Petraeus at the CIA—what does it really mean?

The Return of Domestic CounterInsurgency?

By BRENDAN McQUADE

Gen. Petraeus being gladhanded by John McCain. Perfect fit for an age of courtier generals.

David Petraeus’ appointment as CIA director speaks to the increasing dominance in counterinsurgency in policy and raises a series of troubling questions about general militarization of American society. Petraeus is the man who literally rewrote the book on counterinsurgency and is set to lead the most powerful covert agency in human history. His appointment means that the CIA is going to be even more involved in the shadowy, protracted, ambiguous conflicts that involve building up governments and social movements that support US policy and destroying those that do not.

What is Counterinsurgency?

In the terms of Petraeus’ celebrated manual, counterinsurgency is the “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.” Petraeus describes “insurgency” as “an organized protracted politico-military struggle to weaken the control of and legitimacy of an established government, occupying power or other political authority while increasing insurgent control.”

More critically and historically, counterinsurgency involves a powerful state intervening into a militarily weak (and formerly colonized) society. In contrast to the traditional military war aim, defeating the rival army, counterinsurgency has political goals: building a regime supportive to that more powerful state’s political project and, usually, destroying the revolutionary movement that challenges it. On lower level, counterinsurgency begins with an intelligence effort, gathering information on the politics and culture of the society begin targeted. The goal is to penetrate into the intimate corners of a society—to get agents inside civil society organizations, families, and social networks—and figure out who is “the wrong side.”

With this intelligence on hand, the task becomes neutralizing political rivals by turning, capturing, or killing them. In an 2003 article, Seymour Hersh quoted an American in Baghdad who explained it as: “We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the[m]…into submission.” Despite the official denials, then, the infamous kill teams of Afghanistan are not bad apples but the logical and necessary outcome of this kind of warfare.

A more humanitarian, “civic action,” mission co-exists alongside this more coercive intelligence mission. A functioning government cannot be built with violence alone. Services need to be provided: schools, hospitals, roads, and all the rest of modern infrastructure. The new counterinsurgents, of which Petraeus is the most visible, are acutely aware of this need. Lauded by the press as “scholar-warriors,” counterinsurgents argue for a necessity of unity between civil-military roles, cultural sensitivity and a restrained use of force. Despite all these complexities, it’s still warfare: “Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare; it’s the graduate level of war.”
The Ever-Expanding War on Terror

Today the War on Terror involves American military forces and intelligence operatives in at least 75 countries, not just Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan but the Philippines, Colombia, Yemen, Somalia and “elsewhere in Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.” The CIA is now on the ground in Libya and questions about the twenty years General Khalifa Hifter spent in suburban Virginia and a possible CIA ties are rising. Leon Panetta, the CIA director Petraeus is set to succeed, just held five days of secret talks in Turkey regarding the rebellion in Syria. As the United States continues to involve itself in conflicts like these, counterinsurgency becomes increasingly important. In places like Pakistan, Libya and Syria, where an overt military presence is political difficult, the CIA leads. Under Petraeus’ command, we can expect the CIA to become even more active in this regard.

As Philip Giraldi, a retired CIA counterterrorism expert, told me when I interviewed him in the summer of 2009: “The military’s got a huge tail whenever it goes it has an enormous footprint. The CIA operates in smaller units. They’re civilians. They can blend in. They can have predator [drone] bases in places that politically sensitive like inside Pakistan. For example, the other predators are operating out of Africa. They operate in Djibouti. There’s a French military base where the CIA people are stationed. The French would not let an American military presence but they would accept an intelligence group under civilian auspices.”

Political circumstances have not always favored counterinsurgency. In the Vietnam years, the CIA was the leading proponent of counterinsurgency and the military was quite resistant. It needed the backing of President Johnson to force its agenda on a recalcitrant generation of traditional military officers. After the Tet Offensive, the military embraced counterinsurgency but only for a time. After Vietnam, everyone—including the CIA—distanced themselves from counterinsurgency.

When I asked Giraldi who was the leading counterinsurgent today in the CIA, he told me: “Nobody comes to mind. When I was teaching at the CIA school back in the early eighties, the counterinsurgency people—the Special Operations Group is what it was called at the time—was down to about forty guys and, you know, no leaders, no renowned figures. It wasn’t that kind of thing. It was an adjunct of the Special Activities Division, which I was in, and was sent in do training in various places in Asia and Africa.”

When counterinsurgency returned as dominant policy during the War on Terror, the military was its most visible advocate. Today after the seeming success of the Iraq troop surge, the counterinsurgents are dominant in the military. Andrew Bacevich, perhaps the most prominent critic of counterinsurgency today, went so far as to argue that we are witnessing the emergence of the “Petraeus doctrine,” where “armed conflict will be protracted, ambiguous, and continuous… War [now] implies not only coercion but also social engineering.” The Petraeus doctrine displaces the more cautious Powell Doctrine “with its emphasis on overwhelming force, assumed that future American wars would be brief, decisive, and infrequent.”

In 2009, Giraldi told me that the CIA’s Special Operations Group was again growing: “Now they are much bigger they have a lot of contractors. They have a lot of ex-Special Forces people working for them but they are still kind of an adjunct. I’d be hard pressed to come up with a senior officer in SOG.” With David Petraeus, the man who made counterinsurgency dominant in the US military, at the helm of the CIA, we can expect SOG to continue to grow and become more central.

“How many more Vietnams can the American Republic Sustain?”

Petraeus’ command of the CIA and the increasing importance of counterinsurgency also raise troubling questions for US politics more broadly. Here, the best analysis of “counterinsurgency” comes from Eqbal Ahmad. He saw counterinsurgency from a wildly different perspective than committed counterinsurgents like Petraeus.

Ahmad was born in 1933 or 1934 in the village of Irki in Binhar, India. During the partition of the British Raj into the modern-nation states of India and Pakistan in 1947, Ahmad and his older brothers migrated to Pakistan. In the chaos, Ahmad lost his brothers and traveled north to Lahore alone. As a young man, he went on to fight against the French in the Algerian Revolution and get a PhD from Princeton. Ahmad understood the dilemmas of colonized. He knew what it was like to simultaneously resent, envy and admire his colonial conquer. He saw “counterinsurgency” from the other end of the counterinsurgent’s gun barrel.

In addition understanding what counterinsurgency meant for the targeted, Ahmad also saw its effects on the imperial power. Counterinsurgency threatens democratic politics at home because it necessarily entails a politicization of the military and the blurring of civilian and military roles:

“Training and participation in counterinsurgency necessarily involves emphasis on the unity and interrelatedness of civilian and military talks and authority. It is not realistic to expect military men who are trained to be ‘soldiers-political workers’ to remain apolitical at home…The determination to equip the natives with the ‘will to fight’ transfers eventually to the metropolitan country when the ‘will’ of the people ‘at home’ appears to be sagging. The crusade abroad may find expressions at home when the society is viewed as needing moral or political regeneration.”

