December 12, 2007
Digest commentary:
From different angles we hear the U.S. war described as a "war for oil". Many left 'interpretations' of the slippery 'no war for oil' mantra include blaming 'the war on Iraq' on one or more of these: personal Bush/Cheney connections to 'big oil' profits ...(and insanity); Bush religious fanaticism; domestic consumption; "peak oil" production level's diminishing resources; oil price volatility, etc. Sort of like before --and after --Bush the u.s. wasn't, and won't still be, the #1 scourge of the world, as if Bush isn't a vile rabble-rousing figurehead. All scrupulously miss the point. Why?
Partly because the u.s. left is run in reactionary circles by democrats and neoliberal imperialist financiers like George Soros Move-On, cleverly blaming Bush for apparently birthing u.s. global capital's "manifest destiny" agenda. The delusional, disingenuous and very dangerous message here is that the system's electoral representatives are the problem, not the political-economic system they serve, so just give it up to the complicit democrat imperialist criminals. What's the real story where does oil fit into the big picture, where do we?
The u.s. political-economic system is a dictatorship of finance capital (merchant and corporate capital no longer rule) homebased, internationally operative. Capitalist-imperialism. It is seriously sick. The underlying, driving force behind the desperate u.s. juggernaut is a foundational crisis of capital producing potentially lethal strategic weakness and vulnerability for its global dominance. Oil is central for one reason: the means, the political-economic leverage over allies as well as enemies. The only way out of its crisis for u.s. capitalism. The way to hell for most of the world caught in its juggernaut to save its ass through world war. Again.
It is not war because of 'peak oil', not for domestic consumption, not, as vulgar economists claim, for immediate short-term 'big oil' and/or 'military industrial complex' profits, the Bush family, nor the instant gratification of any other slice of the big pie... this agenda is about the survival of U.S. capitalist world-supremacy. Capitalism must expand or die. With increasingly powerful capitalist rivals as well as spreading anti-imperialist struggle, the geostrategy laid out 20 years ago by (democrat) Zbigniew Brzezinski is still the blueprint ... now in a more desperate hurry with a more military than 'diplomatic' cutting edge. [*** see relevant documents at bottom of the page]
Historically u.s. capitalist-imperialist world wars have provided a (temporary} solution to deep conjunctural crises: by defeating rivals and enemies militarily, restructuring the globe, resources and capital under its hegemony, it has expanded its political power and the basis for maximizing capital accumulation.
Owning and /or controlling "M.E." oil means eliminating obstacles, first and foremost Arab nationalist resistance, strengthening its proxies, especially Israeli, Arab and African. So far this global juggernaut has failed beautifully ... intensifying the crisis and its rulers' desperation thanks to the Iraqi national resistance, support for it worldwide, anti-imperialist/zionist struggle in Palestine, Africa, Indonesia, Latin America ... (all resistance is "terrorism", now "terrorists" are mostly called "al-qaeda") ... plus the threatening coalition-building by its major rivals' against the superpower's unprecedented state terrorism. Its agenda in action has destroyed peoples, cultures and nations. Its agenda is suicide for 'us'. Like earlier imperialist wars, this one is horrific beyond words. It has already slaughtered millions in its crusade [1] to establish military bases, 'peacekeeping forces' and 'humanitarian aid, to increase U.S. 'footprints', on every continent for 'full spectrum dominance' [2] to beat out counter-bloc-building strategic capitalist rivals, especially China & Russia, [3] to legitimize global and domestic state terror by declaring all opposition and resistance "terrorism" ("if you aren't with us you're with the terrorists"}, to gain total surveillance and control of information and communications including a 'war on the net' -- exceeding the Patriot Act. As someone said only a "mini-Pearl Harbor" would set the project for a new america and a new world order in motion: 911was it, the greenlight for an agenda developed a decade earlier to maintain u.s. supremacy.
