Bush's Bloodbath in Babylon: 'Coincidence' and Consequences
by Chris Floyd
by Chris Floyd
Neighbors
are Killing Neighbors (Washington Post): After more
than a week of some of the most vicious sectarian violence of
the war, Baghdad is a skeleton of a city: Many of its shops are
shuttered, its streets drained of people. The violence erupted
July 9 when Shiite Muslim militiamen rampaged through the al-Jihad
neighborhood and killed dozens of Sunni Arabs. By Friday, the
sixth day, the death toll in Baghdad stood at 628 people, according
to Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Nima of the Interior Ministry, citing a
figure that far exceeded the numbers previously suggested by news
reports.
Iraq
Draws First Front Line of Civil War
(Sunday Telegraph): …Many of the recruits to Iraq's
fledging armed forces are drawn from al-Sadr's militias. As Iraqi
security forces and the US military are accused of turning a blind
eye to the slaughter, observers fear that the country has reached
a third, even more intractable, phase in the recent conflict,
beyond insurgency and beyond even combat between organised armed
groups.
"What
we're now seeing has no shape whatever," a Western diplomat
said. "It's just everyone fighting everyone. Anarchy."
Can it be a
total coincidence that the
hellstorm of murder and mayhem that has now turned Baghdad into
"a skeleton of a city" began just after Bush
and al-Maliki announced their ballyhooed "security push,"
pouring thousands of new troops and police into the capital's streets?
 Can
it be a total coincidence that much of the new violence has been
carried out by "men dressed in the uniforms of the Iraqi police,"
to use the timid euphemism adopted by the mainstream media, and
by militia forces associated with perhaps the key political player
in the new "sovereign" government, the hidebound religious
crank Motqada al-Sadr?
Can it be a
total coincidence that the new horror
devouring the conquered land has led some hardline Sunni leaders
once bitterly opposed to the U.S. occupation now
want American forces to stay, in order to quell the chaos, offset
Shiite dominance and ward off Iranian influence? Can it be a total
coincidence that this desire bolsters the Bush Regime's long-held
intention to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq?
Can it be a
total coincidence that the steady rise in militia violence –
now reaching apocalyptic heights – has followed the Bush Regime's
open bruiting
of the "Salvador Option" – i.e., employing militias
and death squads as part of "counterinsurgency" operations
in Iraq, just like those Reagan-Bush glory days of yore, when the
ditches and back alleys of Central America ran red with the blood
of innocent thousands slaughtered by U.S.-backed, U.S.-bought terrorists?
Can it be a
total coincidence that this rise followed the implementation of
the Bush Regime's lavishly-funded, openly attested program "to
arm and train non-governmental 'local militias' – i.e.,
bands of lawless freebooters – to serve as Washington's proxy
killers in the so-called 'arc of crisis" that just happens
to stretch across the oil-bearing lands and strategic pipeline routes
of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and South America,"
as we reported in August 2004? That's when then-Pentagon poo-bah
Paul Wolfowitz told a Congressional committee that:
Bush wants
big bucks [the request was for $500 million] to run 'counter-insurgency'
and 'counter-terrorist' operations in 'ungoverned areas' of the
world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing 'sanctuary'
for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 'National
Security Strategy' of unprovoked aggressive war against 'potential'
enemies, Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist
sanctuary" to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers
to offer even verbal encouragement to America's designated enemies
du jour.
Any rogue
state that countenances such freedom of speech within its borders
will become a prime target for 'the path of action,' said Wolf,
quoting Bush's most ringing Hitlerian phrase from the 2002 manifesto.
To relieve the overstretched U.S. military, the 'action' will
be carried out largely by Bush's new hired guns: religious and
ethnic militias, tribal forces, mercenaries, cultists, insurrectionists,
druglords, pirates – basically anyone willing to slit throats
and terrorize populations at the order of the Oval One.
Can it really
be a total coincidence that the rise in sectarian and terrorist
murder follows the Pentagon's adoption of a plan to foment terrorism
by infiltrating violent groups and goading them into action? I
first wrote of this plan back in November 2002, when it first
surfaced via outstanding investigative work by William Arkin. Then
in January 2005, Sy Hersh came up with the goods to confirm that
the plan was indeed in operation. As
I wrote then:
Not only
will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups
and provoke them into action; the Pentagon itself will create
its own terrorist groups and "death squads." After establishing
their terrorist "credentials" through various atrocities
and crimes, these American-run groups will then be able to ally
with – and ultimately undermine – existing terrorist
groups.
Top-level
officials in the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence services and
the Bush administration confirmed to Hersh that the plan is going
forward, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
– just as we noted here in November 2002. Through a series
of secret executive orders, George W. Bush has given Rumsfeld
the authority to turn the entire world into "a global free-fire
zone," a top Pentagon adviser says. These secret operations
will be carried out with virtually no oversight; in many cases,
even the top military commanders in the affected regions will
not be told about them. The American people, of course, will never
know what's being done in their name.
The covert
units – including the Pentagon-funded terrorist groups and
hit squads – will be operating outside all constraints of
law and morality. "We're going to be riding with the bad
boys," one insider told Hersh. Another likened it to the
palmy days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the
right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and
we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any
area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it"…
Incredibly,
as Hersh notes, the Bushists are now openly citing a sinister
role model for their campaign: Britain's brutal repression of
the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set
up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups and
killed thousands of innocent civilians in putting down an "insurgency"
against their colonial rule. And in fact, Rumsfeld and other Bush
officials increasingly talk of combating not just terrorism but
a "global insurgency" – as if the whole world is
now an American colony, filled with recalcitrant "natives"
rising up against their rightful masters.
Can it really
be a complete and total coincidence, an amazing accident of history,
that the "blood-dimmed tide" now loosed upon Iraq follows
so closely upon the Bush Regime's plans to foment terrorism, employ
death squads and "ride with the bad boys" in order to
achieve its strategic goals – and that the reign of terrorism,
death squads and bad boys now ravaging Iraq has convinced even some
of the most recalcitrant opponents of the occupation that American
forces should stay in Iraq…which happens to be one of the Regime's
primary strategic goals?
Without in
any way imputing the hydra-headed hell in Iraq to a single cause
– for of course as with all human events, the situation there
has coalesced from a myriad of different, confused, even contradictory
factors – can we really say that the rise in violence has nothing
to do with the plans and intentions of the Bush Regime outlined
above?
Is it really
just a complete coincidence?
July
19, 2006
Chris
Floyd [send him mail],
Global Eye columnist for the Moscow Times, is the author
of Empire
Burlesque: The Secret History of the Bush Regime.
Copyright
© 2006 Chris Floyd
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