This is an excerpt from a 'New Yorker' article which covers some of the real tactical and strategic difficulties that have arisen from the American occupational regime, as it was envisioned by Israel.
Seymour Hersh: 'Phoenix' arises in Iraq
MOVING TARGETS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the
mistakes of Vietnam?
Issue of 2003-12-15
Posted 2003-12-08
The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the
Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month,
American officials and former officials said that the main target was
a hard- core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of
the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States
and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121,
has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and
C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered
to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of
the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.
The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years
to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls
'Manhunts'-a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal
Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the
Pentagon's leadership to get his way. 'Knocking off two regimes allows
us to do extraordinary things,' a Pentagon adviser told me, referring
to Afghanistan and Iraq.
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. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would
comment. 'No one wants to talk about this,' an Israeli official told
me. 'It's incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest
level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-
Israeli covperation' on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and
Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about
whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical-or
politically effective-way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially
given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and
reliable information there.
Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing
a new source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from
the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them
to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to
provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to
act on. A former C.I.A. station chief described the strategy in simple
terms: 'U.S. shooters and Iraqi intelligence.' He added, 'There are
Iraqis in the intelligence business who have a better idea, and we're
tapping into them. We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding
our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take
them'-the insurgents-'out.'
A former intelligence official said that getting inside the Baathist
leadership could be compared to 'fighting your way into a coconut-you
bang away and bang away until you find a soft spot, and then you can
clean it out.' An American who has advised the civilian authority in
Baghdad said, 'The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We're
going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla.
Terrorism versus terrorism. We've got to scare the Iraqis into
submission.'
In Washington, there is now widespread agreement on one point: the
need for a new American approach to Iraq. There is also uniform
criticism of the military's current response to the growing American
casualty lists. One former Pentagon official who worked extensively
with the Special Forces command, and who favors the new military
initiative, said, 'We've got this large conventional force sitting
there, and getting their ass shot off, and what we're doing is
counterproductive. We're sending mixed signals.' The problem with the
way the U.S. has been fighting the Baathist leadership, he said, is
'(a) we've got no intelligence, and (
we're too squeamish to operate
in this part of the world.' Referring to the American retaliation
against a suspected mortar site, the former official said, 'Instead of
destroying an empty soccer field, why not impress me by sneaking in a
sniper team and killing them while they're setting up a mortar? We do
need a more unconventional response, but it's going to be messy.'
Inside the Pentagon, it is now understood that simply bringing in or
killing Saddam Hussein and his immediate circle-those who appeared in
the Bush Administration's famed 'deck of cards'-will not stop the
insurgency. The new Special Forces operation is aimed instead at the
broad middle of the Baathist underground. But many of the officials I
spoke to were skeptical of the Administration's plans. Many of them
fear that the proposed operation-called 'prekmptive manhunting' by one
Pentagon adviser-has the potential to turn into another Phoenix
Program. Phoenix was the code name for a counter-insurgency program
that the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces
teams were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to
be working with or sympathetic to the Vietcong. In choosing targets,
the Americans relied on information supplied by South Vietnamese Army
officers and village chiefs. The operation got out of control.
According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed
nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the U.S.
counted more than twenty thousand in the same time span. Some of those
assassinated had nothing to do with the war against America but were
targeted because of private grievances. William E. Colby, the C.I.A.
officer who took charge of the Phoenix Program in 1968 (he eventually
became C.I.A. director), later acknowledged to Congress that 'a lot of
things were done that should not have been done.'
The former Special Forces official warned that the problem with head-
hunting is that you have to be sure 'you're hunting the right heads.'
Speaking of the now covperative former Iraqi intelligence officials,
he said, 'These guys have their own agenda. Will we be doing hits on
grudges? When you set up host-nation elements'-units composed of
Iraqis, rather than Americans-'it's hard not to have them going off to
do what they want to do. You have to keep them on a short leash.'
The former official says that the Baathist leadership apparently
relies on 'face-to-face communications' in planning terrorist attacks.
This makes the insurgents less vulnerable to one of the Army's most
secret Special Forces units, known as Grey Fox, which has particular
expertise in interception and other technical means of intelligence-
gathering. 'These guys are too smart to touch cell phones or radio,'
the former official said. 'It's all going to succeed or fail
spectacularly based on human intelligence.'
