Neocons vs Neoliberal - is there any difference at all?

Neolibs and Neocons, United and Interchangeable
Philip Giraldi

When it comes to foreign policy, particularly as it relates to the Middle East, there is not a whole lot of separation between the Democratic and Republican Parties. Republicans tend to be more bellicose in their statements, but Democrats have more than made up for that with their steely resolve to take the fight to the enemy wherever he might be. Both Republicans and Democrats reflexively support Israel, and nearly all candidates are in agreement on a number of other areas, including an aggressive policy toward Iran.

This unanimity is not particularly surprising as there is little or no serious debate on foreign policy and many of the leading candidates' advisers are graduates of the same school of thought, i.e., that the United States must use its military power to impose certain standards on the rest of the world. Neoconservatives and neoliberals are really quite similar, so it doesn't matter who gets elected in 2008. The American public, weary of preemptive attacks, democracy-promotion, and nation-building, will still get war either way.

The key to understanding the direction that candidates will take is to examine their foreign policy advisers. The candidates themselves, with one or two exceptions, know little about the world and its problems. They operate on a basis of packaged responses to set questions and are essentially looking for quick, soundbite solutions that will enable them to be characterized as strong on national security. Apart from that, most would be quite willing to leave the subject alone. How they think is processed and filtered by their advisers, most of whom appear to believe that the American public has an unending appetite for overseas adventures in spite of the fact that such policies have brought nothing but grief for the past 15 years. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are shy about using force. Bill Clinton enforced sanctions on Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands; he killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians when he bombed Serbia; and he was more than willing to use cruise missiles against civilian targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. George Bush has accepted a rather broader mandate, invading two countries and bombing several more, resulting in hundreds of thousands dead.

The two leading Democratic candidates for president are undeniably Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary is regarded as by far the more conservative candidate in that she has carefully triangulated her potential supporters and is unwilling to say that her vote in the Senate in support of the Iraq war was a mistake. She has also positioned herself with the Israel lobby through her pledge to disarm Iran by whatever means necessary and her threat to use nuclear weapons on terrorists. Her foreign policy advisers are a who's who of neoliberal hawks, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who famously believed that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions was "worth it." Clinton is also being advised by Richard Holbrooke, who is reported to be close to Paul Wolfowitz. Holbrooke is a possible candidate for secretary of state if Clinton is elected president. Holbrooke has been a supporter of the Iraq war, and he was an architect of the 1999 bombing of Serbia. Strobe Talbott, who advised Bill Clinton and was also involved with the bombing of Serbia, is reported to be another Hillary adviser.

Barack Obama is somewhat more enigmatic, but his recent ill-advised pledge to attack Pakistan if Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf does not do something about the Taliban and al-Qaeda shows that he is working hard to catch up. Obama's key advisers who speak for him on foreign policy include Gregory Craig, Anthony Lake, and Samantha Power. Craig is a leading Washington lawyer who was a White House special counsel under Bill Clinton and defended the president in his impeachment trial. Lake was also a Bill Clinton adviser who was involved in the Bosnian conflict. Power is an Irish-born Harvard professor from the Kennedy School who is regarded as an expert on Third World issues. None of the three is considered to be particularly partisan on any foreign policy issues but genocide, which Power has written a book about, but Obama is also accelerating his efforts to woo Jewish donors and to improve his standing with AIPAC, which has been suspicious of him because of youthful indiscretions that included expressions of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. He recently appointed Eric Lynn to develop an aggressive program of outreach to the Jewish community on his record of support for Israel, which he claims is unwavering. Obama fully endorsed Israel's invasion of Lebanon last year, and he has also cited his more recent sponsorship of the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of May 2007, another irresponsible piece of legislation by Congress that will increase the suffering of the Iranian people while doing nothing to change the country's leadership. He has pledged that Iran will not be allowed to threaten Israel through its nuclear program, but he is vague on exactly what he would do to stop it.

Giuliani heads the pack of Republicans in terms of sheer neocon manpower. His appointment of Norman Podhoretz to his team of foreign policy advisers might be a shrewd bid to compete with the Democrats for Jewish money for his campaign, but it might also be reflective of a genuine inclination toward a policy of all aggression, all the time. Giuliani has endorsed the use of force to disarm Iran, including using nuclear weapons. Podhoretz has called for a World War IV against Islamofascism, which presumably means a war against all Muslim countries until they surrender. Giuliani is also being advised by Martin Kramer, a leading neocon who is associated with the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The other two serious Republican contenders, John McCain and Mitt Romney, are also being advised on foreign policy by neoconservatives. McCain is supported by Robert Kagan, a noted American Enterprise Institute chickenhawk and the author of the surge policy, and former CIA director Jim Woolsey, who, like Podhoretz, has called for a World War against Islam. Leading neocon lobbyist Randy Scheunemann, who headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was on the board of the Project for the New American Century, completes the McCain foreign policy and security team. There are reports that McCain will lose some of his advisers as his campaign is in trouble and that they might gravitate to Romney and Giuliani. McCain also had considerable interaction with neocon elder statesman Richard Perle in the early days of his campaign, but Perle has decided that McCain cannot win the nomination. Perle is deferring judgment on where he should go next. Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Henry Kissinger are also reported to be giving McCain advice.

Mitt Romney is being advised by Dan Senor, former AIPAC staffer who graduated to the post of official spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He is also relying on J. Cofer Black, former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and now head of Total Intel, a Beltway bandit that provides security services to the government.

Dark horse and undeclared Republican candidate Fred Thompson is being advised by Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the vice president, and Mark Esper, a Lebanese Christian who is one of the few neocons from an Arab background.

All of the Republican and Democratic presidential aspirants appear to believe that a hard line on foreign policy makes them less vulnerable to attack in their run for the nomination. It is very discouraging to note that the advocates of the Iraq war, which is almost universally seen as Washington's greatest foreign policy blunder of the past hundred years, are continuing to play a major role in the shaping of policy for the next generation of political leaders of both parties.

Gilad Atzmon: Saying No to the Hunters of Goliath

The Israeli army had become used to smashing Palestinian civilians in their homes, to murdering their emerging leadership, to terrorising pregnant women in roadblocks, and to shelling young kids in their school classes.

By Gilad Atzmon
Special to PalestineChronicle.com

“A few reasons help to create the Nasrallah obsession (‘dibuk’), that influenced decision makers along the (Second Lebanon) war. Primarily, Israel always perceived the Arab (leaders) as (private) people rather than representatives of political systems. Even amongst media analysts and politicians the references were pointing at “Assad”, “Arafat” or “Nasrallah” rather than the states and organisations they represent. In the eyes of the (Israeli) decision-makers, as well as the media and public, the Arab world was led by individuals rather than by governmental systems and the best way to influence it was in most cases to drop a bomb in the right place.” (“Captives in Lebanon”, Ofer Shelah and Yaov Limor)[1]

The Israelis tend to personalise conflicts. Yet, by doing this, they are neither original nor innovative. They in fact follow a Biblical lesson. Within the Judaic worldview, history and ethics are often reduced into a banal single binary opposition principle. For instance, the deadly battle between the ‘righteous’ David and the ‘evil’ Goliath personalises the struggle between the ‘good’ Israelites and the ‘bad’ Philistines. Though the Biblical specific tale could be understood in a mere literary terms, the similarities to the Israelite of our time are rather concerning. In Israel, there is a direct express path that leads from the ‘role of the assassin’ to the Government seat. Time after time our contemporary Israelite supplicate their highly decorated assassins to become their kings, to lead their army and then to integrate into the cabinet. This obviously happened to Sharon, Barak, Mofaz, Halutz, Dichter and many more.

However, Israelis are not alone here.

Clearly, the Zionist interpretation is engaged with nothing more than the concrete symptom, with the simplest manifestation of the animosity that surrounds it rather than with the core of the problem itself.

But let’s face it, it isn’t just the Israelis who personalise conflicts. Thanks to the Neocons and their tremendous current influence within the Anglo-American political realm, we are all subject to some oversimplification and personalisation of almost every Western conflict. Seemingly, every current Western war has a ‘face’ attached to it. The ‘war against terror’ has the bearded face of Osama Bin Laden. The alleged ‘liberation of the Iraqi people’ had Saddam Hussein’s face on top of the ‘hit list’. Within the Neocon’s Zionised war, every ideological conflict becomes a personal ‘targeted assassination’ plot. May I remind us all that before Neocons launched their pretty successful attempt to Zionise America and Britain, these two countries were engaged in proper impersonalised ideological wars and political conflicts. Britain and the USA fought courageously against Third Reich Germany (rather than just against Hitler). They coldly clashed with ‘The Reds’ as well (rather than with just Stalin).

