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President Bush stood before an auditorium of war veterans recently, one of the few audiences he can speak to without the risk of being interrupted by a dissenting voice. He wanted to tell us, yet again, of the importance of our work in the Middle East, conveying his starry eyed notion that everything we have been about there was the building of freedom and democracy. And yet again, he drew the same old familiar word picture that first astounded Senator Robert Byrd when he heard it, linking 9-11 to Iraq, and then linking the security and safety of Americans to the success of democracy there, and elsewhere in the world. When Byrd first heard Bush selling the war to congress he noted: “This was quite possibly the most extraordinary feat of rhetorical acrobatics I have ever witnessed. In one fell swoop, the President had linked Saddam Hussein to September 11, placed him in league with Osama bin Ladin, indeed with Hitler, undercut the credibility of the UN inspectors, defied the will of the Security Council, pledged liberation for the people of Iraq. Without a doubt, we were heading straight for war.” (Senator Robert Byrd: Losing America) The President continues his high wire circus act even today, still setting out the same convoluted logic, claiming that the chaos we see now, with Sunni and Shi’ite death squads roaming the country at will, roadside bombings, rampant terrorism, an irrepressible insurgency, the spread of radicalism in nearby regimes like Iran, Palestine and Egypt, the calcified autocracy of the few remaining regimes that are still “friendly” (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, The Gulf States)—all of this is the sure and unfailing sign that democracy is transforming the region in a painful birthing process. Imagine this story in tomorrow’s Washington Post: Purple fingers aside, the fact remains that Iraq did not choose democracy—we imposed it on them from without, through a military occupation that was really there to assure the wholesale seizure of Iraq’s oil infrastructure, signed over to American companies through a host of development contracts and business arrangements that are never mentioned at all in the President’s speeches. It is as if the entire issue of oil as a root cause of the war was just another of those minor unspoken details—a great truth that is always conveniently overlooked, because it does not fit easily into the President’s chosen rhetoric of flags, freedom and our boys. It’s not something you would ever want to tell those veterans who fought and served this nation with unflagging loyalty, but it’s the truth. So instead Bush touts the elections and the drafting of a constitution as evidence of the march of liberty. We did our best to impose democracy, but what we are seeing there now is a gradual but steady evolution of what the Iraqi’s would have chosen, what they are choosing, in spite of our interference in their politics and economy. They are choosing to coalesce around traditional sectarian lines, backed up by armed militias and security forces who are loyal to the sect first, and to the nation second. Security is provided by local gunmen, and therefore law is decided by these men as well. There is no semblance of peace or order, save that provided by the muzzle of an AK-47. After three years the US Army has been unable to do the most fundamental thing to restore civil order—disarm the population. The awful truth about the state of affairs in Iraq is seldom seen or reported in our own corporate controlled mainstream media. Oh, they show the violence when it erupts, but it is mostly misinterpreted or reduced to bland statistics—27 dead in Baghdad today, 12 dead in Samarrah, etc. FOX put on a so call military expert with a light pen the other day, and this retired general characterized the recent outbreak of violence as “Red on Red engagements,” where the Sunnis were clashing with their terrorist bedfellows over what direction to take the country. He indicated that the attack on the mosque was done by Al Qaeda as an attempt to trigger “secretarian violence.”—(yes, that’s not a typo, he said secretarian, not sectarian, and he repeated the error three times as I had visions of administrative assistants rioting in the streets, brandishing their shorthand pens with lethal effect.) I suppose such commentary is well in keeping with the times, where pundits now quip that we should not “misunderestimate the strategery” of this president. Taking a closer look at this attack on the Golden Mosque, the Sunnis might be the natural suspect, but looking at the result, with over a hundred Sunni mosques attacked in reprisal, how would such an operation have benefited them? All it would do is invite the Shi’ites to join the US Army in a tag team match against them, clearly something they don’t want. Other analysts have pointed out that the attack, which killed no one when it went off, was probably carried out by a Shi’ite group locked in the internal power struggle with the secular government. It clearly did not bear the hallmark of an Al Qaeda attack, which would have been calculated to cause mass casualties. What it did do, however, was demonstrate the