This agenda demands desperate measures that reveal the true nature of capitalist "democracy, humanitarian aid, and liberation" even in the "homeland" so far obscenely pacified by fear of losing class and race privilege, by 24/7 psywar propaganda terror, constant fake threats of brown-skinned "terrorists", police state measures disappearing 'civil rights' and the white 'american way' in the name of god and country, ever reliable homegrown racist patriotism and "national security". With no partisan opposition either, the ruling class has been able to create the architecture and public opinion for an infrastructural shift from a capitalist -- democracy mode of rule to a fascist mode (historically always operative against oppressed peoples and nations).
Things are shaky all over for the mass-murderers. Even in the obscenely pacified 'homeland' trouble is brewing because the 'american dream' is becoming a nightmare for true-believers. The system needs peoples' engagement in and support -- electoral politics ... not rebellion in the streets, fields, schools, factories. That's why we have a little voting game giving us 'choice' and 'control'...and blame for what goes wrong. Wake up folks, it isn't even a matter of choosing the 'lesser of the evils'. There is no such beast. Electoral politics spins a deadly web around us with the help of capitalist media. There's one u.s. ruling class and it's bipartisan. Whatever tactical differences there may be, that class is solid for U.S. "world leadership" ...and their own survival. Crocodile tears of regrets and recriminations over 'errors' notwithstanding, they are solidly behind the present imperialist world war, the "global war on terrorism", as a means to that end of global domination.
500 years should have disabused us of the paralyzing delusion that an electoral alterego 'regime change' will stop U.S. "manifest destiny" that today is embedded in every crevice of this society by media, schools, churches and culture and embodied in the ***National Security Strategy, secured by the failsafe complicity of an imperialist neo-liberal electoral "opposition" in america's unprecedented crimes against humanity.
The hidden, good news side of the crisis is this: capitalism's strategic weakness is 'our' opportunity, 'our' as in the people everywhere.
What we decide to do, our agenda must be based on the reality that what's good for U.S. is not good for 'us'. Our strategies and solutions need to be based on 'our' interests, in opposition to those of the predatory few. There is no 'us', 'our', 'one nation...', etc. There is and always has been a war, more or less open and genocidal, between the fraction of 1% in this country who own, control and use over 60% of what the rest of the world produces, and whose system's insatiable drive for total power and profit has already slaughtered untold millions, has now brought humanity and the planet to the brink of destruction. Its desperation is not ours. Its solutions are our our downfall. All successful elected politicians have served the interests of the ruling class well for a time, including Bushco., but some new tricks with new faces are needed. The rulers know what's necessary for their survival ... isn't it time we figure out and implement our own agenda?
.........
"We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
David Rockefeller in a 1994 Statement to the United Nations Business Council
*** documents, analyses and articles revealing
U.S. GEOSTRATEGIC AGENDA & ISRAEL'S ROLE
'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival'
U.S. policy is to 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival' , excerpted from Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999: NYT March 8, 1992
This Defense Planning guidance addresses the fundamentally new situation which has been created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the internal as well as the external empire, and the discrediting of Communism as an ideology with global pretensions and influence. The new international environment has also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression -- the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in U.S. global leadership....: http://www.princeton.edu/~ppn/docfiles/pentagon_1992.html
1996 A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
Following is the policy blueprint prepared for incoming president Netanyahu by The U.S. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated.
[digest note: according to some u.s. apologists jewish neocons are 'traitors' because, they are "israel firsters", and, israel holds the u.s. hostage, making the poor little superpower do it's bidding against its own best interests: first, zionism is political, not synonymous with jewish religion; bipartisan u.s. imperialism is zionist for its shared predatory political interests. Imperialism and zionism are inseparable. Israel is an imperialist creation, now a u.s. supported proxy, doing much of its dirty work under cover. U.S. global domination and 'eretz israel's agendas are well-synched state terrorist expansionism -- but the dog always wags the tail.]
1997: THE GRAND CHESSBOARD: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives
Zbigniew Brzezinski, NYC, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997
"...To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of
ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to
prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to
keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from
coming together." (p.40)
"Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with
regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby
threatening America's status as a global power." (p.55) [...]
