by Enver Masud
Polls by the State Department and independent researchers show that Iraqis
favor an immediate U.S. pullout, meanwhile, an "independent commission",
according to the Sunday Times, "may recommend carving up Iraq into three
highly autonomous regions".
We believe that the commission's recommendation will have little to do with
the welfare of the Iraqis. Their recommendations will have much to do with
expanding U.S. control of the energy resources of the Middle East and
Central Asia.
In a letter to President Clinton in 1998, the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) -- the global domination project of the neoconservatives, which includes
elements of Israel's "A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" -- urged him to
remove Saddam Hussein from power in order to secure "our vital interests in
the Gulf" that holds "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."
This probably wouldn't happen, they said, unless "some catastrophic and
catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" took place.
September 11, 2001 became the new Pearl Harbor.
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by
the Bush administration in September 2002, said: "The events of September
11, 2001, opened vast, new opportunities." But the decision to invade Iraq
had been made much earlier.
White House counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke revealed in 2004 that
on September 11, 2001 -- while he was briefing President Bush, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other high officials -- "the Bush
administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. . . . Rumsfeld
was saying we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said. "We all said, 'But no, no,
al-Qaida is in Afghanistan.'"
Thus began a campaign to deceive the world, and in particular the American
people -- the high point of which was Secretary of State Colin Powell's
infamous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.
To justify the invasion of Iraq "evidence" of Iraq's possessing weapons of
mass destruction was conjured up by the neocon-established Office of Special
Plans in the Pentagon.
In May 2005, the Sunday Times revealed the secret Downing Street memo: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
In June 2005, the Sunday Times revealed: "MINISTERS were warned in July
2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion
of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal."
Now a U.S. commission is about to recommend carving up Iraq as the solution
to Iraq's "sectarian violence".
Iraq's sectarian bloodshed is "Made in the USA" say Erik Leaver and Raed
Jarrar. Writing in Asia Times they say, "Iraq never had a history of
sectarian conflicts. U.S. policy choices provided a perfect road map for
starting one."
The policy choices appear to have been calculated, and deliberate.
Thomas H. Henriksen wrote in the Hoover Digest:
From the founding of the
United States, the federal government has relied on subterfuge,
skullduggery, and secret operations to advance American interests. . . .
The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning
discontent among enemies, . . . Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam,
U.S. elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi
adversaries on the tactical and operational level.
Investigative reporter and author James Bamford writes in "A Pretext for
War":
Oddly, among the things they were trained to do at Harvey Point was
practice blowing up busses -- Palestinian-terrorist style. "We made a school
bus disappear with about twenty pounds of U.S. C-4," said former CIA officer
Robert Baer. . . . "We were also taught some of the really esoteric stuff
like E-cell timers, improvising pressurized airplane bombs using a condom
and aluminum foil, . . . By the end of the training, we could have taught an
advanced terrorism course."
Pepe Escobar writing in Asia Times says:
Pentagon financing of these myriad
[Iraqi] militias and the active involvement of Allawi in all these
operations suggest that the Pentagon itself is destabilizing the country it
is supposed to control. Destination: civil war.
Robert Dreyfuss, who covers national security for Rolling Stone, says:
I have repeatedly written about Shiite death
squads and about abuses by the paramilitary Badr Brigade, the secret
army trained and run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi Sunnis and
opposition leaders . . . have charged that the Iraqi government has been
running assassination teams.
The U.S., with its advisors, control of finances, and by the security it
provides, controls the Iraqi government.
Journalist, author, film-maker, John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman
says:
. . . in contrast to the embedded lie that the killings are now almost
entirely sectarian, 70 per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the
resistance in July were directed against the American occupiers and
20 per cent against the puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted
to 10 per cent. In other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out
by the US, such as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the
resistance is fighting basically a military war and it is winning. That
truth is suppressed, as it was in Vietnam.
According to a poll released last month by the Program on International
Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, "Six in 10 Iraqis approve of
attacks on U.S.-led forces, . . . Nearly eight in 10 say the U.S. presence
in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it's preventing".
