John Paul Vann: American Hero
John Paul Vann: American Hero
A lot of people wail that the age of heroes is long gone....
ONE SUCH MAN WAS JOHN PAUL VANN.
"The Age of heroes is not past....
so long as there remains ONE MAN
who contributes to sustain the weak,
mold the characters of the young
and bring hope to the lives of the needy."
We strongly encourage you to read the best book yet written on
the Vietnam war, A
Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan and learn about this great human being.
John Paul Vann was a "mini-model" of America in her two Asian wars, travel
with him as a young U.S. Army officer he leads by example and personally drops ammunition from a L-19 "Bird Dog"
small plane to troops surrounded by the enemy in the Korean War.
SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT #1: VIETNAM, THE BATTLE OF AP BAC
Follow him later as a lieutenant colonel (LTC), he advises the South Vietnamese Army at the 1963
epic battle of Ap Bac,
(scroll down after going to the link) again from a L-19 (O-1 Bird Dog) observation plane where a technical/tactical level of war pair of errors gives the VC their first victory against the U.S. war machines: the VC are operating a radio which a small plane direction finds locates; rather than run or disperse, the Viet Cong (VC) decide to stand and fight.
PLAN A: what we wanted to do and where we expected the enemy to be: Attack on Ap Tan Thoi village where the transmittor was located
1/11th ARVN foot infantry flying by H-21 "Flying Banana" helicopters would land in the open rice paddies and converge on the enemy transmitter at Tan Thoi.
Unfortunately, the U.S. pilots flying the H-21 "Flying Banana" helicopters carrying the ARVN troops land within effective small-arms range (300 meters) of the dug-in VC despite Vann's radio instructions from the L-19 not to make that the landing zone (LZ).
VANN'S VIEW OF THE LZ
Vann can clearly see from his L-19 that they are landing too close to the treeline, but the cocky American pilots don't heed his directions to land farther away.
ENEMY'S VIEW OF THE LZ
The picture above shows what the Viet Cong rebels saw as the H-21s landed; notice the Thompson .45 sub machine gun in the VC's hands...they opened fire concentrating in the exposed pilot's clear canopy area, killing several Americans and disabling 5 helicopters.
PLAN B: Vann orders 4/2 ARVN M113 commander, Ba to hurry up and drive to where the downed foot infantry force is clinging to its life and assault the VC in the treeline to the east. Ba is reluctant to use his M113s too aggressively as the President of South Vietnam, Diem expects him to use these armored vehicles to keep him in power from possible coups. Ba takes his sweet ass time to get to the scene.
With the helos shot to pieces, ARVN and American advisors wounded and dying, LTC Vann returns to base, gets in yet another small L-19/O-1 "Bird Dog" Grasshopper plane (Like Rommel and Patton, he knew how to fly) to spur the reluctant ARVN M113 commander to save the day and seize victory from the "jaws" of defeat.
What Vann saw from the air from his O-1 Bird Dog
However, the M113 force takes too long to get there by not having fascines to cross rice paddy dikes.
Ba's M113 Gavin light tracked Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) do not have gun shields to protect their track commanders (TCs) manning their .50 caliber Heavy Machine Guns.
Thus, when the M113s arrive, the VC concentrate fire on the exposed TCs and they are turned back.
PLAN C: Vann flies back to base undaunted and gets the South Vietnamese Paratroopers ready to drop while he flies over with an American pilot in a borrowed L-19 to draw enemy fire and call in B-26 Invader air strikes.
Vann asked Porter to have Cao drop the paratroops in the rice fields and swamp land on the east side of Tan Thoi and Bac, the one open flank that the guerrilla battalion commander could not retreat across during the day, but that would become the logical escape route after dark.
However, ARVN paratroop commander Cao does not want to fight the VC, just land safely behind the Civil Guards and M113s as a "show of force". Sheehan continues:
"Topper Six, I've already told him to do that and he says he's going to employ them on the other side," Porter replied.If Vann had been commanding U.S. paratroops he could have ordered them to drop behind the VC and even went up in his Bird Dog plane and personally guided the USAF C-123 transports to the proper drop zone (DZ). Since Vann was an "advisor" he can't make the ARVN fight and win if they didn't want to."I'll be right there, sir," Vann said, and instructed the pilot to return to the airstrip as fast as possible. He knew instantly what Cao's game was. As he was to put it in his after-action report for Harkins, Cao intended to use the airborne battalion not to trap and annihilate the Viet Cong but rather "as a show of force. . . in hopes that the VC units would disengage and the unwanted battle would be over."
Vann clambered out of the little plane and strode into the command-post tent. He told Cao that on this day he could not spend all of this blood for nothing. He had to close the box around the guerrillas and destroy them. Porter supported him, both of them arguing that Cao had no choice as a responsible commander. "You have got to drop the airborne over there," Vann said, poking his finger at the big operations map where it showed the open flank on the east side of the two hamlets.
He became so angry and was jabbing so hard at the map that he almost toppled over the easel on which it rested.
Cao would have none of this Soldier's logic. "It is not prudent, it is not prudent," he kept replying. It was better, he said, to drop the paratroops on the west behind the M113s and the Civil Guards where they could tie-in with these other units. "We must reinforce," he said.
Vann was later to sum up Cao's logic with the tart remark: "They chose to reinforce defeat."
He lost his temper one more time. "Goddammit," he shouted, "you want them to get away. You're afraid to fight. You know they'll sneak out this way and that's exactly what you want."
Embarrassed at being driven into a corner, Cao pulled a huffy general's act on Vann, the lieutenant colonel. "I am the commanding general and it is my decision," he said. Brig. Gen. Tran Thien Khiem, the chief of staff of the Joint General Staff, who had flown down from Saigon at Cao's request and was present during the argument, did not object. Harkins had not come down to find out why an unprecedented five helicopters had been lost, nor had any of his subordinates appeared, so there was no American general in the tent to brandish his stars for Vann and Porter. Cao then attempted to mollify Vann by pretending to move up the drop time. He said, "We will drop at sixteen hundred hours"-4:00 P.M. civilian time. Knowing that it was useless to argue further and hoping that he might at least get a paratroop battalion early enough to be of some use, Vann went back to his spotter plane.
He spent the rest of the afternoon asking when the paratroops were going to arrive and attempting to persuade Cao and Dam and Tho to turn what was about to become the biggest defeat of the war so far into its biggest victory. They still had the opportunity to redeem the day. All they had to do was to pull the two Civil Guard battalions and Ba's company together for a combined attack on Bac. As demoralized as Ba's men were, they could have at least supported the Civil Guards with their .50 calibers, and the guerrillas could not have withstood the total force. Neither Cao nor Tho, who were the men in control, could see that the sensible and moral course was to press ahead and accept the further and proportionately minor casualties that would be necessary to give meaning to the sacrifice of those who had already been killed and maimed.
However, either the American C-123 flight leader or the ARVN jumpmasters, initiated the drop on the west of Ap Bac too late instead of having green light begin at the southernmost beginning of the DZ; the ARVN paratroopers landed too far north and west; in effective small arms fire range of the VC at Tan Thoi, resulting in the two American "red hat" advisers getting wounded and a dozen of their men killed. Night fell and the VC escaped.
Paratroops dropped but inside forward line of troops instead of behind enemy route of retreat
The VC won despite their outnumbered odds because non-motivated ARVN officers refuse to launch a timely parachute assault to the VC's rear to trap them from escaping.
M113A3 Gavins now have gunshields for the TCs IF commanders are combat-oriented and not bogged down with garrison non-sense to order them...Iraqi Freedom's only Congressional Medal of Honor winner, SFC Paul Smith died in a M113A3 Gavin WITHOUT a gunshield kit; a hero who died needlessly from an U.S. Army that doesn't even know its own history or studies the profession of arms...
After Ap Bac, gunshields were placed on M113s like this modern A3 model has
The loss at Ap Bac in 1963, emboldens the VC and the ARVN are routed continually thereafter when they try to fight the VC/NVA "even" rifle vs. rifle on foot; LTC Vann's Army career is destroyed as he is made the "fall guy" for ARVN corruption and incompetence.
The ARVN that wanted to fight effectively create the gunshielded M113 "ACAV" and their light mechanized infantry forces, though a minority---are the only bright spot in their force structure.
The situation deteriorates and this leads to the full-scale U.S. troop landings to fight off the VC from over-throwing the South, particularly the deployment of better Air Assault -trained U.S. Army 1st Air Cavalry Division troopers to prevent the nation being cut into two in the central highlands.
Maneuver Air Support Video: in praise of the O-1 Bird Dog
www.combatreform.org/airmobileAFACandMAS.wmv
Unfortunately, America today has no manned, fixed-wing observation/attack planes like the L-19/O-1 Bird Dog to perform COIN/SASO operations correctly.
"Men don't follow titles........
they follow COURAGE..."
Mel Gibson as Freedom fighter, William Wallace in the film, Braveheart
What is so AWESOME about LTC Vann, is he doesn't give up! He makes countless briefings to those in power at the Pentagon to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people, reform the South Vietnamese Army/government and not over-rely on refighting WWII in the rice paddies.
The recent film adaptation of Sheehan's book, "A Bright Shining Lie" starring Bill Paxton does a wonderful job of showing this. He becomes a civilian aid worker and he then goes about taking apart the VC infrastructure in the villages by Civic Action and fighting corruption. Vann networks---finds allies and leading-by-example makes it happen. After the Tet offensive gamble decimates the VC to nothing, the provinces are secure, though back home in America public support for the war has collapsed. Now for the Communists to win, The North Vietnamese Army (NVA); an external nation-state foe will have to invade. Which is what they do in 1972. The Army and marine generals now had a "WW2" type fight they longed for. Be careful for what you wish for...
There, in his finest hour, Vann gets in a helicopter and single-handedly directs air strikes and U.S. military/ARVN forces to repel the NVA invasion. One man can and did make a difference! NVA General Ngo Giap, victor at Dien Bien Phu, arguably one of THE greatest military generals of all time--no slouch himself, gets fired for this failure!
Sadly, Vann dies in a helicopter crash. The state funeral he has opens Neil Shehann's AWESOME book which Oliver Stone should make into a movie. Our conjecture is that had Vann lived, the South would not have been lost to the communists in 1975. He would have seen to it that people in Washington D.C. and the Pentagon would have not thrown away our hard-won victories in Vietnam. His loss was the turning point in the Vietnam War.
JOHN PAUL VANN AS A METAPHOR FOR U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM?
Neil Sheehan in an extensive interview describing how he wrote his book said:
After all of this experience, both there and here, you chose this Colonel to focus on as a metaphor for American involvement. Why that choice?
He had influenced that band of war correspondents who first clued America in to what was going on in Vietnam during the last period of the Kennedy administration.
Oh yes, he'd influenced us enormously because his first year in Vietnam was during my first assignment as a reporter and David Halberstam's first American war assignment. Vann had an extraordinary mind. He had an incredible capacity to relate to human beings. He was a wonderful actor. He could manipulate people. He could sense human issues. At the same time, he had a capacity to deal with hard facts, like statistics. He was a statistician. Usually those qualities seem to cancel each other out, but they didn't in him. So in that first year, we were faced with the problem of covering a war where the advisors in the field were telling us we were losing the war. We could see that as well when we went out on operations, which was pretty frequent. The General in Saigon, a man named Paul Harkins, always saw the world through
rose-colored glasses and kept seeing it through them. He would maintain we were winning the war. You were caught between the two. It was an adversarial relationship. And Vann helped us to understand the war in a way that other advisors couldn't, because he was fearless. He would work down on a tactical level, and he could apply what he saw down there at the strategic level. He gave us perspectives and information that we didn't get from other advisors. He shaped our reporting because we were trying to come to grips with this ourselves, and this man helped us come to grips with it in a way we wouldn't have been able to without him."
Quantitative attrition/annihilation mentality:
We know one bitter Vietnam vet criticized the book, A Bright Shining
Lie, but needs to rethink his position: Vann is the model of the leader we need today who can network and orchestrate a victory on complex, Non-Linear Battlefields (NLBs).
To this may be added a further set of observations drawn from current
events. Most adversaries that the United States and its allies face in the realm of low-intensity conflict, such as international terrorists, guerrilla insurgents, drug smuggling cartels, ethnic factions, as well as racial and tribal gangs, are all organized like networks (although their leadership may be quite hierarchical). Perhaps a reason that military (and police) institutions have difficulty engaging in low-intensity conflicts is because they are not meant to be fought by institutions. The lesson: Institutions can be defeated by networks, and it may take networks to counter networks. The future may belong to whoever masters the network form."
These guys are right-on-target at the source of our temporary loss in Vietnam 1975-1991?. However, war is not just a lethal sporting contest among combatants, its about whose IDEAS will dominate, in the case of FREEDOM, in the end the truth has won out over communism.
In fact, Sheehan returns years later to Vietnam in the book, After the War is over, Hanoi and Saigon a review states:
However, if the forces of freedom were more open-minded and networked like the Vann did while he was alive and the enemy did, we could have won the struggle sooner on the battlefield and not just wait for cultural changes to do it for us. The men who fought in Vietnam need to know that their sacrifices did count-just ask the people of Thailand. But if we are to learn from our war there, we must not make excuses that the politicians "did this or that" when there is plenty to do at our own level within the military to reorganize for better 2D/3D maneuver, network and "out-guerrilla-the-guerilla", which is what Vann did. We also have thanks to Ben Works of SIRIUS, the British example in "Imperial Policing" in the 1920s/30s and Malaya in 1950 to see what "right looks like".
Imperial Policing (entire book online)
John Paul Vann is one of the greatest American heroes to ever live, America's "Lawrence of Arabia" in the far instead of middle east; Sheehan's book is a classic, the major fault we have is the "lie" ending in the title, probably a sop to get anti-war types to read it! I would change the word to "Hope" that was lost that we need to rekindle by reading this fine book. Webster should contact Sheehan and have him write a sequel book to ABSL on the "missing" period of Vann's Vietnam adventures when he was Mr. Ruff Puff.
SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT #2: IRAQ, JOHN PAUL VANN COIN TECHNIQUES FOR TODAY?
COUNTERINSURGENCY: The John Paul Vann Model
In November of 1968, I can remember the legendary John Paul Vann speaking to our graduation class of newly trained advisors at Di An, South Vietnam. You can't win a guerrilla war by dropping bombs from the air, he said. You may kill some of the enemy, but you will alienate the people you are there trying to help, and they will turn against you.
John Paul Vann was our "Lawrence of Arabia" in Vietnam. He spent 10 years there, first as an American infantry officer, then later as the main architect of the Vietnamization/Pacification program.
Other words of his I remember were, 'You need to go after the guerrilla with a rifle at the village level and kill them face-to-face. And to do that effectively, you need local Soldiers from the area to assist you. If the locals are properly led and equipped, they will do the job.'
What Vann was saying seems to me to be applicable to Iraq today. You need the support of the local population and indigenous troops to combat the guerrillas/terrorists/thugs on their own turf. Large conventional American military infantry units aren't necessarily best suited for this task.
Most think that it was just the Special Forces who were conducting
counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in Vietnam. Very few have heard about the Co Van Mis (Vietnamese for American Advisors) and the mobile advisory teams (MATs). After 1968, fewer than 5000 assisted, advised, and to use a recently coined term, were 'embedded' with a 500,000 Regional Force/Popular Force Army that took the war to the enemy at the local level for a period of over five years. There were 354 mobile advisory teams made up of five U.S. Army personnel (two
officers and three NCOs). The MATs were really a scaled-down Special Forces team with one of the NCOs being a medic and there was a Vietnamese interpreter for communication purposes. As a young lieutenant, I served with a number of Popular Force platoons and Regional Force companies while a member of Advisor Terms 49
and 86.
Very little has been written about this little known aspect of the Vietnam War. In the book about John Paul Vann and the advisory effort, A Bright and Shining Lie, the big lie is what the author, Neil Sheehan, leaves out of the book. Most of the book deals with the South Vietnamese Army and the advisory effort up to the Tet Offensive in 1968, and very little if any detail or mention is given to the many years afterward where the Regional Forces and Popular Forces gave quite a good accounting of themselves against the enemy.
Sheehan spends the first 700 pages of his book detailing how bad the South Vietnamese Army was up to the end of 1967 (parts of which are true), then spends several pages on the Tet Offensive in early 1968, in which he fails to emphasize that the main fighting units of the Viet Cong army including their commanders and NCOs were eliminated, never again to become a viable fighting force. Some interpret this sound defeat of the Viet Cong as a deliberate attempt by the Hanoi Leaders to eliminate their comrades in the south.
Sheehan then skips five years of the war effort where the Regional
Forces/Popular Forces held their own against the NVA/VC and defeated them in most of the smaller unnamed battles of the war at the village level. Then he picks up again with the 1972 Easter Offensive where Vann was killed, not by enemy contact, but by a helicopter crash during the monsoon rains. Barely 30 pages of Sheehan's book are devoted to Vann's success with Vietnamization. There was hardly mention of the Regional Forces/Popular Forces [RF/PF] the home militias, the little guys in tennis shoes, who inflicted over one-third of the casualties against the enemy.
I spent almost nine months with these little guys as a lieutenant taking the fight to the VC at the hamlet and village level. Not all the RF/PFs were great Soldiers, but many of them were if properly led, just as Vann had told us at the advisor school.
Nicknamed the 'Ruff-Puffs', they were not configured to stand up against a large force of NVA regulars, but they could provide security for the locals in a hamlet or village. The Soldiers either had their families living with them, or in the nearby village. Who better to know when the enemy was coming into a village than those who lived there?
There were many times when I knew when the Vietcong were coming into the village at night to recruit or create havoc. And then instead of being ambushed, I and my little band of Popular Force Soldiers became the ambusher. We beat the guerrillas at their own game. We took the night away from them. We no longer patrolled endlessly and aimlessly looking for a needle in a haystack, waiting for the enemy to initiate contact.
We waited for them in the darkness of the night, and kicked hell out of them. In today's military vernacular, we preempted them. That's how you fight the guerrilla and the terrorist and beat him at his own game.
I cringe now watching news clips on TV as young American Soldiers in Iraq are ambushed by snipers and blown up with the new version of the command-controlled booby trap, the IED (improvised explosive device). But how would the young American Soldiers be able to distinguish the al-Qaida terrorist from a local Iraqi civilization? The simple answer is, they can't.
And how do they find the IED? The answer is they can't unless an informer warns beforehand as to the location.
I believe the answer to this problem is found in the type of force that Vann created in Vietnam, coordinated by CORDS (Civil Operations for Revolutionary Development Support). So different was this approach to conventional warfare tactics that Vann insisted it be operated under civilian control on equal footing with the military hierarchy. Vann really wanted the U.S. military advisors to be in command of the Ruff-Puffs instead of being advisors, but Robert Komer, the first director of CORDS, resisted this idea.
Vanns approach to counterinsurgency was the blending of all civilian agencies in Vietnam under CORDS with a loan of 1800 U.S. military personnel to serve as advisors to local Soldiers to provide security for all aspects of the U.S. effort in Vietnam. These were the front line guys who made up the mobile advisory teams, who moved from one RF/PF unit to another accompanying them on day and night time operations.
It seems to me we are always waiting for the enemy to ambush us in Iraq. The first strike is always thrown by the terrorist, and then we react by sometimes killing Iraqi civilians as the sniper fades away into the crowd. This unfortunate response is, in itself, a tactic of the terrorist/insurgent/enemy combatant.
Don't we need to pre-empt the terrorist as he is preparing the IED to blow up an unsuspecting U.S. Soldier and don't we need to know that a terrorist cell from outside Iraq has begun operating in a neighborhood? To do so, we need intelligence from the local civilians and Soldiers from the area who understand the language, customs, and dynamics of the local situation, who can easily point out strangers in the area even though they speak the same language, but look different.
The best of the MAT teams helped perform all of the above missions because they lived with their Vietnamese counterparts 24 hours a day, ate their food, got to know their families and developed friendships that last even today, 28 years after the war. The Co Vans did not retreat back to a secure base camp far removed from the people they were trying to help and defend.
So where do we get the local Soldiers in Iraq to perform this mission? As a former Co Van, I sat in astonishment when I saw the 500,000 man Iraqi Army being disbanded and sent home immediately after Saddam's main army collapsed. For the most part, they surrendered without firing a shot. Why send home a trained army, although obviously not well trained according to Western standards, but surely part of them could have been used along the guidelines of the MAT team concept in Vietnam?
I realize that all of Saddam's army could not have been used like we used the RF/PF in Vietnam, but surely some of them could. It was obvious that a large number of Saddam's conscripted forces were not loyal to him.
We could have had local Iraqi Soldiers patrolling under the command of small military advisor teams to help flush out enemy combatants and newly arrived in-country al-Qaida terrorists. The advisor teams would provide the coordination and communication with the larger American units in the area. This would enhance security for the civilian efforts and NGOs in Iraq. The Iraqi civilians must feel safe and secure before a new form of government can develop without the imprint of a terrorist stamp.
I believe that what Vann said in the 1960s in Vietnam is relevant today in Iraq as it relates to counterinsurgency. All the high-tech gadgetry and firepower that our military has today, leaves us relatively helpless when it comes to fighting the insurgent who blends in with the civilian population. An innocent civilian killed translates into a win for the terrorist. To avoid this, it takes the Soldier-on-the-ground with a rifle taking the fight to the terrorist, in an area that he previously thought was a safe sanctuary. And to do that, you need local Soldiers familiar with the terrain, the language and the customs of the area. John Paul Vann understood that.
The Vietnam Was has been mis-remembered, mis-understood, and mis-reported in regard to John Paul Vann's effort with Vietnamization and the fighting ability of the South Vietnamese Soldier. Sheehan has done them a great disservice in his book, A Bright And Shining Lie, from which a movie of like title was made.
Few know that the Viet Cong lost the war, and that they were no longer a viable force after 1968. The Viet Cong could not have won the war and bested the South Vietnamese Army in battle. The advisory effort in Vietnam wasn't perfect, but the South Vietnamese forces held their own in the 1972 Easter Offensive by the North.
The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) was finally defeated in 1975 when they were invaded by the fifth largest army in the world. They were invaded by 17 divisions of the North Vietnamese Army to include over 700 tanks that steamrolled everyone in front of them. The North Vietnamese were still being supplied with war materiel by their allies, the Soviets and Chinese, while the allies of the South Vietnamese, the United States, abandoned them in their hour of need.
The ARVN were also disadvantaged and vulnerable because they had to defend everywhere, and the NVA could concentrate superior forces at weak points in the South.
The myth perpetuated by the anti-war media was that the South Vietnamese military was no good. I returned to the province capital of Xuan Loc, Vietnam, in 2002 and visited the large communist cemetery there filled with 5000 graves. This is where the last battle of the Vietnam War was fought, where the 18th ARVN Division defeated three NVA divisions before finally being overrun by 40,000 of the enemy.
Would Vann's model of counterinsurgency work in Iraq today? That's a good question, but what is the alternative? Our Soldiers now are getting tired, and our forces are being stretched too thin to continue the mission indefinitely.
The architect of the 1975 invasion of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese Tein Van Dung, in an indirect manner, gave Vann a complement for his conduct of the pacification program. In his book, Great Spring Victory, he never once mentions revolutionary warfare or the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong as aiding him in his final assault on the South. That's because Vann's program of Vietnamization had basically wrested control of the south from the guerrillas who we no longer
a viable fighting force.
That's rather ironic, isn't it? The myth exists today that peasants wearing rubber tire sandals employing guerrilla tactics won the war in Vietnam.
Our officials in Iraq are saying it will take three to five years to build an Iraqi Army. With Vann's model, we could have taken the best of the 500,000 former Iraqi military, and put them under the control of U.S. military advisors. Instead of having young American Soldiers patrolling the streets of Baghdad and the smaller cities around the country, surely we could have used Iraqi Soldiers advised by several thousand American military personnel. Instead, we sent them home to do what?
Unlike Vietnam, there is no outside Army that is going to invade Iraq in division-size strength and overwhelm our military units there. Our powerful and well-trained military units, with the aid of the British, have already won the big battles of the war. Now we need small units of local Soldiers taking the war to the enemy at the village level. I see no other way to preempt the terrorist before he has the time to act.
The small suitcase bomb, the suicide bomber, chemical and germ warfare, and the IED, all weapons used by the terrorists in the 21st century, make it necessary to defend everywhere. The terrorist will always go for the target of opportunity, searching for the most vulnerable target.
And this appears to be the difficulty of the are of the future the preempting of the terrorist before he can strike. Or, even before that, having the will and knowledge of how to preempt the terrorist.
Note: The above article appeared in Counterparts quarterly journal Sitrep in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue. Counterpart is an association of U.S.-Vietnamese advisors and their Vietnamese counterparts.
For more information on the author, the association and its periodical,
contact: Ken Jacobsen; kjacobsen@knology.net
UPDATE 2008: TIME TO LEARN FROM VIETNAM AND JOHN PAUL VANN
PROBLEM #1. Snobby U.S. Military lusting for nation-state wars (NSWs) wrong for COIN/SASO operations: Consequences of American Narcissism in Iraq
"It was an accident to begin with. John Vann was my friend, I had known him in those three years I'd been in Vietnam and I'd see him periodically afterwards. When he was killed, I went to his funeral at Arlington in 1972, and it was like an extraordinary class reunion. Here were all the figures of Vietnam in this chapel. This man had left the army as a renegade lieutenant colonel, had gone back to Vietnam as a civilian, and ended the war holding a General's position even though he was a civilian. General Westmoreland was his chief pallbearer, and a few minutes before the ceremony started, Edward Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy brothers, came in. And I thought of the older brother who sent the country to fight this war in Vietnam in '62 when I first went there, already buried in this cemetery, and here was the youngest brother coming ... he was a friend of Vann's. Sitting with the family was Daniel Ellsberg, who was about to go on trial for copying the Pentagon Papers. He and Vann had remained best friends, despite going in totally opposite directions on the war. It was very moving. I realized that we were burying more than John Vann. We were burying the whole era of the war. We were burying the era of boundless self-confidence that led us to Vietnam. By that time, John had come to personify the war. He'd spent the better part of ten years there. Everyone else would go for a year or two, three at the most, and he'd spent the better part of ten. And I realized that if I wrote a book about him, I could write a history of the war. I could put the two together, and people might be able to understand the war because they would be reading about it in human terms, though the story of a man whose life turned out to be like a novel.
There was a moral outrage in what he was telling you about the war that you wound up conveying to the audience back home in the United States.
"Yes, there was a moral outrage on several levels. First of all, you've got to remember in that period of time, this country was at the high noon of its power. We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans. And Vann embodied that, and so did the reporters. We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this General and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see. I discovered later on that they believed these delusions. We thought they were lying to us; I discovered later on they believed what they were saying. They were really deluded men. And then there was the moral outrage over the way the war was being conducted. Vann had the keen sense of honor as a Soldier and he was enraged at the bombing and shelling of peasant hamlets, which was routinely done by the Vietnamese and American Generals. He thought, first of all, this was terrible. When I say keen sense of honor as a Soldier, he was in Vietnam to fight other men, not to kill somebody's mother or sister or kid. And he felt that, first of all, this was wrong, and secondly, it was stupid, because it was going to turn the population against us, and of course he was quite right. So a sense of moral outrage was conveyed on several levels, yes."
You quote him at one time as saying, "This is a political war, and it calls for the utmost discrimination in killing. The best weapon in killing is a knife." You emphasize his criticism of the indiscriminate bombing, which was really the way that we chose to pursue the war. The Generals were fighting another war, they were still fighting World War II, and it made no sense in the Vietnam context.
"When I got at the records, I realized that they also understood what they were doing. I mean, they thought that they could -- you know, Mao Zedong described guerrillas as fish swimming in the sea; well, they were going to empty the sea. And the Vietnamese Generals on the Saigon side thought that they could terrify their peasantry into ceasing to support the guerrillas. I think the American Generals, as it turned out later on, deliberately wanted to empty these areas of population".
JOHN PAUL VANN AS THE MODEL FOR TODAY'S U.S. ARMY LEADER
"The Mongols, a classic example of an ancient force that fought
according to cyberwar principles, were organized more like a network than a hierarchy. More recently, a relatively minor military power that defeated a great modern power--the combined forces of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong--operated in many respects more like a network than an institution; it even extended political- support networks abroad. In both cases, the Mongols and the Vietnamese, their defeated opponents were large institutions whose forces were designed to fight set-piece attritional battles.
"Cyberwar is
coming" by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, International Policy Department
RAND
"Sheehan sees a Vietnam suffering not from the American war but from a prolonging of the agony by the rigid regime of Le Duan, with its prosecution of new wars and its Stalinist economics. In 1986, as General Giap relates in a longish and candid interview, came doi moi, or ``the new way.'' Out went the collective farms and heavy industrial projects; in came a free market. Within a year, Vietnam was exporting rice, and the currency had stabilized. Still, it's a desperately poor country, the North in particular, as Sheehan's tour of hospitals demonstrates: They are under-equipped and cannot afford to stock antibiotics or basic vaccines. In Saigon, Sheehan is overcome with memories and seeks out his and Susan's old haunts, as well as those of John Vann, subject of much of A Bright Shining Lie. Like the North, the South is a society run by party faithful--and the privileges of rank have hearkened to them, leaving out a great many of the ``mutilated.'' Even so, the armies of homeless have been eliminated, and no one is starving. In Saigon, Western influence is strongest, ready for the moment when the American embargo drops and Vietnam becomes the economic powerhouse everyone is anticipating. Already the BMWs proliferate."
Garrison Mentality in Iraq/Afghanistan: the "Presence Patrol" = Delegating COIN/SASO Dirty Work like it were lawn care
VIDEO PROOF: WHAT WRONG LOOKS LIKE: Trucks on Roads = Land Mines = Deaths
1. Stop "Presence patrolling": there is no PEACE to "keep"--so stop driving around aimlessly like a beat cop when being seen ENRAGES the populace as a foreign occupier; this isn't New York City where being seen deters crimes--it INVITES violence
2. STAY OFF ROADS: stop being so damn lazy.
Park ALL wheeled trucks since they cannot leave roads where land mines wait. WHY GIVE THE REBELS EASY TARGETS TO BLOW UP? If you have to go somewhere to set-up a checkpoint, guard an area, lay an ambush (security creating maneuvers) go in TRACKS and go by unpredictable, cross-country routes.
www.combatreform.org/armoredhmmwvsstrykersfail.htm
3. Don't Clusterfuck: no troops on foot in WW2 style formations in bad camouflage bunched together
www.combatreform.org/camie.htm
4. No Half-Assed Vehicle checkpoints: use BLAST WALLS to channelize incoming cars and compartmentalize any car bombs going off. Use a robot and/or bomb dog to inspect car for guns or explosives. No more than 1 man near the car and only if you have to; use loud speakers from a tracked armored vehicle and/or a guard tower covering the inspection proicess with rifle and machine gun fire and have person get out of car if IDed as a rebel and walk through a blast wall lane and have him swiped for guns/explosives--if he's wearing a bomb he only takes out some easily replaced blast walls
www.combatreform.org/highexplosives.htm
5. Stop accepting any war sitations given; the responsibility of the general officer is to insist that the goals and means are moral and feasible
This video shows in alarming detail the incompetent "From Here to Eternity" U.S. Army and USMC suffering as victims due to its failure to know WHAT RIGHT LOOKS LIKE for a sub-national conflict.
The non-linear battlefield is dominated by high explosives; not feel-good, kinetic energy bullet gunslinger duels. Combat Engineering is the key. War is not a macho ego trip; its about whose WILL dominates the situation. A competent Army SMOTHERS sub-national conflict violence and does not add to it. This can give time for a political settlement to be had, but we can ill afford to drag our feet on it...and if Iraq is just a corporation feeding frenzy backed by an illegitimate puppet government, then military men damn well better open their mouths to Congress and get a legitimate mission to accomplish by demanding real elections be held immediately--monitored by outside agencies to insure we just don't lie again and put another puppet in charge like Mr. Maliki.
BOTTOM LINE: Let's stop looking like and acting like a gadgetized version of the Red Coats.
Canadians in Afghanistan Fail in LAV3Stryker Trucks
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm2cuwJati8
PBS Documentary Afghanistan: The Other War, reveals that the emasculation of western armies into wheeled trucks like the LAV-III/Stryker to not LOOK war-like (ie; look less capable, which they are) cannot even overcome the battle against earth terrain to have basic mobility to reach people in closed terrains in jeopardy at the hands of sub-national groups rebelling against the nation-state. You look less capable means you ARE less capable and being weak with a "glass jaw" neither protects the good civilians nor engenders respect from the enemy. "Nation-building" in war zones in wheeled trucks is a disaster.
Also telling is the Canadian Multi-National Force Commander's obsession with self; who cares how history will judge him? The Mission and the Men should come before "Me". By being in road-bound wheeled trucks, the NATO MN forces have a "glass jaw" that makes it impossible to "turn- the-other-cheek" so they are trigger-happy trying to use firepower to compensate for a lack of M113 Gavin-type tracked cross-country mobility (avoid road troubles in first place) and armored protection. When NATO forces are caught red-handed needlessly killing Afghan civilians, as a Cover-Your-Ass (CYA) politician--maybe without a technotactical grasp of what his subordinates are doing--he gives the standard c'est la guerre (it is war, blame it not our incompetence or willful wrong-doing) excuses sure to infuriate the people whom we want to stay out of the Taliban's camp. He offers that the Soldiers might be court-martialed but he doesn't show any grasp that he has them in bad situations setting them up for such failures; for example they live in exposed tents when they should be in dug-in and Hesco-covered ISO shipping container "BATTLEBOXes" at their forward operating bases (FOBs).
WRONG
RIGHT
Hopefully, he and others will watch this PBS video and realize they need to hand out bright-orange traffic cones or saw horses so his troops can start actually visibly marking impromptu road blocks (place a sign on one of the cones/saw horses saying "STOP!" in the local language) at THE PROPER DISTANCE TO GIVE CAR BOMB STAND-OFF PROTECTION and stop the gleeful "warning shot" BS which lets cars/trucks get too close in the first place and results in needless dead/wounded innocent civilians.
WRONG
RIGHT
Do we want an excuse to open fire and kill "ragheads" confirming we are just there to take their oil/natural resources or do we want to do what's morally RIGHT and technotactically BEST to protect our troops and avoid misunderstandings that kill innocent civilians and feed the rebellion? For all the $$$ millions going into sexy helicopters to fly him around, surely he can afford some traffic cones/saw horses? Or some spark plugs? (see part 2). Watching the PBS video clipabove may not make these lessons obvious; maybe he and other decision-makers will read our captions here and follow the lead of the British and Dutch and re-equip ALL NATO forces with M113 Gavin or other type light tracks since Afghanistan's terrain is traversable by these low ground-pressure vehicles and not wheeled trucks with any armor protection. The Canadians to their credit, have since this video factored in their constant LAV3Stryker truck failures in Afghanistan and turned more and more to tracked vehicles.
Its clear that to do SASO/COIN operations properly, we need a dedicated non-linear, battlefield stability corps composed of older, more mature, psychologically-screened to not be narcissist "shooters" properly equipped with light M113 Gavin armored tracks, affordable 2-seat observation/attack, simple rotary and fixed-wing STOL aircraft to scour the skies 24/7/365 and not constantly crash like UAVs do and see hiding enemies with human eyesight plus sensory help---and plenty of combat engineers to repair the country's infrastructure and separation wall apart warring factions and security fence trouble-makers out.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsO54MQi6es
PBS documentary shows a Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) at an isolated FOB in Afghanistan trying to win over a nearby village from Taliban rebel sympathy by repairing their water pumps and supplying other needed items. The kingdom is lost for want of a nail when the native contracted supply column is turned away because the bomb sniffing dog discovers a driver has traces of explosives. Why OPSEC is violated by having locals drive supplies to FOBs in the first place? Thus, they cannot get measly spark plugs and LAV-III/Stryker clusterfuck drive into a run-down road-side black market where their "shooter" foot narcissists hop out and proceed to "block" the road by NOT blocking it as if Afghans who have lived with guns for centuries are going to cower at them brandishing firearms.
"Look-At-Me-I-Have-A-Gun-Treat-Me-Like-god" Complex
When Afghans continue to drive because the Canadians didn't even post traffic cones or forward vehicles to stop traffic for convoys to pass, they eagerly open fire with "warning shots". Even when moving they don't feel safe in their allegedly "armored" LAV3Strykers spitting out warning shots left and right and causing a truck to over-turn and nearly killing an innocent Afghan. How many spark plugs would the UH-60 MEDEVAC helicopter flight have paid for if it had been prevented? How many brand-new water pumps?
A "pound-of-cure" MEDEVAC helicopter is flown in to fly him out, but the "ounce preventable" damage is already done. So much for "winning hearts and minds" this day. Emasculated ground troops in wheeled LAV-III/Stryker trucks are set up for road/trail restricted failure wherever they are.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZandbBaUw_U
Video begins with the PRT female officer explaining the need to win over the villagers to a smartass kill/capture enlisted narcissist obsessed with the "Taliban all around".
By conveniently being in wheeled LAV3/Strykers without cross-country mobility he is exempt from having to patrol or set up LP/OPs to scour the immediate area of his own FOB of Taliban asking for a M16 vs AK47 firefight.
What he can do when not sharpshooting his officers is play kill/capture on a laptop as his buddy nearby is doing. Me thinks he could better spend his time making some "STOP!" signs in the local Afghan language to bolster impromptu road blocks and prevent the need to "bust caps" into civilians. At 2: 58 yet another LAV3/Stryker clusterfuck convoy is sent down the road hit by a little rain to make contact with another village to win them over when they can't even keep their promises to their first village adjacent to their FOB. A LAV3Stryker gets stuck in a little mud ON THE ROAD and breaks its main bearing. While their officer spins a tail almost as fast as the rubber tires are in the deepening mud, the mission is ABORTED. The "recovery" LAV3Stryker yanks out the first truck but its hitched up to a regular LAV3Stryker to tow back to base. Then as the pair start to move--THEY BOTH GET STUCK in a minor mud rut that would be nothing for a light M113 Gavin armored track to drive through without even stopping to blink. With darkness falling, they need to get back to base before the Taliban come out; the NCOIC walks away in disgust he's been given crap wheeled vehicles to work with.
STILL PHOTOS OF THE LAV-III DEBACLE IN AFGHANISTAN (AMERICANS EXPERIENCE THIS DAILY, TOO)
2: "We are going to make contact with a new village and reach out to them and win over their hearts and minds in our low-maintenance, all-terrain, high-speed SASO wheeled vehicles. Our LAV-IIIs are used by the Americans who call them 'Strykers'".
3: "WAHOO! Look at Me! I'm going 60 miles per hour on the road!!" (Not for long!)
LAV-III stuck a 1st time; Road Speed: 0 MPH
4: "Ohhh....sh$%^&! I drove into a rut....."
5: "Can we get it out?"
6: "We had technical difficulties and had to cancel the mission to the village"
7: "What's that dangling underneath the LAV-III?"
8: "Oh No. Its the main bearing. Its broke, man. This thing won't run its trashed."
9: "What a Piece-of-Shit (POS)."
10: "Careful! Don't get the 'recovery' LAV-III stuck, too!"
11: "Oh Boy. The 'recovery' LAV-III is spinning in the mud, too."
12: "Please...please grip...grip....we don't want to be stuck here outside the wire when the sun goes down..."
LAV-III stuck a 2d time: and it gets another truck stuck, too!
13: "Gun it!!! Get through the dip!"
14: "Damn! We are Stuck Again! BOTH LAV3STRYKERS!!! Dude! It's Getting Dark!"
15: "We Got to get Back to the FOB before the Taliban come out!"
16: "Go Easy! Easy! Let the Wheels Catch!"
17: "Damn. Forget it. Cut the Engine!"
18: "Mission Aborted! Maybe an officer will figure this out."
"We REALLY showed our Afghan allies today why they should trust their very lives to us.
Yeah, Right. We need to turn these pieces-of-shit in and get tracks so we can win"
Fortunately, they survive the debacle and ask the nearby villagers to WALK TO THEM at the FOB to receive the supplies that finally arrive, compromising their own security as well as revealing the villagers to any watchful Taliban as being NATO sympathizers.
If this isn't bad enough, the smirking "shooters" tell them the doctor has run out of supplies and they must walk back to their village, essentially empty handed.
If these Canadians had M113 Gavins instead of LAV3Stryker wheels they could have DROVE the doctor cross-country to the village and done medical assistance and passed out whatever supplies they had---discreetly in a designated home.
Clearly, smirking nation-state war narcissists receiving full-time pay/benefits (welfare recipients in sexy uniforms) wrongly look down on these "ragheads" as "slackers" looking for a "free hand-out" when really they are Islamofascism victims who with a little help might be our friends-for-life if we respect their dignity and follow-through with our promises.
To CYA, the FOB is suddenly dismantled and removed from the area; violating the proven ink blot strategy of counter-insurgency which is to stay and expand goodwill--which is what the Dutch are succeeding at doing in Afghanistan using light mechanized M113 Gavins.
LAV-3/Strykerrrrs fail in Afghanistan and the Canadians ditch their own wheeled trucks they make for more mobile and better armored tracks!
Enter the Leopards and M113 MTVL Gavins!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrATZkFUhaI
The Dutch are using M113 Gavin tracks, too and are being VERY successful in counter-insurgency operations!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKa3tK3zi4c
What caused the turn-around?
COMBAT.
REALITY.
AFGHANISTAN.
A DESIRE TO WIN, NOT CONTINUE TO LOSE IN WHEELED TRUCKS...
We need to stop wasting billions on fatally flawed, break-down-prone wheeled Stryker trucks that fail to get the job done and put our men into constant road/trail ambushes and put our money into M113 Gavin light for cross-country mobility but medium-weight in armor protection tracks that don't get stuck and break down in a mere light rain and minor mud.
Tom Ricks' article in the Washington Post reveals yet more reasons why we need a dedicated Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC) that would listen to all its Soldiers regardless of rank and not treat rebellions like it was just lawn care dirty work that lower ranks need to go out and prune. If what you are growing is "poison ivy" trimming it isn't the solution...the solution is to STOP GROWING WEEDS (making rebel humans). If we don't form a NLB-SC we will have learned nothing from Iraq like we failed after Vietnam....and we will repeat all these mistakes again with more thousands of our young people paying for it with their lives and limbs! We need a NLB-SC that is ready BEFORE the war to rapidly bring back TV, radio and telephone service and call out to former Army Soldiers and government employees to return to work the next day, and have THE MONEY TO PAY THEM to restore social order. We need to stop being so stingy. This also applies to Afghanistan (see article below Ricks' article). Garrison Army and marine generals who have everything provided to them, chow halls, direct deposit every 2 weeks etc. have no clue whatsoever of how civilian life is a struggle to make ends meet and that SOMEONE has to grow and prepare the food they take for granted as they walk intro a DFAC.... They all live in a phony, cloistered mini-society of "From Here to Eternity" garrison BS each day subsidized by U.S. tax payers to allegedly be "attack dogs" let out once every 10 years to do nation-state war, then returned to their garrison "cages". What we need to prevail in COIN/SASO is a helpful "Lassie" that can when threatened fend off attacks not kill/capture "Attack of the Dobermans" 24/7/365.
Living in Former dictator Palaces Enrages the Populace: DON'T DO IT!
The "presence patrol" mentality now ensconced in the new COIN manual FM 3-24 (LTG Petraeus is co-author with marine general Mattis) despite being a miserable failure in Iraq for over 4 years and Afghanistan for 5 years, is senior generals getting to live in comfortable palaces on FOBs as they delegate the dirty work of appeasing the masses to lower-ranking Soldiers who try to "cut deals" with them when the situation itself is already damned by the higher ranks' parameters. Its just the garrison mentality back in the states of the generals and colonels and majors ordering lower ranking personnel to mow lawns and polish floors, except this time its having Soldiers expose themselves to constant enemy ambush to placate the locals or to kill/capture the rebels to "tidy-the-area". Its not lower ranking "empowerment" its snobby delegating the "dirty work" to lower-ranking Soldiers to do EVERYTHING and somehow try to overcome SYSTEMIC problems CREATED BY THE SENIOR OFFICERS. For example, maybe the best CONOPS is to rehire the old Army and create town/village RF/PF security forces to keep rebels out, not have U.S. forces enter/leave villages/towns with "presence patrols" which exposes our men to road ambushes and yields control right back to the rebels? Real empowerment would not be a top-down, one-way RHIP tidy-my-area drill, it would be the lower-ranking Soldiers sitting at the table of the "councils of war" (Bible, God: "with wise counsel make war") and CHANGING THE SYSTEMIC PARAMETERS of the operation with their input so we have a WINNING CONOPS. "Presence patrolling" is senior officers trying to have junior Soldiers do their jobs without their power, funds and authority to change the conditions so they can at least have a chance to succeed.
