Article: Slaughterhouse

It's astonishing how many people believe that Iraq is in a civil war.

Isn't clear by now that all the excuses leading up to the war were entirely false; that of the claims of WMD and connections to 9-11 were completely baseless?

And wasn't the "alleged" terrorist mastermind, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, that shabby invention of Pentagon-propagandists and their surrogates in the state-run media, exposed as a fraud just last week in a Washington Post article:

"The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." (Wa Post)

More lies. More propaganda.

So why are the American people so eager to accept the Pentagon spin about civil war? Are we to believe that the media has suddenly "seen the light" and decided to report events as objectively as possible?

Nonsense.

The present strategy was produced by the right-wing think tank, Rand Corp. and was designed to exploit the ideological and religious differences of the Iraqi people, even though Iraq has no history of sectarian violence.

The very same plan was articulated by Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations who wrote in a New York Times article ("The Three-State Solution," 25 November 2003) that the United States commitment to a united Iraq was "fundamentally flawed".

He added ominously:

"For decades, the United States has worshiped at the altar of a unified yet unnatural Iraqi state. Allowing all three communities within that false state to emerge at least as self-governing regions would be both difficult and dangerous. Washington would have to be very hard-headed, and hard-hearted, to engineer this breakup. But such a course is manageable, even necessary, because it would allow us to find Iraq's future in its denied but natural past."

The Bush administration has never veered from its plan to divide Iraq, that explains why the recalcitrant Rumsfeld has refused to put more "boots on the ground" to establish security. Security is not the plan; dissolution of the Iraqi state is.

The civil war storyline is intended to divert attention from the bloody subjugation of the Iraqi people by a foreign military. This is the real story of the Iraqi conflict. The current malaise in Iraq is reducible to three bullet-points; occupation, occupation, and occupation. Any departure from this essential narrative is simply false.

American Intelligence services are involved in every aspect of the current hostilities. Author Max Fuller ("Crying Wolf: Media disinformation and Deaths squads in Occupied Iraq") has documented how CIA operatives have not only trained the Iraqi death squads operating in the Interior ministry, but created a high-tech facility with data banks of the names of potential targets for future attacks.

Does that sound like civil war or a massive counterinsurgency strategy designed to rip the country apart?

So far, there have been three separate incidents where occupation forces have been either caught or connected to bombings in Iraq. This suggests that America is conducting a clandestine "dirty war" similar to campaigns they executed in El Salvador and Nicaragua under the very same leadership.

The first was the famous incident in Basra where two British paramilitaries were caught disguised as Arabs with a truck-full of explosives in their vehicle. Panicky British forces destroyed the Basra jail to release the two captured SAS soldiers clearly afraid that their involvement in setting off bombs would be exposed.

Another report that appeared in Reuters "American arrested with weapons in Iraq" confirmed that an American "security contractor working for a private company, possessed explosives which were found in his car." He was arrested by Iraqi security guards.

The bombing of the Golden-domed mosque also suggests links to occupation forces. The AFP reported that the bombing "was the work of specialists" and the "placing of explosives must have taken at least 12 hours". The report continues:

"Construction Minister Jassem Mohammed Jaafar said, "Holes were dug into the mausoleum's four main pillars and packed with explosives. Then charges were connected together and linked to another charge placed just under the dome. The wires were then linked to a detonator which was triggered at a distance."

Clearly the bombing was not carried out by rogue elements in the disparate Iraqi resistance but highly trained saboteurs executing a precision demolition to incite sectarian violence. The blast bears all the hallmarks of a covert Intelligence agency operation. Eyewitness accounts verify that American troops and Iraqi National Guard were active in the area throughout the night and that their cars could be heard running "the whole night until next morning". People living around the mosque were told "to stay in your shop and don't leave the area".

At 6:30 AM the American troops left, just 10 minutes before the bombs went off.

Since the bombing, the media has faithfully reiterated the same narrative from every soapbox; that the destruction of the mosque was the "catalyzing event" which put Iraq on the path to civil war.

No independent investigation of the bombing has ever been conducted by occupation forces. That hasn't stopped the media from promoting their Pentagon-friendly view of the incident.

The media spin on the bombing is just as suspect as earlier fabrications about WMD or al Zarqawi. In fact, the one journalist from Al Arybiya who was interviewing people who lived around the mosque was conveniently killed by occupation troops.

Let's summarize: The rationale leading up to the war was a lie. The justification for the ongoing occupation as a fight against terrorism (al Zarqawi) was a lie. The fairy tale about an Iraqi civil war is a lie. And, presumably, all the future stories diverting attention from America's bloody occupation will be lies.

In an article by Dirk Adriaensens "The Assassination of Iraqi Academics" (Brussels Tribune) the author recounts the macabre details of the present campaign to liquidate academics, intellectuals, scientists and other members of the Iraqi middle class -- "a class that has largely resisted the US occupation of Iraq and refused to be co-opted by the so-called "political process" or Iraq's US-installed puppet government."

Why would Sunnis or Shiites choose to target people who represent the intellectual foundation of Iraqi society?

There is a much more sinister plan afoot; a plan to destroy the very platforms of Iraqi identity, a plan to obliterate the monuments, the mosques, the museums; a plan to remove any trace of Iraqi nationalism from the collective memory; a plan to crush any potential threat to the new order.

This is cultural genocide.

As Adriaensens says, "What we are witnessing is the result of a carefully planned US campaign to liquidate every Iraqi who opposes the occupation of his country, the so-called "Salvador option". In fact, since 1945 the U.S. developed counterinsurgency policies based on the model of Nazi suppression of partisan insurgents that emphasized placing the civilian population under strict control and using terror to make the population afraid to support or collaborate with insurgents

The waves of violence that have subsumed Iraq radiate directly from the White House. Don't blame the Iraqis. The world's oldest civilization is being systematically reduced to rubble to feed the insatiable greed of Washington warlords and corporate kingpins.

Iraq is America's slaughterhouse; the Iraqi people have no part in this crime.

Don't call it civil war.