lennart
09-08-03, 17:08
Invisible Troops
US Peacekeepers Grounded at Home
Before Bush took office, planning for post-war scenarios (called 'operations other than war', or OOTW) was built into every war plan. OOTW were considered as carefully and seriously as war action. America was known as a country that had never invaded another without first being attacked, and one that left countries it was forced to fight with a speedy and humane reconstruction plan.
Bush has overturned this proud military tradition. He has not only invaded a nation that posed no imminent threat to the US, he has failed to plan for any scenario other than a welcoming, 'liberated' people. Worse, he has scorned, and encouraged his military leaders to scorn, peacekeeping operations.
At his disposal, Bush has unprecedented resources for peace -a highly trained force, thousands strong, of personnel trained in persuasion and peacekeeping: the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) batallions. Yet his actual use of this resource has, in reality, been inexcusably minimal. Instead of deploying these troops in adequate strength, Bush has treated the American public to a smokescreen of media hype -the dropping of pamphlets and food packets into Afghanistan and Iraq, the endlessly publicized kissing of PSYOPS officer Michael Rega, Jr. by a 'grateful Iraqi,' the much touted "Winning Hearts and Minds" scheme, etc. But fewer PSYOPS troops, whose specialty is diffusing conflict without overt force, have been deployed to Iraq, before, during or after the bombing campaign, than for any other comparable conflict involving the US in the history of PSYOPS. The press has covered the activities of the one fully mobilized batallion (the 303rd based in Pittsburgh so exhaustively that many otherwise well-informed Americans I know believe the 303rd is the only PSYOPS battalion in existence.
In reality, there are over a dozen PSYOPS battalions, comprising an active duty component, which accounts for about one-fourth of overall PSYOPS troop strength, and a reservist component, which accounts for nearly three-fourths. Yet just a few hundreds PSYOPS troops are known definitely to have been deployed. In an apparent effort to make it appear that he has utilized PSYOPS properly, Bush has called up several hundred well-trained reservist troops -then forced them into a limbo zone at Fort Bragg, NC (the primary command post for PSYOPS). Instead of being deployed or even used as a consulting resource, these men and women have been dumped into motel rooms at taxpayer expense, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, unable to return to their families or jobs. Some have now been there since October 2002, when Bush, in a show of mobilizing for war, called up thousands of troops across the country from every imaginable specialty.
Many of the members of PSYOPS battalions were told that being mobilized to Fort Bragg was mandatory. But once they had been processed and moved to North Carolina, they discovered that the October mobilizations for reservists were supposed to consist entirely of volunteers. Thus Bush not only appeared to have called up an adequate number of PSYOPS troops, he appeared to have received an amazing response from "volunteers." In short, he engineered not just the pretext for the war in the form of phony intelligence, but the wave of support from the US military in the form of a phony outpouring of volunteerism.
Worse, hundreds of PSYOPS reservists, and no doubt thousands of troops from other specialties, were recently informed that their "voluntary missions" had been extended indefinitely. Some reservists say they are attempting to take legal action, while others have appealed -apparently futilely thus far- to their Congress members. These soldiers are isolated. Their families are ignored by the Pentagon, while their Congress members appear disinterested in any problem that would require them to stand up to the Bush Reich. The mainstream media is also useless -even if anyone took enough time out from their Jessica Lynch-style fantasy coverage to look into these soldiers' plight, the repercussions could prove worse than the immediate problem. As of the second week of July, the Pentagon has threatened to retaliate heavily against any solider who dares to speak out against Pentagon policy to the press. Yet the press -in a true and just democracy- should be the one door to redress of wrongs that remains open, even when all others slam shut.
As it stands now, there is very little difference between the technical plight of US soldiers trapped without recourse at Fort Bragg or Baghdad, and that of US sailors who were kidnapped and pressed into servitude by the British navy in the 18th century -a practice Americans found so outrageous it was considered sufficient cause to fight the war of 1812. This is the depth to which the Bush administration has reduced the US military.
