(to manufacture a civil war, a banana republic, a client state)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/middleeast/27ARMY.html?ex=1089303337&ei=1&en=c791b294847ba44cBiggest Task for U.S. General Is Training Iraqis to Fight Iraqis
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: June 27, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 26
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 26 — On a recent afternoon in his new office in the heavily fortified Green Zone, Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, a celebrated American field commander, sketched his vision for how America's forces might one day extract themselves from this country.
"I know where this ends," said General Petraeus, 51, who earlier this month took control of a vast project to oversee the training of Iraqi security forces. "It ends with the Iraqis in charge of their country. You get as many Iraqis as possible to have a stake in the success of the new Iraq to defeat the insurgency."
Just a few hundred yards from his office, the magnitude of his challenge loomed in the form of Zhuhair Khamis, an Iraqi Civil Defense officer standing guard at the entrance to the American compound.
"I am not ready to fight Iraqis," said Mr. Khamis, a 33-year-old Iraqi Shiite. "I will throw down my weapon, I will throw down my uniform, and I will give back my badge. I will fight foreigners; but I am not ready to fight Iraqis."
General Petraeus, who scored some of the Army's most notable successes in the previous year here, is now charged with perhaps the most ambitious project that will unfold in the year that begins with the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty on Wednesday: rebuilding an Iraqi security force that collapsed during April's uprisings, when Iraqi soldiers quit and ran rather than fight their own people. The insurgency is still boiling: on Saturday, a group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed it had kidnapped three Turks in Iraq and threatened to behead them, and a bomb killed as many as 40 people in Hilla, south of Baghdad
(snip)
In a related creation
http://ny-2.live.advance.net/fact/content/?040607fa_fact1THE MANIPULATOR
by JANE MAYER
Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation?
( a little down the article)
THE WASHINGTON FRONT
(snip)
Brooke, who is a devout Christian, has brought an evangelical ardor to the cause of defeating Saddam. “I do have a religious motivation for doing what I do,” Brooke said. “I see Iraq as our neighbor. And the Bible says, When your neighbor is in a ditch, God means for you to help him.”
After graduating from Duke University, in 1983, Brooke worked briefly for the unsuccessful Georgia senatorial campaign of Hamilton Jordan, who had been Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. Brooke then became a representative for the beer industry. (“If you want to understand constituent politics, you should try mobilizing opinion against a beer tax,” he said.) But in 1991 he took a public-relations job with an American firm in London called the Rendon Group, which described its specialty as “perception management.” The company had been founded by John Rendon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. It didn’t take long for Brooke to realize that the project he was assigned at Rendon was funded by the C.I.A. Brooke, who at the time was thirty years old, said that he was paid twenty-two thousand dollars a month.
The genesis of Brooke’s assignment was the decision not to unseat Saddam Hussein at the end of the first Gulf War. In May, 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed a covert “lethal finding” that authorized the C.I.A. to spend a hundred million dollars to “create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power.” Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer who was assigned to Iraq at the time, said that the policy was all show, “like an ape beating its chest. No one had any expectation of marching into Baghdad and killing Saddam. It was an impossibility.” Nonetheless, the C.I.A. had received an influx of cash, and it decided to create an external opposition movement to Saddam.
The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,” Brooke said. “It was a very nice job.”
(snip)
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