NewsMax.com wires
February 13, 2001

The Iraqi National Congress, the coalition of Iraqi dissidents and rebels that the United States has officially supported since 1998, is in the final stages of completing a $98,000 contract with the Guidry Group, a consulting firm comprised of former secret service agents. Under that contract, INC security officers would learn the fine art of diplomatic security.

What distinguishes this training from previous courses for the INC, is that the rebels attending the five-day seminar would also learn how to use pistols, Kalishnikov rifles, 12-gauge shotguns and a variety of other firearms. Previous U.S.-backed training for the INC has been limited to "non-lethal" activities, such as emergency medical care, public relations and war-crimes investigations.

Although the State Department still considers this assistance to be of the non-lethal variety, the INC clearly does not.

"This is important because this is the first time we are receiving lethal training with the United States government funding," said Francis Brooke, the Washington adviser for the INC.

Retired Gen. Wayne Downing, the commander of the joint special operations task force during the Gulf War, concurred.

"This is significant because this is the first lethal training," he told United Press International. "It is designed to protect, so the significance is that this is the first time they are being trained to do anything on this level."

But State Department officials disagreed.

"This is not lethal assistance," one official said. "The skills involved are purely protective and defensive in nature of the type necessary for the INC to protect any non-lethal presence or activities inside Iraq."

The debate over lethal assistance marked the INC's fiercest battle with the Clinton administration. The lethal aid promised in the 1998 legislation that authorizes $98 million for the group was never delivered largely under the premise that the INC was not ready to challenge Hussein militarily.

But this thinking may change under the Bush administration. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell has carefully avoided making any comments on the military aspect of the Iraq Liberation Act, his counterpart at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, is a long-time supporter of a plan to oust Hussein through U.S.-backed rebels.

Both Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, signed a letter to Clinton in 1998 that spurred the creation of the Iraq Liberation Act.

The Feb. 18, 1998 letter states, "Iraq today is ripe for a broad-based insurrection. We must exploit this opportunity."

It goes on to outline a series of steps the government should take to aid the INC, including positioning "U.S. ground force equipment in the region so that, as a last resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq."

The $98,000 contract with the Guidry group is tucked into a larger $4 million aid package - separate from the Iraq Liberation Act funding - aimed at establishing an alternative Iraqi media through radio transmitters, satellite television stations and newspapers. The plan, approved initially in September by the Clinton administration, also sets aside money for INC members to go inside Iraq to collect information on war crimes, Iraq's military and political changes in Baghdad.

One of the INC's principal leaders Ahmad Chalabi, speaking to reporters and analysts Friday at the American Enterprise Institute, said he believed his group could attract a number of defectors from Iraq's military if they established a presence inside the country.

"The Iraqi army is unwilling to defend Saddam, but they are too weak to overthrow him," Chalabi said, estimating that 40 percent of Iraq's elite Republican guard is absent without leave.

To be sure, the five-day security seminar is a far cry from the battlefield training and U.S. military support envisioned by Chalabi and his supporters in Washington. Chalabi on Friday said he hoped the Pentagon would change the rules of engagement for U.S. aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone in northern and southern Iraq, to allow fighters to attack Iraqi army battalions when they were moving against civilian targets.

Downing, who has worked as an adviser on a volunteer basis with the INC for three years, called the security training in the State Department aid package a "drop in the bucket."

"This is not the training they will need to put together a liberation army," he said. "There you would need individual training, basic training, weapons training, involving anti tank weapons, machine guns, rockets and that sort of thing."

Downing estimates this sort of training would take six to eight months and could be provided by either the U.S. military or the CIA.

INC officials will meet Edward Walker, the acting assistant secretary for Near East Affairs, Tuesday to discuss the remaining details of the $4 million aid package.

(C) 2001 UPI All Rights Reserved.

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