Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [17]
Post–Cold War
Famously, the American defeat in Vietnam turned the US military away from the study of counterinsurgency, though the methods of irregular warfare remained part of the instruction for US proxy forces in El Salvador, the Philippines, Columbia and elsewhere. Counterinsurgency doctrine made a return after US Army Rangers got into trouble in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, during a botched raid on the compound of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. After a Blackhawk helicopter was shot down in the city, a seat-of-the pants rescue mission eventually shot its way into, then back out of, the city but not without considerable loss of life—particularly for the Somali militiamen, eight to thirteen hundred of whom were killed—and a spectacular humiliation for the US Army.31
After that, the Pentagon began to think more seriously about how to fight irregulars in cities and failed states. Soon the RAND Corporation put out a study called “the urbanization of insurgency,” and a December 1997 National Defense Panel review “castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted combat in the near impassable, maze-like streets of povertystricken Third World cities. As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under realistic third-world conditions.”32
In Iraq, I saw the new doctrine playing out in the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah, Summara, and Baquba. During one firefight, as I hid behind a parked car, my mind drifted back to the war game in Oakland. The shootout in Baghdad encapsulated the whole war—confusing and labor intensive, overly and dysfunctionally technological, and awkwardly urban. The US troops had more firepower than they could use, and they didn’t even know exactly where or who the enemy was. Civilians hid in every corner as bullets hissed past.
Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism makes clear the links between counterinsurgency in Iraq and its antecedents in Central America. Grandin quotes an American counterinsurgency expert who describes the ferocity of US-funded and -trained forces in Central America as “going primitive.” As Grandin explains, “With the United States failing to defeat the [Iraq] rebels on its own, the Pentagon came to debate the ‘Salvadorian option,’ that is the use of local paramilitary forces otherwise known as death squads, to do the kind of dirty work that it was either unwilling or unable to do. It turned to men like James Steele, who in the 1980s led the Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with Oliver North to run weapons and supplies to the Nicaraguan Contras.”33
The Shia death squads of the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are the result. Peter Maas of the New York Times Magazine tagged along with Steele and described the situation:
Looking through the doors, I saw about 100 detainees squatting on the floor, hands bound behind their backs; most were blindfolded. To my right, outside the doors, a leather-jacketed security official was slapping and kicking a detainee who was sitting on the ground. . . . A few minutes after the interview started, a man began screaming in the main hall, drowning out the Saudi’s voice. “Allah!” he shouted. “Allah! Allah!” It was not an ecstatic cry; it was chilling, like the screams of a madman, or of someone being driven mad. “Allah!” he yelled again and again. The shouts were too loud to ignore. Steele left the room to find out what was happening. By the time he returned, the shouts had ceased. But soon, through the window behind me, I could hear the sounds of someone vomiting, coming from an area where other detainees were being held, at the side of the building.34
Maas concluded his article with a lapidary summation: “In El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Turkey, Algeria and other crucibles of insurgency and counterinsurgency, the battles went