Shi’ite militias are a necessary guarantor of security. The secular government wants them disarmed and disbanded, but the powerful factions coalescing around the Badr Brigades, Muqtada al Sadr, or Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Iran-backed leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) do not wish to lose the source of their power in the militias. Another interesting note is that this Golden Mosque was reputed to be the burial site of the 12th imam, Mohammed al-Mahdi, who is said to have gone into hiding through a cellar in the complex in 878, and is expected to return during a time of great turmoil and establish justice in a seven year reign. Now this is exactly the kind of talk that has been coming out of the mouth of Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been drawing on the power of this religious teaching to suggest the end times were indeed near, and the return of the Mahdi was now imminent. (Hence Sadr’s legions in Iraq, heavily supported by Iran, are called the Mahdi militias—disciples of the Mahdi who will enact and assure his just will.) It is also thought that during this time Islam will spread throughout the world. But this is only the view of Shi’ites. The Sunni’s have a different interpretation, a bit like the difference between Judaism and Christianity, where one group accepts Jesus as the Messiah and the other does not, and is still waiting for him. Surely we have all seen the violence such religious beliefs can produce, and how the fervor of these ideas can be used to achieve political ends. It was said that the Mahdi would restore order when all other rulers tried and failed, and we certainly have enough examples of that as the new Iraqi government struggles to maintain order. The chaos this attack on the Golden Mosque precipitated may have created perfect conditions for ideas like the return of the Mahdi to thrive and spread through the Shi’ite population. Again, all this does nothing to help the Sunnis, but it does dramatically enhance the power of the Shi’ite sects and their militia groups. This is what is going on in Iraq now, not some dumbed down military explanation of “Red on Red attacks and “secretarian” violence,” served up by FOX and their retired generals. Bottom line: you won’t find any good information on TV these days. To learn the truth you have to be willing to take a proactive stance and actually search out news on the Internet. The big American news channels, all owned by corporations who do regular business with the US government, will seldom, if ever, present any real information that might challenge the status quo thinking of “liberty vs the world” that Bush serves up. Reporters who do are often muzzled and eventually fired if they do not toe the line. Those with the courage to actually go to Iraq and do any real investigative reporting will likely end up dead, or soon star in their own hostage tape show. Yet in spite of these appalling conditions, which in themselves indicate the seriously degrading condition of Iraq, some information gets out. Look for it, and you will soon learn that, contrary to the rosy DoD assessment and anything our liberty loving President might say, the war is not going well. The insurgency is more organized and lethal than ever before. Even in the few cities of Anbar province where the US forces mounted major clearing operations, like Samarrah, Fallujah or Ramadi, there is still an active and dangerous insurgent movement that has not been repressed. The US forces move through a region like a fire, but after they have gone the insurgents regroup, re-organize and begin their deadly work anew. Increasingly, the targets of Sunni fighters have been their own citizens, Shi’ite Muslims who represent the majority, more as a way of exerting pressure on the government as it tries to negotiate with Sunni leaders than anything else. The Sunnis clearly demonstrate that they can cause chaos, or stand down, as they did in the elections. More and more, Iraqis come to realize that the insurgents can provide security if they choose to, but the US cannot. And because the US cannot seem to get the upper hand on the insurgents, they have deliberately recruited, trained and deployed these new “units” of the Iraqi army along ethnic lines, and turned Shi’ite battalions loose on Sunni trouble spots, exploiting the deep hatred between the two groups. This is your democracy at work in Iraq. The Sadr militias, the militant arm of the Shi’ite’s led by Muqtada Al Sadr, and the Badr Brigades, are only too eager to oblige their Sunni antagonists with a power struggle. Realizing that the Shi’ites would likely take the majority in any election, Sadr made the strategic decision to stand down and avoid direct confrontation with the US army. Instead, his men have been systematically infiltrating the Iraqi Interior Ministry, including security forces, police, and special forces. The fact that Sadr hails from, and seems to pledge loose ideological allegiance to conservative Mullahs in Iran does not make this picture very rosy for the US. In the end, we will trade the Sunni regime of Sadam for a Shi’ite government that is increasingly influenced by our new public enemy #1, Iran.
