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George Coryell / Media General News Service
June 20, 2003
MacDill Air Force Base - With almost back to back wars against Afghanistan and Iraq now called finished, the United States still faces a long road to safety, said Army Brigadier Gen. Gary Harrell.
"If we don't take the global war on terrorism to its conclusion, and eradicate the threat, we will see an attack again in the U.S.," Harrell said Thursday in a rare interview since the Iraq war ended.
Harrell knows terrorism well. He leads SOCCENT or the special operations side of the U.S. Central Command squirreled away in a barracks deep within MacDill Air Force Base.
For much of his Army career, he was either an operator or a commander with the Army's secret Delta Force or Combat Applications Group.
He was one of the Somalia commanders who hovered over the streets of Mogadishu as a force of Delta troops and Army Rangers battled against what seemed like an entire city. And he was in Colombia when the late drug lord Pablo Escobar was hunted, though when asked if he was part of that effort, he only smiled.
Though he lacks evidence to support it, Harrell believes that Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay were killed early in the war. He believes that Uday, the more volatile son, lived longer, running the campaign against the invading army.
"I can't prove that," he said, in an office decorated with military paintings and small arms. "No one can tell you what happened, but there are good logical arguments to believe that."
Osama Still At Large
Similarly, though Osama bin Laden has not been caught, he is less of a threat than before.
"I guess the best answer is their regimes are no longer in power," he said. "They don't have much influence."
Harrell said the evidence of a weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq was solid as far he was concerned, and he said the trailers recovered that indicate use as mobile biological labs backed that up, even though they have been called into question in recent weeks.
Some chemicals and biological weapons might have been dumped into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, he said. Others might remain buried until Iraqis begin to come forward.
Regardless of whether additional weapons evidence surfaces soon, evidence of widespread torture against Saddam's own people was justification enough, Harrell said.
"We were surprised by the stranglehold of fear that Saddam and his regime imposed on the Iraqi people," he said.
"Did we want the Iraqi people to come over and fight with us? Yes, that would have been nice," Harrell said. "The surprise was that any human beings were treated that way. I kind of think this guy was worse than Hitler."
Harrell said in one case, in Basra, where a woman came out to welcome U.S. forces, she was found hanging from a light post the next day, killed by supporters of Hussein.
"In reality, I think the person who has killed the most Muslims in the last couple of decades was Saddam Hussein."
Quick Results Expected
One thing that annoys Harrell is the expectation of immediate results once military force is used.
"I think there is this misperception that when we go somewhere and do something, intelligence must be perfect," Harrell said. "That is almost never the case and none of us expect it."
Harrell said the entire U.S. military, not just the special operations contingents, worked beautifully in Iraq. Called "Shooter" by Central Command leader Gen. Tommy Franks, Harrell said after seeing how the services worked together in Afghanistan, improvements were made for Iraq.
That meant changing old traditions because such things as tracking individual soldiers has improved. Harrell, who served in the 7th and 10th Special Forces Groups earlier in his career, said in the past, a Green Beret A Team leader never gave their exact location.
"An A Team commander would never give coordinates within 1,000 meters of where we were, because we didn't want to get scarfed up (by a mistaken bombing mission or artillery)," Harrell said. "That old idea went out the window. If you don't have operators tell where they are at today, it will literally get them killed."
The job of special operations in Afghanistan was to use small teams to work with warlords opposed to the Taliban, and have them leverage American military might, such as bombing, by using laser targeting designators.
The initial stages of Afghanistan were largely a special operations war, with Army Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Air Force special operations air crews working the the mountainous country.
In Iraq, these same troops were used for different missions. They worked with opposition groups like the Kurds in the north and searched for SCUD missiles and weapons of mass destruction. SEALs took offshore oil platforms, and other units lined up targets inside Baghdad or tried to find Iraqi turncoats.
These men are not undisciplined cowboys, something Harrell said was not represented in the film "Black Hawk Down," which depicted the ambush that left 18 American soldiers dead.
"There were maybe 100 Americans and 5,000 Somalis in Mogadishu, and we killed probably 1,000," Harrell said. "I'll take those odds all day long."
"What we have here is an incredibly complex story of very, very smart, dedicated professionals who are a little bit older and more experienced, who put themselves in extreme risk to do the things that our nation needs done," Harrell said.
Numbers Are Strong
Keeping up the numbers on the special operations side of the house might be the biggest challenge facing the military. Harrell said the entire inventory of special operations troops from all the military services, about 46,000 strong, could be "gainfully employed" in just the Central Command region right now.
On the plus side, "Most Special Forces guys ain't bored these days", Harrell said.
Changes are giving Harrell, who has been nominated for a second star, hope in Central Command's tough neighborhood of 25 countries that reach from the Middle East through Africa into Asia. Yemen and Pakistan are taking action against terrorist factions. Afghanistan is starting to become safer. And even Iraq, where attacks still occur against U.S. troops, is improving.
"I'm willing to bet there were a greater number of violent incidents in Washington, D.C. compared to Baghdad last night," Harrell said.
George Coryell is a staff reporter for The Tampa Tribune.
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