It shouldn't be so hard, then, to understand what motivates Afghan Taliban forces. Greenwald today discusses HERE some realization from David Rhodes reporting from Afghanistan in the New York Times.
Colonial Mentality
He be say you be colonial man
You don be slave man before
Dem don release you now but you
never release yourself ...
Dem judge him go put white wig and jail him brothers.
No be so?
He be so!
Dem go proud of dem name put dem slave name for head
No be so?
The corruption of collaborators by colonial masters is palpable in this bit of Fela's Pidgin English lyrics from the song Colomentality. It translates all too well to the horrors the self-appointed America masters of Iraq are visiting upon the occupied population of Iraq. Tonight two military men on the PBS News Hour gave us a lesson in this depraved, un-self-examined colonial mentality.
But first, let's take a look at the News Hour's scene-setting report. Let me emphasize that what I want is to not have my countrymen at arms thrust into a position to enforce the imperial designs of the Bush administration. I do not blame them and I do not want them hurt by Iraqi resistance. I just want them out of there so they can be home with their families. Still, if they seem so to me, I can just imagine how abhorrent these US soldier's actions and attitudes must look in the Arab/Muslim world. This is a practice of humiliation... Oh hell, I'll just let News Hour correspondent Martin Adler's story speak for itself:
MARTIN ADLER: It's 2 in the morning. American soldiers are searching for a local resistance leader. Rooting out the resistance in Iraq is a messy business. Every night, more Iraqi families come face to face with American force.
SOLDIER: What's your name?
MAN: Hadnan.
SOLDIER: What's your name?
SOLDIER: His name is Ahmed. I don't know if we need it...
SOLDIER: Okay.
MARTIN ADLER: The man in the balaclava is a local informant.
SOLDIER: We took him as prisoner; we kept him for about three or four days. And a lot of times, what we'll do is we use those guys to show us different houses where members of their terrorist cell or whatever cell they're operating with, where they live so ... just used as leverage against them with the hope that they'll be let out of jail earlier, whatever the case may be, similar to what the police do back in the states. It works out pretty well....
MARTIN ADLER: You don't think it's a risk going into people's houses like that, that it might make them more scared of you and sort of more, you know, anti-American?
UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: (long pause of serious contemplation) Not really.
MARTIN ADLER: It turns out the men arrested are not resistance fighters at all. They're just cousins of the man the soldiers were looking for. But they were bound, hooded, and taken away, all the same. A wife asks the soldiers to let her husband at least to take his shoes. (Speaking Arabic) ...
CAPT. KARL FITTSI: I love the Iraqi way of firing weapons in the air.
We're pretty sure this is probably going to end up with about a dozen dead Iraqis before we get out of here. Because, you know what, I see an Iraqi with a weapon outside and I just shoot him. Okay, we're not playing this. 'Oh, I think he's playing celebratory fire.' There's no such thing as celebratory fire. There's enemy fire and there's return fire. That's what it is. So, anyway, they don't ... they don't get it. So I think we've already killed like, what, like two or three of them? They don't get it. They're just going to keep doing it. You think with when they heard my Bradley coming, they'd be smart enough for like the next half hour to not shoot in the air. But, no.
...
MARTIN ADLER: The suspect, bound and hooded, was left in a waste ground for hours before being taken away into detention.
Back at the base, 'The Rock,' as the men call it, it's all about camaraderie... ( laughter ) ...and the overwhelming conviction that their cause is just. For others with their own children, the routine of raiding Iraqi homes is wearing them down.
CAPT. KARL FITTSI: My job is to go in, find the bad guys and kill them. I'm trained for that. They want to see a burning Bradley downtown. That's what they want. They want them jumping up and down, saying, you know, 'God is with us. Allah akbar, God is great.' And they hunt you. They hunt you. They used to say they would park at this southern OP ... and the average time for the first incoming RPG was 120 seconds. [end quotes]
What's the theory behind this aggressive man hunting? The essential reading is Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam? by Seymour Hersh in the 2003-12-15 New Yorker.
"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 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 'pre?mptive 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.' "
If we in America want to understand why a vitriolic reaction against the American occupation of Iraq has been multiplied recently, consider this:
"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."
America will never be seen again as anything but a power broker hostile to the Palestinians. America is now firmly ensconced everywhere in the perceptions of the Arab/Muslim world as the enemy. I ask, how does this reduce the chance for terror strikes back against us? President Bush is leading this country into a security nightmare.
But here is how News Hour's hawks prove that PBS stands for "Pentagon Broadcasting System". Again, I'll let this News Hour interview broadcast just after the soldiers' stories speak for itself:
TERENCE SMITH: Will the tactics described in that report help achieve U.S. objectives in Iraq? We get two military views. Ralph Peters is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and author of numerous books on warfare. The latest: "Beyond Baghdad, Postmodern War and Peace." Gary Anderson is a retired Marine colonel whose tours included Somalia. He was in Iraq in July consulting with the Pentagon on setting up the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Welcome to you both. ... Charlie Company ...
COL. GARY ANDERSON: -- is operating there. An important point to make is that the end state that we, the imperial United States is attempting to achieve in that country is not to have Americans kicking down doors. Doors have to be kicked down in guerrilla wars and suspects have to be hunted down, and so forth. We eventually want Iraqis to be doing that. That's the end state. We're not ready for that yet. Some places they're moving along with that farther or faster than others, but the bottom line is that hopefully someday it will be Iraqis doing the unfortunate kicking down the doors and the kinds of things that these poor kids are being forced to do.
[How's this for balance?...]
LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: Gary is absolutely right. And this is a terribly tough job in the toughest part of Iraq. The tactics already are effective. These are the tactics that we introduced this autumn that got us Saddam Hussein and that got us literally hundreds of the hardest core terrorists and several thousand of the fellow travelers, mid-level, lower-level insurgents.
Now, again, you look at that tape and it's easy to take it out of context and see women crying and children weeping. Well, soldiers don't like to cause that. But what you don't see fascinates me. You don't see soldiers beating people with rifle butts. Nobody is shot.
Now before Operation Iraqi Freedom, when doors were knocked down by Saddam's secret police, men were shot on the spot, tortured in front of spouses, children. When they were taken away, they never came home. Women were raped in front of husbands.
So the people we are going after are the hardest of the hard core, the ones that will never be our friend. The journalist asked the question of one of the soldiers, won't we be making enemies? In most of Iraq, we've made a lot of friends or these people who just wanted Saddam gone, but among the hardest of the hardest core, of the same minority, we will never be friends; we've got to break their power so the rest of Iraq can live free....[end quotes]
The anti-Saddam propaganda is a nice touch, it counters the widespread perception that even ABC's Nightline had the courage to report a few weeks ago -- that the US is worse than Saddam in it's handling of the Iraqi people.
Depravity of the US liberal intellectual class
While I am appalled by the policies of the Bush administration, the support it gets from the supposedly "liberal" PBS News Hour is,... well, ... I am at a loss for words. It's as if General Westmorland is running PBS and the year is 1967. Or worse, it's the Philippines and its 1903... I'm at a loss for words.
Posted by The Owl at 15:19. Filed under: War and peace
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