Petraeus is already implicated in the treasonous game of undermining the democratic politics in the name of inflating the “will to fight.” In early February 2009, Gareth Porter, wrote two stories alleging that “A network of senior military officers is…reported to be preparing to support Petraeus and [the top-commander in Iraq, Gen.] Ray Odierno by mobilising public opinion against Obama’s decision,” to keep to his campaign promises on Iraq withdrawal. According to Porter, Petraeus’ leak reportedly attempted to force Obama’s hand, leaking information that implies “that Obama had requested the three plans,” on Iraq withdrawal. Prophetically, Porter concluded “The Petraeus leak also serves to promote the idea that Obama is moving away from his campaign pledge on a 16-month combat troop withdrawal.”

What will Petraeus’ tenure as CIA director mean for future political developments in the United States? “Counterrevolutionary chickens,” Ahmad presciently noted in 1971, also “have a tendency to come home to roast. Whether the ‘homecoming’ is complete or partial depends on the strains and stresses of involvements abroad a government’s ability to extricate itself from the war in good time. The [French] Fourth Republic survived the first Indochinese war but collapsed during the Algerian. It is impossible to tell how many more Vietnams the American republic can sustain. There is, however, considerable evidence that forces of law and order, including the army and several local police departments are applying the theories of pacification and counterguerilla warfare to problems at home.”

As Ahmad was writing, the FBI’s COunterINTELligence PROgrams, COINTELPRO, domestic programs that used methods similar to counterinsurgency, targeted the Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, the Black Power Movements, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and the American Indian Movement for “neutralization.” While “domestic counterinsurgency” has not yet returned to that scale, the militarization of US society has continued in the last forty years: surveillance and data-mining (NSA, DHS and private); the emerging nationwide intelligence network (DHS “Fusion Centers”); the increasing “paramilitarization” of police (intelligence-led policing); and the creation of the first domestic combatant command, US Northern Command or US NORTHCOM.

With all these measures put in place, domestic counterinsurgency along the lines of COINTELPRO could easily be resumed at a level hitherto unimaginable within the United States. While much would have to change politically for this to become possible, the appointment of Petraeus to head the CIA and the wider rise of the new counterinsurgents is not an encouraging development.

Brendan McQuade is currently working on a PhD in sociology department at Binghamton University (SUNY)

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Careerism and Psychopathy in the US Military

“Glibness, Superficial Charm, Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth, Deceitful, Cunning, Manipulative, Lacks Remorse, Callous, Lacks Empathy, Does Not Accept Responsibility for Own Actions, and Impulsiveness … “

By G. I. WILSON, USMC Ret.

Gen. George A. Custer: Many of his actions—often flamboyant and heroic, were dictated by an unbridled desire for self-promotion.

This essay attempts to make it easier for you to identify the quality and character of military officers and civilian bureaucrats, to increase your awareness and recognition of careerism and its consequences. As Americans, we all must exercise more care and caution in our appraisal of our senior military officers and the Washington “suits” that exert dominating influence on the cost of defense and the conduct of American national security policy.

The Department of Defense (DOD) that I have observed all too closely for over three decades is an overgrown bureaucracy committed to standing still for, if not actively promoting, poorly conceived policy agendas and hardware programs funded and supported by Congress. Coupled to that is the task of attracting the blind loyalty of senior military and civilian actors on the Washington, D.C. stage. For the careerists in America’s national security apparatus, it is all about awarding contracts and personal advancement, not winning wars.

Careerists serve for all the wrong reasons. They weaken national defense, rob the military of its warrior ethos and drive away the very highly principled mavericks that we need to reverse the decay. This can only be remedied by rekindling the time honored principles of military service (i.e. duty, honor, country) among both officers and civilians.

What Is Careerism?

In the DOD today, standard bureaucratic behavior is focused on conniving with politically focused congressional advocates and their counterparts in industry and think tanks to advance selected hardware and policy agendas. Once the careerist generals, admirals, colonels and captains exit active military service, they perpetuate their inside baseball by re-materializing as government appointees, political candidates, DOD contractor shills, so-called Pentagon “mentors,” and network talking heads. All are raking in money, peddling influence, exerting pressure for vested interests, all the while collecting retired pay, healthcare, commissary privileges and more at taxpayer expense.

For example, Gen. Jim Jones, U.S. Marine Corps, ret., occupied a big chair in the White House as the president’s national security advisor. Adm. Joe Sestak, U.S. Navy, ret., went to Congress as a member of the House of Representatives seeking promotion to the U.S. Senate. Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, U.S. Army, ret., is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Many others dot the boards of the big defense contractors. As author Bob Woodward points out in The War Within, many of the uniform-to-suits careerists made themselves cozy with political circles in Washington, D.C. in ways and to a degree that did not exist before 2001. As for the senior careerists in the ranks of the civilian bureaucracy, there is a similar variation of take-this-job-and-flip-it among public, academic and private sector positions. While it’s distasteful observing this in civilian quarters, it is the “self-fixation” of our top military leadership that this author finds most disturbing.

What is wrong with retired officers populating civilian government offices, industry and politics?

Author Edward N. Luttwak explains that it means a lifelong path of political correctness, playing it safe, making only decisions that create no waves, or – better yet – waves that promote the selected agenda. Worst of all, careerists leverage the bureaucracies in DOD and Congress to dilute any personal accountability and responsibility – the very essence of careerism. Luttwak warns “If careerism becomes the general attitude, the very basis of leadership is destroyed.” That era of pseudo-leadership is upon us.

Careerism is also artfully described by Robert Coram and Col. John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force. The careerist’s singular aspiration is “the desire to be, rather than the desire to do. It is the desire to have rank, rather than use it; the pursuit of promotion without a clear sense of what to do with a higher rank once one has attained it.”

The etiology of careerism stems from a shift in the basic values within the officer corps as described by Samuel P. Huntington in his classic work The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Huntington contends the most important feature that distinguishes military personnel from all others is the view that the military is truly a “higher calling” in the service of one’s country.

Today, this is no longer the case. Morris Janowitz observed in The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait:

“Those who see the military profession as a calling or a unique profession are outnumbered by a greater concentration of individuals for whom the military is just another job . . . . For a sizable majority – about 20 percent, or about one out of every five – no motive [for joining the military] could be discerned, except that the military was a job.”