Clearly, this isn’t the case anymore. Within a world shaped by Neocons, the political system is reduced into a simplistic Biblical Goliath chase. We the righteous, the Davids, pursue the Goliaths: Saddam, Bin Laden, Assad, and Ahmadinejad.

However, by now we should all know how futile this philosophy is. As much as Israel failed to defeat Palestinian resistance by killing every noticeable emerging Palestinian leader, as much as Israel failed to defeat the Hezbollah by aiming at its leadership, America and Britain are doomed to fail in their current murderous Zionised battles. Saddam is dead and yet, Iraq and its oil fields are still far beyond reach. Bin Laden never shows his face in public and yet the war against terror has yet to achieve a thing.

I want to believe that the emerging defeat of Israel and its supporting lobbies will be appropriately grasped by the Western public. We must say NO to Zionised tactics, we must say NO to Zionist agents, we must say NO to the hunters of Goliath.

Anatomy of a Colossal Defeat

One year after the humiliating Israeli defeat in Lebanon I found myself reviewing the Israeli fiasco through the eyes of two renowned Israeli military analysts, Yoav Limor and Ofer Shelah. In a recent book named ‘Captives Of Lebanon’ the two have managed to assemble a very detailed journal of the chain of events that led to the war, the war itself and the endless lists of Israeli operational, tactical and strategic failures. However, Limor and Shelah do not stop just with the Army and its commanders, they skilfully convey an image of a society that has lost its way, a society that has gradually become detached from its own reality and from its surrounding environment. A society that is facing total moral collapse, led by an egotistic, self-centred leadership, both politically and militarily.

Israel’s military defeat last year in Lebanon took the world by surprise. It initially shocked Bush’s Administration as well as Tony Blair who were both very quick and keen to give Israel a green light to destroy Lebanon’s Shia leadership, not to mention obliterating Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Bush and Blair weren’t the only ones who came in for a shock, it also stunned the Arab world. Arab leaders are not used to the defeat of the Israeli Army. Moderate Arab leaders found themselves following the TV images in which a single Muslim cleric was teaching Israelis what defiance was all about. Seemingly, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and an insignificant number of warriors, proved to be the first Arabs to defeat the Israeli Army on the ground. Their victory left Israel in shatters. The Israeli power of deterrence disappeared completely. It became a subject for historical research. The IDF Supreme Command was shocked as well: a month after the war, General Udi Adam, the IDF Chief Commander of the northern front, had resigned. It didn’t take too long for Dan Halutz, the IDF Chief of Staff, to follow his lead. Amir Peretz, the Minister of Defence, was ousted by former PM Ehud Barak. It is rather clear that the Israelis are fully aware of the scale of their defeat in Lebanon. Yet, it seems as if the Israelis do not know how to amend the damage. They are truly in love with their ‘good life’, they are captivated by the image of technology and wealth.

Though I am not so sure whether the book is going to be translated into other languages (it is in Hebrew), I would classify this book as a ‘must read’ for anyone who is interested in the affairs of this region. The book is a glimpse into Israeli society in what seems to be its final dysfunctional yet destructive state. I am convinced that those Americans who have been moronically sponsoring the Israeli death apparatus for almost four decades, those who still believe that Israel is a ‘regional super power’ better read this journal of Israeli military cowardice and general political malfunctioning.

Though the book wouldn’t say it, the message is rather clear. Israel operates as a megalomaniac violent ghetto motivated by some bizarre murderous zeal flooded with American lethal technology. As Limor and Shelah reveal, in spite of the fact that the conflict on the ground took place on a very narrow strip of land (the Israeli border on the south and Litani River on the north), the Israeli artillery had managed to shoot over 170,000 shells. In comparison, in the 1973 war while fighting against two strong state armies over two very large fronts, the Israelis had launched only 53,000 shells. The figures relating to the Air Force are even more striking. Though less than a few concrete targets were available for the IDF intelligence, the IAF (Israeli Air Force) had launched as many as 17,550 combat missions, this translates into 520 missions a day, almost as many as in the 1973 war (605 a day). Yet, in 1973 the IAF was fighting two well-equipped air forces, it was engaged in a fair amount of air-to-air combat and a relentless struggle against the latest Soviet ground-to-air missiles. None of that happened in the Second Lebanon War. The IAF was engaged solely in hammering the Lebanese soil. It literally threw and launched everything it had in its disposal, presenting a merciless method that in places (southern Beirut for instance), had a similar effect to the infamous 1940s Anglo-American carpet bombardment.

Why did the Israelis react so harshly to a local border incident? Why did Israeli politicians and military chiefs lose their ability to employ strategic and tactical considerations? Why did they all fail to define achievable military goals, something that would give their war a time frame, shape and justification? In short, why did the Israelis lose their way? This is indeed a crucial question. Though Limor and Shelah refrain from asking these questions, their book manages to provide some answers. I will try to summarise some of their points.

The Military

Let’s start with the Army. The Israeli Army has undergone a serious transition in the last four decades. In the years that followed the rapid 1967 invasion, it was ground officers and tank brigadiers in particular who were promoted to lead the Army. Post 1967 Israel believed in Blitzkrieg, an offensive onslaught that simultaneously puts into action some large ground forces together with close air support. After the 1973 war, following the limited success of ground forces and tank divisions, this trend has changed. Gradually, it was the veterans of the Israeli special units who had been promoted to high command positions. Probably the most famous among those veterans was Ehud Barak, the highly decorated commando officer who ended his military career as the IDF Chief of Staff. It was Barak who as Chief of Staff appointed his ex subordinates for high positions in the Israeli Supreme Command. Ground officers were pushed aside.

This transformation within the Israeli Army had two motivations behind it: first, the intelligence assumption that not a single Arab state would consider a total war against Israel in the near future; and second, since the first Intifada and the general rise of Palestinian civil resistance, the Israeli army found itself engaged in more and more policing operations. Within such a shift there was not much need for massive ground training. Tank and artillery brigades seemed to be useless and even irrelevant to the newly emerging defence needs of Israel. Large units of combatant soldiers were diverted into policing tasks in the West Bank and Gaza. Within the changing scenario, it was initially Israeli special units and security chiefs who took the lead in what the Israelis perceived as their ‘war against terror’. Consequently, more and more Israeli commando veterans found their way to the IDF high command and later straight into the highly militarised Israeli political life.

But things didn’t stop just there; it didn’t take long before Israeli special units failed to provide the solutions to what seemed to be a constantly growing Palestinian civil resistance. Sending the salt of the earth into Gaza in the wee hours proved to be too dangerous. It must be told that as much as Israelis love to see their young boys terrorising Palestinians, they cannot stand seeing their beloved Rambos being ambushed and killed.

It was just a question of time before the Air Force was left to deal with Palestinian defiance. Capitalising on some advanced American technologies, Israel let its F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships launch guided missiles against Palestinian civilian and military targets. The philosophy was rather simple: the IAF was there to maintain the Palestinians in a state of a constant awe. As it happened, in the last decade, the IAF has become the leading force in the war against Palestine, the Palestinian people and their imminent Islamic leadership. The IAF was quick to develop a tactic that was soon named ‘targeted assassination’. According to the new Israeli military doctrine, all that was needed was some intelligence on the ground, which would be followed by a single Israeli jet launching an American guided missile in highly populated Gaza. The achievements were rather clear. In many cases targeted Palestinians were assassinated, in very many cases they found their death alongside innocent civilian bystanders who were unlucky enough to be in the proximity. These unfortunate people were in the wrong place at the very wrong time. In many other cases the pilots just missed or were misled by intelligence. As a result, many Palestinian civilians, old people, women and children found their death. Clearly, no one in Israel could care less. When Dan Halutz, still the IAF commander, was asked how it feels to drop a bomb that kills fourteen Palestinian civilians, his answer was short and simple. ‘It feels like a light bounce on your left wing’. Halutz, the cold-blooded officer, the man who ordered the murder of so many Palestinians, was the right man in the right place, it didn’t take long before he was asked to take the lead of the Israeli Army.

As time went by, the Israeli government refrained from endangering young Israeli soldiers. The Israeli ‘war against terror’ has become very safe warfare on the verge of a computer game. Sheik Yassin, Dr. Rantisi and many other civilians fell victim to this form of murderous tactic. Apparently, Israeli military leadership has been overwhelmed with the success of their new killing method. The people of Israel had a new God, namely ‘technological superiority’. The last Israeli wave of generals, many of them pilots and special units’ veterans, got accustomed to the belief that Israel may maintain its regional supreme power by capitalising on its technological superiority and overwhelming firepower.

As Limor and Shelah reveal in their book, in the last decade Israeli soldiers literarily stopped training of any form of large tactical operations. With the IAF chasing the enemies of Israel in their bedrooms, who needs tanks and artillery? Young Israeli tank drivers were redeployed soon after their initial and minimal training into elementary guard tasks in the occupied territories. In practice not only were those soldiers foreign to their original military tasks in tanks and artillery, they were not familiar at all with any form of large operational tactical manoeuvres. In other words, as far as the Israeli army is concerned, it lost its readiness to war.