Why does this situation (thousands of non-deployed conflict-defusing PSYOPS troops) exist? Simple. Bush is not interested in "waging peace." As long as US soldiers are dying, Bush's friends at Halliburton, Bechtel and SAIC have the perfect excuse for not involving Iraqis in major reconstruction efforts and for stuffing oil and communications industry jobs with American personnel. As long as US soldiers are dying, Bush can continue to refuse to declare the war officially over -legally- and thus be called upon to abide by the Geneva Convention. As long as US soldiers are dying, Bush can continue to call himself a "war time president" and manipulate Congress, the media, and the American public accordingly. What Americans must realize and accept, however horrifying, is that George W. Bush wants and needs a steady stream of dead GIs. As for Iraqi civilians -forget it. This is not a humane administration -there has been evidence of this at every turn. As a sterling example, Condy Rice derided the 82nd Airborne for serving as a protective escort for Kosovar Serbian schoolchildren as a waste of resources. Bombs are a much better investment -ask any defense contractor.
The systematic misuse of covert warriors
Ever since the war in Vietnam, the US military has become increasingly dependent on high-tech firepower at the expense of other options. In the early days of the Vietnam conflict (before it could be classed as a full-blown war), PSYOPS teams and CIA personnel were on the ground, using brainpower rather than firepower to fight the incursion of the North Vietnamese communists. This strategy, which involves face-to-face communications as well as radio broadcasts and the training of local villagers in the art of guerilla warfare, may raise ethical eyebrows, but the death toll and environmental destruction associated with this strategy is, theoretically, just a tiny fraction of that inflicted by massive bombing operations. In Vietnam, this strategy was actually steadily gaining ground over the enemy with a minimized loss of life. But then LBJ and Congress, spurred by the political motivation to appear to be 'doing something decisive,' initiated intensive bombing campaigns. As one CIA officer once put it, "It is hard for the spoken word to compete with air raid sirens." After all, who in their right mind will believe you when you tell them you are a 'friend' while your troops are flattening their village with bombs?
Instead of being used as benign tools for avoiding bloodshed, the CIA and PSYOPS teams, from 1965 on, were increasingly used as tools of powerful individuals in the government, notably Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Bush, Sr., Richard Nixon, Donald Rumsfeld, and GW Bush, to further their own ends. These ends rarely coincided with the interests of the US -after all, how did the assassination of Chile's Allende or the overthrowing of Indonesia's Sukarno ultimately benefit anyone but the oil and mining industries? This abuse reached a first peak in the early 1970s, when Nixon organized his clandestine group known as "the Plumbers." In credit to the CIA, most of the officers approached to participate in this 'private activity' refused. The only people willing to join up were those of minimal ethics and/or maximal greed, such as G. Gordon Liddy.
Ronald Reagan also tapped the dregs of the Agency in his Iran Contra intrigues. During the Bosnia campaign, PSYOPS units were subverted to American newsrooms. A major scandal erupted when it was discovered that several PSYOPS officers had been deployed to the CNN newsroom to learn the operation of American media and to plant news stories. Just a few decades before, the CIA had similarly been misused by the government as a tool for infiltrating American newspapers through the institution of the 'Operation Mockingbird' program. Under Bush, the subversion of the CIA, PSYOPS and FBI has escalated. It is now clear that the White House pressured the CIA to turn up the 'intelligence' it needed to build a case for war against Iraq. But this may just be the tip of a dirty iceberg.
Rear Admiral Thomas Steffens, a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command, says the military has sought ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over areas where special operations are in progress. According to a 2000 article in Intelligenc Newsletter" by Rear Admiral Thomas Steffens (a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command), the military has sought ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over areas where special operations are in progress. An unofficial strategy paper published by the US Naval War College in 1996 and written by an Army officer ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and end state, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection." Now, in 2003, the "cone of silence" and leveraging of "vast resources of the fourth estate" are targeted not at citizens in a third world combat zone, but at US citizens on America's own soil.
However, it must be emphasized that the majority of CIA, PSYOPS, and FBI personnel are not renegades on the take like Liddy. They may often be confused and conflicted (as many admit) due to the enormous pressure on them to maintain secrecy and to use deception as a major modus operandi. But most honestly believe their work is aimed at protection of US interests -and most probably do not consider those interests synonymous with corporate interests. If these highly trained personnel were used responsibly as the defensive, not offensive, forces they were intended to be, they would most certainly save, rather than cost, thousands of lives around the world on a regular basis. Instead, a succession of US presidents has seen its clandestine warriors as a pool of on-call spies, goons, and fall guys their personal use.