A former C.I.A. official with extensive Middle East experience
identified one of the key players on the new American-Iraqi
intelligence team as Farouq Hijazi, a Saddam loyalist who served for
many years as the director of external operations for the Mukhabarat,
the Iraqi intelligence service. He has been in custody since late
April. The C.I.A. man said that over the past few months Hijazi 'has
cut a deal,' and American officials 'are using him to reactivate the
old Iraqi intelligence network.' He added, 'My Iraqi friends say he
will honor the deal-but only to the letter, and not to the spirit.' He
said that although the Mukhabarat was a good security service,
capable, in particular, of protecting Saddam Hussein from overthrow or
assassination, it was 'a lousy intelligence service.'
The official went on, 'It's not the way we usually play ball, but if
you see a couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did
the American things-and we've been the nice guy. Now we're going to be
the bad guy, and being the bad guy works.'
Told of such comments, the Pentagon adviser, who is an expert on
unconventional war, expressed dismay. 'There are people saying all
sorts of wild things about Manhunts,' he said. 'But they aren't at the
policy level. It's not a no-holds policy, and it shouldn't be. I'm as
tough as anybody, but we're also a democratic society, and we don't
fight terror with terror. There will be a lot of close controls-do's
and don'ts and rules of engagement.' The adviser added, 'The problem
is that we've not penetrated the bad guys. The Baath Party is run like
a cell system. It's like penetrating the Vietcong-we never could do
it.'
The rising star in Rumsfeld's Pentagon is Stephen Cambone, the Under-
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who has been deeply involved in
developing the new Special Forces approach. Cambone, who earned a
doctorate in political science from Claremont Graduate University in
1982, served as staff director for a 1998 committee, headed by
Rumsfeld, that warned in its report of an emerging ballistic-missile
threat to the United States and argued that intelligence agencies
should be willing to go beyond the data at hand in their analyses.
Cambone, in his confirmation hearings, in February, told the Senate
that consumers of intelligence assessments must ask questions of the
analysts-'how they arrived at those conclusions and what the sources
of the information were.' This approach was championed by Rumsfeld. It
came under attack, however, when the Administration's predictions
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the potential for
insurgency failed to be realized, and the Pentagon civilians were
widely accused of politicizing intelligence. (A month after the fall
of Baghdad, Cambone was the first senior Pentagon official to publicly
claim, wrongly, as it turned out, that a captured Iraqi military truck
might be a mobile biological-weapons laboratory.)
Cambone also shares Rumsfeld's views on how to fight terrorism. They
both believe that the United States needs to become far more proactive
in combatting terrorism, searching for terrorist leaders around the
world and eliminating them. And Cambone, like Rumsfeld, has been
frustrated by the reluctance of the military leadership to embrace the
manhunting mission. Since his confirmation, he has been seeking
operational authority over Special Forces. 'Rumsfeld's been looking
for somebody to have all the answers, and Steve is the guy,' a former
high-level Pentagon official told me. 'He has more direct access to
Rummy than anyone else.'
As Cambone's influence has increased, that of Douglas Feith, the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, has diminished. In September,
2001, Feith set up a special unit known as the Office of Special
Plans. The office, directed by civilians who, like Feith, had
neoconservative views, played a major role in the intelligence and
planning leading up to the March invasion of Iraq. 'There is finger-
pointing going on,' a prominent Republican lobbyist explained. 'And
the neocons are in retreat.'
One of the key planners of the Special Forces offensive is Lieutenant
General William (Jerry) Boykin, Cambone's military assistant. After a
meeting with Rumsfeld early last summer-they got along 'like two old
warriors,' the Pentagon consultant said-Boykin postponed his
retirement, which had been planned for June, and took the Pentagon
job, which brought him a third star. In that post, the Pentagon
adviser told me, Boykin has been 'an important piece' of the planned
escalation. In October, the Los Angeles Times reported that Boykin,
while giving Sunday-morning talks in uniform to church groups, had
repeatedly equated the Muslim world with Satan. Last June, according
to the paper, he told a congregation in Oregon that 'Satan wants to
destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants
to destroy us as a Christian army.' Boykin praised President Bush as a
'man who prays in the Oval Office,' and declared that Bush was 'not
elected' President but 'appointed by God.' The Muslim world hates
America, he said, 'because we are a nation of believers.'