So The Palestinians Actually Won

Many analysts regard the Palestinian resistance as a militarily futile struggle. At the end of the day, not much harm can be inflicted by a bunch of kids throwing stones. Reading Limor and Shelah may imply that in reality, the Palestinian struggle was actually far from being futile. In fact, it was precisely Palestinian civil resistance that has managed to exhaust the Israeli army. It was the Palestinian resistance that led the Israeli army into a state of paralysis. It was the Palestinian resistance that stretched the IDF manpower to its limit and stopped the Israeli army from training towards the ‘next war’. It was the Palestinians who turned the Israeli soldiers and their commanders into a bunch of cowards who prefer to win wars while sitting in front of computer monitors moving joysticks. It was actually the Palestinians who devastatingly dismantled the IDF readiness for war.

It is very much as Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has been suggesting in one of his most declamatory speeches. Israel was indeed ‘hiding behind technological superiority just to cover its cowardice and incomprehension of what the living in the Middle East may entail’[2]. The Israeli army has become used to smashing Palestinian civilians in their homes, to murdering their emerging leadership, to terrorising pregnant women in roadblocks, to shelling young kids in their school classes, so this was indeed very easy. Yet, when the IDF was asked to engage some tiny groups of lightly trained paramilitary enthusiasts, it collapsed shamefully. It collapsed in spite of its technological superiority; it was defeated in spite of its overwhelming firepower, in spite of Bush’s and Blair’s disgraceful support. The Israeli Army collapsed because it was incompetent, it was not ready to fight, it did not know how to fight and most concerning for the Israelis, it didn’t even realise what it was fighting for.

Soon after the conflict in Lebanon developed into a total war (at least in the eyes of the Israelis) it became clear to most Israeli generals that the IDF doesn’t have the means to address the rain of Hezbollah Katyusha rockets. If the initial Israeli goal was to stop the Katyusha rockets and to bring home the two captured Israeli reserves, these goals proved to be beyond reach. The Israeli commander soon learned that without proper and quality intelligence, their superior firepower and technology lost any relevance. As funny as it may sound, in a matter of a few days the Israeli leadership adopted some post-structuralist vocabulary. Rather than providing the people of Israel with a simple straightforward ‘victory’ they all started to communicate in terms of a ‘narrative of victory’. Days from the launch of the Israeli campaign the Israeli military began to talk in terms of ‘an Image of victory’ rather than ‘victory’ per se. Shimon Peres started to use the term ‘perception’ of a victory. Yet, even ‘perception’ and ‘image’ of a victory proved to be far beyond reach.

The Only Democracy in the Middle East

As useless as the Israeli army proved to be, the Israeli government wasn’t any better. Ehud Olmert, the PM, the man who was voted to ‘disengage’ from Palestinian territories, had very little understanding of military affairs. If this is not enough, Amir Peretz, the Labour leader, the man whom Olmert appointed to be his Minister of Defence, lacked any significant knowledge in defence matters as well. For the first time in its history, Israel was led by two professional politicians who had no military background. On the face of it, one may expect that such a dramatic shift would curve the Israeli hawkish tendency within the military and political realm. In practice, the opposite happened. Both Peretz and Olmert found themselves dragged and manipulated into a large-scale conflict by the bloodthirsty Chief of Staff. Considering their inexperience and the short time that they had been holding office, neither Olmert nor Peretz could come up with some creative alternative solutions that might avoid conflict yet would achieve something more. Rather than holding the Army back and giving diplomacy a chance, they both let Halutz lead the country towards unnecessary escalation. Without understanding the full picture, the Israeli government ended up promising Halutz the necessary time and support to achieve goals that were beyond reach to start with.

But the truth must be said. Olmert and Peretz were not alone in their cabinet. In fact, they were surrounded by military analysts, intelligence experts, ex-generals and security services veterans. Olmert had in his government Reserved General Shaul Mofaz, the ex Chief of Staff, a man who spent the late phase of his military career fighting the Hezbollah. Avi Dichter, a Security Services veteran was there to comment on the IDF operative suggestions. They had in the government Benjamin Ben Eliezer as well, a reserve Brigadier who had been an expert on Lebanese issues for the last three decades. Shimon Peres was himself a Prime Minister and a Defence Minister in the past. Reservist General Ami Ayalon, and ex-IDF General as well as a former Chief of the Internal Security Services offered his help to Amir Peretz. Yet, none of these experts managed to form a decision-making body, none of the above managed to moderate the military enthusiasm of Halutz, Olmert and Peretz. Like a leaf in the wind, the Israeli government was manipulated by the Generals and later by the public opinion that turned dramatically against the leadership and its inadequate achievement.

As time went by, with military failure becoming public knowledge, the more desperately Olmert, Peretz and Halutz tried to change the course of the war just to save their future careers. Though they realised that the chances of achieving a victory were melting down by the hour, they were determined to present the public something that would look like a victory or even simply as an achievement. This is apparently what political survival in the Israeli democracy means for real, you have to present something that may look like a victory. To call it a name, Peretz, Halutz and Olmert ordered the Army to cause some real devastation, assuming that this would gratify the Israeli voter. The IAF and the artillery command reacted instantly, some heavy barrages of cluster bombs, missiles and shells rained over southern Lebanon. In the last 48 hours leading to the ceasefire, Israel emptied it entire stock of weaponry. According to Shelah and Limor, Israel’s ammunition stocks reached the ‘red light’ position.

In order to save the political careers of Olmert and Peretz, the IDF launched more and more pointless risky operations with very limited tactical value. These operations failed one after the other without achieving a single thing. Yet they exposed the IDF’s weaknesses. They revealed an Army and a political leadership in a state of a panic. Towards the final hours of the war, some isolated patches of Israeli special units were stranded and starved along the southern Lebanese front with no access to water and food. A few units of Hezbollah warriors had managed to encircle top Israeli commandos. Seemingly, no one in Israel dared to risk logistic convoys into the battlefield. Food and ammunition that was dropped from cargo airplanes fell into the hands of the Hezbollah. In some areas, the wounded IDF commandos were lying on the ground, waiting many hours for rescue units. The defeat was total. The humiliation was colossal. Not only was the ‘Israeli Defence Army’ unable to defend Israel anymore, it even failed in defending itself.

Limor and Shelah expose many more interesting issues:

Brigadiers who failed to fight alongside their soldiers, instead they preferred to run the battle from secluded bunkers inside Israel.

Helicopter gunships were not allowed to enter Lebanese air space just to avoid the risk of being shot down, as a result, Israeli commandos were left to fight Hezbollah on equal terms (lacking air support).

A Lieutenant Colonel who refused to lead his soldiers into Lebanon admitted being deficient in operative tactical knowledge.

Reservist soldiers were heading towards the front with hardly any of their combatant gear because of some severe shortage in the army emergency stockrooms. Some of those reservists ended up spending their own money so that they could buy the necessary gear.

More details regarding Dan Halutz’s 12 July stock exchange affair. Apparently, the Chief of Staff, General Halutz phoned up the bank and ordered them to sell his investment portfolio soon after he learned about the clashes in the north. All this happened just before he himself ordered a further escalation.

Seemingly, the Israeli army is ‘all over the place’, it is under trained, it is heavy, it is messy, and its leaders are corrupted to the bone. The Israeli political leadership isn’t any better. Though Peretz is no longer at the Ministry of Defence, Olmert, Mofaz, Dichter and now Barak - all qualified mass murderers - are still cabinet members. Considering the state of its army, Israel may have to consider a swift change of direction, it cannot fight anymore. It lacks the endurance. But seemingly this is not going to happen. As it seems, in the next Israeli election we are probably going to see the eloquent yet belligerent Benjamin Netanyahu fighting the belligerent yet far less eloquent Ehud Barak.

For years we tended to believe that Israel would not be defeated in the battlefield. Learning in detail the events of the last war allows us to consider that this may not be the case. Israel has already been defeated in battle and this may happen again sooner than we think.

-Gilad Atzmon is an internationally acclaimed jazz musician whose CD Exile was selected by the BBC in 2003 as Album of the Year. He was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), and is now living in self-exile in the UK. Visit his web site at: www.gilad.co.uk. He can be reached at: gilad@gilad.co.uk

Washington Post admits "British defeated in Basra"

As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates
Violence Rises in Shiite City Once Called a Success Story

By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 7, 2007; A01

As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.

Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.

After Saddam Hussein was overthrown in April 2003, British forces took control of the region, and the cosmopolitan port city of Basra thrived with trade, arts and universities. As recently as February, Vice President Cheney hailed Basra as a part of Iraq "where things are going pretty well."

