OT: Colonel Kurtz alive and well



--
An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal
Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an
American infantry brigade was placed in the position of
providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for
Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were "rounding up
any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them."
The officer went on, "They were killing Sunnis on behalf of
the Shiites," with the active participation of a militia
unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051205fa_fact

UP IN THE AIR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Where is the Iraq war headed next?
Issue of 2005-12-05
Posted 2005-11-28


In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that
President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval
ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling
American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration's
best-case scenario is that the parliamentary election
scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition
government that will join the Administration in calling for
a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White
House hopes, the new government will be capable of handling
the insurgency. In a speech on November 19th, Bush repeated
the latest Administration catchphrase: "As Iraqis stand up,
we will stand down." He added, "When our commanders on the
ground tell me that Iraqi forces can defend their freedom,
our troops will come home with the honor they have earned."
One sign of the political pressure on the Administration to
prepare for a withdrawal came last week, when Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News that the current level
of American troops would not have to be maintained "for very
much longer," because the Iraqis were getting better at
fighting the insurgency.

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he
has seen scant indication that the President would authorize
a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that
it would impede the war against the insurgency. There are
several proposals currently under review by the White House
and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls for American
combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five
thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall,
with all American forces officially designated "combat" to
be pulled out of the area by the summer of 2008. In terms of
implementation, the planner said, "the drawdown plans that I'm
familiar with are condition-based, event-driven, and not in
a specific time frame"-that is, they depend on the ability
of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency. (A
Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not made
any decisions and had "no plan to leave, only a plan to
complete the mission.")

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the
President's public statements, is that the departing
American troops will be replaced by American airpower.
Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to
improve dramatically the combat capability of even the
weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts
have told me, is that, while the number of American
casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn,
the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi
fatalities would increase unless there are stringent
controls over who bombs what.

"We're not planning to diminish the war," Patrick Clawson,
the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy, told me. Clawson's views often mirror the
thinking of the men and women around Vice-President ***
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We just want
to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting-Iraqi
infantry with American support and greater use of airpower.
The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in
places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment,
and withdrawal, depends on their success in the
battlefield."

He continued, "We want to draw down our forces, but the
President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very
deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled
by the American people at the polling places in 2004." The
war against the insurgency "may end up being a nasty and
murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would
still win," he said. "As long as the Kurds and the Shiites
stay on our side, we're set to go. There's no sense that the
world is caving in. We're in the middle of a seven-year slog
in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to
our message."

One Pentagon adviser told me, "There are always contingency
plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don't think the
President will go for it"-until the insurgency is broken.
"He's not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic
politics."



Current and former military and intelligence officials have
told me that the President remains convinced that it is his
personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is
impervious to political pressure, even from fellow
Republicans. They also say that he disparages any
information that conflicts with his view of how the war is
proceeding.

Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the
religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent
interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's
first term, spoke extensively about the connection between
the President's religious faith and his view of the war in
Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the
former official said, he was told that Bush felt that "God
put me here" to deal with the war on terror. The President's
belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002
congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a
purposeful message from God that "he's the man," the former
official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a
referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another
manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he
made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his
findings to Bush in the White House: "I said to the
President, 'We're not winning the war.' And he asked, 'Are
we losing?' I said, 'Not yet.' " The President, he said,
"appeared displeased" with that answer.

"I tried to tell him," the former senior official said. "And
he couldn't hear it."

There are grave concerns within the military about the
capability of the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more
years of combat in Iraq. Michael O'Hanlon, a specialist on
military issues at the Brookings Institution, told me, "The
people in the institutional Army feel they don't have the
luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in
the debate. They're planning on staying the course until
2009. I can't believe the Army thinks that it will happen,
because there's no sustained drive to increase the size of
the regular Army." O'Hanlon noted that "if the President
decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would
be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by
2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences for
morale and competency levels."

Many of the military's most senior generals are deeply
frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don't
want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has "so
terrified the generals that they know they won't go public,"
a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A.
officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his
colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour
there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings
with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that
"things were fucked up." But in a subsequent teleconference
with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms
to themselves.