And it is clear that it is chiefly the U.S. installed government, not the
Iraqi people, that would like the U.S. to stay longer. "Jalal Talabani, the
Iraqi president, has asked for a long-term US military presence in Iraq,
saying his country needs two permanent US air bases to deter what he calls
foreign interference." These bases are under construction.
So now we have this "independent commission" -- the Iraq Study Group, that
wants to carve up Iraq into three regions.
The Iraq Study Group is led by co-chairs James A. Baker, III, a former
Secretary of State, and Lee H. Hamilton, former Congressman. Other members
of the study group include: Robert M. Gates, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Edwin
Meese III , Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon E. Panetta, William J. Perry, Charles
S. Robb, and Alan K. Simpson.
None among this group would appear to have a real appreciation for
Iraq's culture and history, and the needs and aspirations of the Iraqi
people. The group does have experience in covert operations, and in increasing
profits for multinational corporations, and the military-industrial
complex. In doing so, some have enriched themselves.
History leads us to believe that the recommendations of this "independent
commission" will be designed to further the interests of their
constituencies, and not of the Iraqi people.
Most of today's conflicts in present day Asia and Africa may be traced to
imperial/colonial powers that occupied these lands, and carved them up for
the benefit of the conquering Europeans. Carving up Iraq will continue this
policy of divide and rule.
"The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for
our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will
do a fair amount of killing", wrote Ralph Peters in the U.S. Army War College
Quarterly in the Summer 1997.
In June 2006, Ralph Peters, writing in the Armed Forces Journal,
recommended:
As for those who refuse to 'think the unthinkable,' declaring
that boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that
boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have
never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the
Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special representatives
avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).
"Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic
cleansing works", says Peters.
The Iraq war has taken the lives of well over 100,000 Iraqis and Americans,
maimed and wounded countless others, and the unexploded bombs and depleted
uranium will continue to take their toll.
The Iraq war's cost to the American taxpayer
"is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion," according to a report
written by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist, and Linda
Bilmes, a Harvard budget expert.
For the sake of the Iraqi people, the American soldier, and the American
taxpayer, the U.S. should leave Iraq. A reasonable plan with timeline -- say
10 months, prepared with the assistance of the international community --
should be presented to the Iraqis so that they may prepare as best they can.
No doubt, there will be chaos and more killing, but in the long run the
continued U.S. presence will do more damage than the damage the Iraqis may
do to themselves -- there's no way of avoiding that after the destruction of
their society, institutions, and infrastructure.
And one more thing. Iraq paid for its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the
U.S. should pay reparations for its war of aggression against Iraq -- the
"Supreme International Crime".
---
Enver Masud, "Holocaust
Remembrance Veils Criminal Policies," The Wisdom Fund, April 22,
2001
Enver Masud, "Deadly Deception,
Pretexts for War," The Wisdom Fund, July 30, 2001
Robert Fisk, "All This Talk of Civil
War, and Now This Carnage. Coincidence?," Independent, March 3, 2004
Michael Hirsh and John Barry, "'The
Salvador Option'," Newsweek, January 10, 2005
Muhammad al-Baghdadi, "Lies About
Saddam's Oppression of the Shia," AlBasrah.net, March 25, 2005
Enver Masud, "Basra: Were the
'British' Undercover Agents Carrying Explosives? Why?," The Wisdom
Fund, September 28, 2005
Robert Dreyfuss, "Our Monsters In
Iraq," TomPaine.com, November 18, 2005
[Ayatollah Khamenei blamed the intelligence services of the US and
Israel for being behind the bombs in Samarra.--Patrick Cockburn, "Destruction of Holiest Shia Shrine Brings Iraq to
the Brink of Civil War," Independent, February 23, 2006]
[The real news, which is not reported in the CNN "mainstream," is that the
"Salvador Option" has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror
by death squads armed and trained by the U.S., which attack Sunnis and Shias
alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the breakup of
Iraq, the original war aim of Bush's administration.--John
Pilger, "The Return of
the Death Squads," New Statesman, May 8, 2006]
VIDEO: Jon Snow: "Iraq:
The Hidden Story," Channel 4 News, May 12, 2006
[Seymour Hersh's recent revelations that the Israeli government is
encouraging Kurdish separatism in Iraq, Iran, and Syria should ring a bell
for anyone who has followed the long history of English imperial
ambitions.--Conn Hallinan, "Divide
and Rule," Irish Democrat, July 19, 2006]
Erik Leaver and Raed Jarrar, "Iraq's Sectarian
Bloodshed 'Made in the USA'," Asia Times, August 10, 2006
[The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at
Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings
are being published online today by the British medical journal the
Lancet.--David Brown, "Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has
Reached 655,000," Washington Post, October 11, 2006]
"Iraqi parliament approves federal law,"
Reuters, October 11, 2006
[The president, in referring to a war he launched, is marveling at the Iraqi
society's willingness to tolerate the violence he has in effect brought to
their country-willingness and tolerate of course being the operative words.