"In fact, an Islamic revival - already abetted from the outside not only by
Iran but also by Saudi Arabia - is likely to become the mobilizing impulse
for the increasingly pervasive new nationalisms, determined to oppose any
reintegration under Russian - and hence infidel - control." (p. 133)...
"America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's
central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the
Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global
primacy and to America's historical legacy."æ (p.194)...
"With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful
American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a
Geostrategic design." (p.197)
"That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the
emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge
America's primacy..." (p. 198)
"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly
uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single
state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly
global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last." (p.209)
"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may
find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues,
except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct
external threat." (p. 211) ...
1997 A geostrategy for Eurasia,
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Foreign Affairs,76:5, September/October 1997 Council on Foreign Relations Inc.
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html
''China's Distant Threat to U.S. Dominance in Asia''
http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=87
"China's Demand for Energy is Reshaping Power Structures Around the World"
Drafted by Adam Wolfe on February 25, 2004
http://www.pinr.com
China 'Frankenstein threat' to US
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/62F45F67-0096-482B-8B D0-E72D7BA9C...
5/02/07
Critics point to China's rising military power and ask who it might be aimed at. China has come in for heavy criticism from members of the US House of Representatives with one congressman labeling the country a "Frankenstein" created by the US that now threatens American interests...
The Chinese Century
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/magazine/04CHINA.html?th=& pagewanted=p...
China is poised for similar growth in this century. Even if China's people do not, on average, have the wealth Americans do, and even if the United States continues to play a strong economic game and to lead in technology, China will still be an ever more formidable competitor. If any country is going to supplant the U.S. in the world marketplace, China is it. ...Opponents of China's support for Sudan joined the committee hearing [GALLO/GETTY]...John Negroponte, the US deputy secretary of state, said China needed to be "more open about its military budget, doctrine, and intentions". The motives behind China's military build-up are unclear and are of concern to both the US and China's neighbours, he said.
Negroponte is the chief adviser to Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, on China and the rest of Asia...
French author wrote a book titled Chine-USA, La Guerre Programmée by French author Jean-François Susbielle claims the USA invaded Iraq in 2003 to have power over as many major oil fields as possible so as to control China’s access to oil....China is a strategic challenge that must be contained....
1997 US Army War College: "WE HAVE ENTERED AN AGE OF CONSTANT CONFLICT'
We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent. There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. 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....we will win [...] http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peter s.htm
2000 "Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century"
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses .pdf, basically transformed into the following, NSS of USA ...
2002 United States Government, National Security Strategy of the United States /NSS of USA
.
WAR ON IRAQ
Note: IRAQ 'CIVIL WAR' was always part of u.s plans to eliminate Arab resistance for "M.E." control: "Under this plan Iraq would cease to exist"
"...'quagmire' is an interesting word. If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying, god, I love freedom- because that’s what’s happened.... there are killers and radicals and murderers who kill the innocent to stop the advance of freedom. But freedom is happening in Iraq..."
GWB at 11/7/7 joint press conference with French President Sarkozy
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/11/20071107-5.h tml
U.S. Considers Dividing Iraq Into Three Separate States After Saddam Is Gone
FORECASTS & TRENDS, Oct 1, 2002
http://www.profutures.comarticle.php/91/%20
Stratfor.com http://www.stratfor.com/ reports that one of the leading long-term strategies being considered by US war planners is to divide Iraq into three separate regions. Under this plan Iraq would cease to exist. [emphasis added]
Stratfor says that such a plan reportedly was discussed at an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July. Further, they say that in September, the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, stated that the US goal in Iraq was to create a United Hashemite Kingdom that would encompass Jordan and Iraq's Sunni areas. Also, Israeli terrorism expert Ehud Sprinzak recently echoed this sentiment on Russian television on September 24.
So whose idea is this? According to Stratfor, Sprinzak stated that the authors of the "Hashemite" plan are Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, both considered the most hawkish of Bush administration officials.[...]
