At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to
become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema
and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of
the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of
journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was
using all kinds of "black ops" to track down and arrest the terrorists. :
In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in
North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for
fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of
super-spy. But September 11th gave him his chance - and he turned up in
Kabul dressed like this.
And everyone believed him and his stories. In the process Idema
brilliantly exposed the emptiness and fakery of much of the TV and
newspaper reporting of the war on terror.
(Source including video inserts) Text of article continued: He told the journalists and the TV presenters all kinds of lies and
fantasies. He even became the central, heroic figure in a book called
The Hunt for Bin Laden.
Then Idema charged journalists fortunes for what he said was an "al
qaeda" video of a "a training camp" - where strangely many of the
terrorists spoke in english, and allegedly you could hear Idema's voice
on the soundtrack. Few of the journalists did anything to really check
if any of what he was saying was true.
CBS did a special programme about the tapes fronted by Dan Rather,
called "Heart of Darkness". They did check on the tapes - the producers
went to some of the new breed of "terror experts" that were spawning
after 2001. CBS's press office said that they "showed the tapes to three
former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being
practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda".
The BBC did a report that showed the tapes. And they travelled to the
village where they had been recorded - and found an old man who said,
yes there had been Arabs there.
But much later a number of journalists did investigate Jack Idema
properly - and the consensus now is that the tapes are probably fakes.
Here is the original BBC news report
But then Jack Idema started to believe his own stories. He set up his
own militia group that he called Task Force Sabre Seven - and he and
his men went and arrested Afghans they were convinced were terrorists.
And then he locked them up in his own private prison.
Things got out of hand in June 2004 when Idema arrested the Afghan
Supreme Court judge, Maulawi Siddiqullah, because he believed he might
be involved with terrorists. The judge later described what it was like
in Idema's prison:
"The first night, around midnight, I heard the screams of four
people. They then poured very cold water on me. I tried to keep myself
from screaming, but coudn't. Then they played loud, strange music. Then
they prevented me from going to the bathroom; a terrible situation. I
was hooded for twelve days."
In July Afghan police raided Idema's house in Kabul and found what
was described as a private torture chamber. Eight hooded men, including
the judge, were incarcerated there, and three of them were hanging by
their feet from the ceiling, with their heads hooded.
Idema and two others were put on trial - and sentenced to ten years
in an Afghan jail. And all the journalists puffed a lot about how
persuasive he had been.
Here is Idema during the trial - still trying to persuade the
journalists that he is what he said he was. And how he is being set up
by dark sinister forces.
But what is also interesting about Jack Idema is that in a strange way he may have been ahead of his time.
Because at the moment that Idema was entering his Afghan prison, a
group of very senior US military men, led by a General called David
Petraus, were sitting down in a military staff college in Kansas and
beginning to write a study that would completely transform the tactics
of the US army in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
What General Petraus and his team did was to go back into the past
and exhume a theory of warfare that had been discredited by the US
military who thought it was long buried and forgotten. It was called
Counterinsurgency.
And out of that would allegedly come the same kind of arms-length,
privatised interrogation and torture methods that Idema was indulging
in.
I thought I would tell the history of how Counterinsurgency was
invented, why it was discredited in America, and how it returned in 2007
to dominate and brutalise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a
fascinating and weird story that is far odder than anything Jack Idema
could have dreamt up - it involves Mao Zedong, John F Kennedy, French
fascists, the attempted assassination of Charles De Gaulle, and strange
Potemkin-style villages in Vietnam where women get pregnant for no
discernible reason.
The theory of Counterinsurgency also had a terrible logic built into
it that repeatedly led, from the 1950s onwards, to horror - torture,
assassination and mass killing on a far wider scale than anything Jack
Idema ever did in his house in Kabul.
The British military (and their associated wonks) like to think that
it was Britain's colonial independence struggles in places like Malaya
in the 1950s that gave birth to the idea of Counterinsurgency. But the
Petraus team in 2006 thought differently. In the foreword to their
study, called "FM 3-24 - Counterinsurgency" they point to an enigmatic
and long-forgotten French military officer and thinker as their biggest
inspiration. They say:
Of the many books that were influential in the writing of FM
3-24, perhaps none was as important as David Galula's 'Counterinsurgency
Warfare: Theory and Practice'.
David Galula is an absolutely fascinating figure.
