Petraeus
Fell for the Wrong Reason
by
Sheldon Richman
David
Petraeus has fallen — but not as he should have. Before being disgraced by an
extramarital affair, the retired four-star general and ex-CIA director should
have been shamed out of public life for his horrendous military record in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Are
we talking about the same David Petraeus who is said to have heroically saved
Iraq with the famous surge and then salvaged a floundering military effort in
Afghanistan?
That’s
the one. But those “accomplishments” are merely the products of sharp public
relations.
The
fact is that Petraeus presided over the brutal occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, complete with torture, terrifying night raids, and violent
sectarian cleansing. If Americans knew the truth — which the news media are
uninterested in disclosing because it detracts from their narrative — they
would not see heroism in David Petraeus. They would see the villainy of a man
who carries out the orders of his imperial superiors and the ruthlessness with
which the American empire treats whoever gets in its way. Alas, unfaithfulness
in his marriage is the least of Petraeus’s offenses.
Journalist
Eric
Margolis, who has vast experience covering the Middle East, notes that
Petraeus
and his fellow generals used every weapon in the US arsenal against Iraq’s
eleven resistance groups (deceptively misnamed “al-Qaida” by Washington),
including the mass ethnic cleansing of two million Sunni Iraqis, death squads,
torture, and brutal reprisals.…
Petraeus
was then sent to work his magic in Afghanistan before returning to Washington
to head CIA. There, the brainy general, who had a knack for self-promotion and
public relations, tried again to crush the Pashtun resistance by massive
bombardments, billions in high tech gear, reprisals that wiped out entire
villages, search and destroy missions.
What’s
to show for all this? A quagmire, still with high levels of violence, that the
U.S. military will be stuck in for at least another decade. Yes, President
Obama says the troops will be out in 2014, but that does not mean all of them
or that the entanglement will end then.
Another
eminent journalist, Gareth Porter of the Inter Press Service, has mined the
WikiLeaks revelations, which document that under Petraeus’s command, U.S.
forces were ordered not to investigate Iraqi-on-Iraqi killings and torture. Worse,
U.S. troops turned prisoners over to the Iraqis knowing that they would be
tortured.
“The
deeper significance of the order … is that it was part of a larger U.S.
strategy of exploiting Shi’a sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress
the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the U.S. war,” writes Porter. “The strategy [developed by Petraeus] involved the
deliberate deployment of Shi’a and Kurdish police commandos in areas of Sunni
insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as
the reports released by WikiLeaks show.”
This
was known as the El Salvador option: training and equipping death squads to
eradicate undesirables. This was the period when sectarian violence and Sunni
resistance to the U.S. occupation were at their height. Every day, large
numbers of tortured bodies were found on Baghdad streets as vengeful Shi’a
Muslims, backed by America and Iran, engaged in sectarian cleansing of the
city. Porter notes that the Bush-Cheney-Petraeus strategy was “a major
contributing factor to the rise of al-Qaeda’s influence in the Sunni areas. The
escalating Sunni-Shi’a violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare
of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians — mainly Sunnis —
were killed.”
As
Porter recounts, two years earlier the Civil Defense Corps in Sunni areas of
Iraq “essentially disappeared overnight during an insurgent offensive” and Petraeus’s
U.S. command turned to Shi’a and Kurdish police and military units to put down
the resistance. Soon the U.S. order not to intervene in the abuse of prisoners
was issued. “It was a clear signal that the U.S. command expected torture of
prisoners to be a central feature of Iraqi military and police operations
against Sunni insurgents,” Porter writes. From there the American force
established and trained sectarian paramilitary squads for the dirty work, the
first being the Wolf Brigade. “It did not take long for the Wolf Brigade to
acquire its reputation for torture of Sunni detainees,” Porter writes.
That
is David Petraeus’s legacy.
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