But "it's hard now to paint Basra as a success story," said a senior U.S. official in Baghdad with long experience in the south. Instead, it has become a different model, one that U.S. officials with experience in the region are concerned will be replicated throughout the Iraqi Shiite homeland from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf. A recent series of war games commissioned by the Pentagon also warned of civil war among Shiites after a reduction in U.S. forces.

For the past four years, the administration's narrative of the Iraq war has centered on al-Qaeda, Iran and the sectarian violence they have promoted. But in the homogenous south -- where there are virtually no U.S. troops or al-Qaeda fighters, few Sunnis, and by most accounts limited influence by Iran -- Shiite militias fight one another as well as British troops. A British strategy launched last fall to reclaim Basra neighborhoods from violent actors -- similar to the current U.S. strategy in Baghdad -- brought no lasting success.

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

Britain sent about 40,000 troops to Iraq -- the second-largest contingent, after that of the United States, at the time of the March 2003 invasion -- and focused its efforts on the south. With few problems from outside terrorists or sectarian violence, the British began withdrawing, and by early 2005 only 9,000 troops remained. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced further drawdowns early this year before leaving office.

The administration has been reluctant to publicly criticize the British withdrawal. But a British defense expert serving as a consultant in Baghdad acknowledged in an e-mail that the United States "has been very concerned for some time now about a) the lawless situation in Basra and b) the political and military impact of the British pullback." The expert added that this "has been expressed at the highest levels" by the U.S. government to British authorities.

The government of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pointed to the current relative calm in three of the region's four provinces -- barring Basra -- as evidence of success. According to one British official, Brown told President Bush when they met last week at Camp David that Britain hopes to turn Basra over to Iraqi control in the next few months. Although a further drawdown of its forces is likely, Britain will coordinate its remaining presence with Washington after an assessment in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq.

As it prepares to take control of Basra, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has dispatched new generals to head the army and police forces there. But the warring militias are part of factions in the government itself, including radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- whose Mahdi Army is believed responsible for most of the recent attacks on the airport compound -- as well as the Fadhila, or Islamic Virtue Party, and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the country's largest Shiite party.

In March, Fadhila pulled out of Maliki's ruling alliance of Shiite parties in Baghdad after it lost control of the petroleum ministry to the Supreme Council. Last week, under pressure from the council, Maliki fired the Fadhila governor of Basra. Fadhila has refused to relinquish power over the governate or over Basra's lucrative oil refineries, calling the Maliki government "the new Baath" -- a reference to Hussein's Sunni-led political party -- and appealed the dismissal to Iraq's constitutional court.

Jockeying for political power in Baghdad has long since translated into shooting battles in Basra. The militias have shifted alliances with one another, as well as with the British and with Iran as they fight for control of neighborhoods and resources. With the escalation of street battles and assassinations, much of the population is confined to homes and is fearful of Islamic rules imposed by militias.

Although neighbor Iran's presence is pervasive -- with cultural influence, humanitarian aid, arms and money -- U.S. officials and outside experts think that the Iraqi parties are using Iran more than vice versa. Iraqis in the south have long memories of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, one U.S. official said, and when a southern Shiite "wants to tar someone, they call them an Iranian." He said the United States is "always very concerned about Iranian influence, as well we should be, but there is a difference between influence and control. It would be very difficult for the Iranians to establish control."

The ICG study described Iran, Britain and the United States as equally confused about what is happening in Basra. During a recent visit there, the U.S. official said, he was unable to meet with any local Iraqis outside the airport base or to travel beyond the secured route between the base and the palace. About 200 Americans are in and around the city, including those assigned to the embassy office, some civilian support personnel and contract security guards.

Basra's "security nightmare" has already had devastating effects on Iraq's economy, said Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan. Home to two-thirds of Iraq's oil resources, Basra is the country's sole dependable outlet for exporting oil, with a capacity of 1.8 million barrels a day. Much of Basra's violence is "over who gets what cut from Iraq's economic resources," a U.S. Army strategist in Iraq said.

Militias and criminal gangs are financed in part by stolen oil smuggled outside the country, even as Iraq lacks enough energy to provide electricity to many of its people. Both the oil industry and the port facilities -- providing Iraq's only maritime access -- have made Basra "a significant prize for local political actors," the ICG said.

The current U.S. security operation to "clear, hold and build" in Baghdad and its surroundings is almost a replica of Operation Sinbad, which British and Iraqi forces conducted in Basra from September 2006 to March of this year with a mission of "clear, hold and civil reconstruction." Although Operation Sinbad initially succeeded in lowering crime and political assassinations, attacks rose in the spring and British forces withdrew into their compounds.

In the early years of Iraq's occupation, British officials often disdained the U.S. use of armored patrols and heavily protected troops. The British approach of lightly armed foot patrols -- copied from counterinsurgency operations in Northern Ireland -- sought to avoid antagonizing the local population and encourage cooperation. A 2005 report by the defense committee of the House of Commons commended the British army's performance and urged the Ministry of Defense to "use its influence" to get the Americans to take a less aggressive approach.

In a recent BBC interview, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, chief of the British defense staff, insisted that Basra has been a success. But he acknowledged that judgment depended on "what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place," adding: "I'm afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations."

The mission, he said, was simply to "get the place and the people to a state where Iraqis could run this part of the country, if they chose to."

Bush's anti-Chavez allies linked to narco-political corruption

Bush, Colombia & Narco-Politics

By Andrés Cala
August 8, 2007

George W. Bush’s strategy of countering Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chávez by strengthening ties to Colombia’s rightist government has been undercut by fresh evidence of high-level drug corruption and human rights violations implicating President Alvaro Uribe’s inner circle.

These new allegations about Colombia’s narco-politics have tarnished Uribe’s reputation just as Bush has been showcasing the Harvard- and Oxford-educated politician as a paragon of democratic values and an alternative to the firebrand Chávez, who has used Venezuela’s oil wealth to finance social programs for the poor across the region.

Despite the corruption disclosures – and Uribe’s failure to stem Colombian cocaine smuggling to the United States – the Bush administration continues to shower Uribe’s government with trade incentives and billions of dollars in military and development aid.

With other regional leaders unwilling to side with the United States against Chávez, Bush may see little alternative but to stay the course with the 55-year-old Uribe and hope Colombia’s corruption doesn’t draw too much attention in the United States or across South America.

Ironically, the latest evidence against Uribe’s government emerged from a U.S.-backed peace process that offered leniency to right-wing paramilitary death squads and their financial backers in exchange for giving up their guns and disclosing past crimes.

The right-wing paramilitaries and their cocaine-trafficking benefactors testified that elements of the Colombian government collaborated in a decade-long scorched-earth campaign that killed almost 10,000 civilians while seeking to dislodge a leftist guerrilla army known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The confessions include blood-soaked tales of political murders, cocaine smuggling and staggering government corruption. As a result, dozens of former and current congressmen, governors, government ministers, military officers, prominent business leaders and multinational corporations are being investigated or have been arrested.

This so-called “para-scandal” revealed that a counterinsurgency force, known as the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC, collaborated with drug lords to control the cocaine trade and simultaneously worked with Colombia’s elites, including Uribe’s family, to fend off the guerrilla threat.

Another troubling offshoot of the peace process was the creation of a safe haven for drug lords, who flocked to a 370-square-kilometer sanctuary set up for the AUC.

Colombian mafia boss Fabio Enrique Ochoa Vasco, 47, who was indicted in Florida in September 2004 for drug trafficking and money laundering, claimed he was one of 10 U.S.-wanted traffickers who found protection in the Santa Fe Ralito sanctuary.

AUC leaders “promised to include their financial backers in the negotiation” as a way to shield alleged cocaine traffickers from extradition to the United States, Ochoa Vasco told a Colombian magazine in June.

It was all prearranged in 2001, according to paramilitary and drug lord accounts. If Uribe won the presidency, paramilitary leaders would be offered generous sentence reductions and be allowed to serve their time outside prison walls if they demobilized and confessed.

Ochoa Vasco, who allegedly ships eight tons of cocaine monthly to the United States, was told that he and other AUC allies would be sentenced in Colombia to a maximum of 12 years, rather than face possible life sentences in U.S. prisons.

Uribe’s History

The new disclosures also have brought back to public attention the Uribe family’s long history of ties to drug lords and paramilitary militias. Colombia’s Supreme Court announced in July that it was investigating Senator Mario Uribe, the president’s cousin and his point man in the Colombian Congress, for alleged links to the AUC.

Several paramilitary leaders have said Mario Uribe was one of their allies and an intermediary with the government. He has denied any wrongdoing.

But the family link to purported drug lords dates back several decades. As a young man and an aspiring politician, Álvaro Uribe lost his position as mayor of Medellín – after only five months on the job – because the country’s president ousted him over his family’s suspected connections to traffickers, according to media reports at the time.