There were calls in the press and from Congress for Boykin's
dismissal, but Rumsfeld made it clear that he wanted to keep his man
in the job. Initially, he responded to the Times report by praising
the General's 'outstanding record' and telling journalists that he had
neither seen the text of Boykin's statements nor watched the videotape
that had been made of one of his presentations. 'There are a lot of
things that are said by people in the military, or in civilian life,
or in the Congress, or in the executive branch that are their views,'
he said. 'We're a free people. And that's the wonderful thing about
our country.' He added, with regard to the tape, 'I just simply can't
comment on what he said, because I haven't seen it.' Four days later,
Rumsfeld said that he had viewed the tape. 'It had a lot of very
difficult-to-understand words with subtitles which I was not able to
verify,' he said at a news conference, according to the official
transcript. 'So I remain inexpert'-the transcript notes that he
'chuckles' at that moment-'on precisely what he said.' Boykin's
comments are now under official review.
Boykin has been involved in other controversies as well. He was the
Army combat commander in Mogadishu in 1993, when eighteen Americans
were slain during the disastrous mission made famous by Mark Bowden's
book 'Black Hawk Down.' Earlier that year, Boykin, a colonel at the
time, led an eight-man Delta Force that was assigned to help a
Colombian police unit track down the notorious drug dealer Pablo
Escobar. Boykin's team was barred by law from providing any lethal
assistance without Presidential approval, but there was suspicion in
the Pentagon that it was planning to take part in the assassination of
Escobar, with the support of American Embassy officials in Colombia.
The book 'Killing Pablo,' an account, also by Mark Bowden, of the hunt
for Escobar, describes how senior officials in the Pentagon's chain of
command became convinced that Boykin, with the knowledge of his
Special Forces superiors, had exceeded his authority and intended to
violate the law. They wanted Boykin's unit pulled out. It wasn't.
Escobar was shot dead on the roof of a barrio apartment building in
Medellmn. The Colombian police were credited with getting their man,
but, Bowden wrote, 'within the special ops community . . . Pablo's
death was regarded as a successful mission for Delta, and legend has
it that its operators were in on the kill.'
'That's what those guys did,' a retired general who monitored Boykin's
operations in Colombia told me. 'I've seen pictures of Escobar's body
that you don't get from a long-range telescope lens. They were taken
by guys on the assault team.' (Bush Administration officials in the
White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon, including General
Boykin, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Morris Busby, who was the American Ambassador to Colombia in 1993 (he
is now retired), vigorously defended Boykin. 'I think the world of
Jerry Boykin, and have the utmost respect for him. I've known him for
fifteen years and spent hours and hours with the guy, and never heard
him mention religion or God.' The retired general also praised Boykin
as 'one of those guys you'd love to have in a war because he's not
afraid to die.' But, he added, 'when you get to three stars you've got
to think through what you're doing.' Referring to Boykin and others
involved in the Special Forces planning, he added, 'These guys are
going to get a bunch of guys killed and then give them a bunch of
medals.'
The American-Israeli liaison on Iraq amounts to a tutorial on how to
dismantle an insurgency. One former Israeli military-intelligence
officer summarized the core lesson this way: 'How to do targeted
killing, which is very relevant to the success of the war, and what
the United States is going to have to do.' He told me that the
Americans were being urged to emulate the Israeli Army's small
commando units, known as Mist'aravim, which operate undercover inside
the West Bank and Gaza Strip. 'They can approach a house and pounce,'
the former officer said. In the Israeli view, he added, the Special
Forces units must learn 'how to maintain a network of informants.'
Such a network, he said, has made it possible for Israel to penetrate
the West Bank and Gaza Strip organizations controlled by groups such
as Hamas, and to assassinate or capture potential suicide bombers
along with many of the people who recruit and train them.
On the other hand, the former officer said, 'Israel has, in many ways,
been too successful, and has killed or captured so many mid-ranking
facilitators on the operational level in the West Bank that Hamas now
consists largely of isolated cells that carry out terrorist attacks
against Israel on their own.' He went on, 'There is no central control
over many of the suicide bombers. We're trying to tell the Americans
that they don't want to eliminate the center. The key is not to have
freelancers out there.'