Iraq: Kill/Capture/Torture: have U.S. troops tidy the area
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072201004.html
In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam
Early Missteps by U.S. Left Troops Unprepared for Guerrilla Warfare
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50.
That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S. military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied the United States down to this day.
There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't win a conventional war, and some captured documents indicate that it may have intended some sort of rear-guard campaign of subversion against occupation. The stockpiling of weapons, distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all indicate some planning for an insurgency.
But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.
The very setup of the U.S. presence in Iraq undercut the mission. The chain of command was hazy, with no one individual in charge of the overall American effort in Iraq, a structure that led to frequent clashes between military and civilian officials.
On May 16, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation agency, had issued his first order, "De-Baathification of Iraq Society." The CIA station chief in Baghdad had argued vehemently against the radical move, contending: "By nightfall, you'll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you'll really regret this."
He was proved correct, as Bremer's order, along with a second that dissolved the Iraqi military and national police, created a new class of disenfranchised, threatened leaders.
Exacerbating the effect of this decision were the U.S. Army's interactions with the civilian population. Based on its experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Army thought it could prevail through "presence" -- that is, Soldiers demonstrating to Iraqis that they are in the area, mainly by patrolling. "We've got that habit that carries over from the Balkans," one Army general said. Back then, patrols were conducted so frequently that some officers called the mission there "DAB"-ing, for "driving around Bosnia."
The U.S. military jargon for this was "boots-on-the-ground," or, more officially, the presence mission. There was no formal doctrinal basis for this in the Army manuals and training that prepare the military for its operations, but the notion crept into the vocabularies of senior officers. For example, a briefing by the 1st Armored Division's engineering brigade stated that one of its major missions would be "presence patrols." And then-Maj. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then the commander of that division, ordered one of his brigade commanders to "flood your zone, get out there, and figure it out." Sitting in a dusty command tent outside a palace in the Green Zone in May 2003, he added: "Your business is to ensure that the presence of the American Soldier is felt, and it's not just Americans zipping by." [EDITOR: he wouldn't be in that tent for long with a posh palace nearby]
The flaw in this approach, Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek, a civil affairs officer, later noted, was that after Iraqi public opinion began to turn against the Americans and see them as occupiers, "then the presence of troops . . . becomes counterproductive."
The U.S. mission in Iraq is made up overwhelmingly of regular combat units, rather than smaller, lower-profile Special Forces units. And in 2003, most conventional commanders did what they knew how to do: send out large numbers of troops and vehicles on conventional combat missions.
Few U.S. Soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride and the humiliation Iraqi men felt in being overseen by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.
Complicating the U.S. effort was the difficulty top officials had in recognizing what was going on in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at first was dismissive of the looting that followed the U.S. arrival and then for months refused to recognize that an insurgency was breaking out there. A reporter pressed him one day that summer: Aren't you facing a guerrilla war?
"I guess the reason I don't use the phrase 'guerrilla war' is because there isn't one," Rumsfeld responded.
A few weeks later, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid succeeded Gen. Tommy R. Franks as the top U.S. military commander in the Middle East. He used his first news conference as commander to clear up the strategic confusion about what was happening in Iraq. Opponents of the U.S. presence were conducting "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," he said. "It's a war, however you describe it."
That fall, U.S. tactics became more aggressive. [EDITOR: kill/capture] This was natural, even reasonable, coming in response to the increased attacks on U.S. forces and a series of suicide bombings. But it also appears to have undercut the U.S. government's long-term strategy.
"When you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong, and eventually you'll get the tactics right," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran of Special Forces in the Vietnam War. "If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever, but you still lose the war. That's basically what we did in Vietnam."
For the first 20 months or more of the American occupation in Iraq, it was what the U.S. military would do there as well. "What you are seeing here is an unconventional war fought conventionally," a Special Forces lieutenant colonel remarked gloomily one day in Baghdad as the violence intensified. The tactics that the regular troops used, he added, sometimes subverted American goals.
Draconian Interrogation Ideas
On the morning of Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the "Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell" at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent a memo to subordinate commands asking what interrogation techniques they would like to use.
"The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees," he told them. His e-mail, and the responses it provoked from members of the Army intelligence community across Iraq, are illustrative of the mind-set of the U.S. military during this period.
"Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow Soldiers from any further attacks," Ponce wrote. He told them, "Provide interrogation techniques 'wish list' by 17 AUG 03." [EDITOR: instead of stopping the BS presence patrolling in Humvee trucks/on foot with tracked Security Creating Maneuvers, let's kill/capture/torture and try to attrit the bad guys with RMA air strike rather than change ourselves to do maneuver better]
Some of the responses to his solicitation were enthusiastic. With clinical precision, a Soldier attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment recommended by e-mail 14 hours later that interrogators use "open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches." He also reported that "fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely." The 4th Infantry Division's intelligence operation responded three days later with suggestions that captives be hit with closed fists and also subjected to "low-voltage electrocution."
But not everyone was as sanguine as those two units. "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are," cautioned a major with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion, which supported the operations of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. "It comes down to standards of right and wrong -- something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will 'take no prisoners' and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient." Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to "actionable intelligence" was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American. [EDITOR: creating rebels for sure]
These steps were seen inside the Army as a major success story, and they were portrayed as such to journalists. The problem was that the U.S. military, having assumed it would be operating in a relatively benign environment, wasn't set up for a massive effort that called on it to apprehend, detain and interrogate Iraqis, to analyze the information gleaned, and then to act on it.
"As commanders at all levels sought operational intelligence, it became apparent that the intelligence structure was undermanned, under-equipped and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency operations," Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones wrote in an official Army report a year later. Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. [EDITOR: they are now rebels for sure] But as they were delivered to the Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren't isolated from the general prison population.
In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored. [EDITOR: who has time to sudy COIN/SASO? We got lawns to mow, change-of-command ceremonies to attend etc.]
That summer, retired marine Col. Gary Anderson, an "expert" in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said. It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!". [EDITOR: Bremer should have been fired immediately after issuing his De-Baath and fire Iraqi Army orders, and these ordered counter-manded]
This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq. One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967. When the United States went into Iraq, his book, "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice," was almost unknown within the military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort failed to heed. Galula warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they held out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. He insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war.
"A Soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty," he wrote, adding that "the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire."
The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and in the two battles in Fallujah the following year.
One reason for that different approach was the muddled strategy of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. In Galula's view, the people are the prize. [EDITOR: why we need a NLB-SC to be Civil Affairs Command's body guards/muscle so the dumb-ass nation-state war kill/capture/torture types don't run the show into the ground]
"The population . . . becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.
[EDITOR: Oh really? According to FM 3-24, MILITARY CONTROL is the number #1 priority, the support of the populace is secondary].
From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with civilians in the midst of a guerrilla war. "Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hardships for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum," Galula wrote. Cumulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top.
Again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to assert and reassert control in Fallujah, in Ramadi, in Samarra, in Mosul.
"Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting," Lt. Col. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment in 2004.
When Maj. Gregory Peterson studied a few months later at Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies, an elite course that trains military planners and strategists, he found the U.S. experience in Iraq in 2003-2004 remarkably similar to the French war in Algeria in the 1950s. Both involved Western powers exercising sovereignty in Arab states, both powers were opposed by insurgencies contesting that sovereignty, and both wars were controversial back home.
Most significant for Peterson's analysis, he found both the French and U.S. militaries woefully unprepared for the task at hand. "Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all Soldiers, or taught at service schools," he concluded.
Casey Implements a New Tactic
In mid-2004, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. took over from Sanchez as the top U.S. commander in Iraq. One of Casey's advisers, Kalev Sepp, pointedly noted in a study that fall that the U.S. effort in Iraq was violating many of the major principles of counterinsurgency, such as putting an emphasis on killing insurgents instead of engaging the population.
A year later, frustrated by the inability of the Army to change its approach to training for Iraq, Casey established his own academy in Taji, Iraq, to teach counterinsurgency to U.S. officers as they arrived in the country. He made attending its course there a prerequisite to commanding a unit in Iraq. "We are finally getting around to doing the right things," Army Reserve Lt. Col. Joe Rice observed one day in Iraq early in 2006. "But is it too little, too late?"
One of the few commanders who were successful in Iraq in that first year of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, made studying counterinsurgency a requirement at the Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where mid-career officers are trained.
By the academic year that ended last month, 31 of 78 student monographs at the School of Advanced Military Studies next door were devoted to counterinsurgency or stability operations, compared with only a couple two years earlier.
And Galula's handy little book, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, was a best-seller at the Leavenworth bookstore.
Here are the Kill/Capture/torture "weeds" the garrison generals want "pulled" as if once these folks are annihilated, there will be no rebellion.
Occupation Racket: Corporations Get $$RICH$$$; Soldiers Get Dead, Maimed and Ruined for Life
Having 158, 000 American troops--troops in trucks and "boots" on the ground is NOT the best way to handle a SASO/COIN operation--LESS men say 50, 000 in well-armored TRACKS backed by separation walls and border fences--combat engineering means--otherwise we will ruin 1/3 of all the Soldiers for life and bankrupt the nation.
The Joseph Stiglitz Report
Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Harvard University
Stiglitz report says 1/3 of our troops whenever they deploy overseas to a combat zone will be scarred for life and every 100, 000 of these equals $1 BILLION of annual VA medical care costs for the rest of their lives.
353, 000+ out of 1.6M deployed = $3.5 BILLION per year from now until at least another 40 years. If these 20-year olds live to 60ish the costs of the Iraq debacle to make corporations rich will be the current $2 BILLION/week until we leave plus $140 BILLION in VA care by 2048.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080505/ts_alt_afp/healthuspsychiatryiraqafghanistan
Soldier suicides could trump war tolls: U.S. health official
Mon May 5, 2008
1:11 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Suicides and "psychological mortality" among U.S. Soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday.
Of the 1.6 million U.S. Soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent -- or around 300,000 -- show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health.
An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk Soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association's 161st annual meeting here.
If "one just does the math", then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in "suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned.
More than 4,000 U.S. Soldiers have died in Iraq since the U.S. invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the U.S. led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths.
"It's predicted that most Soldiers -- 70 percent -- will not seek treatment through the DoD or VA," Insel said at the meeting, at which the psychological impact of war is expected to top the agenda over the next four days.
Left untreated, PTSD and depression can lead to substance abuse, alcoholism or other life-threatening behaviors.
"It's a gathering storm for the civilian and public health care sectors," Insel said.
He urged public-sector mental health caregivers to recognize the symptoms of psychological troubles resulting from deployment to a war zone and be ready to provide adequate care for both Soldiers and their families.
Other items on the agenda at the meeting, set to be attended by some 19,000 psychiatrists and mental health practitioners from around the world, include violence in schools, the psychology of extremism, and more light-hearted topics such as how music affects mood.
Below offers a list of major known Sunni insurgent/terror groups identified in Iraq and some very top level info about them. For some absurd reason It ignores the Shi'ite militias, the al-Qaeda "foreign fighters" cells, and the Iranian and Saudi agents supporting "their side." The listing was drawn from (other) websites by the folks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the publishers of Foreign Policy magazine and long-time apologists for the UN and its internationalist, one-worlder agenda.
www.foreignpolicy.com/resources/alert.php
Foreign Policy, Posted June 19, 2006Before the U.S. military killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq was the face of the insurgency. Yet his group was probably responsible for only 5-10 percent of the insurgent attacks. What about the other 90 percent? FP takes a look at the other major [Sunni] insurgent groups in Iraq--who they are, what they are trying to accomplish, and which ones are more likely to negotiate than fight to the death.
1. Ansar Al Islam
courtesy IslamOnline www.islamonline.net/english/In_Depth/Iraq_Aftermath/2003/12/ article_05.shtml
First surfaced: In December 2001, before the war.
Ideology: Ansar Al Islam is a violent group of extreme Islamist fundamentalists, not unlike the Taliban in Afghanistan. With close ties to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the group fervently opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq. More specifically, it rejects the U.S.-backed Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Party, which favors Kurdish self-determination and is led by the prominent Iraqi politician Jalal Talabani.
Recruits: These insurgents have been among the most active in attracting members from outside Iraq. One of their known methods has been to recruit radical, like-minded Islamists from Europe (Germany in particular) and smuggle them into Iraq. Like al Qaeda, Ansar Al Islam seeks foreign recruits not only for sheer manpower, but to demonstrate to the world that there's a steady flow of fighters willing to make the trek to Iraq to fight the coalition. However, multiple reports indicate that its makeup is overwhelmingly drawn from Kurds inside Iraq who reject the Patriotic Union.
Tactics: The group, which predominantly operates in the relatively peaceful north, is likely responsible for multiple attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. But unlike other insurgent organizations, it's also attempted to murder high-profile Kurdish politicians. It's rumored that Ansar Al Islam even tried to assassinate then Prime Minister Ayad Allawi during a trip to Berlin in 2004.
What's next: Even though some analysts have pointed to Ansar Al Islam for recent attacks in Fallujah, the group hasn't been as active as it was before. That could be good news for the coalition, as it indicates a weakened ability to recruit fighters from abroad. The group enjoyed close ties with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In fact, he even belonged to this organization before his incorporation into al Qaeda. So much so, that the "treasure trove" of documents apparently uncovered by U.S. troops in the wake of his death is likely to reveal the extent of its organization and tactical secrets.
2. Ansar Al Sunna
First surfaced: September 2003
Ideology: Ansar Al Sunna, originally an offshoot of Ansar Al Islam, is a highly feared and violent terrorist group whose worldview is most in line with al Qaeda's. Because of the similar ideological stance, the group is said to be competing with al Qaeda for new recruits, territory, and funding. The Sunni extremists reject Western influence and interference in Muslim lands and claim to fight U.S. and coalition troops in the hope of establishing an Islamic caliphate throughout the Middle East. Virulently opposed to Shiites, Ansar Al Sunna is one of the leading contributors to the sectarian violence in recent months.
Recruits: Its ranks are largely Iraqi, predominantly Kurds, with some foreign fighters from Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere. As Ansar Al Islam loses strength along with al Qaeda, Ansar Al Sunna may pick up some of its leftover insurgents.
Tactics: If you've seen a beheading on the Internet or watched news coverage of a large attack on coalition troops, chances are you've seen their work. Some of the highly publicized attacks include the murder of 12 Nepalese hostages in August 2004, and the killing of 17 Iraqi workers in December of that year. Ansar Al Sunna claimed responsibility for the December 2004 explosion at a U.S. mess hall in Mosul, which killed 22 people. As recently as June 10, the group is believed to have interrogated and executed three Iraqi police commandos. The video of their grisly deaths was posted on an Islamist Web site shortly after.
What's next: Most reports about this terrorist group paint it as less concerned about killing every last American than it is about remaining intact until the coalition leaves. At that point, Ansar Al Sunna assumes it will finally have the chance to cement Islamic law into Iraqi society. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad recently stated that Ansar Al Sunna maintains a base in northwest Iran. [EDITOR: you said earlier they violently hate Shias?]
3. Islamic Resistance Movement in Iraq (1920 Revolution Brigades)
First surfaced: July 2003
Ideology: In a reference to the 1920 uprising against British colonial occupation, the 1920 Revolution Brigades is the military wing of the group once known as the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance. Like other insurgent groups, the 1920 Brigades fights to remove coalition troops from Iraq.
Recruits: According to most reports, they recruit new members by handing out statements to prospective recruits at the gates of mosques after Friday prayers. The media-savvy organization has even sent tapes to Al Jazeera calling on foreign fighters to do combat in Iraq.
Tactics: Most of the 1920 Revolution Brigades' attacks have focused on the area west of Baghdad, in the so-called Sunni Triangle, with major assaults on U.S. troops and vehicles. Roadside improvised explosive devices and rocket and mortar attacks are their modus operandi. The August 2004 attacks on two helicopters (one near Abu Ghraib and one near Fallujah) were considered major victories for the brigades. The group also claimed responsibility for the October 2005 bombing of TV station Al Arabiya's Baghdad bureau. It too has an online presence, with statements and video of its carnage transmitted through various Islamist Web sites to potential recruits and enemies.
What's Next: According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, the brigades released a statement on Feb. 13 of this year that claimed the group would "carry on jihad until the liberation and victory or [until they are] martyred."
4. Iraqi Resistance Islamic Front (JAMI)
First surfaced: May 2004
Ideology: This relatively new Sunni insurgent group appears to be a coalition of other, smaller groups with the similar political goal of removing U.S. and foreign troops from Iraq. As with many of the insurgent groups, there's plenty of evidence regarding what the group is fighting against, but not much about what it plans to do when U.S. troops depart from Iraq. Statements from the group reveal a highly anti-Semitic worldview, with blame attributed to Jews for everything from the occupation to the escalation in violence there.
Recruits: Perhaps more than any other insurgent group, JAMI invokes the Palestinian cause and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as a call-to-arms.
Tactics: Concentrated in Ninawa and Diyala in northern Iraq, JAMI regularly attacks the Mosul and al-Faris airports. There's also evidence that the group targets suspected U.S. intelligence agents and infrastructure.
What's next: Typical for the constantly evolving insurgency, the group is believed by several experts to have morphed into a public relations arm of some of the other groups with which it shares common cause. According to the Washington Post, the front maintains and frequently updates its Web site and even publishes a magazine called Jami to distribute to sympathizers and potential recruits.
5. Islamic Army in Iraq
First surfaced: In 2003, shortly after coalition troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime.
Ideology: The Islamic Army in Iraq (IAI) is one of the deadliest and largest insurgent groups. Despite its name, the IAI apparently fights more for nationalistic reasons (that is, to remove all foreign influence from Iraq) than religious ones.
Recruits: This Sunni resistance group largely draws its ranks from the Baathists and paramilitary loyalists Saddam Fedayeen who lost much of their influence when Saddam fell. According to military expert Ahmed Hashim, whose new book Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq painstakingly details insurgent methods, this violent organization counts as many as 17,000 among its ranks.
Tactics: The Washington Post estimates that as many of 75 percent of the group's attacks target U.S. troops and Iraqi contractors. Multiple reports cite a highly organized system, with different cells of fighters assigned to different tasks. Kidnappings, executions, and bombings are their trademark, and they're usually videotaped. Although keenly aware of domestic political developments in Western countries, the IAI appears to have an inflated sense of its own ability to effect change in those same countries. As Hashim notes, when the IAI kidnapped two well-known French journalists in August 2004, it demanded that the French law that banned headscarves be repealed. Likewise, when the IAI kidnapped Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni in 2004, the group demanded that Italy pull all its troops from Iraq. Baldoni was executed when Italy refused to comply.
What's next: Like JAMI, there are reports that IAI publishes a monthly magazine called al-Fursan. Although it (and other insurgent groups) adamantly denies it, rumors have swirled for a few weeks that IAI might be in the process of meeting with Iraqi and U.S. government officials. That, along with the calls the IAI made for nonviolence at polling places, suggests there might be some chance for negotiation. The only problem: It would be difficult for the United States and its allies to convince the rest of the world that the war was worth fighting if Saddam-style Baathists appear victorious.
Afghanistan: hire Afghan Soldiers on-the-cheap to tidy up the area of Taliban weeds
Here, the DoD tightwads are losing the war by not paying the Afghan Soldiers what they are worth. At these rates it would be cheap to outbid them, as the Taliban are doing. Its time for us to put our money where our mouth is and pay the ANA Soldiers decent, better wages so they know clearly defending freedom pays. One way to do this would be by REDUCING THE CLUSTERFUCK IN IRAQ to free up monies for Afghanistan.
________________________________London Financial Times
July 26, 2006Taliban Goes For Cash Over Ideology
By Rachel Morarjee, Helmand
The Taliban has found a way to recruit fighters that is less about winning hearts and minds and more about the enduring appeal of cold hard cash.
They are paying fighters up to Dollars 12 (Pounds 6.50) a day to fight the fledgling Afghan National Army, which pays only Dollars 4 a day to its Soldiers in the field, according to military officials.
"The Taliban are supported by Pakistan and they get money from the drugs trade, so they get more pay than our Soldiers," said Colonel Myuddin Ghouri of the national army's 205 Corp.
While the ANA has the advantage of superior equipment and the same medical treatment as UK troops, its Soldiers often have to risk their lives far from home. [EDITOR: why we need a RF/PF equivalent in Afghanistan]
"If you were a lad in the hills and you were offered Dollars 12 to stay local or you could take Dollars 4 and fight miles away from home, which would you do?" said Lieutenant Colonel David Hammond, an officer with 7 Para who is training Afghan officers in the southern province of Helmand as part of a mentoring scheme.
The pay difference is making it harder to recruit Soldiers to the 38,000-strong ANA, which has faced a much better equipped and funded insurgency since January.
Western officials have estimated that the Taliban's forces have risen from 2,000 last year to 6,000 this year. The Taliban claims to have 12,000 men.
Afghan defence ministry officials believe funds for the insurgency are flowing over the border from Pakistan and possibly from Arab countries. [EDITOR: oil money]
The multi-ethnic Afghan National Army has been one of the success stories of the post-September 11 era and is hugely popular with most Afghans.
However, Afghan officials in Kabul say the pay of Afghan Soldiers will remain a problem.
"Basic pay of Dollars 70 a month was a lot of money three years ago, but it's harder to recruit people to fight in a bitter insurgency now," said one Afghan official.
[EDITOR: maybe we should have Sally Struthers go on TV commercials asking Americans to sponsor and fund an Afghan Army Soldier for a few dollars each month? Call it the "Afghan Soldier Fund"]
1. All that energy going towards making Americans comfortable "FOBBITs" should be going towards supplying the Iraqi Army with tracked M113 Gavin armor like the Afghans have, smokescreen generators to counter snipers, barriers and civilian reconstruction. If Iraqis can't handle supplies without black market corruption, then this is reason for SOME Americans to be there. Funds freed from Iraq should go to Afghanistan to get our troops out of flimsy tents and into BATTLEBOXes, supply them Mini-Gavins for 3D Maneuver, and pay the Afghan Army Soldiers far better than the Taliban thugs.
2. At least 80, 000 FOBBIT Americans should be sent home immediately as they are doing nothing but consuming supplies and angering the impoverished Iraqis around them.
3. The 50, 000 Americans that remain should be living in BATTLEBOXes in combat only FOBs sans all the garrison "From Here to Eternity" crap (getting Col. Payne fired etc.) and move in up-armored M113 Gavin tracked armor. Their missions are to:
a. TRAIN the Iraqis to perform a style of war (CONOPS) based on easy-to-maintain tracked armor and fixed-wing observation planes that picket roads and keep bombs out of city centers.
b. SUPPLY the Iraqis
c. REBUILD civilian works
d. Act as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) as needed
4. The 50, 000 Americans should be screened for snobby, narcissistic attitudes. Those that have them should be sent home. This is further proof we need a dedicated COIN/SASO Corps of 3 divisions probably from the 25-40 age group National Guard trained not to be American egocentric snobs.
5. EVERY company-sized unit will have a fluent Iraqi language translator and/or hand-held "Phraselator" translation devices GSA Advantage Web site Contract Number: GS-35F-0379N. No convoy "leaves the wire" of the FOB without having a translator on hand.
www.phraselator.com/test_military.aspx
MULTI-NATIONAL FORCES-IRAQ
Baghdad, Camp Victory, Science and Technology Advisor:
"We have tested the three newest Phraselator-type devices. Of the three we tested, the P2 was the one best understood by the Iraqi people. The other two systems translated phrases into Arabic, which was understood, but the P2 translated phrases with the Iraqi dialect, which proved to easier for the Iraqis to understand. The P2 was also the simplest to use. Soldiers figured out how to use it within one or two minutes of picking it up."
U.S. ARMY
Special Forces Operations NCO, Current Operations NCOIC:
"As for the device...what a great machine. I used the debriefing aid to interrogate former Iraqi intelligence officials. I used it a lot with teenagers and civilians to determine when and where the enemy went. I was able to use the device to get exact information on a huge weapons cache and where unexploded ordinance was."
"And best of all, as a Special Forces Soldier, I was able to use the device to build rapport with the people of Iraq."
"I was able to use the phrase translation device with these teenagers to find a large cache of weapons and ordinance. They were able to debrief me on where the Soldiers where, where the command bunker was, where the Soldiers went, and what they were wearing."
"This device was invaluable, and it assisted in protecting the team."
VoxTec International, Inc.
Main: (410) 626-1110
Fax: (410) 626-1112
Toll Free: 866.4VOXTEC
E-Mail: Info@VoxTec.com
You see a bunch of U.S. forces praising the Phraselator WHY IS THIS DEVICE NOT IN THE HANDS OF EVERY COMPANY-SIZED UNIT? WHAT'S THE HOLD UP?
6. NO MORE KILL/CAPTURE RAIDING! No more conventional unit sweeps that make more rebels than they find. If "Special" units cannot learn to discreetly inter-mingle and surveil "high value targets" on a surgical, rare basis, they should be sent home. Those "Special" units that can do FID better damn well start doing it or they should be sent home, too. We got Saddam. We got Zarqawi. Enough is enough. If the COIN/SASO Corps' leaders want kill/capture SOF units out, they go out. The commander of the NLB-SC is the regional commander like General Casey is now over his ad hoc collection of forces in the green zone in Iraq.
7. Create an Iraqi RF/PF to PROTECT where the Army, Police and government workers live and their families from reprisals. Rehire as much of the 300,000 fire Iraqi Army Soldiers as we can. The Iraqi RF/PFs like the heroes in the movie, "The Magnificent Seven" are there to protect the village from the marauding bad guys. If Iraqi civil servants' homes and families are not safe from reprisals they can't go to work and do a good job restoring the country's infrastructure.
8. Walls work: those that cannot behave, wall them off. The COIN/SASO Corps would be experts at wall and fence technologies to keep a generation of angry people away from each other. It may sadly take an entire generation to die off before a new generation is willing to live in peace since once people have lost loved ones the bitterness can go with them to the grave.
We refused to rehire the strong Iraqi Army after toppling the Saddam regime, the ONLY glue holding the 3 factions together. In Japan, the Emperor held the people under control even AFTER the WW2 militarists were defeated. General MacArthur with a dose of humility chose to keep the Emperor and the civil populace obeyed his orders to not rebel. For the invasion of Iraq, the Bush/Rummy/Wolfowitz "looneycon" team decided they couldn't trust the liberal Democrat State Department for reconstruction so they decided to do it themselves. During this "amateur hour" they never realized that there is a point where if you remove the only glue holding a nation-state's violently opposed factions together, THE CIVIL WAR YOU UNLEASH WILL BE BEYOND YOUR ABILITY TO QUELL SHORT OF ANNIHILATING WHOLE GROUPS (Roman Legion or Asad style)--which would create a cycle of violence and revenge that would never end until the current generation died off and somehow the newer generation didn't pick up the torch of hate.
Now our best option is to PHYSICALLY separate the misbehaving factions (walls, partitions, security fences) since we've only built a new, weak Iraqi army. We blew it. Having a COIN/SASO adept at these matters under DoD funding and control could prevent this from happening again. We are now 0-2. (Vietnam and Iraq).
Our presence then needs to be reduced, reduced, reduced and reduced to just training/advisory duties discreetly done.
London Daily Telegraph
July 22, 2006Violence May Bring Partition Of Baghdad
By Oliver Poole, Iraq Correspondent
Iraq's politicians were reported yesterday to be drawing up provisional plans to divide Baghdad into Sunni and Shia halves after a week of bloodshed that has left the government's security plan to pacify the capital in tatters.
The proposal would mean an acceptance that the country could not be held together and would mark a dramatic failure for the American policy of fostering national unity.
The Tigris river, which would become the dividing line between the predominately Sunni districts of west Baghdad and the majority Shia in the east.
"The parties have moved to Plan B," a government official said yesterday. "Iraq as a political project is finished."
While no members of the cabinet confirmed the existence of the plan, other politicians said they had learnt of the proposal.
"We have received information of a plan to divide Baghdad," said Rida Jawad al-Takki, a senior member of the dominant Shia Alliance. "The government is incapable of solving the situation. The situation is terrifying and black."
A month ago, United States commanders were talking of their belief that flooding Baghdad with 50,000 American and Iraqi troops would wrest control from the sectarian gunmen who increasingly terrorise its streets.
But recent days have brought such a dramatic rise in the number of killings and lawlessness that a western diplomat privately admitted that the situation was close to anarchy. Even an extended daytime curfew yesterday failed to stop the bloodshed as a bomb exploded near a Sunni mosque, injuring four people. Five people, including two women and a child, were killed as U.S. troops raided a northern neighbourhood. Eighteen people died in fighting between Iraqi Soldiers and Shia Muslims in Mahmoudiya, a city south of Baghdad.
This week the United Nations and U.S. military published reports that appeared to confirm anecdotal evidence from Iraqis themselves that the situation had reached new depths of brutality.
The UN said that about 100 people a day were dying across the country and that around 16,000 had been killed since the start of the year. The Baghdad mortuary said it was receiving 50 bodies a day compared with 24 to 26 each day a year ago.
The U.S. admitted that the government's security plan to pacify Baghdad -Operation Together Forward - that, six weeks ago, saw 7,200 American troops and 42,500 members of the Iraqi security forces step up operations, had caused only a "slight down tick" in the violence.
In its first 30 days, said Maj Gen William Caldwell, the number of attacks in Baghdad had averaged 23.7 a day. For the previous three months the average was 23.8.
But there was a 40 per cent increase in the past week as the number of attacks jumped to 34.4 a day. Dozens of corpses have been found dumped in wastelands and there are daily reports of bombings and mortar attacks.
The main source of the killing is sectarianism as antagonism between the Shia and Sunni communities - sparked by the bombing in February of the Golden Mosque, in Samarra, a revered Shia shrine - is spurred on by an ever bloodier cycle of tit-for-tat killings and sectarian cleansing in mixed areas.
The division between Baghdad's west and east is not a clean-cut one, with large pockets of both communities on both sides. Forced separation would likely result in an urban war, potentially resembling Beirut in the 1970s.
Walls Working in Iraq--NOT troop surging and presence patrolling
Niva is a whiner. We get it. The consent of the governed must be had. The Maliki government must be replaced by a legitimately elected government in fair elections.
However, he doesn't get it: IRAQ IS A WAR AGAINST THE CAR BOMB AND LAND MINE; even if every single U.S. Soldier left within the next 24 hours, IF THE FREE FLOW OF HIGH EXPLOSIVES IS NOT STOPPED BY SEPARATION WALLS AND CHECKPOINTS Iraq will continue to be a blood bath as the internal factions kill each other.
Kudos to the U.S. military for finally doing its damn job of understanding what needs to be done to SMOTHER HEs. Now its on senior officials to get off their tails and use this lull to hold REAL elections, replace the Maliki puppet government and stop using Iraq as a corporate feeding frenzy for cheap oil, security and reconstruction contracts paid by the U.S. taxpayers. ONE or two large military bases in the rural south of Iraq might be OK, a mobile, off-shore base (MOB) in the Indian ocean would be far better by being 7 mph mobile than a land base that if done wrong creates civilian population rebellion.
Now if we would FULLY emulate the Israelis into TRACKED armored fighting vehicles with the High-Technology, up-armored, hybrid-electric drive, band-tracked M113 Gavin as the MINIMUM STANDARD on the non-linear battlefield (NLB) we would be even better prepared to smother SNC violence. We could teach the Israelis a thing or two on observation/attack aircraft by the unmanned/manned combat air vehicle (U/MCAV) so we don't go broke pissing away UAVs at a 50% crash rate.
************************************
The New Walls of Baghdad
By Steve Niva
21 April 2008
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5162
The new "surge" strategy in Iraq, led by General David Petreaus, has been heavily marketed as an example of the U.S. military's application of the "lessons of history" from previous counterinsurgencies to Iraq, foremost among them the need to win the population over from insurgents through cultivating human relationships, addressing popular grievances and providing security.
Yet one glance at the realities on the ground in Iraq today reveals that the cornerstone of current U.S. military strategy is less about cultivating human [ED: high explosive] relationships than about limiting them, primarily through concrete walls and checkpoints. And it has been less about minimizing violence than containing Iraq's population and redirecting the battlefield from the streets to the skies above Iraq.
While the coffee klatches between marine commanders and Sunni tribal sheikhs may garner all the publicity, the real story on the ground in Iraq is that from Baghdad to Mosul, the U.S. military has been busy constructing scores of concrete walls and barriers between and around Iraqi neighborhoods, which it terms "Gated Communities." In Baghdad alone, 12-foot-high walls now separate and surround at least eleven Sunni and Shiite enclaves. Broken by narrow checkpoints where Soldiers monitor traffic via newly issued ID cards, these walls have turned Baghdad into dozens of replica Green Zones, dividing neighbor from neighbor and choking off normal commerce and communications. Similar walls are being erected in other Iraqi cities, while the entire city of Falluja remains surrounded by a razor-wire barrier, with only one point of entry into the city. Moreover, the U.S. military has doubled its use of unmanned aerial drones and increasingly relies upon aerial strikes to quell insurgent activities, often through bombings and targeted assassinations.
While there is no question that overall levels of violence have temporarily decreased, Iraq has become virtually caged in a carapace of concrete walls and razor wire, reinforced by an aerial occupation from the sky. Reporting from a recent visit to the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad, the seasoned journalist Nir Rosen noted in Rolling Stone (March 6, 2008) that:
"Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded 'surge,' Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood."
The Israeli Laboratory
The explosion of walls and enclaves reinforced by aerial violence across Iraq suggest that the primary counterinsurgency lessons being followed by the U.S. military in Iraq today derive less from the lessons of "Lawrence of Arabia" than from Israel's experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past decade.
Over the past decade, Israel has developed a pacification strategy against Palestinian resistance to its military occupation by erecting separation walls and checkpoints across Palestinian territory that has enclosed Palestinians within a proliferating archipelago of ethnic enclaves to separate them from each other and from illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. This wall and enclave strategy is maintained under a blanket of aerial Israeli surveillance and deadly unmanned drones, which target the frequent airborne assassinations and strikes. This strategy reached its apotheosis in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal of its Soldiers and settlements in 2005. In Gaza, 1.5 million Palestinians are now living within an enclosed cage, while Israel controls access to the essentials of life through high-tech border terminals and unleashes "penetration raids" and airborne "targeted killings" when resistance is offered.
Iraq, it seems, is surging towards Gaza.
This fact is not missed by average Iraqis. Visiting the Sunni bastion of Amriya in Baghdad, Nir Rosen in The Nation (April 3, 2008) recounts how his Iraqi driver pointed to a gap in the concrete walls with which the U.S. occupation forces have surrounded Amriya: "We call it the Rafah Crossing." He was referring to the one gate from besieged Gaza to Egypt that the Israeli army occasionally allows to open.
The U.S. military's virtual reproduction of distinctively Israeli counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq reveals that claims about applying the "lessons of history" of counterinsurgent warfare to Iraq are largely beside the point. The actual application of counterinsurgency on the ground in Iraq has a distinctly Israeli DNA, born of very recent lessons from Israel's own urban warfare laboratory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This should not be surprising. The Israeli DNA in the new "surge" strategy is only the latest manifestation of a widely overlooked but unmistakable American predilection to increasingly draw from Israel's urban warfare laboratory and its flawed efforts to devise fresh tactics in the service of rebooting its own military occupation of Palestinian lands. What we are seeing in Iraq today has much less to do with the declared shift in U.S. military doctrine than with a deeper and more far-reaching "Israelization" of U.S. military strategy and tactics over the past two decades that was only heightened by America's misadventures in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. In the search for new means to confront urban insurgencies in predominately Arab and Muslim lands, there has been a complex institutional and cultural harmonization between these two militaries under the banner of fighting "the war on terror," though the traffic is mostly in one direction. In light of the real lessons of counterinsurgency history, however, mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure.
The "Israelization" of U.S. Military Doctrine and Tactics
This "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics can be traced back to the early 1990's, especially the "Blackhawk down" debacle of 1993 in Somalia, which led U.S. military strategists to rethink their approach to fighting urban warfare in poor Third World "battle spaces." In the following years, according to urban theorist Mike Davis in his 2004 article "The Pentagon as Global Slum Lord," Israeli advisors were brought in to teach marines, Rangers and Navy SEALs the state-of-the-art tactics against urban insurgencies that Israel was using to ruthlessly suppress Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat doctrine was accompanied by what Davis terms a deeper strategic "Sharonization" (referring to Israeli militarist and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) of the Pentagon's worldview in which U.S. military strategists began to envision the capacity of high-tech warfare to contain and possibly defeat insurgencies rooted in third world urban environments. Sharon is known to have kept by his bedside a well-thumbed Hebrew edition of Alistair's Horne's A Savage War of Peace, an account of the failed French effort to defeat the Algerian insurgency against French colonial occupation. While many viewed the French defeat as proof of the futility of military solutions to anti-colonial insurgencies, Sharon's belief was that Israel could learn from Algeria to get right what the French did not. In 2001, the journalist Robert Fisk reported, Sharon told French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in a phone conversation that the Israelis were "like you in Algeria," the only difference being that "we [the Israelis] will stay."
The "Israelization" of U.S. military doctrine and tactics since the attacks on September 11, 2001, has gone so far as to create what the Palestinian academic Marwan Bishara, writing in Al-Ahram Weekly (April-May, 2002), has termed a new "strategic cult" in which Israel's "asymmetrical war" against the Palestinians became seen as a continuation of the U.S. "war on terrorism" in both theory and practice. Learning from Israel's experiences centered on the need for new precision weaponry and a tactical emphasis on aerial assassinations and armored bulldozers, as well as other elements of Israel's fighting style in the new "asymmetrical" and urban battle spaces. According to The Independent's Justin Huggler (March 29, 2003) Israel's unprecedented assault on Palestinian cities and the refugee camp in Jenin during "Operation Defensive Shield" in April 2002 was keenly observed by foreign militaries, particularly the United States and UK as they geared up to invade and occupy Iraq.
But the most direct application of the Israeli tutorial took place in Iraq, particularly after the U.S. found itself mired in a growing insurgency in an occupied country, confronting urban guerilla warfare and suicide bombings in Fall, 2003. Having banished counterinsurgency doctrine from its own playbook after Vietnam, the Pentagon turned to Israel. According to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker (December 15, 2003),
"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."
Hence, American forces increasingly used a new set of tactics that appeared to have come straight out of the Israeli playbook from the occupied Palestinians territories, including physically enclosing villages within razor-wire fences, bulldozing homes of suspected insurgents, destroying irrigation systems and agricultural fields, taking civilian hostages and using torture to extract intelligence. Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was told it had to "go unconventional" like the Israelis - to use harsh tactics to counter the harsh insurgency such as deploying assassination squads. As he summarized it: "The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to dismantle an insurgency."
According to Julian Borger at the Guardian (December 9, 2003) one former senior American intelligence official raised serious concerns about the dangers of adopting Israel's "hunter-killer" teams, and the political implications of such an open embrace of Israel: "It is bonkers, insane. Here we are - we're already being compared to Sharon in the Arab world and we've just confirmed it by bringing in the Israelis and setting up assassination teams."
The "Surge": Shifting Tactics in Iraq, Israeli-Style
The Israeli tutorial, as we know, was nothing less than a complete failure, as Iraq slipped into anarchy and then raging civil war in large part as a result of the destructive tactics deployed the U.S. military.
As a consequence, the failures in Iraq forced the U.S. military to reconsider the pre-eminence of harsh Israeli-style tactics. And so in late 2006, Gen. David Petraeus and his highly touted cadre of counterinsurgency (COIN) experts, fresh from a six-month command and staff course at Fort Leavenworth that according to The Independent's Robert Fisk (April 11, 2007) included at least four senior Israeli officers, ushered in a heavily marketed new counterinsurgency strategy that reduced the reliance upon brute military force in favor of creating alliances with former insurgents, building intelligence capacity, and restoring a semblance of security for the population, particularly in Baghdad.
But it would be a mistake to read this new "hearts and minds" counterinsurgency strategy as a full-scale retreat from "Israelization" in two important respects, both of which illustrate how remarkably similar American and Israeli strategic and tactical frameworks have become at this point in time.
First, it is striking how much the new U.S. approach in Iraq mirrors Israel's own tactical response to its failed attempt to use harsh and brutal tactics to crush the renewed surge of Palestinian resistance between 2001 and 2004. In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a new strategy - what he termed "disengagement" - as a new way to "shift the narrative." This strategy included the tactical withdrawal of Israeli settlements and Soldiers from the Gaza Strip to be replaced by its complete encirclement and economic strangulation, while further enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank within separation walls, barriers and checkpoints. Whereas the previous approach relied upon aggressive Israeli military incursions within Palestinian areas, the new strategy seeks to control Palestinians from beyond their walled-off enclosures by selectively controlling access to life essentials and relying on air-strikes to quell resistance.
Similarly, in response to the chaos in Iraq and the growing popular demand for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in late 2006, President Bush and the U.S. military adopted the "surge" strategy as its own way to "change the narrative." As in the Israeli case, the "surge" has shifted techniques of domination across Iraq from the direct application of violence against insurgents to indirect spatial incarceration, multiplying archipelagos of externally alienated and internally homogenous ethno-national enclaves through walls and checkpoints, under a blanket of aerial surveillance.
Secondly, the tactical shift towards walls, enclaves and aerial domination is still rooted in the "Sharonization" of U.S. strategic doctrine mentioned earlier; that is, the belief that one can use military force to defeat an insurgency by reformulating one's military tactics. Neither Israel nor the United States are willing to countenance a serious political solution to either occupation, which would entail addressing the core political issue that is driving each insurgency: ending the foreign occupation. As it happens, Henry Kissinger is reported to have given President Bush a copy of Horne's A Savage War of Peace to read in the winter of 2006, and the U.S. military frequently uses the Algerian case as one its primary lessons in most COIN training. They appear to have learned the same faulty lessons as Sharon.
Both Israel and the U.S. are seeking to replace direct military occupation with a form of occupation management in order to preserve the fruits of their respective occupations.
Israel has simply shifted tactics to achieve its original goal of securing its illegal settlements and land confiscations in the West Bank to maintain "greater Israel." Since it is unwilling to accept a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and allow for a fully sovereign Palestinian state, its strategy is to pacify Palestinians through ever confining walls and enclaves until Palestinians accept their fate living in splintered enclaves under complete Israeli control.
Similarly, since the U.S. is unwilling to negotiate with the insurgency or consider a timetable for withdrawal, it is clear that the new counterinsurgency plan is an effort to pacify Iraq into accepting a form of "soft partition" into ethno-political enclaves to enable the U.S. to secure its original goals of establishing permanent military bases, securing access to Iraq's vast oil fields, and installing an Iraqi central government to pass laws to ensure these aims. Like the Palestinians, Iraqis will be sequestered within walled enclaves so that the political and economic occupation can remain in place.
The Real "Lessons of History" for Iraq
Needless to say, all this amounts to trying to find new ways to do the impossible. The bottom line is that both Israel and the U.S. will be losers in their quest for military solutions to fundamentally political insurgencies against a foreign military occupation. Framing an occupation as "liberation" or "counter-terrorism" does not make it any less a foreign occupation. One of the great ironies in all of this is the willful failure of both Israel and the United States to learn the fundamental historical lesson of the French in Algeria: that they could have negotiated a withdrawal far earlier and spared all this bloodshed and violence.
