Eric Margolis

NO MORE MERCENARIES

MUNICH – Private armies have a very sinister reputation in Europe. Memories still linger of Germany’s post WWI army veterans, the`Stahlhelm,’ and Nazi Brownshirts, who battled Communists street toughs here in Munich and Berlin. Europeans remember Italy’s fascist Blackshirts and, most recently, Serb neo-fascist gangs like Arkan’s `Tigers’ and the `White Eagles’ who committed some of the worst atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Germany also remains haunted by folk memory of the hordes of blood-crazed mercenaries who turned much of this nation into a wasteland during the savage 30 Year’s War. The name of the great mercenary captain, Wallenstein, still resounds, and of those most feared mercenaries of all, the ferocious Swiss, who once terrorized Europe. Wrote Machiavelli: `where there is gold and blood, there are the Swiss.’ The Vatican’s Swiss Guard is a faint reminder of the `furia Helvetica.’

Small numbers of mercenaries have been used in many modern wars, from Vietnam to Central America. The most famed modern mercenary force is France’s tough Foreign Legion.

The rise of powerful mercenary armies within the United States, and their use in Iraq and Afghanistan, is an entirely new, deeply disturbing development.

Last weekend, mercenaries from the US firm `Blackwater’ gunned down 11 Iraqi civilians during an attack on a convoy they were guarding. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, ordered Balckwater’s thousands of swaggering mercenaries expelled from Iraq. But his order was quickly countermanded by US occupation authorities.

There are 180,000 to 200,000 US-paid mercenaries in Iraq – or `private contractors’ as Washington and the US media delicately call them. They actually outnumber the 169,000 US troops there. Britain pays for another 20,000. At least half are armed fighters, the rest support personnel and technicians. Without them, the US and Britain could not maintain their occupation of Iraq.

These private enterprise fighters, like the Renaissance’s Italian condotierri, German landsknecht, and Swiss pikemen, are lawless, answering to no authority but their employers. Democrats in the US Congress are rightly demanding these trigger-happy Rambos to be at least brought under American military law.

The US State Department now has its own little army in Iraq and Afghanistan of about 3,000 Blackwater gunmen who protect American officials and their local collaborators. Some reports say State has spent $678 million alone with Blackwater since 2003.

Afghanistan’s US-installed leader, Hamid Karzai, is surrounded at all times by 200 American bodyguards, his own people not being trusted to protect their president. Iraq’s US-installed leaders are similarly guarded by US mercenaries.

Nearly all Washington’s contracts for mercenaries are awarded without competitive bidding to firms close to the Republican Party. Blackwater’s owners are major contributors. Their 7,000- acre base in the southern United States is likely the world’s largest non-government military operation and a menacing creation straight out of the famous film, `Seven Days in May.’

This unprecedented use of mercenaries has masked the depths of US involvement in Iraq and clearly shows how little the occupying forces can rely on the locals, whom they supposedly `liberated.’ It has also allowed the US to sustain an imperial war that could never have been waged with conscripted American soldiers, as Vietnam clearly showed.

Vice President Dick Cheney took Vietnam’s lesson to heart by championing use of mercenaries for nasty foreign wars. But democracies should have no business unleashing armies of hired gunmen on the world.

Worse, these private armies hardwired to the Republican Party’s far right are a grave and intolerable danger to the American Republic. Congress should outlaw them absolutely. The great Roman Republic held mandatory military service by all citizens was the basis of democracy, while professional armies were a grave menace.

How ironic that colonial America, which rose up in arms in response to the British crown’s use of brutal German mercenaries, is today resorting to the same tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan. Europe wants no more of private armies. Americans have yet to learn this painful lesson.

COPYRIGHT - ERIC S. MARGOLIS - 2007

NOTE: Check out Eric Margolis column in the Sunday Times of London website at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2512247.ece

The Soviet Master Plan to Defeat NATO

VIENNA – Memories of past glories still haunt this majestic imperial capitol of the now sadly vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire.

There are also fresher memories of the postwar era when the Soviets shared control of Vienna with Britain, France and the United States. A large, freshly gilded Soviet war memorial still looms over the city.

