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Play it again, Uncle
Sam
By David Isenberg
Evidently, the idea that rebel forces can aid
the United States military in invading a country - an
idea much in vogue among US conservative politicians
since the rapid defeat of Afghanistan's Taliban last
winter - is getting even more of a hearing lately.
The Bush administration is pushing an
initiative, first reported in late September, that will
target either 10,000 (according to one report) or 1,000
(according to another) members of the Iraqi opposition.
The idea is to create small units, which could
possibly act as advance teams or forward observers. Such
forces could be tasked with assignments such as using
laser-guided systems to identify targets on the ground
for US warplanes, enable the forces to target Baghdad's
command and control structure and other key parts of
Iraq's infrastructure. In this sense their mission would
be similar to those of the Northern Alliance opposition
in Afghanistan last year.
Reportedly the Defense
Department has started compiling a list of likely
recruits, taken from names submitted by Iraqi opposition
groups, of those who could assist US units on the
ground, as well as provide guards and supervisors for
Iraqi government troops in prisoner-of-war camps.
The training this time would be provided by the
Defense Security and Cooperation Agency and differ from
Pentagon courses offered to the Iraqi opposition in the
past. Previous courses only covered skills that would
not be used in possible battle, such as first aid, while
these courses are considered lethal training. But there
are no plans to provide full combat training and
sophisticated weaponry to the opposition, although such
activity would be possible under the new presidential
authorization.
Of course, what this is really is
no more than the return of an idea a few years old, an
idea that, until the US victory in Afghanistan, had long
been given up for dead - namely, the Iraq Liberation Act
(ILA).
It isn't as if people hadn't previously
thought about using the groups opposed to Saddam Hussein
to help bring down his regime. In 1998 the US Congress
passed the ILA, whose operative part (Section 3) reads:
"It should be the policy of the United States to support
efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq, and to promote the emergence of a
democratic government to replace that regime."
To that end the ILA provided US$97 million worth
of assistance, including money for radio and television
broadcasting to Iraq by opposition groups to military
education and training. Although then president Bill
Clinton signed the act into law, he ordered that only
"nonlethal" aid be provided, and little of the money has
been spent.
Since the ILA became law, only about
$5 million of the $97 million in "drawdown" authority to
the Pentagon has been authorized, and only a fraction of
the authorized amount has actually been spent. It has
funded training of about 140 Iraqis since 1998 in
Pentagon courses limited to medical, managerial,
computer and public relations instruction. Funding for
an opposition program to gather information in and about
Iraq has been shut down because of questions about how,
and how effectively, money had been spent.
Part
of the problem is that the Iraqi opposition has long
been riven by religious, ethnic, tribal, class-based and
ideological splits. Having fled as a result of regime
repression and therefore unable to function inside the
country, most opposition groups have had a hard time
maintaining close links with the Iraqi people. In some
cases opposition groups have served as little more than
vehicles for personal ambition.
And those that
are there, like the Kurds, have good reason for being
wary of US efforts to recruit them. The views of the
Kurdish groups are of critical importance as they have
the bulk of the fighters. The Kurdish Democratic Party,
the largest armed group, claims it can count on 20,000
guerilla fighters, in addition to a regular army of some
30,000 soldiers.
But much of the Kurdish
population has come to enjoy considerable political
autonomy from Baghdad as a result of the UN's
oil-for-food program, and they are not about to endanger
it. Also, it must be remembered that when the Gulf War
ended in 1991, Washington called on Iraqi dissidents to
rebel, implying that the US would provide air cover. The
uprisings materialized, but US air cover never did. When
the Iraqi military retaliated, butchering thousands of
rebelling Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south,
US officials claimed that Bush favored a military coup
within the regime, not a popular insurrection, which
Washington feared would lead to a possible breakup of
Iraq and a destabilization of the regional power
balance.
Most disastrous was a 1996 covert US
military training operation in Irbil in northern Iraq
that degenerated into internecine feuds. Saddam's forces
crushed the Iraqi National Congress, one of the main
opposition groups, forcing its operations to come to a
standstill.
Thus, a combination of fear of
losing what autonomy they have gained under Saddam,
along with remembrance of Washington's historically
inconsistent record of support, to put it politely,
makes the Kurds extremely leery of US efforts.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co Ltd. All rights
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