His father Alberto Uribe, a wealthy landowner, reputedly had been a close associate of the Medellín cartel and its kingpins, such as Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers, who were personal friends.

In 1983, Alberto Uribe was reportedly wanted by the U.S. government for drug trafficking when he was killed in a kidnapping attempt by the FARC. According to media accounts, his body was airlifted back to his family by one of Escobar’s helicopters.

In the early 1990s, Álvaro Uribe’s brother, Santiago, was investigated for allegedly organizing and leading a paramilitary militia that was headquartered at the Uribe family hacienda. He was never charged and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. But Santiago was photographed alongside Fabio Ochoa at a party even after the government had declared Ochoa one of the most notorious Medellín cartel kingpins.

The incident with Santiago Uribe coincided with Álvaro Uribe’s eight years in the Senate, where he opposed extradition of drug suspects. His critics accused him of working for the Medellín cartel.

But the relationship between right-wing narco-financed paramilitaries and the Colombian government has been a long and complex one, with shifting alliances based on the self-interest of the moment.

In 1992, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA and the U.S. military, along with Colombian intelligence services, joined forces with the Cali cartel to train, equip and coordinate an undercover group of mercenaries known as the Pepes, an acronym for Persecuted by Pablo Escobar. Among its leaders was Carlos Castaño, who would later run the AUC.

Systematically, the Pepes assassinated Escobar’s top henchmen and their families, finally killing Escobar himself in 1993. The Pepes then split up. Some went on to create their own drug empires, while Castaño built a paramilitary army financed by rich landowners and drug dealers.

Since the war on Escobar’s organization, Castaño and the Cali cartel – as well as Colombian military officers – have claimed that they work side by side with U.S. agencies, but U.S. authorities have denied such an alliance.

The alienation from Washington widened in 1994 when President Ernesto Samper came to power amid disclosures that his campaign had received generous donations from drug cartels. President Bill Clinton cut most aid and severed some military support to Colombia because of Samper’s ties to drug traffickers.

With less U.S. aid, the Colombian army was unable to contain the FARC and coca acreage soared. Colombia’s rulers responded with the creation of paramilitary militias that used terror to reduce popular support for the guerrillas.

The Samper government pushed what was known as the Convivir project. It armed, trained and organized local defence cooperatives to provide “special private security and vigilance services” alongside the armed forces, creating another cover for right-wing paramilitary forces.

Rise of Uribe

Alvaro Uribe’s political rise was tied to the success of Convivir. In 1995, Uribe became the governor of Antioquia, a north-western district with Medellín as the capital.

Uribe was the country’s most vocal supporter of the defence cooperatives, authorizing dozens of them with almost 20 of these Uribe-backed cooperatives run by paramilitary leaders, including the AUC’s current top commander, Salvatore Mancuso. [Castaño, who operated in a different state, wasn’t one of them.]

Castaño is quoted in a biography as saying Uribe was the presidential candidate of the AUC’s social support base.

“Deep down, he’s the closest man to our philosophy,” Castaño said, adding that Uribe’s support for the Convivir was grounded on the same principle that gave rise to paramilitarism in Colombia, the right to self-defence against guerrillas.

When confronted with accusations of complicity between Convivir and drug-connected paramilitaries, Uribe said that at the time nobody knew who the right-wing leaders and the cocaine traffickers were.

After an international outcry, however, the government slowly phased out Convivir. By the time it was outlawed in 1998, however, over 200 defence cooperatives, counting thousands of men, defied the order to demobilize and joined Castaño’s new paramilitary alliance, the AUC.

The Convivir project had other long-term consequences. Beyond establishing and arming paramilitary militias, the project created a web of cooperation between Colombia’s military and right-wing death squads. Some paramilitary leaders, such as Castaño, claimed the CIA and DEA also gave the AUC discreet support.

At least two top paramilitary commanders have claimed that the Colombian military coordinated counterinsurgency operations with the AUC.

“I am living proof of state-sponsored paramilitarism in Colombia,” said the AUC’s Mancuso in his deposition earlier this year.

The AUC leaders have named several high-ranking Colombian officers as collaborating with the paramilitaries, including former General Rito Alejo del Rio, Antioquia’s commanding officer during Uribe’s governorship.

While running for the presidency in 2002, Uribe cited the perceived success of the Convivir program in damaging the FARC’s infrastructure in Antioquia as a key reason why Colombians should vote for him.

Despite the drug suspicions – and the links to paramilitary death squads – Uribe benefited from public disenchantment with a sputtering peace process that had failed to end the civil war. Uribe emerged as the winner with 53 percent of the vote.

After Uribe’s election, several drug barons claimed they had financed his campaign. Indicted drug trafficker Ochoa Vasco said he contributed $150,000 of his own money at the AUC’s request.

Ochoa Vasco also said he witnessed a conversation between the AUC’s leaders and supposed representatives of Uribe’s campaign before the election.

“They talked about the peace process,” Ochoa Vasco said. “They said anyone with problems with the U.S. could get involved. And in another meeting, there were businessmen, landowners and drug traffickers who [the AUC] thought they could also include, so they told them to get ready for the peace process.”

All the paramilitary leaders who negotiated the peace agreement “know the truth. They know that to be there, they invested more than 10 million dollars,” Ochoa Vasco said.

Government negotiations with the AUC began four months after Uribe took office. Castaño repositioned himself as an opponent of the drug corruption that, by then, clearly pervaded the AUC. He resigned as AUC military leader.

In April 2004, Castaño was ambushed by 20 elite paramilitaries following orders from the AUC’s top leaders. He was shot almost two dozen times in the face, chopped into pieces, and burned.

Surviving AUC leaders and drug traffickers said Castaño was killed because he was negotiating his surrender to the DEA along with all trafficking information about the AUC and its government and military allies. U.S. authorities have denied any negotiation.

Uribe-Bush Alliance

Meanwhile, Uribe lined up solidly behind President George W. Bush by becoming the only South American leader to endorse Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Uribe also sought more U.S. military aid as he defined the civil war against the leftist FARC as part of the “global war on terror.”

The backbone of U.S. policy in Colombia is Plan Colombia, a mostly military aid program to fight both drug production and irregular armies, most notably the FARC and the AUC. Since 2001, Washington has sent over $5 billion to Bogotá.

Nonetheless, Plan Colombia put little dent in cocaine production. The coca acreage in 2006 was slightly more than in 2001, when Plan Colombia was implemented. Acreage was reduced in 2003 and 2004 but shot up again in 2005 and 2006.

But Uribe’s success in curbing political violence boosted his popularity in Colombia. He vigorously pressed the war against the FARC, forcing the leftist guerrillas into a tactical retreat. Overall, Uribe reduced the number of murders, kidnappings and massacres by about one-third.

The Uribe-controlled Congress also passed the Justice and Peace Law, which launched a peace process with the right-wing paramilitaries that demobilized 30,000 men and women. The law was written by Sen. Mario Uribe, the cousin now being investigated for his AUC ties. Even the Bush administration criticized the law’s terms as overly lenient.

With Uribe’s popularity soaring, he got his congressional allies to change the Constitution to permit a second presidential term. Uribe then swept to reelection in 2006, winning 62 percent of the vote.

Still, accusations of corruption and unpunished human rights violations dogged him.

Several investigations, especially those led by Colombia’s Supreme Court, slowly amassed evidence against former and current government officials and prominent figures among the country’s elite.

Those implicated included dozens of current and former members of the Congress; high-ranking military officers, including the current chief of staff; entire army battalions allegedly working for drug cartels; prominent businessmen; and some of Uribe’s closest allies, including the father and brother of Colombia’s former foreign minister María Consuelo Araújo.

In March 2006, a laptop belonging to a top paramilitary leader was seized in a raid. The computer was found to contain detailed information on drug-trafficking operations, killings committed during the peace process, potential hit lists of other victims, the AUC’s plan for influencing the government, and a list of contributors and political allies.

One of the hit lists was linked to Colombia’s intelligence service and to its director, Jorge Noguera, a close Uribe ally who the president named consul in Milan after the initial investigation was opened.

Noguera was later arrested for his ties to the AUC and drug traffickers, for filtering information to the AUC, for erasing incriminating evidence of several drug traffickers and paramilitary leaders, for complicity in the assassinations of several union leaders, and for obstructing operations to capture his allies.

Other Colombian intelligence officials also were arrested, including one high-level official, Rafael García, who testified that he erased evidence at the request of Noguera. García also accused Noguera of plotting to assassinate Venezuela’s president Chávez in coordination with high-level officials in Uribe’s administration, though García didn’t give their names.

Paramilitary leader Mancuso also accused Uribe’s Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos in his deposition of plotting with the AUC to kill Venezuela’s Chávez, although it’s not clear whether Santos was one of the men whom intelligence officer García was referring to. Santos denied the accusation.