Many regional experts, Americans and others, are convinced that the
Baathists are still firmly in charge of the insurgency, although they
are thought to have little direct connection with Saddam Hussein. An
American military analyst who works with the American- led Coalition
Provisional Authority in Baghdad told me he has concluded that 'mid-
ranking Baathists who were muzzled by the patrimonial nature of
Saddam's system have now, with the disappearance of the high-ranking
members, risen to control the insurgency.' He added that after the
American attack and several weeks 'of being like deer in headlights,'
these Baathists had become organized, and were directing and leading
operations against Americans. During an interview in Washington, a
senior Arab diplomat noted, 'We do not believe that the resistance is
loyal to Saddam. Yes, the Baathists have reorganized, not for
political reasons but because of the terrible decisions made by Jerry
Bremer'-the director of the C.P.A. 'The Iraqis really want to make you
pay the price,' the diplomat said. 'Killing Saddam will not end it.'
Similarly, a Middle Eastern businessman who has advised senior Bush
Administration officials told me that the reorganized Baath Party is
'extremely active, working underground with permanent internal
communications. And without Saddam.' Baath party leaders, he added,
expect Saddam to issue a public statement of self-criticism, 'telling
of his mistakes and his excesses,' including his reliance on his sons.
There is disagreement, inevitably, on the extent of Baathist control.
The former Israeli military- intelligence officer said, 'Most of the
firepower comes from the Baathists, and they know where the weapons
are kept. But many of the shooters are ethnic and tribal. Iraq is very
factionalized now, and within the Sunni community factionalism goes
deep.' He added, 'Unless you settle this, any effort at reconstruction
in the center is hopeless.'
The American military analyst agreed that the current emphasis on
Baathist control 'overlooks the nationalist and tribal angle.' For
example, he said, the anti- coalition forces in Falluja, a major
center of opposition, are 'driven primarily by the sheikhs and
mosques, Islam, clerics, and nationalism.' The region, he went on,
contains 'tens of thousands of unemployed former military officers and
enlistees who hang around the coffee shops and restaurants of their
relatives; they plot, plan, and give and receive instructions; at
night they go out on their missions.'
This military analyst, like many officials I spoke to, also raised
questions about the military's more conventional tactics-the
aggressive program, code-named Iron Hammer, of bombings, nighttime
raids, and mass arrests aimed at trouble spots in Sunni-dominated
central Iraq. The insurgents, he told me, had already developed a
response. 'Their S.O.P.'-standard operating procedure-'now is to go
further out, or even to other towns, so that American retribution does
not fall on their locale. Instead, the Americans take it out on the
city where the incident happened, and in the process they succeed in
making more enemies.'
The brazen Iraqi attacks on two separate American convoys in Samarra,
on November 30th, provided further evidence of the diversity of the
opposition to the occupation. Samarra has been a center of intense
anti- Saddam feelings, according to Ahmed S. Hashim, an expert on
terrorism who is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval
War College. In an essay published in August by the Middle East
Institute, Hashim wrote, 'Many Samarra natives-who had served with
distinction in the Baath Party and the armed forces-were purged or
executed during the course of the three decades of rule by Saddam and
his cronies from the rival town of Tikrit.' He went on, 'The type of
U.S. force structure in Iraq-heavy armored and mechanized units-and
the psychological disposition of these forces which have been in Iraq
for months is simply not conducive to the successful waging of
counter-insurgency warfare.'
The majority of the Bush Administration's manhunting missions remain
classified, but one earlier mission, in Afghanistan, had mixed results
at best. Last November, an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-
Harethi was killed when an unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft
fired a Hellfire missile at his automobile in Yemen. Five passengers
in the automobile were also killed, and it was subsequently reported
that two previous Predator missions in Yemen had been called off at
the last moment when it was learned that the occupants of suspect
vehicles were local Bedouins, and not Al Qaeda members.
Since then, an adviser to the Special Forces command has told me,
infighting among the various senior military commands has made it
difficult for Special Forces teams on alert to take immediate
advantage of time-sensitive intelligence. Rumsfeld repeatedly
criticized Air Force General Charles Holland, a four-star Special
Forces commander who has just retired, for his reluctance to authorize
commando raids without specific, or 'actionable,' intelligence.
Rumsfeld has also made a systematic effort to appoint Special Forces
advocates to the top military jobs. Another former Special Forces
commander, Army General Peter Schoomaker, was brought out of
retirement in July and named Army Chief of Staff. The new civilian
Assistant Secretary for Special Operations in the Pentagon is Thomas
O'Connell, an Army veteran who served in the Phoenix program in
Vietnam, and who, in the early eighties, ran Grey Fox, the Army's
secret commando unit.
