Petraeus and the Shiite Genocide

This is Part 2 of a four-part series, “How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success.” Part One: “How the Myth Began – Petraeus in Mosul” was published November 27, 2012.

How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned
4 December, 2012 – By Gareth Porter – Truthout

Introduction

The discovery of his affair with Paula Broadwell has ended David Petraeus’ career, but the mythology of Petraeus as the greatest US military leader since Eisenhower for having engineered turnarounds in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lives on.

A closer examination of his role in those wars reveals a very different picture, however.

As this four-part series shows, Petraeus represents a new type of military commander, whose primary strength lay neither in strategy nor in command of combat, but in the strategic manipulation of information to maintain domestic political support for counterinsurgency wars of choice, while at the time enhancing his own reputation.

The series shows how Petraeus was engaged from the beginning of the Iraq war in creating a myth about himself as a commander with unique ability to defeat insurgents, that he had failed in his first two commands in Iraq and that he did not believe that war was winnable.

But the account also shows that Petraeus seems to have eventually begun to believe his own myth of himself as successful counterinsurgency strategist. The shift from deception of others to self-deception is the dominant theme of his command of the war in Afghanistan.

Sectarian Militias and “Frago 242”

In April 2004, the US-supported Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units, recruited from Sunni communities, collapsed in the face of insurgent offensive, shrinking overnight by more than 50 percent – including 82 percent of the troops in the Sunni stronghold of western Iraq. The US military and the Bush administration suddenly realized that they could not rely on the Sunni troops and police to fight the Sunni insurgency.

That event propelled David Petraeus into a new level of responsibility. He was given a new command to oversee the creation of a new Iraqi military and police force, along with his third star. Petraeus told Newsweek that he had met with President George W. Bush and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and they had told him, “Whatever you need, you’ve got it.”

The decision to name Petraeus commander of Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) was accompanied by another momentous decision: the Defense Department abandoned its previous public policy of requiring that sectarian militias disband – a policy it had not actually carried out. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 19, 2004, Wolfowitz said, “The approach to those militias is to try over time to integrate them into new Iraqi security forces.”

The militias in question were both Shi’a and Kurdish, and the idea of using them to fight Sunni insurgents raised the specter of sectarian and ethnic warfare. But that was consistent with the larger strategy of Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy: a de facto alliance with the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its military arm, the Badr Organization.

Their friend Ahmad Chalabi, head of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress who was aligned with SCIRI and Badr, had promised them that that a Shi’a government would normalize relations with Israel. Along with the rest of the neoconservative elite, Wolfowitz and Feith refused to believe Chalabi’s allies intended to pursue a sectarian Shi’a political agenda, with support and direction from Iran.

A third consequential Bush decision followed the Petraeus command decision and the new reliance on Shi’a troops: an order to US commanders not to interfere, in effect, with the torture of prisoners by Iraqi security forces. On June 26, 2004, the US military command in Baghdad issued “Frago [fragmentary order] 242,” regarding the handling of incidents of detainee abuse by Iraqi troops and police. The order said, “Only an initial report will be made for apparent LOAC [Law of Armed Conflict Violations] … not involving US personnel. No further investigation will be required unless direct by higher HQ.”

That order, issued a few weeks after Petraeus had set up the new training command, opened the door for the use by newly formed Iraqi security forces of brutal interrogation techniques on suspected insurgents. It came shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandal over mistreatment of Iraqi detainees by US troops had blown up in April, raising serious questions about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s previous approval of the use of torture by the US military to obtain intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency from detainees. …more