The sad fact is that the Army allowed the Iraqi security and armed forces to organize along the same ethnic lines that presently fracture the country, and the loyalty of the men to their old ethnic ties more than outweighs their loyalty to the new Iraqi government. The Kurds have their own military in the north, (former Peshmerga rebels that are now nominally in the 2nd and 4th Divisions). The Kurds primary goal is not a free and independent Iraq, but a free and independent Kurdistan, and to achieve this they have designs on the oil rich regions of Kirkuk to provide them the economic revenues needed to fuel their future economy, and they will fight for it against all comers. In the south, Shi’ites make up the 8th and 10th Iraqi divisions, largely infiltrated by Sadr’s men, and the Sunnis run rampant throughout Anbar Province, joining their insurgency instead of the army. Mixed in with these we have thousands of small paramilitary militias and a virus like infection by ten or twenty terrorist cells quietly replicating in the lawless cities, where the US forces have finally pulled out and no longer patrol. Representative John Murtha, no slouch when it comes to defending liberty, clearly had it right when he said the army has done all it can in Iraq, and it’s time to bring our troops home. All these armed Iraqi factions are on a sure collision course, and the US Army is presently caught in the middle, incapable of suppressing the smallest of the three factions in the Sunni insurgency. Should the conflict ignite and widen, the US will not be able to stop it, and our troops will simply have to stand aside or withdraw to secure bases. Should they attempt to impose order, the bullets will be coming at them from every side this time—for there is one thing that all sides seem to be agreeing on these days, and that is that the hated “occupation” must end. The US, being unable to establish order, would soon be forced to watch this false edifice of democracy in Iraq come crashing down into a larger civil conflict. And don’t count on the new Iraqi Army to save the day. All these “battalions” the American army has been training will eventually fight one another for their own sectarian interests. The policy of deploying Iraqi security forces after a US military sweep had a fatal flaw. The US used units from a different ethnic group, probably because they could not get Sunnis to police Sunni insurgents. This is, in effect, the US “exit strategy,” to back the Kurds and Shi’a, who control all the key provinces where there is oil in Iraq. The result was tailor made for the conflict which now appears to be reaching a critical mass. If you want to determine who is to blame for something, simply look to see who benefits. More and more, the attack on the Golden Mosque seems to have been a carefully calculated bid to further the power of the Shi’ite militias, who would eventually be forced to disarm by a secular government. That seems unlikely now. The growing strength of the armed factions within Iraq, a reality Saddam kept brutally under control, will now decide the fate of that nation. It’s inevitable. Many analysts doubt that any one side will be able to achieve a complete victory in the struggle that is emerging, or hold the country together as “Iraq.” I predict that we will watch a steady rising conflict between Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurd, and eventually see three separate and independent regions there, Kurdistan, Shia Iraq with strong ties to Iran, and a new Sunni nation in the Anbar Province with ties to Syria, probably sulking over the geographic fact that the other two enclaves have all the oil. There, in that desolate region, lurking among this sullen, disaffected Sunni population, Al Qaeda will find a host of eager recruits. None of the genius planners in the neocon think tanks ever seemed to predict this, but then again virtually everything they have done in Iraq after Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” has been a fiasco. The blood that will be shed in any wider sectarian war will be on our hands as much as anyone else, and the best we can hope for will be governments that are “friendly” to US oil and business interests when the dust settles. Fat chance. The Shi’ite factions now consolidating power in that camp have strong ties to Iran, not the US. In all of this I must say that an assessment made by New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman before the war has come hauntingly true. At that time he said that we would invade Iraq and then wake up to realize one of two things: the first was that Iraq would turn out to be the rebuilt “Germany” of the Middle East, thriving from its relatively well educated and westernized population and fed by a steady inflow of capital from the US and Europe and its own oil revenues. The second was that Iraq would turn out to be the “Yugoslavia” of the Middle East, a nation divided along ethnic fault lines that would grind against one another to no good end. And when the strong arm of Saddam was removed, (as when Tito fell), the violence