MUST-SEE VIDEO: The Battle of Algiers (Entire Film): Don't Delay Political Settlement
Militarily, the French army did not lose - they certainly won the Battle of Algiers and had pacified the country by late 1958. But the military victory was hollow. The French achieved pacification only, which simply meant that the number of violent incidents per month was at a tolerable level. But this came at the price of herding over a million Algerians into fortified villages, extensive torture, and millions killed. This was a situation that could not be sustained and it unraveled as open warfare broke out between settlers and Algerians with the French army caught in the middle, battling both. All of this looks very much like Iraq today with Americans caught between Shia and Sunni militias, battling both in an effort to achieve pacification on behalf of an ineffective puppet government associated with its occupation. There are also obvious parallels to Israel's predicament in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The primary reason why the French military victory was hollow was because the French offered no political solution that met the core aspirations of Algerian nationalism, which should be clear to anyone who reads the second half of A Savage War of Peace. They only offered a flimsy notion of "self-determination" and "democracy" that De Gaulle called "association," which we recognize today as a neo-colonial relationship. France sought to maintain exterritorial control through military bases and dominion over Algerian oil resources, including a permanent French settler presence. The Algerians rejected this and fought until the French were forced to leave entirely. The parallels with U.S. plans for Iraq hardly need to be elaborated.
Instead of learning from the French experience, the U.S. has naively looked to the Israeli experience as a training manual for counterinsurgency. The U.S. continues to be mesmerized by a mythical version of Israel that is based more on savvy marketing than demonstrated performance. Israel's responses to unconventional war has never been well developed or very successful; it was defeated by Hezbollah in South Lebanon not once but twice, and its attempt to crush the Palestinian uprising through force actually led to further suicide bombings, while its destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure has left the political field open to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Mimicking Israel is a recipe for failure. Martin Van Creveld, an Israeli military historian who had lectured U.S. military officials on Israeli military strategy in late 2003, warned in an Associated Press article (December 12, 2003) that just as Israel had been unsuccessful in eliminating militant groups and suicide bombers, the United States cannot expect to be victorious in Iraq. "The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good," he reportedly warned. "I don't see how on earth they (the U.S.) can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."
Whether or not this happens will be the subject of future "lessons of history." But by following the Israeli model rather than the actual lessons of counterinsurgency history, the U.S. appears trapped by the logic of its own image co-dependency with Israel as a state now permanently at war with much of the Arab and Muslim world, with history's lessons decidedly not on its side. Read correctly, A Savage War of Peace is less a user's manual for counterinsurgency than a warning about the futility of fighting colonial wars in the first place.
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Dr. Steve Niva is a professor of Middle East Studies and International Politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between Israeli military violence and Palestinian suicide bombings.
One War futurist who agrees that we need a specialized force for COIN/SASO is Thomas Barnett.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map
The Pentagon's New Map
The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century is a 2004 book by Thomas Barnett based around an earlier article he wrote for Esquire magazine. It outlines a new grand strategy for American foreign policy. It is an iteration of a PowerPoint presentation that Barnett has been making for years that is known simply as "The Brief." Interested parties include the public and private sectors, encompassing military organizations and foreign governments.
At least two versions of Barnett's presentation have aired on C-SPAN as of 2005. In December 2004, the network broadcast one of Barnett's recent presentations followed with a live call-in program in which Barnett discussed his book and its effects. See the article on Barnett for an outline of his ideas.
Barnett was asked by the United States Air Force to give the presentation to every new officer who attained the rank of General.
In late 2004, Barnett's employer (the Naval War College) gave him the choice of either writing the second book or retaining his job. He chose the former, and wrote Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. Barnett also continues to write articles as a contributing editor at Esquire and consult on global security issues as a senior managing director at Enterra Solutions. He is currently in the planning stages of a third book on Resiliency with co-author Stephen DeAngelis, founder of Enterra Solutions.
Key ideas:
1. Systems of rules called Rule-sets reduce violent conflict. Violence decreases as rules are established (e.g., the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding) for dealing with international conflicts.
2. The world can be roughly divided into two groups: the Functioning Core, characterized by economic interdependence, and the Non-Integrated Gap, characterized by unstable leadership and absence from international trade. The Core can be sub-divided into Old Core (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia) and New Core (China, India). The Disconnected Gap includes the Middle East, South Asia (except India), most of Africa, Southeast Asia, and northwest South America.
3. Integration of the Gap countries into the global economy will provide opportunities for individuals living in the Gap to improve their lives, thereby presenting a desirable alternative to violence and terrorism. The US military is the only force capable of providing the military support to facilitate this integration by serving as the last ditch rule-enforcer. Barnett argues that it has been doing so for over 20 years by "exporting" security (U.S. spends about half of the world's total in military spending).
4. To be successful the U.S. military must stop thinking of war in the context of war but war in the context of "everything else", i.e. demographics, energy, investment, security, politics, trade, immigration, etc.
5. In recognition of its dual role, the U.S. military should organize itself according to two functions, the "Leviathan" and the "System Administrator." 6.
* Leviathan's purpose is employ overwhelming force to end violence quickly. It will take out governments, defend Core countries, and generally do the deterrence work that the US military has been doing since the end of WWII. The Leviathan force is primarily staffed by young aggressive personnel and is overwhelmingly American. *
* The SysAdmin's purpose is to wage peace: peacekeeping, nation building, strengthening weak governments, etc. The SysAdmin force is primarily staffed by older, more experienced personnel, though not entirely (he would put the marines in SysAdmin as the " Mini-me Leviathan"). The sys Admin force would work best as a Core-wide phenomenon.
7. By exporting security, the US and the rest of the Core benefit from increased trade, increased international investment, and other benefits. 8.
Books
* Thomas P.M. Barnett (April 22, 2004). The Pentagon's New Map. Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN 0-399-15175-3 *
* Thomas P.M. Barnett (October 20, 2005). Blueprint for Action. Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN 0-399-15312-8
External links
* Barnett homepage * Google's Gapminder
WSJ EXCERPT: Vann vs. Harkins, all over again!
"He and fellow advisers say U.S. troops on the American side of the base saddle Iraqis with the least-desirable missions and often fail to provide them with the basics they need to protect themselves against insurgent attacks. 'They treat the Iraqis with utter scorn and contempt,' Col. Payne says. 'The Iraqis may not be sophisticated, but they aren't stupid. They see it.'"
Wall Street Journal
June 17, 2006
Pg. 1A Camp Divided
As U.S. tries to give Iraqi troops more responsibility, clash of two American colonels shows tough road ahead.
By Greg Jaffe
Camp Taji, Iraq--This sprawling military base is divided down the middle by massive concrete barriers, a snaking fence and rifle-toting guards. On one side, about 10,000 U.S. Army Soldiers live in air-conditioned trailers. There's a movie theater, a swimming pool, a Taco Bell, and a post exchange the size of a Wal-Mart, stocked with everything from deodorant to DVD players.
On the other side are a similar number of Iraqi Soldiers whose success will determine when U.S. troops can go home. The Iraqi troops live in fetid barracks built by the British in the 1920s, ration the fuel they use to run their lights and sometimes eat spoiled food that makes them sick.
The only Soldiers who pass regularly between the two worlds are about 130 U.S. Army advisers, who live, train and work with the Iraqis.
For many of these advisers, the past six months have been a disorienting experience, putting them at odds with their fellow U.S. Soldiers and eroding their confidence in the U.S. government's ability to build an Iraqi force that can stabilize this increasingly violent country.
Army commanders back in the U.S. "told us this was going to be the most thankless and frustrating job we have ever held, and boy, were they right," says Lt. Col. Charles Payne, who until last month oversaw about 50 Army advisers.
He and fellow advisers say U.S. troops on the American side of the base saddle Iraqis with the least-desirable missions and often fail to provide them with the basics they need to protect themselves against insurgent attacks. "They treat the Iraqis with utter scorn and contempt," Col. Payne says. "The Iraqis may not be sophisticated, but they aren't stupid. They see it."
Col. James Pasquarette, who commands most of the Soldiers on the U.S. side of Camp Taji, calls those claims "totally ridiculous." He says he's proud of what the Iraqi units have achieved in the region and has made supporting them his top priority, after ensuring his own troops have the protection they need. But he worries that if the Iraqis are given too much latitude to execute challenging missions too quickly, they will alienate Iraqi civilians with heavy-handed tactics.
He says Col. Payne and his fellow advisers have "gone native."
Though the divide here at Camp Taji is extreme, it reflects a growing friction throughout this war-torn country. No one on either side of the divide expects the Iraqi troops to be trained, equipped or housed to U.S. standards. But if U.S. troops are going to go home, U.S. commanders must allow Iraqis to take a far greater role in planning operations and taking the fight to the enemy, senior military officers say.
Right now, Iraqi commanders and some of their U.S. advisers say that isn't happening enough. Part of the reason, U.S. officials say, is that widespread Iraqi corruption has made it hard for the fledgling Iraqi government to supply their troops with basics like good food, batteries and fuel. But Iraqi Soldiers and their U.S. advisers say the problem extends beyond basic supply issues. They complain that U.S. troops, bunkered down on large, fortified bases, treat Iraqi forces more like a problem than a partner. U.S. forces "don't talk to us," says Col. Saad, a senior Iraqi commander on Camp Taji. The Iraqi colonel, whose family has been threatened by insurgents, asked that his full name not be used.
U.S. commanders counter that there are huge risks to giving the Iraqi army too big a role right now. They worry some Iraqis will leak word of impending operations to the enemy or use military force to settle sectarian scores. Many U.S. commanders say Iraqi forces aren't as disciplined as U.S. troops and are too prone to abuse civilians and detainees.
The debate raises difficult questions for U.S. commanders, as they plot the way forward in Iraq: Should Iraqi units be held to the same standards as U.S. units? What happens when the Iraqis' solution is at odds with the American commander's strategy?
Earlier this spring, the tension between the two sides at Camp Taji reached the breaking point when the Iraqi army brigade that Col. Payne was advising leveled two dozen roadside kiosks. The Iraqi Soldiers said insurgent snipers, who had killed and wounded Iraqi troops, used the kiosks for cover.
Col. Pasquarette thought destroying the kiosks would only enrage locals and drive them to support the insurgents. "This was a great day for the terrorists," he recalls telling Col. Payne on the day that the Iraqi army flattened the fruit and vegetable stands.
Col. Payne says the Iraqi army bulldozed the kiosks -- consisting mostly of palm fronds suspended by bamboo poles -- to protect Iraqi Soldiers. "When I first heard what they had done, my initial response was, 'I am all for it,' " Col. Payne says. "This is not a law and order situation. This is a war."
Late last month, Col. Pasquarette asked that Col. Payne be dismissed from his position, just four months after the two men started working together. Col. Payne was then assigned to a desk job in Baghdad.
The unit Col. Payne headed is at the leading edge of a major shift in U.S. strategy. Until last summer, the U.S. military saw its primary mission as fighting insurgents. With pressure mounting to bring the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq home, President Bush decided the military's main effort should instead focus on training Iraqis to take its place.
To speed development of Iraqi army forces, about 3,000 U.S. Soldiers were placed with Iraqi units throughout the country. The teams live and work with Iraqi Soldiers in places such as Camp Taji.
In November 2005, Col. Payne came back from retirement to lead his team. The colonel had served 28 years in the Army, fought in the Grenada invasion and taught history at West Point. He retired in July 2001. A few weeks later, terrorists struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Col. Payne called the Army and volunteered to return. "There was a chuckle on the end of the phone," he says. The Army told him he wasn't needed.
Four years later, with the Army stretched thin by the war, the 50-year-old Soldier, who was teaching at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, called again. This time, the Army was eager to send him to Iraq. In November, he was told he had 23 days to report to Fort Carson, Colo., and link up with his unit. His wife was "very unhappy," he says. Col. Payne says he was determined to go. "The nation is at war and all real Soldiers want to be where the action is."
Col. Pasquarette, a former college basketball player, took command of his 6,000-Soldier brigade in June 2005. Before that, the 45-year-old had attended Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon and served as an aide-de-camp to a four-star general.
The two men's troops arrived in Iraq in December 2005 and settled on opposite sides of Camp Taji, a sprawling former Iraqi army base, about 20 miles north of Baghdad. Col. Payne's group consisted of 50 U.S. Soldiers, assigned to advise the Iraqi military. His team was one of the few at Camp Taji that didn't report to Col. Pasquarette.
The 2,500-Soldier Iraqi brigade that Col. Payne was advising had formed 11 months earlier and had been fighting nonstop. The Iraqis had scrounged all of their tanks and armored personnel carriers -- most of which were at least 30 years old -- from a massive junkyard on the Iraqi side of Camp Taji. When something broke, Iraqi Soldiers retreated to the scrapyard where they would pillage rusting hulks for spare parts. Of the $260 billion spent on the Iraq war since 2003, about $10 billion has gone to build Iraqi army and police forces.
The U.S. officers bonded quickly with their Iraqi counterparts. In January, Maj. Michael Jason, who leads one of the advisory teams, was on patrol with a 42-year-old Iraqi colonel when a terrified farmer told them he had found bodies in a field. He then led them to the corpses of 11 Iraqi army Soldiers who had been headed home on leave. Each had been beaten, blindfolded and shot in the head. Their Iraqi army identification cards had been taken from their wallets and pinned to their shirts by insurgents who regularly target Iraqi forces.
Maj. Jason, a Roman Catholic, and his Iraqi counterpart, Col. Khalid, a Muslim, kneeled next to the bodies and prayed. The U.S. Army asked that Col. Khalid's full name be withheld for his safety. That night, Maj. Jason, a 33-year-old West Point grad, wrote an email home describing his Iraqi colleague's bravery and sacrifice.
"Col. Khalid's children have to move constantly for fear of their lives. When he goes home on leave, he cannot tell anyone for security reasons. He just disappears. He drives 90 mph with a pistol tucked in the small of his back and his ID hidden. I love these guys, no s-t," he wrote. A month later, Col. Khalid's brother, also an army officer, was kidnapped. Insurgents killed him and dumped his body on his parents' doorstep. Col. Khalid couldn't go to the funeral for fear that he would be assassinated. So Maj. Jason and Soldiers in the unit mourned with him at Camp Taji.
In March, Col. Khalid left the battalion for a safer assignment, which doesn't require him to leave the base.
As the U.S. advisers grew closer to the Iraqis, they also grew more frustrated with U.S. Soldiers on the other side of the base.
Shortly after Col. Pasquarette arrived at Camp Taji, he beefed up the number of guards and armored vehicles at the gates separating the U.S. and Iraqi sides of the base. "Securing my [base] is my No. 1 mission. I am risk averse here," he says. The U.S. advisers to the Iraqis thought the additional guards and guns were unnecessary and only served to make U.S. Soldiers more suspicious of the Iraqis.
When the advisers asked if they could bring an Iraqi colleague to eat with them on the American side of the base, they say they were shocked at the response. They were told that the presence of an Iraqi officer in the dining hall might upset the U.S. Soldiers.
"These kids go outside the gate and deal with a very hostile environment. They need a place where they can relax and let their guard down," says Lt. Col. Kevin Dixon, Col. Pasquarette's deputy commander. He says the policy was driven by the bombing of a dining facility in Mosul in 2004 by an Iraqi who had sneaked in.
The advisers felt differently. "We really believe there is a systemic contempt for Iraqi Soldiers," says Master Sgt. John McFarlane, a senior enlisted adviser to the Iraqis at Camp Taji. The policy has since been amended to allow advisers to eat with Iraqi officers on the U.S. side if they file a letter in advance with the base's security office.
One of the Iraqi army's primary jobs in the Taji area is to guard water-purification substations that provide most of Baghdad's drinking water. Last summer, insurgents blew up one of the substations, cutting off water for two weeks. To ensure that didn't happen again, Iraqi army units were dispatched by the U.S. to guard the sites. Iraqi Soldiers began to take regular sniper fire there.
In January, the U.S. advisers asked Col. Pasquarette for help installing barriers around one of the substations, to shield the Iraqis from snipers. Col. Pasquarette asked one of his units to help. Weeks passed, but help never came. American engineering units were "too busy" fortifying the U.S. side of Camp Taji and bases around it, says Maj. Martin Herem, who handled the request.
On Feb. 28, a sniper shot in the back one of the Iraqi Soldiers at the water station. The Soldier bled to death. Three weeks later, a sniper killed a second Iraqi Soldier who was on patrol near the water station. Iraqi troops said that both times snipers used the small fruit and vegetable stands lining a nearby road for cover. The Iraqi army couldn't return fire without killing shopkeepers and customers.
When the Iraqi Soldiers ran over to ask people who had been shooting at them, locals said they hadn't seen anything. It's dangerous for locals to be seen helping the U.S. Army or the Iraqi army.
The day after the second killing, Col. Saad, an Iraqi colonel in the unit Col. Payne was advising, ordered his men to tell the shopkeepers to empty the vegetable stands. The Iraqi Soldiers then bulldozed the stands. Col. Saad says he destroyed the kiosks to protect his Soldiers.
When Col. Pasquarette learned about the incident, he was furious. The Iraqis' actions ran completely counter to his strategy. He had told his Soldiers to focus less on killing insurgents and more on reconstruction programs designed to win support of the people.
"When you go lethal or destroy property there may be a short-term gain, but there is a long-term loss," he says. He saw the move as a throwback to the Saddam Hussein era when the army was used to quell unrest and inflict mass punishment.
Because the Iraqi troops operate in his sector, Col. Pasquarette oversees them. He called Col. Payne into his office and demanded that he tell Col. Saad to have his Soldiers apologize and pay reparations to the shop owners.
Col. Payne passed along the orders. But Col. Saad says he refused to follow them. "Here in Iraq if someone makes a mistake, you punish them," he says, referring to the shop owners' failure to give Iraqis information about the snipers. "If you give him money, he will repeat the mistake. And he will consider the person who gave him the gift an idiot."
The next day, Col. Pasquarette met with Col. Saad's Iraqi superior and told him about the dispute. The Iraqi general fired Col. Saad. Later that day, three low-ranking Iraqi Soldiers, accompanied by about a dozen Americans, passed out the reimbursement forms.
The Iraqi officers in Col. Saad's brigade felt betrayed. On March 21, just before midnight, four senior officers stopped by Col. Payne's office and threatened to resign. "They were furious," says Col. Payne. Two days later, Col. Saad was quietly re-hired.
Col. Payne says he is still angry that neither Col. Pasquarette nor his subordinate commanders talked to Col. Saad to hear his side of the story. "This is a respect issue. These guys don't respect the Iraqis," Col. Payne says.
"Personally I don't think there was anything to discuss," Col. Pasquarette says.
In the days that followed, the relationship between Col. Payne and Col. Pasquarette grew more tense. In mid-March -- about the time the Iraqis flattened the vegetable stands -- insurgents attacked an Iraqi army patrol base in Tarmiyah, a city of about 50,000, a short drive from Camp Taji. One Iraqi Soldier from Col. Saad's brigade was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade and another was shot in the head by a sniper. The next day, four of Col. Saad's Soldiers died when their armored personnel carrier hit a roadside bomb. The blast threw the turret of the vehicle about 30 yards and lopped off the head of one of the Iraqi Soldiers inside, U.S. and Iraqi officers say.
Senior Iraqi officials in the Ministry of Defense were convinced Tarmiyah was a hotbed of insurgent activity. Col. Pasquarette says he was told by his commander in Baghdad to clear the city of insurgents.
Col. Pasquarette and his team spent several days building a plan before he invited Col. Payne, Col. Saad and Col. Saad's commander to the U.S. side to explain it.
The two Iraqi officers were led through a 208-slide PowerPoint briefing, in which all the slides were written in English. The six areas the Iraqi troops were supposed to occupy were named for New England cities, such as Cranston, Bangor and Concord. The Iraqi officers, who spoke only Arabic, were dumbfounded. "I could see from their body language that both of them were not following what was going on," says Maj. Bill Taylor, Col. Payne's deputy.
Once the plan was explained to them through an interpreter, the Iraqis strongly disagreed with it. Col. Pasquarette planned to surround the city with razor wire and set up checkpoints to search all cars moving in and out of the city. U.S. and Iraqi Soldiers would then begin regular foot patrols through the city to gain intelligence on insurgents. The centerpiece of the plan was $5 million in reconstruction projects.
Col. Pasquarette argued that the projects would help the U.S. win support of the city's powerful mayor, Sheik Sayid Jassem, who had been detained by U.S. forces in the early days of the occupation for supporting the insurgency. He also thought the projects would turn the people to the side of the new Iraqi government.
The Iraqis favored a harder-nosed approach. They wanted to conduct house-to-house searches and find a way to put pressure on the mayor, who they insisted was still supporting insurgents. They suggested shutting Tarmiyah's business district down for a week. Once the mayor had been cowed with the stick, they favored dangling the $5 million in reconstruction funds.
Col. Pasquarette says the Iraqi approach would have alienated the people in Tarmiyah. He rejected it and stuck to his plan. Although the operation hasn't netted any insurgents, he says people are out shopping and businesses that had been closed are bustling as a result of the checkpoints and foot patrols. The U.S. military is bankrolling a pipeline that will bring potable water into the city, building medical clinics and repairing the main road.
Attacks in the city are down substantially since March, though they have begun to climb of late, Col. Pasquarette says. Still, he says the operation was a success because residents feel safer. He doubts the city was ever really a major insurgent hotbed. "We were all wrong about Tarmiyah," he says.
Col. Saad and Col. Payne say the insurgents have simply moved outside the city's gates.
Gen. George Casey, the top military officer in Iraq, acknowledges it has often been hard for U.S. commanders to let Iraqis take over the fight. "We are so mission-oriented and so focused, we tend to want to do everything ourselves," he says. "It is a constant battle ... . I would hope that when the Iraqis have ideas we try to help them execute them."
Iraqi troops "have never betrayed their U.S. advisory teams," adds Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who is overseeing the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces.
In their four months together, Col. Payne and Col. Saad became close. Col. Payne teased him about a poster on his office wall of two fluffy white kittens, nuzzling next to a dozen roses. "What in the world is the deal with the cat and the flowers?" Col. Payne asked.
"It reminds me of softness and women," Col. Saad replied. He often referred to Col. Payne as "my brother."
Col. Saad confided his worries about his country and his army to Col. Payne. His unit was constantly short of supplies. His Soldiers often didn't have enough fuel for their armored vehicles and generators. They also lacked AA batteries to run the night-vision goggles the Americans had given them. He blamed corruption in the Iraqi system for supply shortages. "If you don't have the basics to survive, you cannot be great. You cannot win," he said one evening. Col. Payne threw his arm around the Iraqi colonel's shoulder. "No, but you can survive," he said.
The U.S. says it is helping the Iraqis fix problems that have led to shortages of equipment. The Iraqi government recently replaced the contractor responsible for serving troops spoiled food. Supplying the army is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and "there have been a few cases of poor performance" among Iraqi contractors, says Lt. Col. Michael Negard, a senior spokesman in Iraq. "While the problems aren't huge, the issue's certainly of the highest priority," he says.
Col. Saad has also grown frustrated with the Americans on the other side of Camp Taji. Last month, Col. Pasquarette asked the Iraqis to provide a couple of dozen Soldiers to man some checkpoints with U.S. Soldiers. The U.S. Soldiers showed up at the checkpoints for about a week. Then, without warning, they left the Iraqis to run them on their own, Col. Saad says. The Iraqis, who questioned the value of the checkpoints in the first place, were angry they had suddenly been abandoned.
"Why did they leave? Aren't they supposed to be helping us?" Col. Saad asked Col. Payne.
"I don't know what the hell they are doing," Col. Payne replied.
Col. Pasquarette says the Iraqis should have been informed that the U.S. Soldiers were pulling out of those checkpoints.
In late May, Col. Payne began to push the Iraqi Soldiers to get out on the offensive. "I am sick of sitting around and waiting to get attacked," Col. Payne told Col. Saad. He asked Col. Saad to cut loose 10 or 15 Soldiers that he could pair up with three or four U.S. Soldiers to venture out at night in search of the enemy. Col. Saad agreed.
On May 19, Soldiers from Col. Payne's and Col. Saad's units set out on their second night patrol. After they stopped a car that was out in violation of curfew, the enemy opened fire on them from a surrounding palm grove. The Soldiers fired back, killing three insurgents and dispersing the rest. When the shooting ended, a man stumbled out of a small shack deep in the palm grove. His hands were tied and a blindfold hung around his neck. "Come mister. I am problem," he sobbed in broken English.
The man said he worked as a legal adviser for Iraq's Ministry of Defense and had been kidnapped by men who told him they would slaughter him "like a sheep." The kidnappers were setting up a camera to film his execution, he said, when they heard the Soldiers and left him. "God sent you to save me," the man said, as tears streamed down his face.
Col. Payne was elated. "The Iraqi army saved a life. It also demonstrated that it will go into the field to find and destroy the enemy," he said.
His victory, however, quickly gave way to crushing defeat. The next day, he was summoned to meet with his immediate supervisor. Col. Payne was relieved of his command and told to move to a headquarters position in Baghdad.
He says he was told that he removed because he was "ineffective" and "lacked the skills necessary to lead [his] team in this challenging environment." An Army spokesman in Baghdad said Col. Payne wasn't relieved for any single incident. He declined to comment further.
A few days before Col. Payne was fired, Col. Pasquarette said in an interview that he thought Col. Payne and his men had grown too close to the Iraqis they were advising and his decisions were too often guided by emotion. "From my perspective, the move was warranted," Col. Pasquarette wrote in an email after Col. Payne was dismissed.
The morning after he was fired, Col. Payne spent the day saying goodbye to Col. Saad and the U.S. Soldiers on his team. That evening, he boarded a helicopter for Camp Victory, a massive U.S. base on the outskirts of Baghdad.
"I'm now here in Victory -- an alien environment to me and one I never wanted to be a part of," he wrote in an email. He was able to hold his emotions in check until his helicopter lifted off from Camp Taji. Then, he says, he began to sob. "I simply cannot tell you how much I will miss my team."
Iraq is yet again, a WW2 re-enactment U.S. military with even LESS ground maneuver tendencies and MORE aircraft delivered firepower lust than it had in Vietnam, and ZERO airborne forward air controllers in fixed-wing observation planes! DoD in love with Rumsfeld/MacNamara-style RMA bombardment doesn't realize air striking buildings full of civilians makes more rebels. In the following Tribune article a couple marine officers point this out, but be advised outsider 4GW disciple marines Hammes and Wilson do not represent the USMC HQMC corporate or rank & file mentality.
Hammes also doesn't understand that even if you are using restraint you can't be driving around in wheeled trucks and must be in multiple armor layered tracks lest you get blown up and go bezerk like the Haditha marines did. You can't have a "glass jaw" and "turn the other cheek".
We have contacted Wilson and he may understand that you ain't gaining any populace confidence if you cannot even protect yourself because you are in a wheeled truck.
However, the whole problem with the Boydian 4GWs is they have an anti-equipment knee-jerk outlook. Their mental narcissism uses grease pencils and books while the RMA firepower mental narcissism uses laptops and electronic gadgets. What's the essential difference? The former are right that the loyalty of the people are key but then blow it running with stupid egomaniac marines in wheeled trucks and on foot who lack the maturity and humility to pull off a T.E. Lawrence. Narcissism is not AOK and the "maneuver warfare" camp that needs the token USMC approval of their views to somehow feel their lives were not wasted have swallowed the cancer of pride that undermines everything.
Chicago Tribune
June 17, 2006
Pg. 1Analysis
Experts: U.S. Using Wrong Tactics
Fighting in Iraq likely to stay at same level
By Stephen J. Hedges, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Despite the recent killing of insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, some former military officials and experts worry that the U.S. has not learned the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and that, as a result, a significant improvement in the fighting may not be around the corner.
In confronting a frustratingly resilient insurgency, the U.S. is relying heavily on precision bombing, which destroys buildings and can kill civilians, generating ill will. Tactics used in house clearings have led to incidents such as an alleged massacre by marines in the town of Haditha. Large incursions into the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi have bred dissatisfaction among ordinary Iraqis, violating a cardinal principle of counterinsurgency.
Pentagon leaders repeatedly have vowed to improve their counterinsurgency training, but only last year did the Army begin a revision of its tactics, and a new manual on the topic has not been warmly received. U.S. commanders in Iraq also have opened a counterinsurgency school in Iraq in an attempt to better confront the enemy.
But many specialists in this type of fighting, including recently retired military officers, worry that key lessons have not been learned three years into the war. Even as the military targets al-Zarqawi's apparent successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, they say killings of insurgent leaders will have a limited effect.
"It's about the will of the American people and the trust of the Iraqi people, and situations like Haditha attack both," said T.X. Hammes, a retired marine colonel and Iraq veteran whose book on counterinsurgent warfare, "The Sling and the Stone," is considered a "must-read" among younger officers in Iraq. "Fighting insurgents is about not making any more enemies."
Despite his recent high-profile Camp David, Md., summit with his war Cabinet and select outside experts, there is little evidence that President Bush has made any changes to his strategy for Iraq.
Bush holds his ground
Indeed, during his surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday and in a news conference upon returning to Washington on Wednesday, Bush repeated what he has said often about the U.S. military presence there.
"The policy of the United States government is to stand with this new government and help them succeed, and we will do what it takes to help them succeed," the president said. [EDITOR: except changing our bombard from the air mentality from comfy bases]
The good news of the killing of al-Zarqawi all but eclipsed a run of negative developments in Iraq for the U.S. In mid-May the Pentagon acknowledged that it was investigating allegations that marines might have shot 24 Iraqi citizens in Haditha in revenge for the roadside bomb attack that killed a marine. Marine officers, the Pentagon suggested, might have covered up the incident.
The Haditha allegations prompted allegations of other alleged civilian shootings by U.S. troops. The military dismissed one as previously investigated, but eight marines have been detained at Camp Pendleton, Calif., pending possible charges in a second case.
Though al-Zarqawi's demise has shifted the spotlight off Haditha, the shootings there could represent a dividing line in U.S. military operations in Iraq. Civilian deaths violate a primary rule of counterinsurgency doctrine, which emphasizes non-violent, community police actions that enhance personal security instead of endangering it.
The Haditha incident, still under Pentagon review, isn't the only suggestion that the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign is off track. Al-Zarqawi's bombing death aside, U.S. forces in Iraq have made frequent use of precision bombing as a means of targeting insurgents.
That tactic, while sometimes effective, can also lead to extensive civilian deaths and property damage.
A `losing' tactic
The increased use of air strikes, said G.I. Wilson, a retired marine colonel who recently finished a second tour in Iraq and who writes frequently on fighting insurgents, "means that you're losing. A 500-pound bomb causes a lot of destruction."
One of the allegations of wrongful civilian deaths leveled at the military recently involved the destruction of an Iraqi home by a C-130 gunship. The U.S. military said it investigated a nighttime raid on the village of Ishaqi, about 55 miles north of Baghdad, and found that U.S. troops used proper force. An Iraqi human-rights group alleged that 11 civilians were wrongfully killed in Ishaqi, and citizens there alleged that a building was destroyed by the C-130 to conceal dead residents.
The same troubles have vexed U.S. troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban enemy is more remote. Last month, the Afghan government complained that a U.S. bomb struck a village where Taliban suspects had taken refuge. Sixteen civilians died in that air strike, the government said. An estimated 20 Taliban fighters were also killed in the strike.
Bush said in December that about 30,000 Iraqi citizens had died "as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence." Although some of those deaths can be attributed to al-Zarqawi's campaign of car bombing and suicide attacks, Iraqi civilian deaths have continued in a spate of car bombings and shootings since al-Zarqawi's death.
The reasons for the missteps by U.S. troops can be traced to an ingrained Pentagon tradition of training and fighting for conventional war, with well-plotted battle lines and an easily distinguished enemy. The U.S. force in Iraq was slow to recognize the emergence of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and it has been reluctant to adopt counterinsurgency tactics. Commanders trained in heavy artillery assaults bristled at the notion of exposing troops on street patrols, interacting with Iraqi citizens and gathering intelligence on likely insurgents.
Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, developed a counterinsurgency school there because, as one subordinate told The Washington Post, the task was not getting done during predeployment training in the U.S. In addition, Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli, commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq, is credited by many with putting a heavier emphasis on counterinsurgent tactics.
Hint of drawdown
The strain on U.S. troops during three years of war and the possible political necessity of reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq before the November congressional elections may play a part in any decision to cut the number of troops. Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested last week that the force might be gradually be drawn down as the end of normal seven-month and yearlong rotations are completed.
"The overall strategy, it's important to remember, is not driven by numbers but by effect," Ham said. "And as the Iraqis are able to exercise greater responsibility and independence, then over time we would certainly like to see the U.S. number come down."
"We Got the Guns" = immature American marines wrong for SASOs, Part 1
The following is even more conclusive evidence that during the nation-state war phase, WE MUST USE 3D MANEUVER TO BLOCK AND KILL/CAPTURE FLEEING ENEMY LEADERS, otherwise they will inter-mingle with the civil populace and start a rebellion against us if we stick around. Once inter-mingled, if we try to do dragnets, we end up creating new rebels by our kill/capture door kicking and incarcerations for every previously existing rebel found. Studying Trainor/Gordon's book, "Cobra II" it appears CENTCOM's war plan did NOT have and 3D maneuver blocking forces to kill/capture Saddam and his sons leaving Baghdad. CENTCOM absurdly expected a slow, obvious 2D maneuver "armored stampede" from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division and a constantly-pinned-down-by-Iraqi-rear-guards, USMC clusterfuck in 75% wheeled trucks to encircle from the west and east Baghdad would trap them when they had several days to pack all their belongings and be long gone. This is not how we got Noriega in Panama in 1989. The heavy tanker "mech pussies" planned Cobra II and the light narcissists did Operation Just Cause.
This is also yet more proof that the immature American narcissist and weak economic co-dependant with zero humility, zero cultural training, has his weapons locked up 24/7/365 as he's victimized in a "From Here to Eternity" garrison routine is the wrong type of person to send overseas for SASO operations who suddenly has power in his hands and a chip-on-his-shoulder.
www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060627_occupation_iraq_hearts_minds
The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds
Editor's note: Truthdig contributor Nir Rosen, an American reporter who has lived for the last three years in Iraq and who can pass as Middle Eastern, describes what it's like to live under the boot of a culturally callous-and sometimes criminal-occupying force in Iraq. "The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."
A Dig led by Nir Rosen
Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as "sea changes" that would "break-the-back" of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War's My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by "a few bad apples" who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.
In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.
Americans, led to believe that their Soldiers and marines would be welcomed as "liberators" by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father's Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja's worst neighborhoods.
I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic-in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.
My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another "haji", the "gook" of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American Soldiers and another Soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer, I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one Soldier say about me, "That's the biggest fuckin' Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw." A Soldier by the gun said, "I don't care how big he is, if he doesn't stop movin' I'm gonna shoot him."
I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: "Don't shoot! I'm an American!" It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.
In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004, 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the "good news" and go along with the "official" story.
My first direct encounter with American marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The marines did not understand Arabic. "Irjau!" "Go back!" the demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting "America is the enemy of God!" as they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: "That's why we've got the guns."
Even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. [EDITOR: disagree; www.combatreform.org/johnpaulvann.htm]
A nervous Soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, "You must go." "I have the weapons," the sergeant said. "You back off."
"Let's get the fuck out!" one marine shouted to another as the tension increased. I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades. It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American Soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city's support of the resistance.
I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American Soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable. [EDITOR: you mean the palace generals who sent them out to tidy the area via presence patrols?]
(Page 2)
I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003. (I spent two weeks with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for "foreign insurgent fighters".) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert. Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American Soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the Soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The Soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One Soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: "Do I owe you money? So why the fuck are you looking at me?"
After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army. All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the "nervous system" of the area resistance "and the guys who actually do the shooting."
The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. "Fuck yeah!" cheered one sergeant, "Hi honey I'm home!" The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian Soldier who said, "You'll fucking learn how to walk." Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. "Down the road," he pointed. "Show us!" he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the Soldiers ran ahead. "No, no, it's here," yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the Soldiers, "Take me for 10 years but leave my father!" Both were taken. The children screamed 'Daddy, Daddy!' as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.
As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets.
Home after home, met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by Soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man's arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.
As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the Soldiers, calling them "Dogs! Jews!" over and over. When his Soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the Soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses Soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women. When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the Soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.
Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic "zip ties" sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a Soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to "Shut the fuck up" as their basket's contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.
The Soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. "If they got something to tell us I'd rather they be scared," he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked "Police." He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. "It's good for morale after such a long mission," a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing Soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the Soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.
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In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that "112 suspects" had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. "The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources," a military spokeswoman said. "Troops from the 1st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find 'subversive elements,' including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture," she said.
That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by Soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with. "Did they just arrest every man they found?" he asked, wondering if "we just made another 300 people hate us." The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for "further interrogation". Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects.
The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead. "That woman is annoying!" one young Soldier complained about a mother's desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. "How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?" a sergeant asked him.
Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting "USA, USA!" over and over. "They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we made 'em talk somethin' we liked to hear," one of the Soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty "will be guilty next time," after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.
In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general's office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed "security detainees" and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a "security risk." Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an "occupation" or "liberation". Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.
The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past-a fact that frustrated Soldiers to no end. "You get all psyched up to do a hard mission," said one sergeant, "and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry."
The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub. I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub's home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.
On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub's door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub's frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense Soldier to spare her son's life, protesting his innocence. She took the Soldier's hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub's four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as Soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called "The Crimes of Saddam," are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the Soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.
Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round-balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent. He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the Soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub's injured hand and chuckled to his friends, "It ain't my hand." The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the Soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.
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Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. "Oh shit," said the S2 captain, "[we've got] the wrong Ayoub." The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running. But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by Soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days. "It was not the wrong guy," the troop's captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. "We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to."
When the Soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. "Oops," said one. Another one wondered, "What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?" "It's depressing," a third said. "We trashed the wrong guy's house and the guy that's been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed." The Soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, "I'm just glad he didn't do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet]." Then the Soldiers resumed their banter.
A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. This had rightfully alarmed the Army's intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.
The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them.
The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. "Oh he just hates anything Iraqi," another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army's civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the Soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of "incidents" and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.
In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army's appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The Soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the Soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man's backyard. "He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming," one Soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.
Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his praetorian guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. "He was up to no good," the captain explained.
On Nov. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces Soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush's death that same day. The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. "Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness," according to the statement, " ... the Soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective." On Dec. 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner's autopsy said the general's death was "a homicide by asphyxia," but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of "asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression" and that there was "evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs." Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths.
EDITOR: There are hand-held devices that can send out phrases in the Iraqi language....notice these clowns don't have them. A NLB-SC would have these devices and have mature psychologically screened to not be narcissistic egomaniacs, Soldiers who know the language and culture who could intermingle with the civil populace and do surveillance ops to kill/capture as threats appear while doing their primary function of restoring social order.
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American Soldiers had no [EDITOR: nation-state war] mission and viewed Iraqis as "the enemy" through a prism of "us and them." An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of "a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum." Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army's civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American Soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig's blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions. One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that "I am not here to win hearts and minds, I am here to kill the enemy." He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate.
One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot.
The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its Soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British Soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as "material witnesses" when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the Soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on [EDITOR: vulnerable, wheeled] military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. "They were up to no good," they explain. Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country's counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents.
It is hard to relax when the Soldier in the Humvee in front of you aims his machine gun at you.
It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened Soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams, that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after "incidents" or when they are looking for planted bombs. [EDITOR: too late, CONOPS should be to PICKET the MSRs so they CAN'T HAVE LAND MINES EMPLACED] Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive "wrong side," as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage. They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused.
It is hard to relax when the Soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when Soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. [EDITOR: I'd ban U.S. troops wearing arrogant dark tint sunglasses in Iraq] Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.
An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the Soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to "get the fuck away." She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The Soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave "we will kill you."
The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American Soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days.
Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when Soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.
Kill/Capture Wannabe Delta Force narcissists in LAV-III trucks jam streets, Part 2
Caveat: this immature narcissist just now coming around to some adult conclusions, is a Stryker truck weenie not a numbered "Special Forces" group Soldier. He's BSing the reporter on his true social standing he had in the U.S. Army.
1. While the Soldier lied to Rosen that he was a "Special Forces" Soldier, its clear what he told of his experiences as an infantry narcissist in a Stryker truck are true. It also says a lot about U.S. Army narcissist culture that he had to pad his resume to feel good about himself, more proof that the whole "pyramid of ego" needs to be shit-canned. He wore the uniform of the United States of America with "U.S. Army" on his nametape, if this isn't enough its time we shut down the snobs within the Army who are dividing us into "us" and "them" in the militarism ego pyramid.
2. Some of those who have posted there on the TRUTHDIG web page foisting the "he-didn't-have-an-adequate-penis-to-make-it-into-SF" crap is exactly the "pyramid of ego" narcissism we have created that has elevated KILL/CAPTURE by SMALL UNITS as the epitome of military self-validation, which is total BULLSHIT. America needs a military that can do other things than small unit commando actions, like large-scale nation-state war and stability operations and its wrong to elevate a small group of egomaniacs doing a small set of missions as the ultimate end state when planet earth is still very large and small groups CANNOT defend human freedom since they cannot offer enough military terrain control. Its also increasingly obvious that SF units cannot do large nation-state "hearts & minds" stability operations and kill/capture at the same time if they are all committed to the latter. Details:
www.geocities.com/militaryincompetence/militarismsucks.htm
What's NOT mentioned in the story is that SFOD-D "Delta Force", the numbered SF groups, Rangers are so busy doing ego gratifying "kill/capture" in Iraq/Afghanistan that they are not available to do foreign internal defense (FID) to train the Iraqi Army to use all those "cultural skills" they allegedly have so in this vacuum, the "young, dumb and full-of-cum" conventional nation-state war Soldiers are training the Iraqis to be cheap imitations of foot and truck-bound easily ambushed, lightfighter narcissists. In fact, our lust to kill/capture a mythical minority of "bad apples" (truth is OUR POORLY EXECUTED OCCUPATION IS CREATING THE REBELS) is so across-the-board in Iraq, we don't have enough "special" troops to do it so VOILA! the wannabe Delta Force Soldier in a Stryker truck gets to knock down some doors after "stacking" by the door and going into the "fatal funnel". He finally got to wear that drop leg holster afterall! Take some digital pics back home and now he's "Special Forces". British General Slim had some stern warning in his book, Retreat into Victory about the pitfalls of having your best Soldiers, your "cream" skimmed off into "special", "elite" units. Large scale operations units need self-actualizers and go-getters, too. Slim was able to get some amazing "special" performances out of his Soldiers and Wingate's CHINDITs showing LARGE UNITS CAN BE SPECIAL AND "HIGH-SPEED", not just small ones that keep and reject a bunch of others out. Military excellence does not have to be a zero-sum game if egalitarian leaders like Chamberlain, Ridgway, Grange, Moore or a Gavin are in charge.
Since we did not learn from Vietnam and are botching Iraq, its high time we learn how to stabilize a country larger than what a SF Group could handle; WE NEED A NON-LINEAR BATTLEFIELD STABILITY CORPS composed of adults, not narcissistic egomaniacs with scores to settle and manhoods to prove:
www.combatreform.org/johnpaulvann.htm
Anything less than creating a Stability Corps and we will just repeat the same mistakes we made in Vietnam, but with Iraq listed as another failure to our resume.
www.truthdig.com/report/page2/20060627_ugly_americans_iraq
Ugly Americans in IraqPosted on Jun 27, 2006
Nir Rosen
Pic:
This was the scene in October of 2003 after U.S. Soldiers nearly broke the arms of a fragile elderly Iraqi man (in pink head-covering) as they tossed him "zip-tied" to the ground during a raid in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters. (This is not a photo of the U.S. Special Forces Soldier described in the article.)
By Nir Rosen
Editor's note: The following is an oral history of a U.S. Soldier who served with the Army's Special Forces during the allied occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004, as told to journalist Nir Rosen.
It is a companion piece to Rosen's essay "The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds," which describes his experiences as an American reporter who sometimes passed as a Middle Easterner during the occupation.
The oral history is composed almost entirely of e-mail correspondences that Rosen received from the Soldier, who wished to remain anonymous.
About the Soldier: He served in Iraq during 2003 and 2004 as part of a Special Forces unit whose job, as he told Rosen, was to "hunt enemies and destroy their networks" --to go after "former masterminds and leaders of Saddam's Baath Party." His targets soon morphed into members of "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" and insurgents-"a broad term that extended to criminals, influential gangs, bomb-making masterminds and generally pissed-off Arabs across the Sunni Triangle laid off by CPA Order #2--which dismissed all Baath Party members."