He turns up everywhere in the second half of the 20th century in the
wrong place at the right time - like revolutionary China and the Greek
civil war in the 1940s, Indo-China in the early 50s, and above all in
the French struggle in Algeria in the late 1950s.
In Algeria Galula conducted radical experiments in what was called
"revolutionary warfare" - and in these experiments lie the key to
understanding the strange revolutionary roots of the theory of
Counterinsurgency - and why it could so easily go wrong and lead to
horror.
David Galula was born in 1919 in one of the most important colonies
of the French Empire - Tunisia. His family were rich merchants and in
the 1930s Galula went to study at the prestigious St Cyr military
college in France and rose rapidly.
Then, in 1946, Galula was sent to China as the assistant to the
French Charge d'Affairs in Beijing. He arrived in the midst of the civil
war being fought between the communists led by Mao Zedong and the
Koumintang nationalists. A year later Galula went on a trip by himself
into the interior and was captured by the communists and held for a
week.
Although he was anti-communist, Galula was fascinated by the way the
communists behaved towards the local people because it was different
from any other troops he had seen. He began to study their tactics which
were based on a theory of revolutionary guerrilla war that had been
developed by Mao himself.
What Galula realised was that Mao had invented a completely new idea
of how to fight a war. Put simply - there was no conventional army any
longer, the new army were the millions of people the insurgents moved
among. And there were no conventional victories any longer, victory
instead was inside the heads of the millions of individuals that the
insurgents lived among. If they could persuade the people to believe in
their cause and to help them - then the conventional forces would always
be surrounded - and would be defeated no matter how many traditional
battles they won.
Mao explained the theory in a famous phrase:
"The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea"
Here is a picture of David Galula
Galula became convinced that if western armies were going to fight
against these new revolutionary ideas they were going to have to change
radically. And the way to do it, Galula decided, was to behave exactly
the same as Mao's revolutionaries - to swim among the people.
Over the next eight years Galula moved around the world observing the
bitter wars of liberation being fought in Greece, Malaya and in Indo
China - and he saw how the French army was catastrophically defeated by
the communist revolutionary army in Vietnam.
And in 1956 he volunteered to go and serve in Algeria where France
was fighting a war against the guerrilla army of the National Liberation
Front. Galula found that other officers had been thinking along the
same lines - and he was allowed to go and set up what was called "An
Experimental Operational Zone".
In a book Galula wrote about his Algerian experiment, that was going
to become the bible of the Counterinsurgency movement, he said:
"I felt I had learned enough about insurgencies, and I wanted to test certain theories I had formed on counterinsurgency warfare."
Galula took a village that was in the centre of the insurgency and
sent his men to live and work there among the population. The aim was to
persuade the people of the village to turn away from the insurgents and
thus rob them of their power. The way to do this, Galula said, was
through psychological tactics - both by making the villagers feel that
they would be safer with the French, but also through indoctrination
into a new and modern way of thinking about the world.
If his soldiers and civilian advisers could do this, Galula believed,
then the villagers would realise that the real way forward to a better
life was not through the insurgents and their vicious tactics, but
through the European vision of a new, modern democratic community
created amid the harsh mountains of Algeria.
It was a highly idealistic vision - and in 1960 the BBC made a
documentary about one of these experiments. It was a "protected village"
high up in the Aures Mountains. Galula does not appear - but it is the
area in which he was working and is clearly modelled on Galula's
theories.
The reporter is the brilliant James Mossman. He was deeply involved
in reporting the new wars of liberation that were breaking out round the
world - and was no natural supporter of the colonial powers. But he
portrays the experiment sympathetically:
"How deeply can the officers influence the minds of the young
Algerians by these methods? The officers in charge of the new 'protected
villages' make no secret of the fact that this is what they are trying
to do. What started as a predominantly military-security operation has
blossomed into a fully-blown social experiment"
But at the end Mossman states bluntly "It's all too late"
Here's the film
But there was another side to this Counterinsurgency theory. If you
could persuade the local people to come over to your side - then that
would leave the insurgents who lived among the people drastically
weakened. And that meant you could destroy them.
But to do that you had to identify the insurgents - and that meant
getting information from your new "friends" the local villagers. But
sometimes they didn't want to give that kind of information, possibly
because they were frightened, or they might even be an insurgent
themselves, just pretending to be a villager.
And that led to the French soldiers finding ways to persuade the
villagers to tell them who was an insurgent. It was called torture.
