Madame Nhu, Vietnam War Lightning Rod, Dies
Roosevelt knew that Japan coveted the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to its Asian expansion. Back in 1900, when he was still vice president, Roosevelt had written, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” When, in February 1904, Japan broke off relations with Russia, President Roosevelt said publicly that he would “maintain the strictest neutrality,” but privately he wrote, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”
In June 1905, Roosevelt made world headlines when — apparently on his own initiative — he invited the two nations to negotiate an end to their war. Roosevelt’s private letter to his son told another story: “I have of course concealed from everyone — literally everyone — the fact that I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion ... . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.”
Years later, a Japanese emissary to Roosevelt paraphrased the president’s comments to him: “All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine, preserved the Latin American nations from European interference. The future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the United States towards their neighbors on the American continent.”
In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act.
(...)
Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.In planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto was specifically thinking of how, 37 years earlier, the Japanese had surprised the Russian Navy at Port Arthur in Manchuria and, as he wrote, “favorable opportunities were gained by opening the war with a sudden attack on the main enemy fleet.” At the time, the indignant Russians called it a violation of international law. But Theodore Roosevelt, confident that he could influence events in North Asia from afar, wrote to his son, “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”
It was for his efforts to broker the peace deal between Russia and Japan that a year and a half later Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize — and one of only three presidents to do so while in office (the other two are Woodrow Wilson and President Obama, who will accept his prize this week). No one in Oslo, or in the United States Congress, knew the truth then.
But the Japanese did. And the American president’s support emboldened them to increase their military might — and their imperial ambitions. In December 1941, the consequence of Theodore Roosevelt’s recklessness would become clear to those few who knew of the secret dealings. No one else — including my dad on Iwo Jima — realized just how well Japan had indeed played “our game.”
-NYT
The Honduran minister who called U.S. President Barack Obama "that little black guy" quit the country's post-coup interim government on Tuesday, citing U.S. Embassy "pressures."
A U.S. embassy spokeswoman denied the United States was exerting any pressure, saying the embassy had no contact with a government it did not recognize. [ho ho ho] Enrique Ortez's resignation comes just days after he was moved from the post of foreign minister to minister of government and justice in the wake of his comment about Obama. The interim government had previously apologized to the United States.
“The fact that he had seen Gray and he had talked to me after his lunch, that I remembered,” Mr. Phelps said. But he said it was not until Mr. Smith jogged his memory that he recalled what revelations had the young reporter so excited.
In the book, he wrote, “We never developed Gray’s tips into publishable stories. Why we failed is a mystery to me.”
“My memory is fuzzy on the crucial point of what I did with the tape,” he wrote.
Given - it's way cheap but it B our lead-in:
Iraq hasn't gotten much attention recently in the American presidential campaign, thanks to the reduction in violence there, but U.S. policymakers are increasingly worried about what's ahead.
The negotiations to complete a new status-of-forces agreement for U.S. troops are deadlocked. With a Dec. 31 deadline approaching, Baghdad and Washington seem to be running out of bargaining room. The Iraqis are determined to assert their sovereignty through legal jurisdiction over U.S. forces, while American officials are demanding broad protections from Iraqi law until U.S. troops are gone in 2011.
U.S. officials are warning that if the talks remain stalled, there isn't an easy Plan B, such as a new U.N. Security Council resolution to replace the one that expires at year's end and now provides the legal mandate for American troops.
"I've tried to make clear the consequences of not getting a SOFA agreement," Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told me in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Iraqis should be under no illusion that a rollover of the U.N. resolution would be an easy option." He said the United States would refuse anything but a clean, one-year extension of the current U.N. mandate -- meaning that the Iraqis would lose the gains they have won in the new status-of-forces agreement.
Crocker said he has advised the Iraqis that without some formal mandate, U.S. troops will return to their bases Jan. 1. "Without legal authority to operate, we do not operate," he said. "That means no security operations, no logistics, no training, no support for Iraqis on the borders, no nothing."
Iraq has been regarded as such a success story in recent months that many have forgotten that all the old cleavages still exist -- Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, regional autonomy vs. central government. With growing uncertainty about the future of U.S. forces in the country, these tensions are returning with a vengeance.