2004 Rand study "U.S. Strategy in the Muslim World After 9/11"
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali, exec. editor American Muslim Perspective
http://www.amperspective.com/html/neo_orientalists.html
Rand study titled "U.S. Strategy in the Muslim World After 9/11" suggests exploiting Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides to promote the US policy objectives inthe Muslim world. [...]
The invasion and occupation of Iraq: premeditated murderous aggression
By Ghali Hassan
The U.S. plan to divide Iraq—on ethnic and religious lines—and control its wealth was prepared several years before the war. It was no secret. ...
http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/092405Hassan/09 2405hassan.html
Sinister Plan to Divide Iraq
Hassan Tahsin
Arab View Guest Contributor
http://arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=84596&d=29&m=8 &y=2006
... US wanted to guarantee the implementation of its secret scheme to divide the Arab world into small petty states that could be easily brought to obedience in order to protect the US and Israeli interests forever...Iraq’s division into three states — Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish. This division would also pave the US road to Iran and Syria. There are some naïve people who believe that Washington would not break its promise of maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq.
Iraqis reject the US military presence in their country. They also reject the US plans including the imposition of a spurious American democracy.
The Iraqi resistance ... is being undertaken jointly by the Sunnis and Shiites because their goal is one: Oppose the occupying forces and their supporters... leave Iraq to Iraqis letting them decide their future.
Destruction of Holiest Shia Shrine Brings Iraq to the Brink of Civil War
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2006/0223-Mosque.html
Robert Fisk, "All This Talk of Civil War, and Now This Carnage. Coincidence?," Associated Press, March 3, 2004
The horrific attack which destroyed much of the Golden Mosque generated sectarian outrage which led to attacks on over 50 Sunni mosques. Many Sunni mosques in Baghdad were shot, burnt, or taken over. Three Imams were killed, along with scores of others in widespread violence. This is what was shown by western corporate media. As quickly as these horrible events began, they were called to an end and replaced by acts of solidarity between Sunni and Shia across Iraq.
This, however, was not shown by western corporate media. . . .
The Sunnis where the first to go to demonstrations of solidarity with Shia in Samarra, as well as to condemn the mosque bombings. Demonstrations of solidarity between Sunni and Shia went off over all of Iraq: in Basra, Diwaniyah, Nasiriyah, Kut, and Salah al-Din.
Thousands of Shia marched shouting anti-American slogans through Sadr City, the huge Shia slum area of Baghdad, which is home to nearly half the population of the capital city. Meanwhile, in the primarily Shia city of Kut, south of Baghdad, thousands marched while shouting slogans against America and Israel and burning U.S. and Israeli flags.--Dahr Jamail, "Who Benefits?," Iraq Dispatches, February 24, 2006]
Civil war likely in Iraq, not necessarily negative
Tony Jones Interview with Daniel Pipes
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 02/03/06
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1582736.htm
http://www.pwgd.com/blog/lb/1197-civil-war-in-iraq-not-bad-f or-us-with-appreciation-for-teaching-democracy-to-iraqis-why ...
TONY JONES: Tell me what sort of trends you’re talking about? Because I’m still struggling to understand how it would be anything but a strategic disaster.
DR DANIEL PIPES: ...should there be a civil war in Iraq, there are various trends which will be disrupted, trends which I think are negative... in the first place, there would be fewer attacks on our forces in Iraq as they fight each other. More broadly outside Iraq. There would be fewer attacks on us as the Shi’ites and the Sunnis attack each other. The imperative that the US Government, in particular, has been following would be shunted aside - an imperative which I think has led to negative results, because the victors in democracy, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have in all these cases been our most extreme enemies - the Islamists. And I think as developments in Iraq slow down the democracy process, so it will elsewhere and we will be the better for it. …
The Pentagon is Fomenting the Civil War in Iraq
The Pentagon’s "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)" is behind many of the terrorist attacks in Iraq. The car bombings, assassinations, sabotage, kidnappings and attacks on mosques are designed to cause violence and discord between Sunnis and Shiites. P2OG in collusion with Israeli IDF and MOSSAD operatives are responsible for a series of secret covert operations whose purpose is to create an all out civil war in Iraq. The ultimate purpose is to dismember the country, achieve complete control and make it easier for the USA and Zionist Israel to profit from Iraq’s vast oil resources.