would be inevitable between these factions. It is now increasingly apparent that we must first endure the horror and turmoil of Yugoslavia there before there is any hope of future progress. In the face of these deeply rooted clan rivalries, old bitter blood feuds, and religious differences, no bureaucratic veneer of “democracy” can hope to prevail in the short run. Democracy, as we should well know, cannot be imposed from without. It must be chosen by the people. So you can write off Paul Bremer’s edicts, the Iraqi “constitution” and the whole purple fingered mess when this conflict takes its inevitable course—and what will our young soldiers have fought and died for? Their bravery and dedication has been severely undercut by a President bemused by false notions of liberty, deeply ignorant of the true realities, the culture, the political situation in Iraq, and arrogantly obsessed with control of the oil resources there. The administration consistently rewards its corporate bankrollers, with no bid contracts and a seemingly endless flow of taxpayer dollars strong armed from congress under the guise of “supporting our troops.” Today the Army decided to finally reimburse Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root, a company that had been accused of fraudulent overcharges by auditors. The Army stated that “a company can’t be expected to operate perfectly.” Nope, a little fraud here, a little graft there, a touch or two of corruption—all par for the course. Business is business, right? This was, after all, the real reason for our occupation of Iraq, business, the money, the oil we need, but you will never hear the President talk about it on TV. Face it, if the US government could control the oil, with certainty and security, do you really think they would care who actually governed Iraq? Do they care about the long rooted autocratic and oppressive regime in Saudi Arabia? Oh, we’d like to see the entire Middle East turn into a pacific democratic sewing circle, but the reality is that we will take any form of government there we can get, as long as the oil comes with it. This, my fellow citizens, is the real state of affairs in Iraq—an emerging civil conflict fueled by terrorism, sectarian violence and the longstanding enmity between Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurd, all financed by Iran and fomented by a host of al Qaeda cells that were never there before we got this hankering to go in there after them thar WMDs. The notion that these developments represent “democracy on the march” is ludicrous. That our President would stand before us and make such naïve statements is astounding—but what else is Bush to say? His initial arguments, made in hushed and fearful tones to congress, spoke of the imminent threat of botulism, VX, anthrax and Saddam’s “advanced nuclear program”—a line of “talking points” that has long since evaporated from the bitstream. The administration then adroitly shifted its message away from the fear of these non-existent weapons, and pinned our security interests on the success of democracy in Iraq. To be sure, this would have been a noble goal, if it were true. Does the President actually believe his own words? Now for the clincher--we are hearing the same old line of argument with Iran! As the Middle East reaches a near boil, we still have all this media generated fear of WMDs, returning like a bad song on a broken record, with a shrill harmony of tough administration talk about Iran. CIA Chief Porter Goss reportedly went to Turkey in December of 2005 and told Ankara that an operation against Syria and Iran was in the advanced stages of planning, and that it could include the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Bush approved their use by executive order in National Security Presidential Directive 35, and it is he (not congress as mandated by the constitution) who will start the next war relying on the power congress gave him to use all necessary force against Iraq. (Never mind that Iran is a different country!) To do so he could authorize CONPLAN (Concept Plan) 8022 to be coordinated by a special unit of our Strategic Defense Command, according to William Arkin of the Washington Post. This is a plan to carry out a rapid strategic attack against any emerging “threat.” And this is why the recent hearings with Attorney General Gonzales over just what powers the President has under the “use of force” authority passed by congress were so important, for as Gonzales clearly stated, the Bush administration believes it already has the authority to act unilaterally, to take us into what will surely be the one nightmare we have all feared most--a war in which nuclear weapons are used. The weapon of choice will be the B61-11, the nuclear version of the conventional BLU-113 bunker buster bomb. So the United States appears to have decided that the way to keep others from using nuclear weapons is for us to use them first--a maddening idea right out of Dr. Strangelove. Israel has been publicly voicing its intention to take a military option, and there has been tons