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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.gateway2russia.com/st/art_184941.php 23 December 2003 11:59 The war Against Terror: Task Force 121`s Big CatchSaddam Hussein's arrest will only make the underground guerilla war in Iraq worse. Now free from association with the despised despot, resistance to American occupation will attract many new combatants. Shamsudin Mamayev The ninth day of the intense search around Saddam Hussein's native area near the town of Tikrit ended in success. On December 12th, Task Force 121 captured a former officer of Saddam's security forces, whom military reconnaissance units from the 4th Infantry Division deployed in that area had been seeking since July. The next day, this officer informed his interrogators that perhaps the former Iraqi dictator was hiding in the village of al-Dawr, twenty kilometers south of Tikrit. When the helicopters, jeeps, and armored vehicles with six hundred soldiers under the command of Colonel James Hickey and the task force arrived on the scene, they focused in particular on two locations, the property of the former Iraqi dictator's cook and his brother, a taxi driver who once worked as Saddam's chauffeur. A careful search found nothing. Hickey ordered his men to go other the entire surrounding area with a fine-toothed comb. One soldier noticed a prayer rug lying on the ground in the middle of yard of a dirty, neglected farm. A cord stuck out from under the rug. Under the rug, soldiers discovered a polystyrene lid with two handles. Under the lid was a narrow shaft, two and a half meters deep. The soldiers were about to toss a grenade into the hole when two uplifted arms appeared. The soldiers grabbed them good-naturedly and dragged a bedraggled, bearded man out of the hole. "I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am ready to negotiate," the man said, addressing the soldiers in broken English. That was December 14th. The Pentagon and Ramadan Last month proved the most difficult so far for American troops in Iraq. In the four weeks of the holy month of Ramadan, attacks took the lives of more than eighty soldiers, while in the seven weeks of war against the Iraqi Army in March and April, the Americans lost only 114. Moreover, Ramadan cost two dozen Spanish police officers their lives, as well as several Japanese diplomats and Korean engineers. President Bush's rating back home fell below 50% for the first time. The main organizer of the war in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, experienced the dangers of growing Iraqi resistance directly. Attacks in Tikrit and Baghdad plainly demonstrated to the Americans that the Iraqi combatants were not only coordinating their operations, but also working together with Al-Qaida, which according to the Pentagon is actively bringing fighters from Afghanistan to Iraq. The Americans in turn showed that they could learn from their mistakes. In November, the head of US Central Command in the region, General John Abizaid signed an order to create a special division, Task Force 121. The aim of this division was to secretly search for and arrest or eliminate Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and others on the Americans' "most wanted" list. Not much is known about this division. It is headed by an air force brigadier general whose name, as well as the task force's structure and powers, are classified. 121 is part of the army, air force, and navy's elite special forces, and it can request the assistance of any part of the American military in its operations. The entire US secret service provides intelligence to 121. Military analysts spent the entire summer drawing diagrams and studying the family and tribal ties between the clans of Tikrit which might lead to Saddam Hussein. "As we conducted raids and arrested individuals, we also collected information about families close to Saddam. We got the ultimate information we needed from one such individual." In late November at the north of the Sunni Triangle, large-scale clean up operations of Tikrit clans began. The strategy Major-General Odierno and 121 used in the search proved to be the right one. The Iraqi dictator was only able to trust his clan and could only hide in his native area. The same old outlook Capturing Saddam was indeed a major accomplishment for the Americans and the coalition in the war against terror. However, it does not mean the underground guerilla war in Iraq is over. On the contrary, resistance will only grow as it is now free any association with Hussein. The arrest has removed all moral barriers for those who fought Saddam and who are now fighting the Americans. Or so stated Iraqi police colonel Ibrahim Mutlak after the arrest. In the first days after Hussein's arrest, at least 23 Iraqi police died in a suicide bomber attack, and dozens of Iraqi civilians died as the result of a car bombing in downtown Baghdad. And though Kurdistan, the Shiite south, and even a significant portion of Baghdad celebrated the arrest of the former dictator, almost