Then, in December 2006, embarrassed by the ongoing criminality in the AUC’s Santa Fe Ralito safe haven, the government put some paramilitary leaders in prison. But even there, they continued to live the high life and kept on top of their criminal operations.

The local press published in May transcripts of police wiretaps revealing AUC leaders continuing to order killings and to direct drug trafficking from prison, while also enjoying dance parties, sexual orgies and alcohol. They hosted “Mexican friends” and had unrestricted access to cell phones and the Internet.

In one conversation, the frustrated former prison warden complained to a colleague that her orders were constantly overruled by her superiors when paramilitary leaders called to complain to the peace commissioner, government ministers and even the president. The warden soon requested to be relocated.

Infuriated by the wiretap disclosures, Uribe ordered the firing of the top 12 generals in the police, but he said little about the evidence of AUC criminality beyond promising another investigation.

AUC leaders also threatened to break off the peace process, accusing the government of changing the terms. They felt betrayed, they said, and threatened to incriminate all their elite allies, including politicians, businessmen, and multinationals.

Regional Trouble

The Organization of American States, which has overseen the peace process with the AUC, has been critical of the results. The OAS warned that the paramilitaries are rearming and reorganizing under different names, with stronger ties to drug traffickers, and are being led by some of the same leaders who supposedly had surrendered.

OAS Assistant Secretary General Albert Ramdin said this year that the AUC demobilization process might well fail to solve Colombia’s problem with drug-financed paramilitary groups.

Colombia’s approach “could trigger a truth and justice process that would put an end to paramilitary groups in the regions, and lead to reconstruction of the State,” Ramdin said. “Or, on the other hand, it could accentuate the influence of paramilitary groups linked to drug trafficking.”

Despite Colombia’s problems – the corruption, the shaky peace process and the shortcomings of its anti-drug program – Bush has continued to show unstinting support for Uribe. Calling Uribe a true democrat and a strong leader, Bush has visited Colombia twice, including earlier this year, and met with Uribe several times in Washington.

“I’m proud to call [Uribe] a friend and strategic ally,” Bush said during one of Uribe’s visits. In Bogotá, the U.S. president said: “I appreciate the [Colombian] president’s determination to bring human rights violators to justice. … I believe that, given a fair chance, President Uribe can make the case.”

Bush asked the U.S. Congress to increase financial support for Plan Colombia, but Democrats cut military aid from 80 percent to 65 percent of the total allocation, while increasing economic and humanitarian aid. Moreover, the Democrats attached strict conditions on the total $530 million.

Democrats also have conditioned their ratification of a free-trade agreement with Colombia on Uribe improving the country’s human rights record and prosecuting paramilitary leaders.

In South America, Uribe has slowly backed himself into a corner by siding with Bush. While most South American countries have grown more critical of U.S. foreign policy and its Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, Colombia has staunchly supported Bush’s policies, distancing itself from its neighbors.

Brazil and Ecuador have closer relations with Venezuela, as do most countries in the region, in stark contrast to a decade ago. Colombia has been kept out of South America’s Mercosur regional trade union, while Venezuela is expected to join sometime this year.

Uribe also has lost some regional backing in his fight against the FARC. Ecuador has resisted labelling the FARC a terrorist organization, but did criticize Plan Colombia and sought reparations for collateral damage inflicted by Colombian forces on Ecuador’s border population.

Meanwhile, the drug and corruption scandal keeps growing. Though Uribe has denied most of the accusations, drug lord Ochoa Vasco has said he is willing to negotiate his surrender to the DEA along with proof to support his charges.

Ochoa Vasco said some AUC leaders and drug traffickers now are willing to negotiate their surrender to U.S. law-enforcement agencies to avoid being murdered in Colombia, as powerful forces seek desperately to silence them and end the “para-scandal.”

In July, Henao Gómez Bustamante – the biggest reputed drug lord since Pablo Escobar – was extradited to face trafficking charges in the U.S. He is believed to have been a key player in right-wing politics and one of the main financers of the AUC.

The target of at least half a dozen assassination attempts while he was in prison, Gómez Bustamante told a magazine that he preferred being extradited to being murdered. He also said he will disclose all the information about drug corruption in Colombia, AUC infiltration, and Mexican cartels, in exchange for a more lenient sentence.

Whatever is ultimately proven, however, the spilling out of evidence linking Uribe to Colombia’s vast cocaine industry and to the country’s history of political murders is bad news for President Bush as he counts on Uribe to serve as the model for South America’s future and as a bulwark against Hugo Chávez.

Madrid-based Andrés Cala has written about Colombia’s civil conflict since 1998. An award-winning journalist, he’s worked in six countries for several outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, and the Associated Press. Cala's e-mail is andres.cala@gmail.com.

An American paleo-conservative's view on how to win in Iraq

A stable Iraqi state would constitute a strategic victory—and the only one still possible.

by William S. Lind

Among the bits of lore of the United States Senate is a story that dates back to before I arrived there in 1973 as a staffer to Sen. Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio.

A senator—from New York, perhaps—known for depending wholly on his staff while treating it with contempt, told his assistant for foreign policy, “I want to give a major speech on the Vietnam War tomorrow morning. Stay here all night and write it.” With that, the senator headed out for a Capitol Hill reception rich with giant shrimp and large checks.

The staffer did as he was bidden, despite the fact that it was his anniversary, and his wife had made grand plans. The next morning, the senator found the text of the speech in his inbox. Snatching it eagerly, he proceeded directly to the floor of the Senate. His voice booming, he laid out a brilliant and incisive analysis of the war. At the bottom of the seventh page, he proclaimed, “I will now lay out my plan for winning the Vietnam War.” Page eight began with the words, “Now you’re on your own, you S.O.B. I quit.”

At the risk of finding myself in the same situation, I offer my plan for winning in Iraq.

The starting point, despite the disastrous course of the war to date, is to realize that the only possibilities for victory lie at the strategic level, not the tactical level. In part this is because we have botched the tactical level beyond redemption. While the efforts of General Petraeus and the Marines in Anbar province to apply classic counter-insurgency doctrine and protect the population instead of brutalizing it are laudatory, they come too late.

In larger part, we cannot win at the tactical level because this kind of war is not additive. You cannot win at the strategic level simply by accumulating tactical successes, as our Second-Generation, firepower/attrition-oriented military automatically assumes. The strategic level follows its own logic, and strategic victory requires a sound strategy. When, as is currently the case, we have no strategy, this fact works against us. If, however, we adopt a prudent strategy, it can work for us. Because a higher level of war trumps a lower, we can yet redeem our many tactical failures at the strategic level. In other words, we can still win.

To devise a successful strategy, we must begin by defining what we mean by winning. The Bush administration, consistent with its record of military incompetence, continues to pursue the folly of maximalist objectives. It still defines victory as it did at the war’s outset: an Iraq that is an American satellite, friendly to Israel, happy to provide the U.S. with a limitless supply of oil and vast military bases from which American forces can dominate the region. None of these objectives are now attainable. None were ever attainable, no matter what our troops did. And as long as those objectives define victory, we are doomed to defeat.

Fortunately, another objective, the one that actually matters most, may, with luck and skill, still be achieved. That objective—restoring a state in what is now the stateless region of Mesopotamia—must become our new definition of victory.

This definition is not arbitrary. On the contrary, it reflects a correct, Fourth-Generation understanding of the threat. The serious threat to America, in the Middle East and elsewhere, is not any state. Rather, it is posed by a growing congeries of non-state organizations, which we label “terrorists.”

Non-state forces win when states are destroyed and are replaced by stateless regions. Even the long-term objective of al-Qaeda is not a state but a restored caliphate, a type of social organization that precedes the state by centuries. In the meantime, stateless chaos will serve very well, thank you.

And thank us they do because our initial invasion of Iraq and subsequent blunders, such as sending home the Iraqi army and civil service, destroyed the Iraqi state. It has not been rebuilt. We created the illusion of an Iraqi government in Baghdad’s Green Zone, but it is a government without a state, which is to say a Potemkin parliament. As long as Iraq remains stateless, our non-state enemies win.

The other side of the same coin, however, offers us a chance for victory. If a real state can be restored in Iraq, al-Qaeda and the other Islamic non-state forces lose. That is true regardless of the nature of a restored Iraqi state. States dislike competition, and the definition of a state says that it must have a monopoly of violence within its borders. If that suggests something about the state of the state—in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere—well, it should.

Winning the war in Iraq therefore means seeing the re-creation of an Iraqi state. I say “seeing,” not “re-creating,” because our strategy, if it is to have a chance of success, must proceed from a realistic understanding of the situation in Iraq. We do not now have the power to re-create a state in Iraq, if we ever did. That is due in part to military failure, but it has more to do with a problem of legitimacy. As a foreign, Christian invader and occupier, we cannot create any legitimate institutions in Iraq. Quite the contrary: we have the reverse Midas touch. Any institution we create, or merely approve of and support, loses its legitimacy.