The supreme irony, of course, is that bombing campaigns, unless of hideous proportions, like the nuking of Hiroshima, are rarely effective in the near and/or long term. During WWII, the British, under constant bombing raids, adapted, went on with daily life and became even more hardened against their German foes. In Bosnia, the allied bombing campaign actually precipitated the commission of many of the war's worst atrocities by enraged Serbs. Yet despite all this evidence against firepower over brainpower, the US military, as international policy expert Michael Bhatia points out "is highly focused on preparing for conventional warfare, emphasizing the use of high-tech weapons and massive firepower, with decreasing emphasis on the human dimension. As a result, it spends very little effort preparing for the kinds of engagements in which it overwhelmingly finds itself: As the Congressional Research Service pointed out in 1996, of the 234 occasions in which American force had been used abroad from 1798 to 1993, only five involved a formal declaration of war; more than 220 could best be described as small-scale contingencies."
Worse yet, Bush II, unlike any past president, has failed to include anything in his war plans but bombing. There is no provision for any other element, no OOTW at all, much less a post-war plan. By sharp contrast, in 1942, with World War II still raging and its end unforeseeable, FDR directed the Defense Department to incorporate post-war planning into its overall military strategy planning. To implement this, several Civil Affairs Training Schools were established, including the School for the Government of Occupied Areas. The 14th PSYOPS was founded in 1943. Thanks in large part to this effort and the US tight-knit cooperation with its allies, the aftermath of WWII -the most geographically consuming, vicious conflict in human history- was incredibly smooth, especially as compared to the aftermath of WWI. After WWI, with no coherent post-war planning in place, a desperate, hate-conducive environment in Germany was fostered that incubated Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. Post-war Iraq, alas, is far more reminiscent of what happened in post-WWI Germany.
US Peacekeepers Grounded at Home
Before Bush took office, planning for post-war scenarios (called 'operations other than war', or OOTW) was built into every war plan. OOTW were considered as carefully and seriously as war action. America was known as a country that had never invaded another without first being attacked, and one that left countries it was forced to fight with a speedy and humane reconstruction plan.
Bush has overturned this proud military tradition. He has not only invaded a nation that posed no imminent threat to the US, he has failed to plan for any scenario other than a welcoming, 'liberated' people. Worse, he has scorned, and encouraged his military leaders to scorn, peacekeeping operations.
At his disposal, Bush has unprecedented resources for peace -a highly trained force, thousands strong, of personnel trained in persuasion and peacekeeping: the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) batallions. Yet his actual use of this resource has, in reality, been inexcusably minimal. Instead of deploying these troops in adequate strength, Bush has treated the American public to a smokescreen of media hype -the dropping of pamphlets and food packets into Afghanistan and Iraq, the endlessly publicized kissing of PSYOPS officer Michael Rega, Jr. by a 'grateful Iraqi,' the much touted "Winning Hearts and Minds" scheme, etc. But fewer PSYOPS troops, whose specialty is diffusing conflict without overt force, have been deployed to Iraq, before, during or after the bombing campaign, than for any other comparable conflict involving the US in the history of PSYOPS. The press has covered the activities of the one fully mobilized batallion (the 303rd based in Pittsburgh so exhaustively that many otherwise well-informed Americans I know believe the 303rd is the only PSYOPS battalion in existence.
In reality, there are over a dozen PSYOPS battalions, comprising an active duty component, which accounts for about one-fourth of overall PSYOPS troop strength, and a reservist component, which accounts for nearly three-fourths. Yet just a few hundreds PSYOPS troops are known definitely to have been deployed. In an apparent effort to make it appear that he has utilized PSYOPS properly, Bush has called up several hundred well-trained reservist troops -then forced them into a limbo zone at Fort Bragg, NC (the primary command post for PSYOPS). Instead of being deployed or even used as a consulting resource, these men and women have been dumped into motel rooms at taxpayer expense, with nothing to do, nowhere to go, unable to return to their families or jobs. Some have now been there since October 2002, when Bush, in a show of mobilizing for war, called up thousands of troops across the country from every imaginable specialty.
