Mick Hartley

Michael J Totten does another fascinating interview, this time with Richard Francona, a former intelligence officer in the US Air Force and author of Ally to Adversary: An Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace about the First Gulf War and his role as interpreter to General "Stormin' Norman" Schwartzkopf. It's a long piece and needs to be read in full – Francona speaks fluent Arabic and knows the area really well - but a couple of points caught my eye.

On Iraq:

When we supporting Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, it was not about Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t even about Iraq. It was about Iran. Everything we did was calculated to make sure the Iranians did not emerge victorious and become the primary power broker in the Gulf.

During the Second Gulf War we did almost everything wrong for years after the fall of Baghdad. Disbanding the Iraqi army was probably the biggest mistake. It triggered the insurgency and played into Iranian hands. But back in 1987 and 1988, we had to make sure Iran didn’t win. If that meant getting in bed with Saddam Hussein, so be it. But the minute the war was over and the Iranians failed to emerge victorious, we left. That was it. We left and we cut off our support for Saddam because it was never about him or Iraq. And the Iraqis were smart enough to understand that. […]

The army and Marines did a magnificent job in Iraq. The run to Baghdad was classic. That will be studied for years. The logistics were terrific. What the army did out there in the desert was fabulous. But after Jerry Bremer became the viceroy of Iraq and turned our military into an occupation army—something we hadn’t planned or staffed for—everything fell apart.

And on Libya and Lockerbie:

As for the claims by a defecting official that Qaddafi personally ordered the attack on Pan Am 103, I don’t buy it for a minute. I have always thought it was an Iranian-sponsored, PFLP-GC -executed operation; the two Libyans were co-opted by Ahmad Jibril’s people and were not operating with Qaddafi’s sanction. If they had been authorized by Qaddafi, there is no chance that they would have been given up for trial. Countries do not offer up their intelligence officers for carrying out orders. If so, no officer would ever undertake these missions again. As I learned in the intelligence business years ago, defectors often tell you what they think you want to hear in hopes of getting favorable consideration. Qaddafi is guilty of a lot of things, but I doubt the Lockerbie bombing is among them.