Perhaps he should next wonder why they don't ask for cake. The breadth of
his misunderstanding and naivety is simply astounding.--Ximena Ortiz, "W. The
Man," The National Interest, October 12, 2006]
VIDEO Interview: We think about 650,000 extra people have died because of
this invasion, and about 600,000, some 90%, are from violence. . . . this
cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very
poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of
war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing
country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of
the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S.
government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most
ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per
year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN
workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and
disasters.--"Co-Author of Medical Study Estimating 650,000 Iraqi Deaths
Defends Research in the Face of White House Dismissal ,"
democracynow.org, October 12, 2006
Stephen Fidler, James Blitz and Guy Dinmore, "UK
presence 'worsening Iraq situation'," Financial Times, October 13, 2006
[No, what will likely bring on the coup is the December deadline for
crafting a new oil law, which was imposed on Iraq by the International
Monetary Fund, . . . which essentially opens up Iraq's oil wealth to decades
of despoliation by U.S. and European energy conglomerates. The Maliki
government - already weak, incompetent and despised, as are all puppet
regimes - could not possibly survive the political backlash that such a move
would provoke.--Chris Floyd, "Why Bush
Smiles: Victory is at Hand in Iraq," Information Clearing House,
October 17, 2006]
Colin Brown and Rupert Cornwell, "Bush
and Blair isolated as criticism of war grows," Independent,
October 18, 2006
[Muslims, whether Sunnite or Shiite, will thus stand united in protecting
the independence, unity, and territorial integrity of Iraq--"
MAKKAH AL-MUKARRAMAH DECLARATION ON THE IRAQI SITUATION,"
Organization of Islamic Conference, October 21, 2006]
Jim Lobe, "Endgame
coming, ready or not," Asia Times, October 21, 2006
[Out of the population of 26 million, 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the
country and a further 1.5 million are displaced within Iraq, according to
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.--Patrick Cockburn, "The Exodus: 1.6m Iraqis have fled their country since the war,"
Independent, October 23, 2006]
VIDEO: Sean Smith and Teresa Smith, "Iraq: The
Real Story," GuardianFilms and BBC Newsnight, October 23, 2006
John O'Neil, "Iraq Agrees
to New Security Timetable, U.S. Officials Say," New York Times,
October 24, 2006
Simon Jenkins, "We
have turned Iraq into the most hellish place on Earth," Guardian,
October 25, 2006
Anne Penketh, "Kuwaitis
still getting payouts for damage of 1990 Iraqi invasion,"
Independent, October 27, 2006
[ . . . the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of
last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was
reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out
"irregular missions". The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the
"Salvador Option" after the American-backed counter-insurgency in Latin
America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless
instances of human rights abuse.--Kim Sengupta, "
Operation enduring chaos," Independent, October 29, 2006]
Anthony Shadid, "This is Baghdad. What could be worse?,"
Washington Post, October 29, 2006
[Only a complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops - within six months and with
no preconditions - can break the paralysis that now enfeebles our
diplomacy.--William E. Odom, "How to cut and run," Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2006]
VIDEO:
"The Death
Squads," Channel 4 News, November 7, 2006
Ray McGovern, "Don't Look for Much
From the "Bipartisan" Iraq Study Group," truthout.org, November 14, 2006
David Montoute, "The
Strategy of Disintegration: False flags, dirty tricks and the dismemberment
of Iraq," israelshamir.net
Robert Fisk, "Like
Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial," Independent, December 1, 2006
AUDIO: Juan Cole, "Early
Divisions at Root of Sunni-Shia Conflict," NPR News, December 3, 2006
Antonia Juhasz, "It's still about oil in Iraq," Los