Maj. Michael L. Mosier posits in “Getting a Grip on Careerism” in Airpower Journal how military sociologists theorize that the idea of a higher calling has diminished as institutional values deteriorate. While institutional values deteriorate, careerists exhibit traits of psychopathy replacing the higher calling with ambitions of personal gain and unaccountability.

Babiak and Hare’s Snakes in Suits, a book about psychopaths in the workplace, may seem foreign when juxtaposed with national security, but is instructive in the recognition of character traits the careerists exhibit and the wreckage they leave behind. (The writer is not suggesting that all careerists are psychopaths; however, the behavior of both has much in common.)

Consider the behavior of psychopaths described by Babiak and Hare: Glibness, superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, deceitful, cunning, manipulative, lacks remorse, callous, lacks empathy, does not accept responsibility for own actions, and impulsiveness. Look for these behavioral markers in careerists and what psychologists call the “paradox of power.”

Jonah Lehrer writes about the “paradox of power” in The Wall Street Journal, contending that the very traits that help leaders accumulate power and influence in the first place (being polite, honest, outgoing) all but disappear once power and authority are achieved. Positive leadership traits are replaced with impulsiveness, recklessness and rudeness. Lehrer further notes that authority coupled with the power paradox leads to flawed cognitive processes that in turn “distort the ability to evaluate information and make complex decisions.”

As one who has worked in and around the Pentagon bureaucracy for a few decades, other characteristics come to mind. In addition to placing one’s self in a position of accelerating personal gain, careerists also collect accoutrements of rank and position, perks and lists of biographical achievements, defined as positions, ranks and titles held. It is not about what they achieved but rather the positions and titles they held.

Gen. David Petraeus, the epitome of the new military bureaucrat. The corporatization of the US military has deepened in recent decades, further corrupting the martial values necessary for a healthy military.—Eds

It is appalling that so many senior officers think that the military is all about getting promoted and accumulating as many signs of rank and status as possible, completed with a host of perks. What is lost on careerists is that they are getting the opportunity to actually do things that most people only dream of, or get to see just in the movies.

They are so prevalent because bureaucracies are in effect designed by and for careerists propagated by reams of regulations and layers of superfluous commands. Bureaucracies give careerists a place “to be somebody” rather than an opportunity to do something. They are promoted because of a zero defect record of playing it safe, making no controversial decisions and requiring others to do the same.

Recognizing Careerists

Careerists in both uniforms and suits thrive on hardware programs. It is not a matter of whether a weapon system works but whether it survives. One might point to the failed programs like the A-12 bomber or the Sgt. York “DIVAD” gun which saw billions wasted before they were cancelled. But look more skeptically at the programs that survive, even prosper, that are irrelevant to the wars we fight, double in cost (or more), are delivered years late and break promise after promise for performance.

Even for the so-called successful programs, the improved performance is never commensurate with the increase in cost. What manager among the orchards of low hanging fruit of Pentagon procurement fiascos has been held accountable? What senior DOD acquisition “Czar” has not found himself a huge pay raise from industry upon retirement? Congress and DOD often reward poor program performance and cost escalation. In 2010, Defense Secretary Gates replaced the general in charge of the Joint Strike Fighter program, but the action was a remarkable exception, and nothing fundamental to the program’s problems was changed.

The careerists are not interested in fostering people and ideas or developing good personnel and education programs. The rewards are in hardware issues, not people issues – except that one human factor does predominate: self.

The Washington Post wrote a review of Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S. Army, who was relieved of command in Europe in 2000 shortly after the ineffectual military campaign he commanded against Serbia in 1999. (Not long thereafter he immersed himself in presidential campaign politics.) The article revealed much about the man’s careerism and its characteristics. The reporter for The Washington Post explains with details the animus against Clark: His leadership was  “undercut by his relentless need to be front and center, to always make it all about him winning — rather than the mission.”

Clark’s deep infatuation with the word “I,” which runs through the veins of all careerists, was evident in his own explanation to the reporter:

“How do you think I could have succeeded in the military if everybody didn’t like me? It’s impossible,” he said. “Do you realize I was the first person promoted to full colonel in my entire year group of 2,000 officers? I was the only one selected. Do you realize that? . . . Do you realize I was the only one of my West Point class picked to command a brigade when I was picked? . . . I was the first person picked for brigadier general. You have to balance this out. . . . A lot of people love me.”

If Clark blames himself at all for the abrupt ending of his career after 34 years in the Army, he has never let on. More than one friend has quoted him, when trying to comprehend his forced retirement, as saying plaintively, “But we won the war…”

Without question Clark, like most careerists, has little love for subordinates, peers and others whom he sees as impediments to his career. The Post reported “In an institution filled with ambitious men, some viewed Clark as over the top, someone who would do or say anything to get ahead — and get his way.”

Placing self above the interests of one’s military service, DOD, and even national security is de rigueur. The Taipei Times of Sept. 9, 2010, wrote of retired U.S. Navy Adm. William Owens the following:

“Retired US Admiral William Owens — the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wants to end arms sales to Taiwan — is now aiding an effort by China’s Huawei Technologies to supply equipment to Sprint Nextel and operate in the US.

“A team of eight US senators has written to the administration of US President Barack Obama warning that the move by Huawei could ‘undermine US national security.’

“A national carrier in the US servicing 41.8 million customers at the end of the second quarter, Sprint Nextel is also a supplier to the Pentagon and US law enforcement agencies.”

And later,

“‘If our electronics are compromised, we are cooked,’ [China expert Arthur] Waldron said in his e-mail sent to a wide circle of China watchers.

‘Who is to say that subsystems bought from China will not have back doors and hidden links to their suppliers? We would be mad to think otherwise. The Chinese are not stupid,’ he wrote.”

Recognizing the Silence of Careerism

The same careerist system rewards those who ignore hardware but promote, or fail to stand up against, gigantic policy mistakes. Ambassador Paul Bremmer, who was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom, insisted on the disbanding of the Iraqi army in May 2003. This put an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 Iraqi soldiers out of work, and available to help foment the violence that followed.

Many serving officers and retirees are not forgetting that when senior commanding generals of America’s expeditionary ground forces assembled in Baghdad in May 2003 to hear Ambassador Bremer announce the decision to dismantle the Iraqi state, army and police and occupy much of Arab Iraq with U.S. and British forces, not a single general officer raised any objection.

It is impossible to know whether the refusal of general officers commanding American forces in the field to implement such a misguided and disastrous policy would have allowed American forces to avoid the expensive occupation of Iraq. Speaking out or retiring immediately certainly would have given officials in the government an opportunity to consider places a thousand times more important than Diyala or al-Anbar, starting with the United States itself.”