The old, sinister of days spying, kidnapping and black marketeering were captured here by Carol Reed’s magnificent film, `the Third Man,’ starring Orsen Wells as the charming thug, Harry Lime. My father used to produce plays with Wells, and the actor often regaled us with amusing tales about making this film in the ruins on Vienna under the baleful eyes of the KGB. Half a century later, Well’s presence still haunts Vienna. I half imagine seeing him in the twilight, dressed in a long, black great coat and fedora, slipping around a corner into the dusk.

Vienna also has another fascinating secret. Back in the 1960’s, at the height of the Cold War, I was studying international law at a Swiss University. A group of Swiss Army officers in mufti (civilian dress) were arrested by Austria for spying on its modest fortifications on its Czech border.
Many jokes about `chocolate spies’ were made at the time over this seeming trivial incident. But the Swiss, as always, were deadly serious.

The Swiss officers were monitoring Austria’s eastern defenses against the Soviet Warsaw Pact because their intelligence service had uncovered frightfully alarming news. This information still remains a Swiss state secret, but thanks to my contacts with the Swiss military, I can reveal it for the first time.

NATO’s defenses were concentrated on the North German Plain – the hundreds of miles of flat terrain running from the Bavarian Alps up to the North Sea and supplied by the vast Belgian port complex of Antwerp. This region, and the Fulda Gap to the south, were the Warsaw Pact’s expected invasion route into Western Europe. US, German, British, Canadian, Dutch and Belgian troops were massed there, waiting an attack.

However, the Soviet General Staff had developed a brilliant plan to outflank the bulk of NATO forces
in north Germany. It was a variant of the pre-World War I German Schlieffen Plan. The Soviet version called for a major deception and pinning attacks in the north, while a mass strike force of at least 60 armored and mechanized divisions would sweep west from Czechoslovakia into neutral Austria, cross it, and then erupt into eastern Switzerland.

The Red Army would have to fight its way through the Swiss fortress zone at Sargans, then drive west on an axis Zurich-Bern-Neuchatel-Lausanne-Geneva. From Geneva, the Soviet blitz would break out into France’s Rhone Valley near Grenoble and Lyon, swing northwest along the Saone River and envelop Paris from the south and west.

This vast enveloping attack, whose northern flank would be in large part protected by the Alps and Vosges, would come up behind NATO forces deployed much further east. A Soviet column would take Antwerp and Rotterdam, thus cutting of the main supply lines of US, British, and Canadian forces, and attacking them from the rear.

Had this plan worked, it would have been more successful than the 1914 Schlieffen Plan and as great a triumph as Germany’s 1940 campaign against France. Like Von Manstein’s and Guderian’s audacious attack through the Ardennes forest in May, 1940, a Soviet offensive through Austria and Switzerland would have struck the least expected spot - NATO’s underbelly.

Austria lay naked, but Switzerland was ready. Its 600,000 tough soldiers prepared to fight the Red Army from their mountain fortress redoubts at Sargans, Gothard and St Maurice in the Valais. The Swiss would have seriously delayed Soviet attacks, perhaps giving NATO time, were it fleet enough, to withdraw its northern forces eastward, and pull back troops to defend the strategic Rhone Valley. But it would have been a very, very close run thing.
30 MARGOLIS

DAMN, IT’S NAM – AGAIN!

I recently read about a condition psychiatrists call `jamais vu.’ That’s where one sees something very familiar, but the brain cannot identify it. It’s the opposite of `déjà vu.’

Both the White House and US military seemed gripped by `jamais vu.’ Many of the same political and military mistakes the United States made in the Vietnam War are being repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. But neither the White House, Pentagon, nor US field commanders seem to understand they are repeating errors from the past.

Today’s much ballyhooed testimony to Congress by Gen. David Petreaus, commander of US forces in Iraq, will report the `progress’ his troops’ are making in Iraq as part of the so-called `Surge’ strategy. This lame idea, worthy of World War I thinking, was developed by one of America’s dimmer military minds, retired general Jack Keene, and sold to President George Bush.