of press about the supposedly “secret” plan to strike Iran’s emerging nuclear facilities. Given the situation we see now in Iraq, this would be like throwing gasoline on fire, but the neocon mentality that has been controlling our government may feel that we have finally reached a “now or never” situation concerning Iran, and the region as a whole—so why not take them out, and Syria as well? Are you ready for the most serious outbreak of violence since WWII? The conflict that would erupt from a US or Israeli strike on Iran would make us look back on our present difficulties in Iraq with nostalgia. We will have real chaos in the Middle East if this happens, and who knows what will emerge from that whirlwind? If you spend a few hours with Google and do some web browsing you will find a healthy “conservative” movement out there espousing the overthrow of the present Iranian regime by any means possible, be it overt military action, covert operations again, like those that installed the Shah, or by furthering a popular rebellion. Suppose this happened, by any means. Do you think the millions of radical Islamists and their Mullahs would simply say “aw shucks” and vanish? Have they done that in Iraq after Bush declared mission accomplished? And if the heart of our 21st Century military cannot even pacify the Sunnis in Iraq, what makes you think that we will have a happy little democracy flourishing in Iran any time soon after the present government is removed? Such thinking verges on the insane, wholly wishful, and pathetic in the way it uses aspirations of liberty and democracy as window dressing to conceal the more obvious economic reasons why the US wants “regime change” in Iran. If the present government of Iran were thrown out, by any means, we would get a mega conflict where the daily terror and persistent insurgency would stretch all the way from the West Bank to Kabul. Good for business? Is that any place you would want to sink your venture capital if you were a wealthy Western concern? Is it a place you would want the energy future of our nation anchored? I think not, but it would be an ideal place for someone to step forward and claim he was the long awaited Mahdi, would it not? Beneath all the talk about democracy and liberty, the harsh economic realities driving our presence in the Middle East remain apparent. “Driving” is the key word there, for we are addicted to it here in this country, and therefore beholden to the corporate petro-dynasty that provides us with 26% of the world’s daily energy production. Do Americans love war? I think not, but they do love driving, and they love the elevated life style we have over here, fueled by all that Middle Eastern oil. Could the neocons actually see the hour of truth about to make that awful stroke to midnight? Even as I write additional Marine Amphibious Units have been quietly slipping into the Gulf region. Could they be so bold and foolhardy as to attempt to break the Middle East open, once and for all, in a conflagration of war that might see Israel actively engaged with Iran and Syria while we fling tactical nukes around to show we mean business--that no one gets to kill people with nukes but us. Who would want to kiss their child good-bye and send them into the cauldron of Iraq these days? No, the American people do not want this war—but their government does, for it has set itself on a path to secure our future by first securing the oil we need for fuel, by any means, including nuclear war … and we let them. Another influential world leader once said: “Of course the people do not want war…That is understood. But , after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along…The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same way in every country.” (Hermann Goering: The Nurnberg Diary). Article By: John Schettler - March 2006 |
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Sadr’s men in the interior ministry now have their own secret prisons, torture
facilities, and roving death squads, and right under the noses of the US Army, which seems unable to provide even a semblance of security anywhere outside
the beleaguered “Green Zone.” Any serious military analyst will soon realize that the situation in Iraq has slipped decidedly out of the control of the US Army. The
strength of the Shi’ite militias cannot be controlled. The army knows this. These militias can count at least 2 million men now, (more than 15 times the size of the
US Army in Iraq), and they control entire areas of Baghdad and most Shi’ite cities of the south, including Basra, where the British presence is increasingly nominal. As the US army has not been able to provide
security, the people have turned to these localized cadres of young fighters for their protection—but such security comes at a price. Lawlessness, extortion, kidnapping, bribery, and a host of other crimes are
commonplace in Iraq now, and the local policeman on the beat might be a Shi’ite militia man one day, and a Sunni militia man the next. Imagine living like that here. Does that sound like liberty on the march?