Mistrust between Kurds and Arabs almost led to a military confrontation in the Khanaqin area northeast of Baghdad in August. The Kurds had moved their pesh merga militia into the mixed Kurdish-Arab area, prompting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to deploy Iraqi army troops and order the Kurdish forces to leave. Crocker admonished both sides not to make stupid miscalculations, and U.S. commanders warned that they wouldn't come to Maliki's rescue. The overmatched Iraqi army retreated, but the crisis left bitter feelings on all sides.
"The Kurds still see things as a zero-sum game, as does everyone else," grumbles another senior U.S. official who has been deeply involved in the negotiations. Jockeying among the Shiite parties has been especially intense, he says, with none of the Shiite leaders wanting the potential stigma of supporting the SOFA deal.
Iran is waging an aggressive covert-action campaign to derail the agreement, U.S. officials say. The new commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, highlighted Tehran's push last week when he said Iranian operatives had been seeking to bribe Iraqi members of parliament to reject the pact when it comes up for a vote.
This public allegation of Iranian meddling drew a rebuke from Maliki, but U.S. officials say they have recently intercepted Iranian couriers carrying suitcases of money to pay bribes and political subsidies to pro-Iranian parties. It isn't clear whether the United States is mounting a covert effort of its own to counter the Iranian campaign.
The Iranians obviously want to limit U.S. influence in the new Iraq by defeating the status-of-forces agreement and in the process hand America a strategic defeat. But some top U.S. officials think the Iranians have a more fundamental goal in pushing U.S. forces out before the Iraqis are ready to take over -- namely, bringing a final, decisive resolution to the Iraq-Iran war that ended in a 1988 truce. "Now, 20 years later, they have an opportunity to win that war," the official argued.
"My one-word definition of Iraq is 'fear,' " says Crocker. "Everybody is afraid of everybody. They're afraid of the past, present and future. They're afraid of the consequences of signing an agreement. But they should be even more afraid of the consequences of not signing."
TSKHINVALI -- Under the standards of information warfare, it was an easy job by all accounts.
The Kremlin only had to charter a plane, take about 60 foreign and Russian reporters to Beslan, bus them through the nearby Roksky Tunnel to South Ossetia, and stand back.
The journalists did the rest. They were free to speak to whomever they wanted and ask any questions.
The comments that they heard on all sides -- from South Ossetia leader Eduard Kokoity, local officials and ordinary residents -- matched the Kremlin's official line perfectly. Everyone said they had waited for years for Russia to recognize the breakaway Georgian republic of 70,000 people as independent and hoped for a future together.
"We've been waiting for this for 18 years," said Tsiala Gergaulova, a Tskhinvali resident whose 24-year-old son was injured in the Russian-Georgian war last month. "I would like for us to be part of Russia. I believe everybody wants this."
Boris Bagayev, an 85-year-old artist and official with the local administration, said he was more than happy that Moscow had recognized his republic last week. "It gives meaning to my life," he said.
Two weeks after the short but intense war, life in the South Ossetian capital appears to be coming back together. On Monday, damaged government buildings, ruined neighborhoods and a statue with a missing head in a central square stood as grim reminders of the fighting. But the streets were being patched up, reconstruction was being planned, and most children attended their first day of the school year -- just like their peers in Russia.
For the situation to improve further, Kokoity said, the world should recognize South Ossetia and another breakaway Georgian region, Abkhazia, as independent.
"The recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will stabilize the situation in the Caucasus," the South Ossetian leader told reporters, standing in front of green netting covering the remains of the local parliament building. Russia so far has been the only country to recognize the breakaway republics, although Belarus and Venezuela have expressed support. Western powers have denounced the decision.
Kokoity said the immediate task for his government was to strengthen South Ossetia's independence and then to officially become part of Russia. He urged foreign reporters to ignore criticism from their governments and "listen to the voice of people and common sense."
A Kremlin official supervising the journalists on the trip, Vladislav Petrushin, said the main purpose of the visit was to give the foreign reporters access to the administration led by Kokoity. "We've provided an opportunity to talk. It's not like we've given him a cheat sheet. He said the truth," Petrushin said.