Petreaus will tell Congress that despite serious problems, including Iraq’s useless government, the US still needs to keep most of the current 170,000 US troops in Iraq, and hint at some minor, brigade-sized future troop reductions in the future. `There’s light at the end of the Iraq tunnel,’ will be Petreaus’ message.

The report will speak of important security successes in Baghdad and restive Anbar Province, where the US occupation has been bribing local sheiks with very large amounts of cash. One can rent loyalty, but never buy it.

Gen. Petreaus is a very smart, well respected commander, but one suspects his report will unfortunately be the latest example of `jamais vu’ syndrome. And one heartily wishes that the general had the courage to stand up and tell Congress that his men were being killed and wounded in a war that has already been lost. That won’t happen because US officers are taught to be relentlessly optimistic and toe the political party line.

American commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan keep proudly reporting how their men have occupied villages or towns, killed scores of `suspected terrorists’(usually thanks to air attack), and forced the enemy to flee. They issue glowing reports about the numbers of Baghdad neighborhoods they have pacified. They do not seem to understand they are fighting a fluid guerrilla war in which territory and body counts mean very little.

Mao Zedong perfectly described the principles of such guerilla war: "When the enemy advances, withdraw; when he stops, harass; when he tires, strike; when he retreats, pursue."


The `successes’ being reported from Iraq and Afghanistan are illusory. We heard exactly the same story during the Vietnam War, when US military spokesmen trumpeted glowing daily reports about enemy body counts, strategic hamlets created, Vietcong tunnels blown up, hearts and minds won over, and smiling children waving little American flags. While the US was `winning’ all these little daily battles, Communists were winning the war.

Institutional memory rarely exceeds ten years. Most of Vietnam’s bitter lessons have been totally forgotten. Guerilla wars are fought not for territory but for control of civilian populations. Recent polls show that 80% of Iraqis want US forces out.

Once again, US soldiers Iraq and Afghanistan have been sent into no-win wars by their poorly informed, badly advised civilian masters, and ordered to keep coming up with rosy progress reports, then blamed when these pointless wars are lost.

I have covered numerous guerilla wars in Africa, Central America and Asia in my time and have never seen western powers win a single one. Yet Americans keep forgetting this hard lesson, and the great Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s warning after the bloody Korean War, `never fight a land war in Asia.’

Petreaus’s testimony is far more about US domestic politics than war in Iraq. It is a key weapon in the game of political chicken President George Bush is playing with the Democratic-controlled Congress, which wants to withdraw US forces from Iraq in accordance with the wishes of a majority of Americans.

But Bush appears determined to keep the war going until his term expires so as to avoid blame for defeat in Iraq. Congress is trying to lay all the blame for the war on Bush, get him to admit defeat, and evade its own shameful role in authorizing the trumped-up Iraq War.

But Congress is in a jam. If US troops do withdraw, Iraq may fall into even worse chaos than it now suffers – which the next president, who polls suggest will be a Democrat - will inherit. In an election year, Republicans will blast Democrats as `defeatists’ for `cutting and running’ and `losing Iraq.’ That’s why worried leading Democrats are now backing off calls for total withdrawal and mumbling about partial pullbacks and `training Iraqi forces.’

Meanwhile, the administration keeps up the pretense there is a functioning government in Baghdad. Washington refuses to admit Iraq has no real national government or army, and is an anarchic stew of competing Shia militias, tribal chiefs, death squads, a score of Sunni resistance groups, and Kurdish separatists who want their own independent state.

Iran is becoming the real power in eastern Iraq, and particularly so now that British troops are pulling out of the Basra region. Iran’s intelligence agency already pretty much controls one of the two main Shia parties and its militia, the Badr Brigades.

The US occupation is largely responsible for unleashing Shia ethnic cleansing that has created four million Iraqi refugees. By using Shia death squads and militias to attack Sunni resistance forces, Washington poured gasoline on Iraq’s ethnic fires.