As part of the Pentagon’s well funded programme, the CIA and Israeli MOSSAD have been training and arming the Kurds for terror raids inside Iraq. The Israeli operatives are also helping train US special forces in aggressive counter-insurgency operations, including the use of assassination squads against guerrilla leaders, prominent Iraqi academics, scientists, politicians and religious leaders. .
Their first major operation was the bombing on February 22, 2006 of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra, also known as the Golden Mosque. The mosque was a very well thought out target that holds the tombs of two revered 9th-century imams of the Shiite branch of Islam. The attack on the Golden Mosque began at 7 a.m., when a dozen men dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered the shrine and handcuffed four guards who were sleeping in a back room. The attackers then placed a bomb in the dome and detonated it, collapsing most of the dome and heavily damaging an adjoining wall. The covert operation against the Golden Mosque was designed to provoke Shiite groups into committing violent acts and retaliations against the Sunnis. Sunni political leaders said retaliatory attacks hit more than 20 Sunni mosques across Iraq with bombs, gunfire or arson. Authorities reported at least 18 people killed in the aftermath, including two Sunni clerics. In one incident, in Basra in southern Iraq, police said gunmen
in police uniforms broke into a jail, seized 12 Sunni men and later killed them. These attacks against the Sunnis were also carried out by operatives under the Pentagon’s "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group".
The Pentagon blamed the bombing of the Golden Mosque on al-Qaeda but cleric Abdul Zara Saidy had another explanation He said the mosque attack was the work of "occupiers," Americans, "and Zionists". Related La Voz de Aztlan report:
NORTHWOODS PROJECT: Exposing the Pentagon’s Schemes
http://www.aztlan.net/northwoods.htm
U.S.IRAQ EXIT STRATEGY: CIVIL WAR
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF10Ak03.html
The plan [to break up Iraq] allegedly conceived by David Philip, a former White House adviser working for the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC)[...]
'WAR ON TERROR' REVISITED
The conquest of Southwest Asia
By Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GJ07Ak01.html
For Washington the real enemy is not Islamic fundamentalism: it's Arab nationalism. For decades the ultimate target of Israeli foreign policy has been to sow disunion among Arabs. Secular Arab nationalism is the ultimate threat to Israel, thus to the US, in neo-con thinking. The crux is not religious: it's political...
US staying the course for Big Oil in Iraq
By Pepe Escobar
Dec. 14, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HL14Ak03.html
...It is now clearer than ever before that the blueprint for Iraq from the very start was to deliberately allow the country to descend into chaos and encourage Muslim to kill Muslim as the Neo-Con juggernaut of ethnic cleansing roars on to steamroll its next victim. In brief, the Iraq "civil war" essentially started on February 22, 2006 with the bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra which was done in an American-controlled city under American auspices. Witnesses reporting military movement around the mosque during a dusk-to-dawn curfew. The bombing required extensive drilling in stone pillars and was done by demolition experts. The SCIRI death squads operating mainly in Baghdad were trained by US agents. This is the "Salvadoran Option" mentioned by Cheney in his debate with Edwards. From Asia Times: The Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group [P20G] implemented by the Pentagon is regarded by Sunnis and quite a few Shi'ites as being the mastermind...of the car bombings, assassinations, sabotage, kidnappings and attacks on mosques fueling the "civil war". The "Salvador option" has developed into the "Iraqification option". US-trained death squads in Iraq are not much different from the death squads in El Salvador during the 1980s - subordinated to the same "divide and rule" tactics. This is the "civil war" dirty secret: let the Arabs kill one another with the US posing as "victims"....Iraq won't succumb to "divide and rule" and break up - because its identity as the eastern flank of the Arab nation is a geopolitical fact. So the real tragedy is how much longer millions of Iraqis caught in the crossfire will be paying with their own blood for the United States...www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15892.htm
It's The Resistance, Stupid
By Pepe Escobar
The ultimate nightmare for White House/Pentagon designs on Middle East energy resources is not Iran after all: it's a unified Iraqi resistance, comprising not only Sunnis but also Shi'ites.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18597.htm
P20G: Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
From the Moscow Times, Nov. 1, 2002.
Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
From the Moscow Times, Jan. 25, 2005. This is the follow-up to "Into the Dark."
http://collectioncf72.blogspot.com/2005/04/darkness-visible- pentagon-pla...
'The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
"A WEB EXCLUSIVE" Jan. 14, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/
..."We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it...
...the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.... Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK. Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation.... the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.) [...]
"If they do it, it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom."
Anthony Quainton, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984
Iraq's Partition
The U.S. will... work to dissolve the Iraqi nation and state into three independent statelets under a powerless sham national government and, of course, total U.S. control (...) As Col. Lang emphasizes, the seeds for partioning were laid when Cheney and the neocon figures around him ordered the Iraqi army to be disbanded and the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government, its total annulment. The idea of partitioning Iraq may even have been the very reason for the war. The New Middle East expression goes back to the [see above] 1996 "Clean Break" document (pdf) prepared by U.S. as a strategy for Israel's Netanyahu government. The first modern partition Iraq argument was made by Zionist strategist Oded Yinon in 1982. In A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties he recommends: In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. The now imminent, new policy of partitioning Iraq is indeed only the announcement of the result of a process that has been the plan and the policy all along. This is a real "Mission Accomplished" moment...
http://www.uruknet.org.uk/?s1=1&p=27322&s2=09
"The Erasing of Iraq"
Naomi Klein
The Plan Was Always to Divide Iraq. It's a tried-and-tested torture technique: strike fear into your victims, deprive them of cherished essentials and then eradicate their memories. In 2003, the US applied this on an enormous scale for its invasion of Iraq. And then, after Saddam's regime crumbled, Washington set out to rebuild the traumatised country through a disastrous programme of privatisation and unfettered capitalism,
http://www.iacenter.org/iraq-collon.htm Michel Collon, at iacenter.org www.burbankdigest.com/node/28
The Road to Partition
By DAVID BROOKS
America's best course is not to reunify Iraq, but simply to inhibit the violence as Iraqis feel their own way to partition.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html?t h&emc=th
Plans for Iraq’s Future: Federalism, Separatism, and Partition
Greg Bruno, Council on Foreign Relations Staff Writer
http://www.cfr.org/publication/14547/plans_for_iraqs_future. html
A non-binding resolution that sailed through the U.S. Senate in September 2007 reignited debate over Iraq’s political future. Introduced by Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) and Sam Brownback, (R-KS), the measure calls for a decentralized Iraqi government "based upon the principles of federalism" and advocates for a relatively weak central government with strong Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish regional administrations.
The War Becomes More Unholy
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/iraq/000528 .php
...Occupation forces claim that mosque raids are being conducted because holy places are being used by resistance fighters.
A leaflet distributed in Fallujah by US forces late November said mosques were being used by "insurgents" to conduct attacks against
"Multinational Forces," and that this would lead to "taking proper procedures against those mosques." The statement referred to daily
sniper attacks against occupation forces in Fallujah in which many US soldiers have been killed.
Local people refute these claims made by coalition forces.
"Fighters never used mosques for attacking Americans because they realize the consequences and reactions from the military,"
a member of the local municipality council of Fallujah told IPS. "Nonetheless, US soldiers always targeted our mosques and
their minarets."… the occupation forces have been supportive of clerics who took part in the political structure that the US coalition created
in Iraq. These include Shi’ite clerics and political leaders... most Sunnis do not follow any leader for religious reasons. Yet after we found
Americans targeting our religious symbols, we had to stand together around the man who did not sell us to the occupation." [...]