The trip also indicates how far the Kremlin has evolved in communicating with the outside world. When the fighting broke out Aug. 8, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and other senior officials made their case in interviews with major Western media outlets. Top Russian officials, meanwhile, were shown on state television holding meetings. As international sentiment grew in Tbilisi's favor, the Kremlin mounted its own campaign of informational warfare. President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have offered a series of interviews in recent days.
"They've understood they can't neglect communications," said Anthony Orliange, a television reporter with Capa, a production company, on the Kremlin trip to South Ossetia.
"The whole point of me being here is that the Kremlin wants to communicate," said Orliange, who came with a colleague from Paris after receiving their Russian visas in record time. "I didn't have a visa three days ago," he said.
During the war, access to the conflict zone was tightly controlled for foreign reporters. While Monday's visit was vastly different from seeing the war itself, it was still helpful, Orliange said. "I am getting the vibe of this place," he said. "It will change my perspective."
A hacked & jacked The Moscow Times via Johnson's Russia List
This report focuses on the evidence provided by the IAEA. The sections dealing with IAEA reporting – particularly the latest reports as of November 2007 -- quote the key technical judgments and findings of IAEA inspectors and not just the summary comments. These detailed findings often do a far better job of revealing the level of Iranian non-compliance, delay, and obfuscation than the summary comments.
The evidence presented provides strong indications that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Specifically, Iran is known to have made significant efforts in all of the following areas, most of which have been tracked by the IAEA for some time:
■ Beryllium (neutron reflector)
■ Polonium (neutron initiator)
■ Plutonium separation
■ Uranium enrichment
■ Machining of Uranium hemispheres
■ Re-entry vehicle design
■ Acquisition of North Korean (Chinese) weapons design? AQ Khan network transfers
■ High explosive lenses
The attached briefing shows that the IAEA has traced a pattern of Iranian efforts that fit a coherent and consistent nuclear weapons program that is difficult to explain in any other way, but no certainties are involved. Moreover, major uncertainties exist in virtually every aspect of any effort to characterize what kind of program Iran may be intending to create, when it will have a significant stock of weapons, and how it intends to deploy and exploit such a capability.
At the same time, there is wide range of possible Iranian activities that the IAEA may never be able to fully address, even if Iran does adopt the full range of NPT protocols:
■ Clandestine elements of nuclear weapons research.
■ Passive (non-fissile) testing of nuclear weapons designs and warheads/bombs/reentry vehicles.
■ Clandestine R&D activity in centrifuges, reactors, plutonium separation, LIS.
■ Existence and nature of undisclosed facilities.
■ “Breakout” plans for nuclear power reactors and fuel cycle.
■ True intention of disclosed and inspected activities.
■ Level of North Korean (Chinese) weapons and warhead designs.
■ Existence and validity of national intelligence data.
■ MEK truths vs. half-truths vs. lies.
"Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."
When special services are unable to undertake certain kinds of undercover operation, they use parallel structures. This was the case of Bob Denard.
While the editorial team sits in safety in Oslo, television journalists on the ground risk arrest by secretly filming footage inside Burma, and smuggling the tapes to a neighbouring country.
News editor Moe Aye talks regularly on the telephone to his secret contacts in Burma.
Having established the line, he spends some minutes making sure it is safe, and that the contact cannot be overheard.
The contacts "really want to inform and let us know what is happening inside Burma," explained Mr Moe. "On the other hand they're really concerned about their lives and their security."
The Democratic Voice of Burma says its television programmes are an important part of the non-violent fight in support of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
She was banned by the military from travelling to Oslo to receive her Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
The Paris-based media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranks Burma third worst for media freedom, after North Korea and Cuba.
Its Burma expert, Vincent Brossel, welcomes the new TV station, and hopes people will risk watching it.
"There is a law against satellite transmission, and you can go to jail if you have a parabole [satellite dish] without a licence," he told the BBC News website.
"But we know now so many people have paraboles and can watch this TV programme. People inside can understand that outside the Burmese are also fighting for democracy.