Angeles Times, December 8, 2006
VIDEO: "Authors
of Lancet Study, Middle East Analyst Juan Cole Testify at Kucinich Hearing
on Civilian Casualties in Iraq," democracynow.org, December 15, 2006
Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Saad Fakhrildeen, "Sistani rejects U.S. plan, supports
Sadr," Los Angeles Times, December 23, 2006
[ . . . the triggering of sectarian divisions and "civil wars" is
contemplated in the process of redrawing of the
map of the Middle East--Michel Chossudovsky, "The 'Demonization' of Muslims and the Battle
for Oil," globalresearch.ca, January 4, 2007]
[With some two million of its citizens having fled to other countries and
another 1.7 million internally displaced, Iraq has become one of the world's
biggest and fastest growing humanitarian crises--Jim Lobe, "U.S. Offers Scant
Help to Fleeing Refugees," IPS, January 17, 2007]
[The Pentagon's ever-expanding secret armies are deeply enmeshed in such
efforts as well. As Sy Hersh has reported ("The Coming Wars," New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2005), after his
re-election in 2004, George W. Bush signed a series of secret presidential
directives that authorized the Pentagon to run virtually unrestricted covert
operations, including a reprise of the American-backed, American-trained
death squads employed by authoritarian regimes . . .
Bush's formal green-lighting of the death-squad option built upon an already
securely-established base, part of a larger effort to turn the world into a
"global free-fire zone" for covert operatives, as one top Pentagon official
told Hersh. For example, in November 2002 a Pentagon plan to infiltrate
terrorist groups and "stimulate" them into action was uncovered by William
Arkin, then writing for the Los Angeles Times. The new unit, the "Proactive,
Pre-emptive Operations Group," was described in the Pentagon documents as "a
super-Intelligence Support Activity" that brings "together CIA and military
covert action, information warfare, intelligence and cover and
deception."
. . . as investigative reporter Max Fuller has pointed out in his detailed
examination of information buried in reams of mainstream news stories and
public Pentagon documents, the vast majority of atrocities then attributed
to "rogue" Shiite and Sunni militias were in fact the work of
government-controlled commandos and "special forces," trained by Americans,
"advised" by Americans and run largely by former CIA agents.--Chris Floyd,
"Assassinations,
Terrorist Strikes and Ethnic Cleansing: Bush's Shadow War in Iraq,"
TruthOut.org, February 15, 2007]
[Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader . . . went on, "I can say
that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be
partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is
dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, 'I cannot
do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I
honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.'"--Seymour M. Hersh, "THE REDIRECTION," New Yorker, February 25, 2007]
CHARTS: INSURGENT AND MILITIA ATTACKS / AVERAGE DAILY CASUALTIES--"Civil
War: Lost in Transition," Mother Jones, March 1, 2007
[Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide the "other",
"them", our potential enemies, from each other, while we - we civilised
Westerners with our refined, unified, multicultural values - are
unassailable. I could draw you a sectarian map of Birmingham, for example -
marked "Muslim" and "non-Muslim" (there not being many Christians left in
England - but no newspaper would print it. I could draw an extremely
accurate ethnic map of Washington, complete with front-line streets between
"black" and "white" communities but The Washington Post would never publish
such a map.
Imagine the coloured fun The New York Times could have with Brooklyn,
Harlem, the East River, black, white, brown, Italian, Catholic, Jew, Wasp.
Or the Toronto Globe and Mail with French and non-French Canadian Montreal
(the front line at one point follows the city Metro) or with Toronto (where
"Little Italy" is now Ukrainian or Greek), and colour the suburb of
Mississauga green for Muslim, of course. But we don't draw these Hitlerian
maps for our societies. It would be unforgivable, bad taste, something "we"
don't do in our precious, carefully guarded civilisation.