The apologists for this behavior deceptively ascribed their ruthless climb of the Pentagon ladder as an artifact of doing the right thing. But it is actually a lack of professionalism and an abandonment of the principles of military service. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan provide the most painful recent examples. They have severely tested and frequently compromised the U.S. officer corps’ traditional values of duty, honor and country. This is obvious in the selective careerist- and agenda-ridden assertions to portray a false picture of events to the American public about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Recent examples from every level of command are:

  • Americans were told Iraq was invaded to locate and destroy weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.
  • Americans were told former National Football League star Army Ranger Sgt. Pat Tillman died fighting the enemy. It was a lie.
  • Americans were told Army Spc. Jessica Lynch fired her M16 rifle until she ran out of bullets and was captured. It was a lie.
  • Americans were told repeatedly the rebellion against our military presence in Iraq was defeated and “security was improving.” It was protracted lying punctuated by a daily diet of exploding bombs and mutilated bodies until massive cash payments to the Sunni Arab opponents bought cooperation.
  • Despite numerous classified and unclassified accounts of brutality meted out to prisoners of war and the civilian population by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan – reports that describe the chain of command as aware of the abuses but routinely ignoring or covering them up – not a single general officer was called to account.
  • In 2010, Americans are told Iraq is a “democracy,” when in reality, Iraq is mired in corruption and violence,  its oil is in Chinese hands, and Iran, not the United States influences Iraq’s political destiny.

One can go on, especially now about Afghanistan, but surely the point is made: as the American people are told the conjured tales of the policy advocates, the senior military command stays silent; in fact, some assist, even fabricate, deceptive rationalization further underwriting deafening silence.

Effects

President Eisenhower’s worst nightmare described in his January 1961 farewell address has become fulfilled. Today’s consolidated defense industries have become inseparable from the government and hold political careers in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives at risk if sufficient tax dollars are not committed to the industries’ expensive defense products. That the politicians succumb, holding their political well-being above the merits of any weapons debate, is the very definition of careerism. Unless and until the politicians realize their political fate hinges on a broader perspective, their votes on defense issues will be driven by their narrowly perceived short-term interest, mostly “pork” and campaign contributions.

The “revolving door” enriches civilian executives in the defense industry, and its supporting consulting businesses, for periodic service in the Department of Defense, and it rewards retired generals and admirals for their access to the men and women they left behind in the Pentagon and not coincidentally promoted to flag rank. Rewards are particularly plentiful for the three- and four-star officers who supported and defended expensive defense programs even when the usefulness of the programs was doubted inside their own service bureaucracies, among other places.

Consequently, it’s no surprise that federal auditors, poring over the Defense Department’s conflicting financial statements, missing data and accounting discrepancies, are unable to provide an accurate accounting of the Defense Department’s books.  According to a July 8, 2004 report by the Government Accountability Office, the generals in U.S. Central Command and Washington, D.C. lost $1.2 billion worth of war materiel shipped to Iraq for the campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power. More recently, a congressional staff report found aid to Afghanistan ending up in the hands of the Taliban. This sort of thing would almost be funny, in an insane sort of way, if poor senior leadership did not result in the loss of American life in uniform, undermine American strategic interests abroad, drain the United States Treasury of its tax dollars, and erode the economic well-being of the American people the nation’s flag officers are sworn to defend.

Perhaps, the lack of accountability explains why supposedly objective, retired military officers retained as analysts by national television networks have little incentive to jeopardize their lucrative contracts with the political and industrial elites by telling the American people the hard facts about events in Iraq or Afghanistan? Nurturing the Pentagon money flow and the domestic political environment that supports it while influencing their chosen successors—often their former aides—to keep the money spigots open profoundly changes the message the retired generals and colonels send to the listening audience.

These behaviors help reinforce the myth that only generals and admirals can or should formulate the fundamental principles governing the application of American military power, or even military doctrine. Today, this myth has transformed the president, as well as members of the House and the Senate, into doormats for the four-stars. Secretary of Defense Gates and the Army and Marine Corps four-stars in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) currently wield more influence over U.S. defense and foreign policy than any senator or congressman, and almost no one in the mainstream media is willing to challenge anything they say or do.

Renewed enthusiasm in the four-star ranks for pursuit of the presidency is surely also related to these trends. It’s no secret that a four-star general who transforms himself into a political figure while still in uniform with the aid of political allies in the press and Congress can be so powerful the president may be reluctant to publicly oppose him. After all, members of Congress are always willing to cultivate outspoken four-star generals for narrow partisan advantage. Gen. David Petraeus, the current CENTCOM commander, [and nominated last week by President Obama to be the next director of the CIA]  is the latest in the succession of Army four-stars (including former NATO Commanders Alexander Haig and Wesley Clark) who clearly harbors, despite denials, aspirations to be president.

It is against this backdrop of tumultuous change in civil-military relations since Eisenhower left office that officers coming to Washington, D.C. for the first time – in many instances from arduous duty as company, battalion or brigade commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan – must be viewed. These are the officers that members of Congress and their staffs are likely to meet, and it is from their ranks that will spring the next generation of flag officers. Understanding what makes these officers tick is the real challenge.

Understanding Military Officers

It’s impossible to talk about officers in the armed forces without some mention of demographics. As in the past, the overwhelming majority of officers (roughly 75 per cent) are of European ancestry. However, regardless of their ethnic origin, American officers are more likely to be from high-income families and they are on average better educated than most American citizens. This demographic profile is consistent with historic data in all, but one way. Today’s officers are more religious than their predecessors were 20 or 30 years ago, and they’ve grown up inside a military bureaucracy that differs in important ways from the Reagan-era armed forces.

There are other factors as well. Today, the new paradigm of warfare (counterinsurgency) creates bureaucratic power bases and careerists that derive their relevance from the currently accepted view of war. Few, if any, military officers rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Vietnam War by arguing for an institutional doctrine that addressed the complexities of limited wars. Today, just about no one will rise through the ranks by raising issues about the U.S. armed forces’ ironically new exclusive strategic focus on counterinsurgency. The overemphasis on counterinsurgency must be countered by candid debate and coming to grips with fourth generation warfare – the legacy of failed states and hybrid threats.

The tendency inside the peacetime military to advance officers who tell the boss what he wants to hear is well known; being candid is not career enhancing. This chronic lack of professional candor is now a pervasive facet of political correctness and careerism that supports a new doctrinal orthodoxy inside DOD. That new orthodoxy is a doctrine based in part on a popular journalistic narrative that is deeply flawed but coincides with the careerist modus operandi of going along to get along. In practice, the advocates of this doctrinal orthodoxy are not telling U.S. ground forces to adapt to future strategic conditions and global hybrid threats. They are instead telling American forces to train and equip almost exclusively for future unwanted occupations inside the Islamic world.