That means our new strategy must employ what the British military theorist Basil Liddell-Hart called an “indirect approach.” This is chancy. So is war itself. You cannot guarantee events; you try instead to influence them. Again, this reflects a realistic appreciation of the situation in Iraq. Our vaunted “boots on the ground” have been fought to a stalemate by flip flops in the alleys. In this kind of war, a stalemate means we have lost tactically. A combination of good strategy and some luck may yet enable us to pull our chestnuts out of the fire, but we are in no position to dictate events. We must try, instead, to shape and ride them.

An indirect approach to winning the war in Iraq on the strategic level has three central elements. The first is the lesson of Nixon’s trip to China.

That brilliant diplomatic move of establishing a rapprochement with China in effect won the Vietnam War for the United States. The threat that drew us into a major war was not North Vietnam, a power of purely local significance. Rather, it was Mao’s doctrine of exporting wars of national liberation. (The phrase at the time was “Two, three, many Vietnams.”) The new relationship Nixon established with China ended that threat, rendering our defeat on the ground in Vietnam irrelevant.

In the case of the war in Iraq, Iran is China, and the first component of a strategy to win in Iraq is to establish a rapprochement with Iran. That is, a general settlement of differences. The Iranians have offered us such a settlement—including a compromise on the nuclear issue—on generous terms. But the Bush administration, true to its hubris, refused to consider it, going so far as to upbraid the Swiss for daring to forward the overture to us. It seems, however, to remain on the table.

The reason a strategy to win in Iraq must begin with a rapprochement with Iran is that any real Iraqi state is likely to be allied to Iran. Even the quisling al-Maliki government cowering in the Green Zone is close to Iran. A legitimate Iraqi government, which is virtually certain to be dominated by Iraq’s Shi’ites, will probably be much closer.

A restored Iraqi state that is allied with Iran will quickly roll up al-Qaeda and other non-state forces in Iraq, which is the victory we most require. But the world’s perception will still be that the United States was defeated because its main regional rival, Iran, will emerge much strengthened. If Iran and America are no longer enemies, that issue becomes moot.

A rapprochement with Iran may encourage Tehran to use its influence in Iraq to promote the revival of a state, but that is in Iran’s interest in any case once it is clear American troops are withdrawing. Conversely, until it is clear that America has given up its ambitions for large, permanent military bases in Iraq, Iran must continue to promote instability in its neighbor.

Once it becomes possible for both the U.S. and Iran to win in Iraq, we must move to the second element of our new strategy: allowing any elements that may hold the potential of restoring an Iraqi state to rise within Iraq. Consistent with an indirect approach, this means letting go.

At present, the United States works to suppress any elements that challenge the al-Maliki government. We teeter on the verge of open war with the most prominent of those elements, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. On the ground, al-Sadr is the leader most likely to restore an Iraqi state, and thanks to his steadfast opposition to the American occupation, he has legitimacy. While he may not have the support of a majority of Iraq’s Shi’ites, majorities do not make history. He is the leader of the Shi’ites who count, which is to say the young men willing to fight. Nor is al-Sadr merely a Shi’ite leader; he has kept open channels of communication to at least some of the Sunni insurgent groups—and perhaps channels not of communication only. Some of the Sunni insurgents clearly have benefited from Iranian support, which may have come through al-Sadr. Of late, al-Sadr has taken care to restrain his followers from revenge attacks against Sunnis, stressing Shi’ite-Sunni unity against the foreign occupier. He has had his eye on the brass ring, the supreme leadership position in a restored Iraqi state, from the beginning. Now he may see it as within reach.

Our new strategy would let him grab it. Under his leadership, or that of anyone else in Iraq with a shred of legitimacy, a restored Iraqi state will not be a friend of America. Given what we have done to that country, we can hardly expect it to be. But our new strategy has no such unattainable objective. Its objective is solely the restoration of a real state, and that al-Sadr may be able to accomplish. If he can, we will have little to complain about in terms of his toleration of al-Qaeda or other Fourth Generation elements. Nor will his close relationship with Iran be a problem, given that we will no longer regard Iran as an enemy.

There is, of course, no guarantee that al-Sadr or anyone else in Iraq can restore a state. The only sure thing is that we cannot do so, as four years of failure have amply demonstrated. The one chance of victory we have left is to get out of the way of al-Sadr and anyone else in Iraq who might be able to re-create an Iraqi state, praying fervently that they succeed. Having failed in our own efforts, it is time to give the Iraqis and Dame Fortune our place at the gaming table.

Some may object that a rapprochement with Iran coupled with allowing al-Sadr or someone like him to become the leader of a restored Iraqi state will upset the Sunni regimes in the Middle East. Indeed it may, but that is not our problem. There is little the Sunni states can do about it, given the regions’s geography. Syria is in a position to support a continued insurgency by Iraqi Sunnis, but Syria is ruled by an Alawite clique, and the Alawites are offshoots of Shi’ism. The Saudis will be both angry and terrified, but beyond supplying Iraq’s Sunni insurgents with money and volunteers, which they are already doing, they cannot intervene. Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are a joke, and overt Saudi military intervention in Iraq would quickly fail. All the other Sunni states are too far away to do anything effective.

Moreover, by accentuating the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry within Islam, we may help fold Islamic expansionism back on itself, an essential quality of any indirect approach. As James Kurth wrote in a September 2005 article in this magazine entitled “Splitting Islam”:

If the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict became not only intense and widespread but also prolonged, perhaps as much so as the Sino-Soviet conflict during the last three decades of the Cold War, the global Islamist movement might have almost no meaning or attraction at all. In the Muslim world there might be Sunni Islamists and Shi’ite Islamists, but each might consider their greatest enemy to be not the United States, but each other.

The third and final element of a strategy for winning in Iraq is to withdraw all American forces as rapidly as possible, which means within 12-18 months. That is the only way we can create the space necessary for al-Sadr or someone else to re-create an Iraqi state. If we remain and work against him, a dicey task becomes that much harder, undermining both him and our strategic goal. And if we work for him, he loses legitimacy, the sine qua non for re-creating a state in Iraq.

In this strategy, our withdrawal is not that of a defeated army. It is a strategic withdrawal—a necessary part of our strategy. That distinction is a critical for our prestige in the world, for the future health of America’s Armed Forces, and for our domestic politics, which could be roiled beyond what any conservative would desire by a vast military defeat.

If our new strategy works and our withdrawal is followed by the restoration of a real Iraqi state, we will have learned our lesson about wars of choice, but avoided a catastrophe. If it fails and Mesopotamia remains a stateless region, Iraq is no worse off than it is now, and our troops will be safely out of the mess.

There is no chance the Bush administration, locked in a Totentanz with its dreams of world empire, will adopt this strategy. But the presidential debate season has already begun, and a bevy of candidates in both parties are looking around for something, anything that might get us out of the Iraqi morass without accepting defeat. If just one of them picks up on it, those yawningly dull debates might get a lot more interesting.

William S. Lind is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C.

The Iran Attack That Wasn't

How reporters trumped up a story about Iranians killing Americans in Iraq

by Gareth Porter

On July 2 and 3, The New York Times and the Associated Press, among other media outlets, came out with sensational stories saying that either Iranians or Iranian agents had played an important role in planning the operation in Karbala, Iraq last January that resulted in the deaths of five American soldiers. Michael R. Gordon and John F. Burns of The New York Times wrote that "agents of Iran" had been identified by the military spokesman as having "helped plan a January raid in the Shiite holy city of Karbala in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed by Islamic militants …"

Lee Keath of the Associated Press wrote an even more lurid lead, asserting that U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner had accused "Iran's elite Quds force" of having "helped militants carry out a January attack in Karbala that killed five Americans."

The story was a big break for the war-with-Iran faction in Washington. Within hours, Sen. Joe Lieberman issued a press release saying that the Iranian government "has declared war on us." That set the stage for the unanimous passage the following week of his amendment stating that "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," and demanding the government of Iran "take immediate action" to end all forms of support it is providing to Iraqi militias and insurgents.

No one questioned the authenticity of the story at the time. But the official source -- Brig. Gen. Bergner -- offered no real evidence of Iranian involvement in planning the January attack in his press briefing on July 2. Even more remarkably, Bergner never even explicitly claimed such direct Iranian involvement in the planning. Instead, he used carefully ambiguous language that implied but did not state such an Iranian role.