The Soldier left the Army in May 2005 but can be recalled in case of a "national emergency." He joked to Rosen that "the day we invade Iran or North Korea is the day that I become a Canadian citizen."
Rosen met the Soldier in Washington, D.C., during the spring of 2006 and struck up a friendship, "feeling a bond," in Rosen's words, "that all who have served in Iraq in some way must feel."
About the Soldier's wish to remain anonymous, he wrote the following to Rosen:
"If my friends from the army even knew I was corresponding with a journalist, I'd probably lose a lot of respect. I am bound by legal contract and personal loyalty to protect the operational security (OPSEC) of my former unit. Because of the sensitivity of their work, their insane burden in Iraq (I still have friends in the military), and the oath of my contract, it is illegal for me to discuss many things-units we work with, equipment, locations, technology, and activity within the country, etc. Furthermore, as I was raised in the community of special operations, I am skeptical almost to the point of paranoia about talking to anyone about Iraq outside of my former unit and family. There is a good reason for this-namely: Loose lips sink ships."
Nir Rosen's account of the Soldier's oral history begins below.
My friend wanted to begin his recounting of his time in Iraq by discussing "the character of the American men fighting this war." He joked that "it might be a shock to some of the architects of this war that our fighters don't read magazines like The Weekly Standard or The New Republic or give a rat's ass about where our occupation in Iraq is headed." He continued: "The reason most of them signed up for service (me included) was to get some action, destroy Al Qaeda and come home with a body count to brag about at a local bar. Who gives a fuck about the rest? I think it can be best summed up in a conversation I overheard at my recruitment station. When one kid was asked why he joined the infantry, he didn't have any doubts: 'I enlisted to kill towelheads.'
Photo essay: www.truthdig.com/gallery/onecategory/C72Nir Rosen presents a series of pictures that illustrate the brutal realities of the U.S. occupation of Iraq
"The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds" :
www.truthdig.com/dig/item/20060627_occupation_iraq_hearts_minds
Nir Rosen's companion piece to this oral history. A description of what it's like to live under the boot of a culturally callous-and sometimes criminal-occupying force in Iraq.
"The very nature of special operations and the infantry is to kill and/or capture dangerous people, destroy shit and prevent attacks. Creating rapport with the local population isn't really part of the vocabulary-especially if the local population is as insanely dangerous as Iraq. In the eyes of many fellow Soldiers who signed up because of 9/11, and because of the Bush administration's portrayal of Iraq as part of the 'war on terror,' many of the guys fully believed that they were in a hunt [for] men responsible for the blood bath in lower Manhattan." My friend added that regardless of where Soldiers are, "be that a foreign country or a local bar in a military town, they usually wear out their welcome anywhere they go-they've perfected the skill."
Nothing adds to the disconnect between U.S. Soldiers and the Iraqi populace like absolute miscommunication. We are astronauts and they are Martians, plain and simple.
My friend stressed that "our officers took extra special care to fully explain the Rules of Engagement (ROE) in formal briefings to men in my company, and over the course of 140 missions they practiced professional restraint with their actions. But there is also a golden explicit rule with everything you do in war: Make sure that your ass comes home alive. This necessitates aggressive infantry platoon behavior on the part of the U.S. military that ultimately results in something quite the opposite of our stated goals: 'building democracy' and winning 'hearts and minds.' While we were largely successful in hunting the men we were pursuing, my personal impression was that we probably created two times more insurgents than we caught, not to mention the communities we greatly angered with our raids. Our actions were a direct contribution to, as [allied commander] Gen. George Casey said in September 2005, an occupation that is 'fueling the insurgency.' "
He told me a story about his platoon's return to the U.S. after its second deployment to Iraq, when its members went to see the premiere of the film "Team America." Made by the creators of television's "South Park," "Team America" was a comical marionette action flick about a jingoistic fire team whose utter recklessness was matched by their righteous yahoo attitude that America must preserve the very fabric of civilization. No film has more accurately depicted our presence in Iraq; it was a looking glass and it instantly became a platoon favorite. There is a classic scene in the movie where Team America's overbearing red, white and blue helicopter lands on top of a bazaar in the Middle East, crushing an Arab's cashew stand. The side of the helicopter read: "We Protect, We Serve, We Care." That scene hit so close to home, it was scary. Later in the movie, in a high-speed chase against terrorists, a missile gets misfired and destroys the Sphinx (in Egypt). "The movie theater, packed with guys from my platoon, was howling with laughter. We even sarcastically recited lines from the theme songs 'Freedom Isn't Free' and 'America, Fuck Yeah' before and after missions on our third tour in the winter of 2005. By then the disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of our leaders and the crap we dealt with on the ground couldn't have been greater. The mentality of soldiers in Iraq is compounded by a group of factors-wrecked relationships, senselessly drawn-out deployments, sex/alcohol deprivation, and getting mortared on a nightly basis, to name a few." He added that "Iraq is a scary fucking place. Every hard-hitting thing we did there was due in large part to our fear of that place."
My friend explained that over the course of his three deployments to Iraq he discovered what he described as a "breakthrough method of communicating in foreign languages. It was so cutting-edge that Rosetta Stone [the language-training program] doesn't even know about it. It goes something like this: The louder you yell at an Arab in English, the more the Arab will understand you. I've seen this done by my brothers in arms on a hundred-plus occasions. Hell, even I did it. And let me be the first to exclaim that it works wonders. The language barrier has done irreversible damage to our entire occupation.
"On the rare occasions that we've had men who speak the language with us, it has yielded key information-in one case it almost resulted in the capture of a high-value target. I can't begin to imagine the kind of miscommunication damage we could have avoided had we had interpreters during two of our three deployments. Nothing adds to the disconnect between U.S. Soldiers and the Iraqi populace like absolute miscommunication. We are astronauts and they are Martians, plain and simple. The average Soldier looks like Buzz Aldrin, loaded with enough high-tech gear to land him on the set of a sci-fi flick. Every night we descend unexpectedly upon Mars from helicopters. Under the cover of darkness we prowl across mud-hut villages on the search for wanted Martians that communicate with each other in weird, harsh sounds. As a matter of fact, the glow on our eyes created from our night observation devices earned us a nickname by Sunni Arabs across Al Anbar; they called us the 'men with green eyes.' "
(Page 2)
Many of his missions in the Anbar province of western Iraq involved "ground insertion," which meant that "we had to shoot our vehicles through multiple narrow streets to hit the objective. I remember one night vividly breaking the rear-view [mirrors] of every car parked on both sides of the street for three blocks, because our Stryker vehicle couldn't be accommodated on the road. When we reversed the vehicle after a wrong turn, we backed right into a Red Crescent van, putting a four-foot dent into the side of the ambulance and shattering its rear lights. Every time we went out, vehicular damage onto Iraqi-owned cars was always common in urban terrain."
One evening his unit thought it had a breakthrough of "actionable intelligence," he told me. "Some leading figures in the insurgency were believed to be at a meeting in a farmhouse off the Euphrates River--some six officials in total. The mission was treated with an abnormal level of planning. We rolled out with a large group of men, using both ground and air assets. When reaching the objective, men in the house burst out running in multiple directions. Brought just for that scenario was an attack dog trained to stop insurgents from getting away. Trained to attack the arms, he was sent to catch one of the fleeing men. By the time the guy returned, his arm was so torn up, it looked like it had been shot by an AK-47 7.62-millimeter round. We rushed the man back for immediate medical assistance. An American doctor sewed his arm back together. After a thorough investigation, it was concluded that all six men had no intelligence value. Our interrogators smelled a rat, so they brought the accuser into the room of the men we captured. From what I heard, they were livid. 'He is a car thief! He is a criminal!' Apparently he was from a rival tribe and had a feud.
"They were taken back to their home, courtesy of the U.S. 'Oops, We Fucked Up' cab company. They dropped off all of the captured men and the accuser at the same location. After all of the time and resources spent on that one, street justice was given its time to take care of that one. This would be one of the few cases that I was aware of when the innocent men were given reparations-medicine for the arm and $500, a decent sum by Iraqi standards."
The only ice cream my friend ever had in Iraq was when his unit raided an ice cream parlor run by two suspected resistance fighters in a major Sunni city. "After grabbing them in a daytime raid in front of hundreds at a local souk," he told me, "we dumped enough of their ice cream to feed our entire platoon in one of our assault packs. By the time we got back to base, most of it had melted. A hole at the bottom of the pack made to let out water was flowing out with a stream of white vanilla cream onto the sand. It must have been 110 degrees. We ate what we could and couldn't stop laughing about what had transpired."
By that point another platoon had very clearly disrupted prayer service, as testified by hundred of Sunni Arab men standing on the front landing of the mosque giving us what I could only refer to as the 'Arab look of death.'
My friend described a "highly planned mission that utilized many military assets ... over 200 special forces went on a head hunt against a high-value target in the heart of Al Anbar." The mission occurred at 1 p.m. on a Friday, prayer time in the Muslim world. "What essentially transpired was the seizure of two central mosques right in the middle of prayer time-our target was believed to be in one of the mosques. Two other platoons were in charge of taking over three surrounding blocks of families 'sympathetic' to the insurgency. When we rolled up to the central mosque, you could see hundreds of pairs of shoes and sandals lined out by the front door. By the time my platoon had raided a local house, which including the standard demolition of a locked gate door with a linear charge, we launched into the family's two-story house with three fire teams. Our entrance included accidentally stepping all over the family's freshly prepared lunch of salad and kabobs-Arabs typically eat on the floor. After kicking down every door, busting open every cabinet and flipping over every mattress, unearthing every prayer rug and breaking every lock in the house in the search for weapons and bombs, we proceeded to detain a 15-old-kid ('male of active age,' i.e. possible insurgent) and tossed him in our Humvee while his mom cried and pleaded with us that he was innocent (at least that's what I thought she said-none of us had an Arabic vocabulary besides 'Shut up' 'Stop or I'll shoot' and 'Get the fuck out of my face').
"It required a unique form of telepathic genius to understand the people we were liberating if you didn't understand Arabic, and none of us possessed that skill. After our block was pacified, we linked up down the road at the central mosque. By that point another platoon had very clearly disrupted prayer service, as testified by hundred of Sunni Arab men standing on the front landing of the mosque giving us what I could only refer to as the 'Arab look of death.' Another team herded a line of stumbling blindfolded and handcuffed men like cattle into one of our vehicles. By that time at least 20 of us had our weapons pointed at the Muslim congregation, not taking any chances. A fire team across the road was jumping over a nearby wall and breaking into a backyard shed. Two F-16s flew in figure eights overhead, buzzing the city and reminding any cavalier haji (our affectionate term for Arab citizen) that day to think twice before they act.
"We detained some 15 men, including the target's brother (the main target was apparently a no-show that day). We rolled out staring at a thoroughly humiliated community on their most sacred day. Their home doors blown off their hinges, some of their teenage children stolen by Kafirs, and in the house that I raided, a hard-earned lunch kicked across the dirty floor. We would later return to the same neighborhood three times during that deployment, looking for the same guy. Each time, doors were blown off their recently repaired hinges, house glass was broken, car tires were slashed, the few interior possessions found in the houses were thrown around, damaged and destroyed. But still, we couldn't find the guy we were looking for. We would go on to conduct a follow-on mission on that specific day, raiding a building reported to house 'eight hard-core Syrian fighters.' We blew down the door with electrical charging tape to find a broken Kawasaki dirt bike. We also went down the road to an elementary school (school was out that day) that was reported to be an arms cache for the insurgency, and our orders were to raid the entire building. After breaking into one room only to find school books, one of our officers ... called back the mission and decided any further damage to the school was folly, given the apparent effort to win 'hearts and minds' across Iraq."
(Page 3)
One summer evening my friend's unit targeted a sheik who was reportedly a mastermind of the resistance. The sheik lived in a mansion behind a tire store, my friend recalled. "He reportedly had the material and spiritual support of the surrounding area. Thus, the objective of our mission would be not just to capture the sheik, but to capture every male in the entire neighborhood for intelligence about the sheik. I was in the fire team whose objective was to raid the house next door to the sheik's. Approaching the house, we tried to enter in text-book fashion- using something called the 'hooligan tool' to break the lock on the front door.
"After two unsuccessful tries, we used a steel rammer, which did nothing but break the glass on the door. Then we went with Plan C- we turned the door handle on the door next to the one we were trying to break. The door was unlocked. Our two teams then flowed in, full of yelling to add to the shock value of our dynamic entry. 'Get the fuck down,' 'Shut the fuck up,' 'Don't move,' etc. Of the four rooms in the house, two were full of women and children, the other a kitchen, and the fourth, a middle-aged man and a senior citizen. Three of our men rushed the man while the old man on an oxygen tank starting hitting a couple of us with his cane. The old man was quickly dropped to the floor, next to his oxygen tank, while we zip-tied his arms and legs. This wasn't out of personal preference, but we were trying to control the situation. I walked out the blindfolded middle-aged man, who was weak and fell to his knees, trembling and mortified. His wife and two daughters were crying hysterically. I can only guess that they thought I was going to execute him. I wish I knew enough Arabic to tell him that things would be OK if he was innocent-but honestly, why should I be confident enough to say that? Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been thrown in detention facilities across the country with incompetent oversight and filtering processes. Even if I did know Arabic, I probably wouldn't want to tell him the honest truth: 'Sir, after you leave here, I'm sorry, but I have no fucking idea what's going to happen to you.'
"After consolidating the detainees we got the orders to clear the surrounding structures. After running with two fire teams across a typical Iraqi backyard farm, we used a shot gun to blast open the door lock. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to score a major intelligence victory in the war on terror: a den of 40 smelly goats. We immediately took one casualty on that raid-a goat got hit in the ass with one of the buckshots. If our raid on 20 homes wasn't yet successful in waking up everyone in the neighborhood, then that pissed-off goat sure did the job. We had to seek cover on the rear side of the building as another team 'leapfrogged' to an adjacent house. In all of our distraction, the goats poured out of their den. When we eventually left the objective, I saw the group of goats wandering down the main highway that we had taken on our way to the sheik's crib. We just had conducted a raid of liberation. I was reminded of one of Gen. [Anthony] Zinni's early warnings about Iraq: 'There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with 97 million dollars' worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely.' Just add 130,000 U.S. Soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars to the equation and the statement still stands.
"Acting on intelligence and orders beyond our control, we succeeded that night in sending a father of four off to who knows where, losing his livestock livelihood that barely made ends meet, detaining five others guilty of living in that neighborhood and finding no sheik. Before departing, I remember a wild dog staring at me in the eye as he consumed the flesh of a fellow dead dog. Our presence didn't seem to faze him. On the way back from this glorious mission, we came onto an unexpected surprise. To our great amusement, in the middle of desert nowhere (the closest village was eight miles away), we found two men engaged in passionate homosexual intercourse on top a sand dune. I don't think they were expecting any extra company. I guess nowhere was safe in Al Anbar from the U.S. occupation."
My friend quipped that "infantry Soldiers have never been known for their raw talent in mathematics." Therefore the explosives charges made by Soldiers sometimes exceed the bare minimum necessary to blow off a door handle. "In one case," he told me, "I watched a charge succeed in blowing a door five feet across a living room. Being as the suspect was about to open the door after hearing the ruckus on his doorstep, he went airborne as well. And the steel door landed on top of him. Like in a scene out of the movie 'Heat,' blood and puss flowed down both of his ears on the trip back to base."
(Page 4)
During the summer, my friend's unit temporarily inhabited one of Uday Hussein's palaces on the Tigris River. "It was fully furnished with gold-leaf furniture," he said, "working bidets and a nice swimming pool. As the story goes, he had women walk in circles by the pool and he chose which one to rape for the evening. We just used the pool to forget about the fact that we were in Iraq. That summer our tanning sessions by the pool were often interrupted by mortar attacks on our compound. Apparently the chain of command threatened a scorched-earth policy on the surrounding farm communities if they didn't put a stop to whoever was doing it. We also did our part by directing warning shots at local fishermen floating slowly down the Tigris River and staring at the compound. If they didn't get the point the first time, we shot closer to their boat. They would get the message and start rowing like Vikings on speed until they were out of our eyesight. It was only in our self-interest to keep all unwanted activity away from our bases. By the summer of 2004, all trust had fully dissipated."
My friend was rare in that he had somehow overcome the necessary brainwashing Soldiers undergo and was able to critically assess his role in Iraq. "In hindsight," he said, "I have often asked myself what my reaction would be like if I were on the opposite end of this equation. After years of living under a harsh dictatorship, 150,000 Soldiers of Sharia show up and offload into Georgetown from boats on the Potomac River after shelling the Capitol. They have a simple mission, they say: transplanting Islamic enlightenment in the decadent land of Kafir. They take over the D.C. Mall and throw a wall around the Smithsonian buildings; they call it the 'Halal Zone.' The White House becomes the embassy of Iraq. Some asshole like John Walker Lindh (Ahmed Chalabi), who has lived in the Middle East while the U.S. suffered under dictatorship, is Iraq's favorite child for taking over the peacock throne of the U.S. My house gets raided and my mother patted down by hygiene-deficient Wahhabis, so I go to Georgetown to force the humiliation off my mind. A group of wirey majahedin show up at Haagen Daaz while I'm enjoying a cone of cookies and cream-a rare moment of bliss in a country going to shit-and grab the owners while taking their ice cream. I return to my home, after walking through one foot of raw sewage water, to turn on the radio and hear the Arab 'viceroy' declare in a fatwa that all Christian values should be erased from our governing culture. Meanwhile my dad is laid off from his paycheck for the crime of serving in the U.S. Army to provide for his struggling family." My friend concluded that "without much doubt in my mind, if I were an Iraqi under the U.S. occupation, I'd be an insurgent."
When you put your life on the line every night, you don't have the luxury to be skeptical or even critical.
I sympathized with what must have been his painful realization that he had inadvertently committed crimes. "All the way up to my third deployment I was an avid reader of a lot of foolish writing on the war," he said. "I believed in the mission because I had to-after all, what Soldier wants to die for an unworthy cause? I wanted to believe in the propaganda and I willfully avoided things that harshly rubbed against my hope that we were sacrificing for a good cause. When you put your life on the line every night, you don't have the luxury to be skeptical or even critical. In certain ways, I feel embarrassed about my belief that this was once a noble mission, but I have the honesty to admit that I was wrong. I deployed to this war with many great assumptions about our national leadership: I assumed that the WMD intelligence case wasn't a cherry-picked house of cards, I assumed we had a plan for the aftermath of the invasion, I assumed our leaders had a greater understanding of the character of Iraq outside the mouths of Ahmed Chalabi and Kana Makiya. I assumed, I assumed, I assumed."
"As a Soldier trained exclusively to fight, destroy and capture," my friend said, "I was no more different than any of the rest of the men in my platoon who viewed Iraq as a broken country, loaded with assassins and inhospitable people. Hardly any of us spoke Arabic, which added to the dehumanization of the people (or should I say, 'targets') that we hunted and disrupted on a nightly basis; during my time there we conducted over 140 missions. We were always decent to the men we captured, but a raid by definition can never be a humanitarian act. I could never escape the impression from our heavy-handed insertions into hundreds of family homes that our presence only fueled more and more hatred. Every night we returned to base, the adrenaline rush faded and everything in hindsight looked like a black comedy. You couldn't escape the fact that our actions only fueled the insurgency. For every insurgent or jihadist we caught, we created two times as many future fighters. And that is the tragedy- good men inadvertently pissing off an entire population. As our fearless leaders walked into this debacle without a plan, you can rest assured that few at the top ever considered the historical meaning of occupation to Arab civilization. Also, the White House fixation on figureheads like Zarqawi, which bolstered the Al Qaeda/Iraq smokescreen, ensured that our myopic obsession with foreign fighters blinded us to the understanding that 90% of the insurgency was home-grown."
SOLUTION: Learn from Iraq Debacle: Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC) Needed
Its highly likely after the American occupation of Iraq is over, that the U.S. military will revert back to "From Here to Eternity" garrison games and lusting for linear nation-state wars as Iraq is chalked up as another Vietnam; a non-linear conflict we couldn't sort out in our heads and come up with a winning strategy (CONOPS).
Dedicated Stability Force with Moral Compass
At some point, America will have to fight again to overthrow an enemy country and if we do not figure out how to create a friendly government in its aftermath, our nation-state foes will take a time-out, let us take the capital city and then proceed to defeat us with an insurgency/rebellion/guerrilla war. To prevent us from botching the aftermath of a nation-state war, we propose a Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps (NLB-SC) filled by 50, 000 active-duty volunteers from all the armed services but would report directly to the President of the U.S. and get funding directly from Congress. Another option would be to designate 3 mid-west National Guard divisions full of hopefully more mature 25-40 year olds not involved in border security missions to be the NLB-SC. Retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew proposes we should have formed a "MACV-Iraq" (Military Assistance Command after Victory, we keep the "V" in there because it sounds better and salutes the Vietnam MACV and reminds the listener of the past precedent) during the planning phase leading up to the Iraq invasion, securing from Congress the necessary funds and authority to reconstitute the Iraqi Army, police and government. A "MACV-Iraq" could insist on using older NG troops, armored tracks (M113 Gavins are plentiful) IF the people putting the MACV-Iraq together are WISE. There's no guarantee that a kill/capture nation-state mentality staff like CENTCOM would do any better setting up a MACV-Iraq then it did doing "Phase IV" planning this last time, but its an idea worth considering.
The following articles show the pitfalls of taking the garrison Army/marine general's lawn care Soldiers and giving them guns in a foreign land. The articles below offer yet more proof that we need a Non-Linear Battlefield Stability Corps composed of older NG or screened-beforehand active-duty Soldiers in ARMORED TRACKS who understand civilian life to do COIN/SASO not active duty prove-their-manhood, young, dumb-and-full-of-you know-what, types walking on foot and in vulnerable Humvee trucks who are obsessed with kill/capture and have no idea what civilian life is about because they play "From Here to Eternity" garrison make-believe 24/7/365. KEY QUOTE:
"Wood said the decreasing dependence on reservists is counterintuitive. They believe aggressive operations by combat-centric soldiers have escalated a primarily political battle that requires a vast amount of noncombat skills."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
July 30, 2006
Pg. 1After The 48th: Iraq Conflicts Heighten
Are civilian or combat skills most needed?
By Moni Basu and Ron Martz
Soon after Doraville's police chief, Lt. Col. John King, arrived with his Soldiers in Iraq's treacherous "Triangle of Death" last summer, they set about the civilian task of nation-building.
Within months, the Georgia Army National Guard's 48th Brigade Combat Team began earning trust from the residents in Mahmudiyah, a small, rural town 45 minutes south of Baghdad that had become notorious for insurgent attacks and criminal activity.
The Citizen-Soldiers knew that the key to their success would be their ability to nurture relationships with the Iraqi people.
"They were telling us where the bad guys were, where the IEDs [improvised explosive devices, or makeshift bombs] were put in so that we could destroy them instead of hitting them," said Brig. Gen. Stewart Rodeheaver, commander of the 48th Brigade.
But, after just five months on the job, the [active-duty] Army replaced the Georgians in Mahmudiyah and southwest Baghdad. [EDITOR: the active duty garrison Army full of egomaniacs wanting young gullible people to order around to do kill/capture "lawn care" envies the NG and is quick to stab it in the back if it starts doing well and in their insecure minds threatens their job security somehow]
Brigade officers found themselves handing over control to the 101st Airborne Division, the storied regular Army unit out of Fort Campbell, Ky., that has a well-respected history dating back to the beaches of Normandy.
What happened after the 101st Airborne units moved in, however, has raised questions among military analysts about what type of combat unit is best suited for Iraq.
The 48th Brigade's 1st Battalion of the 108th Armor Regiment, a unit that had roughly 800 Soldiers, suffered six deaths in the Mahmudiyah area -- three of them from non-combat vehicle accidents. By comparison, the two 101st battalions of about 1,400 Soldiers patrolling the same area have been hit hard, losing 35 Soldiers in eight months.
Additionally, U.S. military officials have opened investigations into two incidents involving 101st Airborne Soldiers and the deaths of Iraqi civilians, one of them in the Mahmudiyah area.
It would be impossible to pinpoint exactly why violence has escalated in Mahmudiyah since the 48th's departure. Both the U.S. military and the insurgents are known to commonly change tactics in Iraq's war of one-upmanship. And in recent months, spiraling sectarian violence has contributed to the chaos.
But as the United States tries to shift more of the burden for Iraq's defense onto the Iraqi army and police, some have questioned whether reservists -- part-time Soldiers who are generally older and bring more life experience to their military jobs -- are more appropriate than their regular military counterparts for a counterinsurgency mission.
"I think by the nature of the beast, most National Guard forces are better in what actually needs to be done," said Piers Wood, a retired lieutenant colonel whose 28 years in the Army included duty in the Vietnam War.
"The last person who should be running a town and having meetings with the mayor is a West Point colonel. Not because he's not bright but because nowhere along the line have they developed the requisite skills for running a municipality or understanding what goes on in an economy," said Wood, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, a Washington-area military watchdog organization.
King said the skill sets his Soldiers brought to the combat zone were essential.
"The fact that my guys are older has a lot of resonance in the Arab community because they respect age and maturity," he said. "All the experience the Georgia Guard has gotten on dealing with national disasters and dealing with chiefs of police and local mayors -- my brothers in active duty don't get those opportunities."
War not all about fighting [kill/capture]
Military officials won't say why the 48th Brigade was replaced less than halfway into its deployment. But there was concern within the National Guard and Congress that Citizen-Soldiers were bearing too much of the load in Iraq.
At one point last year, U.S. troops in Iraq drew 40 percent of their numbers from the National Guard and Army Reserve. The Department of Defense estimates that now has dropped to 20 percent.
Wood said the decreasing dependence on reservists is counterintuitive. They believe aggressive operations by combat-centric Soldiers have escalated a primarily political battle that requires a vast amount of noncombat skills.
"In a counterinsurgency, aggression just gets you deeper in trouble," Wood said. "You are going to create more enemies than you are able to kill."
U.S. military officials are developing a new counterinsurgency manual, the first in more than 20 years, designed to aid troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A draft copy of the manual was posted recently on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization that researches issues of global security and nuclear arms control. It appears to make the case that Iraq and Afghanistan require more nation-building skills to support the local government than combat skills.
Co-written by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne on the initial invasion of Iraq and later led the training of Iraqi security forces, the manual indicates the U.S. military has forgotten the counterinsurgency techniques it learned in Vietnam.
In one section titled The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is, the co-authors write, "The more force applied, the greater the chance of collateral damage and mistakes. It also increases the opportunity for insurgent propaganda to portray lethal military activities as brutal. The precise and discriminate use of force also strengthens the rule of law that needs to be established."
Officials with the 101st in Iraq declined to answer questions about the division's tactics and procedures. Maj. Frank Garcia, spokesman for the 101st in Baghdad, said in an e-mail response to questions that he could not comment on such issues "due to the sensitivities of the ongoing investigations in our area."
Military officials are looking into an incident involving 101st Soldiers -- four Soldiers still with the division and one former GI. They are accused of rape and murder in the death of a teenage girl in the Yusufiyah area, near Mahmudiyah, in March, and of then burning her body and killing three members of her family to conceal the crime. If convicted, all could face the death penalty. A fifth Soldier has been charged with dereliction of duty for alleged failure to report what happened.
The Army has charged three 101st Soldiers in connection with the killing of three Iraqi men in custody near Samarra.
The investigations and casualties have taken their toll on the 101st, whose Soldiers were among the first to parachute behind enemy lines on D-Day -- heroics recounted in historian Stephen Ambrose's book "Band of Brothers."
Cal Posner, a Marietta man who served in Vietnam with the 101st and is now the secretary of the Georgia chapter of the 101st Airborne Division Association, called the recent drumbeat of bad news "discouraging."
He said the young Soldiers are trained to fight, not to be ambassadors or policemen. [EDITOR: THEN DON'T FUCKING HAVE THEM DO COIN/SASO OPERATIONS. Get their garrison generals to stop saying "any Soldier can do COIC/SASO, we have to be able to operate across the whole spectrum of conflict" etc. etc. If generals want their nation-state war units to be able to do COIN/SASO THEN BUILD THE MATURITY IN TO DO SO OR STOP TRYING TO DO THE MISSION].
"I'm surprised things haven't started happening on a larger scale," he said. "That speaks well of the leadership that it hasn't."
Still, given the pervasive bloodshed in Iraq, some military analysts interviewed for this article argued that well-honed combat skills override all else.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey praised the efforts of the 48th Brigade as a "capable force for peacekeeping missions" but said the 101st Airborne was sent into the Mahmudiyah area with the objective of quelling the violence.
"There was a widespread belief that we had to break up insurgency havens, including south of Baghdad, to make sure we did not end up with open rebellions," said McCaffrey, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and now a consultant and West Point professor who has been critical of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq. "So the 101st had a different mission than the 48th."
But that did not exempt the 101st Soldiers from picking up the noncombat missions the 48th Brigade left behind. They, like other Army units, were required to deal with local leaders and their problems.
Overall violence up
Officers of the 48th said their replacements have not been able to continue the nation-building gains the brigade made.
"It was calming down when we left," Rodeheaver, the 48th commander, said of the Mahmudiyah area. "It seems to have intensified in the last few months."
Overall violence soared in Iraq after the February bombing of a major mosque in Samarra fueled anger between Sunnis and Shiites. But Rodeheaver also said the 101st has suffered because it is a light infantry unit that does not have the heavy tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that the 48th Brigade used. And, said Rodeheaver, the Iraqi people may not have taken to the 101st Soldiers.
He said the biggest challenge for the 101st was that they had to start from scratch in building trust with the local Iraqis.
"I think the Iraqi people don't have a relationship with the American Army -- they have a relationship with the people they meet," Rodeheaver said.
He added that the 101st Soldiers might have been targeted specifically because of their participation in the 2003 invasion and its aftermath.
Iraqis, said journalist and Middle East expert Sandra Mackey, live in the most tribal of Arab societies and have long memories. The sheiks and town leaders Rodeheaver dealt with remembered the Eagle patch worn on the left arm by 101st Soldiers when the unit was forced to take much more aggressive battlefield action in the first months of the war.
"Revenge is a very, very powerful motivation in Arab society," said Mackey, who spent time in Iraq researching her book "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein."
Rodeheaver said it was not easy to earn the trust of Iraqis in the Mahmudiyah area. He and his officers attended local council meetings and spent hours chatting with sheiks.
Within a few months of the brigade's departure, insurgents started to pick off key Iraqi leaders whom the 48th Soldiers had worked with in Mahmudiyah. The city's mayor and a popular Iraqi Army battalion commander were assassinated, and a police official was killed by a roadside bomb, King said.
Recently, gunmen killed at least 50 people, mostly Shiites, in a brutal attack on the market in Mahmudiyah.
Based on the increased insurgent attacks in that area, King said he suspects "there was not a lot of progress" diplomatically between the 101st and Sunni tribes after the Georgians left.
"There were a lot of attacks out there and air assaults and things like that," King said of the U.S. military's efforts to wipe out the insurgency. "But I don't know if we really went down there and put the economic and political might of the American Army behind changing attitudes."
Staff writer Jeremy Redmon and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Here is a WSP story of a young active duty punk full of emotional scores to settle going over to Iraq and being an ugly American gunman/asshole.
Washington Post
July 30, 2006
Pg. B1"I Came Over Here Because I Wanted To Kill People"
By Andrew Tilghman
"I came over here because I wanted to kill people."
Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad. "The truth is, it wasn't all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like, 'All right, whatever.' "
He shrugged.
"I shot a guy who wouldn't stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing," he went on. "Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it's like 'All right, let's go get some pizza.' "
At the time, the Soldier's matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him --mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as "killers", lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this Soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn't afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.
The next time I saw him, in a front-page newspaper photograph five months later, he was standing outside a federal courthouse in North Carolina, where he had pled not guilty to charges of premeditated rape and murder. The brutal killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family in Mahmudiyah that he was accused of had taken place just three weeks after we talked.
When I met Green, I knew nothing about his background -- his troubled youth and family life, his apparent problems with drugs and alcohol, his petty criminal record. I just saw and heard a blunt-talking kid. Now that I know the charges against Green, his words take on an utterly different context for me. But when I met him then, his comments didn't seem nearly as chilling as they do now.
Maybe, in part, that's because we were talking in Mahmudiyah. If there's one place where a Soldier might succumb to what the military calls "combat stress," it's this town where Green's unit was posted on the edge of the so-called "Triangle of Death", for the last three years a bloody center of the Sunni-led insurgency. Mahmudiyah is a deadly patch of earth that inspires such fear, foreboding and uneasiness that my most prominent memory of the three weeks I spent there was the unrelenting knot it caused in my stomach.
I was nervous even before I arrived. Although Mahmudiyah is only a 15-minute drive from the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, I was taken there by helicopter. Military officials didn't want to risk my riding in a truck that might be hit by a roadside bomb. I'd chosen to go to Mahmudiyah because I wanted to be on the front lines of the war and among the troops fighting it. [EDITOR: there are no "lines" on the NLB]
When I arrived in February, Green's battalion -- the 101st Airborne Division's 502nd Infantry Regiment -- was losing an average of about one Soldier per week. Whenever I asked how many of the nearly 1,000 troops posted there had been killed so far, most Soldiers would just frown and say they'd lost count.
Danger was everywhere. Inside the American base camps, mortar shells fell almost daily. In the towns where U.S. forces patrolled, car bombs were a constant threat. On the rural roads, the troops kept watch for massive artillery rounds hidden under piles of trash that could shred the engine block of an armored Humvee and separate a driver's limbs from his torso. [EDITOR: shouldn't be "presence patrolling" in anything least of all Humvee trucks]
Wheeled Trucks Unsound for Combat
www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=3F7FFB8E9FF9355F
About a month before I arrived at Green's base -- an abandoned potato-packing plant lined with 20-foot concrete walls -- the Soldiers there fought off a full-blown assault that rallied dozens of insurgents in a show-of-force almost unheard of for a shadowy enemy that typically avoids face-to-face combat. It took more than an hour to quell the attack of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades coming from all sides of the camp.
Morale took another nosedive soon after, when the hastily rigged electrical wiring system caught fire and burned down the Americans' living quarters. The Soldiers watched as the early-morning blaze destroyed all reminders of home: the family photographs, the iPods and the video games that provide brief escapes from combat. When I got there a week later, a chow-hall storage room, packed with radios and satellite maps, was serving as the base command center. The sergeants were still passing out toothbrushes and clean socks to the young troops who had lost everything.
The company commander in charge of Green's unit told me that the situation was so stressful that he himself had "almost had a nervous breakdown" and had been sent to a hotel-style compound in Baghdad for three days of "freedom rest" before resuming his command.
And yet despite the horrific conditions in which they were daily being tested, I found extraordinary camaraderie among the Soldiers in Mahmudiyah. They were among the friendliest troops I met in Iraq.
Green was one of several Soldiers I sat down with in the chow hall one night not long after my arrival. We talked over dinner served on cardboard trays. I asked them how it was going out there, and to tell me about some of their most harrowing moments. When they began talking about the December death of Sgt. Kenith Casica, my interview zeroed in on Green.
He described how after an attack on their traffic checkpoint, he and several others pushed one wounded man into the back seat of a Humvee and put Casica, who had a bullet wound in his throat, on the truck's hood. Green flung himself across Casica to keep the dying Soldier from falling off as they sped back to the base.
"We were going, like, 55 miles an hour and I was hanging on to him. I was like, 'Sgt. Casica, Sgt. Casica.' He just moved his eyes a little bit," Green related with a breezy candor. "I was just laying on top of him, listening to him breathing, telling him he's okay. I was rubbing his chest. I was looking at the tattoo on his arm. He had his little girl's name tattooed on his arm.
"I was just talking to him. Listening to his heartbeat. It was weird -- I drooled on him a little bit and I was, like, wiping it off. It's weird that I was worried about stupid [expletive] like that.
"Then I heard him stop breathing," Green said. "We got back and everyone was like, 'Oh [expletive], get him off the truck.' But I knew he was dead. You could look in his eyes and there wasn't nothing in his eyes. I knew what was going on there."
He paused and looked away. "He was the nicest man I ever met," he said. "I never saw him yell at anybody. That was the worst time, that was my worst time since I've been in Iraq."
Green had been in country only four months at that point, a volunteer in a war he now saw as pointless.
"I gotta be here for a year and there ain't [expletive] I can do about it," he said. "I just want to go home alive. I don't give a [expletive] about the whole Iraq thing. I don't care.
"See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for nothing."
A couple of days later, I ran into Green again, and he invited me to join him and another Soldier in a visit to the makeshift tea room run by the Iraqi Soldiers who share the base with the American troops. It was after dusk, and the three of us walked across a pitch-black landing zone and into a small plywood-lined room where a couple of dozen barefoot Iraqi Soldiers were sitting around watching a local news channel.
"Hey, shlonek ," Green said, offering a casual Arabic greeting with a smile and a sweeping wave as he stepped up to the bar. He handed over a U.S. dollar in exchange for three Styrofoam cups of syrupy brown tea.
Green knew a few words of Arabic, and along with bits of broken English, some hand gestures and smiles, he joked around with the Iraqis as he sipped their tea. Most U.S. Soldiers didn't hang out on this side of the base with the Iraqis.
I asked Green whether he went there a lot. He did, he said, because he liked to get away from the Americans "who are always telling me what to do."
"These guys are cool," he said, referring to the Iraqis.
"But," he added with a shrug, "I wouldn't really care if all these guys got waxed."
As we talked, Green complained about his frustration with the Army brass that urged young Soldiers to exercise caution even in the most terrifying and life-threatening circumstances. [EDITOR: "glass jaw" infantry on foot and in vulnerable wheeled trucks expected to "turn the other cheek"]
"We're out here getting attacked all the time and we're in trouble when somebody accidentally gets shot?" he said, referring to infantrymen like himself throughout Iraq. "We're pawns for the [expletive] politicians, for people that don't give a [expletive] about us and don't know anything about what it's like to be out here on the line."
The Soldiers who fought alongside Green lived in conditions of near-constant violence -- violence committed by them, and against them.
Even in my brief stay there, I repeatedly encountered terrifying attacks. One night, about a mile from Green's base, a roadside bomb exploded alongside the vehicle I was riding in, unleashing a deafening crack and a ball of fire. In most places in Iraq, Soldiers would have stopped to investigate. In the "Triangle of Death", however, we just plowed on through the cloud of smoke and shower of sparks, fearing an ambush if we stopped. Fortunately, the bomb was relatively small, its detonation poorly timed, and the Soldiers all laughed about it moments later. "Dude, that was [expletive] awesome," the driver said after making sure no one was hurt.
A few days later, I was standing outside chatting with an officer about the long-term legacy of the Vietnam War when a rocket came whistling down and struck the base's south wall. A couple of days after that, a mortar round blew up a tent about 20 feet from the visitors' tent that I called home. [EDITOR: NO MORE TENTS! LIVE IN FORTIFIED BATTLEBOXES!]
My experience, however, was nothing compared with that of Green and the other young men of his Bravo company who spent months in the "Triangle of Death".
In the end, I never included Green's comments in any of the handful of stories I wrote from Mahmudiyah for Stars and Stripes. When he said he was inured to death and killing, it seemed to me -- in that place and at that time -- a reasonable thing to say. While in Iraq, I also saw people bleed and die. And there was something unspeakably underwhelming about it. It's not a Hollywood action movie -- there are no rapid edits, no adrenaline-pumping soundtracks, no logical narratives that help make sense of it. Bits of lead fly through the air, put holes in people and their bodily fluids leak out and they die. Those who knew them mourn and move on.
But no level of combat stress is an excuse for the kind of brutal acts Green allegedly committed. I suppose I will always look back on our conversations in Mahmudiyah and wonder: Just what did he mean?
Andrew Tilghman was a correspondent in Iraq for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He lives in Houston.
NLB-SC will not buy into GWOT Fantasies, only do necessary missions
However, the NLB-SC will also not be politically naive and be pliable pawns to corrupt politicians like the Bush administration PNAC loonie-cons (Neocons) who buy into the patronizing Leo Strauss BS that they are a Marxist, God-is-actually-dead "elite" who must steer an underclass of rank/file America with national mythology (lies) and religious lies to keep the nation-state together. America IS a great nation because our founding fathers and men who thought like him have believed in TRUTHS like all men are created with equal, high value and have a God-given (means he actually exists, Straussian fucks) RIGHT to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No one is above the law, which is based on Judeo-Christian truths higher than men; the PNAC think-tank loonie-con Bush administration should be impeached immediately before they stage another 9/11 attack (first 9/11 attacks may have been an U.S. instigated "Reichstag fire") to suspend the U.S. Constitution so they can stay in illegitimate power. The NLB-SC will carefully consider missions given to it and report back to Congress if something is amiss like the current "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) fantasy the loonie-cons have constructed for themselves to seize power and maximize (military, industrial, congressional complex and think tanks) MICC-TT war profits using a new "bogeyman" (Islam-or-else by gunpoint) to replace the old Soviet "Evil Empire" bogeyman. The NLB-SC will not support MICC-TT war profiteers by buying RMA firepower junk. Maybe the REAL reason DoD/military/Congress/Think Tanks don't want a quality U.S. military that can MANEUVER is because it would quickly round up the Taliban, get OBL and his loud mouth side-kick, eliminating the "boogie men" needed to keep their huge war profits going? Why stop the GWOT when its all you got (any maybe you started the GWOT in the first place, too)? Its high time the American people demand RESULTS: Osama Bin Laden and his madman doctor Z be killed/captured or else folks will start getting fired, starting with Bush/Cheney.
www.newscentralasia.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=837
News: The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex Benefits Hugely from Islamic ExtremismDr. Gideon Polya
At this point in the global "war on terror" it is useful to see how the two sides are faring - in terms of "body count" the U.S. and its close allies are winning hands down. We could logically begin our tally in 1983 with the bombings that killed some 200+ U.S. marines and some 60 French paras in Beirut. Over 2 decades of "terror" the military and civilian dead of the U.S. and its First World allies in war and terrorist violence total about 7000, the main contributors being the Beirut bombings, the Gulf War, the African embassy bombings, Israelis in Israel and neighbouring territories, 9/11, Bali, Madrid and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Remarkably, total U.S. military "hostile deaths" in combat were only 676 for the period 1980-2002 (U.S. Census Bureau) and about 650 so far in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Total Coalition military casualties in Iraq come to about 1100, including both non-combat and "hostile deaths". These deaths are dwarfed by total U.S. military deaths in the period 1980-1998 of 10, 900 out of total personnel over that period of 27.5 million - with all but a few percent of these deaths being non-combat and due to accidents, suicide, homicide and illness (Atlas of Injuries in the U.S. Armed Forces).
Of course the non-combat deaths of the U.S. military since 1980 (about 11,000) are in turn dwarfed by the ANNUAL deaths in the U.S. due to car accidents (over 40,000) and due to cigarette-smoking-related causes (over 400,000). The ANNUAL deaths world-wide due to car deaths total about 1 million and those due to cigarette smoking total about 5 million (WHO). These immense statistics surely indicate that we really need a "war on cars" (e.g. no urban private cars, free public transport and taxis only for emergencies, with consequent massive greenhouse gas reduction and health benefits) and a "war on smoking" (e.g. a complete prohibition of cigarettes, corporate compensation for victims worldwide and "economic war crimes trials" for the mainly U.S. and UK tobacco corporations).
Turning to the other side of the "war on terror", we can assess casualties in the Muslim world as a result of war and occupation by the U.S., the UK, Israel and their principal First World allies such as Australia. However, as seen with the casualties in the U.S. military, only a small proportion of deaths in conflict are due directly to violence - most deaths occur from other causes. A useful way of assessing avoidable mortality is to calculate "excess mortality", which is the difference between the ACTUAL deaths in a country over a given period and the deaths EXPECTED in a decently-run, peaceful country with the same demographics.
Using United Nations Population Division data for the period from 1950 to the present, it has been possible to calculate "excess mortality" for every country over the last half century. In order to compare different countries and regions it is useful to express the post-1950 "excess mortality" as a percentage of the present population, this giving an estimate of how many people died AVOIDABLY in a country for every 100 people alive in that country today. Thus total. post-1950 "excess mortality" has been 0.1 million in Israel, giving an "excess mortality" score of about 2% i.e. since 1950 2 Israelis died avoidably for every 100 alive today. In contrast, since 1950 the "excess mortality" has been 0.7 million in the rest of Palestine, giving a "score" of 18% i.e. 18 non-Israeli Palestinians have died avoidably since 1950 for every 100 alive today in the Occupied Palestine Territories.
