The New Counterinsurgency (Page 2)

One would think that past experiences with death squads indirectly supported by the United States, as in El Salvador in the 1980s, or the recent exposure of abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan's Bagram facility and Guantánamo, would justify such worries about complicity. But Sewall defends Harvard's collaboration through a pro-military revisionist argument. She says, "Military annals today tally that effort [the war in El Salvador] as a success, but others cannot get past the shame of America's indirect role in fostering death squads." Can she mean that the Pentagon's self-serving narrative of the Central American wars is correct, and that critics of a conflict in which 75,000 Salvadorans died--the equivalent of more than 4 million Americans--most of them at the hands of US-trained and -equipped security forces, including death squads, simply need to "get past" being squeamish about the methods? Instead of churning out self-deluding platitudes about civilizing the military, Harvard would do well to worry more about how collaboration with the Pentagon impairs the critical independent role of intellectuals.

The most fitting metaphor for Iraq today might be that of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. The effect of the "gated communities" and Kit Carson Scouts--indeed, the effect of much of the US occupation since 2003--has been to grind native populations into a state of anarchic fragmentation, with the vacuum filled by multiple sectarian militias. Consider the following evidence:

§ A bombshell Pentagon report in September recommends "scrapping" the sectarian Iraqi police force and starting over.

§ According to a July Los Angeles Times analysis, the current Interior Ministry, heavily funded and advised by Americans, is run by loyalists of the Shiite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and is responsible for secret prisons and torture. An average of one to two employees are killed each week, with Sunnis now "almost entirely purged from the ministry."

§ The prestigious Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group noted last year that the Iraqi police "routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians."

§ The White House's own July benchmarks report noted "evidence of sectarian bias in the appointment of senior military and police commanders" as well as "target lists emanating from the Office of the Commander in Chief that bypassed operational commanders and directed lower-level intelligence officers to make arrests, primarily of Sunnis."

§ According to the New York Times, as of the end of 2005, in Baghdad there were eight to ten secret prisons operated by militia units that reported directly to the Interior Minister.

§ BBC television reporter Deborah Davies showed footage of torture and ethnic cleansing against Sunni civilians in late 2006, reporting that "it's all happening under the eyes of US commanders who seem unwilling or unable to intervene."

§ The United Nations has accused the Iraqi government of failing to address allegations of torture inflicted on the several thousand new detainees rounded up during the current Baghdad security plan.

§ According to the US Government Accountability Office, since 2004 190,000 US-made AK-47s have gone missing, with many thought to be in the hands of various Iraqi militias.

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