is HIM, not the JINSA neocons, that
we elected (sort of). Obviously, from hearing him give
speeches, it is clear that he has his hands full
memorizing what his speech writers put before him. It
is very telling that “speech writer” and “policy
maker” is a blurred distinction in this
Administration. Even Connzie Rice at times delivers
speeches she first read on the podium as she speaks,
according to some staffers. The point is that this
Administration was until recently the monopoly of the
JINSA neocons. Of course, by now, the back-tracking
comes a little late–though that’s exactly what the
non-neocon Bush re-elect gang is now imposing on
policy (a very interesting Charlie Rose Show on this
very issue last night on PBSTV is worth paying $7 for
the transcript if you want to know details of how our
Iraq-in-reverse policy is unfolding).
One can only ask, how could this great American ship
of state have been allowed to pitch and yaw in such
pendular fashion over the last three years?
The answer is that had academia forced itself on the
White House and politely said: Mr. President, it’s not
so simple, think of the consequences, he might well
have given academia a hearing. From there on in, the
outcome would have been quite different, his
high-and-mighty speeches notwithstanding. For, though
I attack academia for its behavior, I surely recognize
its cognitive largeness and knowledge richness, ie.
its far far far superior intellect to the mediocre
JINSA neocons that spent their whole lives conning
American Conservatives and Christian extremists.
In her first year in office, Dr. Rice sent out NSC and
CIA operatives to seek out academia. All it got was
rhetoric directed to “an election thief” instead of
fatherly advice for a President that has still got a
lot of growing up to do. Any academic worth his salt,
in my view, after seeing President Bush in his very
first press conference, should have concluded: this
boy needs help; I’ll go and offer to tutor him with my
pedagogic skills. No, instead they made jokes about
him and noted his vulnerabilities for a 2004 revenge
for Florida. From his part, well, he’s a Texan and he
doesn’t beg. Perhaps, having graduated from Yale
without knowing anything, he might have thought that
he could similarly “wing” the Presidency. But he soon
learned that he was wrong. Without academic response
to his desperate but subtle plea, he let Rumsfeld and
the JINSA neocons take over. Suddenly he was buried
under “Rummy snowflakes” making war with
Iraq–>Syria—>Iran seem not only inevitable but a
damn good thing. Meanwhile academia turned hostile
instead of tutorial. The teach-ins were long gone and
the lone Sec. of State Powell could not hold back the
neocons.
Now Saddam, looking like someone you could pull off a
New York City subway on any night, is in custody and
undergoing “pressured” interrogation. In the meantime,
our goals in Iraq are being scaled down and down and
down in time for Nov. 2004. The dead don’t vote, so
it’s not making their sacrifice mean something that’s
important, only getting the rest of us to appreciate
Bush for bringing back our surviving weekend soldiers.
What harm we did to the Middle East, what harm we can
STILL do and what harm, no matter what we do, we are
likely to produce, no one in academia seems to be
discussing with President Bush and the public. Only
Fagami gets to join the retired military and
“embedded” journalists on talking heads TV. That’s
because now he comes across like an “as you like it”
intellectual, no longer the feisty contrarian of the
1980s. Otherwise, the rich platform available to
academics during the Vietnam War has disappeared.
People now talk in terms of Nov. 2004 and nothing
else.
Perhaps now is the time for academia to redeem itself
by reminding its fellow Americans that the Middle East
is not just a place where you garnish Jewish votes for
Nov. 2004, but a critical spot on the globe where
lives a great variety of peoples are at stake– making
for COMPLEXITY– a word missing from the lexicon of
President Bush and the now-out-of-favor JINSA neocons.
Season’s greetings to you all and may the new year
bring us all hapiness, health and wisdom.
Daniel E. Teodoru
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“BREAKING DOWN” THE “BAD GUYS” IN IRAQ
I sometimes wonder if Seymour Hersch and I are tasked by the same “.gov” people to make the public aware of what is being done at the Defense Dept. (DoD) under Sec. Rumsfeld and his neoconservative cabal. For, within days of eachother, we have been both loaded with similar evidence that there is something rotten in the Pentagon, paraphrasing Shakespear.
