Donald Trump and maga Republicans are creating a fascist state with ICE as the 21st century Gestaopo

Gestapo was the official secret state police of Nazi Germany, founded in April 1933, by Hermann Göring, and later led by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. 👿

With ICE, America is becoming the country we created in Iraq
The tactics the United States used in Iraq are migrating home.

Opinion published in the Boston Globe:

Thomas E. Ricks is the author of two books about the Iraq War, “Fiasco” and “The Gamble.” His most recent work is “Big Money, Small Town,” a novel set in Maine.

Every time an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent kills a person in our streets, I think back to something that a Middle Easterner said just before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003: “You Americans think you are going to change us to be more like you,” he predicted, “but I think the Middle East is going to change you to be more like us.”

I didn’t really believe it at the time. Frankly, I thought America was too resilient for that, with a good track record of observing human rights and bolstering democracy. 

But that prescient observation still haunts me more than two decades later. Unfortunately, that passing voice was right.

Over the past two years, the way the US Army often mistreated Iraqis has come home to roost — ICE personnel have invaded our cities, acting just as reckless and lawless as our troops abroad once did. There are armed men in the streets, outfitted in goggles, masks, helmets, and body armor, ill-prepared for the tasks at hand but possessing an overwhelming arrogance about how to perform those tasks. They point their weapons at unarmed people and shout obscenities at them. They answer to no one that we can see, and they shroud their actions in an overarching excuse: They can shoot if they feel threatened.

In some ways, they behave worse than did the American troops who blundered around the streets of Baghdad. Those soldiers had little other ways to communicate than gestures, because very few of them spoke Arabic. By contrast, ICE agents often speak the same language as the people they victimize. 

But, having a common tongue is not always de-escalatory. In Minneapolis last January, after ICE agent

Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good with three shots, he called her a profane slur.

Another difference in Iraq is that when American troops acted brutally, they were investigated by their own superiors. In November 2005, for example, when Marines killed 25 unarmed civilians in the western Iraqi town of Haditha, one of them a baby, officers in the chain of command began to ask questions.

Those Marines were acquitted, but the Haditha incident came to mark a turning point in the war. It forced top American commanders in Iraq to reexamine their tactics and strategy and begin to focus on protecting the civilian population.

This in turn led to changes on the ground that eventually permitted the United States to withdraw from Iraq, not quite claiming a victory but neither leaving in a pell-mell retreat.

And that change in Iraq, overdue and difficult, may be the biggest difference between then and now. 

There is no evidence that Trump administration officials are going to step back, recalculate, and reform. 

Indeed, they show no impulse even to investigate why unarmed people are being killed in our streets by government agents.

Rather, the president and his subordinates seem quite satisfied with having masked men terrorize the population, especially in cities that don’t support him politically. In some cases, these men are the same veterans who served abroad: ICE agent Ross, the Minneapolis shooter, was a machine gunner in Iraq, while David Brouillette, the trigger puller in Biddeford, Maine, served in Afghanistan in a military intelligence unit. One can only wonder just what lessons those men brought home from their combat tours — and how many more ICE agents are like them.

This bleak conclusion leads me to one more parallel with the Iraq war: It is indeed time for regime change here. Just as Iraq needed to move on from living under an authoritarian, law-breaking ruler and his corrupt circle, so do we.

A final thought: Every war, even bad ones, has its heroes. The people who stand out to me now are the volunteers who monitor the actions of ICE agents and sometimes have guns and tasers brandished at them in return. These are the people who truly are fighting for our freedoms. We are in their debt.