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The author is one of those cranky, scary ex-special forces guys. Lots of these guys write books, mostly unreadable book-length boasts of scalps taken and "ragheads" blown away. Goff is very different. He's not in love with his youthful avocation, when he was "slitting throats for [his] country, and making a damned good living at it," if I may quote Hot Shots Part Deux. In fact, he went all the way over to the other end of the ideological spectrum, becoming a hardcore Mao-quoting Leftist revolutionary.
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Once Goff starts explaining how the Ameican empire is maintained, he's brilliant--not just a great storyteller, but a very smart analyst. There are lots of old soldiers who can tell a good story, but few who can fit their stories into the bigger picture as smoothly and intelligently as Goff does.
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What.s most impressive about Goff's description of life as Imperial enforcer is the way it seems to apply so well to Iraq now, though this book was written before the situation there had really started to fall apart. Here's Goff's account of what it was like when, in 1994, he "acted as the shadow de facto dictator of a portion of Northeastern Haiti." (In fact, Goff was in charge of Gonaives, the city first taken by the current crop of Haitian rebels.) His description of the job explains the Iraqi situation depressingly well:
"The troops carrying out these occupations are carrying out seemingly contradictory directives...[They feel] confusion, [which] develops into frustration, then an indescribable psychic fatigue, and finally into hatred of the place and its people. Those who have no desire to collaborate with the occupiers will keep their distance.or more.attack them...Those who did approach the American troops had agendas. Lots of agendas...after every revolution, there is a scam period. It was a time to settle scores. A time to brown nose the new rulers. To maneuver for jobs and positions. And every time there is a conflict of interest between occupation grifters, they compete for the attention and credulity of the occupying troops. This begins to leave the impression.among the troops.that the whole society is a pack of scheming, pathological liars. They are, after all, being approached by the most unethical sectors of that society."
Every time he talks about what he's seen, Goff cuts through the crap from what he calls "the political correctness of the Right." One striking example is his version of returning from combat in Vietnam: "I've heard the stories about the poor, spat-on Vietnam vets, which is [sic] more urban legend than reality. No one ever spit on me when I got back from Vietnam. They didn't spit on me when I came back from other exotic places either: El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Colombia, Peru, Somalia, Haiti...I got a chest full of fruit salad ribbons, free drinks in airports, and people just admired the fuck out of me. I got paid for my trauma. A lot more than our victims did."
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Then came service in Latin America, where the US never really bothers to wash its hands after slaughter. He saw, and did, the really raw stuff there. A Peruvian officer points to the graveyard and says, "That's where the friendly Indians are." A loud, drunk CIA officer admits murdering a schoolteacher who was working for a US Agency: "He was a communist." A US military attache in El Salvador boasts that he's "training the finest right-wing death squads in the world."
If Goff merely told these horror stories, this would still be a pretty impressive book. But he does more; he provides a context and an argument about guerrilla war, based on what he saw in Latin America. Using the Colombian guerrilla army FARC-EP and the Mayan Zapatistas as his examples, he argues that in most Latin American countries, radical peasant movements face a grim choice: either let themselves be slaughtered or take up arms in earnest--not just parading with a few guns and banners, but actually going after the death squads, killing them and if necessary anyone who gets in the way. He argues that the Zapatistas, after backing down from armed confrontation, have been neutralized, while the FARC-EP is winning the war in Colombia because it had the courage to face "the iron logic of war": "The FARC stood down from the armed struggle, forming an electoral wing., in 1984, calling a truce and agreeing to engage in electoral politics. Four thousand members [of the electoral wing] were summarily assassinated by death squads. This was [FARC's] one flirtation with [the] 'bourgeois right.' They are in a war, and they understand the iron logic of war, particularly after 1984."
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His chapter on Iraq is probably the one you should read right now, if you don't have time to finish the book. What's most impressive is that he wrote it right after Bush landed on the carrier to announce that hostilities were over. That is to say, before the real hostilities broke out.
Goff saw what was coming far more clearly than either the Administration or its tame journalists did. Writing after the US killed 13 demonstrators in Fallujah, but before Fallujah had become the site of the present all-out war, Goff sets the stage: "Once Iraqi combatants were displaced from Fallujah, local imams stepped in. They stopped the looting and vengeance attacks, re-opened public services, and established an interim constabulary. Normalcy was beginning to take hold there, when the Bradley fighting vehicles rolled into town...The Americans...arrested the imams, installed their own mayor, and road-blocked the whole city...Popular outrage was swift. The Americans...were besieged by angry demonstrators, who they began to shoot. Between April 28 and April 30, 20 Iraqis were killed and scores wounded. Lies about weapons in the crowd were concocted, and eyewitnesses effectively excluded from the American media...But lies...do not erase reality. In Fallujah...the popular base for a guerrilla struggle had been established by the American military..."
Writing before the Iraqi resistance really got into gear, Goff has the eye and the experience, to have seen the skill and potential of its early attacks: "The attacks [in June 2003] were triangulated, engaging US forces from two or more points, and coordinating the use of Soviet-era rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and assault rifles. Striking in this way, with both bullets and explosives, from more than one direction, removes the element of cover from targeted forces. When they get behind one side of the vehicle to take cover from fire, they are exposed to fire from another direction. When they use the vehicle's light armor to block rifle ammunition, the RPGs can be used against that same armor for concussion, secondary missile hazard, and flame."
All in all, Goff,s account, written more than eight months ago, sounds more accurate and explains better what happened in Fallujah than anything I've seen in the mainstream press. For the most part, he follows the precept he often quotes: "Mask no difficulties, tell no lies, claim no easy victories." Strange to think that the only journalist around who seems to follow this precept is this goddamn crazed commie ex-hitman. Strange, and very, very depressing.
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