Here is part of a Panorama film made only two years later in the same
Aures Mountain region that revealed some of the horror that had been
going on in other of the "protected villages"
By 1962 the French President, de Gaulle had given Algeria its
independence. The victorious FLN took power - and it's guerrilla army,
the ALN, came out of the shadows, with a great slogan:
Independence is Only a Step. Revolution is our Goal
The Panorama film is a very weird piece of journalism. It treats the
ALN like conquering heroes - and slaps an extraordinary piece of
romantic music all over shots of them.
But it then shows what it says is the reality of the protected camps
and villages that the local population had been put in for
"re-education". As the commentary says, the reality was very different
from that shown by the French to TV and newspaper correspondents while
the war was on.
The film alleges that torture was used in the camps - and then it
shows the revolutionaries unblocking an old well outside one of the
villages and sending a young boy into the well to find out what is
hidden down there.
Here is the section of the film.
There was a terrible paradox at the heart of the theory of
Counterinsurgency. As formulated by people like Galula, the theory said
that the colonial powers had to imitate the tactics of the revolutionary
insurgents they were fighting. They had to become like a mirror that
copied Mao Zedong's revolutionary theories - but in reverse, so they
could pull the people away from the insurgents.
But what this also meant was that in effect the Europeans became
copies of the insurgents - and that could so easily lead them to use
some of the same terror tactics as their guerrilla enemy.
The paradox was that while this probably led to less deaths than
pointless conventional battles - it also brought torture and murder and a
copy of the terrorist mind-set into the heart of the European colonial
armies.
This was expressed very powerfully in the film The Battle Of Algiers
made in 1966 about the struggle against the insurgents in the Casbah in
Algiers. They key figure is the French officer Lt Col Mathieu who comes
in to separate out and destroy the FLN insurgents.
This is the scene in the script of the film where he elegantly and
rationally argues the case for this logic of Counterinsurgency.
In the French military elite this ruthless extension of
counterinsurgency was called "guerre revolutionaire" - or revolutionary
war theory. And it captured the imagination of many of the leading
officers fighting the war. But it was also going to have very strange
consequences for France itself.
When President de Gaulle decided to give independence to Algeria,
many of the senior French army officers who had been fighting the
insurgents were furious. They believed it was a complete betrayal of
everything they had been fighting for, and also of the thousands of
French Algerians living in Algeria.
In their anger they set up their own clandestine organisation to try
and stop de Gaulle. It was called the Organisation de L'Armee Secrete -
the OAS - and among its leaders were some of the officers that had led
the Counterinsurgency programme. But Galula himself was not among them.
The OAS was a terrorist organisation that between 1961 and 1962
created an intensely violent campaign of bombings and assassinations in
both Algeria and France. At one point they exploded hundreds of bombs a
day, killing innocent people, to try and force the FLN to resume their
terrorist attacks and thus justify the return of French control.
They also tried to assassinate President de Gaulle five times.
Historians who have studied the OAS have argued that this terror
campaign had many of its roots in the "black ops" and techniques of
subversion that had been developed by the French military in their
Counterinsurgency campaign against the insurgents in the late 1950s -
techniques that they had come to believe in deeply.
One historian says that the descent of many of the French officers into...
"..the OAS's terror campaign is inexplicable without their faith in the magical qualities of the counterinsurgency theory"
What had begun as a reverse copy of Mao's revolutionary theories had
now mutated into a form of revolutionary terror that was trying to bring
down a major European political system.
Here are some of the reports of the time - they give a good sense of
the fear and uncertainty that the OAS terror was spreading through
France in the early 1960s. Many believed that the terrorism was
destroying the very idea of democracy.
I have included an interview with Jean Baptiste Biaggi who was the
leader of a fascist group called The Revolutionary Patriotic Party that
had risen up out of the crisis. He talks of using revolutionary war to
bring down the government - the same "guerre revolutionaire" that had
been used in Algiers.
But David Galula had nothing to do with this horrific corruption of Counterinsurgency.
Instead, in the early 1960s, he went to America to spread his
idealistic vision of the theory among the US military elite. And the
reason he was invited was because an ambitious young Senator had become
fascinated with the whole notion of how to fight the spread of communism
around the world in a new, revolutionary way. He was John F Kennedy.
Counterinsurgency ideas had first reached America in the form of a best-selling novel. It was called The Ugly American
and was published in 1958. It told the story of how communism was
spreading through SE Asia - helped on its way by the stupid, arrogant
behaviour of the Americans there.