It was not Bergner, in fact, but New York Times military reporter Michael Gordon who articulated the narrative of an Iranian-inspired attack on Americans. Gordon, readers may recall, played a key role, along with Judith Miller, in legitimizing a major theme of the Bush administration's Iraq propaganda -- the infamous aluminum tubes argument -- as the White House Iraq Group kicked off its campaign to prepare public opinion for war in September 2002. And in February 2007, Gordon enthusiastically embraced the administration's charge of official Iranian arms exports to Iraq in his coverage of that issue, despite a notable lack of evidence for the charge.

But at the Bergner press briefing on July 2, Gordon went even further in playing the role of transmission belt for the Bush administration line. The transcript of that briefing, obtained from the U.S. military command press desk in Baghdad, shows that when Bergner failed to claim a direct Iranian involvement -- or even through a Hezbollah operative in Iraq -- in the planning of the January raid in Karbala, Gordon pushed him to state clearly that the Iranians not only helped plan but actually "directed" the attack on Americans.

What Bergner said in his prepared statement was that both Hezbollah operative Ali Musa Daqduq, who was in liaison with the militia group which carried out the attack, and Kais Khazali, the Iraqi said to have been in charge of the group -- both of whom had been captured on March 22 -- "state that senior leadership within the Qods Force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack …"

Using such indirect language -- "knew of and supported planning" -- is a far cry from claiming actual participation or assistance in planning the attack. Bergner gave no indication of when or how the Iranian Qods Force might have learned about the attack plans, for example, or how much they might have known about them. That vagueness implied that the prisoners had not implicated Iran in the planning of the operation.

Bergner also said Daqduq "contends that the Iraqi special groups could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Qods Force." That statement was ambiguous: it could be interpreted as referring to support and direction of the Karbala operation, but if Bergner meant to flatly state that there was such "direction" of the operation from Iran, why would he have attributed such indirect language to the same prisoner?

These statements seem to be a deliberate tease by Bergner, who provided neither complete transcripts of the interrogations nor quotations from the prisoners.

Although Bergner provided a number of details in the briefing about Hezbollah training of Shiite militia groups in Iran, including the number of sites, their location, and the number of militiamen trained at any given time, he did not claim that the specific group in question had been trained by Hezbollah, either in Iran or anywhere else. And he stated that the attack was authorized not by the Hezbollah cadre or by the Qods Force, but by the group's Iraqi chief, Kais Khazali.

Bergner's failure to refer explicitly to an Iranian or Hezbollah role in the actual planning of the attack prompted Gordon to help formulate the story for the spokesman. "What's new here, as I understand it," said Gordon during the briefing, "is that you're asserting the Qods Force and the Iranians had specific knowledge of this attack in advance and helped guide and support it, not merely train the force." He then prodded Bergner to say that the purpose of Iranians was to try to "capture these American soldiers in the hope of trading them for the detained Iraqi officials."

Bergner refrained from addressing Gordon's restatement of the story as Iranian help and guidance of the January attack. Instead he responded to Gordon's thesis about the objective of the Karbala operation, saying, "The specific motivations behind these operations that I described, we're still learning more about that."

Frustrated by Bergner's unwillingness to be specific, Gordon pushed him once again. "But you're asserting essentially that the Qods Force directed and helped plan this attack in Karbala," he insisted.

Bergner responded, "That is what we learned from [K]ais Khazali," and said nothing more on the subject. If Bergner’s earlier failure to use such precise language had been due merely to incompetence, one might have expected him to take advantage of Gordon’s prompting to state the story more forcefully and even elaborate on it. But his use of the indefinite "that" and his failure to volunteer anything further indicate that Bergner was not prepared to be quoted as making an explicit allegation of direct Iranian -- or Hezbollah -- involvement in planning the Karbala raid – even though he did not discourage reporters from writing the story that way.

Another indication that the command had no evidence of Iranian involvement in the attack was the statements of the top commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, on the issue in an April 26 press briefing. Petraeus had referred to a 22-page memorandum captured with the Shiite prisoners that he said "detailed the planning, preparation, approval process and conduct of the operation that resulted in five of our soldiers being killed in Karbala." But he did not claim that either the document or the interrogation of Khazali had suggested any Iranian or Hezbollah participation in, much less direction of the planning of the Karbala assault.

Later in that briefing, a reporter asked whether Petraeus was "saying that there was evidence of Iranian involvement in that [Karbala] operation?" Petraeus responded, "No. No. No. That -- first of all, that was the operation that you mentioned, and we do not have a direct link to Iranian involvement in that particular case."

At the time Petraeus made this statement, Khazali, the chief of the militia group that had carried out the attack, had been in U.S. custody for more than a month. Despite nearly five weeks of intensive interrogation of Khazali, Petraeus's comments would indicate that U.S. officials had not learned anything that implicated Iran or Hezbollah in the planning or execution of the Karbala attack

The raid on the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center on Jan. 20 was a serious embarrassment for the Bush administration. Some 30 gunmen traveled in a convoy of at least seven SUVs with tinted windows, just like those driven by top U.S. military officials, wearing uniforms similar to those worn by the U.S. military. By flashing fake identification cards, they gained access to the compound through three different checkpoints without a security screening.

Soon after the attack, U.S. officials speculated that it had been carried out by Iranians or "Iranian-trained operatives," arguing that it was "beyond what we have seen militias or foreign fighters do." Officials suggested that the raid -- coming a little over a week after Iranian officials had been seized by U.S. forces in Iraq -- was aimed at exchanging American prisoners for those Iranians. But it was also reported that some officials had concluded that it was an "inside job," which could not have been undertaken without help from someone working within the camp.

The revival of the charge of Iranian involvement in the Karbala attack, despite the earlier Petraeus denial, has the all the hallmarks of a White House decision. The alleged Iranian export of arms to Iraqi Shiites, on which the U.S. command briefed the media in Baghdad in February, reflected the administration's decisions in the preceding months to hold Iran responsible for the killing of U.S. troops in Iraq with armor-piercing explosives. After the replacement of the top commander in Iraq with a general who had pledged to carry out the surge strategy chosen by the White House, and the June arrival of a new U.S. command spokesman in Baghdad -- Gen. Bergner -- who had been special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq, the command’s briefings were tied more closely to the White House propaganda machine than ever before.

But the success of this media operation also depended on journalists who would fill in the blanks cleverly left open by Bergner with their own imagination. As the transcript of the briefing shows, Michael Gordon was not just a passively recording the line presented by the administration. He was actively pushing the sensational -- and unsubstantiated and highly suspect -- story of "Iranians killing Americans" that would then become a mantra of the war-with-Iran crowd.

*****
Gareth Porter, a historian and journalist, writes regularly on U.S. policy in Iran and Iraq for Inter Press Service. His most recent book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005).

According to the US Labor Department 1,001 Contractors Have Died in Iraq

By David Ivanovich

Washington - More than 1,000 civilian contractors have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion more than four years ago, according to Labor Department records made available Tuesday.

In response to a request from Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., the Labor Department revealed that 1,001 civilian contractors had died in Iraq as of June 30, including 84 during the second quarter of the year.

So far in 2007, at least 231 contractors working for U.S. firms have died in Iraq.

Those contractor fatalities are in addition to the 3,668 military personnel the Defense Department had confirmed dead in Iraq from the start of the war in March 2003 until today.

"We are not getting the full picture" of the cost of the war in Iraq, Schakowsky said in a recent interview.

Another 76 civilian contractors have died in Afghanistan since the start of operations there, the Labor Department records show.

Besides those killed, 4,837 workers in Iraq and 879 in Afghanistan suffered injuries severe enough to miss at least four days of work, the Labor Department said.

The report did not identify which companies employed the workers, or their nationalities.

Houston-based KBR, the Pentagon's largest military contractor working in Iraq, has had 50,000 employees and subcontractors in the country building bases, serving up meals, delivering mail and providing a host of other logistical support services for U.S. troops serving in Iraq.

More than 100 of the company's employees and contractors have been killed in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.

"Obviously, all of our employees that work in the region perform their work under harsh and dangerous conditions," KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne said Tuesday. "We continue to grieve with the families of those we have lost and remain committed to the safety and security of all our employees and subcontractors in the region.

The civilian contractor figures are compiled by the Labor Department's Division of Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation, which tracks workers' compensation claims by injured workers or families of slain contractors under the federal Defense Base Act.

But these numbers likely do not tell the whole story.

"The data show the number of cases reported to the (Labor Department), not the number of injuries or deaths which occurred," Labor Department official Miranda Chiu wrote in a message to Schakowsky.

Labor Department officials have not responded in recent weeks to inquiries from the Chronicle about the contractor deaths.

The Labor Department only provided the numbers after Schakowsky called personally to request the data.

The United States has about 162,000 troops serving in Iraq. Military families have long complained about the stress placed on them by long and repeated deployments to Iraq.

By using civilians contractors, the Pentagon is able to send fewer troops to Iraq, since the civilians can perform noncombat functions and allow those in uniform to focus on military activities.