Unfortunately, the officers advocating doctrinal orthodoxy and persistent warfare inside the Islamic world are as career-minded and oppressive as those who maintained the fiction that Operation Desert Storm validated warmed over “Blitzkrieg theory” in the form of air-land battle doctrine in 1991. The use of the term “counterinsurgency” to describe conflicts inside the Muslim world creates the illusion the United States has “discovered” a military solution to societal misery. This assertion is untrue, and officers who’ve served for years in places where no sane American would voluntarily spend two minutes will make these points in private if asked.

Many officers today think America’s national security demands armed forces organized around the capability to fight enemies with the capability to fight back – enemies that look like our own conventional forces and are not optimized for counterinsurgency, or even split down the middle that try to do both. A major with two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan summed up the problem that weighs heavily on the minds of many officers in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines:

“If we were to fight against someone who was capable and at least marginally equipped, we could, for the first time since the Korean War or World War II, find ourselves fighting on someone else’s time schedule and initiative. No one in the force today knows what it is to fight on someone else’s clock. If we were hit and hit hard during a build-up, if we faced a capable anti-air threat that knocked a few aircraft, manned or unmanned, out of the sky, against a naval threat that could actually threaten our surface combatants in coastal waters, or that had a ground force that could give battle and launch surprise attacks of their own, our collective psyche’s would be shocked, and our forces paralyzed.”

In sum, our armed forces today are tasked to fight occupational wars they cannot win and they are unprepared for the enemies we claim to be best suited for. That the voices you can faintly hear expressing concern about this (and the assertion that it is not a hardware acquisition question – i.e. a money-making issue) come from the middle of and beneath the officer corps shows how vacant the careerist minds at the top have become. 

The Officer Corps in the Balance

In years past, it was easy to identify officers who spent their time checking with superiors or peers concerning whether or not to act. These types seldom pursued what was right. They were simply “staying in their lane,” as the saying goes. Officers with the moral courage to take a stand on the grounds that it was in the interest of the American people, even when it might contradict the service’s bureaucratic guidelines, were not easy to find, but not uncommon. Today, officers with these attributes still exist, but they are very hard to find. Officers who do so now must be extremely clever, as well as extraordinarily courageous. The erosion that caused this change is an important change that outsiders, including journalists and Hill staffers, must grasp and appreciate.

Officers’ disenchantment with the nation’s focus on hostile occupations and armed nation-building is matched by a growing lack of confidence in, and recognition of careerism among, the field-grade officers, i.e., colonels and generals, but also those senior enlisted who have opted for careerism – aping their officers.

My personal experience and recent surveys indicate that junior officers in the U.S. Army (and Marine Corps) feel a lot of dissatisfaction with the quality of senior leadership. This “disconnect” between junior officers, and their commanders, has been around for more than a decade. It’s gotten worse with a war on, because, unlike past wars, there has not been widespread removal of battalion and brigade commanders who did not perform well. In World War II and Korea, it was common for commanders who did not deliver, to be replaced. With a war going on now and junior officers facing life and death situations because their commanders were not being aggressive or innovative enough, many have been leaving the service.

Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, U.S. Army, returned in 2009 from two months in Iraq where he interviewed young Army officers for a research project. His observation reinforces the comments above: “There is enormous pride among young officers in their units and in each other, but I see strong evidence that they are rapidly losing faith in the Army and the country’s political leadership.” Careerism and political correctness in all the services may be taking a much greater toll (although a somewhat different one) on our personnel than the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Concluding Thoughts

The U.S. military is not led by a Centurion or Spartan class of hardened professionals. Perhaps it should be. The leadership of the armed forces looks bleak, save for a very few. The outliers among senior officers are those who are willing to take unpopular positions for the troops’ or nation’s benefit (not for their own benefit and career enhancement) on politically charged issues. For example, Generals Conway and Amos articulate opposition inside the Marine Corps to the repeal of the “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” policy regarding gay and lesbian service members (DADT), reflecting a sentiment in the Corps’ ranks. Whether or not one agrees or disagrees with DADT, is not the issue. The point is Generals Conway and Amos have the moral courage to state their position as unpopular as it may be in some politically correct circles. This writer submits too many, unlike these generals, would rather go along to get along.

For the moment, U.S. military culture and the essence of conducting warfare within clearly defined Constitutional and sensible strategic parameters are insidiously perverted by domestic political interests, political correctness and political constituencies inside the senior ranks of America’s military establishment fused to the generals’ and admirals’ unabashed careerism.

The questions members of Congress and journalists should ask are the questions on the minds of many officers in the armed forces regarding these issues: Are the four-star generals and admirals merely military “caretakers” for the assigned mission without taking moral or professional responsibility for the assignment to which American military power is committed? Are conflicts with Islamic groups that have no armies, no air defenses and no air forces yet another avenue for generals, admirals and colonels to pursue selfish ends?

Lt. Col. Paul Yingling writes about the failure to resist utterly stupid and self-defeating policies conceived in Washington, D.C. Yingling contends that this failure is not the result of “individual failures, but rather a crisis of an entire institution.”  America’s generals and admirals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war, yet they advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.

Meanwhile America’s generals, colonels, admirals and captains blinded by the illusion of bureaucratic power, mimic the behaviors of the politicians, managers and policy advocates. Individuals preoccupied with their own internal goals are blind to what is happening around them: “Being in a position of power makes people feel they can do no wrong.” As a result of this intoxication with power, careerists unwittingly (and wittingly) underwrite a defense-industrial-congressional complex where the primary purpose is awarding contracts and shoveling power, perks and money in disparate forms, rather than winning wars.

How do we fix this? Part of the answer is military reform ushered in by drastic budget cuts to hardware programs Col. Michael Wyly, U.S. Marine Corps, ret., who is held in high respect, seeks a culture where a warrior class of “mavericks” is accepted and those who place themselves above the time-honored principles of military service (duty, honor, country) find themselves on the outside looking in. Wyly observes of the consummate Pentagon maverick, Col. John Boyd :

“Yet it is unfortunate that we have to think of him as a maverick. He should have been the norm: an independent thinker who did his own research on a daily basis and espoused his views regardless of convention because he had the courage to do so. Courage is a virtue. In the military profession, courage tops the list of virtues required and demanded. My experiences in combat demonstrated that you can’t have the physical kind of courage without the moral kind. Officers with Boyd’s degree of moral courage need to be the norm, not the mavericks. Another way of putting it is that we all need to have the courage to be mavericks when institutional thought stagnates. But we have a responsibility not to let it stagnate.”