One person with whom the Pentagon's top commanders have
shared their private views for decades is Representative
John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the
House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and
his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha
gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of
troops within six months. The speech was filled with
devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that
the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred
and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the
past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American
soldiers will suffer "from what I call battle fatigue" in
the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as "the
common enemy" in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the
White House's claims-that foreign fighters were playing the
major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American
soldiers "haven't captured any in this latest activity"-the
continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border
with Syria. "So this idea that they're coming in from
outside, we still think there's only seven per cent."

Murtha's call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to
strengthen the White House's resolve. Administration
officials "are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious
threat to their policy-both on substance and politically,"
the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air
Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha's speech,
Bush said, "The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front
in their war against humanity. . . . If they're not stopped,
the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to
develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to
intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our
government into isolation. I'm going to make you this
commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch."

"The President is more determined than ever to stay the
course," the former defense official said. "He doesn't feel
any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage 'People may suffer
and die, but the Church advances.' " He said that the
President had become more detached, leaving more issues to
Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. "They keep him in the
gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be
anyway," the former defense official said. Bush's public
appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front
of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four
decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also
confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited
to similar public forums. "Johnson knew he was a prisoner in
the White House," the former official said, "but Bush has no
idea."



Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a
substitute for American troops on the ground has caused
great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in
particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility
that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target
selection. "Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to
snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your
own sect and blame someone else?" another senior military
planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. "Will some
Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the
insurgency, or the Iranians?"

"It's a serious business," retired Air Force General Charles
Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991
Gulf War, said. "The Air Force has always had concerns about
people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward
air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it
out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that
somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else."
(Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were
plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq
had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to
rely on the United States for some time.)

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most
significant-and underreported-aspect of the fight against
the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and
Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting
of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of
the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the
Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in
Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of
the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. "With a massive
Marine air and ground offensive under way," a Marine press
release said, "Marine close air support continues to put
high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and
night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine
Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front
line." Since the beginning of the war, the press release
said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more
than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. "This number is
likely to be much higher by the end of operations," Major
Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than
seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S.
officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but
press reports at the time told of women and children killed
in the bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to
have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the
hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad
and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor
the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate
about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and
Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided
bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on
targets that must be "painted," or illuminated, by laser
beams directed by ground units. "The pilot doesn't identify
the target as seen in the pre-brief"-the instructions
provided before takeoff-a former high-level intelligence
official told me. "The guy with the laser is the targeteer.
Not the pilot. Often you get a 'hot-read' "-from a military
unit on the ground-"and you drop your bombs with no
communication with the guys on the ground. You don't want to
break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in
targets that the pilots can't verify." He added, "And we're
going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?"

The second senior military planner told me that there are
essentially two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a
deliberate site-selection process that works out of
air-operations centers in the region, and "adaptive
targeting"-supportive bombing by prepositioned or loitering
warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or targets
of opportunity by military units on the ground. "The bulk of
what we do today is adaptive," the officer said, "and it's
divorced from any operational air planning. Airpower can be
used as a tool of internal political coercion, and my
attitude is that I can't imagine that we will give that
power to the Iraqis."

This military planner added that even today, with Americans
doing the targeting, "there is no sense of an air campaign,
or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets-it's a
reversion to the Stone Age. There's no operational art. That's
what happens when you give targeting to the Army-they hit
what the local commander wants to hit."

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was
optimistic that "American air will immediately make the
Iraqi Army that much better." But he acknowledged that he,
too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. "We have the most
expensive eyes in the sky right now," the consultant said.
"But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going
to have authority to call in air strikes? There's got to be
a behavior-based rule."

General John Jumper, who retired last month after serving
four years as the Air Force chief of staff, was "in favor of
certification of those Iraqis who will be allowed to call in
strikes," the Pentagon consultant told me. "I don't know if
it will be approved. The regular Army generals were
resisting it to the last breath, despite the fact that they
would benefit the most from it."