Post-1950 "excess mortality" for Arab countries with which Israel has been at war are sobering ("excess mortality" in millions; "excess mortality" percentage score also given in parenthesis): Egypt (20; 27%); Iraq (5; 20%); Jordan (0.6; 11%); Lebanon (0.5; 14%); Occupied Palestinian Territories (0.7; 18%); and Syria (2; 12%). The total post-1950 "excess mortality" of Israel's immediate Arab neighbours has totalled about 24 million. The "excess mortality" in the Occupied Palestinian territories has totalled 340,000 since occupation by Israel in 1967.
Other First World powers have variously been involved with the Arab and Muslim worlds over the last half century and before 1950. Early conflict at the interface of the Muslim and European Christian worlds occurred during the Crusades to Palestine; in Spain and culminating in the expulsion of Muslims and Jews; in conflict in Eastern Europe between the Turks and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; in Russian wars with the Turks and with the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia; and Western European colonization of Africa, South Asia and South East Asia. The Anglo-American push East of Suez into the Middle East and Central Asia began in earnest in 1914 (British invasion of Iraq), accelerated with the discovery of oil in the Persian Gulf and is presently poised dramatically after the recent Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The result of horrendous colonial occupations and malignant, violent, neo-colonial involvements by the European First World countries has been an appalling post-1950 "excess mortality" (avoidable mortality) of 1.2 billion in the non-European world, about 1 billion in the Third World and about 0.5 billion in the Muslim world. However the "mainstream" Anglo-American media steadfastly IGNORE both the Third World and Muslim Holocausts, support violently-maintained U.S. hegemony and demonize those who oppose the new colonialism. Indeed the power, transparent dishonesty, aggressiveness and pathological narcissism (psychotic self-love) of the present U.S. administration is such that in general any adverse comment, even from Third World, Muslim or "dissident" First World countries, is very muted indeed.
In contrast to the Third World Holocaust and the Muslim Holocaust (ignored by global media), the crimes of Islamic extremists, notably the murder of innocent First World civilians (total deaths now 5000), are reported daily and hysterically, leading to endangerment of basic human rights in the Anglo-American world and providing "excuses" for immensely destructive wars against Iraq (post-1991 "excess mortality" 1.5 million) and Afghanistan (post-2001 "excess mortality" 1.2 million).
Resistance to increasing U.S. domination of the world, including the Muslim world, has come from "secular" Muslim regimes (notably those of Libya, Syria, Malaysia and pre-occupation Iraq) and vociferously from theocratic, fundamentalist Muslim Iran. While the U.S. backed the extremist Muslim Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, they subsequently fell out, with the mutual hatred being cemented by the 9/11 atrocity of the Taliban-supported Al-Qaeda and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Conversely, the U.S. backed the "secular" Iraqis against the fundamentalist Muslim Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War but the invasion and occupation of Iraq, together with uncritical U.S. support for Israel's conduct in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, [EDITOR: Israel no longer occupies these areas, is only there now because militrants kidnapped an IDF Soldier] has evidently boosted Islamic extremism and threat to First World civilians. However the consistent "winner" in all of this has been U.S. global power and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
What are the connections between "excess mortality" in the Muslim world (or the conditions that give rise to it) and the growth of religious extremism? Religious faith in general is of great help to many in difficult circumstances and it is no coincidence that Islam is rapidly expanding in the high "excess mortality" region of non-Arab Africa. Islamic evangelism over the last 2 decades has also been directed to converting "nominal" Muslims into more actively practising, fundamentalist Muslims. However some have recognized this fundamentalist Muslim "constituency" as the basis for political programs leading to "Islamic States" (such as the Iranian theocracy) and violent Muslim extremists and jihadists have evidently recognized the global Muslim fundamentalists as a source of recruitment for violent, global action against the First World, notably the U.S. and its close supporters.
While desperate poverty (and consequent "excess mortality") explains Islamic conversion in Africa, fundamentalist political activism and thence violent, extremist jihadism derive from ideological education rather than poverty as such. Thus the Taliban military and political force arose out of fundamentalist Muslim schooling and was supported by similarly ideologically-schooled Pakistani military and security personnel; the 9/11 perpetrators were mostly highly educated, professional Saudis; the Al-Qaeda leader is a multi-millionaire from a Saudi family worth billions of dollars; and Saudi Arabia has a relatively low "excess mortality".
However judging by their passionate public statements, knowledge and experience of poverty and injustice suffered by Muslims throughout the world has clearly motivated both fundamentalist political activists and jihadists. To that extent, a "war on poverty" makes vastly more practical sense than the "war on terrorism" as presently conducted - thus the Bush invasion of Iraq was absurdly directed against a major opponent of Muslim fundamentalism and jihadism, has seriously damaged the reputation of the U.S., has caused massive mortality in Iraq and has increased anger throughout the Muslim world over the violence and injustice of this continuing 14-year war against a ravaged Muslim country.
Naturally ruling establishments in Muslim countries (mostly authoritarian) would want to retain power and thus to varying degrees have opposed the Islamic extremists of both the political and jihadist kinds - pre-occupation Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Uzbekhistan being well known examples. In South East Asia, the democratic countries of Malaysia (prosperous, low "excess mortality") and Indonesia (poor, high "excess mortality") have similarly attempted to constrain both political and jihadist extremists.
If killing people is a measure of "success" in the "war on terror", then the Islamic extremists have been extraordinarily unsuccessful. However the brutality of jihadist efforts directed against First World civilians (with some 5000 victims over 20 years) has been hysterically and selectively reported by First World media and has thus provided the dishonest and untruthful "excuses" for rampant U.S. imperialism with the consequent deaths of millions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thanks to the jihadists, an aggressive, narcissistic and violent US now dominates the world. The U.S. military-industrial complex has been doing marvellously since 9/11 and U.S. military expenditure is now at a record U.S. $400 billion per year. The U.S. has a long record of supporting terrorism (e.g. see "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" by former CIA agent Philip Agee) and has massively backed violence by both secular Muslim dictators (e.g. Hussein and Suharto) and by Islamic extremists (in Afghanistan). Since they have profited so immensely from Islamic extremism it is not unreasonable to suspect that the U.S. military-industrial complex and the present corporate-linked and imperialist U.S. administration have been facilitating jihadist activity - indeed the continuing, appalling mass mortality in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan is clearly doing exactly that.
About the author: Dr Gideon Polya of Melbourne, Australia published some 130 works in a 4-decade scientific career including the pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (Taylor & Francis/CRC Press, London & New York, 2003).
If you want to further understand what's going on today, watch these BBC videos ONLINE for free. Reviewers have said: "One of the best documentaries of recent times."
3-Part Video: The Power Of NightmaresThis film series explores the origins in the 1940s and '50s of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Middle East (Egyptian Sayyid Qutb), and Neoconservatism (Leo Strauss) in America, parallels between these movements, and their effect on the world today. From the introduction to Part 1: "Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were we-know-the-truth-you-don't, idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful." The Power of Nightmares has been broadcast over three nights from Tuesday 18 to Thursday, 20 January, 2005 at 2320 GMT on BBC Two. The final part has been updated in the wake of the Law Lords ruling in December that detaining foreign terrorist suspects without trial was illegal.
Should we be worried about the threat from organised terrorism or is it simply a phantom menace being used to stop society from falling apart? In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares. In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.
The rise of the politics of fear begins in 1949 with two men (Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss) whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neo-conservative movement that dominates Washington. Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together. The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this "decay". But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neo-conservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision. They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see. The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to "see the truth"'.
BBC News: Watch the complete BBC documentary:
The Power of Nightmares Part I: Baby It's Cold Outside http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id417.html
OBSERVATIONS:
Lawn care self-absorption non-sense in 1950s America similar to garrison U.S. Army/marine officers, both (militant Islam) Sayyid Qutb and (neocons/looniecons) Leo Strauss tell their people lies to create fear/insecurity to yield to them power as faith in nation-states due to bureaucracy erode.
The Power of Nightmares Part II: The Phantom Victory
http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id418.html
The Power of Nightmares Part III: The Shadows In The Cave
http://johnmccarthy90066.tripod.com/id419.html
The NLB-SC would NOT be organized around the corrupt UCMJ or the narcissistic egomaniac blind obedience culture of the current charge-the-machine-guns-head-on-and-be-a-flag-draped-coffin-or-hero U.S. military. The Commander of the NLB-SC will have the power to say "NO" to the President of the U.S. and Secretary of Defense if they order him to do foolish things like not rehire the Iraqi military as we promised if they didn't fight us when taking Baghdad. The NLB-SC will be a force with a MORAL COMPASS and would set policy specifics within the parameters set for them because they would be the experts of what's possible and what's not. President of the United States (POTUS) says restore civil order, the NLB-SC has the latitude to do what it takes to restore order by guiding principles like that as soon as possible the people should govern themselves. Details: www.geocities.com/airbornemuseum/nlmb.htm The NLB-SC will have the TV, radio, telephone means to communicate to the nation-state's former regime Soldiers, policemen, government services employees and the FUNDS to rehire them immediately, as in THE NEXT DAY after U.S. forces topple the regime.
A Security/Training Force that is Discreet, Self-Reliant
The ranks of the NLB-SC will be screened to insure none are narcissistic personality disorder egomaniacs who not only cannot adapt because they cannot admit to any failure, but who would look down on foreigners without ranks, badges and uniforms they wear and be likely to brutalize them. The NLB-SC's specialty will be restoring order to a country by securing borders, eliminating road ambush risks, building walls, making it safe for NGO relief agencies by rapidly training/equipping new indigenous security forces etc. while living as discreetly as possible in rural locations using fortified ISO shipping container "BATTLEBOXes". They will be self-reliant through zero energy home means to not need hundreds of truck resupply convoys which invite rebel ambushes. Details: www.geocities.com/strategicmaneuver/battleboxes.htm
Losing the War of Words/Ideas; Lose the Sub-National War Against False Islamic Terrorists
--American Proverb
Students of Conflict Thought
The NLB-SC cadre would study 24/7/365 by geographic region the on-going human conflict thought patterns. All military foreign area officers would assist the NLB-SC with email reports on their observations/trips of their dedicated region. All elements of the NLB-SC cadre would meet regularly to improve their intervention plans. For example. OPLAN Mecca might be what if Saudi Arabia falls into chaos after a series of royal family assassinations; how do we restore order without using foreign non-Islamic troops? The cadre might conclude that U.S. NLB-SC troops would secure infrastructure out of eyesight of the populace (airports, seaports, pipelines) while the rapid training team advises the Saudi National Guard to invoke marshal law until such time as a royal family member can be found to continue the monarchy.
The point here is the regional unified commands like CENTCOM don't give a flying F about any of their region's social ills, all they long to do is invade and kill/capture. Its a huge job for a single NLB-SC to be ready for instability anywhere in the world, but since none of the trigger pullers want to prepare for these things, a general world-wide stability force that does prepare will be "good enough" compared to a "perfect" solution of a stability force in every regional unified command. We simply do not have the troops to have say a division of stability troops in USSOCOM, USCENTCOM, USEUCOM, USPACOM, USSOUTHCOM etc. Those that think the 10 divisions of U.S. Army kill/capture troops can fulfil the stability role will try to boast on Bosnia/Kosovo as proof they can do the job, but the debacle in Iraq shows in a more demanding, more violent situation with 3 warring factions ad hoc with the dumb jocks is not enough.
The NLB-SC would not just study nation-states but the sub-national groups within these possibly failed states using their country as bases to launch attacks. Some may say, we have a "CIA" and a "DIA" full of foreign area analysts so we don't need the NLB-SC with its own area analysts. We all know the CIA/DIA cabal doesn't work, whatever they learn NEVER reaches the DOERS. The best the CIA/DIA can do is get their stuff to decision-makers (Thinkers--we use this world loosely) and do some OSS direct actions on their own, like going to Afghanistan and bribing a bunch of people to ditch the Taliban. Some will say, "we have numbered Army Special Forces Groups aka Green Berets to be the DOERS". Wrong again. There's not enough 12-man A-Teams to cover the still very large planet earth's many troubled areas and if that area needs actual troops on the ground controlling things like infrastructure which can go on for hundred and thousands of miles, a small group of narcissists will not be able themselves to do the job or even be enough to rapidly train locals in sufficient quantity to secure the vast areas required. Basically the NLB-SC is the realization that Civil Affairs Command turning to SF or conventional forces to be their "bouncers" as they coordinate NGO recovery efforts is either too small or big and very destructive. The SF is likely to be off on kill/capture glory missions and unavailable to train anyone as is the case today. Flooding unstable area with arrogant and all-the-comforts-of-home American nation-state war troops is a recipe for a rebellion to blossom. The NLB-SC solves this by having the cultural skills of the SF but with the combat skills and size of a nation-state war force with the restraint of adult maturity.
The NLB-SC would stay on top of the regional thoughts causing human conflicts there and should be tasked by the leaders of all the armed services for an "opinion" since the CIA/DIA are so messed up and lack the unique focus of the NLB-SC that whatever it learns is applied to how possible intervention actions are done.The NLB-SC would stay on top of the Killer Words (KWs) and Dominant Strategic Ideas creating the conflicts in their world areas.
Words Become Actions: Killer Words
Know the actors: who is a "Freedom Fighter" and who is a "Terrorist" (criminal, murderer, sociopath)?
Excuses: Lies people use to try to justify the wrong things they do
Freedom Fighter: man who fights others denying him freedom to live, to get a geo-political situation where he can live in peace, and after he gets it, he puts his guns and bombs away
Terrorist: a criminal who enjoys killing and will never stop using guns and bombs until someone/something stops HIM. His manta: "We want no progress, no prosperity".
A retired officer caveats what a "Freedom Fighter" is willing to do or not do:
"Freedom fighters can be totally non-violent (like John Paul II as both a cardinal and pope or Hungarian Cardinal Windzenzy (mispelled), or popular icons like Gandhi). If they take up arms, they attack government personnel (preferably uniformed and armed) and government security facilities. They don't attack private civilians or civilian facilities, residential areas, schools, hospitals, religious facilities. They don't blow up cafes or shopping malls. They may wage war conventionally, as irregulars/insurgents, or slide between the two (remember our own Revolution and the Confederates in the War Between the States).
Terrorists deliberately attack "soft" targets to create popular terror. They are too weak and cowardly to attack the security organs or government officials, etc. They are always violent, and often have agendas that are so incoherent that they are essentially violent cults rather than violent political movements. Terrorists often resort to criminal behavior to gain money/resources/access, but they are fundamentally different. Criminals may not like having the law applied to them, but expect (implicitly) others to adhere to it; they may break laws, but consider themselves as good as any other citizens in most respects (remember the mafia helping the FBI during WWII, etc.). Terrorists are totally lawless, like pirates and brigands; they acknowledge no constraint on their quest for destruction and power. Some slide completely into nihilism (Sendero Luminoso, Japanese Red Army Faction, Abu Sayyaf). Others slide into criminal behavior with only a thin rhetorical veil of politico-babble (IRA, etc.). Some gain enough power to largely set aside terrorism for more legitimate power (MNLF in Philippines). Most but not all insurgents resort to terrorism as a tactic, but few incorporate it as a strategy for victory."
The following is an example of a terrorist who was NOT ever a "Freedom Fighter". Ben Works of SIRIUS writes:
Who was the Grand Mufti, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini?Muhammed Amin al-Husseini [many spelling variations] was born in 1893 (or 1895), the son of the Mufti of Jerusalem and member of an esteemed, aristocratic family. The Husseinis were one of the richest and most powerful of all the rivalling clans in the Ottoman province known as the Judaean part of Palestine.
Amin al-Husseini studied religious law at al-Azhar University, Cairo, and attended the Istanbul School of Administration. In 1913 he went to Mecca on a pilgrimage, earning the honorary title of "Haj". He voluntarily joined the Ottoman Turkish army in World War I but returned to Jerusalem in 1917 and expediently switched sides to aid the victorious British. He acquired the reputation as a violent, fanatical anti-Zionist zealot and was jailed by the British for instigating a 1920 Arab attack against Jews who were praying at the Western Wall.
The first Palestine High Commissioner. Sir Herbert Samuel arrived in Palestine on July 1, 1920. He was a weak administrator who was too ready to compromise and appease the extremist, nationalistic Arab minority led by Haj Amin al-Husseini. When the existing Arab Mufti of Jerusalem (religious leader) died in 1921, Samuels was influenced by anti-Zionist British officials on his staff. He pardoned al-Husseini and, in January 1922, appointed him as the new Mufti, and even invented a new title of Grand Mufti. He was simultaneously made President of a newly created Supreme Muslim Council. Al-Husseini thereby became the religious and political leader of the Arabs.
The appointment of the young al-Husseini as Mufti was a seminal event. Prior to his rise to power, there were active Arab factions supporting cooperative development of Palestine involving Arabs and Jews. But al-Husseini would have none of that; he was devoted to driving Jews out of Palestine, without compromise, even if it set back the Arabs 1000 years. William Ziff, in his book "The Rape of Palestine," summarizes:
"Implicated in the [1920] disturbances was a political adventurer named Haj Amin al Husseini. Haj Amin, was sentenced by a British court to fifteen years hard labor. Conveniently allowed to escape by the police, he was a fugitive in Syria. Shortly after, the British then allowed him to return to Palestine where, despite the opposition of the muslim High Council who regarded him as a hoodlum, Haj Amin was appointed by the British High Commissioner as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for life. [P. 22]"
Al-Husseini represented newly emerging proponents of militant, Palestinian Arab nationalism, a previously unknown concept. Once he was in power, he began a campaign of terror and intimidation against anyone opposed to his rule and policies. He killed Jews at every opportunity, but also eliminated Arabs who did not support his campaign of violence. Husseini was not willing to negotiate or make any kind of compromise for the sake of peace. As a young man, al-Husseini worked with a native Jew, Abbady, who documented this comment: * Remember, Abbady, this was and will remain an Arab land. We do not mind you natives of the country, but those alien invaders, the Zionists, will be massacred to the last man. We want no progress, no prosperity. Nothing but the sword will decide the fate of this country. *
In 1929, major Arab riots were instigated against the Jews of Palestine. They began when al-Husseini falsely accused Jews of defiling and endangering local mosques, including al-Aqsa. The call went out to the Arab masses: "Izbah Al-Yahud!" - "Slaughter the Jews!" After the killing of Jews in Hebron, the Mufti disseminated photographs of slaughtered Jews with the claim that the dead were Arabs killed by Jews.
In April, 1936 six prominent Arab leaders formed the Arab Higher Committee, with the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini as head of the organization, joining forces to protest British support of Zionist progress in Palestine. In the same month, riots broke out in Jaffa commencing a three-year period of violence and civil strife in Palestine that is known as the Arab Revolt. The Arab Higher Committee led the campaign of terrorism against Jewish and British targets.
Using the turmoil of the Arab Revolt as cover, al-Husseini consolidated his control over the Palestinian Arabs with a campaign of murder against Jews and non-compliant Arabs, the recruitment of armed militias, and the raising of funds from around the Muslim world using anti-Jewish propaganda. In 1937 the Grand Mufti expressed his solidarity with Germany, asking the Nazi Third Reich to oppose establishment of a Jewish state, stop Jewish immigration to Palestine, and provide arms to the Arab population. Following an assassination attempt on the British Inspector-General of the Palestine Police Force and the murder by Arab extremists of Jews and moderate Arabs, the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal by the British. The Grand Mufti lost his office of President of the Supreme muslim Council, his membership on the Waqf committee, and was forced into exile in Syria in 1937. The British deported the Arab mayor of Jerusalem along with other members of the Arab Higher Committee.
According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, the Nazi Germany SS helped finance al-Husseini's efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin.
In 1940, al-Husseini requested the Axis powers to acknowledge the Arab right:
"... to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy."
While in Baghdad, Syria al-Husseini aided the pro-Nazi revolt of 1941. He then spent the rest of World War II as Hitler's special guest in Berlin, advocating the extermination of Jews in radio broadcasts back to the Middle East and recruiting Balkan Muslims for infamous SS "mountain divisions" that tried to wipe out Jewish communities throughout the region.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny (subsequently executed as a war criminal) testified:
"The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. ... He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz."
With the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Mufti moved to Egypt where he was received as a national hero. After the war al-Husseini was indicted by Yugoslavia for war crimes, but escaped prosecution. The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal.
From Egypt al-Husseini was among the sponsors of the 1948 war against the new State of Israel. Spurned by the Jordanian monarch, who gave the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to someone else, Haj Amin al-Husseini arranged King Abdullah's assassination in 1951, while still living in exile in Egypt. King Tallal followed Abdullah as king of Jordan, and he refused to give permission to Amin al-Husseini to come into Jordanian Jerusalem. After one year, King Tallal was declared incompetent; the new King Hussein also refused to give al-Husseini permission to enter Jerusalem. King Hussein recognized that the former Grand Mufti would only stir up trouble and was a danger to peace in the region.
Haj Amin al-Husseini eventually died in exile in 1974. He never returned to Jerusalem after his 1937 departure. His place as leader of the radical, nationalist Palestinian Arabs was taken by his nephew Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini, better known as Yasser Arafat. In August 2002, Arafat gave an interview in which he referred to "our hero al-Husseini" as a symbol of Palestinian Arab resistance.
Sources and additional reading on this topic:
* al-Hajj Amin Husayni and the Arab Higher Committee (Photo)
* Nazi ally, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, is Arafat's 'hero'
* Haj Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974)
* Haj Amin al Husseini
* Summons to a Intifada Against Britain: A "Fatwa" Issued by Haj Amin al-Husseini
* Bosnian Moslems recruited the Nazi SS by Yasser Arafat's 'Uncle'
* Arafat's Hitler-loving Role Model
* The Prisoners of History
* Arafat, the Nazi symphatizer
* The Myth of Yasser Arafat
* Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini
* Haj Amin al-Husseini
* The Mufti and the Fuhrer
* We Didn't Start the Fire
* The rise of Haj Amin
* Jerusalem Divided Between Jordan and Israel 1950-1951
* Put an End to It
* Arafat and the Big Lie
* Their Kampf: Hitler's book in Arab hands
* Plus ca change ... Journalists fail to confront Lies against Israel
* Were Jews and Arabs Destined To Hate Each Other?
* The Peace Encyclopedia: Arafat, Yassir
*
The point here is that sovereign nation-states CAN live at peace since they have many people involved who are responsible and by forming a nation-state they are more or less wanting to live and let live. Yes, there are rogue nation-states like North Korea, Iran that thugs have taken over but for the most part, a group of people once they form into a nation-state turn to domestic life concerns; its a civilizing principle.
Sub-national groups Hezbollah and Hamas have land within weak nation-states that they could use to live at peace BUT THEY REFUSE TO DO THIS. They are not Freedom Fighters, they are terrorists who want to kill. Their current idea is that Israel is the scapegoat and it must be killed. If Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, they'd go find another scapegoat to kill....the Sunni vs Shia split proves this already...anything so they don't have to give up their cool guns, bombs and hoods to go running around in and HAVE TO GET A 9-5 job. They are paid criminals and sociologically, nihilists and sociopaths using a false distortion of a religion as cover (excuses).
NY TimesSectarian Divide
On Web, a Sunni-Shiite Split on HezbollahBy EDWARD WONG
Published: July 22, 2006BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 21 - The question has popped up all over Internet sites frequented by Islamic militants: Should your average God-fearing jihadist support Hezbollah in its battle against the Zionist aggressors and their American lap dogs?
But consider this posting about Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah: "Let us explain that the party of Hassan Nasrallah, for us, is a party which has a Shia ideology. Thus, he is considered our enemy like our enemies the Jews, the Christians."
"So what should we do now?" wrote the somewhat confused author, a Sunni jihadist known as Saif al-Din al-Kanani. "What side shall we take? Who shall we support?"
The conflict in Lebanon has ignited a robust debate on jihadist Web sites over backing for Hezbollah, the Shiite group that set off the crisis when it seized two Israeli soldiers on July 12. The discussions reflect the widening divide between Shiite and Sunni Arabs in parts of the Middle East. Accusing Palestinians of being anti-Shiite, one Iraqi Shiite militant bitterly wrote, "It is better to concentrate one's efforts on helping the Shiite kinfolk rather than the Sunnis."
The world of Islamic militants on the Internet is a nebulous one. Those posting messages range from people identifying themselves as veterans of the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan to teenagers paid to plant roadside bombs in Iraq.
But experts in the United States who study the messages say prominent supporters of holy war, including religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have joined the debate. Well-recognized guerrilla groups and militant clerics in Iraq have also posted their views . About 80 percent of the postings this week on jihadist sites concern the question of supporting Hezbollah, according to the SITE Institute, a group in Washington that tracks and translates the messages. (The group's translations were used for this article.)
Suspicions among Sunnis over growing Shiite power - and a backlash by Shiites - have come to the fore during the Iraq war and fighting in Lebanon. Animosity is especially virulent among Sunni militants who adhere to a conservative strain of Islam that views Shiites as infidels. And like many of the region's Sunni leaders, they see Hezbollah as a puppet of Iran, whose Shiite Persian majority has traditionally been seen by Arabs as a mortal enemy.
So while many ordinary Sunnis have spoken out in support of Hezbollah, Sunni Arab governments and ultraconservative militants have withheld their backing. One Sunni fighter said the Lebanon conflict was a plot by an Iranian-American-Israeli axis to spread the Shiite faith across the region. Another militant suggested that the Sunnis should sit this one out and let the Americans and Israelis fight the Iranians and their proxies to the death.
"All of this at the end will be in Islam's favor - even if Islam and its people suffer a great disaster - because the two aggressive powers will be consumed in the war," wrote Sheik Hamid al-Ali, a religious leader in Kuwait who has stood trial there for ties to radical groups.
A prominent cleric in Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdullah bin Jabreen, issued an edict that said of Hezbollah: "The support of that Shiite party is not allowed, and to supplicate for their victory and their establishment is not allowed. We advise the Sunni people to disown them, desert whoever joined them and to reveal the Shiite enmity to Islam and the Muslims." A Shiite fighter wrote in response: "God damn this Zionist guy. He clearly supports the Zionists."
The two sheiks, like many Sunni militants, belong to the fundamentalist Salafiya branch of Islam, which regards Shiites as little better than non-Muslims. Osama bin Laden is a Salafist, as was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jihadist who declared war on Shiites in Iraq and helped drag the country into its sectarian violence before he was killed by an American airstrike last month.
"If they're Salafist jihadists, like Al Qaeda or groups associated with it, this is exactly their vernacular," Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at the RAND Corporation, said of the anti-Hezbollah messages. "To them, Shiites are heretics."
Examples exist of cooperation between Sunni and Shiite groups. Hezbollah mentored the militant Palestinian groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which do not have Salifist leanings. A wave of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel that began in April 1994 was believed to have taken place because of Hezbollah's tutelage, Mr. Hoffman said.
This month, Hezbollah seized the two Israeli Soldiers after Hamas had already captured one and prompted an Israeli assault on Gaza. An Israeli ground invasion of south Lebanon could draw to the area Sunni and Shiites eager to kill Israeli troops.
Even Al Qaeda has some links to Hezbollah. The groups had contact with each other in the early 1990's through a Hezbollah operations chief. "Bin Laden is a practical consensus builder; he'll take support," Mr. Hoffman said.
But a Web site suspected of ties to Al Qaeda, Al Hesbah, has posted a wave of anti-Shiite comments, including: "Lebanon today is exposed to a Zionist war not only against Hezbollah, but against all Lebanon. This is what Hezbollah wanted."
Mr. Kanani, the Sunni jihadist, wrote on the site that Hezbollah earlier conspired with Israel to secure Israel's northern border, thus allowing Israel to direct its wrath toward the Palestinians. "The Shiite party has no ideological problem with making peace with Jews, collaborating with them and being friendly with them," he said.
Another author, "an Egyptian holy warrior," recommending Al Qaeda not aid Lebanon, said, "It is known that most of the inhabitants of Lebanon are Shiites and cross worshipers."
All the Shiite-bashing has provoked some acid responses on radical Shiite forums. One writer on www.yahosein.com questioned Palestinian loyalty to Hezbollah, asking, "For all the assistance the Shiites provide the Palestinians, why don't the Palestinians wave pictures of the Mujahid Hassan Nasrallah or banners of his victorious party?" In the same thread, an Iraqi Shiite named Abu Zeer al-Ghafari said, "Hezbollah should only support the Shiites, because only the Shiites support them."
It was in the deserts of Iraq that the Sunni-Shiite fault line originated in the seventh century, with the slayings of the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and grandson. Sunni Arab and Shiite militant groups battle one another daily across Iraq. So it might have come as a surprise to some when a well-known Sunni insurgent group, the 20th Revolution Brigades, issued a statement this week supporting Hezbollah.
"The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on the jihadi groups in Iraq to step up their jihad work," it said, "to fortify and support against the American and British occupation, in support of our jihad brothers in Palestine and Lebanon."
To provide inspiration, the group released two short videos that each showed an American [EDITOR: a Stryker truck] armored vehicle being blown up in a ball of fire.
SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT #3: Lebanon
The conflict in Lebanon is caused because the nation-state is militarily weak and cannot keep the sub-national terror group Hezbollah from launching attacks on neighboring nation-state, Israel. It was thought that if Hezbollah got some land---the southern part of Lebanon and were drawn into civilian politics, they'd "get a life" and put away their guns and bombs. Clearly, they are only in southern Lebanon because its close to Israel to indulge their criminal urges. Rewind the tape 20 years and they are nothing more than Arafat's PLO in southern Lebanon but without "we want a homeland" even as an EXCUSE for their killing lifestyle. They have no excuse. They have got land to live at peace on. Notice after the IDF expelled Arafat in the 1980s, he reappeared in the Gaza strip, got a chunk of land to have a Palestinian nation-state "homeland" (there goes malcontent excuse) and he still refused to put away the gun and the bomb! Arafat didn't stop killing until THE BATTLE AGAINST THE EARTH got him; he died of old age and unhealthy lifestyle created illness. We need to face the fact that there are some people who are criminals who like to kill instead of getting boring 9-to-5 civilian jobs because its fun and sexy to them. Dr. Martin van Crevald said this in his book, The Transformation of War. [Note he used the "T" word before it was perverted into the current emasculation of military forces with physical capabilities into effeminate "RMA transvestites" who "bitch and gossip" over mental commo links endless "mother, may I?" directives from micro-managers.] Organized killing feeds their baser instincts and no amount of political settlement and concessions will appease them, they are not looking to put away their guns/bombs to live at peace with anyone. Remember how appeasement worked for Hitler? They are functional nihilists and sociopaths.
Famous lawyer, professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard writes:
There is no democracy in the world that should tolerate missiles being fired at its cities without taking every reasonable step to stop the attacks.The big question raised by Israel's military actions in Lebanon is what is "reasonable." The answer, according to the laws of war, is that it is reasonable to attack military targets, so long as every effort is made to reduce civilian casualties.
If the objectives cannot be achieved without some civilian casualties, these must be "proportional" to the civilian casualties that would be prevented by the military action.
This is all well and good for democratic nations that deliberately locate their military bases away from civilian population centers. Israel has its air force, nuclear facilities and large army bases in locations as remote as anything can be in that country. It is possible for an enemy to attack Israeli military targets without inflicting "collateral damage" on its civilian population.
Hezbollah and Hamas, by contrast, deliberately operate military wings out of densely populated areas. They launch antipersonnel missiles with ball-bearing shrapnel, designed by Syria and Iran to maximize civilian casualties, and then hide from retaliation by living among civilians. If Israel decides not to go after them for fear of harming civilians, the terrorists win by continuing to have free rein in attacking civilians with rockets. If Israel does attack, and causes civilian casualties, the terrorists win a propaganda victory: The international community pounces on Israel for its "disproportionate" response. This chorus of condemnation actually encourages the terrorists to operate from civilian areas.
While Israel does everything reasonable to minimize civilian casualties -- not always with success -- Hezbollah and Hamas want to maximize civilian casualties on both sides. Islamic terrorists, a diplomat commented years ago, "have mastered the harsh arithmetic of pain. . . . Palestinian casualties play in their favor and Israeli casualties play in their favor."
These are groups that send children to die as suicide bombers, sometimes without the child knowing that he is being sacrificed. Two years ago, an 11-year-old was paid to take a parcel through Israeli security. Unbeknownst to him, it contained a bomb that was to be detonated remotely. (Fortunately the plot was foiled.)
This misuse of civilians as shields and swords requires a reassessment of the laws of war. The distinction between combatants and civilians -- easy when combatants were uniformed members of armies that fought on battlefields distant from civilian centers -- is more difficult in the present context.
Now, there is a continuum of "civilianality": Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents -- babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually.
The laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these realities. An analogy to domestic criminal law is instructive: A bank robber who takes a teller hostage and fires at police from behind his human shield is guilty of murder if they, in an effort to stop the robber from shooting, accidentally kill the hostage. The same should be true of terrorists who use civilians as shields from behind whom they fire their rockets. The terrorists must be held legally and morally responsible for the deaths of the civilians, even if the direct physical cause was an Israeli rocket aimed at those targeting Israeli citizens.
Israel must be allowed to finish the fight that Hamas and Hezbollah started, even if that means civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon. A democracy is entitled to prefer the lives of its own innocents over the lives of the civilians of an aggressor, especially if the latter group contains many who are complicit in terrorism. Israel will -- and should -- take every precaution to minimize civilian casualties on the other side. On July 16, Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, announced there will be new "surprises," and the Aska Martyrs Brigade said that it had developed chemical and biological weapons that could be added to its rockets. Should Israel not be allowed to pre-empt their use?
Israel left Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. These are not "occupied" territories. Yet they serve as launching pads for attacks on Israeli civilians. Occupation does not cause terrorism, then, but terrorism seems to cause occupation. If Israel is not to reoccupy to prevent terrorism, the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority must ensure that these regions cease to be terrorist safe havens.
However, if America jumps on the looneycon broad-brush bandwagon and widens the war against Sunni nation-states that do not support the Shia Hezbollah/Hamas latest insubordination, all we are doing is making the U.S. a part of Israel to be the big bully/scapegoat that the terrorists use as an EXCUSE (see definition above) to continue their run-around-with-an-AK47 lifestyle. Prototypical terrorist, Arafat never wanted to stop being a guy running around with a gun; his heart was never into being a peaceful government figurehead.
One better solution is to radically reorganize and strengthen Lebanon's Army say along Colonel Douglas Macgregor's "Breaking the Phalanx" model so it can keep Hezbollah out after the IDF pushes it from southern Lebanon. The U.S. could help with this with a competent NLB-SC with trainers and equipment since the NLB-SC would be EXPERTS IN SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT TECHNOLOGY. This means members would go to trade shows and visit companies and actually STUDY what the "state of the art" is and not just act on ignorance and prejudices.
Here's two web pages showing two approaches to getting a manned observation/attack plane with sensors over the Israeli/Lebanon border to target Hezbollah rockets instantly:
Modifying a Cessna like Vann's L-19/O-1 Bird Dog (less to work with but cheaper)
www.geocities.com/usarmyaviationdigest/grasshoppersmustreturn.htm
Modifying a Crop-Duster with sensors, armor, armament (can immediately attack, too)
www.combatreform.org/killerbees3.htm
(scroll down to nearly bottom for AY-65 Vigilante II)
Plus, having Aerostat blimps with sensors could enable as soon as a rocket team or firing signature is detected, the manned observation/attack plane to launch a missile if its within range to take them out (Armed Crop Duster option).
The best thing America could do to help the Israelis defeat the rockets would be to buy them some O/A attack planes and Aerostats that they can afford to run 24/7/365. Israeli AH-64 attack helicopters are simply too expensive and cannot fly continuously overhead like fixed-wing O/A aircraft can as former DoD Director of Air Warfare, Chuck Myers [cmyersaero@aol.com] calls: "Maneuver Air Support by COntinuous Overhead Presence". Relying on F-16s on strip alert at air bases rearward even as fast as they are takes too long.
Another example, the U.S. Army's anti-rocket and mortar laser system prototype should be sent to northern Israel to help swat down Hezbollah rockets, but YOU HAVE TO KNOW SUCH THINGS EXIST TO REQUEST THEM. As long as infantry/SF officer narcissists ruin ehh run the U.S. Army and not the "spaceballs weenies", things like anti-rocket/missile/mortar lasers will collect dust. This is why we need a NLB-SC that would fight for the needed weapons and equipment and get them by a separate budget not competing with the narrow-minded narcissists.
Huntsville (AL) Times July 22, 2006Laser That Could Stop Rockets Sits In Army Storage
Budget cuts halt part of missile defense program
By Shelby G. Spires, Times Aerospace Writer
A few U.S. Army vehicles, generators and a very precise laser now sitting in a storage building in the New Mexico desert could some day become a missile shield that would blast small rockets out of the sky - rockets just like the ones pounding Israeli settlements near Lebanon.
Wartime needs and a lack of money drove Army leaders to halt test and development on the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser, or MTHEL, program in late 2004, effectively canceling the missile defense program developed by the U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense Command in Huntsville.
"The Army has "no official requirement for (MTHEL)" or budget authority, and without that I can't proceed on any kind of real meaningful work" on the program, said Scott McPheeters, Army acting product manager for directed energy applications on Redstone Arsenal.
[EDITOR: "Official requirement" how many damn missiles and rockets have to strike U.S. Soldiers is it going to take? Does HQDA need a "burning bush" experience from the Almighty?]
But the laser weapon works. "It's highly effective and accurate. It can hit a target or a spot the size of a quarter at five miles away," McPheeters said.
It's a program defense experts think could protect American troops and their allies from rockets, artillery shells, mortar rounds and possibly cruise missiles or other types of guided ordnance.
"Normally, I'm highly skeptical about missile defense and some of its testing, but this seems to be a pretty ingenious type of defensive system that the Army might want to rethink and continue work on," said Chris Hellman, a missile defense expert with the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation in Washington.
The Pentagon spent about $300 million developing the MTHEL system from 1996 through early 2002, and would need to invest another $350 million to complete the work and build prototype vehicles, McPheeters said.
Although the exact details are secret, McPheeters said the laser causes a warhead to super-heat, blowing itself up in a few seconds.
The laser, invisible to the naked eye, uses a deuterium and fluoride chemical process to generate the high-energy beam.
It showed enough promise during tests in the late 1990s for the Pentagon to set up a series of summer 2000 flight engagements that shot down Russian-built Katyusha rockets, artillery shells and mortar rounds in flight.
The laser equipment, called "directed energy" applications by Army and defense engineers, now sits in storage at the White Sands Missile Range.
The system has shot down a number of targets, including 20 mortar rounds, 28 Katyusha rockets, five artillery shells and more, McPheeters said at his Redstone Arsenal office in an interview Friday.
Originally Russian in origin, the name Katyusha refers to a family of simple-to-use Soviet-era rockets that can range from two-inch diameter rockets to those about a foot wide, McPheeters said.
There is some interest in the laser program now, but there is no official interest yet in reviving it, he said.
Settlements on Israel's southern border near Gaza and in the north near Lebanon have been exposed to a hail of rocket fire from Hamas and Hezbollah.
Hellman said the mortar and rocket attacks on Israel have "very little military impact, but a huge terrorism impact."
"You don't want your civilian population terrorized. That's what governments are in place to do, protect the populace," Hellman said in a phone interview.
"These Russian rockets and attacks now falling on Israelis sort of bring back to mind the (World War II) London Blitz and V-2 attacks that really struck terror into the civilians," he said. "It did nothing much in the way of direct damage against the military, but the attacks tied up resources and scared the population."
McPheeters said the MTHEL technology could be used to protect American troops in war zones from roadside bombs and rockets and mortar rounds.
"It's not just an Israeli problem. These things have been used against (the U.S.) military all over the world for the last 50 or so years," McPheeters said. "The Vietnamese used them against us, terrorists have used them and now they are a problem" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The laser concept can be traced back to Redstone work begun in the late 1960s, but McPheeters said the current MTHEL program began in 1992. "I didn't develop this concept; it was already known," he said. "We've just put it to use."
If the program is left in limbo too long, McPheeters said, the expertise built up over the past 15 years could evaporate over the next year. "We can last another six or nine months, and then people will start to drift away and find other work" on other research projects.
There's no money in the budget to train new engineers for the project if it is resurrected later, McPheeters said.
"Reality is that the Army has other priorities and we all have to work within those," he said. "The infantry units now deployed in the war on terror have to be supported, and that means a lot of funds are needed for that."
The NLB-SC would see to it that they are the "Subject Matter Experts" (SMEs) insuring the best military know-how is applied not the narrow-minded parameters of conventional and unconventional force narcissists protecting egoclub turf. In the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran, both are trying to BURROW underground to evade detection and firepower/maneuver attacks; ie; the THE THREAT FROM BELOW:
www.combatreform.org/thethreatfrombelow.htm
The Vietnamese long ago realized they needed to use a 3rd dimension--underground locations-----to counter our 3rd dimension of using the air----to absorb our small-scale use of bombs, rockets and artillery. Glick is right on the mark with why the IDF is just doing small scale ground operations in the south, THEY ARE INVESTIGATING HEZ'S BURROWING METHODS. The IDF is the smartest and most adaptive Army in the world, no one thinks faster on the feet than they. The NLB-SC would follow their example and be on the cutting edge of developments to insure U.S. forces can defeat underground enemies. A few bunker-busting bombs from handfuls of sexy fighter-bombers isn't going to get the job done as events in Lebanon prove.
1. We need to develop some kind of seismic sensor, ground radar etc. that can locate underground bunkers, caves, tunnels ASAP.
2. We need to develop a LIQUID stable explosive that can be piped into the ground and seep very deep before being detonated to collapse tunnels/bunkers. Ammonium nitrate liquid and diesel fuel liquids may be the solution; these are used in the U.S. iron ore mining industry.
3. Israel should contact the U.S. about buying a half-squadron of 6 x B-52s to be able to on call deliver 80K of earth-penetrating "iron" bombs to locations to collapse entire tunnel networks. If U.S. will not help, then IAF should consider getting 4 x C-17s or 747s and converting them into heavy bombers to smash underground complexes. NLB-SC should work with USAF B-1/B-52 communities to develop the TTP for tunnel busting large areas after maneuver forces have located and marked where the "Arc Light" missions are to strike.
Once rebels in bunkers and tunnels are smashed, they will come out to the top like cockroaches and could then surrender or be gunned down by waiting ground forces and air strikes.
What we've outlined above is the best non-nuclear solution to forces that burrow themselves deep underground in order to ensconce themselves on that land for proximity's sake (HEZ rocket launching positions into Israel) or to hide secret labs (Iran's nuclear program).
In fact, let's talk about whose failure to adapt has led to this construction of the Hezie-B "bogeyman".
The USMC's failure to adapt after getting their asses kicked by Hezzi-B in 1983 and turning tail and running is what's lead to this whole Hezzi-B-are-great-fighters BS. Anyone who has NOTHING TO LIVE FOR and is suicidal has an "edge" over those of us who want to live. Don't get me wrong, I believe in God and the whole Jesus Christ as-mankind's-savior-dying-in-our-place-we-get-amnesty package deal. But clearly Islam is total BS and if there ain't no life hereafter (aka I'm wrong) the following condemnation by Dalton Trumbo applies to Hezzi-B's misbehavior:
"Just say mister I'm sorry I got no time to die I'm too busy" and then turn and run like hell. If they say "coward" why don't pay any attention because it's your job to live not to die. If they talk about "dying for principles that are bigger than life" you say: "mister you're a liar. Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about lying in the ground and rotting? What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead? Because when you're dead mister it's all over. It's the end. You're less than a dog less than a rat less than a bee or an ant less than a white maggot crawling around on a dungheap. You're dead mister and you died for nothing.You're dead mister.
Dead."
From "Johnny Got His Gun", Chapter X, copyright 1939 (c) 1959 by Dalton Trumbo
You can think/say, "we are white boy Judeo-Christians with no business being in Arab/Islam/brown-skin Lebanon" AKA we shouldn't have had marines there in first place.
