The UN, US and Iraq IV

Amid all this boasting about its lucrative connections, IILG is surprisingly modest about the family connections of its founder, Salem Chalabi. The website doesn't mention that he is a nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, who just happens to be the leader of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), a member of the governing council and current president of Iraq. Uncle Ahmed, a former banker in Jordan, fled the country in 1989 before he could be arrested in connection with a $200 million financial scandal. He was later tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.

Bush, BCCI, Saddam, Noriega, bin Laden, and the Cleanup Wars

The Desert Storm war never accomplished any of its supposed goals. Kuwait does not have 'democracy,'

and the Kurds who were incited to rise up against him received no U.S. help when Republican Guard American-made attack helicopters mowed them down.

Saddam's chemical and nuclear arsenal were never eliminated.

The Kurds were gassed like rats.

Sofia wrote:

The Kurds were gassed like rats.

Indeed. In the 1980s. Under Ronnie Ray-gun.
I do, however, recall hearing of a Kurd uprising that was encouraged by Bush I along with the Shi'ite uprising.

Following the Nazi collapse, Germany was an unpredictable, violent place for quite some time.
Hitler's Werewolves never amounted to much, but their post-war anti-occupation terror-and-sabotage campaign had been planned meticulously, down to the prepositioning of arms and munitions. In large part, the failure of the Werewolves was due to the pragmatic nature of Soviet De-Nazification: all military age males were suspect, and those unable to convince the skeptical Soviet Army and NKVD interrogators of the absolute certainty of their future cooperation were shot, marched off to The Gulags, or imprisoned within Germany. It became quite evident to the Germans, Werewolves, ex-military, and just-plain-man-in-the-street alike that resistance, particularly to the Soviets, was futile; many would-have-been resistors went to great, and often unfufilled, effort to surrender to US or British forces. Surrendering to the French was considered almost as risk-prone as falling to the Soviets, and for cause. Banditry and brigandry were common, a black market thrived (far more money was transfered by Allied Occupation troops from Germay to accounts in their respective homelands than was paid to those troops by their governments), certain neighborhoods or districts were so dangerous for Occupying troops that they were "Off Limits", entered only by armed patrols on full war alert. There were assaults, murders, robberies, lootings, bombings, arsons, kidnappings, and assorted other mayhem aplenty even without organized resistance (to be fair, the occupying troops evidenced a bit of violent criminality as well ... rapes, robberies, assaults, and the like). Commanders of US combat units pressed into occupation and pacification duty bemoaned the sad state of equipment that had fought non-stop from Normandy all the way into Germany, the scarcity of repair facillities and replacement parts, and the ill-suitedness of combat troops to the task of overseeing civil affairs. Troops were griping that "We've done our share. The war is over and we should be at home now", and there was considerable clamor at home to get them home the sooner the better.

Werewolves? Must be a full moon

By Tom Blackburn, Palm Beach Post Editorial Writer
Monday, September 1, 2003

As Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army roared past the vineyards toward Wittlich, near Trier in Germany's Mosel Valley, burghers decided that the war was over. White flags flew from windows, and a 12-year-old boy waving a bedsheet ran to meet the advancing GIs, shouting in his best English, "We surnder, we surnder!"

That's how it went in Germany in 1945. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice spun a very different story last week to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week. "You will recall," Mr. Rumsfeld said, "that some dead-enders fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany." Ms. Rice said, "SS officers, called Werewolves, engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those local forces cooperating with them -- much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants."

On the same day, and relying on the same invented history, both of them invoked the "Werewolves" to make it seem that chaotic postwar Iraq is no different than postwar Germany.

"They and other Nazi remnants," Mr. Rumsfeld said, "targeted allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with allied forces. Mayors were assassinated, including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated."

Werewolves? They were to today's Iraq what the Terminator is to Gen. Patton.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels dreamed them up, along with an Alpine Redoubt from which the Nazis would fight for 100 years. To be prudent, the Allies had to take the threats seriously. But Goebbels was a failed novelist before he got a government job. He poisoned his children, who could have grown up to be Werewolves, and killed himself in Berlin before the Russians arrived.

At the same time, most Germans were learning to say "We surrender."

In an impressionistic account of the last days of the Third Reich, Scenes from the End (2000), Frank Manuel, who was an intelligence officer, re-created an interview with an enemy counterpart in Rothenberg:

"Speaking frankly, do you think we will have much trouble with the Werewolf?"

"Well, speaking frankly, as you ask me to, I think it all depends on how you treat the little Michels. If you feed them enough and treat them well, the Werewolf will not get very far." (Little Michel is the German equivalent of Joe Sixpack.)

Which is how it turned out. "The Werewolves existed more in the idea or the fantasy stage than ever as a real phenomenon," Lt. Col. Kevin Farrell, a historian at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, told the Los Angeles Times.

"The Werewolves existed more in fiction than in fact, being primarily the fictional creation of... Goebbels," says the standard World War II encyclopedia by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen.

The Allied-installed Mayor Franz Oppenhoff of Aachen was assassinated by an SS hit squad after six months in office. Mr. Rumsfeld didn't mention that his death came two months before the war ended. Kids were armed and told to defend their towns, and SS groups hanged or shot Germans who surrendered prematurely. (The Wittlichers waited until the SS left.) But all of that was while the war was still on.

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower cabled -- from a schoolhouse, not the deck of an aircraft carrier -- "The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945." After that, medics dealt with the diseases of fraternization, not battle casualties.

A mere handful of true believers needed further persuasion after May 7. The stories the Bush officials told to the VFW were war stories.