G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) has deployed on multiple combat tours with the Marines; he holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York – Albany and a master’s degree from Webster University. He teaches criminal justice at the college level and is a graduate student in forensic psychology currently doing an internship with University of California, San Diego’s Department of Psychiatry. This essay is one of the contributions to The Pentagon LabyrinthTen Short Essays to Help You Through It, edited by Winslow T. Wheeler and published bythe Center for Defense Information / World Security Institute and accessible, with footnotes, at http://dnipogo.org/labyrinth/

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OpEd: Trial By Hit Squad

May 3, 2011

Why Patriotic Americans Should Be Angry That Bin Laden Was Killed
By BRIAN J. FOLEY

Navy SEALs: Tremendously well-trained, but to serve what goals?

The widespread jubilation at reports of Bin Laden’s death is misplaced. Patriotic Americans should be angry.

Brian J. Foley is a law professor. Email him at brian_j_foley@yahoo.comVisit his blog at http://brianjfoley.net/

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Waterboarding ‘Worked’?

Media Advisory 

Waterboarding ‘Worked’?
Media push pro-torture message

5/4/11

Peter King: as despicable a right-wing blowhard as they make them.

To hear some tell it, the intelligence clues that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan were generated by the use of torture. But the evidence available so far does not bear this out.

Torture advocates on the right are claiming vindication. On Fox News Channel‘s O’Reilly Factor (5/2/11), Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) announced that we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. And so for those who say that waterboarding doesn’t work, to say that it should be stopped and never used again– we got vital information which directly led to us bin Laden.

This led O’Reilly to proclaim: “You’re not going to hear that on the other networks. I guarantee you.”

Actually, talk about how water torture may have revealed the identity of bin Laden’s trusted courier could be heard widely. On the CBS Evening News (5/2/11), reporter David Martin said, “Some of the leads to that courier came out of the CIA’s secret prison where those Al-Qaeda captives were waterboarded.”

And ABC World News reporter Jonathan Karl tapped Dick Cheney for expertise (5/2/11):

Karl: One key, Cheney suggests: the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program that Obama stopped because he said it included torture. An early tip leading to bin Laden’s courier came from some of those interrogations.

Cheney: All I know is what I’ve seen in the newspaper at this point, but it wouldn’t be surprising if, in fact, that program produced results that ultimately contributed to the success of this venture

The Los Angeles Times (5/2/11) reported:

Crucial information about the trusted courier who owned the compound came years ago from CIA interrogations of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, the official said. This is significant, because the Al-Qaeda mastermind was subject to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted (5/3/11) that Obama killed bin Laden “with an apparent assist from the Bush administration’s interrogation program.” And on NBC‘s Today show (5/3/11), Jim Miklasziewski reported:

U.S. officials tell NBC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while in CIA custody, provided key information regarding a courier close to bin Laden. Intelligence sometimes obtained through aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding

But the details that are known so far do not support the argument that torture produced any of the key intelligence. As New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote (NewYorker.com, 5/2/11):

You would think that if the CIA’s interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the CIA’s custody of so-called “high-value detainees” ended…. This timeline doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative

The blog Think Progress (5/3/11) noted that administration officials disputed the idea that critical information came from torture sessions:

This morning on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe [5/3/11], Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan confirmed that the information acquired over nine years did not come from waterboarding but was pieced together from multiple sources.

The New York Times (5/4/11), interviewing an array of intelligence sources, reported that “a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden’s trusted courier and exposing his hide-out.”

Most importantly, the Times noted that “two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment–including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times–repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity. “

An Associated Press dispatch (5/2/11) reported that

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

This “up for debate” conclusion is strange, given that evidence would suggest that the pro-torture side of the “debate” has little to support their case. And such discussions serve to reaffirm a media narrative that tries to normalize torture by making it a debate that prioritizes outcomes–i.e, Does it work?–over legality and morality. (See Extra!, 1-2/02.)

Along those lines, CNN‘s Kiran Chetry (5/3/11) posed this question to former Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice:

Things like enhanced interrogation have fallen out of favor. This administration has said they were ending some of those controversial practices like waterboarding that were acceptable under the Bush administration. The other big thing is the so-called black sites, these CIA interrogation sites around the world. All of this met with huge criticism. As more trickles out about whether or not any of these strategies played a key role in eventually killing Osama bin Laden, do they have to rethink this administration?

Along with rethinking the Bush administration, there are many media voices suggesting we should be reevaluating the question of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. One can only hope the media treat the subject more carefully than they have in the past.

GET TO KNOW FAIR, THE MEDIA WATCHDOG Its work is vital to the survival of our freedoms.

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SYRIA: Who is Behind The Protest Movement? Fabricating a Pretext for a US-NATO “Humanitarian Intervention”

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, May 3, 2011

 

There is evidence of gross media manipulation and falsification from the outset of the protest movement in southern Syria on March 17th.

 

The Western media has presented the events in Syria as part of the broader Arab pro-democracy protest movement, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia, to Egypt, and from Libya to Syria.

Media coverage has focussed on the Syrian police and armed forces, which are accused of indiscriminately shooting and killing unarmed “pro-democracy” demonstrators. While these police shootings did indeed occur, what the media failed to mention is that among the demonstrators there were armed gunmen as well as snipers who were shooting at both the security forces and the protesters.

The death figures presented in the reports are often unsubstantiated. Many of the reports are “according to witnesses”. The images and video footages aired on Al Jazeera and CNN do not always correspond to the events which are being covered by the news reports.

There is certainly cause for social unrest and mass protest in Syria: unemployment has increased in recent year, social conditions have deteriorated, particularly since the adoption in 2006 of sweeping economic reforms under IMF guidance. The IMF’s “economic medicine” includes austerity measures, a freeze on wages, the deregulation of the financial system, trade reform and privatization. (See IMF  Syrian Arab Republic — IMF Article IV Consultation Mission’s Concluding Statement, http://www.imf.org/external/np/ms/2006/051406.htm, 2006)

With a government dominated by the minority Alawite (an offshoot of Shia Islam), Syria is no “model society” with regard to civil rights and freedom of expression. It nonetheless constitutes the only (remaining) independent secular state in the Arab world. Its populist, anti-Imperialist and secular base is inherited from the dominant Baath party, which integrates Muslims, Christians and Druze.

