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November
2, 2006
We Need an Hour of Truth
More
Than Timetables
By VICTORIA FURIO
Instead of criticizing Iraqis for not
curbing the deadly militias, the Bush administration ought to
own up to its role in creating and fomenting them. With singular
hypocrisy U.S. officials have been calling for their dismantling
even while the Pentagon remains convinced that these "aces-up-the-sleeve"
are our ticket to victory.
Despite public denials of plans
for war, the Department of Defense was organizing, training and
arming a secret militia of 5,000 Iraqi exiles and Arab mercenaries
outside of Budapest in December 2002. They were to be slipped
into Iraq with the invading forces to serve as muscle for its
then-preferred choice for prime minister, Ahmed Chalabi. [1]
Reports are they later comprised the bulk of looters who ripped
Baghdad apart while U.S. soldiers stood idly by.
The Coalition Provisional Authority's
highly undemocratic response when resistance to the occupation
appeared was to form a paramilitary unit directly tied to members
of Iraq's provisional government. They included gunmen of the
Kurdish peshmerga, Shiite units--especially those of the
SCIRI's Badr Brigade--and of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress
(INC).
In late 2003, Vice-President
Cheney wasted no time in obtaining $3 billion in covert funds
to finance a secret police, and by year's end, the new favorite,
Iyad Allawi, was at CIA headquarters designing the not-so-covert
operations that would put special commando brigades on the scene.
Assigned to head up a new counterinsurgency force was Colonel
James Steele, former chief of the U.S. Military Group in El Salvador,
who developed special operating forces (sic) during the
death squad era there. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's denials
of the existence of a "Salvador Option"--death squads
in Iraq-- were contradicted by the reality on the ground and
by the former head of all U.S. Special Forces, Gen. Wayne Downing,
who called it a "very valid strategy, a very valid tactic,"
and stated that "it's actually something we've been doing
since we started the war back in March of 2003." [2]
Making their debut in September
2004 with heavy-weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault
rifles, mortars and 9mm pistols, the special commandos were infinitely
better armed and trained than Iraq's regular army and police.
Being outside the official security forces also assured immunity
for extrajudicial killings.
"We don't call them militias.
Militias areillegal," said Maj. Chris Wales, sent to track
down the "pop-up units" camped out in bombed-out buildings
around Baghdad. There were as many as 15,000 soldiers in a dozen
units, whose first loyalty was to the unit's commander and not
necessarily to the central government. At least three were linked
to Allawi.
Former Ba'athist intelligence
officer Gen. Adnan Thavit headed up the Special Police Commandos,
which was singled out early on by the United Nations for conducting
death squad strikes. When Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who was overseeing
the U.S. effort to train and equip Iraqi military units, visited
the Commando's base, he agreed to provide the unit with funds
for infrastructure, vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons.
"When I saw themI decided this was a horse to back,"
said Petraeus. [3] The commandos were particularly attractive
for their potential to reduce U.S. casualties, shifting the burden
to zealous militiamen. So popular was the idea that the U.S.
Marines proceeded to set up a private militia of their own, the
Iraqi Freedom Guard, [4] to carry on "preemptive manhunts"
ahead of their forces.
As execution-style killings
mounted throughout 2005, Shiite militias, police and death squads
linked to the SCIRI-dominated Interior Ministry were widely blamed.
Outgoing United Nations human rights chief John Pace declared
that as many as 1,000 Iraqis per month were turning up in morgues,
bound and gagged, with signs they had been tortured. According
to Pace, "The vast majority of bodies [in the Baghdad morgue]
showed signs of summary execution.Some showed evidence of torture,
with arms and leg joints broken by electric drills." [5]
Corpses found along roadsides
and in shallow graves brought the unprecedented level of violence
in early 2006 to some 2,000 a month. The Pentagon's own report
to Congress showed Iraqi civilian casualties up 51% this summer,
claiming a staggering 3,438 lives in July, more than in any previous
month of the war. [6] And yet Sec. Rumsfeld repeatedly told
Congress that the plan was to prevent a civil war. Or if one
occurred, to have the Iraqi security forces deal with it. In
other words, Iraqis would be left to shoulder the U.S. wreckage.
Following the Samarra shrine
bombing in February, US Ambassador Khalilzad's declaration that
"Militias are the infrastructure of civil war and the basis
of warlordism," was a further attempt to blame Iraqis for
their plight. In the height of cynicism, Khalilzad told reporters
in August "that Iraq's political leaders had failed to fully
use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that
people associated with the government are stoking the flames
of sectarian hatred."
Today Gen. Thavit is director-general
of the Iraqi police. His irregular units were eventually incorporated
into the government. When the 8th Iraqi Police Unit was suspended
from duty, charged with the October 1 kidnapping and murder of
26 factory workers, Adnan Thavit said they would not face punishment,
but would rather be rehabilitated and placed back in service.
It is widely known that the security forces are permeated with
militiamen, policemen by day and hit men by night. It is truly
El Salvador déjà vu.
Death tolls for Iraqis are
now running above 100 a day. Militias are fighting militias.
The country teeters on the edge of a full-blown civil war. Both
spiraling conflicts: the insurgency, fuelled by the invasion,
and sectarian violence, provoked by illegal militias, are the
direct result of US policy. The Pentagon's latest "solution"
to the Sunni-led insurgency has been to create yet another militia
just last month-a Sunni one! Rumsfeld continues to look for
the magic pill, still refuses to believe that his "ace"
strategy did not work and will never work-not if democracy is
the aim.
President Bush has asked us
to hold him accountable if we are unhappy about the war in Iraq.
We should take him up on it. A moment of truth would go a long
way to righting the terrible wrongs. This administration must
own up to its responsibility in unleashing the ungodly carnage
and massive destruction. Rather than ordering others to develop
a timetable for it to end, or plotting a coup so a strongman
will handle it, the goal would swiftly be achieved by an immediate
U.S. disengagement.
Iraqis have a right to design
their own future, their own governance, as it should have been
from Day One. They have endured the lashes of U.S. will for
too long, ever since it paved the way for Saddam Hussein's rise
to power. The same illegal and despicable means--hiring him
to assassinate their prime minister in 1959--has brought decade
upon decade of horrendous suffering, worse now than during Saddam's
rule.
When will the Iraqi people
be free? When will they finally be released? It would only take
an ounce of humanity to halt the slaughter, to pull them back
from the brink of civil war. It's time for deceit and finger-pointing
to end. Long past due.
Victoria Furio has been dedicated to education for
justice since 1976, having directed several regional and national
programs within the religious community. She has also spent
15 years in Latin America in ecumenical human rights and reconstruction
efforts, and is currently on staff at a major U.S. seminary.
She can be reached at: goldenrules05@yahoo.com.
Notes
[1] "US paying Iraqi rebels
at secret training camp," Sunday Herald-UK, January
5, 2003.
[2] "Today Show",
WNBC, January 10, 2005.
[3] Greg Jaffe, "Brands
of Brothers-New Factor in Iraq: Irregular Brigades Fill Security
Void," Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2005.
[4] Reuters, "U.S. Marines
hire private Iraqi force to hunt insurgents," January 3,
2005.
[5] Jonathan Steele, "Baghdad
official who exposed executions flees," Guardian,
March 2, 2006.
[6] Department of Defense,
"Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq," August
2006, p.3.
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