"A friend told me that recently in Bassein, outside Rangoon, the electricity was cut off when the DVB [Democratic Voice of Burma] programme started. So it means the authorities are afraid of the DVB TV influence."
But back at the television station, editor Khin Maung Win is not worried that the military will stop the programme. He thinks the generals themselves will tune in.
"At the beginning they jammed our radio, but later on they became our regular audience, because they wanted to get real information, even about their own country," he said.
"They cannot rely on reports from their subordinates. So they have to listen to our radio to get real information, or to measure the feeling of the grassroot people. We believe that will happen with television also."
For now Democratic Voice of Burma TV broadcasts two hours of news and educational programmes weekly. [That's been recently ramped up to 9 hours/day due to the crisis at hand -M1]
It wants to expand to become a daily source of television news for viewers inside Burma.
And as long as the media situation remains unchanged, the station will continue to broadcast from far-away Norway.
The hard-core denialists who still think that the U.S. can ever achieve anything a reasonable person would consider "success" in Iraq are ignoring the elephant in the room:[S]upporters of the war and opponents both know that the multiple conflicts in Iraq have no military solution. Soon to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Michael Mullen, is unequivocal on this: "Security is critical to providing the government of Iraq the breathing space it needs to work toward political national reconciliation and economic growth.… Barring that, no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference" (emphasis added). If U.S. forces cannot make a difference, improved Iraqi forces certainly cannot.
What, then, is the political and economic situation? Moderate Sunnis have left the government, Shia unity has crumbled, and Kurds and Shia are less, not more, willing to share power with the Sunnis. Seventeen of 38 cabinet ministers have walked out. Former Sunni insurgents have turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar province, but this does not mean support for the Iraqi government or for U.S. goals. More and more of the Iraqi people look to a source other than the government (a sectarian party or militia, Islamist terrorists, a tribe, a criminal gang) for the security and services the Baghdad government cannot provide. By the Pentagon’s reckoning, unemployment stands at about 60 percent, draining the economic base any government needs to stand on.
Basra, Iraq's second largest city and not long ago relatively peaceful, is the place where the "clear, hold, and build" strategy the United States is now following was first applied by the British and judged to be the model to follow. Today it is lawless and bloody, in the grip of warring Shia militia and fundamentalist clerics. The International Crisis Group (ICG), whose reporting from Iraq over five years has been among the best, fears that Basra’s fate will be the country's. The Iraq ICG sees is "a failed state—a country whose institutions and, with them, any semblance of national cohesion, have been obliterated."
As convenient as it would be to have a scapegoat, Iraq's political disintegration cannot be blamed on its prime minister, nor fixed by replacing him. It sources are deeper. Minority Sunnis, who ruled the country for a long time, are still unwilling, as the recent National Intelligence Estimate found, "to accept a diminished political status." That hasn't changed in four years and probably will not until they have fought to exhaustion for what they see as their rightful place.
The political disintegration also comes from the momentum of violence. More than 4 million Iraqis are refugees, internally displaced, or dead from violence. In per capita U.S. terms, that would be nearly 50 million people. Could we, under such conditions, come together as a nation, bury past wrongs, and under foreign military dictate reallocate wealth and make frightening political accommodations? The question answers itself—yet we continue to insist that Iraqis can, perhaps if we threaten a bit more.
No one knows whether or not an Operation Iranian Freedom is in the cards. A good deal of focus is already being placed on military planning. But it is also worth asking what America is doing to prepare for the trove of documents and other media that a newly liberated Iran could produce.
Their methods had echoes of the Gestapo: kidnapping at night by state officials who offered no evidence of identity. Recently declassified secret documents reveal how at the end of the second world war an elite British unit abducted hundreds of German scientists and technicians and put them to work at government ministries and private firms in the UK.
The programme was designed to loot the defeated country's intellectual assets, impeding its ability to compete while giving a boost to British business.
In a related programme, German businessmen are alleged to have been forced to travel to post-war Britain to be questioned by their commercial rivals, and were interned if they refused to reveal trade secrets.