Many of the members of PSYOPS battalions were told that being mobilized to Fort Bragg was mandatory. But once they had been processed and moved to North Carolina, they discovered that the October mobilizations for reservists were supposed to consist entirely of volunteers. Thus Bush not only appeared to have called up an adequate number of PSYOPS troops, he appeared to have received an amazing response from "volunteers." In short, he engineered not just the pretext for the war in the form of phony intelligence, but the wave of support from the US military in the form of a phony outpouring of volunteerism.
Worse, hundreds of PSYOPS reservists, and no doubt thousands of troops from other specialties, were recently informed that their "voluntary missions" had been extended indefinitely. Some reservists say they are attempting to take legal action, while others have appealed -apparently futilely thus far- to their Congress members. These soldiers are isolated. Their families are ignored by the Pentagon, while their Congress members appear disinterested in any problem that would require them to stand up to the Bush Reich. The mainstream media is also useless -even if anyone took enough time out from their Jessica Lynch-style fantasy coverage to look into these soldiers' plight, the repercussions could prove worse than the immediate problem. As of the second week of July, the Pentagon has threatened to retaliate heavily against any solider who dares to speak out against Pentagon policy to the press. Yet the press -in a true and just democracy- should be the one door to redress of wrongs that remains open, even when all others slam shut.
As it stands now, there is very little difference between the technical plight of US soldiers trapped without recourse at Fort Bragg or Baghdad, and that of US sailors who were kidnapped and pressed into servitude by the British navy in the 18th century -a practice Americans found so outrageous it was considered sufficient cause to fight the war of 1812. This is the depth to which the Bush administration has reduced the US military.
Why does this situation (thousands of non-deployed conflict-defusing PSYOPS troops) exist? Simple. Bush is not interested in "waging peace." As long as US soldiers are dying, Bush's friends at Halliburton, Bechtel and SAIC have the perfect excuse for not involving Iraqis in major reconstruction efforts and for stuffing oil and communications industry jobs with American personnel. As long as US soldiers are dying, Bush can continue to refuse to declare the war officially over -legally- and thus be called upon to abide by the Geneva Convention. As long as US soldiers are dying, Bush can continue to call himself a "war time president" and manipulate Congress, the media, and the American public accordingly. What Americans must realize and accept, however horrifying, is that George W. Bush wants and needs a steady stream of dead GIs. As for Iraqi civilians -forget it. This is not a humane administration -there has been evidence of this at every turn. As a sterling example, Condy Rice derided the 82nd Airborne for serving as a protective escort for Kosovar Serbian schoolchildren as a waste of resources. Bombs are a much better investment -ask any defense contractor.
The systematic misuse of covert warriors
Ever since the war in Vietnam, the US military has become increasingly dependent on high-tech firepower at the expense of other options. In the early days of the Vietnam conflict (before it could be classed as a full-blown war), PSYOPS teams and CIA personnel were on the ground, using brainpower rather than firepower to fight the incursion of the North Vietnamese communists. This strategy, which involves face-to-face communications as well as radio broadcasts and the training of local villagers in the art of guerilla warfare, may raise ethical eyebrows, but the death toll and environmental destruction associated with this strategy is, theoretically, just a tiny fraction of that inflicted by massive bombing operations. In Vietnam, this strategy was actually steadily gaining ground over the enemy with a minimized loss of life. But then LBJ and Congress, spurred by the political motivation to appear to be 'doing something decisive,' initiated intensive bombing campaigns. As one CIA officer once put it, "It is hard for the spoken word to compete with air raid sirens." After all, who in their right mind will believe you when you tell them you are a 'friend' while your troops are flattening their village with bombs?
Instead of being used as benign tools for avoiding bloodshed, the CIA and PSYOPS teams, from 1965 on, were increasingly used as tools of powerful individuals in the government, notably Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Bush, Sr., Richard Nixon, Donald Rumsfeld, and GW Bush, to further their own ends. These ends rarely coincided with the interests of the US -after all, how did the assassination of Chile's Allende or the overthrowing of Indonesia's Sukarno ultimately benefit anyone but the oil and mining industries? This abuse reached a first peak in the early 1970s, when Nixon organized his clandestine group known as "the Plumbers." In credit to the CIA, most of the officers approached to participate in this 'private activity' refused. The only people willing to join up were those of minimal ethics and/or maximal greed, such as G. Gordon Liddy.