But the hero of the novel - an American engineer called Homer Atkins -
behaves differently. He goes and works in local villages to help the
local people develop and modernise. Then an American military officer
points out that what Atkins is doing is exactly the same as Mao's
revolutionary theories set out to do - "win the minds and the hearts" of
the local people.
The Ugly American was a runaway bestseller and was later made into a film starring Marlon Brando.
Senator John Kennedy was gripped by The Ugly American. In
1960 he and five other opinion leaders bought a large advertisement in
the New York Times saying that they had sent copies of the novel to
every US senator because its message was so important.
And on January 18th 1961 - two days before taking office as President
- Kennedy set up the new Special Group, Counterinsurgency in the
Pentagon - SGCI, led by a powerful General.
But there was only one problem - it couldn't find any real Counterinsurgency experts in America.
So David Galula was invited over by the American military as one of
the few people who knew what the new President was on about - and had
even written a book about it. And in April 1962 Galula was one of the
main guests at a now legendary symposium on Counterinsurgency held by
the RAND Corporation military think tank.
All sorts of people were there - like Lt. Col. Frank Kitson who had
led the British struggle against insurgents in Malaya, and the
mysterious American Colonel Edward Lansdale who was involved in attempts
to overthrow Castro in Cuba, and was fascinated by communist theories
of revolutionary war.
Galula was the star guest and he got up to speak first. To begin with he put forward his fundamental theory.
"Revolutionary warfare requires a revolutionary approach on both
sides in the struggle. Whereas in ordinary war the objective is to
destroy the enemy and occupy his territory, the guerrilla's aim is to
control the population.
This, therefore, must be the aim of the counter-guerrilla as well"
But then Galula put the boot in to the aspiring counter-insurgents.
Whether it was due to his disenchantment with what had happened in
Algeria is not clear - but Galula laid out the central problem for the
counterinsurgents when they tried to mirror the communist
revolutionaries - they didn't have a cause:
"One basic difference between insurgency and counterinsurgency is
that the insurgent starts out with nothing but a cause and grows to
strength, while counterinsurgent often starts with everything but a
cause and gradually declines in strength to the point of weakness"
So the RAND corporation decided to find something equivalent to a
cause, powerful enough to bring the villagers in SE Asia over to the
American side.
Up to this point RAND had been exclusively dealing with the tactics
of nuclear warfare, but in the mid 60s it turned its attention to
counterinsurgency - or what they started calling COIN. And very quickly
there was a furious debate within the think tank.
The traditionalists argued that you stuck with the Hearts and Minds
approach - or what they now called HAM. But others said that this never
worked because the Americans didn't have as powerful a vision to offer
the peasants as the communist revolutionaries did. They didn't have a
romantic picture of creating a new world.
The solution, they said, was to fuse counterinsurgency with modern
economic theory - above all the theory of the free market - and treat
the villagers as "rational actors" in an economic system. You didn't
offer them a vision, or a cause, instead you gave them "selective
incentives" to co-operate with the government, plus disincentives to
stop them resisting.
One of the men behind this new approach was an economist at RAND
called Charles Wolfe Jr. Here he is in 1965 - looking like an economist.
The new theory was called:
"The Cost/Benefit-Coercion theory of Counterinsurgency"
It still believed in Galula's theory of putting the local population
into protected villages and making them feel safe. But it gave up on
worrying about what was in the villagers heads and treated them instead
as self-interested "rational actors" who would respond in more or less
predictable ways to incentives - and to disincentives.
It was best summarised in a later book written by another economist
called Samuel Popkin all about the cost/benefit calculations of
Vietnamese peasants. It was called "The Rational Peasant"
In some ways the shift that happened in Counterinsurgency theory was a
picture in microcosm of the much wider shift that was going to happen
to all Western societies over the next thirty years. Politicians would
give up on the idea that politics was about inspiring the people - and
giving them a vision of changing the world. Instead the politicians
would adopt the ideas, and the language, of economics, and turn to
treating their population as individuals who could simply be
incentivised and disincentivised by appealing to their self-interest.
You didn't change society any longer - you managed it.
But when this new hybrid theory of counterinsurgency was applied in
South Vietnam in the 1960s it didn't work out the way it was intended.
To begin with it led to absurdity. And then, just like in Algeria, it
led to horror.
Here is part of a film made in 1969 which brilliantly illustrates the
absurdity. It is about a South Vietnamese village called Bin Hao -
which was held up by the Americans as the model of a pacified village,
an example of how their theory and its use of incentives was really
working.