The economic warfare programmes are detailed in batches of Foreign Office files, marked "Top Secret", many of which lay unseen at the National Archives at Kew until discovered by the Guardian.
While it has long been known that German scientists and technicians worked in the US and Britain after the war, it has generally been assumed they were all volunteers, lured by the promise of good pay and accommodation. However, the declassified papers make clear that for more than two years after the cessation of hostilities the British authorities were subjecting them to a programme of "enforced evacuation".
The records show that abductions in the British-controlled zone of post-war Germany were carried out on the orders of an organisation called the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, or Bios. This committee was answerable to the cabinet and made up of representatives of the armed forces and Whitehall departments, including the Board of Trade and Ministry of Supply, as well as MI16 - the War Office's department of scientific intelligence.
The other organisation was the Field Information Agency (Technical), or Fiat, which had been established during the war as a joint Anglo-American military intelligence unit, and which earmarked scientists for "enforced evacuation" from the US and French zones, and Berlin.
Responsibility for seizing the scientists fell to a unique British army unit known as T-Force. Formed shortly after D Day, this lightly armed and highly-mobile force had raced ahead of allied troops at the end of the war, seizing objects which had a scientific or intelligence value before they could be sabotaged by retreating Germans, or captured by the Soviet Union.
After the war some officers and men from T-Force were formed into the Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section, which would escort the Bios and Fiat investigators and then take away the scientists and technicians wanted for interrogation.
Scientists were not the sole targets. The papers disclose brief details about Operation Bottleneck, which aimed to extract business information. In January 1947 Erich Klabunde, head of the German journalists' union, complained about how this was being achieved. A British official in Hamburg reported to headquarters that Klabunde told a public meeting: "An English manufacturer would name his German counterpart and competitor and 'invite' him to England (whether the man comes voluntarily or not is questionable). They then discuss business and the German is gently persuaded to reveal secrets of his trade. When he refuses, he is kept in polite internment until he gets so tired of not being allowed to return to his family that he tells the Englishman what he wants to know. Thus for about £6 a day the English businessman gains the deepest secrets of Germany's economic life."
The rationale for this had been set out by Herbert Morrison, lord president of the council, who told the prime minister, Clement Attlee: "It is most important at this formative stage to start shaping the German economy in the way which will best assist our own economic plans and will run the least risk of it developing into an unnecessarily awkward competitor."
The Iraq war came in two phases. The first phase is complete: the destruction of the existing state. The second phase consists of building a new state tied to our interests and smashing dissenting sectors of society. Openly, this involves applying the same sort of economic shock therapy applied to Eastern Europe. Covertly, it entails degrees of intimidating, kidnapping and killing a plethora of opposition voices. (*Covert operations can rarely achieve an important objective alone. At best, a covert operation can win time, forestall a coup, or otherwise create favorable conditions which will make it possible to use overt means to finally achieve an important objective. - From the Report of the Covert Operations Study Group. Dec 1, 1968. (Secret) *h/t Effwit)
The long unfolding pattern of academics assassinated in Iraq appears to lend some credence to claims that a campaign exists and is being conducted to erase a key section of the secular middle class in Iraq — a group that has largely resisted the US occupation of Iraq and refused to be co-opted by the so-called “political process”. Academics are not the only ones being killed: 311 teachers killed the past 4 months, 182 pilots, 416 senior military officers killed in the first 3 months of 2006. 20.000 people kidnapped since the beginning of 2006.
Some commentators claim that the assassination campaign of academics is part of a so-called civil war between Sunni and Shia. That’s it’s the ignorant Islamist Shia who receives direct orders from Iran to kill intellectual Sunni’s, and that it is unfortunately beyond the control of the US now. And thus the occupying forces should remain in Iraq to restore law and order. Another smokescreen is the claim that most of the assassinations are carried out by criminal gangs, who first kidnap their victims, and then a ransom is paid. And after that either they are assassinated, and if not, they flee the country.
Perhaps some context is in order:
What we might very well be witnessing is the result of a carefully planned campaign to liquidate key Iraqis who oppose the occupation, the so-called “Salvador option”. In fact, since 1945, we have developed counterinsurgency policies based much upon the model of the Third Reich's suppression of partisan insurgents that emphasized placing the civilian population under strict control and using terror to make the population afraid to support or collaborate with insurgents.
