Tom Hayden: Prelude to a Police State in Iraq

[marmar]

from The Nation:


article | posted September 19, 2007 (web only)
Prelude to a Police State in Iraq
Tom Hayden



Virtually ignored in last week's national debate on the US military surge was a report by military experts recommending that the Iraqi police service be scrapped because of its brutal sectarian character. The scathing report stopped short of acknowledging that continuing US support for the Iraqi Security Forces is in violation of the 1997 Leahy Amendment barring assistance to known human rights violators.

So far Representatives Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee have raised the issue with HR 3134, a bill that would end funding for the repressive Iraqi security forces. The Center for American Progress, headed by former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, takes the same view in its July document Strategic Reset. Perhaps the most important sign of rising awareness is the new willingness of Senate leader Harry Reid to remove the provision for funding American trainers in the timetable legislation he is co-sponsoring with Senator Russell Feingold.

The little-noticed report exposes the lethal nature of the counterinsurgency doctrines promoted by Gen. David Petraeus and the official warfighting manual developed in collaboration between the Army, the Marines and Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

In comparison with past public outcries about "tiger cages" and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, death squads in El Salvador and Honduras, or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, there is little or no attention today to the issues raised in the new report. All the major Democratic presidential candidates support maintaining thousands of American trainers embedded with what the report calls "dysfunctional and sectarian" forces. In short, whether intentional or not, all the major proposals on Iraq are based on a lower-visibility, lower-casualty dirty war reminiscent of Algeria, Central America, South Vietnam and, today, Afghanistan.

General Petraeus was the commander of US transitional forces in 2004-05, in charge of training, arming and organizing Iraq's military and police forces. A scandal involving tens of thousands of missing weapons on Petraeus's watch has been pursued by the American Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction since that time. A Petraeus subordinate, Col. Theodore Westhusing, committed apparent suicide on June 5, 2005, leaving a note that said, "I cannot support a that leads to corruption, human rights abuses, and liars.... I don't know who to trust anymore." .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071001/hayden

[Dhalgren]

1. K&R. This needs to be widely known - not that it will make any difference...

[marmar]

2. Thanks for the K&R.....

and you're right, I'm giving up hope that knowledge really makes much difference in this country these days.

[Dhalgren]

4. That's the thing that shoots all of our "activism" in the head.

If you cannot educate the citizenry, then you cannot change the government's behavior. You can change the President and the various elected officials, but the "stance" of the government won't change. That is why all of these Democratic candidates are now saying that "some" levels of troops will be maintained in Iraq indefinitely - they say all kinds of things like "force protection", "training", "quick-strike terrorist responders", but it all amounts to US military occupying parts of Iraq from now on. And you hear various people (even Democrats) talk about how we have forces in Japan and Germany and South Korea, but those are completely not comparable to the situation in Iraq - they are beyond "apples and oranges". Sorry for the rant, but I needed a little outlet...

[endarkenment]

3. Some of us never forgot and Tom is a fine example.

The continuity between the events of the vietnam era and those of the iraq debacle era is important to understand.

[progressoid]

5. Hey, wait a minute, I thought America was a police state.

At least that's what many here argue.

[Trillo]

6. Compare and contrast the OM's linked article

and criticisms of Iraq's Ministry of Interior and sectarian issues with the story about Blackwater and other security contractors in Iraq.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1854856

To me, it seems each side projects their own characteristics, at least in part:
Blackwater is not sectarian :silly: they just don't answer to the same command structure as other security contractors :tinfoilhat: nor do they follow the same rules as the military, :crazy: who cares about innocent Iraqi civilians casualties :grr: they're lower than animals anyway (characterization is from the article, not mine) :grr: