[R-G] Phoenix Rising

[David.Mcr@earthlink.net]

 http://www.prospect.org/print/V15/1/dreyfuss-r.html
Volume 15, Issue 1.   January 1, 2004.
Phoenix Rising
Tucked away in the recent Iraqi appropriation was $3 billlion for a new
paramilitary unit. Close students of Vietnam may see similarities.
Robert Dreyfuss


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
funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress
approved in early November—will 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 Baathists—up 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.

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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