But then the Americans discover that the village that their theory
has created isn't at all what it appears to be. Their worries begin when
many of the women become pregnant - yet there seems to be only old men
in the village. And then they discover something much worse.
I have also put at the front of the film a wonderful couple of
minutes of two civilian "advisers" in Vietnam playing a board game
called "Insurgency". It had been designed by one of the team to express
and test out their theories. It sets the weird context for the even
stranger reality that then follows.
But, just as in Algeria, the counterinsurgency programme had its own logic that led to torture and murder.
The aim of the protected villages and all the incentives was to
separate the population from the insurgents. The next objective was to
destroy the insurgents - and to do this the CIA set up what they called
The Phoenix Programme.
One of the men in charge was another RAND theorist called Robert
Komer. He knew David Galula and had read his books, but he took a rather
tougher approach which was summarised by his nick name - "Blowtorch
Bob".
Here is a picture of Blowtorch Bob briefing President Johnson on the sort of things he is up to.
What Komer and the others who ran the Phoenix programme did was set
up camps to train Vietnamese militias - drawn from the rational
peasants. Their job was going to be to root out and kill the communist
insurgents. Following the counterinsurgency theory, the militias were
direct copies of the communist cadres.
But also - following the economic model - they were to be
incentivised. They were given money for killing Vietcong, twenty pounds
for a village official, thirty for a district officer.
In a really good documentary made in the 1990s about the Phoenix
Programme, Robert Komer appears. He is a great character - and he is
absolutely blunt about what his aim was with the militias:
"We would use the Vietcong techniques to beat them. They
conducted a terror campaign, so I thought we had to conduct a
counter-terror campaign to kill the VC assassins. And we did."
Another of the architects of the Phoenix Programme, who is
interviewed, was Nelson Brickham. He was a devotee of David Galula's
ideas and he took Galula's books everywhere he went in South Vietnam. He
claims in the film to have been "the conceptual father of the Phoenix
Programme" - and says that it worked well.
But others involved have now changed their mind. The film shows, with
first hand testimony, how that counter-terror campaign ran out of
control. Men who directed the campaign for the CIA say that in essence
it led them to become terrorists themselves.
Here is that section of the film with Blowtorch Bob and the other Americans telling what happened.
There is a strong counter-argument to these criticisms. It simply
says - so what? In war killing happens, and a programme of targeted
assassination certainly killed far fewer civilians than the horrific
indiscriminate bombing by America's conventional forces.
But the documentary goes on to show how the Phoenix programme created
something much worse - which it was powerless both to understand or to
stop.
The Rational Peasant approach looked at Vietnam as a society of
millions of self-seeking rational individuals. In reality, Vietnamese
society was far more complicated. Extended families had tangled and
intricate histories of relationships - some were friendly but many were
driven by rivalries and hatreds.
As the film makes clear this had created a powerful tradition of
violent retribution in Vietnamese society - and it goes on to show how
some of the militias that the Americans had created used the free rein
their masters gave them, to kill and torture not communists, but other,
innocent civilians against whom they had long-standing grudges or
hatreds.
One CIA officer describes how he found that the local police chief
was using their programme's safe house to torture and carve up people
who didn't have the right family protection.
An innocent Vietnamese woman who was tortured describes how the Americans just stood and watched.
It shows the terrible limitations of the economic model of society.
The Americans were helpless because their militias would assure them
that the people they were torturing were communists.
And when you look at everyone as simply a "rational actor" you have
no way of knowing whether they were telling you the truth or not.
After such experiences in Vietnam the whole idea of Counterinsurgency
in the American military was discredited. It was buried away and
forgotten.
It was replaced in the 1980s by what was called the Powell-Weinberger
doctrine. This said that the US should only get involved with a
conflict where there are clear objectives and it can use overwhelming
force.
But after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the Americans became bogged
down in a new guerrilla war. And so - in 2006 - General David Petraus'
team dug up Counterinsurgency again. They took David Galula's ideas and
made them the central architecture for a new idea of how to rescue Iraq
from the horror that had engulfed it since the invasion of 2003.
At the beginning of 2007 Petraus was given 20,000 extra troops - and
he used them to create a counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq modelled on
Galula's theories from the 1950s.
And Galula's central idea - copied from Mao Zedong's revolutionary
theory of warfare - that you swim among the people like a fish in water,
became the driving idea behind "The Surge".
