Us looking for Iraqi Strong Man
"Those who try to do the undoable must also think the unthinkable. US strategists in Iraq are contemplating what they have always denied, the search for a "strong man with a moustache" to stop the present rot. If the result is not democracy, so be it.
If the result is the dismemberment of Iraq, so be it. Iraq has become a mess. There is only one priority: to "get out with dignity".
This strategy is now being rammed down the throat of the US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, by George W. Bush's new "realist", Deputy National Security Adviser Bob Blackwill. He answers to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, not US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and is the new boss of Iraq.
The Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, architects of the old "idealist" strategy, are in retreat. The Iraqi Governing Council, which Bremer reluctantly created, will be disbanded. Washington must find someone with whom it can do business, someone who can deliver order in return for power. That search is Blackwill's job.
In a nutshell, Washington has bought the old British Middle East strategy, that you deal with local leaders and leave them to it. The fantasies of Rumsfeld and of Bush's recent "world democracy" speech are at an end. There must be no second Vietnam in Iraq. Necessity has become the mother of humiliating invention... etc.
US to fund and run paramilitary deathsquads
With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration's hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA's Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America's death squads or Israel's official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists, the results are likely to look chillingly familiar.
The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds?tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November?will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists?up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq.
"They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam," says Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism. Ironically, he says, the U.S. forces in Iraq are working with key members of Saddam Hussein's now-defunct intelligence agency to set the program in motion. "They're setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things," Cannistraro says... etc.
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Now I don't know how accurate these reports are but if they are true Iraq will become even shittier if possible. What happened to "liberation" and "democracy"?
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