Early in November, the Times reported the existence of Task Force 121,
and said that it was authorized to take action throughout the region,
if necessary, in pursuit of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and other
terrorists. (The task force is commanded by Air Force Brigadier
General Lyle Koenig, an experienced Special Forces helicopter pilot.)
At that point, the former Special Forces official told me, the troops
were 'chasing the deck of cards. Their job was to find Saddam,
period.' Other Special Forces, in Afghanistan, were targeting what is
known as the A.Q.S.L., the Al Qaeda Senior Leadership List.
The task force's search for Saddam was, from the beginning, daunting.
According to Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector,
it may have been fatally flawed as well. From 1994 to 1998, Ritter
directed a special U.N. unit that eavesdropped on many of Saddam
Hussein's private telephone communications. 'The high-profile guys
around Saddam were the murafaqin, his most loyal companions, who could
stand next to him carrying a gun,' Ritter told me. 'But now he's gone
to a different tier-the tribes. He has released the men from his most
sensitive units and let them go back to their tribes, and we don't
know where they are. The manifests of those units are gone; they've
all been destroyed.' Ritter added, 'Guys like Farouq Hijazi can
deliver some of the Baath Party cells, and he knows where some of the
intelligence people are. But he can't get us into the tribal
hierarchy.' The task force, in any event, has shifted its focus from
the hunt for Saddam as it is increasingly distracted by the spreading
guerrilla war.
In addition to the Special Forces initiative, the military is also
exploring other approaches to suppressing the insurgency. The
Washington Post reported last week that the American authorities in
Baghdad had agreed, with some reluctance, to the formation of an
Iraqi-led counter-terrorism militia composed of troops from the
nation's five largest political parties. The paramilitary unit,
totalling some eight hundred troops or so, would 'identify and pursue
insurgents' who had eluded arrest, the newspaper said. The group's
initial missions would be monitored and approved by American
commanders, but eventually it would operate independently.
Task Force 121's next major problem may prove to be Iran. There is a
debate going on inside the Administration about American and Israeli
intelligence that suggests that the Shiite-dominated Iranian
government may be actively aiding the Sunni-led insurgency in
Iraq-'pulling the strings on the puppet,' as one former intelligence
official put it. Many in the intelligence community are skeptical of
this analysis- the Pentagon adviser compared it to 'the Chalabi
stuff,' referring to now discredited prewar intelligence on W.M.D.
supplied by Iraqi defectors. But I was told by several officials that
the intelligence was considered to be highly reliable by civilians in
the Defense Department. A former intelligence official said that one
possible response under consideration was for the United States to
train and equip an Iraqi force capable of staging cross-border raids.
The American goal, he said, would be to 'make the cost of supporting
the Baathists so dear that the Iranians would back off,' adding, 'If
it begins to look like another Iran-Iraq war, that's another story.'
The requirement that America's Special Forces units operate in
secrecy, a former senior coalition adviser in Baghdad told me, has
provided an additional incentive for increasing their presence in
Iraq. The Special Forces in-country numbers are not generally included
in troop totals. Bush and Rumsfeld have insisted that more American
troops are not needed, but that position was challenged by many senior
military officers in private conversations with me. 'You need more
people,' the former adviser, a retired admiral, said. 'But you can't
add them, because Rummy's taken a position. So you invent a force that
won't be counted.'
At present, there is no legislation that requires the President to
notify Congress before authorizing an overseas Special Forces mission.
The Special Forces have been expanded enormously in the Bush
Administration. The 2004 Pentagon budget provides more than six and a
half billion dollars for their activities-a thirty-four-per- cent
increase over 2003. A recent congressional study put the number of
active and reserve Special Forces troops at forty-seven thousand, and
has suggested that the appropriate House and Senate committees needed
to debate the 'proper overall role' of Special Forces in the global
war on terrorism.
The former intelligence official depicted the Delta and seal teams as
'force multipliers'-small units that can do the work of much larger
ones and thereby increase the power of the operation as a whole. He
also implicitly recognized that such operations would become more and
more common; when Special Forces target the Baathists, he said, 'it's
technically not assassination-it's normal combat operations.'
END EXCERPT
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