Here are some unedited rushes recorded in July 2007 - they follow
General Petraus visiting Baqubah -which had been one of the most vicious
battlegrounds of the insurgency. General Petraus shows the BBC reporter
John Simpson how the surge is working. As Petraus talks you can hear
the ghost of Galula and his ideas. It is just like the French officer
showing a BBC reporter around The Experimental Zone high up in the Aures
Mountains fifty years before.
But - just like in Algeria - there were also suspicions about what
might be really happening. That the Iraqi army and police were also
involved in sectarian killing under the cover of the surge.
John Simpson is a very good reporter - and he knows this and asks the
sharp question of the local commander that Petraus is visiting. The
officer's response is, to put it mildly, a bit naive.
And there were other suspicions about the Iraq Surge of 2007. That
there was something far more violent and sinister behind it than the
simple Hearts and Minds approach.
In his book - The War Within - the reporter Bob Woodward challenges the myth of the surge. He says bluntly:
"The truth is that other factors were as or even more important than the Surge.
Beginning in about May 2006 the US military and intelligence
agencies launched a series of TOP SECRET operations that enabled them to
locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups
The operations, which were part of Special Compartmented
Information (SCI) incorporated some of the most highly classified
techniques and information in the US government"
Then, rather strangely for an investigative journalist, Woodward becomes very coy. He says:
"Senior military officers and officials at the White House have
asked me not to publish the details or the code word names associated
with these ground-breaking programs. They argue that the publication of
the names alone might lead to the unravelling of state secrets.....
But a number of authoritative sources say these covert activities
had a far-reaching effect on the violence and were very possibly the
biggest factor in reducing it. Several said that 85-90% of the
successful operations and 'actionable intelligence' ‘had come from these
new sources, methods and operations."
The words 'actionable intelligence' are a bit opaque - but they do
imply that there was, just like in Algeria and in Vietnam, a large-scale
programme of targeted assassination.
There have also been claims made that, again just like in Vietnam,
the Americans gave over much of the operation of the programme to the
local militias that they had trained. In this case these were the
predominantly Shia Iraqi army and police. And these Iraqis, it is
alleged, then hi-jacked the programme and used it to torture and
assassinate their Sunni enemies on a wide scale.
There has been little reporting of this, but the Rolling Stone
journalist Michael Hastings has just written a brilliant and fascinating
book called The Operators. It is about the man who commanded the Joint
Special Operations Command in Iraq - General McChrystal. JSOC's job was
to run the special units involved in hunting down and
assassinating the insurgents, In the book Hastings describes what seems
to have happened:
"Behind the scenes, McChrystal, operating his own Phoenix-like
Special Ops program, wipes out "thousands," according to McChrystal's
deputy, Major General Bill Mayville, noting that "JSOC was a killing
machine.".......................
The COINdistas strive to prove the surge strategy is an
enlightened form of combat - "graduate level of war" as the manual FM
3-24 calls Counterinsurgency. But the reality on the ground is dark and
not very reminiscent of graduate school.
Petraus and his allies decide to team up with a Shiite Islamist
government, picking the majority's side in a civil war. The Americans
themselves round up tens of thousands of youg Iraqi males. The Iraqi
army and police, fully funded and trained by the US military, conduct a
campaign of torture and killing, assassinating suspected enemies and
abusing Sunnis with electric shocks and power drills, with entire units
being used as death squads. The Sunnis respond in kind.
The American response to this campaign, as the New York Times would later note, was an 'institutional shrug'."
Very much the response of a Rational Peasant.
In June 2007 Jack Idema was suddenly, and rather mysteriously, freed early by President Karzai.
He went off to live in a house in Mexico and ran a charter boat for
tourists. He had a new girlfriend called Penny who had corresponded with
him while he was in prison in Afghanistan. Then last year he fell ill,
and died in January this year of AIDS-related complications.
After his death Penny described how in his in time in Mexico Idema
got lost in the different personas he was playing. For the tourists on
the charter boat he played the role of what he called "Captain Black
Jack". Idema modelled this on the character of Jack Sparrow played by
Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.
But at home Idema dressed up in Arab Robes - like Lawrence of Arabia -
drank heavily, took cocaine and continuously played Arab music, the
soundtrack to Apocalypse Now, and What a Wonderful World by Louis
Armstrong.
And David Petraus is tipped by some to be the next US president but one.
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