November 23, 2004
Xymphora ( http://www.uruknet.info/?p=7513 )quotes Juan Cole today, who says "guerrillas [in Iraq] … have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially Shiites, [and the killings] were planned and executed from Fallujah. … They are killing civilians elsewhere in order to throw Iraq into chaos and avoid the enfranchisement of the Kurds and Shiites." Xymphora responds to this by rightfully stating that the "hard-core militants who may or may not be involved in the car bombings left Falluja long before the American attack—an attack which was telegraphed for weeks while Bush waited for the election to be over—and all that were left to die were the civilian inhabitants of Falluja defending their families against the new Nazis, and a very tiny group of Islamic fighters hoping to become martyrs," and concludes with a question: "Have Americans all gone insane?"
I’d like to think not all of us here in America are insane.
First and foremost, it is nearly impossible to ascertain who is responsible for the car and suicide bombings in Iraq, primarily due to an almost complete lack of reporting there, due mostly to the Bush administration’s desire to make sure the news does not get reported in an objective manner (and "embedded" journalists are anything but objective). As we now know, hospitals were bombed in Fallujah for this very reason—to make sure the true number of civilians killed and wounded in that besieged city would not be counted—and the one "embedded" exception to the rule (the cameraman who captured the execution of an unarmed and wounded prisoner) demonstrates that more than likely the United States has and continues to commit serious war crimes in Iraq, that is unless we assume that particular event was an aberration.
Since we do not have a balanced picture of what’s going on in Iraq—or for that matter, much of a picture at all beyond what the Bush Ministry of Disinformation reports—Cole’s conclusions are not only absurd, they are irresponsible. Having said that, I’d like to credit Juan Cole for the invaluable background information he has (and continues to) provided on Iraq. I am a regular visitor to his excellent blog.
I know far less about Iraqi culture and society than Cole does, however I do believe I have a grasp on the mentality driving Bush and the Strausscon dominated Pentagon as it sows chaos in Iraq (and that’s what they are doing, sowing chaos, not sincerely attempting to defeat the "insurgents," who are Iraqi freedom fighters, same as the French partisans during WWII were freedom fighters or, for that matter, the Algerian Mujahedeen were freedom fighters fighting against French colonialism).
Since it appears, at least to me, that the Strausscon plan is to essentially Balkanize the Arab and Muslim Middle East (as dictated by Israeli interests), suicide and car bombings, blamed on Iraqi "mass murderers, serial murderers" (as Cole terms them), makes perfect sense, that is if civil war (and a fracturing of society along ethnic and tribal lines) is your objective. Israel Shahak’s translation of Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties" (http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/zionist_plan.htm
l , enclosed in Shahak’s "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East") makes this perfectly clear. For as Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, said, the area of the Jewish State stretches "from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates."
(See this map.)
:
Shahak summarizes the Zionist plan thus: "The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation." (Emphasis in original.) Unfortunately, Shahak’s translation has received almost no notice (and the late Shahak is routinely written off, predictably, as a "self-hating Jew" or a closet anti-Semite).
I also believe it is no mistake U.S. "military planners" are using what are essentially Israeli tactics in Iraq, including fronting their own "insurgent" groups to engage in terrorism (most recently and sensationally, the abduction and execution of CARE’s Margaret Hassan). Israel has a documented history of doing these sorts of things to weaken Palestinian nationalism, including covert support and funding of Hamas and even creating a bogus al-Qaeda cell in Gaza. In fact, as Noam Chomsky points out in a foreword to Livia Rokach’s "Israel’s Sacred Terrorism ( http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/sacred_terror.ht
ml )," the Zionist state "may have had a substantial role in initiating and perpetuating violence and conflict" in order to avoid making peace with its neighbors (since obviously peace is diametrically opposed to the idea of Greater Israel).
Livia Rokach had no idea American foreign policy would be captured by American Zionists when Rokach, daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett, wrote her study of Sharett’s personal diary. "Just as Zionism, based on the de-Palestinization and the Judaisation of Palestine, was intrinsically racist and immoral, thus the West, in reality, had no use for a Jewish state in the Middle East which did not behave according to the laws of the jungle, and whose terrorism could not be relied on as a major instrument for the oppression of the peoples of the region," Rokach’s monograph concludes. It would be the Strausscons, in league with Sharon’s Likudites, who would take the "laws of the jungle" to new and dizzying heights, eclipsing the older, less reliable U.S.-Israel relationship (for instance, although Clinton was pro-Israel, even to the point of betraying Arafat at Camp David, the Strausscons viewed him as weak on Israel’s "security," especially after he refused to follow step one of the Strausscon game plan, viz. the invasion of Iraq).
Although Juan Cole is a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history, I believe he underestimates the role Israel plays in Arab terrorism, as do a large number of academics (as for the media, they invariably portray Israel is a sterling example of "democracy" amid a sea of Arab terror, thus adding to the insanity [as Xymphora terms it] of the American people, even intellectuals should know better). Again, there is little evidence Israel and the United States are behind the truly horrific number of car and suicide bombings in Iraq—targeting not only Iraqi policemen (who may be considered legitimate military targets) but children and other innocent civilians as well—although past behavior of Mossad, the CIA, and the covert military operations of both countries in the Middle East should, at minimum, allow us to consider the possibility. As a primary example, consider the CIA car bombing ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/8/new
sid_2516000/2516407.stm ) outside a block of flats and close to a mosque as worshippers were gathering for Friday night prayers in a densely populated Shia Muslim suburb in Beirut, 1985 (the target of the bomb, that killed 45 people and wounded 175, was Sheikh Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, a Shia cleric).
|
