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Hersh links neocon-driven policy, Abu Ghraib

Thread ID: 14333 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-06-27

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TexasAnarch [OP]

2004-06-27 05:29 | User Profile

[url]http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact[/url]

PLAN B by SEYMOUR M. HERSH As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds. Issue of 2004-06-28 Posted 2004-06-21 In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been among the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened insurgency—a campaign of bombings and assassinations—later that summer. Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border, at whatever cost.

The border stayed open, however. “The Administration wasn’t ignoring the Israeli intelligence about Iran,” Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties to the White House, explained. “There’s no question that we took no steps last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the border, and thousands were coming across every day—for instance, to make pilgrimages.” He added, “The questions we confronted were ‘Is the trade-off worth it? Do we want to isolate the Iraqis?’ Our answer was that as long as the Iranians were not picking up guns and shooting at us, it was worth the price.”

Clawson said, “The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was very straightforward—that the Iranians would create social and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would engage in armed attacks against Americans.”

The warnings of increased violence proved accurate. By early August, the insurgency against the occupation had exploded, with bombings in Baghdad, at the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations headquarters, that killed forty-two people. A former Israeli intelligence officer said that Israel’s leadership had concluded by then that the United States was unwilling to confront Iran; in terms of salvaging the situation in Iraq, he said, “it doesn’t add up. It’s over. Not militarily—the United States cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq—but politically.”

Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who until last year served on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, told me that late last summer “the Administration had a chance to turn it around after it was clear that ‘Mission Accomplished’”—a reference to Bush’s May speech—“was premature. The Bush people could have gone to their allies and got more boots on the ground. But the neocons were dug in—‘We’re doing this on our own.’”

Leverett went on, “The President was only belatedly coming to the understanding that he had to either make a strategic change or, if he was going to insist on unilateral control, get tougher and find the actual insurgency.” The Administration then decided, Leverett said, to “deploy the Guantánamo model in Iraq”—to put aside its rules of interrogation. That decision failed to stop the insurgency and eventually led to the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison.

In early November, the President received a grim assessment from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security situation in Iraq was nearing collapse. The document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that “none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country” or to hold elections and draft a constitution.

A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the violence and the new intelligence, finally attempted to change its go-it-alone policy, and set June 30th as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an interim government, which would allow it to bring the United Nations into the process. “November was one year before the Presidential election,” a U.N. consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. “They panicked and decided to share the blame with the U.N. and the Iraqis.”

A former Administration official who had supported the war completed a discouraging tour of Iraq late last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and found that the Israelis he met with were equally discouraged. As they saw it, their warnings and advice had been ignored, and the American war against the insurgency was continuing to founder. “I spent hours talking to the senior members of the Israeli political ....

Summary: The intra-agency cleavage between: U.N., State Dept., CIA (non-neo-algned), contingent advocating a slower, broader approach to the Iraq war, on the one hand ....(supported by mass demonstrations, but muted by the mainstream pro-neocon media) .. vrs. the Pentagon, Feith, Cheney, Woolsey contingent. (assuming ZOG intersected compartments) .... led to defacto victory by the second component, and that pushed Bush to do what hehad been prepared to do all along, faith-based as his initiatives are wont to be. So after blizkreiging into Baghdad, and every available jail cell busting with detainees, there was duplicated the situation like in Somoza's Nicaragua prisons - notorious souce of whatever torturers needed from the human flesh at their disposal. Then, to get them to talk (this isn't related by Hersh, but elsewhere) the abominable "Israeli Template" of torture techbnique was used; "who knows better than than the Jews how to deal with Arabs?' one source said.

This means: the lurid photos that came to light -- those particular ones were made Nov. 8, it was reported -- COULD WELL HAVE BEEN TO EXPOSE THE NEOCON'S AGGRESSIVENESS -- and thus, overall, a necessary though barely 'good' thing, to get it stopped. (Pictorials designed for maximum effect.) But Heads would have to roll, literally (it turned out) and figuratively -- Chalabi and Tenet drew the short straws.

The other dimension Hersh lays out here is the Israeli manipulation of the Kurds from the '90's, as a counterweight to Iran, who immediately emerged as its chief threat. And their two-faced policy toward Turkey, who demand a unified Iraq including the Kurds, now seeing Wolfowitz edge toward Kurdish secession, if not Greater Kurdistan carved dout of Syria, Iran, Turkey and Iraq. (That "America first" streak in him, one guesses. Who could know?) He seems to think the Kurds (with some help from their friends) will occupy Kirkurk, and the Shi'ites immediately unify with Iran, giving al Sadr nuclear potential (just kidding -- on the square, though, as Al Franken says).

Hersh's intention is to implicate neocons unambiguously, scathingly. To close, here are his crushing comments on their use of "democsracy":

The Saban Center’s Flynt Leverett said of the transfer of sovereignty, “If it doesn’t work, there is no fallback—nothing.” The former senior American intelligence official told me, similarly, that “the neocons still think they can pull the rabbit out of the hat” in Iraq. “What’s the plan? They say, ‘We don’t need it. Democracy is strong enough. We’ll work it out.’”

Middle East diplomats and former C.I.A. operatives who now consult in Baghdad have told me that many wealthy Iraqi businessmen and their families have deserted Baghdad in recent weeks in anticipation of continued, and perhaps heightened, suicide attacks and terror bombings after June 30th. “We’ll see Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis getting out,” Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of Information, reported. “What the resistance is doing is targeting the poor people who run the bureaucracy—those who can’t afford to pay for private guards. A month ago, friends of mine who are important landowners in Iraq came to Baghdad to do business. The cost of one day’s security was about twelve thousand dollars.”