In his memoir Decision in Germany (1950), Gen. Lucius D. Clay, who was military governor of Germany from the start, had nothing to say about Werewolves. There was nothing to say. His top civilian aide, Robert Murphy, recalled (in Diplomat Among Warriors, 1964) that "the Army required extensive German assistance to maintain the cities and villages we had so swiftly overrun. The conquered people obeyed even our severest orders because they considered themselves fortunate to be under western protection."
[...]

Where to Find Good News
The big story in Iraq is the little stories.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, September 26, 2003 12:01 a.m.

Some 64% of Americans stand firm in support of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, according to The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll just out. That makes sense. But 51% now oppose Mr. Bush's request for $87 billion to rebuild Iraq. That makes sense, too. What evidence of progress in Iraq have the American people been given to sign another check?
If the people e-mailing and calling this office about Iraq at all mirror these poll numbers, they suggest that many Americans think the situation there can't be as bad as they are reading or seeing on TV but are confused about just what is going on there. Is Iraq as anarchic and homicidal as they've been given to believe the past 12 weeks? Or is something else happening in Iraq as well, something that would justify the moral and financial commitment the U.S. is making to win this war?

More of the media should embed themselves with the Iraqi people outside the Sunni Triangle, rather than inside the Baghdad bunker. But don't blame the media alone for not telling the full postwar story in Iraq. The administration's information effort so far has been poor. On Aug. 8 the White House released a "100 Days" progress report, but there's been little since. This is a shame, because if one makes the effort to dig for news beyond the front-page war deaths, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Baghdad's bad-news tail is wagging the entire Iraqi dog.

The Sunni Triangle in central Iraq--which runs west from Baghdad to Fallujah and Ramadi, north to Tikrit and back down to Baghdad--is beset with diehard Baathists, contract killers and in-migrating jihadists. Out beyond the Baghdad hellhole, however, what one finds is Dodge City after Wyatt Earp cleaned it up. That is, most of Iraq's 26 million people are trying to behave like citizens of a civilized nation, a large change that inevitably reveals itself as the effort to form up Edmund Burke's "little platoons."





"Basrah Moves Towards Religious Stability," reports Ahmed Mukhtar for Iraq Today, a new and useful source of information about the rebuilding--online at www.iraq-today.com, in English. Though the "former regime" tried to foment sectarian conflict in Basra, today Sunni, Shiite and Shakhi Muslims and Christians and Sabeans are trying to create joint self-help societies in the city of 1.4 million. "We regarded ourselves as original Iraqi residents," the Chaldean Christian leader Archbishop Gabriel T. Kassab told Iraq Today. "We had one destiny."
From Najaf, Sarmad S. Ali reports that "Security Efforts Target Foreigners," the "foreigners" being Iranian and Saudi infiltrators. But he also describes the rebuilding of the holy shrine of Imam Ali, which took a hit during a recent bomb attack. The marble work "is being done by Iranian workers who have come from the same quarries where the marble was made." Iraq's Olympic weightlifters, formerly fodder for Uday's amusements, have been invited to a training camp in the U.S.

Even from bloody Baghdad one reads that the Court of First Instance, the Iraqi civil court, is creating procedures to resolve disputes over debts, landlord problems and property confiscated during "the former regime."

But this is news written by Iraqis, who may tend toward hopefulness. Let us turn to a recent, underpublicized report from the U.S. National Democratic Institute, which sent an assessment mission to Iraq this summer (www.ndi.org). NDI's chairman is Madeleine Albright and its advisory committee includes Richard ("miserable failure") Gephardt.

The report's first sentence: "NDI's overwhelming finding--in the north, south, Baghdad and among secular, religious, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish groups in both urban and rural areas--is a grateful welcoming of the demise of Saddam's regime and a sense that this is a pivotal moment in Iraq's history."

Touring the southern cities of Basra, Nassiriya and Aamara, NDI found, "Despite all of the obstacles, virtually every individual and group NDI met with in southern Iraq perceived this as a time of opportunity. . . . Iraqi citizens in the south demonstrated a hunger for information about the functioning of democracy." In the Kurdish-controlled north, NDI saw "clear evidence of a developing economy, relative security and prosperity and an active civil society and culture. . . . Local municipal councils are active and appear to be working."

The institute's advance delegation called Iraq "fertile ground for democracy promotion initiatives on a scale not seen since the heady days of the fall of the Berlin Wall." Sounds like a good story.

An American officer who worked on reconstruction in Mosul, well north of Baghdad, told me of meeting with young Muslawi lawyers who now want help forming a Mosul bar association and developing a modern system of defendants' rights. The Americans who lectured at the university in Mosul generally spoke in English because so many Iraqi professors speak English. The successes in Mosul, with two million people, are now being taken to smaller towns in the Nineveh province, generally with around 40,000 people.

About 10 days ago, some 140 delegates from eight districts in Salah-ad-Din province chose an interim governing council. The new council's members include a Shia woman from Bayji, tribal sheiks from Dujayl, religious leaders from Samarra and Kurdish and Turkmen members from Tuz. They of course posed afterward for group photographs.

Paul Bremer's Baghdad office is now, at last, assembling this information. In a world with an infinity of Web sites, the U.S. government should be able to create just one dedicated to this great story. The U.S. Central Command has a decent one at www.centcom.mil. If the press wants to debunk them, feel free; better that than nothing. The little stories of Iraq's rebuilding may not make the front page, but I know a lot of people who would like to read them, no matter where they appear.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110004067