My earlier indication was one of what seemed like a hastily put together war without much planning. But, of course, much planning had gone into an Iraq invasion for several years, starting with the Clinton Administration. These plans, to minute details, based on all the avialable facts, proved very well informed. The trouble was that they all indicated that the cost in life and treasure for us to remove Saddam and “deomcretize” Iraq (a term which turned all of the former academics in DoD into utter babblers)demanded far, far more that either adminstration deemed prudent to spend. So Mr. Rumsfeld, by the prestigiditory powers infered on him, presumably by Merlin, did a real “snow job” on this president, with a blizzard of “Rummy snowflakes” that made visibility into the future of such a war totally impossible. Then, this hawkish advocate, suddenly turned into a stingy pencil pushing accountant, cutting down everything the Joint Chiefs required. I leave the details to the Gen. Franks’ book that will be a real blast. When asked to take the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs after “victory,” he told Rumsfeld: no thanks, I’m going to write a book instead– the message was loud and clear, sir– stay tunned. Finally, the Rumsfeld DoD civilians, in all their hubris, decided to take a Napoleonic approach: first we advance; then we see. The concequences that almost everyone(and I) predicted were the same, in many case with far far less hard info than others.
But I felt far more alone when I sought to serve as transmitter of British press reports on the American attitude towards the Iraqis after America came to “own” them, per Sec. Powell’s “Pottery Barn rules.” It is that in their desperation, Mr. Rumsfeld and his civilian neocons at DoD chose to resort to Middle Eastern methods in order to replace Middle Eastern ends with that muddled thing, “Western Democracy.”
Totally unprepared for the growing resistance to an incompetent and negligent “liberation,” the American Proconsul Bremer refused to admit that the pipeline of “reconstruction” was empty for six moths because the war on Iraq was run on funds stollen from the war on terror in Afghanistan, the one approved by Congress. Thus, many Iraqis who trully saw the Americans as “liberators” came to see them as “occupiers” motivated by oil. I would say here that if one develops a network of informers amongst the dispersed Iraqi medical profession, one gets reports of every step along the pathologic path of anti- Americanism. As one who watched up close America turning the war in Vietnam into its own, I can only say that since we respected our Vietnamese enemies, most of whom we also killed, we tended to treat those who survived with respect– expressing outrage when stopping their Saigon army compatriots from humiliating or hurting them. But in over our heads, in an occupation running out of supplies, we turned to another nation with over half of a century experience in occupying Arabs at minimum cost. The Israeli occupation of the conquered Palestinian territories made them ideal trainers in Middle Eastern ways of occupation; hence the large proportion of civilian casualties along with the killing of the resisters we call, “the bad guys”– “criminals, perverts and murderers” all, per Gens. Myers and Sanchez; and, hence also the abuse and humiliation of prisoners swept up randomly in dragnets and in need-to-be-“broken down”-so-that-they-will-talk Arabs. It is often forgotten by our zealous “intelligence” units that these anaonymous “bad guys” have brothers, fathers, cousins and friends ready to avenge them at any cost– life included. The stoicism of the Vietnamese is not to be found in Iraq. And so, the more Iraqis we kill and/or humiliate and “break down,” the more come out to kill us. Being as low-casualties- tolerant as the Israelis, we might find ourselves choosing between “ethnic cleansing” or “transfer,” like the Israelis, in order to secure “our” Iraq. But by then the “coalition of the willing” may be limited to one– US.
Already the great muddler of English, Bush, and the great disember of English, Cheney, are speaking of our “occupation” instead of our “liberation” of Iraq. As the June 30th deadline appears and we run out of “add water and stir” instant-Iraqi-leaders from near and far, we may find that no one given that post can any longer be trusted to express gratitude for our presence– instead, demanding that we leave forthwith. Then, it will be like South Vietnam circa 1963-65: revolving door governements; as we removed one for negotiating a “entre nous les vietnamiens” deal, offering to kick us out, replacing it with another that assures us that it will never deal with the enemy, we found ourselves kicking it out for secret talks with the Vietcong and again we were looking for another no-negotiations alternative. But in Iraq, there may not be any Thieu and Ky available. Even Chalabi has today expressed refusal to have anything to do with Israel, according to Salon.com. His is a position held by every other DoD darling Iraqi. Since we secretly demanded a pledge of “love thy neighbor”- Israel, we may now be back where we were in Vietnam, 1964.
Yet, I hear no outrage at the fact that for 3/4 of a year the President and his cabinet had no idea how much Iraq “reconstruction” would cost, nor how long our troups would be there. I hear no outrage that the Asst. Sec of Defense had no updated casualty figures on hand when asked in a Congressional hearing and so he low-balled it. I hear no outrage that the President told a press conference that while we are doing well in Iraq, alQaeda “is still coming after us”– the reverse was supposedly the purpose of our war on terror begining two years ago. I cannot help but think that America’s “higher education” teachers, are just not teaching the President or the public the “higher” realities that somehow don’t get into the campaign ads.
Perhaps finally, Americans looking at the pictures of the abused Iraqis, Hersch made public, will in their shame and fear of retribution seek answers to the question: how is it that our kids so hate the people they are supposed to die “liberating”? They may discover that this hate comes from Israeli training based on the principle often heard in Israel: the only good Arab is a dead Arab.
Daniel E. Teodoru
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