Seymour Hersh: Iraq 'Moving Towards Open Civil War'

[Jack Rabbit]

Address by Seymour Hersh at the University of Illinois at Urbana
Delivered Tuesday evening, May 10
Broadcast on Democracy Now! Wednesday May 11
Interview conducted by Amy Goodman dated Wednesday May 11

Iraq "Moving Towards Open Civil War"
By Seymour Hersh

(A)fter I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me, and – was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some general rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units -- soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.'s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they're called in as an insurgent kill. It's a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I'm sure it's briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, “128 Vietcong killed.” And so you have that pattern again. You know, ask me why I didn't do this story. Because I didn't think the kids did murder. I think it was another day in the war. And even to write about it in a professional way would name names and all that.

In any case, the paper also says -- this is the last one of these things that I found great interest -- that the Lummi tribe, one of the members – it’s a major tribe in the Sunni heartland of Baghdad, the four provinces that Saddam -- the center post of the resistance, the Lummi tribe probably had something to do with turning in Saddam. He had turned on some of those people. Anyway, the new Defense Minister is a Sunni, from the tribe, and he says he's going to continue the policies of Mr. Allawi, the former Defense Minister, which is what? What's the defense policies of Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister? Well, basically, what we have done since -- in the last year, is we have recreated the Iraqi Mukhabarat. This is the heavy-hitting secret police that Saddam ran. We have gone in and recreated many of the members, put them through a little acid test, made them vow that their allegiance – to what? – I guess, to America, or they're no longer Saddamites. In any case, this is our main force right now. This is the force that Allawi controls. This is a force, the former, you know, whatever the guys, whatever you want to call them, the former roughest guys that Saddam had are now working for us. They're our most prominent security force. And we have had really an amazing spectacle of the Secretary Of Defense, Rumsfeld, making at least two trips in the last five months, I think it’s three, but I know of two, I think it was three, though -- going in and basically -- once before the election was announced, and two more trips -- basically pleading on the inside for the two major factions, the Kurds and the Shia, I'm assuming some knowledge of -- I hope I'm not -- Iraq? -- you know, the country? and there's -- anyway, I don't want to kid you. But we're negotiating -- obviously the whole point of the election was to keep Allawi in play so that he could serve as a bridge, our man, between the Kurds and the Shia. And what he delivers is, of course, is the Mukhabarat.

And here you have Rumsfeld. We went to war to get rid of Saddam and all of that. Here you have Rumsfeld going at least twice in the last four months or so to beg, to beg for Allawi to stay in, and beg basically for the former Mukhabarat security forces to continue doing what they do, terrorizing. It was an amazing piece in The New York Times Magazine. I mean, amazing in its inability to go beyond the immediacy of what they were reporting about one of these militias that are former Mukhabarat, former Saddam people, that are now working for us, killing, (quote, unquote), “insurgents,” which means they're basically -- I don't know, when do you describe what's going on as a civil war? I don't know. When is somebody going to say that? But if it's not a civil war, it's very close. And I don't know -- I can’t see an end game. I'll give you a ticket out.

From the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: The news of this Operation Matador that is taking place right now, US forces carrying it out, one of the largest post-Saddam military operations in Iraq, the US admitting it’s facing fierce resistance. What is the significance of this? When do casualties count, when don't they?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, they're not counting now. American casualties are discounted in the newspapers. We have had an awful lot of people, more than a dozen die in the last few days alone in Iraq. American casualties are back up. And it's not a major story. Once in a while it gets to be a story. And so, they put out -- they do their own sort of accounting. The one way they balance the bad news is they have raids. And we suddenly show us on the offensive. And part of it is what the information -- it's an operation, it's a public relations. It's a strategic deception in a way. I’m not suggesting the raids are not there. I’m not suggesting they may even be finding people. God knows who they find. But clearly, one reason they're being emphasized is to detract from what's going on, which is a steady increase in the insurgency and the resistance.

And what happened is after the election of January 30, the elections so widely hailed by this President and the government, which as we now know has had very little consequence on the reality of what's going on on the ground, as we move towards an open civil war there, but after the election, there were orders put out to change the reporting requirements on incidents. In other words, you had to have a serious American fatality or casualty, not necessarily death, but a serious incident, to get reported. So just a mine going off and somebody being lightly wounded wouldn't get reported. So the numbers went down right away, suggesting that somehow the election had worked.

Read more.

[mikehiggins]

1. I wonder when Bush will realize he's been played by Iran from the

first.

Maybe he already has, or some of those around him have.

As our good buddy Chalabi comes to the fore in the new Iraq, doesn't anyone think there might be a four in there somewhere when you start adding two and two?

What a world of wonder we live in.

[wisteria]

2. Thanks for posting. This is a good read. n/t

[underpants]

3. I heard some of that yesterday morning

Printing now for later reading.

I loved the Trotskyite part.

[Jack Rabbit]

6. I think of Bush as more of a Stalinist or even a divine-right monarch

The idea isn't so much permanent revolution but permanent power.

Bush's view of the world is not democratic. He does not see himself as a man of the people chosen by them to be a first among equals, but rather a shepherd anointed by God to oversee a flock that cannot possibly understand the ways of cosmos. A flock of sheep can't choose their shepherd.

The difference is that Bush knows he cannot be president for the rest of his life, while Stalin knew he could be in power until death and fellows like Louis XIV knew they were supposed to be. So Bush has to concentrate power in a small ruling elite. Hersh alludes to this aspect of the Bush regime when he talks of Bush a man "who can't be reached by us." Bush doesn't need to talk to us. He is the ruler and he speaks to a higher authority than the people whom he rules. Bush may think of this authority as God, as did the Stuarts, the Bourbons and the Romanovs. Many of us try to come up with a more down-to-earth term than God for the authority to which Bush listens, but whatever it is it is abstract and omnipresent.

While Bush knows he must depart by January 20, 2009, he wants to make sure he is succeeded by another shepherd anointed by God. Rigged elections and government-sponsored propaganda (aided by a compliant mainstream media) are perfectly acceptable to him. This assures that he remains in power for now and will assure that right wing Republicans, who talk to God, will remain in power indefinitely. This is how one does God's will.

It might be noted in this discussion that Stalin, before he became a revolutionary, studied in a seminary. There was something messianic about his world view and his view of his place in it. While he was no intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, as Lenin was, Stalin was an elitist. It's not hard for a literate man to feel elite in a nation where 97% of the population can't read or write. Stalin simply ceased to call the abstract force that governed the cosmos God and started calling it history instead, viewing history as deterministic, impersonal force, no less mysterious than a monastic view of God. Nevertheless, he was the one chosen by history to shepherd his flock and to pass his authority to a line of similarly anointed rulers to the end of time.

[underpants]

8. Great post

That out to be a damned thread.

[Boo Boo]

4. Well...

That was rather depressing!

:banghead:

[KoKo]

5. Hersh sounds pretty distressed reading this.

His answers are kind of jumbled like he's fighting to hold back some things he wants to say.

Thanks for posting. It's an interesting but disturbing read, because he sounds so distraut.

[Jack Rabbit]

7. My impression is that Hersh was being a good journalist

Hersh quite naturally speculates based on what he knows, but, as a journalist, feels his job is to report facts, not speculate. It's one thing to draw clear deductions from what is known and has been proved, but once a journalist tries to assert a mere possibility as an established fact, then he has entered into muddy waters. Hersh was trying to stay out of those waters.

It is difficult to stay out of those waters because the Bush regime is so secretive. There's an awful lot we don't know for certain, which is the way Bush and his aides like it.