Back on August 20, I noted that the war in Iraq has already started. Special Forces are playing a significant role in the initial phase, and to that end it's useful to understand a bit more about how they work.

It may not be what you think.

While Hollywood portrays Special Forces as hunter-killer teams, that's only really true for a few select units like Delta Force. Special Forces soldiers are a big investment, with almost 2 years of dedicated training time that includes learning a new language or two. If they're killed doing the kinds of things that make for good Hollywood movies, replacements will be a long time in coming.

Most of the Green Berets' activities, therefore, centre around working with local groups and training them to do what needs doing: fighting, building, whatever. This is supplemented by their ability to call in and guide supply drops (an important negotiating lever) and of course the ability to serve as targeters for U.S. air strikes.

For an excellent depiction of what this means in practice, see "Team 555 Shaped a New Way of War" and "Hamid Karzai and his U.S. Partners." Reading these articles will give you a new depth of insight into just what happened in Afghanistan - and what kinds of things are now happening in Iraq, where U.S. Special Forces have been in Kurdish-held Northern Iraq for several months now.

Of course, much more will be happening in Iraq soon - I reiterate my prediction of November. So it's interesting to read news that 5,000 Turkish troops have entered northern Iraq and taken over the Bamerni air base north of Mosul (the Turkish daily Hurriyet, August 9).

It's part of a larger strategy, and of course U.S. Special Forces are involved.

In Kurdish Iraq - according to Israeli sources - US army engineers are working around the clock to build a series of six to eight airstrips along a western axis from the city of Zako southwest to the city of Sinjar; a central axis from Zako south to Arbil; and an eastern axis from Arbil to Sulimaniyeh. Special Forces teams are involved in on-the-ground military target identification, mapping out Scud and anti-aircraft battery locations. They are also helping set up, equip and train Kurdish militias and are cooperating closely with Turkish counterparts engaged in the same activities in Turkoman regions.

The military usefulness of those northern air bases is immense. They make great staging points for air-mobile strikes on command locations, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities, and other military objectives. They're also a good way to quickly bring in substantial forces to the north, in a north-south attack that makes clear to all Iraqi officers the hopelessness of their cause.

That sense of hopelessness will be crucial in convincing officers not to obey orders like, say, launching bioweapon tipped SCUDs at Kuwait or Israel. At least, those who survive the SAS and Green Beret raids on SCUD sites, which did more than anything else to stop the SCUD attacks in Gulf War I.

Because there's a time and a place for real Hollywood bravery, too.