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!