Patrick Lang, former chief of Middle East analysis for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said: “What those of us in El Salvador learned was that American policy might call for surgical action, but once the local troops are involved, they’re as likely to use a chain-saw as a scalpel. And that, too, can serve American ends."
In almost any counter-insurgency, the basic message the government or the occupiers tries to get across to the population is brutally simple: We can protect you from the guerrillas, but the guerrillas can’t protect you from us, and you’ve got to choose sides. Sometimes you can win the population’s hearts and minds; sometimes you just have to make them more frightened of you than they are of the insurgents. And for this aim we use the likes of the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions Brigade, the Lions Brigade, the Peshmerga’s and the “security forces” of the Ministry of Interior.
On January 1 2004, Robert Dreyfuss stated that: “part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November 2003 — will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extra-judicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists—up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq. “They’re clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam,” said Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counter terrorism.
“The big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance,” said John Pike, an expert of sorts on classified military budgets at www.globalsecurity.org. “And it has to be politically loyal to the United States. It’s also channeling money into the creation of an Iraqi secret police staffed mainly by gunmen associated with members of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council. Those militiamen are linked to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the Kurdish peshmerga forces and Shiite paramilitary units, especially those of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Technically illegal, these armed forces have been tolerated, even encouraged, by the Pentagon.”
Soon after this money entered Iraq, the consequences of this secret operation became clear. According to an article published in New York Times Magazine, in September 2004, Counselor to the US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces James Steele was assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, formed under the operational control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry.
Not few of the same men in charge of training El Salvador's counter-insurgency forces during its civil war are advisors to Iraqi security forces.
Max Fuller, a journalist specializing in Latin-America, has investigated this matter. He writes: “From 1984 to 1986 then Col. Steele had led the US Military Advisory Group in El Salvador, where he was responsible for developing special operating forces at brigade level during the height of the conflict. These forces, composed of the most brutal soldiers available, replicated the kind of small-unit operations with which Steele was familiar from his service in Vietnam. Rather than focusing on seizing terrain, their role was to attack ‘insurgent’ leadership, their supporters, sources of supply and base camps. In military circles it was the use of such tactics that made the difference in ultimately defeating the guerrillas; for others, such as the Catholic priest Daniel Santiago, the presence of people like Steele contributed to another sort of difference:”“People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador – they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.”
In the context of Iraq where good information is extremely scarce, disinformation and black propaganda are endemic and independent journalists and monitors are deliberately eliminated, it is vital to be able to model the situation in order to understand it and, hopefully, be effective. There are two principle dimensions to such modeling. In the first, Iraq has frequently been compared to Vietnam. The similarity is that the US has well over 100,000 soldiers on the ground. However, the analogy is misleading in that in Iraq conflict with a populous enemy state, as North Vietnam was, ended quickly.
As a model, El Salvador is not wholly accurate either. In El Salvador US advisors were few in number and prohibited from taking part in combat. Nevertheless, it is towards this model that the US is attempting to move, hoping to farm out the business of occupation to Iraqi auxiliaries. But, in many ways it is contemporary Colombia that offers the closest analogy: not for the disposition of US forces, but because here the same process of asset-stripping is both deeply entrenched and ongoing.
It is here that is to be found that clearest pattern for the assaults on academics, independent trade unionists and peasant organizations that will increasingly characterize Iraq for those prepared to look beyond the fireworks. This is the second dimension that any model must address, but in essence the pattern is repeated time after time in most every counter-insurgency war.
In Iraq, the Salvador Option may mean returning home to find your entire family seated at the table with their own severed heads served to them and a bowl of blood for relish. IO's too can have their fair share of pointy glory. In fact, maybe it's when they're pointy that they prove most effective in dealing with alien cultured folks. Some say music is the universal language that best bridges cultural divides. I beg to differ. I'll go with pure horror any ol' day, even in the land of Babel.