all the large cities of the Sunni Triangle to the north and west of Baghdad held protests. In early December, analyst Anthony Cordesman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies published his findings on the "asymmetrical war" in Iraq between the US and the Iraqi/Islamic resistance, stating that "neither side can achieve its original strategic goals. This forces them to limit their goals and makes real victory impossible in terms of grand strategy. The US will be forced to withdraw long before political, economic, and energy issues have come into balance." This means that the Americans will not succeed in establishing a modern democracy or a market economy in Iraq. "This country has years, if not decades, of instability ahead of it." Consequently, Iraq will not become a "beacon of democracy" in the Middle East in the near future, nor will the US "be able to win the hearts, minds, and good will" of the Iraqis or the Arabs. America will not be able to accomplish its strategic goal of reducing the threat of terrorism, if only because there is no evidence that this threat ever existed: "Iraq in the best case scenario played only a peripheral role in terrorism and if the US succeeded in something, it was in further enraging Arabs and Islamic fundamentalists." How to rebuilt Iraq The day after the arrest of Saddam, the UN Security Council held a scheduled meeting on Iraq in order to examine the Governing Council's timetable for the transfer of power to an Iraqi national government by the end of June 2004. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari submitted the timetable to the Security Council and made an impassioned speech against UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who evacuated almost all UN workers from Baghdad after elections in October. The UN offices responsible for Iraq reopened in Cyprus and Jordan. "It's impossible to organize effective assistance and consultation from Cyprus or Jordan," stated Zebari. "The UN failed as an organization to help rescue Iraqis from the murderous tyranny that lasted for 35 years. The UN must not fail the Iraqi people again." He suggested that Annan immediately return UN workers to Iraqi "under the protection of the Iraqi Ministry of Internal Affairs." This protection means little today. Observers immediately supposed that Washington had prompted Zebari's statement, as the US has long had its scores to settle with both the UN and its Secretary General. The US hopes that Saddam's arrest will encourage the Security Council to rally around America's plans to transform Iraq. President Bush made as much clear at the press conference announcing the arrest of the former dictator. He furthermore refused once again to say when the occupation of Iraq would end and refused to change his plans in light of European and Russian demands to put the situation in Iraq under international control. The Security Council limited its reaction to a brief statement welcoming the Saddam's arrest. "We are in general speaking about a symbolic act. If coalition members intend to act independently, they can hardly expect support and understanding from other nations," stated Russian deputy foreign minister Yuri Fedotov. Washington's most recent "independent" action was to keep all countries that opposed the war in Iraq from participating in bidding for contracts to reconstruct the country. Moscow and Europe reacted immediately. Sergei Ivanov, the Russian Defense Minister, announced that Russia was not willing to forgive Iraq's multimillion-dollar debt. Paris and Berlin stated their intentions to file a complaint with the WTO, as WTO rules prohibit this kind of preferential treatment. Symbolic acts often play a deciding role in politics. The arrest and upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein could become as great a catalyst for democracy in Iraq as taking down his statue was on April 9th. The world community is praying that Washington will not squander this symbolic capital as thoughtlessly as it did after the war. The best way to creatively reexamine the "grand strategy" would be for the US to forego clumsy rhetoric in favor of dialogue with France, Germany, and Russia, thereby involving them in the process of rebuilding Iraq. -__ ___ _ ___ __ ___ _ _ _ __ /-_|-0-\-V-/-\|-|-__|-|-|-/-_| \_-\--_/\-/|-\\-|-_||-V-V-\_-\ |__/_|--//-|_|\_|___|\_A_/|__/ SPY NEWS is OSINT newsletter and discussion list associated to Mario's Cyberspace Station - The Global Intelligence News Portal http://mprofaca.cro.net ######## CAUTION! ######### Since you are receiving and reading documents, news stories, comments and opinions not only from so called (or self-proclaimed) "reliable sources", but also a lot of possible misinformation collected by Spy News moderator and subscribers and posted to Spy News for OSINT purposes - it should be a serious reason (particularly to journalists and web publishers) to think twice before using it for their story writing, further publishing or forwarding throughout Cyberspace. 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