Dr. Rawi, avowedly a secular Sunni, told IPS that the number of Iraqis who believe the occupation is waging a "religious war" increased
dramatically after the 2004 attacks on Fallujah…."The world must be aware that this US administration is pushing the situation to the black hole of a new religious conflict by giving the green light to their soldiers to attack mosques and arrest clerics whenever they feel like it," Kassim Jabbar, an Iraqi political analyst from Baghdad University told IPS….(Inter Press Service)
ASSORTED EXCERPTS:
Ray McGovern does not rule out Western involvement in this week's Askariya mosque bombing in light of previous false flag operations that have advanced hidden agendas of the ruling elite. During the mid-eighties, McGovern was one of the senior analysts conducting early morning briefings of the PDB one-on-one with the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.--"Former CIA Analyst: Western Intelligence May Be Behind Mosque Bombing," prisonplanet.com, February 26, 2006]
Iraq's monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war". Note how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with the appalling violence in Iraq.
Robert Fisk, "Defeat is victory. Death is life," Independent, February 26, 2006
VIDEO: Iraq is not a sectarian society...People are intermarried. Shiites and Sunnis marry each other. . . . Some form of militias and death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities.--Robert Fisk, "Somebody is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq," ABC Lateline (Australia), March 2, 2006]
Iraq's Sectarian Bloodshed 'Made in the USA'
Iraq never had a history of sectarian conflicts. U.S. policy choices provided a perfect road map for starting one
by Erik Leaver and Raed Jarrar, Asia Times
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2006/0810-Sectarian.html
When the United States ousted Saddam Hussein in April 2003, crime spiked and full-scale looting erupted. But there were still no signs of sectarian clashes. That quickly changed, however, as the U.S. administration assumed control over Iraq, led by Paul Bremer.
Bremer, attempting to put an Iraqi face on the occupation, appointed members to the Iraqi Governing Council. Instead of reflecting how Iraqis saw themselves, the council's makeup mirrored and reinforced the U.S. sectarian view of the population . . .
FULL TEXT http://www.twf.org/News/Y2006/0810-Sectarian.html
The Minister of Civil War: Paul Bremer, and the rise of the Iraqi death squads
Bayan Jabr, Harper’s Magazine, August 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
http://www.harpers.org/the-minister-of-civil-war-399309.html
The rise of the death squads corresponds almost precisely to the April 2005 appointment of Bayan Jabr as interior minister in Iraq’s transitional government. The Interior Ministry, which is something like a combined FBI and Department of Homeland Security, controls billions of dollars and more than 100,000 men in police and paramilitary units. Jabr was a former high-ranking member of the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade, the military arm of the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that is now the dominant political force in the country. After taking over the Interior Ministry, he quickly purged it of Sunnis, and members of the Badr Brigade were widely incorporated into the ministry’s police and paramilitary units….
Cooperative Sadr surprises [SIC] U.S.
The Shiite cleric, long a foe of America [SIC], says it backs the new Iraq security plan.
Borzou Daragahi, LATimes Staff Writer
Muqtada Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric [SIC], has backed away from confrontation with U.S. and Iraqi forces in recent weeks, a move that has surprised [SIC] U.S. officials who long have characterized his followers as among the greatest threats to Iraq’s security. Thursday, a leader of the Sadr movement in one of its Baghdad strongholds publicly endorsed President Bush’s new Iraq security plan, which at least some U.S. officials have touted as a way to combat Sadr’s group. "We will fully cooperate with the government to make the plan successful," said Abdul-Hussein Kaabai, head of the local council in the Shiite Muslim-dominated Sadr City neighborhood. "If it is an Iraqi plan done by the government, we will cooperate."…
Mahdi Army 'Not to Resist’ U.S. Troops
By Nidhal al-Laithihttp
http//www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news2007-01-15 kurd.htm
The Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia group blamed for much of the sectarian violence in Iraq, has taken several measures to alleviate the impact of a possible attack by U.S. troops. The United States is sending thousands of more troops to Baghdad as part of a new strategy to pacify the restive city. Moqtada al-Sadr, often described as a 'radical anti-American cleric,’ is at the center of Iraq’s growing sectarian divide. He has reportedly ordered the commanders of the Mahdi Army,which he controls, to hold their fire when the Americans begin
operating in Sadr City and other Shiite areas....