Passing a book stall in New York this week, I spotted the iniquitous Time
magazine and there on the cover - and this might truly have been a 1930s
Nazi cover - were two cowled men, one in black, the other largely hidden by
a chequered scarf. "Sunnis vs Shi'ites," the headline read. "Why they hate
each other." This, naturally, was a "take-out" on Iraq's civil war - a civil
war by the way, that America's spokesmen in Baghdad were talking about in
August 2003 when not a single Iraqi in his worst nightmares dreamt of what
has now come to pass.--Robert Fisk, "How
easy it is to put hatred on a map," Independent, March 3, 2007]
"The Americans planned to make
him a suicide-bomber," uruknet.info, March 18, 2007
Sudarsan Raghavan, "Sadr Accuses U.S. of Dividing Iraq
Through Violence: Radical Shiite Cleric Calls on Iraqis to End U.S.
'Occupation' in Iraq," Washington Post, April 8, 2007
Robert Fisk, "Divide
and rule - America's plan for Baghdad," Independent, April 11, 2007
[Occupation has left no room for any initiative independent of the
officially sanctioned political process; for a peaceful opposition or civil
society that could create networks to bridge the politically manufactured
divide. . . .
According to Brookings, the independent US research institute, 75% of
recorded attacks are directed at occupation forces, and a further 17% at
Iraqi government forces.--Haifa Zangana, "The
Iraqi resistance only exists to end the occupation," Guardian, April
12, 2007]
[I remember Baghdad before the war - one could live anywhere. We didn't know
what our neighbors were - we didn't care. No one asked about religion or
sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you
Sunni or Shia?--"The Great Wall of Segregation," riverbendblog, April 26,
2007]
["The terrorists claim that they are fighting the forces of occupation,
while the occupiers justify their presence under the pretext of the war on
terror. Therefore, this axis of occupation-terrorism is the root of all
problems in Iraq."--"Quote of the
Day," IHT, May 4, 2007]
[ . . . the defining battle for Iraq at the political level today is between
nationalists trying to hold the Iraqi state together and separatists backed,
so far, by the United States and Britain.--Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland,
"Majority of Iraqi
Lawmakers Now Reject Occupation," alternet.org, May 10, 2007]
[The former collaborator said that "operations of planting car bombs and
blowing up explosives in markets are carried out in various ways, the
best-known and most famous among the US troops is placing a bomb inside cars
as they are being searched at checkpoints. Another way is to put bombs in
the cars during interrogations.--"Former collaborator discloses
details of US-ordered assassinations, sectarian bomb attacks targeting Iraqi
civilians," Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, May 11, 2007]
[This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one
of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves -- at least, not
until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were
Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized
until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys
and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of "Sunni Iraqis" or
"Shiite Iraqis" before the war, just like there was no "Sunni Triangle" or
"Shiite South" until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities
onto Iraq's regions.--Nir Rosen"What Bremer Got Wrong in Iraq," Washington
Post, May 16, 2007]
[Gen. Petraeus: "The fundamental source of conflict in Iraq is competition
among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources."--Raj Chohan, "Petraeus
Iraq Report Contained Few Surprises," cbs4denver.com, September 11, 2007]
Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters, "Greenspan
admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m," Guardian,
September 16, 2007
[The Bosnia-style plan "would add new complications to the already difficult
Iraqi situation," GCC chief Abdel-Rahman al-Attiyah said in a statement.
"Instead of calling for division, the causes that led to the current
situation should be addressed. These include the [US-led] occupation, the
sectarian and ethnic quota system, absence of law and security and the
paralysed administration."--"Baghdad fumes over 'federalism' plan passed by US
Senate," Daily Star, September 19, 2007]
[We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis
from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of
the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.--INTERVIEW WITH INVESTIGATIVE
JOURNALIST SEYMOUR HERSH: "'The
President Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing'," Spiegel Online,
September 28, 2007]
["Dividing Iraq is a problem, and a decision like that would be a
catastrophe."--Qassim Abdul-Zahra, "Al-Maliki Criticizes Senate
Proposal," Associated Press, September 29, 2007]
Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, "A
divided Iraq unites against partition plan," Los Angeles Times,
October 1, 2007
[Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military
invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see
the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation,
according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.--Karen
DeYoung, "All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for
Discord, Study Shows," Washington Post, December 19, 2007]