PS
I recently saw a new face of COIN on The Daily Show. COIN was now main stream laughing matter.
Wow. "You've come a long way baby"
The exiled president of Iran's largest Kurdish opposition group appealed for U.S. political and military support for its campaign to topple Iran's Islamic regime and create a new democratic, federal government in Tehran.
In his first visit to Washington, Rahman Haj-Ahmadi, president of the three-year-old Kurdistan Free Life Party, told The Washington Times that the Iranian regime faced a growing internal challenge to its power from the Kurds, Azeris and other restive minority groups.
Mr. Haj-Ahmadi, who lives in Germany, said his movement, known by its Kurdish acronym PJAK, was forced to take up arms and retreat to the rugged highlands along the Iran-Iraq border in self-defense against the central government. ...
PJAK, he said, has only limited contact with the U.S. government, but he appealed to Washington to push Iran harder on its human rights record and said his party would welcome American military and financial aid to carry on its fight.
"We obviously cannot topple the government with the ammunition and the weapons we have now," he said. "Any financial or military help that would speed the path to a true Iranian democracy, we would very much welcome, particularly from the United States." ...
The Kurdish independence movement in Turkey, known as the PKK, was officially designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Chris Zambelis, a terrorism analyst with the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, said there are multiple reports of operational and logistical links between the PKK and PJAK.
PJAK officials traveling with Mr. Haj-Ahmadi said they tried to set up meetings with the State Department and other administration officials, but received "no answer" to their requests. Mr. Haj-Ahmadi said PJAK had good relations with other Kurdish movements in the region, but insisted his party was a "completely independent organization" from the PKK.
In the past six months, Israel and the United States have also been working together in support of a Kurdish resistance group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan. The group has been conducting clandestine cross-border forays into Iran, I was told by a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon civilian leadership, as "part of an effort to explore alternative means of applying pressure on Iran." (The Pentagon has established covert relationships with Kurdish, Azeri, and Baluchi tribesmen, and has encouraged their efforts to undermine the regime’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran.) The government consultant said that Israel is giving the Kurdish group "equipment and training." The group has also been given "a list of targets inside Iran of interest to the U.S."
As US and Iranian diplomats met in Baghdad on Tuesday for a second round of talks on Iraq, the domestic US political climate appeared decidedly more supportive of an aggressive US posture toward Iran than existed just a few months ago, reflecting the apparent triumph of the Bush administration's narrative on Iran's role in Iraq.
That new narrative threatens to obscure the bigger picture of Iranian policy toward Iraq, widely recognized by regional specialists. Iran's strategic interests in Iraq are far more compatible with those of the United States than those of the Sunni regimes in the region with which the US has aligned itself.
Contrary to the official narrative, Iranian support for Shi'ites is not aimed at destabilizing the country but does serve a rational Iranian desire to maximize its alliances with Iraqi Shi'ite factions, in the view of specialists on Iranian policy and on the security of the Persian Gulf region.
Symptomatic of the toughening attitude in the US Congress toward Iran was the 97-0 vote in the Senate last week for a resolution drafted by its leading proponent of war against Iran, Senator Joe Lieberman, stating, "The murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable act of hostility against the United States." The resolution demanded that the government of Iran "take immediate action" to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias and insurgents.
That vote followed several months of intensive Bush administration propaganda charging that Iran is arming Shi'ite militias in Iraq, and characterizing Iranian financial support and training for Shi'ite militias as an aggressive effort to target US troops and to destabilize Iraq.
But this administration line ignores the fact that Iran's primary ties in Iraq have always been with those groups who have supported the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, including the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Da'wa Party and their paramilitary arm, the Badr Corps, rather than with anti-government militias. That indicates that Iran's fundamental interest is to see the government stabilize the situation in the country, according to Professor Mohsen Milani of Florida International University, a specialist on Iran's national-security policies.
Milani argues that Iran's interests are more closely aligned with those of the US than any other state in the region. "I can't think of two other countries in the region who want the Iraqi government to succeed," said Milani.
He believes the Iranians are so upset with the efforts by the Saudis to undermine the Shi'ite-dominated government that they may try to use the talks with the US on the security of Iraq to introduce intelligence they have gathered on Saudi support for al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents.