That misses the point.
A HIGH QUALITY MILITARY FORCE CAN PREVAIL NO MATTER WHERE ITS SENT BECAUSE ITS READY AND IT ADAPTS.
The Reagen administration should have yanked the dumbass marines in 1983 and sent the U.S. Army Airborne and Mechanized forces into Lebanon and kill/captured every Hezzi-B clown as a "learning event" that if they fuck with the U.S. they will get their "Dalton Trumbo moment". The NLB-SC will be able to give those resisting them a "Dalton Trumbo moment", too---but without creating folks to resist them in the first place.
So when we refuse to stand up to bullies who want to die, we only ask for it to come back later in spades. We need an adaptive, high-quality U.S. military that fights and LIVES, that vanquishes those and their ideas who want to embrace death instead of life. We want to live like Dalton Trumbo says but not at anyone else's gunpoint that we have to believe in their fucking BS allah-or-else crap---or anyone's religious crap for that matter.
For 6 years, Israel has been peace-loving and honorable to Hezie-B and not occupied south Lebanon. Some may say they've been doing dirty tricks. Hezie-B has not been all-innocent; its been talking shit "narrative" saying Israel chickened out by withdrawing, and recruits have been flocking to be a Hezie-B suicide-monger.
If Israel did nothing after its Soldiers were kidnapped, that Israel-is-weak "narrative" would be drawing more recruits than the current Hezie-Bs-are-rock-stars BS. Rock stars also DIE YOUNG, don't they? Especially after the Israeli Army invades them and starts killing them.
You could say the IDF invincibility image has been damaged. Well, it was the first few days of Yom Kippur in 1973. Then the IDF adapted, encircled the Egyptians and annihilated them because they are smart, HUMBLE and adapt. Image earned and restored. I see IDF encircling Hezie-B now as we speak. We'll see how "popular" and "sexy" being a DEAD "Islamic rock star" is in the coming weeks, months and years.
There comes a time when you have to fight, and during that fight take the measure of your enemy; guesstimates can only do so much and most often they are wrong. For the IDF to have a reputation of being unbeatable like a prize fighter/heavyweight champ they have to enter the ring and prove it from time to time. Now is one of those times.
Our World: Seeing the war in its true colors
Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST
July 25, 2006
Today U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will meet with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The press reports leading up to their meeting were full of details about how European armies wish to send their forces to Lebanon. The reports also noted that Israel will be expected to surrender the Shaba Farms on Mount Dov to Lebanon in exchange for promises of security.
For their part, Israeli leaders from Olmert to Defense Minister Amir Peretz to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have been demonstrating a disturbing lack of resolve. Their statements expose a consistent watering down of the goal of the IDF's mission in Lebanon - from destroying Hizbullah as a fighting force to weakening it as a fighting force and "paving the way for a diplomatic settlement" that will apparently include Hizbullah.
On the other hand, other voices make clear that despite the best wishes of the government and the Israeli left-wing intelligentsia, it is far from clear that the IDF will end its operations without victory achieved.
For instance, writing in The Sunday Times, former Conservative MP Michael Portillo told his British countrymen that their hostility for Israel and the U.S. aside, "The bloody truth is that Israel's war is our war." Portillo went on to argue that given the threat that Iran and Hizbullah pose to Britain itself, "for us to turn against Israel and America would be perverse and potentially suicidal."
STRENGTHENING the view that opposition to war against Iran and its proxies is suicidal, it was reported Sunday that Bulgarian border guards along their border with Romania had intercepted a British truck filled with radioactive materials for building a so-called dirty bomb. The components, which included dangerous quantities of radioactive caesium 137 and americium-beryllium, were stored in 10 lead-lined boxes addressed to the Iranian Ministry of Defense.
According to the Daily Mail, this was the second time in less than a year that a British shipment of nuclear materials had been stopped by Bulgarian border guards. Last August, Bulgaria stopped a shipment of zirconium silicate, which can be used as a component of a nuclear warhead, at its border with Turkey en route to Iran.
THE CURRENT campaign in northern Israel and Lebanon has brought into sharp focus the major pathologies and strengths of the West in fighting the Iranian-led jihadist axis. The British government's push for a cease-fire, together with the enthusiasm of the UN and France for sending their own troops to Lebanon to protect the Lebanese from the "disproportionate" Israelis; the demand of Israel's radical Left that a deal be made with Syria; and the demands of leftist ideologues in the U.S. that an artificial deadline be set for the conclusion of Israel's operations in Lebanon all point to a similar pathology.
As a group, the ideological Left rejects the notion of victory in war for Western forces (although it is fine for jihadists); rejects the notion that there are enemies that are impossible to appease; and specifically rejects the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself against its enemies, let alone vanquish its foes.
LET US BE clear. The European foreign ministers and UN envoys who are tripping over one another on their way to Jerusalem are the same European foreign ministers and UN officials who brought about the misguided American decision to throw out 27 years of US practice and officially engage the mullahs in Teheran.
That is, the same European governments now jockeying for a place in an international force that will protect Hizbullah from destruction are the ones who have been stymieing American attempts to take concerted action against Iran's nuclear weapons programs for the past three years.
This is the pathology of the West. For if one takes the ideology of appeasing unappeasable foes to its logical conclusion, appeasing states will eventually join forces with their enemies against themselves, or, as Portillo put it, they will become suicidal.
AND SO, Britain's Department of Trade and Industry can give export licenses to dirty bomb components en route to Iran. And so American columnists named Cohen can tell the world that Israel's existence is a mistake. And so, Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, can refuse to acknowledge that Hizbullah is an Iranian-run terrorist organization dedicated to Islamic world domination even as its supporters throughout Europe hold mass demonstrations where they hold signs calling for Europe's destruction at the hands of Hizbullah and Iran in the name of Islam.
And so Yossi Beilin can say that Israel doesn't need to worry about the repercussions of standing down while a fifth of its population sits in bomb shelters, because Hizbullah is just a measly terrorist organization that poses no real threat to the country.
On the other hand, events of the past two weeks have also shown some of the West's greatest strengths in fighting the war so many of its powerful citizens and statesmen refuse to acknowledge.
First of all, the IDF has discarded its dangerous delusions that it will be possible to win this war by remote control. Today it fights like an army that knows it is both at war, and at war with an enemy that needs to be destroyed, whatever the price may be.
SEVERAL supporters of Israel were quick to write off the IDF in the wake of unsupported statements by Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz and his generals last week, in which they announced - based perhaps on the tonnage of ordnance IAF jets dropped on Lebanon - that Israel had destroyed up to fifty percent of Hizbullah's capacities.
"Israel is losing this war," these commentators moaned, not recognizing that the IDF is capable of learning from its mistakes. "Israel's intelligence services fell asleep on their watch," it was said.
But these eagerly defeatist voices do not recognize that the failure was not one of intelligence, but of politics. Mesmerized by the dovish ideologies propounded by three consecutive governments, it took the General Staff a week to understand that Israel was at war.
BUT NOW they know. And now the IDF is fighting well, boldly and effectively on the ground. Halutz initiated a rolling mobilization of the reserves, and the IAF has pulled back to its proper supportive role.
As well, it is impossible not to recognize the Bush administration's centrality in the current campaign. Not only is the US rearming the IAF with bunker buster bombs, it is making certain that its own public and the international community recognize that what is at stake here is far greater than the well-being of Israel's citizens.
As President George W. Bush has made clear, this is not just Israel's war. This is a campaign of the Iranian-led axis of jihad that seeks to dominate the entire free world. And echoing Bush are voices like Portillo's that are heard from Beirut to Sydney.
Moreover, by rising to the challenge Hizbullah, Syria and Iran have placed before it, the entire Israeli public is setting an example for its army, its government and the world to follow. Families in the North are stoically accepting the around-the-clock bombardments and standing strong in their demand for victory. Families in the rest of the country are opening their homes to thousands of refugees from Haifa and Nahariya and Tiberias.
As a friend put it the other day, "Halutz has no choice but to win. Israel is a country with five million chiefs of staff and they are all breathing down his neck."
FINALLY, the campaign in Lebanon is indeed the opening salvo of Iran's war against the free world. But this works both ways.
Iran and Hizbullah believe that the ferocity of the attacks against Israel will deter us all from taking action against Iran's nuclear facilities. But by giving the West the opportunity to fight it first in Lebanon, Teheran is providing the US, Israel and others with critical intelligence about its own installations. The subterranean bunkers in south Lebanon that IDF ground forces are now conquering were built by Iranian Revolutionary Guards units and designed by Iranian engineers - the same forces that conceived and constructed Iran's nuclear installations.
IN 1982, when Israel destroyed the Syrian Soviet-made and trained air force in Lebanon, it was able to provide the U.S. with critical information about the Soviet Air Force and its air defense systems that enabled the U.S. to outstrip both in a manner that all but sealed the fate of the evil empire. Today, by fighting Iran's proxy, Hizbullah, Israel is amassing information that will be critical for planning a successful strike against Iran's nuclear installations.
It is impossible to know what will actually be discussed today as Olmert meets with Rice. But it must be hoped that now that the U.S., Israel and other Western states are acknowledging the true nature of the war against Israel, they will abandon their suicidal demons and use this campaign as a stepping stone for neutralizing its chief instigator: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
www.jcpa.org/brief/brief006-2.htm
A Strategic Assessment of the Hizballah Warby Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror and Dan Diker
Jerusalem Issue Brief
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
July 19, 2006 ( Vol. 6, No. 2 )Israel's current military operations to uproot Hizballah and to destroy it as a formidable military and terror organization is not merely an operation against another determined terror group like Hamas in Gaza. Hizballah has a disciplined, well-trained army with sophisticated weaponry, backed directly by Syria and Iran.
A high-level Iranian official recently emphasized to Western diplomats in London Hizballah's importance to Iran: 'Hizballah is one of the pillars of our security strategy, and forms Iran's first line of defense against Israel.'
Walid Joumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, shares this perspective: 'The war is no longer Lebanon's... it is an Iranian war. Iran is telling the United States: You want to fight me in the Gulf and destroy my nuclear program? I will hit you at home, in Israel.'
Iran's Revolutionary Guards provide the majority of Hizballah's weaponry, financing, instruction, and strategic command and control. Hizballah's short- and medium- range missiles are manufactured in Iran and exported to Lebanon via the Damascus International Airport. Iranian officers from the Revolutionary Guards are on the ground in Lebanon, playing active roles in supervising terror actions and training Hizballah operatives to launch rockets against Israel. Hizballah is nothing less than an extension of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Iran has taken a strategic decision to activate Hizballah terror against Israel in order to preclude the United States and its Western allies from stopping Iran's nuclear development program.
The only way to defeat an insurgency is to first isolate it from external reinforcement. Israel is seeking to cut off Hizballah from Syria and Iran and isolate it from the rest of Lebanon. Israel must carry out its current military operation against Hizballah until it is fully neutralized and disarmed. It would be nothing short of catastrophic for both Israel and the international community if diplomatic efforts result in Israel being forced to end its military operation prematurely.
Hizballah Has No Red Lines
The current war being waged against Israel by Hizballah and its Syrian and Iranian patrons is in large part the result of Israel's long-time, hands-off policy with regard to the Lebanon-based fundamentalist terror group.
Since Israel's overnight unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Hizballah built itself into a deterrent military force possessing 13,000 to 15,000 short- and medium-range missiles. The terror organization exploited Israel's political preference to maintain the relative quiet for the residents of its northern border communities instead of uprooting the Hizballah terror infrastructure and risking war. As a result of Israel's skittishness to confront it, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah assessed that he could determine when to launch hostilities against Israel completely on Hizballah's terms.
Hizballah -- the 'Party of God' -- has no red lines. Any strategic strike that it can execute, it will execute, limited only by its ability and the conditions permitting it to carry out an attack at any particular moment. In that regard, Hassan Nasrallah lives in his own bubble in which he judges democratic Israel the same way he judges the Lebanese or those in Hizballah. Nasrallah recently called Israeli resolve 'weaker than a spider's web.'
Nasrallah's decision to kidnap two Israeli soldiers on July 12 was made partly in reaction to Hamas' kidnapping at the Israel-Gaza border of Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Nasrallah said in a speech shortly after the terror attack and kidnapping of the two Israeli army reservists that he wished to negotiate an exchange for Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese terrorist, and other 'prisoners and detainees held by Israel.' Israeli intelligence assessed that Nasrallah meant he would also negotiate for Palestinians as well, and thereby assume a leading role on the Palestinian issue as well, even ahead of Hamas.
Israel's Response
According to Israeli intelligence assessments, Hizballah, Syria, and Iran were taken by surprise by the sheer magnitude and intensity of Israel's response to the missile attacks and kidnapping.
Nasrallah did not understand what causes a democratic country to act harshly when its red lines are crossed and its citizens are threatened, as Israelis are today. Nasrallah never thought that as a result of kidnapping two Soldiers, Israel would launch such a far-reaching counter-offensive. He failed to understand that Israel has gone to war because Hizballah has launched a strategic attack against it, and that Israel views the kidnappings as part of a much greater threat.
Israel's current military operations to uproot Hizballah and to destroy it as a formidable military and terror organization is not merely an operation against another determined terror group like Hamas in Gaza. Hizballah has a disciplined, well-trained army with sophisticated weaponry, backed directly by Syria and Iran.
Iran's Role
According to a May 11, 2006, Asharq Al-Awsat report, a high-level Iranian official who held a closed meeting with a small group of Western diplomats in London emphasized Hizballah's importance to Iran: 'Hizballah is one of the pillars of our security strategy, and forms Iran's first line of defense against Israel. We reject [the claim] that it must be disarmed.'
Walid Joumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader, shares this perspective: 'The war is no longer Lebanon's... it is an Iranian war. Iran is telling the United States: You want to fight me in the Gulf and destroy my nuclear program? I will hit you at home, in Israel.'
Hizballah is not an independent actor. Iran's Revolutionary Guards provide the majority of Hizballah's weaponry, financing, instruction, and strategic command and control. Most of Hizballah's terrorist weaponry, particularly short- and medium- range missiles -- including the Zalzal missile that can reach as far as Tel Aviv, 150 kilometers from Israel's northern border -- are manufactured in Iran and exported to Lebanon via the Damascus International Airport. Weaponry and materiel are then openly transported by truck convoys to Hizbullah in Lebanon.
According Israeli intelligence, Iranian officers from the Revolutionary Guards are on the ground in Lebanon, playing active roles in supervising terror actions and training Hizballah operatives to launch rockets against Israel. On July 14, Hizbullah fired an Iranian copy of a Chinese C-802 Kowthar missile at an Israeli warship, killing four crew members. These rockets have been in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' arsenal for four or five years.
Some of Hizballah's weaponry is manufactured by Syria and is provided to the terror organization at the direct order of President Bashar Assad. The rockets in the first barrage that struck the northern city of Haifa on July 16, killing eight Israelis, were manufactured and supplied by Syria. Other medium-range Syrian and Iranian missiles are also in Hizballah's stockpile but have yet to be used against Israel.
Dimensions of the Conflict
On a macro level, there are three dimensions to the current war against Hizballah:
The first dimension is Hizballah's ability as a highly-disciplined terror force with approximately 13,000 rockets that have wreaked havoc on hundreds of thousands of Israelis in northern Israel. Additionally, its ground forces were previously deployed right up to the Israeli-Lebanese border, oftentimes within rifle range of public buildings in Israeli towns and villages. In this regard, it is abundantly clear that Israel cannot allow Hizballah to return to its former positions in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese army must be deployed to ensure that southern Lebanon remains free of Hizballah control.
Second, Hizballah cannot be allowed to be the driving force that decides, whenever it so chooses, together with its Syrian and Iranian patrons, to inflame the Middle East. In this sense, Israel's current war in Lebanon is not punitive; it is strategic. The Israeli air force has struck the main arteries for the transfer of weapons to Hizballah from Syria and Iran through Beirut International Airport, all Lebanese seaports, and across the Beirut-Damascus highway from the east, which has served as one of Hizballah's main lines of weapons transport. During the present hostilities, Syria has continued to attempt to resupply Hizballah in the Bekaa Valley, as well. In bombing
Hizballah's Daheyh stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Israel is seeking to separate it from Hizballah forces further south. Thus, Hizballah is being cut off from Syria and Iran and isolated from the rest of Lebanon.
Hizballah has waged an insurgency against Israel from the mini-state it has created inside of Lebanon. The only way to defeat an insurgency is to first isolate it from external reinforcement. That is what Israel is seeking to do.
In a second phase, the insurgency must be disarmed. In this regard, the international community must enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1559 that imposes the obligations of state sovereignty and responsibility on Lebanon to force the Hizballah to disarm, as even French President Jacques Chirac has demanded.
The third and broader dimension of the escalating conflict is that Hizballah is nothing less than an extension of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iran has taken a strategic decision to activate Hizballah terror against Israel in order to preclude the United States and its Western allies from stopping Iran's nuclear development program. The uprooting of Hizballah's military capacity will neutralize one of Iran's most dangerous and valuable deterrent threats against any country that attempts to act against Tehran's nuclear weapons program.
The Stakes for Israel and the West
Israel must carry out its current military operation against Hizballah until it is fully neutralized, disarmed, and unable to serve as Iran's long 'arm' that can bring terror upon Israel and destabilize the Middle East region at will. The current Israeli victims of Hizballah terror will not have sacrificed their lives in vain if Israel conducts its war to an uncompromising victory. However, if Hizballah is allowed to remain a military force in Lebanon or even an armed presence in southern Lebanon, Israel will have indeed sacrificed its soldiers and citizens in vain, and will also suffer similar attacks in the future.
Furthermore, it is a primary interest of the international community that Hizballah be fully neutralized as a military extension of Iran. Only a full victory against Hizballah will allow the possibility for Lebanon to emerge as a free and democratic country. This is also in line with the Bush Administration's vision of helping the peoples of the Middle East to free themselves of tyrannical and fundamentalist elements and prevent the threat to the region of a nuclear Iran. This underscores the regional and international importance of Israel's current mission.
Any Syrian or Iranian forces or advisors in Lebanon are legitimate targets for Israel. Israel must send a clear message to Bashar Assad that it will not accept any Syrian interference in Lebanon. However, while Israel should not open up a front against Syria at this juncture, if Syrian forces show any type of movement, Israel must be ready to engage them.
The duration of the current war depends on Israel, Lebanon, and the international community. If the Lebanese realize that with every passing day the accumulating losses are taking too great a toll, if the international community continues to allow Israel to uproot Hizballah without pressuring Israel for a cease-fire, and if the UN stays out of the fray, the war does not have to last very long. But if Israel is pressured to stop its operations, this acute conflict will indeed last a long time.
This is a war in which Israel is acting primarily through its air force, which is a new approach. However, if Israel's air force fails to stop Hizballah rocket assaults, Israel may be forced to send in substantial ground forces to control the areas from which rockets are being launched. This real possibility would have far-reaching implications in terms of potential losses for the IDF and for the citizens of Lebanon.
No less significant is Israel's readiness to absorb damage to its home front. This requires a much higher degree of national resilience than that of the first Iraq war when Saddam Hussein fired 39 Scud missiles at Israeli cities. This time there is much more damage and loss of life on the home front, but Israel is showing great fortitude and national will.
Iran's Ongoing War Against the West
Even if Israel is successful in destroying the Hizballah infrastructure, Iran will not be deterred in its ongoing war against the West, for Hizballah's attacks on Israel represent Iran's strategic decision to launch what it sees as a counter-offensive against the West following America's post 9/11 attacks on the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Echoing Iran's perspective, the conservative daily Jomhour-e Eslami, affiliated with the Islamic seminaries of Qom, reiterated in a July 17 editorial the charge that 'the conspiracy of bringing down the Twin Towers in New York with one plane, which was totally dubious, was a pretext for occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, and for [providing] unqualified support to the Zionist regime in its crimes against Palestine.' The Iranian editorial noted that 'America's collaboration with the Zionists in murdering the Palestinian people, destroying Lebanon, and [hurling] baseless accusations against Iran [regarding] nuclear activity -- which is now coming to a head -- is a new phase in America's crusade against the Muslims. This is exactly the point at which the leadership of the Islamic nation must play a role.'
This underscores the assessment that if Hizballah is neutralized in the current conflict, Iran will have lost a major asset in its ongoing struggle against the West.
The Diplomatic Front
In order to achieve its war objectives, Israel must succeed on the diplomatic front in addition to the battlefield. It would be nothing short of catastrophic for both Israel and the international community if diplomatic efforts result in Israel being forced to end its military operation prematurely. Furthermore, it is incumbent on the international community, which last year demanded that the Syrian army withdraw from Lebanon, to provide the necessary assistance to Lebanon that will ensure that Hizballah is disbanded as a military force, and this must be the highest international priority.
-- Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, Program Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs, is former commander of the IDF's National Defense College and the IDF Staff and Command College. He is also the former head of the IDF's research and assessment division, with special responsibility for preparing the National Intelligence Assessment. In addition, he served as the military secretary of the Minister of Defense.
-- Dan Diker is a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and heads its Defensible Borders Initiative. He also serves as Knesset correspondent and analyst for the Israel Broadcasting Authority's English News.
Notes 1. www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3274616,00.html
2. Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD120406
3. Anton La Guardia, 'Israel Fights West's Cause Against Radical Islam,' Telegraph (UK), July 17, 2006.
4. See Uzi Rubin, 'The Global Range of Iran's Ballistic Missile Program,' Jerusalem Issue Brief 5-26, http://jcpa.org/brief/brief005-26.htm
5. An Iranian military source close to the Revolutionary Guards leadership revealed to the London Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat details concerning Iran's role in training and arming Hizbullah. The source said that 'in Lebanon, there are 70 trainers, experts, and technicians, as well as 60 Faylaq Quds intelligence agents, who assist the Hizballah missile unit and its local leadership. In addition, there is a secret Revolutionary Guards unit, consisting of 20 officers, who use advanced means to track the movement of Israeli forces in the field, and select targets in Israel for the operation commanders.
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP120706
6. MEMRI, July 17, 2006, http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?
7. MEMRI, http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD120806
Source: www.jcpa.org/brief/brief006-2.htm
United Nations Resolution 1559, calls for the disarming of Hezbollah and the deployment of the Lebanese Army to southern Lebanon. If we believe in the nation-state model for civilization, its time to act like it, not long to have more nation-state misbehavior (World Wars) which has caused the people to distrust governments starting in the middle part of the 20th century. Now is a time for nation-state restraint and discipline to fathom complex situations (Half the Arab world is Sunni and don't want Shia Iran through Hamas and Hezbollah taking over them) and come at an exact solution based on external facts not a broad brush based on internal prejudices (Straussian Neocons).
Suicidal Islamic Mufsidoon in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine: have nothing to LIVE for?
Most people in the west realize that the LEADERS of sub-national terrorist groups are immoral and not following even Islam correctly much less common human decency. Yet, the secular U.S. government refuses to acknowledge this and encourage followers of Islam to not be deceived and follow these false Islamics who lead terror organizations. Making things worse, U.S. forces refer to sub-national terrorists using their own POSITIVE religious labels, so every time we condemn them as a "Jihadi" we are actually inadvertently praising them and making them seem legitimate. We are not saying to ever call ANYTHING unless they deserve the label. If Americans are occupying Iraq, which they are, we call-a-spade-a-spade. Occupying is actually a neutral word but its only negative if you never plan on leaving and the majority of the populace there don't want you there. We must never start lying and being dishonest and calling anyone or anything derogatory names if the truth does not support it. However, we should also not call people who violate Islam by creating their own following of violence, killing and mutilating bodies, nice Islamic names. They don't deserve these names and we should not be calling them the following:
False Islamic Terrorist Labels we should NOT use
a. Their history of violent acts: "Jihad" = Holy War
b. Terrorist Instigators like Bin Laden "Mujihadeen" = Holy Religious, Warrior
c. Excuse for doing terrorist acts "infidel" = Un-believer worthy of being murdered
d. Dying during violent acts "shahiddin" = Martyr
e. Their reward for violence "paradise, 72 virgins" = Alleged sexual pleasure in afterlife
We know most suicide bombers blow themselves up due to peer pressure. There is a chance that if we stopped using positive Islamic words and used the more accurate negative Islamic words that a WARNING could be sent out to those thinking about blowing themselves up that they are violating Islam and to think twice.
Since the Bush administration and the rest of the U.S. government lacks the professional understanding that human WAR is actually a conflict of whose IDEAS will dominate, they are oblivious to this "war of words" and use BS secularism as an excuse to not delve into the religious arena which then surrenders that plane to the enemy without a fight. We cannot surrender the moral high ground to an enemy that is IMMORAL. We therefore propose that Congress make into law, that those who attack America (an act of war) while claiming to be following Islam will not be afforded positive religious name references. The words we will use from here on will be:
True Islamic Terrorist Labels we should use
a. Their history of violent acts: "Hirabah" = Un-Holy War against innocent civilians
b. Terrorist Instigators like Bin Laden "mufsiduun" = corruptors and evildoers
c. Those that do terrorist acts "irhabist = terrorist
d. Dying during violent acts "murtadd" = apostasy against Allah
e. Their reward for violence "Jahannam" = Eternal Hellfire
Jim Guirard writes:
We need truth-in-language and truth-in-Islam to win the vital "war of words" and "hearts, minds and souls" aspects -- namely, the vital spiritual and intellectual aspects -- of the broader war on false Islamic terrorists. The al Queda-style suicide mass murder and mayhem must be stopped at the thought stage before it proceeds any farther. As you can see from the essay displayed below, one of the major weapons in our arsenal we are not using to advantage is the language itself -- which, in our opinion, is currently being corrupted in very dangerous ways by Osama bin Laden's carefully constructed lexicon of self-sanctification. As the recently retired chief of the National Counter-terrorism Center (NCTC), John Brennan, has said in a Washington Post op-ed column:
Bin Laden has also insidiously convinced us to use terminology that lends legitimacy to his activities. He has hijacked the term "Jihad" to such an extent that US and other Western officials regularly use the terms "Jihadist" and "terrorist" interchangeably. In doing so, they unwittingly transfer the religious legitimacy inherent in the concept of Jihad to murderous acts that are anything but holy." In this connection, please reflect on the major parallels drawn by my essay between UBL's language of so-called "Jihadi martyrdom" and the Soviets' patently deceitful Cold War language of "people's democracy" and "progressive fronts" and even of the pseudo-religious scam of "Liberation Theology." (Note the powerful quote from Pat Moynihan re: "semantic infiltration" about half-way through the text.)
Our problem today is a language which paints a highly seductive but cynically false picture of "Jihad" (Holy War) by "mujahiddin" (holy warriors) and "shahiddin" or "shuhada" (martyrs) destined for Paradise as a proper reward for killing us alleged "infidels." This is bad enough. But it becomes multiple times worse when these are the same words which so many of us tend to use, as well -- thus tending to confirm their accuracy and validity in a way which relegates America and the West to the role planned for us by al Qaeda, the role of "The Great Satan." For who, indeed, other than the Great Satan would go about killing a bunch of holy guys (saintly Jihadi guys) on their way to Paradise?
Presented to NORTHCOM Conference on Militant Extremism -- Jan 11-12, 2006____________________________________
TrueSpeak Institute
Jim Guirard, President
1129 Cameron Road
Alexandria, Virginia 22308
(703) 768-0957
Justcauses@aol.comAl Qaeda's Satanic War Against Society-"Hirabah" Is Its Name
From its inception in the form of unauthorized and un-Islamic fatwas (religious edicts) in 1996 and 1998, Osama bin Laden's so-called "Jihad Against America and the West" is nothing but a pseudo-Islamic scam. It is no more "holy" or "godly" than the genocidal haters and killers who concocted and are fomenting it.
As Islamic Law scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl of UCLA explains in his highly acclaimed new book, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, these radicals "entirely ignore the Qur'anic teaching that the act of destroying or spreading ruin on this earth is one of the gravest sins possible - fasad fi al-ard, which means to corrupt the earth by destroying the beauty of creation. This is considered an ultimate act of blasphemy against God. Those who corrupt the earth by destroying lives, property and nature are designated as mufsiduun (corruptors and evildoers) who, in effect, wage war against God by dismantling the very fabric of existence... the crime is called Hirabah (waging war against society)."
This Hirabah's (this unholy war's) more appropriate name is The Al Qaeda Apostasy -- a perversion of authentic Islam which (in the name of Allah, of course) threatens to turn that religion into nothing but a perpetual killing machine of all Christians, all Jews and all Muslims who happen to disagree. Beneath its false labels it is a plainly satanic, cultic violation of many of the fundamental precepts of Qur'anic Islam-including such sinful transgressions and such de facto desecrations of the Qur'an as:
* Wanton killing of innocents and non-combatants, including many peaceful Muslims
* Decapitating the live and desecrating the dead bodies of perceived enemies
* Committing and enticing others to commit suicide for reasons of intimidation
* Fomenting hatred among communities, nations, religions and civilizations
* Ruthless warring against nations in which Islam is freely practiced
* Issuing and inspiring un-authorized and un-Islamic fatwas (religious edicts)
* Using some mosques as weapons depots and battle stations, while destroying others
* Forcing extremist and absolutist versions (and perversions) of Islam on Muslims, when the Qur'an clearly says that there shall be "no compulsion in religion"
* Distorting the word "infidels" to include all Christians, all Jews and many Muslims, as well-when the Qur'an calls them all "Children of the Book" (the Old Testament) and "Sons of Abraham," and calls Jesus one of Islam's five main Prophets
* Deliberate misreading, ignoring and perverting of passages of the Qur'an, the Hadith and the Islamic Jurisprudence (the Fiqh)
All of this constitutes a gigantic apostasy (or blasphemy, choose your word) against the "peaceful, compassionate, merciful and just" Allah who is repeatedly so described by the Qur'an. And, of course, the penalty for apostasy in Islam is death. Ask poor old Salman Rushdie who has been under an Iranian fatwa of death for over a decade-for allegedly mistranslating certain verses of the Prophet in his famous book, The Satanic Verses.
It is noted at this point that many authentic Muslim Scholars and Jurists -- particularly those who participated in the recent anti-terrorism summit sponsored by King Abdullah bin al-Hussein of Jordan -- have strongly condemned the excesses of "takfir" : namely, the many and uniformly baseless accusations of apostasy being leveled by al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist movements against any and all of their perceived enemies.
But the mere fact that these "takfiri" practices might be un-Islamic in their extremism, this very well-intentioned "Amman Message" should not be regarded as prohibiting truthful and provable charges of apostasy against those whose ruthless transgressions -- such as those ten listed above -- so clearly identify their godless perpetrators as the "Abd' al-Shaitan" (the Servants or Slaves of Satan) they truly are.
But, wonder of wonders, Osama bin Laden's multiple perversions of Islam -- which are a thousand times worse than Rushdie's alleged offenses -- are shielded from valid charges of apostasy by the existing halo of so-called "Jihad." While that halo is a patently false one, it is made to seem true by the fact that so many of us (its intended victims) mindlessly parrot bin Laden in calling it a holy and Godly "Jihad."
Surely, if it were something else, its harshest critics (particularly our Public Diplomacy and Psychological Operations experts on the subject) would be calling it by some other more truthful Islamic term -- particularly if that much needed name were the exact opposite of the so-called "holy" and "godly" war it is universally alleged to be. Now, more than four years after the suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001, it is high time that we discover the correct Islamic word for such sinful atrocities and proactively begin using that name -- rather than continuing to lip-sync with Osama bin Laden, at the risk of our lives and those of our children and grandchildren.
The Word Is "Hirabah"-Forbidden War Against Society
Of course, there is a word for the genocidal kind of warfare which violates all of the Qur'anic prohibitions listed above, despite our sophomoric inability to have found it by now. As confirmed above by Professor El Fadl, it is the ancient word Hirabah (pronounced hee-RAH-bah), which the Islamic Jurisprudence (the Fiqh) defines as a forbidden "war against society" -- or what in modern parlance would be called "genocidal terrorism" or "crimes against humanity." In his seminal article on Hirabah in the Fall 2001 issue of Muslim World, the renowned University of Michigan scholar of Islam, Prof. Abdul Hakim (a.k.a., Sherman Jackson), long ago confirmed this interpretation with remarkable clarity as follows:
"In the end, however, Hirabah assumes its place as an effective super-category hovering above the entire criminal law as a possible remedy to be pressed into service for the more sensational, heinous or terrifying manifestations of these and other crimes. In this capacity, Hirabah appears, again, to parallel the function of terrorism as an American legal category. Its function is not so much to define specific crimes but to provide a mechanism for heightening the scrutiny and/or level of pursuit and prosecution in certain cases of actual or potential public violence."
In sum, we may conclude that it is terror, or the spreading of fear and helplessness, that lies at the heart of Hirabah. From this perspective, Hirabah speaks to the same basic issue as does terrorism in American law. As mentioned earlier, however, Hirabah actually goes beyond the FBI definition of terrorism, inasmuch as Hirabah covers both directed and coincidental spreading of fear.... Hirabah, as it turns out, [once was and should be seen again as] the most severely punished crime in Islam, carrying mandatory criminal sanctions."
But, looking back in history, we discover that the widespread killing and pillaging of entire communities and tribes by ruthless barbarians, brigands and Crusaders gradually subsided in the Middle Ages. And the powerful Islamic word which had been used since the 10th and 11th centuries to condemn such atrocities-but which is not in the Qur'an -- gradually faded from use, as well.
Obviously, it must now be rediscovered and resuscitated. Hand-in-hand with the root word "Irhab" (Terrorism), it must become the keystone of both truth-in-language and truth-in-Islam in the war against al Qaeda-style suicide mass murder and related forms of hatred and violence now posing as "holy."
A powerful step in that rediscovery of the truthful Hirabah frame of reference can be found in the September 30, 2005 keynote address to the Association of Muslim Social Scientists by the distinguished Professor S.Abdallah Schleifer of the American University in Cairo:
"Indeed one of the good signs I promised earlier to allude to is the imperative - felt by both many Islamist as well as all traditional Muslims -- to unambiguously denounce terrorism. To make it increasingly clear in a series of declarations over the past year that nothing can justify the intentional targeting of unarmed civilians, and that what has been described by extremist Islamists as "Jihad" is in fact Hirabah, a classic Islamic legal category that can best be translated as 'terrorism' ...
In his critically important essay, "Domestic Terrorism in the Islamic Legal Tradition" - which appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Muslim World -- Dr. Sherman Jackson noted that in the classic legal literature defining Hirabah, its is the elements of intimidation, of the terroristic spreading fear and a sense of helplessness in the community, that is central."
As Dr. Schleifer explains, "Jackson quotes the 11th century Spanish Maliki jurist Ibn Abd al Barr who defines the agent of Hirabah as: "Anyone who disturbs free passage in the streets and renders them unsafe to travel, striving to spread corruption in the land by taking money, killing people or violating what God has made it unlawful to violate is guilty of Hirabah... be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim, free or slave, and whether he actually realizes his goal of taking money, or of killing or not."
And it is clear, in his extensive review of all of the classic legal sources from all of the schools of Islamic law, that the very impersonality of Hirabah, of terrorism, in which there is invariably no personal relationship between the terrorist and his victim, is what makes it more criminal than homicide ... and in the eyes of the classical jurists, it is why the terrorist deserves to be sentenced to death regardless of the status of the victim, be he or she Muslim or non-Muslim."
Looking to the future, it is only by the assertive and insistent use of this truthful term, along with four or five others which follow from it, that the false and blasphemous language of so-called "Jihadi martyrdom" (which portrays a bunch of holy guys destined for Paradise as a reward for murdering all variety of so-called "infidels") can eventually be defeated. These other essential words are as follows:
irhab (terrorism) and such derivatives as irhabi (terrorist), irhabist (terroristic), irhabism (terrorism), etc.-all of which are easy alternatives to the Jihad-Jihadi-Jihadist-Jihadism misnomers which now so thoroughly distort both the Arabic and English lexicons
mufsidoon or mufsiduun or mufsiddin (evildoers) -- the Islamic word for those who are fomenting and waging unholy Hirabah and who, therefore, cannot be either the mujahiddin (holy warriors) or the shahiddin (martyrs) they so arrogantly claim to be
Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire) -- which is authentic, Qur'anic Islam's destiny for unrelenting and unrepentant mufsidoon who will not cease their evildoing and who will, therefore, not be destined for Paradise but for Shaitan's Eternal Hellfire
tajdif (blasphemy) and/or murtadd (apostasy) -- which is what these Jahannam-bound mufsidoon are engaged in when they ruthlessly kill innocents and noncombatants, foment hatred, commit and entice others to commit suicide, condemn everyone but themselves as "infidels," etc.
khawarij (outside the religion) -- a condemnation which can apply either to individuals or to activities which are so un-Islamic, so extremist and so unrelenting as to invite charges and conviction of apostasy or blasphemy
istihlal (sin of "playing God") -- the cardinal sin of ignoring Qur'anic truths and concocting one's own self-serving perversion of Shar'ia (Islamic Law)
shaitaniyah (satanic) -- which is the fundamental character of the willful and mortally sinful Osaman Apostasy described at the beginning of this essay
Logically, now that our scholarly experts, our public diplomacy spokespersons and our national leaders know the word Hirabah and the name mufsidoon for those who are fomenting and waging this forbidden "war against society," we should be using these truthful Islamic words aggressively and without fail.
Cold War Parallels
To continue a mindless repetition of al Qaeda's preferred labels of "Jihad by mujahiddin on their way to Paradise" and to go about condemning al Qaeda sinners as "Jihadists" (holy warrior-ists) is as naïve and as self-destructive as it was when we mindlessly parroted such preposterous Soviet, Maoist and Castro-ite labels as "people's democracies" and "progressive fronts" and so-called "wars of national liberation."
Truth be known, there were no such "wars of national liberation," because no liberty was ever involved. And today, there is no so-called "Jihad," because there is neither any holiness nor any "peaceful, compassionate, merciful and just" Will of Allah of the Qur'an involved -- but only the al Qaeda Apostasy, Qur'anic Islam's punishment for which is death in this life and Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire) in the next.
As outlined above, this is reminiscent of the subtle but deadly Cold War problem identified in the 1970s and 80s by Dr. Fred Charles Ikle and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as "semantic infiltration" -- which the late Senator defined as follows:
"Simply put, semantic infiltration is the process whereby we come to adopt the language of our adversaries in describing political reality. The most totalitarian regimes in the world would call themselves 'liberation movements.' It is perfectly predictable that they should misuse words to conceal their real nature. But must we aid them in that effort by repeating those words? Worse, do we begin to influence our own perceptions by using them?"
Of course, we do! The problem is as real and as deadly dangerous today as it was then. Bin Laden and his murderous kind say "Jihad and Holy War," and we repeat these false words thousands of times over -- thus endorsing and confirming their claim to a holy and godly purpose. They say "mujahiddin" (holy warriors) and "shuhada" or "shahiddin" (martyrs) on their way to Paradise and we dutifully copy-cat those words, as well. Back in Cold War days, that sort of naiveté was called "useful idiocy" and should still be.
Recall, please, how the perfidious Soviets and their surrogates, Fidel Castro in particular, successfully co-opted the powerfully positive word "liberation" and turned it into a lovely but patently false label for adding colonies -- euphemistically known as "satellites," of course -- to the
Evil Empire
Truth be known, those bloody wars of Soviet colonial conquest (properly defined) had absolutely nothing to do with either national independence or personal liberty -- no more than today's so-called "holy wars" of al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad and their pseudo-Islamic clones have anything to do with godliness or holiness.
In addition to the words of wisdom from Professors Hakim, El Fadl and Schlieffer cited above, here are quotations from three more (of about twenty-five) distinguished scholars of Islam and of Middle Eastern affairs-with many more to come -- who are have embraced this truthful Hirabah (unholy war, "war against society") frame of reference, and sharply rejecting the false and un-Islamic language of so-called "Jihadi martyrdom:"
* PROF. AKBAR AHMED (Chair of Islamic Studies, American University) "Properly understood, this is a war of ideas within Islam -- some of them faithful to authentic Islam, but some of them clearly un-Islamic and even blasphemous toward the peaceful and compassionate Allah of the Qur'an..... As a matter of truth-in-Islam, both the ideas and the actions they produce must be called what they actually are, beginning with the fact that al Qaeda's brand of suicide mass murder and its fomenting of hatred among races, religions and cultures do not constitute godly or holy "Jihad" -- but, in fact, constitute the heinous crime and sin of unholy "Hirabah"..... In its worst excesses, particularly in the wanton killing of innocents-both non-Muslim and Muslim alike -- as a method of terrorizing the entire community, such ungodly "war against society" should be condemned as blasphemous and un-Islamic."
* DR. AKHTAR EMON (President, Arabic Language Institute Foundation) -- "Hirabah represents an Unholy War against innocent civilians. The truth stands clear from falsehood. Hirabah can never be confused as 'Jihad' (Holy War), as much as al-Qaeda would like to label their heinous acts against humanity as Jihad.... Hirabah is forbidden and sanctioned not only by the teachings of Qur'an, but also by the Bible and Torah -- all three Abrahamic faiths (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) agree on this, and so also other major faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Bahai's, and the New Age religions addressing "mind, body and soul".... TrueSpeak efforts are highly commendable in educating the world citizenry with truth-in-language and expanding the lexicon, e.g., to distinguish a good guy with a bad guy (mufsidoon), a good act with an act of blasphemy (tajdeef), etc."
* DR. ROBERT D. CRANE (former Chairman, Center for Understanding Islam, and currently working in a hospice for the dying in south Chicago): "Today there are many alienated extremists who rely on their own resort to violence in protest against perceived injustice, rather than relying on the Jihads of akbar, saghrir and kabir with the help of Allah and ecumenical cooperation in peacefully building a better world. In effect, these extremists rely on and worship themselves. They are exhibiting the most serious crime condemned in the Qur'an, which is the root of almost all the other crimes -- namely, arrogance. This leads them to commit the crime of Hirabah and to justify it in the name of Islam. There can be no greater evil and no greater sin. If there is to be a clash of civilizations, a major cause will be the muharibun [a synonym for mufsidoon] those who commit inter-civilizational Hirabah."
A Ticket to Hellfire, Not to Paradise
As these scholarly words of authentic Islam suggest, we will be missing the proverbial boat if we continue to focus so much on trying to make America look GOOD in the Muslim and Arab worlds and so little on the need to make the "mufsidoon Saddam" and the "mufsidoon Osama" (Saddam's and Osama's evildoers) look BAD in the eyes of the Arab Street and the world at large -- namely, like the sinful blasphemers against the "peaceful, compassionate, merciful and just" Allah of the Qur'an who they actually are.
Of course, this antidote to the Al Qaeda Apostasy is best delivered in Islamic religious words -- just like the seductive al Qaeda mantra is. As explained above, the latter proposes to impressionable and religiously motivated young Muslims that they "Join the Jihad, become mujahiddin and martyrs, enter into Paradise."
But imagine, please, how much more difficult it will be for al Qaeda and its murderous ilk to inspire and to sustain the suicidal zealotry of young Muslims -- or the approval of any truly devout and faithful Muslims whatever-once these genocidal irhabis come to be viewed by the Umma (the Muslim World) as mufsidoon (evildoers) engaged in Hirabah (unholy war) and in murtadd (apostasy) against Allah and, therefore, on their way to Jahannam (Eternal Hellfire), instead.
Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism
By Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and LTC Harry D. Tunnell IV
National Defense University
23 May 2006The United States must do more to communicate its message. Reflecting on Bin Ladin's success in reaching Muslim audiences, Richard Holbrooke wondered, "How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world's leading communications society?" 1
Use Precise Terms Precisely.
The answer to Mr. Holbrooke's question is an unsophisticated one: Bin Ladin speaks in a language that his Muslim listeners understand. We, on the other hand, simply do not comprehend the meaning of many words that we use to describe the enemy. American leaders misuse language to such a degree that they unintentionally wind up promoting the ideology of the groups the United States is fighting.2 We cannot win wide-spread support throughout the Muslim world if we use terms that, to them, define the behavior of our enemies as moral. Because the Global War on Terrorism-or more precisely the war against Islamic totalitarian terrorism-includes a war of ideas, leaders, journalists, authors and speakers must use the most accurate terms to describe those ideas.