Ronald Reagan also tapped the dregs of the Agency in his Iran Contra intrigues. During the Bosnia campaign, PSYOPS units were subverted to American newsrooms. A major scandal erupted when it was discovered that several PSYOPS officers had been deployed to the CNN newsroom to learn the operation of American media and to plant news stories. Just a few decades before, the CIA had similarly been misused by the government as a tool for infiltrating American newspapers through the institution of the 'Operation Mockingbird' program. Under Bush, the subversion of the CIA, PSYOPS and FBI has escalated. It is now clear that the White House pressured the CIA to turn up the 'intelligence' it needed to build a case for war against Iraq. But this may just be the tip of a dirty iceberg.
Rear Admiral Thomas Steffens, a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command, says the military has sought ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over areas where special operations are in progress. According to a 2000 article in Intelligenc Newsletter" by Rear Admiral Thomas Steffens (a psychological warfare expert in the Special Operations Command), the military has sought ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over areas where special operations are in progress. An unofficial strategy paper published by the US Naval War College in 1996 and written by an Army officer ("Military Operations in the CNN World: Using the Media as a Force Multiplier") urged military commanders to find ways to "leverage the vast resources of the fourth estate" for the purposes of "communicating the [mission's] objective and end state, boosting friendly morale, executing more effective psychological operations, playing a major role in deception of the enemy, and enhancing intelligence collection." Now, in 2003, the "cone of silence" and leveraging of "vast resources of the fourth estate" are targeted not at citizens in a third world combat zone, but at US citizens on America's own soil.
However, it must be emphasized that the majority of CIA, PSYOPS, and FBI personnel are not renegades on the take like Liddy. They may often be confused and conflicted (as many admit) due to the enormous pressure on them to maintain secrecy and to use deception as a major modus operandi. But most honestly believe their work is aimed at protection of US interests -and most probably do not consider those interests synonymous with corporate interests. If these highly trained personnel were used responsibly as the defensive, not offensive, forces they were intended to be, they would most certainly save, rather than cost, thousands of lives around the world on a regular basis. Instead, a succession of US presidents has seen its clandestine warriors as a pool of on-call spies, goons, and fall guys their personal use.
The supreme irony, of course, is that bombing campaigns, unless of hideous proportions, like the nuking of Hiroshima, are rarely effective in the near and/or long term. During WWII, the British, under constant bombing raids, adapted, went on with daily life and became even more hardened against their German foes. In Bosnia, the allied bombing campaign actually precipitated the commission of many of the war's worst atrocities by enraged Serbs. Yet despite all this evidence against firepower over brainpower, the US military, as international policy expert Michael Bhatia points out "is highly focused on preparing for conventional warfare, emphasizing the use of high-tech weapons and massive firepower, with decreasing emphasis on the human dimension. As a result, it spends very little effort preparing for the kinds of engagements in which it overwhelmingly finds itself: As the Congressional Research Service pointed out in 1996, of the 234 occasions in which American force had been used abroad from 1798 to 1993, only five involved a formal declaration of war; more than 220 could best be described as small-scale contingencies."
Worse yet, Bush II, unlike any past president, has failed to include anything in his war plans but bombing. There is no provision for any other element, no OOTW at all, much less a post-war plan. By sharp contrast, in 1942, with World War II still raging and its end unforeseeable, FDR directed the Defense Department to incorporate post-war planning into its overall military strategy planning. To implement this, several Civil Affairs Training Schools were established, including the School for the Government of Occupied Areas. The 14th PSYOPS was founded in 1943. Thanks in large part to this effort and the US tight-knit cooperation with its allies, the aftermath of WWII -the most geographically consuming, vicious conflict in human history- was incredibly smooth, especially as compared to the aftermath of WWI. After WWI, with no coherent post-war planning in place, a desperate, hate-conducive environment in Germany was fostered that incubated Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. Post-war Iraq, alas, is far more reminiscent of what happened in post-WWI Germany.