Moreover, in contrast to Egypt and Tunisia, in Syria there is considerable popular support for President Bashar Al Assad. The large rally in Damascus on March 29, “with tens of thousands of supporters” (Reuters) of President Al Assad is barely mentioned. Yet in an unusual twist, the images and video footage of several pro-government events were used by the Western media to convince international public opinion that the President was being confronted by mass anti-government rallies.

Tens of thousands of Syrians gather for a pro-government rally at the central
bank square in Damascus March 29, 2011. (Reuters Photo)

Syrians display a giant national flag with a picture of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad during a
pro-government rally at the central bank square in Damascus March 29, 2011. (Reuters Photo)

The “Epicenter” of the Protest Movement. Daraa: A Small Border Town in southern Syria

What is the nature of the protest movement? From what sectors of Syrian society does it emanate? What triggered the violence?

What is the cause of the deaths?

The existence of an organized insurrection composed of armed gangs involved in acts of killing and arson has been dismissed by the Western media, despite evidence to the contrary.

The demonstrations  did not start in Damascus, the nation’s capital. At the outset, the protests were not integrated by a mass movement of citizens in Syria’s capital.

The demonstrations started in Daraa, a small border town of 75,000 inhabitants, on the Syrian Jordanian border, rather than in Damascus or Aleppo, where the mainstay of organized political opposition and social movements are located. (Daraa is a small border town comparable e.g. to Plattsburgh, NY on the US-Canadian border).

The Associated Press report (quoting unnamed “witnesses” and “activists”) describes the early protests in Daraa as follows:

The violence in Daraa, a city of about 300,000 near the border with Jordan, was fast becoming a major challenge for President Bashar Assad, …. Syrian police launched a relentless assault Wednesday on a neighborhood sheltering anti-government protesters [Daraa], fatally shooting at least 15 in an operation that began before dawn, witnesses said.

At least six were killed in the early morning attack on the al-Omari mosque in the southern agricultural city of Daraa, where protesters have taken to the streets in calls for reforms and political freedoms, witnesses said. An activist in contact with people in Daraa said police shot another three people protesting in its Roman-era city center after dusk. Six more bodies were found later in the day, the activist said.

As the casualties mounted, people from the nearby villages of Inkhil, Jasim, Khirbet Ghazaleh and al-Harrah tried to march on Daraa Wednesday night but security forces opened fire as they approached, the activist said. It was not immediately clear if there were more deaths or injuries. (AP, March 23, 2011, emphasis added)

The AP report inflates the numbers: Daraa is presented as a city of 300,000 when in fact its population is 75,000;  “protesters gathered by the thousands”, “casualties mounted”.

The report is silent on the death of policemen which in the West invariably makes the front page of the tabloids.

The deaths of the policemen are important in assessing what actually happened. When there are police casualties, this means that there is an exchange of gunfire between opposing sides, between policemen and “demonstrators”.

Who are these “demonstrators” including roof top snipers who were targeting the police.

Israeli and Lebanese news reports (which acknowledge the police deaths) provide a clearer picture of what happened in Daraa on March 17-18. The Israel National News Report (which cannot be accused of being biased in favor of Damascus) reviews these same events as follows:

Seven police officers and at least four demonstrators in Syria have been killed in continuing violent clashes that erupted in the southern town of Daraa last Thursday.

…. On Friday police opened fire on armed protesters killing four and injuring as many as 100 others. According to one witness, who spoke to the press on condition of anonymity, “They used live ammunition immediately — no tear gas or anything else.”

…. In an uncharacteristic gesture intended to ease tensions the government offered to release the detained students, but seven police officers were killed, and the Baath Party Headquarters and courthouse were torched, in renewed violence on Sunday. (Gavriel Queenann, Syria: Seven Police Killed, Buildings Torched in Protests, Israel National News, Arutz Sheva, March 21, 2011, emphasis added)

The Lebanese news report, quoting various sources, also acknowledges the killings of seven policemen in Daraa: They were killed  “during clashes between the security forces and protesters… They got killed trying to drive away protesters during demonstration in Dara’a”

The Lebanese Ya Libnan report quoting Al Jazeera also acknowledged that protesters had “burned the headquarters of the Baath Party and the court house in Dara’a” (emphasis added)

These news reports of the events in Daraa confirm the following:

1. This was not a “peaceful protest” as claimed by the Western media. Several of the “demonstrators” had fire arms and were using them against the police:  “The police opened fire on armed protesters killing four”.

2. From the initial casualty figures (Israel News), there were more policemen than demonstrators who were killed:  7 policemen killed versus 4 demonstrators. This is significant because it suggests that the police force might have been initially outnumbered by a well organized armed gang. According to Syrian media sources, there were also snipers on rooftops which were shooting at both the police and the protesters.

What is clear from these initial reports is that many of the demonstrators were not demonstrators but terrorists involved in premeditated acts of killing and arson. The title of the Israeli news report summarizes what happened:  Syria: Seven Police Killed, Buildings Torched in Protests.

The Daraa “protest movement” on March 18 had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel)

Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.

What has unfolded in Daraa in the weeks following the initial violent clashes on 17-18 March, is the confrontation between the police and the armed forces on the one hand and armed units of terrorists and snipers on the other which have infiltrated the protest movement.

Reports suggest that these terrorists are integrated by Islamists. There is no concrete evidence as to which Islamic organizations are behind the terrorists and the government has not released corroborating information as to who these groups are.

Both the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (whose leadership is in exile in the UK) and the banned Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation), among others have paid lip service to the protest movement. Hizb ut Tahir (led in the 1980s by Syrian born Omar Bakri Muhammad) tends to “dominate the British Islamist scene” according to Foreign Affairs. Hizb ut Tahir is also considered to be of strategic importance to Britain’s Secret Service MI6. in the pursuit of Anglo-American interests in the Middle East and Central Asia. (Is Hizb-ut-Tahrir another project of British MI6? | State of Pakistan).

Supporters and members of Islamist party ''Hizb Ut-Tahrir'' wave their party's flags and chant slogans during a protest in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, to express solidarity with Syria's protesters, April 22, 2011. REUTERS/ Mohamed Azakir

Hizb ut-Tahrir anti-Assad rally in Tripoli, Lebanon (40 km from Syrian border), April 22, 2011.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in Syria

Syria is a secular Arab country, a society of religious tolerance, where Muslims and Christians have for several centuries lived in peace. Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation) is a radical political movement committed to the creation of an Islamic caliphate. In Syria, its avowed objective is to destabilize the secular state.

Since the Soviet-Afghan war, Western intelligence agencies as well as Israel’s Mossad have consistently used various Islamic terrorist organizations as “intelligence assets”. Both Washington and its indefectible British ally have provided covert support to “Islamic terrorists” in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya, etc. as a means to triggering ethnic strife, sectarian violence and political instability.