The responsibility for precision in expression rests with anyone who believes in the need to share information candidly. But for those unfamiliar with Islamic doctrine, history and tradition, it may often be necessary to rely on scholars or other experts about the Islamic world to provide one with the necessary guidance to help convey the message correctly. Muslims will ultimately determine whether the ideology of al-Qa`ida, its affiliates, franchisees and fellow travelers represents authentic Islam or not, but the West can have enormous influence on their decisions.
Furthermore, it is important to make sure that the civilian community in the United States and that of our allies and coalition partners accurately understands the nature of the enemy that we are fighting. Unfortunately, Western governments, intellectuals and journalists commonly use words that inadvertently (or sometimes deliberately) authenticate the doctrines of our enemy as truly Islamic. Correcting this vocabulary is a necessary step to educate the wide-ranging groups who are affected by the war; to discredit those who either passively or actively, or wittingly or unwittingly support Islamic totalitarian terrorism; and to reveal the truly insidious nature of our enemy.
What Are We Really Saying?
This essay discusses the most egregious and dangerous misuses of language regarding Islamic totalitarian terrorists; a comprehensive study would require a book. We begin with the word jihad, which literally means striving and generally occurs as part of the expression jihad fi sabil illah, striving in the path of God. Striving in the path of God is a duty of all Muslims. Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad thus indicates that we recognize their doctrines and actions as being in the path of God and, for Muslims, legitimate. In short, we explicitly designate ourselves as the enemies of Islam.
Muslims have debated the meaning and application of the concept of jihad for centuries. Our application of the term to the actions of our enemies puts us on their side of the debate. We need not concern ourselves with the identification of the original or legally correct meaning of the term; individual Muslims will make up their own minds. As Professor Streusand has previously written, "Classical texts speak only to, not for, contemporary Muslims." It is also important to note that opposing jihad, a basic principle of Islam, violates a classical text of our own. The United States Constitution denies our government the ability to prohibit the free exercise of religion; consequently, we should never use a term, such as jihad, that misstates our current and historical position on religion.
Mujahid (plural mujahidin or mujahideen): one who participates in jihad, and frequently translated in the American media as "holy warrior." The use of this term designates the activity of the enemy as jihad and thus legitimizes it. It was quite proper for us to describe the warriors who resisted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as mujahidin, many of whom are now our allies in Afghanistan. To extend the term to our current enemies dishonors our allies as well as authenticates our opponents as warriors for Islam. Even to a Western audience it can lend a sense of nobility to an otherwise ignoble enemy.
Caliphate (khlilafa): This term literally means successor and came to refer to the successors of the Prophet Muhammad as the political leaders of the Muslim community. Sunni Muslims traditionally regard the era of the first four caliphs (632-661) as an era of just rule. Accepting our enemies' description of their goal as the restoration of a historical caliphate again validates an aspect of their ideology. Al-Qa`ida's caliphate would not mean the re-establishment of any historical regime; it would be a global totalitarian state. Anyone who needs a preview of how such a state would act merely has to review the conduct of the Taliban in Afghanistan before September 11, 2001.
Allah: the word Allah in Arabic means the God, nothing more, nothing less. It is not specifically Muslim; Arabic speaking Christians and Jews also use it. In English, Allah should be translated as God, not transliterated. While translation emphasizes the common heritage of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the three faiths which identify their God as the God of Abraham) it does not imply that the Abrahamic faiths share identical concepts of God. Even though some Muslims use Allah rather than God in English, the practice exaggerates the divisions among Judaism, Christianity and Islam.3
What Are the Right Words for the Job?
Now that a few unsuitable word choices have been addressed, it is time to begin to identify the proper expressions to use whenever discussing the global Islamic totalitarian terrorist movement. Many of these terms will be unfamiliar to Westerners, but not to most Muslim audiences. Only those who actively, passively or even unwittingly support al-Qa`ida's (and similar groups) professed goals would find the terms, and their use by non-Muslims, offensive.
To refute challenges to the new context surrounding these expressions, any user of these terms must be able to define the words in order to defend their accuracy and the appropriateness of their use. Otherwise anyone who dares to define the enemy using its own Islamic language can be challenged by a variety of "pundits" who still see the struggle in terms of religion or poverty rather than political ideology; who despise Western society, capitalism or democracy; or who oppose the war for any other reason.
Hirabah: this word, which is derived from the Arabic root which refers to war or combat, means sinful warfare, warfare contrary to Islamic law. There is ample legal justification for applying this term to Islamic totalitarian terrorists and no moral ambiguity in its connotation. We should describe the Islamic totalitarian movement as the global hirabah, not the global jihad.4
Mufsid (moofsid): this word refers to an evil or corrupt person; the plural is mufsidun. We call our enemies mufsidun, not jihadis, for two reasons. Again, there is no moral ambiguity and the specific denotation of corruption carries enormous weight in most of the Islamic world.
Fitna/fattan: fitna literally means temptation or trial, but has come to refer to discord and strife among Muslims; a fattan is a tempter or subversive. Applying these terms to our enemies and their works condemns their current activities as divisive and harmful.5 It also identifies them with movements and individuals in Islamic history with negative reputations such as the assassins of the Caliph `Uthman in 656, who created the first fissure in the political unity of the Muslim community.
Totalitarian: calling our enemies totalitarian serves several purposes. There is no such thing as a benign totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a Western invention and it appeared in the Islamic world as a result of Western influence (first fascist, then Marxist-Leninist). It is also in direct contrast to the idea that the enemy would actually establish a caliphate if they defeat the United States, our allies and coalition partners.
Not the Last Word, Just the Beginning.
This essay is neither definitive nor complete. It is only the beginning of a "primer" of the terminology used to describe Islamic totalitarian movements. There should be far more discussion about the right words to use to describe the variety of threats posed by transnational terrorists-Islamic groups and others. This article, we hope will help jumpstart the discourse.
Notwithstanding the fact that this article is a small beginning, the terms proposed herein should become an indispensable part of the vocabulary of America's leaders, reporters and friends immediately. The wrong terms promote the idea that terrorist elements represent legitimate Islamic concepts, which in turn might aid in the enemy recruitment of disenfranchised Muslims because we have identified to them a seemingly "traditional" outlet through which they can voice their dissatisfaction. It is essential to use the right language to address worldwide problems so that various audiences-which include the American-Muslim community-understand the full scope of the problem and are intellectually able to identify with potential solutions that are reasonable and ethical.
This paper offers word choices not just for public officials and correspondents but even students in the classroom and others studying terrorism. In fact, anyone who is interested in current events should have some familiarity with these words as well as the concepts and new dialogue they represent. We must use the right turn of phrase whenever attempting to inform and educate; language is a key component for us to be able to, in a way that makes sense to any audience, ask for assistance or demand action that will help defeat the scourge of Islamic totalitarian terrorism.
Footnotes
1 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, undated), 377.
2 The 9/11 Commission's own report is guilty of this by using Jihad (and other variations of the term such as Jihadists) throughout. Jihad, discussed more in detail later, does not have a negative connotation for most Muslims-even when combined with descriptions of terrorist purpose or action.
3 On this issue see Daniel Pipes, "Is Allah God," FrontPageMagazine.com, June 28, 2005, at www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18577.
4 James Guirard of the TrueSpeak Institute explains the reasons for using the term hirabah rather than jihad in "Terrorism: Hirabah versus Jihad: Rescuing Jihad from the al-Qaeda Blasphemy," American Muslim, July-August, 2003 athttp://theamericanmuslim.org/2003jul_comments.php?id=349_0_21_0_C. Guirard's approach underlies this entire article.
5 For example the leader of al-Qa`ida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has stated that Shiites are rafada or rejecters of Islam. The Salafist Sunni terrorist groups, the most well-known of which is al-Qa`ida, do not recognize other traditional Islamic sects as acceptable or Muslims. Use of rafada is from Fouad Ajami, "Heart of Darkness," Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2005, pg.16. As cited in the on-line version of The Early Bird, www.us.army.mil/suite/earlybird/sep2005/e20050928393978.html, accessed September 28, 2005. The al-Qa`ida attack of civilian weddings at three hotels in Amman Jordan on November 9, 2005 is another case in point of terrorist attempts to promote discord among Muslims. The attacks killed 57 people and wounded 115, the majority of whom were Jordanian and Palestinian. Direct attacks by al-Qa`ida in Iraq against Shiite holy sites throughout Iraq continue as of February 28, 2006.
The Dominant Strategic Idea (DSI) must be translated into physical ACTION
Having seen the importance of Killer Words above, its hypocritical that they are being ignored by those who claim "information" is the most important aspect in war and the physical can be skimped on and done without. The whole point that INFORMATION which is MENTAL---is the most important thing in war is a dangerous lie embraced by DoD and even many in our military and is the primary cause for our on-going defeats. We are surely making more un-named rebels each day, but we are also not killing/capturing/persuading the rebels we do know about because we are trying to do it the lazy way by "sending a bullet and not a man".
Human beings do not live in glass jars with electrodes implanted into floating brains, the billions of us on the PHYSICAL still very large planet earth live inside PHYSICAL bodies. Anyone who seeks to elevate the mental over the physical is creating a false balance and America's enemies exploit our anti-physical mentalism all the time by hiding in difficult closed terrain surrounded by sympathetic populations. OMNISCIENCE (god-like mental knowledge) doesn't result in anything if PHYSICALLY YOU ARE UNABLE TO ACT ON IT. And this is what the BS RMA madness has done to DoD/U.S. military forces with increasing damage since the publishing of Alvin/Heidi Toffler's book "War and Anti-War" after Desert Storm. Mental gadgetizing our military is the ideal way to waste billions of dollars and years of time WITHOUT ACTUALLY HAVING TO PHYSICALLY CHANGE OURSELVES to be superior against our enemies. Details:
www.geocities.com/transformationunderfire
There are two basic battles underway when we fight, a battle against THE EARTH and against other HUMANS. Ignoring the EARTH and jumping to human conflict is a false balance. If we optimize forces FIRST to defeat the earth's resistance to applying military force, then we can focus on human war which is all about WHOSE IDEAS PREVAIL. Its not about "information". Its about whose IDEA is to prevail in the hearts of men. In the current phony undeclared war on Islamic terrorism, the Dominant Strategic Ideas (DSIs) now in conflict can be boiled down to the following:
Islam: "We are right with god, you are not"
The West: "We have technology and live better than you. P.S. we take your oil to run our technology".
Therefore, we can relabel our agencies so we are not obvious lie factories all day long, as long as our DSI being put out is an immoral lie, militant Islam will continue to pick up converts as our lazy mental short cut way of war keeps bombing civilians and making new rebels with our "technology". We need to out-think our foes by MAKING THEM INTO OUR FRIENDS with a DSI that is TRUE that we live by. This means WE HAVE TO CHANGE AND BE WORTHY OF THEIR FRIENDSHIP. Our DSI should be:
The West: "We have technology, but we use it unselfishly to help others and be right with God".
Persuasion
www.answers.com/topic/persuasion-2
What we should do in U.S. Army Civil Affairs/Psychological Operations Command is change the "P" from Psychological Operations which sounds like brainwashing and forcing people to do things by lies to "Persuasive Operations" using truthful "information" or "PIO" Persuasive Information Operations...
To "earn" the right to say this DSI truthfully, we also need to reform ourselves in the U.S. to be less the selfish consumer: www.combatreform.org/braveamerican.htm and reform our military to be a PHYSICALLY AGILE MANEUVER FORCE THAT CAN DIFFERENTIATE BEWTEEN GOOD GUY AND BAD GUYS THAT IS SELF-SUFFICIENT----like the Roman Legions were with less technology (we have no excuse) by shipping containerizing the entire Army/marines so we don't waste ANY time playing "From Here to Eternity" garrison games mowing lawns and polishing floors of static buildings that don't fight. Containerized U.S. maneuver forces are packed and ready to go anywhere in the world to fight from fortified but energy self-sufficient (does not need hundreds of easily ambushed supply truck convoys to stay in operation) Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) that obviously are TEMPORARY so the people do not rebel against us if we were moving in to live on their soil permanently via multi-billion dollar static building construction. Details:
www.geocities.com/strategicmaneuver/battleboxes.htm
If we ignore the BATTLE AGAINST THE EARTH, we are in no physical mechanical advantage position to employ ANY mental means however improved.
Accurate Words only Accepted if Deeds Back Them Up
"God will not help those who do not change themselves" --Qu'ran
"God helps those who help themselves" --Aesop and Jesus (completes the principle)
First, the self-professed "jihadis" (mufsidoon) from their warped perspective ARE being good, devout Muslims in their minds. Externally, Islam was built upon conflict and strife and is a false religion. Internally, Islam at the same time contradicts itself by saying its a religion of "peace" and "toleration" when at other times its for war and intoleration; we should use their own WORDS to remind the Islamics that they are being hypocrites at the same time they think they are being devout.
An important "perception management" would be convincing the Islamists that we are no tangible, physical (DEEDS) threat to them. It is unacceptable for a Qur'an-obeying, Muhammad-follower to allow any threat to Islam (including the seductive lure of secular humanist hedonism, i.e., sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll) or to tolerate any non-Muslim (re-)taking of Muslim lands, and against such threats, a defensive (no-holds-barred) jihad is not only allowed, but required. For starters, that would require us to withdraw our military from Muslim lands, which we could do by finally building the SEA BASES we keep talking about but never do. What bases we do hold, we can be obviously temporary using the BATTLEBOX system, so score one point for us, 1-0. It would require us to allow the Arabs to eliminate Israel as we allowed them to eliminate Christian Lebanon, which we won't do--thank God---so we are 1-1. It would also require us to end our efforts to promote democracy, women's/children's rights, and any sort of civil liberties in the Islamic world, which we won't do, so we are 1-2 in their minds. Last and least likely, it would require us to self-censor our "media" and "entertainment" industries to stop broadcasting/selling their subversive cultural products in Muslim countries, leaving us at 1-3..which isn't bad, we can win still from such a deficit if we are aware of it and actively seek to score more points. Pinning down the Islamic terrorists as the mufsidoon that they are ups our score to 2-3. Creating a superior SDI like "we have technology that we use unselfishly to help others and be right with God" evens the score to 3-3. If we can then kill/capture the apostate trouble makers like OBL, we go up to 4-3. If we can stop the current generation from getting caught up into the cycle of violence by walls and barriers, then one of the negative scores; our media delivered culture can work its magic and get these folks excited more about blue jeans and coca cola than RPGs and suicide bombs, then score turns to 5-2. At that point they will be mad at us for supporting Israel and speaking out in favor of personal freedom which includes those choosing to be decadent hedonists. If they are not in the Middle East, Israel shouldn't bother them via the out of sight, out of mind principle. Now we are at 5-1. The Muslim's gripes then are that there are BILLIONS of people who don't buy into their religion and live otherwise. If they think they are so right, they should shut up and leave other people alone who think differently and be glad they are going to get 72 virgins in the next life and be glad. A desperate desire to convert others to Islam looks like classic inferiority/insecurity that needs others all around doing something to have a context to hide amongst, the herd instinct. If you think Islam is so right, act like it. If God is gonna get the un-believers, let him do his work to "convert them". Now the conflict is over, 5-0.
When we accurately call Muslims who are violating their religion through Habarah mufsidoon, we must be aware they might not accept our labels because we are non-Islamic, Muslims don't care what non-Muslims call them, any more than you or I care what Muslims or atheists call born-again/saved Christians (and they have many choice names for us, to be sure). Its vital that we get peace-loving Moslems to call the evil doers the Islamic labels they deserve so other Moslems will be forced to accept the truth that they are not following Islam and should be resisted. Non-Moslems are unclean -- kaffirs, seen automatically as the enemy, and even rival faction Muslims automatically get the benefit of the doubt because they are Muslims, whose GOALS are not disputed even if their methods are. That is why even the Khomeini'ists will assist the Sunni Islamists despite their ancient, deep, and often violent disputes. For an analogy, whatever I may feel about Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian theology and practice, when it comes to dealing with Muslims or with atheist statists (old Soviet regime, PRC, etc.), I will always side with and support the Catholics and Orthodox against the unbelievers because we have more in common that not!
Human beings tend to like to polarize issues and have simple good/bad, yes/no characterizations/solutions. So, for sake of clarity, because this IS a war between fundamentally incompatible belief systems, let's remember that the vast majority of Muslims consider the jihadis to be jihadis; which is why its critical that we wake up and call them the MUFSIDOON that they are to invigorate the silent majority of peace-prefering Muslims to disassociate themselves with the terrorists. However, thdhe rank & file consider Islam the only true faith, and consider Muslims always right in their dealings with non-Muslims, and consider non-Muslims to be at best unclean, and at worst vermin to be exterminated (read the relevant Qur'anic passages -- they are very enlightening).
National security in a very complex world (especially after decades of the U.S. not using its superpower abilities to best possible goals nor using best possible means) requires recognizing and focusing on the ideal, but without losing sight of the unpleasant realities of the present and the need to effectively address them. The U.S. must deal with the full range of threats; so it needs a Navy and AF able to focus on the global, high-tech threats (including IO/IW and space/missile threats as well as air and naval) and deter/disarm/defeat them AS WELL AS needing a capability (the Army) to seize territory and control populations for short periods of time to overthrow hostile/aggressive regimes and disarm threatening states AND ALSO needing a capability for what we used to call Foreign Internal Defense and now call SSTRO -- the economy of force means of gaining/maintaining long-term influence in under-/un-developed countries to support indigenous regimes (democratic or not) able to establish and maintain order, suppress insurgent/terrorists and organized crime, and create a foundation for economic development that in turn is the necessary precursor to desirable socio-political development. AKA we need the NLB-SC!
Traditional Islam is incompatible with secularism, representative government (as we know it), individual sovereignty (as opposed to State sovereignty or theocracy), and market-oriented capitalism. Muslims who focus on the intolerant parts of the Qur'an must ward off these challenges and restore adherence to sharia -- which means they are Islamofascists. They want everyone to sacrifice their individual identities to the Islamist whole. Islamists disagree among themselves about when and how much violence is necessary/appropriate to achieving this goal, but they all agree on the absurd and immoral goal of the entire world enslaved to the internally inconsistent Islamic lifestyle, and thus are a permanent threat to non-Muslims.
Our politicians cannot grasp this because they insist upon assuming that all religions provide for tolerance of others as equals. Islam in places does not. Muslims only accept tolerance on the basis of Islamic rule and non-Muslims living as disenfranchised dhimmis -- resident aliens in their own country, with even fewer rights and privileges than Muslims living under sharia. Our politicians also have a problem with this because they genuinely believe in freedom of conscience, even for Muslims, even though Muslims are much more ambivalent on that subject than Christians, Jews, etc. If we create a government with freedom and the people overthrow that government and chose Islamic sharia law, they will use their freedom to make themselves slaves, in effect a one-time representative democracy. Especially with several million Muslim citizens and several million more Muslims who are legal resident aliens, this poses a potential civil liberties nightmare -- until/unless our political leaders can accept that Islam is not just another modern tolerant religion or philosophy as we are used to, but a internally inconsistent, socio-political, legal and intolerant religious structure that is incompatible with the USA's Constitutional and other European forms of government. Islam's intolerance of other views is the one point of view that should not be tolerated by a free government. Any religion that advocates active violence against those who disagree with them instead of peaceful persuasion should be banned from Western Nations. If Muslims in a western nation create a version of Islam that specifically states loyalty to the free country they are in, religious tolerance, then they can abide in the country as citizens.
SUB-NATIONAL CONFLICT #4: Afghanistan -- Taliban Haven is GI's "Camp Hell" when occupying a country may make us more enemies than friends...
STRATEGIC
Grand Strategy: CONTAIN Islam or Annihilate it?
A retired USAF officer writes:
"I am afraid that the U.S. and its NATO allies are now essentially replaying the British efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries to "stabilize the Hindu Kush," not out of any intrinsic value, but because we see it as essential to protecting more valuable assets. For the Brits, it was protecting India from Russian intrusion (or Persian subversion). For us it is "establishing stability to prevent the return of a Taliban-like regime."
Unfortunately, I don't think it can or will work. We cannot save the Muslims from the Islamists, because from any genuine Muslim perspective, the Islamists are more or less obedient to the Qur'an, while we Westerners are unclean aliens who cannot be right and cannot be preferred/accepted over other Muslims. I don't think that Karzai, regardless of how charming, clever, and sincerely committed to secular pluralism and democracy, can pull off what he's attempting -- and his obvious dependency upon Western military power to stay alive and even nominally in control indelibly marks him as a traitor to Islam and to the local quasi-feudal tradition of rule by a monarch who is really a first among equals -- the most respected major tribal chief or warlord -- not a slick-talking Westernized exile coming back.
As long as we try playing our secular globalist/internationalist games in Islamey, we will continue to lose personnel, waste billions, and achieve nothing. We cannot win their hearts and minds as long as we claim to honor and respect Islam, which keeps them irreconcilably hostile to us. The only workable alternatives are to either:
a. withdraw from the Islamic world, contain them, and leave them to destroy themselves (much as we did with the Europeans during the Napoleonic Wars and later with the Soviets)
b. or we must engage them in total war and annihilate enough of them and ruthlessly reprogram the survivors (as we did with the American Indians and, arguably, the Confederates and later the NAZIs and Japanese bushido-based militarists).
I prefer the former course as less risky and less destructive, but for that course to work we must remain ready to shift to the latter if containment fails."
How NOT to do a Counter-Insurgency: Inept American Foot-sloggers and Trucksters with Glass Jaws get PTSD and Air Strike Civilians in Afghanistan
Instead of foot slogging, trucking and getting hurt with the knee-jerk air strikes against civilians, light infantry should be in M113 Gavin light armored tracks, find where the enemy fire is coming from EXACTLY and then chase down the rebels to kill by their own 120mm mounted mortar fire (like Dutch do) and infantry action
NATO Light Mechanized Success in Afghanistan
M113 Gavin 120mm Heavy Mortars for Mountain Warfare
or an air strike controlled by an Airborne FAC in a slow observation/attack plane.
At their FOBs they should be living in climate and enemy fire effects-protected BATTLEBOXes:
www.combatreform.org/battleboxes.htm
At the Afghan/Paki border should be a security fence with sensors like the successful "Morice Line" that kept rebels in Tunisia out of Algeria.
*********
www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24afghanistan-t.html
Battle Company Is Out There
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside. It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the Soldiers and landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River valley in Afghanistan's northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the Americans' small mountain outposts, but the area's reputation among the Soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents. American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the Soldiers I was with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were predicting their own Yaka China doom.
The Korengal Valley is a lonely outpost of regress: most of the valley's people practice Wahhabism, a more rigid variety of Islam than that followed by most Afghans, and about half of the fighters confronting the U.S. there are homegrown. The rest are Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks; the area is close to Pakistan's frontier regions where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda figures are often said to be hiding out. The Korengal fighters are fierce, know the terrain and watch the Americans' every move. On their hand-held radios, the old jihadis call the Americans "monkeys," "infidels," `'bastards" and "the kids." It's psychological warfare; they know the Americans monitor their radio chatter.
As far as "the kids" are concerned, the insurgents are ghosts - so the Soldiers' tactics often come down to using themselves as bait. The insurgents specialize in ambushes, harassing fire and hit-and-run attacks. NATO's military advantage in such a war is air power. The Soldiers don't hesitate to call in Big Daddy (who, in today's military, often flies in with the voice of a female pilot). But while these flying war machines are saviors to the Soldiers, they cannot distinguish between insurgents and civilians.
I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths - 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.
After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American Soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion.
Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside Soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day - decisions that led to the deaths of Soldiers and of civilians.
Subduing the Valley OVER THE LAST two years, the Americans have steadily increased their presence [ED: more narcissist gunslinger-victims] in Kunar province, fanning out to the small platoon-size outposts that have become the signature of the "new counterinsurgency doctrine" in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Korengal Outpost, nicknamed the KOP, was built in April 2006 on the site of a former timber mill and motel. The Soldiers of Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team live there in dusty tents and little wooden huts. They now have hot food and a small chow tent with an Internet linkup and a few phones for calling home. But the place was protected by not much more than concertina wire and sentries. Nearly every time I arrived at the KOP our helicopter was greeted by sniper fire or the dushka - a Russian-made antiaircraft gun.
Dan Kearney was essentially lord of the Korengal Valley. A self-described Georgia army brat, he grew up idolizing his warrior dad, Frank Kearney, and wanted to move in his father's world of covert and overt operations. (His father is now a lieutenant general in Special Operations command.) Kearney often calls himself a dumb jock, playing the crass, loudmouthed tough guy with his Soldiers. He had been in Iraq and told me he had gone emotionally dead there with all the dying and killing, and stayed that way until the birth of his son a year ago. His hardest day in Iraq was when a close friend, Rob Shaw, was severely wounded by an improvised explosive device that killed his first sergeant and a bunch of their friends - and the next thing he knew their colonel was asking Kearney to step in for Shaw and lead the company.
But as hard as Iraq was, he said, nothing was as tough as the Korengal. Unlike in Iraq, where the captains and lieutenants could let down their guard in a relatively safe, fortified operating base, swapping stories and ideas, here they had no one to talk to and were almost as vulnerable to enemy fire inside the wire as out. Last summer, insurgents stormed one of the bases in a nearby valley and wounded 16.
And unlike every other place I've been in Afghanistan - even the Pech River valley, just an hour's drive away - the Korengal had no Afghan police or district leaders for the Americans to work with. The Afghan government, and Afghans down the valley, seemed to have washed their hands of the Korengalis. As Kearney put it to me one day at the KOP, the Korengal is like a tough Los Angeles neighborhood, "and we're the L.A.P.D. kicking in the door, arresting guys, demanding information about the gangs, and slowly the people say, `No, we don't know anything, because that guy in the gang, he's with my sister, and that other guy, he's my uncle's cousin.' Now we've angered them for so many years that they've decided: `I'm gonna stick with the A.C.M.' " - anticoalition militants - " `who are my brothers and I'm not gonna rat them out.' "
So what exactly was his job out here? To subdue the valley. It's a task the marines had tried, and then the Soldiers of the Army's 10th Mountain Division - a task so bloody it seemed to drive the 10th Mountain's Soldiers to a kind of madness. Kearney's Soldiers told me they'd been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.
Kearney kept his Soldiers on a tight leash at first. Col. John Nicholson, a brigade commander with the 10th Mountain Division, had promised the Afghans he would not bomb their homes. When Kearney and the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team officially took over from the division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team on June 5, they kept that promise. "My guys would tell me they didn't know which houses they're shooting from, and I'd tell them they can't shoot back into the villages," Kearney recalled. "They hated me." The insurgents were testing the new captain, he suspected, by deliberately shooting from homes. On July 10, the Korengalis ambushed his Soldiers from one house they often used - a three-story mansion on a fertile outcropping, with balconies overlooking the valley, that belonged to Haji Matin, a timber baron turned insurgent leader. It had been the scene of fighting in the past.
When Kearney's moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon's sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stichter, had been shot, and the fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the house. "We saw people moving weapons around," Kearney told me. "I tried everything. [EDITOR: NO YOU DID NOT. YOU HAVE NOT TRIED GETTING YOUR MEN OFF THEIR FEET AND INTO M113 GAVIN ARMORED TRACKS SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO RETURN FIRE OUT OF FEAR OF BEING DECISIVELY ENGAGED] I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache" - an attack helicopter - "got shot at and left. I kept asking for a bomb drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of dropping a bomb on a house." Finally, he said, "We shot a javelin and a tow" - both armor-piercing missiles. "I didn't get shot at from there for two months," Kearney said. "I ended up killing that woman and that kid."
[EDITOR: STOP FOOT-SLOGGING AND YOU WON'T BE KILLING CIVILIANS]
Kearney could often sound cold-blooded, like when he'd march into the mess tent in shorts, improvising rap lyrics about killing bad guys. But then he'd switch to counselor, trying to salvage a Soldier's marriage, or he'd joke with a Korengali elder about arranging a marriage between his own infant son and the elder's daughter to make peace. The performances steeled him against shouldering so much mortality. As he put it, "The only reason anyone's listening to me in this valley right now is 'cause I'm dropping bombs on them." Still, he wasn't going to let himself shoot at houses every time his unit took fire: "I'd just create more people that hate me."
A Blood Feud
IN LATE 2001, the B-52 symbolized, for many Afghans, liberation from Taliban rule. They wove images of the plane into their carpets. Urban legends sprang up about the B-52's power, how the planes glided along unscathed, even as the Taliban barraged them with antiaircraft fire. Kabulis spread the story that the B-52s had dropped thousands of leaflets saying, "Hit us if you can!" - and afterward the Taliban didn't waste their bullets on the B-52s.
But the jets that defeated the Taliban were wiping out innocent families as well. In July 2002, Special Forces in the mountains of Oruzgan thought they were destroying a high-value Taliban target, but
instead they rocketed and bombed an engagement party. About 40 Afghans were killed and nearly 100 were wounded.
Such mistakes have continued, though the causes can change. The insurgents regularly use civilians as shields, children as spotters and women as food suppliers. NATO killing civilians is great propaganda for the Taliban. At the same time, to Afghans with little technological sophistication, the scale and impersonality make the accidents seem intentional. Many are convinced the Americans are deliberately bombing them and even deliberately aiding a Taliban comeback. The reality is that bombs are only as accurate as the intelligence on the ground - and since 9/11, the U.S. and NATO have used air power as a substitute for ground troops.
By now, seven years of air strikes and civilian casualties, humiliating house searches and arbitrary detentions have pushed many families and tribes to revenge. The Americans then see every Afghan in those pockets of recalcitrance as an enemy. If you peel back the layers, however, there's always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying. That original misunderstanding and grievance fertilizes the land for the Islamists. Whom do you want to side with: your brothers in God's world or the infidel thieves?
In the case of the Korengal Valley, the story began about a century ago, when the tribesmen now known as Korengalis were kicked out of the province of Nuristan (immediately north of Kunar province) and settled in the Korengal, which was rich with timber forests and farmland. Over time they made an alliance with one branch of the large Safi tribe, which once dominated Kunar politics. But down the road along the Pech River valley, the rest of the Safis opposed the Korengalis.
As the Afghans tell the story, from the moment the Americans arrived in 2001, the Pech Valley timber lords and warlords had their ear. Early on, they led the Americans to drop bombs on the mansion of their biggest rival - Haji Matin. The air strikes killed several members of his family, according to local residents, and the Americans arrested others and sent them to the prison at Bagram Air Base. The Pech Valley fighters working alongside the Americans then pillaged the mansion. And that was that. Haji Matin, already deeply religious, became ideological and joined with Abu Ikhlas, a local Arab linked to the foreign jihadis.
By 2007, the Americans understood what happened. Last year, the governor of Nuristan even sat them down with the Korengali elders to try and mediate between the two sides. Nothing came of it. Kearney tried to dig deeper, sending e-mail messages to anthropologists and Afghan experts to get their guidance. He spent hours listening to Haji Zalwar Khan - who acted as the valley's representative to the Americans and the government - talk about history and grievances. Haji Zalwar, a jihadi veteran of the anti-Soviet fight, bore the valley's burden almost alone and had the grim demeanor to prove it. Kearney met as many villagers as possible to learn the names of all the elders and their families. But he inherited a blood feud between the Korengalis and the Americans that he hadn't started, and he was being sucked into its logic.
"Serious P.T.S.D."
LAST AUTUMN,, after five months of grueling foot patrols up and down the mountains, after fruitless encounters with elders who smiled in the morning and were host to insurgents in the evening and after losing friends to enemy fire, Captain Kearney's men could relate to the sullen, jittery rage of their predecessors in the 10th Mountain Division. Many wondered what they were doing out there at all.
Kearney refused to entertain that thought. He would tell his visitors, whether generals or reconstruction teams, that his campaign plan was clear, if modest: "It's World War II Pacific-island hopping, turning one village at a time." Over five months, he had gained about 400 yards of terrain. When some generals and colonels had flown in for a quick tour, and Kearney was showing them the lay of the land, one officer said to another, as Kearney later recalled it, "I don't know why we're even out here." Another officer jumped in to talk up the logic of the operation. Kearney told me he thought: Sort your stuff out before you come out here. My boys are sucking it up and dying. . . . For besides being lord of the valley, he had another role to play - motivator, disciplinarian and confidant to his Soldiers. "It's like being in charge of a soap opera," he told me. "I feel like Dr. Phil with guns."
One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the
garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. "I hate this country!" he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. "He's on medication," Kearney said quietly to me.
Then another Soldier walked by and shouted, "Hey, I'm with you, sir!" and Kearney said to me, "Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour." Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. "Medicated," Kearney said. "Last tour, if you didn't give him information, he'd burn down your house. He killed so many people. He's checked out."
As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire bases. It didn't take long to understand why so many Soldiers were taking antidepressants. The Soldiers were on a 15-month tour that included just 18 days off. Many of them were "stop-lossed," meaning their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin. You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: "We don't get supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business."
For sanity, all they had was the medics' tent, video games and movies - "Gladiator," "Conan the Barbarian," "Dogma," Monty Python. Down the road in the Pech Valley, Soldiers played cricket with Afghan kids and had organized boxing and soccer matches. Lt. Kareem Hernandez, a New Yorker running a base on the Pech River, regularly bantered over dinner with the Afghan police. Neighbors would come by with tips. But here in the Korengal, the Soldiers were completely alienated from the local culture. One night while watching a scene from HBO's "Rome" in which a Roman Soldier tells a slave he wants to marry her, a Soldier asked which century the story was set in. "First B.C. or A.D.," said another Soldier. The first shook his head: "And they're still living like this 800 meters outside the wire."
At the end of the summer, Kearney told his dad, "My boys are gonna go crazy out here." The army sent a shrink, and Kearney got a wake-up call about his own leadership. He discovered that half his men thought he was playing Russian roulette with their lives and the other half thought he stuck too closely to the rules of engagement. "The moral compass of the army is the P.L. and the C.O." - the platoon leader and the commanding officer, Kearney told me. "I told every one of my P.L.'s that they have to set that moral standard, that once you slip to the left, you can't pull your guys back in."
Operation Rock Avalanche
ON OCT. 19, Kearney and Battle Company were air assaulted into the insurgents' backyard for a mission that many thought insane. It was called Rock Avalanche and would last about six days. One of its main targets was the village of Yaka China.
Kearney, being the good Soldier, tried to pump up his boys with the promise that they would be going after insurgents who had killed their friends and whose grizzled faces were plastered on their bad-guy
family-tree wall at the KOP. They would upset the guerrillas' safe haven and their transit routes from Pakistan. They would persuade the villagers to stop harboring the bad guys by offering an $11 million road project that had just been approved by NATO and Kabul and would be built by the Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team. And they'd complete the "human terrain mapping" that is part of the new counterinsurgency doctrine - what families dominate, who's married, who's feuding, are there divisions to be exploited?
It was a lot to ask of young Soldiers: play killer, cultural anthropologist, hearts-and-minds winner and then killer again. Which is why, just hours before the mission was to begin, some Soldiers were
smearing black-and-green war paint on their faces when their sergeant shouted: "Take it off. Now!" Why? They'd frighten the villagers. [ED: more PC BS]
It seemed a moot point as Rock Avalanche got under way. Apache gunships were scanning the ridges for insurgents. Other helicopters were dropping off more Soldiers. An unmanned drone was whining overhead as it sent infrared video feeds to a large screen back at the battalion's headquarters, Camp Blessing, six miles north of the KOP.
Almost immediately, high on a mountainside looking down on Yaka China, Kearney had to play God. In a ditch to his left, Jesse Yarnell, a young intelligence officer, along with John, an Afghan interpreter, were intercepting insurgents on their two-way radios saying, "We see them, we're going to wait."
"They're right down there!" said Kevin Caroon as he gazed out of his night vision. Caroon, from Connecticut and a father of two, was an Air Force JTAC - the joint terminal attack controller who talks the combat pilots onto their targets. "See that? Two people moving south 400 meters away from us," Caroon said, pointing down the mountain face. More insurgents were located nearby.
"Sir, what do you want to do?" Caroon asked Kearney.
"I want them dead," Kearney said.
"Engage them?"
"Yes. Take 'em out."
Caroon radioed the pilot his instructions, "On-scene commander's intent is to engage." And that was it.
A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes ricocheted all around the village. Kearney was in overdrive. The Soldiers back at the KOP were radioing in that the drone was tracking 10 men near the tree line. Yarnell was picking up insurgent radio traffic. "They're talking about getting ready to hit us," someone said. The pilot could see five men, one entering a house, then, no, some were in the trees, some inside, and then, multiple houses. He wanted confirmation - were all these targets hostile? Did Kearney have any collateral-damage concerns? Cursing, Kearney told them to engage the men outside but not to hit the house. The pilots radioed back that men had just run inside. No doubt there would be a family. Caroon reminded Kearney that Slasher had only enough fuel to stay in position for 10 more minutes.
"What do you want to do, sir?" Caroon asked him.
Kearney radioed his Soldiers back at the KOP to contact his boss, Lt. Col. Bill Ostlund. Ostlund, a Nebraska social scientist who could switch effortlessly from aggressive bomber to political negotiator talking family values with Afghan tribal elders, was in the crowded tactical-operations room at Camp Blessing watching the drone's video feed and getting the same intelligence. He signed off on collateral damage, and Kearney turned to Caroon: "Take out the compound. And anyone that comes out."
[EDITOR: BULLSHIT. A light mech force in M113 Gavins could swarm around such houses and flush out the bad guys and not kill civilians. Our incompetent tactics make more rebels] Flaming rockets [ED: AC-130s shoot 40mm or 105mm shells--not rockets] flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to Yarnell in his ditch, "You picking anything up?" Nothing. More spitting rockets.
The night seemed incomprehensible and interminable. Slasher departed and Gunmetal - an Apache helicopter - swept in. Radio communication kept breaking down. At one point the crew of Gunmetal, sensing no hostile intent, refused Kearney's orders to fire. Then suddenly Gunmetal was rocketing at figures scattering for cover. Then Slasher was back in the sky doing more "work." In the predawn light Bone - the nickname for the B-1 bomber that seemed to be the Soldiers' favorite - winged in and dropped two 2,000-pound bombs above the village. Finally, around dawn, a weary Kearney, succumbing to gallows humor, adrenaline and exhaustion, said: "O.K., I've done my killing for the week. I'm ready to go home."
Kearney estimated that they killed about 20 people, adding: "I'm not gonna lie. Some are probably civilians."
In the logic of war, the best antidote for the menacing ghostliness of the ambushing enemy is killing and knowing you've killed them. The Soldiers in the Korengal almost never had that kind of satisfaction.
Any insurgents, if they were killed, would be buried fast, and all that was left in their wake were wounded civilians. That morning, after a long night of fighting, was no different. Within an hour or so, Lt. Matt Piosa, an earnest, 24-year-old West Point grad, and his patrol were in Yaka China. They radioed that the village elders were asking to bury their dead. They'd also collected wounded civilians.
The tally was bad - 5 killed and 11 wounded, all of them women, girls and boys.
Kearney radioed Camp Blessing the bad news and dropped his head between his knees. Killing women and children was tragedy enough. But civilian casualties are also a political issue. If he didn't manage to explain his actions to the Yaka China villagers and get them to understand his intentions, he could lose them to the enemy. Meanwhile, Yarnell and his team were intercepting radio messages like: "Be very quiet. Move the things over here. Pray for us." At least some of the insurgents from the previous night's fight had survived to fight again. The planes were tracking them hiding along a creek. But after the civilian casualties of the night before, senior commanders were refusing to give Kearney clearance to bomb or rocket them.
The short day was fading. The sun dropped behind the peaks. The cold winds rattled our bones. The Soldiers tried to make light of their conviction that they'd be attacked by those insurgents dissolving into the villages. Their fears were realized.
Hearts and Minds
TO TRY TO ACQUIRE allies, Kearney and some of his men flew down the next day to Yaka China. With nowhere else to land, the Black Hawk helicopters descended on the roof of a house not far below the compound that Slasher, the AC-130, had rocketed the night of the 19th. Dust and dried grass whipped across the house and the villagers' faces. Just to endear themselves even more, the Soldiers from Battle Company had to step on harvested corn as they climbed down; it was drying on the second story.
[ED: fast rope, anyone?]
The adversaries faced off in the courtyard as chickens sprinted in and out. On one side were Kearney, Ostlund and Larry LeGree, a naval nuclear engineer and head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team,
together with their entourage, including interpreters, all in futuristic high-tech gear. On the other side were the Korengali elders, who looked as if they stepped out of "Lord of the Rings" with their crooked walking sticks, beards dyed red and blue eyes framed by kohl. With no Afghan government out here, the elders are the only channel for communication. The younger men sat on the ground, wrapped in shawls and bold indifference.
Kearney squatted and told the Korengalis that when he came to this region he hoped to walk into Yaka China and find out what the villagers needed. Instead, he found that there were some 50 insurgents
in and around the village. He pointed to the evidence - military radio batteries that his men had found, binoculars, rockets, an old pistol, a small pamphlet titled, in Arabic, "How to Kill," and one in Pashto, "The Concise Book on the Virtues of Jihad" - that had been collected in the general area by Afghan Soldiers and Americans. It was not a very incriminating haul, and everyone knew it.
The day before, a U.S. medevac had airlifted out the wounded civilians from the village. Humanitarian assistance was air-dropped in, including concrete for retaining walls, rice and blankets for winter.
The provisions were not compensation, Kearney told the elders. "It's what the government does for their people when there is security here," he said. He asked them to tell him where in the mountains the insurgents were hiding their supplies. "That way I don't have to come in here and shoot at you and identify the good guys from the bad guys," he said.
To keep his bearings amid the hostile faces, Kearney kept appealing to Haji Zalwar Khan, the leading go-between among the valley's elders. He made his fortune in the timber trade and blamed the Americans for shutting it down. He tried to placate both the Americans and the insurgents. He was not about to side with Kearney in public. "How can I know where you found these things?" he asked, referring to the jihadi items. "In the mountain? The house? How do I know whom they belong to?"
Kearney smiled. He was getting used to the routine between the Americans and the villagers - miscommunication and deception. The encounter felt as much performative, a necessary part of the play, as substantive. And I wondered how Kearney was going to keep his sanity for 10 more months.
Just a week or so earlier, I had been at the KOP when villagers from Aliabad - a mile south of the KOP, and the home village of Haji Zalwar Khan - complained to Kearney that some ordinance had hit a house.
Later they sent up the homeowner's teenage son to wrest compensation from Kearney. As we walked to the KOP's entrance to meet the boy, a shot rang out, then another. The bullets smacked the dirt in front of
us. Kearney shoved me into a shack where an Afghan was cooking bread. A few more shots were fired. It was "One-Shot Freddy," as the Soldiers refer to him, an insurgent shooter everyone had a theory about regarding the vintage of his gun, his identity, his tactics - but neither Kearney's scouts nor Shadow the drone could ever track him. I accidentally slashed my forearm on a nail in the shack and as I watched the blood pool I thought that if I had to live with Freddy and his ilk for months on end I, too, would see a forked tongue in every villager and start dreaming of revenge.
Kearney was angry. "Taliban shot your house?" he asked the boy from Aliabad. An interpreter translated.
No, said the boy, Americans did.
"What'd we shoot with?"
"I don't know the weapon, but there's little holes and two big holes."
"I didn't shoot into Aliabad," said Kearney, adding that if one of his Soldiers had, it was because insurgents were firing from the village.
"No one shoots from the village," said the boy, though everyone knew insurgents had wounded several of Kearney's Soldiers by shooting from the mosque, the cemetery, the school. . . .
The boy changed course, "God knows better than me," and that sent Kearney on a riff: "Yes. God does and God talks to me and told me they do." And by the way, hadn't the boy noticed that the bad guys always start shooting first?
"O.K., then shoot them, not our house," the boy said.
"Then tell me where the bad guys are," Kearney said. The boy said he didn't know. What he knew was that the Americans were always shooting at the village.
This went on for some time. When the boy again protested that no one shoots from his village, Kearney interrupted him. "Aminullah does," he said. Aminullah was a native of Aliabad and a rising figure in the valley's insurgency.
The boy smiled.
"You're smiling because you know I'm right," Kearney said.
"You're right," the boy said. "So shoot the cemetery, not our house."
Kearney moved closer to him. "Look, if you want help with your house, all you have to do is ask. But don't accuse us every time something goes wrong."