A Pentagon consultant with close ties to the officials in
the Vice-President's office and the Pentagon who advocated
the war said that the Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal
and personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire had
created "impatience and resentment" inside the military. He
believed that the Air Force's problems with Iraqi targeting
might be addressed by the formation of U.S.-Iraqi transition
teams, whose American members would be drawn largely from
Special Forces troops. This consultant said that there were
plans to integrate between two hundred and three hundred
Special Forces members into Iraqi units, which was seen as a
compromise aimed at meeting the Air Force's demand to vet
Iraqis who were involved in targeting. But in practice, the
consultant added, it meant that "the Special Ops people will
soon allow Iraqis to begin calling in the targets."

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University
of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and
who taught for three years at the Air Force's School of
Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the
air war "will get very ugly" if targeting is turned over to
the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the
Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines
have done-plowing through Sunni strongholds on
search-and-destroy missions. "If we encourage the Iraqis to
clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the
insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be
useful," Pape said. "The risk is that we will encourage the
Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less
judicious about using airpower-and the violence would go up.
More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents
will be created."

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained
Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful
against the insurgency. "It's not going to work," said
Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at
the Royal Air Force's advanced staff college, who is now at
the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in
London. "Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?"
Brookes said. "No. You can concentrate in one area, but the
guys will spring up in another town." The inevitable
reliance on Iraqi ground troops' targeting would also create
conflicts. "I don't see your guys dancing to the tune of
someone else," Brookes said. He added that he and many other
experts "don't believe that airpower is a solution to the
problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground
with airpower didn't work in Vietnam, did it?"



The Air Force's worries have been subordinated, so far, to
the political needs of the White House. The Administration's
immediate political goal after the December elections is to
show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned
over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It
has already planned heavily scripted change-of-command
ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at
bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.

Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government have settled
on their candidate of choice for the December elections-Iyad
Allawi, the secular Shiite who served until this spring as
Iraq's interim Prime Minister. They believe that Allawi can
gather enough votes in the election to emerge, after a round
of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former senior
British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi
"is the best hope." The fear is that a government dominated
by religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would
give Iran greater political and military influence inside
Iraq. Allawi could counter Iran's influence; also, he would
be far more supportive and coöperative if the Bush
Administration began a drawdown of American combat forces in
the coming year.

Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide
political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He
also said that there was talk late this fall, with American
concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to
join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the
post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi,
who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed
intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the war,
is now a deputy Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter
rivals while in exile.

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled
by the high American and British hopes for Allawi. "I know a
lot of people want Allawi, but I think he's been a terrific
disappointment," the diplomat said. "He doesn't seem to be
building a strong alliance, and at the moment it doesn't
look like he will do very well in the election."

The second Pentagon consultant told me, "If Allawi becomes
Prime Minister, we can say, 'There's a moderate, urban,
educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive
women of their rights.' He would ask us to leave, but he
would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside
Iraq-to keep an American presence the right way. Mission
accomplished. A coup for Bush."

A former high-level intelligence official cautioned that it
was probably "too late" for any American withdrawal plan to
work without further bloodshed. The constitution approved by
Iraqi voters in October "will be interpreted by the Kurds
and the Shiites to proceed with their plans for autonomy,"
he said. "The Sunnis will continue to believe that if they
can get rid of the Americans they can still win. And there
still is no credible way to establish security for American
troops."

The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would
inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas,
that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United
States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence.
An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal
Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an
American infantry brigade was placed in the position of
providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for
Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were "rounding up
any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them."
The officer went on, "They were killing Sunnis on behalf of
the Shiites," with the active participation of a militia
unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier.
"People like me have gotten so downhearted," the officer
added.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues,
the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to
Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an
S.M.U., for "special-mission unit," has been ordered, under
stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi
insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.)
"It's a powder keg," the Pentagon consultant said of the
tactic. "But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without
hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in
Syria would get away. When you're fighting an insurgency,
you have to strike everywhere-and at once."


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