Trita Parsi, author of a new book on Iranian-Israeli security relations, agrees that Iran's support for the Maliki government stands in contrast to the attitude of the leading US Sunni ally in Middle East, Saudi Arabia. "Look at what the Saudis are calling the Maliki government - a puppet government," he observed. "You're not hearing that from Iran."
James A Russell, a lecturer in national-security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a specialist on security affairs in the Gulf region, agrees that Iran and the US do indeed share common strategic interests in Iraq, at least in terms of rational, realist definitions of strategic interest.
The problem, Russell said, is that the history of the relationship and domestic political constituencies pose serious obstacles to realizing those common interests. Two such obstacles are "the very powerful political constituency for attacking Iran" and support for Israel, said Russell.
James Dobbins, former US ambassador to Afghanistan and director of the Rand Corporation's International Security and Defense Policy Center, agrees that Iran is not trying to destabilize Iraq. "They have been supportive of the government and hope it prevails," he said. As for the chief source of instability in Iraq, the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict, Dobbins noted that "Iranians don't see anything to be gained by Sunni-Shi'a conflict in Iraq".
Using methods that hark back to the years following Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, Iranian state-run television on Wednesday night broadcast what it called "confessions" of two Iranian-American academics accused of undermining the regime.
Called "In the name of Democracy," the 50-minute film deftly spliced images of "velvet" revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan with segments of interviews with the two dual citizens. The film sought to portray the detained activists' work for American think tanks and civil-society groups as a tool for a US policy of regime change in Iran.
The documentary comes amid one of the most comprehensive crackdowns on political activism since the revolution. Confronted with $75 million worth of pro-democracy funding set aside by the US Congress – and frequent rhetoric about regime change – Tehran is taking a page from its old playbook to fight what it sees as a mounting threat to political stability.
"The impetus comes from die-hard people around [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, the former Revolutionary Guards, people who now dominate the intelligence services," says Ervand Abrahamian, an Iran expert at the City University of New York. "They practiced this under Khomeini, so they are really going back to the old methods [that] did work."
In the film, Haleh Esfandiari, head of Middle East programs at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, spoke of facilitating scholarly exchanges, networks of Iran experts, and meetings at international conferences. Ms. Esfandiari, looking pale and drawn, sat on a couch in a black head scarf and robe beside a plant – not in her cell at Tehran's Evin prison, where she has been held in solitary confinement since May 8.
"What was my role here?" she was heard to ask while describing her work identifying experts. "In the course of these years, when you put these number of meetings back to back, you would come to the conclusion that, willingly or not, a network of connections would be formed," said Esfandiari.
Other segments showed Kian Tajbakhsh, a US-educated urban planner, speaking with notes about his work in Tehran with the Soros Foundation. Mr. Tajbakhsh sat in what appeared to be a wood-paneled office instead of his prison cell. He spoke of an "overt" Soros program, and then other "dimensions" that included creating nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and bringing Iranian contacts to Europe.
A third academic, Canadian-Iranian Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was held for four months last year and released, said the Wilson Center "receives most of its money ... from the US Congress," and spoke of conferences where he met Americans and some Israelis "who were mostly intelligence agents." ...
"They didn't say anything that would amount to a confession," says an Iranian analyst in Tehran who asked not to be named. "However, when put together with the [velvet revolution] documentary, very, very professionally, with the comments of [all] the individuals, it did give you a feeling: 'Ah, these guys were working together in a network, that is so extensive and [well established] that it would be able to topple the regime.'" ...
The Bush administration has spoken frequently of regime change, and includes Iran as part of an "axis of evil." The vitriol has prompted fears among security forces in Iran of an East European-style "velvet revolution."
In the film, Mr. Bush is seen during a speech saying "the untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." The movie also shows President Vladimir Putin of Russia – which has clamped down on NGOs over concerns of similar, Western-sponsored unrest – complaining about such pro-democracy efforts.
After showing scenes of street violence abroad, and then in Iran, the narrator asks, "How are velvet revolutions led? Which country is next?"