The boy laughed and repeated that he didn't know where the bad guys were.
"It's crazy, man. They must be ghosts!" Kearney said, laughing.
"Aminullah doesn't come to Aliabad anymore," the boy said, perhaps trying to give Kearney a bone.
Kearney leapt at it. "So Aminullah is bad?"
"Yes."
"Ah! Finally! We're getting somewhere." Kearney took off his helmet and squeezed his hands together and rocked as he sat on a wall. "What about Mohammad Tali, he's a good guy isn't he?" Kearney asked.
Smiling again, the boy looked at the dirt: "No. You already told us he's a bad guy."
"Ah!" Kearney said, throwing up his hands. "So you were down there in the village when I gave radios and food. But instead you say I shoot at you all the time?" Kearney swung his legs back and forth. "Hey dude, ask yourself. Why would I bring you radios and food and shoot at you? Does Aminullah? No. What happened that day after I left?" The boy said all he knew was that the villagers went home and "they" started shooting. "Where?" Kearney asked, "from your village?"
"What can I say? The Americans were in my village."
"Yeah, so I was doing good stuff for you guys and they shot at me. And what I'm trying to say is they could have shot at you again. And if I shoot at your house I'll help. We'll fix up that wall. I'm not here to hurt you."
Everyone was getting restless in the little check post. Kearney tried to lighten up a bit. He asked the boy what he thought about the Americans.
"You build roads and clinics and schools and are here to help," the boy said.
Cop out," Kearney shouted, chuckling. "Easy answer. Hey dude, you can say we're rotten and messing up your lumber trade." The boy laughed. Kearney laughed. Pfc. Michael Cunningham, the radio operator, and Sgt. Taylor White, who always manned the check post, both laughed.
"See, I knew it," Kearney said. "That's what you really think. Think I want to be here?"
"Yeah," the boy said. "I think so."
"Dude. I got a wife and son. I came here to help you out. If you give me as much help as possible I'll get out of here a hell of a lot faster."
Kearney told him to enjoy Ramadan, and then shouted, "Where's my fuzzy friend?" as he looked about for Jericho, the puppy whose ears were chopped off by an Afghan worker: it was pre-emptive preparation for dog fighting - the ears would just give an enemy dog something to grab onto. "I need someone to make me happy. Jericho, I need some love." Jericho appeared, leaping about. Kearney picked him up. "Hey, what's up buddy? You're a good boy. You smell like dirt."
Kearney turned to Cunningham and White and said, "Well, he's the first to admit Aminullah's bad." And give or take a little unreliable information shared here and there, that was the Korengal routine.
Fight Time
THE DAY AFTER the meeting with the elders of Yaka China, Yarnell and John could hear insurgents trying to pinpoint where Kearney and his men were. The helicopters had moved us to a ridge line, about 8,400 feet high, straddling the Korengal and Shuriak Valleys. The insurgents used the deep caves, boulders and forests as hideouts and transit routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. We could hear someone who called himself Obeid saying he'd do whatever the Yaka China elders decided - whether to cooperate with the Americans or take revenge. By evening the elders had apparently reached their verdict. It was fight time.
Kearney, too, had reached a verdict. He would fool the insurgents, feigning a troop extraction when the helicopters came for resupply and pushing out his best guys in small "kill teams." We heard the insurgents say, "We have wolves on them," meaning spotters. A hoarse, whispering insurgent had eyes on either Sgt. Larry Rougle and his scouts or on Lieutenant Piosa and his rear guard. There was joking that Rougle and Piosa should dance and see which one the whisperer was spying on. Then nothing happened for almost 24 hours.
Rougle - who was called Wildcat - was on his sixth deployment since Sept. 11, 2001. He was with the first group of Rangers in Afghanistan. Even his rough background was something of a legend; he would tell how he grew up in a South Jersey gang, shot a guy, went to "juvie," and there taught himself Russian (though he was estranged from his Russian father), taught himself politics, history, zoology. At night out in the woods, he'd tell his fellow scouts, "You know penguins are monogamous?"
i hung out with Piosa and his crew. His white skin, red hair and blue eyes belied the months of constant warfare he and his platoon had scraped through. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon and the Soldiers were joking around, heating up Meals-Ready-to-Eat, spitting gobs of Copenhagen and then, in a moment, recess was over. The insurgents were on them. Bullets ricocheted all through the woods. A strange silence fell as everyone scrambled for cover. Three of us crouched behind a skinny pine tree. And the silence broke: curses, shouting.
"Where's it coming from?"
"Where are my guys?"
"Jones, are you seeing things?"
More bullets. Cracks against the tree trunks. Bits of confusing information were coming in on Piosa's radio.
"They're comin' up the low ground at 2-4" - Sergeant Rice's call sign.
"One W.I.A. hit in the arm." Then there was panic and screaming.
"The enemy's overtaken the hill," bellowed Pvt. Sterling Dunn from further down the trees.
"2-4 is hit" - that was Rice.
"Wildcat is run over the hill" - that was Rougle.
"Get a team to run up there and take that hill. They pushed Wildcat over the hill!" Piosa shouted, trying over and over to reach Rice and Rougle, but getting no answer. The battalion surgeon, Capt. Joel Dean, and a sergeant sprinted up the hill to get to the wounded. As the first Americans neared Rice and Rougle's positions they were fired on from those same positions. What was going on?
I followed Piosa through the brush toward the ridge. We came upon Rice and Specialist Carl Vandenberge behind some trees. Vandenberge was drenched in blood. The shot to his arm had hit an artery. Rice was shot in the stomach. A Soldier was using the heating chemicals from a Meal-Ready- to-Eat to warm Vandenberge and keep him from going into shock.
[ED: a M113 Gavin would not only have PREVENTED the injury, any injuries incurred while dismounted could be treated and heated inside]
Piosa moved on to the hill where the men had been overrun. I saw big blue-eyed John Clinard, a sergeant from North Carolina, falling to pieces. He worshiped Rougle. "Sergeant Rougle is dying. It's my fault. . . . I'm sorry. . . . I tried to get up the hill. . . ." Sergeant Rougle was lying behind him. Someone had already covered him with a blanket. Only the soles of his boots were visible.
"There's nothing you could do," Piosa said, grabbing Clinard's shoulder.
[EDITOR: BULLSHIT!!! STOP FIGHTING THE ENEMY M16 VERSUS AK47 GET M113 GAVIN ARMORED TRACKS!]
"You got to be the man now. You can do it. I need you to get down to Rice and Vandenberge and get them to the medevac." Clinard wiped his face, seemed to snap to and headed off through the trees.
Two of Rice's squad mates appeared, eyes dilated. They couldn't believe they'd seen, up close, the ghosts they'd been fighting for the last five months. "I saw him in the eyes," Specialist Marc Solowski said. "He looked at me. I shot him." He and Specialist Michael Jackson had crawled up the hill twice trying to retake it. Each time the insurgents in "manjammies" whipped them back with machine-gun fire.
There was blood on the stones around us. Some thought they saw blood trailing down toward the village of Landigal, where they were sure an insurgent had dashed into a cottage.
"We're not losing this hill again," Piosa shouted. "This hill is ours!" He wanted bombs to be dropped immediately.
"There's women praying in that house," Dunn shouted back.
I was fixating on Rougle's black hat, lying by the bloodied rock patch where Dunn was sitting, when Sergeant Stichter, Dunn's senior, appeared, out of breath and shaking, back from tending to Vandenberge. He needed water. The F-15 known as Dude was en route, the Apaches were chasing men and Kearney - who had bolted down the mountain, throwing grenades in caves - was barking orders. Kearney was badly shaken. He adored Rougle, and he'd broken down when he saw his big old buddy Rice bleeding at the landing zone. Rice comforted him and then lumbered to the helicopter, just asking to talk to his wife before they put him under.
The insurgents had run off with some of Rougle, Rice and Vandenberge's stuff - ammunition, communication equipment, night vision goggles, machine guns. Kearney wanted the equipment back. He wanted to punish the valley. Stichter had his eyes on a guy pacing a rooftop in Landigal and wanted to blow his head off. Specialist Mitchell Raeon, whose uniform was now soaked in Rougle's blood, had the guy in his scope but couldn't range that far. "That's a female," Dunn said.
Kearney had identified insurgents who'd dashed into a house and wanted to hit them, but Stichter got back word from Camp Blessing saying the target was too close to other houses. Kearney sent back a reminder - you let some guys get away the other night. It was impossible to know for sure, but Kearney believed they were the guys who had killed Rougle, and now, he said, you're going to let another group get away?
Someone cursed, then said, "They're all leaving the house."
Kearney radioed down to one of his lieutenants at an observation post. "Where are they going?" Yarnell heard the insurgents say they were coming back for the rest of the equipment. And then, with no warning, an F-15 dropped a bomb on Landigal, but off target, or so it seemed. Kearney was furious. He was sure headquarters had intentionally missed the house he had wanted hit.
I noticed Raeon was packing and unpacking Rougle's things. Rougle's scouts were in disarray, rudderless, and admitting it. Raeon said he kept seeing in his mind Rougle's face alert and then dead, switching back and forth; he wanted it to stop.
The next day brought another brief firefight, and Rougle's scouts rallied swiftly. They said they felt him watching and proud. There were more bomb drops and refusals to drop bombs, and then Becky, everyone's favorite Apache pilot, swept in. Not only did she offer the comforting voice of a woman seeping right into their ears, but Becky was one of the most aggressive shooters. She flew up and down the canyon walls seeking out and rocketing insurgents. We heard them on the radio again boasting about retreating to safety under fire. They talked about the strike in Landigal that they thought might have killed Azizullah - "a real bad guy," the radio operator told me.
Kearney was watching a crow flying above us. "Taliban are right," he said. "Like they said yesterday, follow the birds, they follow the Americans. I wish I was made as strong as haj" - their nickname for insurgents. "They were balls to do what they did. And guess what? I'm not gonna lie. They won."
Killing Together
AS WE WAITED for dusk to get back to the KOP, we all knew the insurgents were nearby, eyes on Kearney, eyes on the Soldiers down in the valley. Even nightfall was no comfort because the full moon was floodlighting the Korengal. I returned to the KOP by helicopter with Kearney, while 1st and 2nd Platoons had to make the long trek back on foot. As soon as 1st Platoon set off, the insurgents struck with a devastating L-shaped ambush. All Kearney could do, back at the KOP, was calm his boys on the radio, get in the medevac and invoke the gods of war. The Apaches, Slasher and Bone dropped bombs all night. The Soldiers and insurgents were so close that when Slasher, the AC-130, flew in, the pilot coordinated not with the JTAC but with Sgt. Roberto Sandifer, the platoon's forward observer, who at that moment was under fire watching one of his guys die.
Around midnight, 1st Platoon filed into the KOP, eyes bulging, drenched in sweat, river water and blood. They were hauling the belongings of Mohammad Tali, a high-value target. Specialist Sal Giunta had killed him.
The next day I climbed up to the KOP and found Specialist Giunta, a quiet Iowan lofted into a heroism he didn't want. His officers were putting him up for a medal of honor. Giunta told me the story of that night, how they'd barely moved 300 yards before they were blasted. Giunta was fourth in the file when it happened, and he jumped into a ditch. He couldn't figure out why they were getting hit from where Joshua Brennan and baby-faced Franklin Eckrode should have been leading up ahead. He knew it must be bad, but as he leapt up to check he got whacked with a bullet in with a bullet in his armored chest plate. It threw him down. They were taking fire from three sides. He grabbed some grenades: "I couldn't throw as far as Sergeant Gallardo. We were looking like retards and I decided to run out in front of the grenades." He found Eckrode with gunshot wounds. "He was down but moving and trying to fix his SAW" - a heavy machine gun - "so I just kept on running up the trail. It was cloudy. I was running and saw dudes. Plural."
He couldn't figure out who they were. Then he realized they were hauling Brennan off through the forest. "I started shooting," he recalled. "I emptied that magazine. They dropped Brennan." Giunta scrambled up to Brennan. He was a mess. His lower jaw was shot off. "He was still conscious. He was breathing. He was asking for morphine. I said, 'You'll get out and tell your hero stories,' and he was like, 'I will, I will.' "
They were still taking fire. No one was there to help. Hugo Mendoza, their platoon medic, was back in another ditch, calling: "I'm bleeding out. I'm dying." Giunta saw Brennan's eyes go back. His breathing was bad. Giunta got Brennan to squeeze his hand. A medic showed up out of the sky. They prepared Brennan to be hoisted to the medevac in a basket. Soon he would be dead.
As the medevacs flew out, Sergeant Sandifer had talked in air cover: Slasher, the AC-130. The pilot was a woman and, Sandifer later told me, "It was so reassuring for us to hear her voice." She spotted guys hiding and asked if she was clear to engage. " 'You're cleared hot,' I told her. And we killed two people together." But, at this point, the killings were no consolation to Sandifer.
As Giunta said, "The richest, most-trained army got beat by dudes in manjammies and A.K.'s."
[EDITOR: FUCKING BULLSHIT. WE ARE ILL-PREPARED AND ILL-TRAINED. STOP MAKING EXCUSES AND ADAPT]
His voice cracked. He was not just hurting, he was in a rage. And there was nothing for him to do with it but hold back his tears, and bark - at the Afghans for betraying them, at the Army for betraying them.
[ED: YES FOR NOT HAVING THEM IN M113 GAVIN ARMORED TRACKS AND FIGHTING THE WAR PROPERLY BY SEALING THE BORDER WITH A SECURITY FENCE ETC.]
He didn't run to the front because he was a hero. He ran up to get to Brennan, his friend. "But they" - he meant the military - "just keep asking for more from us." His contract would be up in 18 days but he had been stop-lossed and couldn't go home. Brennan himself was supposed to have gotten out in September. He'd been planning to go back to Wisconsin where his dad lived, play his guitar and become a cop.
Sandifer was questioning why they were sticking it out in the Korengal when the people so clearly hated them. He was haunted by Mendoza's voice calling to him: "I'm bleeding out. I'm dying." He worried that the Korengal was going to push them off the deep end. In his imagination it had already happened. One day an Afghan visited their fire base, Sandifer told me. "I was staring at him, on the verge of picking up my weapon to shoot him," he said. "I know right from wrong, but even if I did shoot him everyone at the fire base would have been O.K. We're all to the point of `Lord of the Flies.' " And they still had 10 months to go in the Korengal.
I wondered how Kearney was going to win back his own guys, let alone win over the Korengalis. Just before I left, Kearney told me his biggest struggle would be holding his guys in check. "I've got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people," he said. One of his lieutenants wanted to shoot every Afghan in the face. Kearney shook his head. He wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage. He tried to tell them the restraints were a product of their success - that there was an Afghan government with its own rules. "I'm balancing plates on my goddamn nose is what I'm doing," he said. "All it's gonna take is for one of these guys to snap."
But leave the Korengal, as the colonel had suggested, and let some other company deal with it? No way. He'd spent five months learning the valley, getting involved in it; he couldn't just pull out. At least he would keep the insurgents busy here so the other companies could do hearts and minds unimpeded down along the Pech river. "I lost seven dudes here," he told me. "It's too much blood. I don't want to give this up. This is mine."
To Be Continued
COLONEL OSTLUND and his officers, and the governor of Kunar and his officials, held an all-day meeting with the Korengali elders. The elders wanted to talk about Rock Avalanche and the devastation that had rained down on them. Colonel Ostlund told them, "If anything should happen to Captain Kearney, pain and misery will knock on many doors in the Korengal." He gave them 10 days to pick sides - the insurgents or the government. Only then would he consider going ahead with the road project. Their answer came back. They would leave the valley altogether. But they didn't, and 10 days later insurgents pulled off another ambush of a platoon from the 173rd. The entire patrol went down, either wounded or killed. Kearney told me recently that they had wounded Abu Ikhlas and killed some other bad guys. He said he was pretty sure that Haji Matin, the embittered timber lord, had been killed, too. But the dialogue with the Korengalis was pretty much the same as it had been. Only the winter snows have brought some minor respite to the valley.
Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer, has reported extensively on Afghanistan, most recently in a two-part series for the magazine on the revival of the Taliban.
The Morice Line: Lesson Gunslinger Americans Have Yet To Learn
www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1985/HJR.htm
1985 Army Command and Staff College paper described France's Morice Line in the Algeria War as follows:
Defeating Insurgency On The Border
CSC 1985
SUBJECT AREA National Military Strategy
Executive Summary
TITLE: DEFEATING INSURGENCY ON THE BORDER
I. Purpose: To establish the validity of border barriers as a counterinsurgency strategy for United States military forces.
II. Problem: Although border barriers have been used successfully by other armies, United States forces have developed little doctrine on the subject. This oversight should be a matter of concern because United States forces are likely to be involved in counterinsurgency warfare for much of the future.
III. Data: Much of United States counterinsurgency doctrine has been taken from the French who perfected the use of border barriers in Algerian United States forces, however, did not use border barriers well in Vietnam, and as a result current doctrine is rudimentary. Border barriers are needed, however, because they are one of only three methods of eliminating the benefits of sanctuary to the guerrilla. The other two methods, diplomacy and direct military intervention, provide more timely solutions to the sanctuary problem, but often can not be used because of political constraints. Border barriers can best be used when the insurgency is still in unconventional phases, adequate manpower and material resources are available, and the nation is committed to a lengthy war. The technology, mobility, and firepower available to United States forces make them particularly well suited to use border barriers.
IV. Conclusions: Border barriers must be a primary consideration in developing strategies for countering guerrilla sanctuaries, especially for United States forces who are well equipped to efficiently use them.
V. Recommendations: The various military Services should develop appropriate doctrine for establishing and controlling border barriers during counterinsurgency operations.
Defeating Insurgencies On the Border
Outline
Thesis
The use of border barriers should be a primary consideration in the development of any United States counterinsurgency strategy because many insurgencies can not be defeated without barriers and United States military forces are well equipped to use them.
I. Evolution of Border Barrier Doctrine
A. Morice Line in Algeria
B. McNamara Line in Vietnam
C. Doctrine for United States forces
II. Importance of Sanctuary to Guerrillas
A. Base to establish and supply army
B. Haven for guerrilla operations
III. Methods of eliminating sanctuaries or their benefits
A. Diplomacy
B. Direct military intervention
C. Border barriers
IV. Requirements for effective border barrier operations
A. Insurgency in unconventional war phases
B. Resources and manpower to control all border routes
C. National commitment to a lengthy war
V. Special capabilities of United States forces
A. Infiltration detection devices
B. Firepower and mobility
VI. United States' need for border barrier doctrine
A. Likely commitment to counterinsurgency operations
B. Effectiveness of border barriers as a strategy
C. Special capabilities of United States forces
DEFEATING INSURGENCY ON THE BORDER
In 1957 the French Army, fresh from defeat at the hands of guerrillas in Indo-China, found itself losing to them again in Algeria. Despite five years of fighting and the commitment of nearly one half million men, France's continued role in the colonization of Algeria appeared clearly in doubt. A guerrilla army of independence-seeking Algerians, protected and supplied by sanctuaries in Tunisia, had grown from an initial strength of less than 400 to nearly 70,000 men.[1] As a result, guerrilla operations against the French Army and its surrogate forces had become more threatening and decisive. As casualties increased to more than 900 per month and the situation grew more desperate, it became evident to the French leadership that a change in strategy was needed. The tactic of using French troops primarily to garrison and secure the major towns and settlements of Algeria was not working. If France hoped to prevail, the battle would have to be taken to the enemy, first along the Tunisian border and then in the Algerian countryside. In the spring of 1957 the French began construction of an elaborate barrier--the Morice Line--along 200 miles of the frontier with Tunisia. Anchored by the Mediterranean Sea in the north and the Sahara Desert in the south, it was a miracle of modern technology. Its main feature was an eight foot high electric fence through which a charge of 5000 volts was passed. There was a 45 meter minefield on either side of it, and on the Algerian side there was a barbed wire entanglement, and then a footpath, patrolled day and night. If the fence was penetrated, an alarm was automatically activated which brought instant fire from 105mm howitzers and attack from mobile strike farces consisting of helicopters, tanks, and airborne infantry. Some 80,000 French Soldiers defended the line.[3] During the remainder of 1957 and 1958, Tunisian-based guerrillas tried every conceivable means of breaching the wire using high tension cutters, bangalore torpedoes, tunnels, ramps, and even assaults by entire infantry battalions. French countermeasures, however, in every case proved to be decisive. By the end of 1958 the guerrillas had lost over 6,000 men and 4,300 weapons to the deadly combination of the barrier and mobile strike forces.[4] In addition nearly 30,000 insurgents in Tunisia were left cut off from the war in Algeria. Guerrillas left in Algeria, stripped of reinforcement and resupply, proved to be easy prey for the French offensives in the countryside which quickly followed. By the end of 1959 less than 10,000 guerrillas remained in Algeria, most without weapons or ammunition. In less then two years the French Army had accomplished with the Morice Line what it had failed to achieve in the five previous years using conventional counterinsurgency tactics.[5]
Although political unrest in Paris caused the French to later abandon Algeria, the military aspects of their "successful" counter-insurgency were studied widely by the major powers of the world, particularly the United States. French counterinsurgency methods such as resettlement, pacification, combined action programs, and cordon and search techniques were later adopted and used by United States forces in Vietnam. The concept of border barriers, however, received little attention. Army Field Manual 31-16, Counterquerrilla Operations -- the bible for military operations in Vietnam--discussed border operations only briefly, noting that: "While certain definite portions of an international land border or shoreline may be placed under effective surveillance and control led by use of static posts, reserve forces, ground and aerial observers, electronic listening posts, and patrols, the continuous surveillance and control of an extensive land border or shoreline is extremely difficult." [6]
The United States, nevertheless decided in 1967 to employ a "fence" or "iron shield" along the DMZ between North and South Vietnam.[7] This line, erected at the direction of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, was primarily an electronic barrier rather than a physical one. Although it included a barbed wire fence, its main feature was a field of secret, electronic detection devices hidden along its length which were used to alert air and ground forces of enemy infiltration. Political and practical considerations prevented the extension of the McNamara line along the lengthy Laotian border, the main infiltration route for the North Vietnamese guerrillas.[8] As a result, the line presented only a minor obstacle to infiltrating guerrillas who easily avoided it by traveling through Laos rather than across the DMZ. Construction of the final phase of the line was subsequently terminated when its ineffectiveness became obvious.
Since the failure of the McNamara Line in 1971, the United States doctrine on the use of border barriers has remained rudimentary. Border operations of all types have, in general, been neglected by military planners, probably because of the political repercussions that have often accompanied their use in the past. Instead, it has been emphasized that control of the borders during counterinsurgency operations is primarily a responsibility of the government of the host nation; and that border police, customs personnel, local police, and other government agencies should be used before military forces. Military forces are committed to border denial operations only, "after careful consideration of the threat, the environment, and the location of the infiltrators probable targets and method of operation."[9]
The absence of any definitive U.S. doctrine on the use of border barriers strongly suggests that most military planners have concluded that border barriers are not needed, are ineffective when used, and make poor use of military capabilities. Such a conclusion, however, ignores the shortcomings of other border denial methods and fails to recognize the technological capabilities of U.S. forces. In fact, the use of border barriers should be a primary consideration in the development of any United States counterinsurgency strategy because many insurgencies can not be defeated without barriers, and United States military forces are well-equipped to use them. The importance of border barriers in counterinsurgency operations can best be appreciated by understanding the importance of sanctuary to guerillas. According to the late Dr. Bernard Fall in his book Street Without Joy, a sanctuary is "a territory contiguous to a rebellious area which though ostensibly not involved in the conflict, provides the rebel side with shelter, training facilities, equipment, and--if they can get away with it--troops."[10] Sanctuaries are an essential requirement for the conduct of any successful insurgency. The availability of sanctuaries allows relatively small groups of guerrillas to establish and equip entire armies within the safety of neighboring borders. These guerrilla armies are then able to attack counterinsurgency forces at a time of their own choosing, returning to the safety of their sanctuaries between combat operations. The guerrilla without sanctuary is, on the other hand, vulnerable to attack at any time and therefore has little opportunity to train and equip his forces.
The value of sanctuaries to guerrillas was never more apparent than during the Algerian war. During that war Tunisian sanctuaries provided both a supply base and a safe haven for Algerian guerrillas. The guerrillas were able to transport arms from Arab and communist-bloc nations directly to their Tunisian camps while the French looked on helplessly. In just three months during 1957 the guerrillas received 17,000 rifles, 380 machineguns, 296 automatic rifles, 190 bazookas, 30 mortars, and over 100 million rounds of ammunition by this means. Within Tunisia, they established five command posts, two replacement depots, eight hospitals, nine arsenals and three training camps all of which were free from French attack. Without such sanctuaries the guerrillas would never have been able to support their 70,000-man Army.
Sanctuaries proved to be equally essential to guerrilla forces some ten years later when Vietnamese Communist (VC) and North Vietnam Army (NVA) forces, operating from protected sanctuaries in Cambodia and Loas, challenged the armies of South Vietnam and the United States. Many historians credit the success of the VC and NVA to their ability to use their sanctuaries effectively against an enemy with "vastly greater manpower, firepower and maneuverability". In this regard, some writers suggest that the outcome of every insurgency since WWII has depended upon how well the sanctuary performed its expected role. Others such as Walter Lippman claim that "it is for all practical purposes impossible to win a guerrilla war if there is a privileged sanctuary behind the guerrilla fighters."[14] How then can sanctuaries be defeated? There are three widely recognized methods for eliminating or denying guerrillas the use of sanctuaries. Of these, diplomacy is almost always the first attempted, followed by direct military intervention, and finally border barriers depending upon the situation.
The diplomacy method depends upon persuasion to force the country "hosting" the sanctuary to eliminate it. Because it does not require the commitment of troops, diplomacy is normally the most desirable approach. For it to be successful, however, substantial world opinion must be marshalled against the host country, the host country must be swayed by that opinion, and it must have the power to force the guerrilla to surrender his sanctuary. Seldom are all three of these essential conditions met. Most countries hosting sanctuaries share common goals with the insurgent and along with him enjoy substantial economic and military support from one or more world powers or power blocks. Thus, it is to their advantage to continue the sanctuary condition.
Such was the case during the Algerian War in France's former colony, Tunisia. With powerful support from the Arab and communist worlds, the Tunisians had few incentives to help its former master, France, eliminate the Algerian guerrilla sanctuaries. Even had the Tunisians been persuaded, it is unlikely that they could have eliminated 30,000 armed insurgents from their borders. In this regard, the potential consequences facing a host country which agrees to militarily oppose sanctuaries within its borders are particularly severe. For example, during the Southeast Asian conflict of the 60's and 70's, Cambodia, a declared neutral, had 40,000 North Vietnamese Army(NVA) regulars and Vietnamese Communist (VC) guerrillas occupying sanctuaries within its borders. In 1970, after years of United States diplomatic pressure, Cambodia reluctantly agreed to resist communist use of these sanctuaries. In March of that year Cambodia's small, poorly lead army was ordered to move against selected sanctuaries in coordinated attacks with elements of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam(ARVN). The results were disastrous for both Cambodia and the United States. Within a matter of weeks the communist forces drove the ARVN back into South Vietnam and destroyed the Cambodian Army. The Cambodian government, no longer considered a neutral by the communist forces, became subject to attack both from its own constituents and the communist forces. In its weakened condition it fell to the communist forces shortly after their victory in South Vietnam.[15] Thus, what the United States had hoped would be the least costly method of eliminating the communist sanctuaries, instead became the catalyst for the eventual communist takeover of one of the few neutral countries in the area.
When diplomatic pressures fail to eliminate sanctuaries direct military intervention against them must be considered. Such intervention may include aerial bombing, artillery and rocket attacks, raids, or even assaults against the sanctuaries by entire mechanized divisions. Military intervention offers the swiftest and most direct method of eliminating the sanctuary. On the other hand, it is fraught with risks. The crossing of sovereign borders by allied forces is likely to turn public and world opinion against their cause, and may expand the war in totally unpredictable and undesirable directions. In this regard, the United States and its allies have enjoyed few successes in using this method against sanctuaries.
For example, as has been previously noted, the intervention of ARVN and U.S. forces against communist sanctuaries in Cambodia eventually led to the downfall of that country. Furthermore it expanded the war, forcing the long-term commitment of U.S. firepower and logistical support, and of ARVN troop support to the Cambodian forces at a time when these resources were badly needed in South Vietnam.[16] Although the operation was successful from a military point of view-communist operations were reportedly set back six months-it did little to contribute to the long term, strategic plan for this area. Reported one observer
The Cambodian decision has set in motion a secondary chain reaction in the U.S.. For Richard Nixon, that reaction must seem a negative and not fully foreseen outcome. It has cost him credibility with the people, aroused and angered the Congress and surely limited his future choices for Indochina. [The Cambodian decision]... may be working out in ways that he did not expect and would not have chosen.[17]
No example more graphically illustrates the risks of direct military intervention against sanctuaries than the recent Israeli operations in Lebanon in June 1982. What was planned as a shallow penetration to drive Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas from sanctuaries along the Israeli border, quickly became an all out war. Israeli forces, initially enjoying overwhelming success, drove deeper into Lebanon than originally planned. Syrian forces were drawn into the fighting, and the balance of power among guerrilla forces, previously a stabilizing element in Lebanon, was destroyed. As a result, Israel has been forced to stay in Lebanon for nearly three years at a tremendous cost to its army and economy. In return Israel has achieved little in terms of securing its borders, but instead has seen the PLO replaced by even more radical guerrilla organizations. Thus, while direct military intervention often appears to offer the quickest and least complicated method of eliminating sanctuaries, it seldom does. Instead, it more often creates new problems which can not be foreseen.
When diplomatic methods fail and nations are unwilling to risk direct military intervention against sanctuaries, border barriers must be employed. Border barriers require costly manpower and material resources to erect, and more time than other methods to eliminate the sanctuary. On the other hand, border barriers are defensive in nature, and therefore avoid the political pitfalls associated with other border crossing operations. Furthermore, they generally provide a more lasting and effective solution to the sanctuary problem. For example, in addition to the Morice Line in Algeria, border barriers have been used successfully by both the Soviets and Israelis. In this regard, it has been reported that barriers erected by Soviet forces within the mountain passes of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have limited Afghan rebel resupply across that border to less than twenty percent of the total supplies received. As a result, the rebels have been denied most of the United States aid that originates in Pakistan, and have instead had to rely heavily upon internal support.
The Israelis, have been even more successful with their "Security Belt" along the border with Lebanon. This line, consisting of a wire fence, minefields, watch towers, and a variety of sensor and alarm devices is supported by helicopter-borne pursuit forces and artillery.[19] To reduce the manpower cost of patrolling the 60 mile border the Israel is have established outposts and settlements in frontier areas which provide bases for patrols by both military units and local personnel. Upon establishment of the security belt and a "dead zone" six miles deep along the border in 1970, Israeli casualties due to infiltrators dropped from 14.5 per month to 3.2 in less than a year.[20] The Security Belt has thus proven to be an effective combat power multiplier for this small nation of relatively limited military means.
The success of the Israeli Security Belt and of the Morice Line suggests that certain requirements must be met before the use of border barriers can be used successfully.
First, the insurgency must still be in the unconventional war phases. Guerrillas, especially in the early stages of an insurgency, are too poorly trained and equipped to overcome a well-established barrier. In the later stages of an insurgency, however, as the guerrilla transitions into conventional warfare, his ability to overcome such barriers is greatly increased. In this regard, border barriers are seldom effective against conventional weapons such as tanks, armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and helicopters.
Secondly, the counterinsurgency force must have the resources and manpower to effectively control all primary border routes for guerrilla ingress and egress. In this regard, border barrier operations require a large commitment of troops, both to patrol the border and to provide reaction forces and fire support when the barrier is penetrated. In Algeria for example, more than 200 troops were required along each mile of the Morice Line.[21]
This is not to say, however, that border barriers could not be used in almost any country in the world. Almost all countries have natural barriers such as mountains, seas, and deserts along much of their border. These barriers make infiltration difficult if not impossible for guerrillas. For example, the Mediterranean Sea and Sahara Desert on Algeria's northern and southern borders proved to be insurmountable obstacles to the guerrillas who had neither the mobility for sea nor desert operations. Attempts by the guerrillas to bypass the Morice Line by crossing these natural barriers were easily defeated by the highly mobile French. Likewise, the rugged mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have hindered guerrilla operations and allowed the Soviets to use border barriers with a minimum of manpower along a border of almost 1200 miles in length. In this regard, many areas where U.S. forces are likely to be committed to counterinsurgency operations, such as Central America, have natural barriers which are particularly supportive of border barrier operations. Why then are United States forces not prepared to use border barriers today?
[EDITOR: because we are gunslinging, unprofessional dumbasses who don't give a crap about COMBAT ENGINEERING]
The commitment of a government and nation to a lengthy counterinsurgency operation is the third, and probably the most difficult requirement for effective use of border barriers. In most situations, months or even years are required before border barrier operations eventually strangle the external support of an insurgency. Unless therefore, a nation is committed to a long-term counterinsurgency operation, border barriers will not be effective. Few nations, particularly the United States, have demonstrated such patience. [EDITOR: patience must be for the right things not gunslinging alone] In this regard, the United States approach in Vietnam was plagued by strategies to achieve a quick victory. Yet when one considers the time and resources ultimately expended by the United States in Vietnam, the failure to use border barriers early in that conflict appears to have been a tragic oversight.
This is unfortunate because United States forces are particularly well suited for conducting border barrier operations, even under conditions that other larger, and more experienced armies would find unacceptable. Efficient border barrier operations require the utilization of modern technology and light, mobile forces in lieu of costly fortifications and large numbers of troops. In this regard, the United States armed forces, which for several decades have depended upon technology and mobility to meet a broad range of global commitments are well-equipped and organized for conducting border barrier operations. For example, United States forces have a broad range of devices to assist them in detecting enemy movements including seismic and acoustical ground sensors, thermal vision devices, ground and airborne radar, and even infrared cameras mounted or satellites. Information received from these devices can be relayed to high speed computers which develop real time targeting information for artillery, gunships, airborne attack aircraft, or heliborne [ED: parachute] reaction forces. In addition, the computers can identify patterns of enemy infiltration and select likely areas to be seeded with pressure activated anti-personnel mines or other types of area denial weapons. The massive firepower immediately available to U.S. forces from heavy artillery, aircraft-mounted cannons, and laser guided munitions, when tied into the sensor network, makes the use of troops unnecessary along the remote, rugged strips of many borders. The speed with which helicopters, short take-off and landing aircraft, and armored vehicles can deploy U.S. reaction forces from inland bases to trouble spots along the border further reduces the need for large numbers of defenders.
The effectiveness of U.S. technology against guerrilla sanctuaries was clearly demonstrated during Operation Dewey Canyon in Southeast Asia. This air interdiction operation against the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main guerrilla supply route and sanctuary in Loas, made superb use of United States technology. To locate the enemy, ground sensors were emplaced along the Ho Chi Minh Trail by helicopters and transport aircraft while reconnaissance aircraft, using highly sensitive thermal detectors, monitored the trail day and night. Information from these sources was fed into computers which developed patterns of guerrilla convoy movement and identified supply depots. Based upon this information jet aircraft and helicopters were able to seed guerrilla supply routes, truck parks, and depots with anti-material and anti-personnel mines. Additionally, convoys were brought under attack from bombs, rockets, and laser-guided munitions the minute they started to move. The operation was so successful that in one year it was estimated that NVA supplies entering Vietnam were reduced by eighty percent. According to one observer, for every 320 tons of supplies along the trail only 10 tons survived to reach South Vietnam. [ED: by bicycles]
Some military experts who were close to this secret and highly successful electronic war have concluded that "the persistent and patient application of superior technology can be decisive in guerrilla war situations."[24] Certainly U.S. capabilities are even more impressive today and, if properly applied, could be just as decisive in defeating a guerrilla along almost any border in she world.
Guerrilla warfare has become the predominant method of waging war in the twentieth century. As the military capabilities of the major powers of the world have rapidly outpaced those of their adversaries, they have found themselves increasingly involved in counterinsurgency operations. France, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have all, in the last twenty years alone, found themselves involved in lengthy, bloody counterinsurgency operations, often with disappointing results. The United States, more than any other major power, faces the prospect today of having to fight guerrillas again. The task at hand then for the military leadership of our country is to determine how counterinsurgencies can be fought and won.
The strategic use of border barriers has been one successful technique employed by other counterinsurgency forces in the past. It has provided these forces with the capability to deny the guerrilla the benefits of sanctuary so critical to his survival. Border barriers have worked to defeat sanctuaries when diplomacy failed, and direct military intervention was not possible or was unwise. Along with other counterinsurgency techniques, it has allowed the counterinsurgency forces to divide the guerrilla and defeat him piecemeal.
United States forces are well-equipped to use border barriers and grow more capable in this respect every day. They possess both the technology, firepower and mobility required to make border barrier operations both efficient and effective.
What the United States military needs now is a better appreciation of the benefits of border barriers and an understanding of how they are best employed. In this regard, doctrine is needed which defines the conditions which favor the use of border barriers, describes how they are constructed, and provides the concepts for tactical barrier operations. Then and only then can America forces be expected to employ such barriers effectively. More than 10,000 Frenchmen lost their lives before the strategy of the Morice Line was perfected. We in the military today can ensure that this sacrifice was not for naught.
FOOTNOTES
1. "Tunisia," TIME, 3 March,1985, p.25.
2 "Algeria-Reluctant Rebel," TIME, 13 October, 1958, p. 25.
3. Alistar Horne, A Savage War of Peace (New York: Viking Press, 1978), pp.263-264.
4. Ibid, p.266.
5. Harold D. Nelson,ed. Algeria, A Country Study. (Washington: The American University, 1979), p.58.
6. Headquarters, Department of the Army, Counterguerrilla Operations, FM 31-16 (Washington, 1967), pp. 98-100.
7. "Why Saigon's Neighbors Fear Was Expansion," Armed Forces, 14 (February,1968), p.83.
8. Ibid.
9. Headquarters, Department of the Army, Low Intensity Conflict, FM 100-20 (Washington, 1981), pp.96.
10. Professor John D. Deiner, "Guerrilla Border Sanctuaries and Counterinsurgency Warfare, " The Army Quarterly and Defense Journal, 109 (April 1976), p.162.
11. Horne, p.264.
12. TIME, 13 October, 1958, p.28.
13. George Weiss, "Battle For the Ho Chi Minh Trail," Armed Forces Journal, 108 (February 1971), p. 18.
14. Major G.R. Christmas, "Guerrilla Sanctuaries," Infantry, 63 (May-June, 1973), p.25.
15. "The Cambodia Venture: An Assessment," TIME, 6 July, 1970, pp.16-17.
16. Ibid, p. 17.
17. Ibid.
18. "Reports of More Aid to Afghan Rebels Stir Fueds," Washington Post, February 7, 1985, Section A, p.1.
19. Major Leonard Supko, USMC, Personal Interview about observations while a member of U.N. Peacekeeping Forces in Palestine: Quantico, Virginia, 5 March 1985.
20. Bard E. O'Neill, Armed Struggle in Palestine:A Political-Military Analysis (Boulder: Western Press, 1978), pp. 76-84.
21. Horne, p. 264.
22. Ibid, p.18.
23. Weiss, pp.18-23.
24. Ibid, p.18.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"Algeria, Reluctant Rebel." TIME, 13 October 1985, pp. 25-29.
"Behind the Lines In Algeria-Quiet, Then Sudden Death." U.S. News and World Report, 18 April 1958, pp. 58-63.
Brace, Richard and Joan. Ordeal In Algeria. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.
"The Cambodia Venture: An Assessment." TIME, 6 July 1970, pp. 16-17.
Christmas, Major G. R. "Guerrilla Sanctuaries." Infantry, 63 (May-June 1968), 22-27.
Deiner, Professor John D. "Guerrilla Border Sanctuaries and Counterinsurgent Warfare." Army Quarterly and Defense Journal 109 (April 1976), 162-178.
"Fortifications," Collier's Encyclopedia (1975), Volume 10, 201-205.
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Counterquerrilla Operations, FM 31-16. Washington: 1967.
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Denial Operations and Barriers; FM 31-10. Washington: 1968.
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Low Intensity Conflict, FM 100-20. Washington: 1981.
Headquarters, United States marine corps. Counterinsurgency Operations, FMFM 8-2. Washington: 1980.
Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace. New York: Viking Press, 1978.
Hutcheson, Major John M. "Scorched Earth Policy: Soviets in Afganistan." Military Review, LXII (April 1982) 32-33.
"McNamara Line: It's Still A Building, But." U.S. News and World Report, 13 (25 March 1968), 14.
Nelson, Harold D., ed. Algeria, A Country Study. Washington: The American University, 1979.
O'Neill, Bard E. Armed Struggle in Palestine: A Political- Military Analysis. Boulder: Westview Press, 1978.
"Reports of More Aid to Afghan Rebels Stir Fueds," Washington Post, February 7, 1985, Section A, p.1.
Supko, Leonard, Major, USMC, Former member of U.N. Peace- keeping Forces, Palestine. Interview concerning Israeli security belt. Quantico, Virginia, March 5, 1985.
"Tunisia, Good Offices From Friends." TIME, 3 March 1958, pp. 25-27.
Weiss, George. "Battle For Control of Ho Chi Minh Trail." Armed Forces Journal, 108 (February 1971), 18-22.
"Why Saigon's Neighbors Fear War Expansion." Armed Forces Management, 14 (February 1968), 83.
OPERATIONAL/TECHNOTACTICAL
Afghan tent FOBs needs BATTLEBOXes, M113 Gavin tracks, Non-Linear Log if we are going to stay and try to influence events...
BATTLEBOXes to replace flimsy tents
www.combatreform.org/BATTLEBOXinactionphotos.htm
M113 Gavin armored tracks to get off easily ambushed/roads-trails, armor protection AS THE MINIMUM TRANSPORTATION STANDARD ON THE NLB
www.combatreform.org/armoredhmmwvsstrykersfail.htm
Non-Linear Logistics
www.combatreform.org/abnlogistics.htm
www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-
0607110158jul11,1,736947.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
By Kim Barker, Tribune foreign correspondent
Tribune foreign correspondent Kim Barker reported from a remote region
in Afghanistan
MUSA QALA BASE, Afghanistan -- Nobody waves at the Soldiers here. Children do not crowd around the Humvees, asking for pens and candy, as they do in the rest of Afghanistan. Even the girls throw rocks at passing U.S. military helicopters.
U.S. troops set up this base in southwestern Helmand provi
In the spring of 1957 the French began construction of an elaborate barrier-the Morice Line-along 200 miles of the frontier with Tunisia. Anchored by the Mediterranean Sea in the north and the Sahara Desert in the south, it was a miracle of modern technology. Its main feature was an eight foot high electric fence through which a charge of 5000 volts
was passed. There was a 45 meter minefield on either side of it, and on the Algerian side there was a barbed wire entanglement, and then a footpath, patrol led day and night. If the fence was penetrated, an alarm was automatically activated which brought instant fire from 105mm howitzers and attack from mobile strike farces consisting of helicopters, tanks, and airborne infantry. Some 80,000 French Soldiers
defended the line. [3] During the remainder of 1957 and 1958, Tunisian-based guerrillas tried every conceivable means of breaching the wire using high tension cutters, bangalore torpedoes, tunnels, ramps, and even assaults by entire infantry battalions. French countermeasures, however, in every case proved to be decisive. By the end of 1958 the guerrillas had lost over 6,000 men and 4,300 weapons to the deadly combination of the barrier and mobile strike forces. In addition nearly 30,000 insurgents in Tunisia were left cut off from the war in Algeria. Guerrillas left in Algeria, stripped of reinforcement and resupply, proved to be easy prey for the French offensives in the countryside which quickly followed. By the end of 1959 less than 10,000 guerrillas remained in Algeria, most without weapons or ammunition. In less then two years the French Army had accomplished with the Morice Line what it had failed to achieve in the five previous years using conventional counterinsurgency tactics.
www.geocities.com/strategicmaneuver/battleboxes.htm
www.combatreform.org/m113combat.htm
Taliban haven is GIs' 'Camp Hell'
Afghan villagers `don't want to help us any'
Chicago Tribune
July 11, 2006