The Myth of al-Qaeda in Iraq
Andrew Tilghman, The Washington Monthly
... After a strike, the military rushes to point the finger at al-Qaeda, even when the actual evidence remains hazy and an alternative explanation. The press blasts such dubious conclusions back to American citizens and policy makers in Washington, and the incidents get tallied and quantified in official reports, cited by the military in briefings in Baghdad. The White House then takes the reports and crafts sound bites depicting al-Qaeda as the number one
threat to peace and stability in Iraq ... When the White House singles out al-Qaeda in Iraq for special attention, the bureaucracy responds by creating procedures that hunt down more evidence of the organization. The more manpower assigned to focus on the group, the more evidence is uncovered that points to it lurking in every shadow. "When you have something that is really hot, the leaders start tasking everyone to look into that," explains W. Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former head of Middle East intelligence analysis for the Department of Defense. "Whoever is at the top of the pyramid says, 'Make me a briefing showing what al-Qaeda in Iraq is doing,' and then the decision maker says, 'Aha, I knew I was right.'"
With disproportionate resources dedicated to tracking AQI, the search has become a self-reinforcing loop. The Army has a Special Operations task force solely dedicated to tracking al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Defense Intelligence Agency tracks AQI through its Iraq office and its counterterrorism office. The result is more information culled, more PowerPoint slides created, and, ultimately, more attention drawn to AQI, which amplifies its significance in the minds of military and intelligence officers. "Once people look at everything through that lens, al-Qaeda is all they see," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked at the U.S. State Department's Office of Counterterrorism.
"It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."..."Sometimes it's as simple as an anonymous tip so they will go out on an operation and whoever they roll up, we call them al-Qaeda," says Alex Rossmiller. "People can get labeled al-Qaeda anywhere along in the chain of events, and it's really hard to unlabel them." Even when the military backs off explicit statements that AQI is responsible, as with the Tal Afar truck bombings, the perception that an attack is the work of al-Qaeda is rarely corrected. The result can be baffling for the troops working on the ground, who hear the leadership characterizing the conflict in Iraq in ways that do not necessarily match what they see in the dusty and danger-laden villages. Michael Zacchea, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves who was deployed to Iraq, said he was sometimes skeptical of upper-level analysis emphasizing al-Qaeda in Iraq rather than the insurgency's local roots...
The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority
of those interviewed for this article believe that the military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate? The reason is that alternate views are running up against an echo chamber of powerful players all with an interest in hyping AQI's role... The press has also been complicit in inflating the threat of AQI. Because of the danger on the ground, reporters struggle to do the kind of comprehensive field reporting that's necessary to check facts and question statements from military spokespersons and Iraqi politicians. Today, for example, U.S. reporters rarely travel independently outside central Baghdad. Few, if any, insurgents have ever given interviews to Western reporters.... Today multiple Iraqi insurgent groups target U.S. forces, with the aim of driving out the occupation. But once our troops withdraw, most Sunni resistance fighters will have no impetus to launch strikes on American soil... no one has more incentive to overstate the threat of AQI than President Bush and those in the administration who argue for keeping a substantial military presence in Iraq. Insistent talk about AQI aims to place the Iraq War in the context of the broader war on terrorism. Pointing to al- Qaeda in Iraq helps the administration leverage Americans' fears about terrorism and residual anger over the attacks of September 11....
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=36103
Washington’s consensus al-Qaeda deception
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2210.shtml
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