The staged protest movement in Syria is modelled on Libya. The insurrection in Eastern Libya is integrated by the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) which is supported by MI6 and the CIA. The ultimate objective of the Syria protest movement, through media lies and fabrications, is to create divisions within Syrian society as well as justify an eventual “humanitarian intervention”.

Armed Insurrection in Syria

An armed insurrection integrated by Islamists and supported covertly by Western intelligence is central to an understanding of what is occurring on the ground.

The existence of an armed insurrection is not mentioned by the Western media. If it were to be acknowledged and analysed, our understanding of unfolding events would be entirely different.

What is mentioned profusely is that the armed forces and the police are involved in the indiscriminate killing of protesters.

The deployment of the armed forces including tanks in Daraa is directed against an organized armed insurrection, which has been active in the border city since March 17-18.

Casualties are being reported which also include the death of policemen and soldiers.

In a bitter irony, the Western media acknowledges the police/soldier deaths while denying the existence of an armed insurrection.

The key question is how does the media explain these deaths of soldiers and police?

Without evidence, the reports suggest authoritatively that the police is shooting at the soldiers and vice versa the soldiers are shooting on the police. In a April 29 Al Jazeera report, Daraa is described as “a city under siege”.

“Tanks and troops control all roads in and out. Inside the city, shops are shuttered and nobody dare walk the once bustling market streets, today transformed into the kill zone of rooftop snipers.

 

Unable to crush the people who first dared rise up against him – neither with the secret police,  paid thugs or the special forces of his brother’s military division – President Bashar al-Assad has sent thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Deraa for an operation the regime wants nobody in the world to see.

Though almost all communication channels with Deraa have been cut, including the Jordanian mobile service that reaches into the city from just across the border, Al Jazeera has gathered firsthand accounts of life inside the city from residents who just left or from eyewitnesses inside who were able to get outside the blackout area.

The picture that emerges is of a dark and deadly security arena, one driven by the actions of the secret police and their rooftop snipers, in which soldiers and protestors alike are being killed or wounded, in which cracks are emerging in the military itself, and in which is created the very chaos which the regime uses to justify its escalating crackdown. (Daraa, a City under Siege, IPS / Al Jazeera, April 29, 2011)

The Al Jazeera report borders on the absurd. Read carefully.

“Tanks and troops control all roads in and out”,  “thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Daraa”

This situation has prevailed for several weeks. This means that bona fide protesters who are not already inside Daraa cannot enter Daraa.

People who live in the city are in their homes: “nobody dares walk … the streets”. If nobody dares walk the streets where are the protesters?

Who is in the streets? According to Al Jazeera, the protesters are in the streets together with the soldiers, and both the protesters and the soldiers are being shot at by “plain clothes secret police”, by “paid thugs” and government sponsored snipers.

The impression conveyed in the report is that these casualties are attributed to infighting between the police and the military.

But the report also says that the soldiers (in the “thousands”) control all roads in and out of the city, but they are being shot upon by the plain clothed secret police.

The purpose of this web of media deceit, namely outright fabrications  –where soldiers are being killed by police and  “government snipers”– is to deny the existence of armed terrorist groups. The later are integrated by snipers and “plain clothed terrorists” who are shooting at the police, the Syrian armed forces and local residents.

These are not spontaneous acts of terror; they are carefully planned and coordinated attacks. In recent developments, according to a Xinhua report (April 30, 2011), armed “terrorist groups” “attacked the housing areas for servicemen” in Daraa province, “killing a sergeant and wounding two”.

While the government bears heavy responsibility for its mishandling of the military-police operation, including the deaths of civilians, the reports confirm that the armed terrorist groups had also opened fire on protesters and local residents. The casualties are then blamed on the armed forces and the police and the Bashar Al Assad government is portrayed by “the international community” as having ordered countless atrocities.

The fact of the matter is that foreign journalists are banned from reporting inside Syria, to the extent that much of the information including the number of casualties is obtained from the unverified accounts of “witnesses”.

It is in the interest of the US-NATO alliance to portray the events in Syria as a peaceful protest movement which is being brutally repressed by a “dictatorial regime”.

The Syrian government may be autocratic. It is certainly not a model of democracy but neither is the US administration, which is characterized by rampant corruption, the derogation of civil liberties under the Patriot legislation, the legalisation of torture, not to mention its “bloodless” “humanitarian wars”:

“The U.S. and its NATO allies have, in addition to U.S. Sixth Fleet and NATO Active Endeavor military assets permanently deployed in the Mediterranean, warplanes, warships and submarines engaged in the assault against Libya that can be used against Syria at a moment’s notice.

On April 27 Russia and China evidently prevented the U.S. and its NATO allies from pushing through an equivalent of Resolution 1973 against Syria in the Security Council, with Russian deputy ambassador to the UN Alexander Pankin stating that the current situation in Syria “does not present a threat to international peace and security.” Syria is Russia’s last true partner in the Mediterranean and the Arab world and hosts one of only two Russian overseas naval bases, that at Tartus. (The other being in Ukraine’s Crimea.)” (Rick Rozoff,   Libyan Scenario For Syria: Towards A US-NATO “Humanitarian Intervention” directed against Syria? Global Research, April 30, 2011)

The ultimate purpose is to trigger sectarian violence and political chaos within Syria by covertly supporting Islamic terrorist organizations.

What lies ahead?

The longer term US foreign policy perspective is “regime change” and the destabilization of Syria as an independent nation-state, through a covert process of “democratization” or through military means.

Syria is on the list of “rogue states”, which are targeted for a US military intervention. As confirmed by former NATO commander General Wesley Clark the “[The] Five-year campaign plan [includes]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan” (Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark).

The objective is to weaken the structures of the secular State while justifying an eventual  UN sponsored “humanitarian intervention”. The latter, in the first instance, could take the form of a reinforced embargo on the country (including sanctions) as well as the freezing of Syrian bank assets in overseas foreign financial institutions.

While a US-NATO military intervention in the immediate future seems highly unlikely, Syria is nonetheless on the Pentagon’s military roadmap, namely an eventual war on Syria has been contemplated both by Washington and Tel Aviv.

If it were to occur, at some future date, it would lead to escalation. Israel would inevitably be involved. The entire Middle East Central Asian region from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Chinese-Afghan border would flare up.

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Editor of globalresearch.ca. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages.  He spent a month in Syria in early 2011.


 

Read about Osama Bin Laden in Michel Chossudovsky’s international best-seller


© Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, GlobalResearch.ca, 2011  

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