History does not repeat itself, but men’s mistakes and follies do. The latest somber example is Iraq, where our memory of Vietnam is…`jamais vu.’


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

TURKEY ENTERS THE 21ST CENTURY

The scowling generals commanding Turkey’s 515,000-man armed forces – NATO’s second largest – staged a shocking act of insubordination and anti-democratic behavior last week. They refused to attend the inauguration of their nation’s just elected president, and new commander-in-chief, Abdullah Gul.

President Gul was the widely-admired former foreign minister of Turkey’s Justice and Welfare Party, better known by its Turkish initials, AK, which recently won yet another decisive victory in national elections.

Just before Gul was sworn in, Turkey’s powerful Chief of Staff, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, thundered that `centers of evil’ threatened secularism in Turkey - a brazen warning the generals might overthrow the government for the fifth time since 1960.

If there was ever a moment for the US and NATO to show support for Turkey’s new democratic government and tell the generals to go back to their barracks and polish their medals, it was this week.

But aside from a few peeps of tepid support from mid-level western officials for Turkey’s new president, the US and NATO remained silent. This was a major mistake.

The generals had good reason to be upset. An oligarchy made up of the military, its `secularist’ allies, and a shadowy `deep government’ of spooks has ruled Turkey for the last 84 years behind a façade of parliamentary government. This westernized elite includes officers, industrialists, judges, academics, media owners, bureaucrats, and the urban upper class which looks down on all expressions of Islam as anti-modern. Secularists have held power since modern Turkey was created in the 1920’s as a corporate state by army commander Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk, who detested religion and saw Islam as the principal reason for the backwardness of the former Ottoman Empire.

Last month’s electoral landslide by the Welfare and Justice Party, which has mildly Islamic roots, proved a watershed for Turkey. Secularists, who had been blocking Gul’s from the presidency, got only 20% of the vote. Turkey’s elite has long tried to impose western culture and values on Turkey’s conservative, deeply religious farmers and recent urban newcomers who make up 70% of the population.

Claims by the secularists AK would impose Iranian -style Islamic government on Turkey were rejected by a majority of voters. What leading secularists really feared was that AK might launch investigations of their sweetheart arms and business deals, and links to the `deep government.’

AK’s victory likely means the beginning of the end of the cult of `Kemalism’ and Turkey’s role, to paraphrase Voltaire’s description of Prussia, as `an army disguised as a nation.’ Worshiping a strongman who died in 1938, and making a religion of his polices, is outdated behavior for an important nation entering the 21st Century.

In recent years, AK, led by PM Recep Erdogan, proved itself Turkey’s most progressive, popular party since World War II. Under Erdogan, AK made important advances in human rights and justice, improved relations with the restive Kurdish minority, fought corruption, and stabilized Turkey’s chronically chaotic finances.

In the west, Islamic parties conjure up lurid images of terrorism, beheadings and veiled women. But in the Muslim World, where most governments are incompetent, uncaring, and corrupt, Islamic parties are associated with providing basic social services, honest courts, and fighting corruption.

Turkey’s AK has combined these core Islamic values of good government, and the best western practices, while avoiding imposing any religious dogmas. AK has also harmonized Turkey’s legal system with that of the world’s leader of human rights, the European Union.

The Islamist `lite’ AK has championed Turkey’s restructuring into a modern nation and promoted joining the EU while, ironically, the reactionary westernized secularist elite and military have mostly opposed it, fearing EU entry would threaten their long-protected political and economic privileges. Chief among them was control of the presidency, which names army and security commanders, judges, senior civil servants and even religious leaders.

Washington keeps claiming it seeks to nurture genuine democracy in the Muslim World. Turkey’s AK Party is precisely the kind of moderate, sensible, capable government the US should be strongly supporting. Unfortunately, the terms `Islamic’ and `Islamist’ have been so demonized by Washington it cannot deal with even moderate Muslims, like AK, who in many ways resemble Europe’s Christian Democrats.

The US and other NATO nations should have sent their chiefs of staff to Turkey to offer a salute and congratulations to President Gul, and to put Turkey’s blustering dinosaur generals in their place.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

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