The USUK puppet state will be even more sectarian. In the voting they simply excluded the sunni triangle. The USUK colony will virtually shut sunnis out and be even more religious fundamentalist than some of the resistance is.
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Sectarian feuds have seemingly escalated in intensity. Some accuse the Sunni resistance fighters of trying to start a civil war and destabilize the country.
Is there any proof of this?
Why would they do this and how would it benefit them?
The USUK puppet state will be even more sectarian. In the voting they simply excluded the sunni triangle. The USUK colony will virtually shut sunnis out and be even more religious fundamentalist than some of the resistance is.
'...the proletariat, not wishing to be treated as a canaille, needs its courage, its self-esteem, its pride, and its sense of independence more than its bread.' Marx...★
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........★....★
..........★..★ Starry Plough Magazine
'From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers' - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stop Killer Coke
Any proof? When they drive a van into a Shi'a neighborhood, announce they're hiring day laborers, and then blow it up killing 150 workers, that's not proof enough?
And besides the bombing, "resistance" gunmen are also driving out Shi'a from mixed neighborhoods....
The civil war has already begun. On more than one side.
Why? Because the "resistance" is not, and never has been, primarily anti-U.S. All its elements - Ba'athist, al-Qaeda, etc. - have a past history of collaboration with imperialism, you may recall.
It is primarily aimed at restoring the political supremacy of the Sunni Arab population - more precisely, of the capitalist layers of that population.
And on the other side, or sides, other parts of Iraq's population have their own goals - Shi'a majority rule, Kurdish autonomy or if possible independence.
Ironically, it's the US/UK which just pressured the Baghdad government to restore the Sunni-Arab veto to the constitution ratification process. Reuteres
You might as well recognize the parties making up that government have their own agenda, and that's what's driving their side of the civil war. While subordinate to Washington, they are not merely a "colony" or puppet.
The "Sunni supremacy" motive remains an unproven hypothesis.
¡Viva Palestina Libre!
<--- Restricted for recognizing Zionist influence. Can't let the truth out now, can we?
Revolutionary Left: more effective than the Government at hushing up facts.
I see your point Severian.
If what you say is true than that is disheartening. Attacking fellow Iraqis while the country is still occupied? Hmm I dunno.
However, I think that if the resistance has the capacity to drive the US out, then it is worth some sectarian violence. I can't possibly imagine anything worse than being occupied by the US, and even more horrible, their neo-liberal "free market" policies.
I'd like to see a less reactionary, more left leaning resistance emerge but I don't see any material conditions that could warrant that. I could be wrong, and it would nice if I was wrong, but at the current time I'm still rooting for the resistance. Plus I'm sure this sectarian violence is by no means representative of the greater movement.
Yeah, but i think its a well-researched hypothesis. Sunni extemists are angry that they no longer get to have their way with the Kurds and the Shia. Now they are blowing things to hell in Shia cities and neighborhoods, directly threatening (and slaughtering) Shia.
It's easy to see
Evil as entity
Not as condition
Inside you and me
-Eugene Hutz
The resistance is a multi-layered movement of many Iraqi groups taking directions from members of their respective communities so don't try to oversimplify them in one category because that's total hogwash. This "Sunni supremacy" myth goes back to Rumsfeld and is just another embarassing attempt by Washington to make Americans feel better about themselves by white-washing the fact that the entire country is in opposition to the brutal occupation. If Severian has any new evidence to offer to support this claim, I'd like to see it. Otherwise, he should know better than to parrot this fairy-tale of spin.
¡Viva Palestina Libre!
<--- Restricted for recognizing Zionist influence. Can't let the truth out now, can we?
Revolutionary Left: more effective than the Government at hushing up facts.
There is also some Iraqi Communists in the Resistance. I used to have a link for this huge essay that showed which groups comprised the Resistance, but I seem to have lost it.
True, much of the country is against the occupation. However, the Kurdish peshmerga and the Mahdi Army aren't causing much of the most recent bloodshed. If you would take the time to see the location of these attacks, you'll find that they are mainly Shia areas.
Here's a few most recent attacks:
Shia Mosque
Link
link
Much of the fighting is taking in Al Anbar province, a Sunni majority province. If it were much more than a few Sunnis taking up arms, many more American troops would be dead now. That said, fighting between U$ forces and the Mahdi army takes place sporatically, but not nearly as frequent as other attacks.
It's easy to see
Evil as entity
Not as condition
Inside you and me
-Eugene Hutz
You're wrong about something there - al qaeda aren't part of the resistance. Like some of the Islamists in Palestine, they're attempting to hijack the energy behind the resistance for another purpose. Al-qaeda has only pulled off "spectaculars" - incidents aimed to create headlines, not seriously damage the occupation.
They're attempting to manipulate the opinion of the muslim world in their favour, not defeat the USUK occupation. Al-qaeda, by its very nature cannot create a widespread armed resistance.
You left out something pretty substantial there - the history of communist involvement in guerilla war and armed resistance in Iraq. There has been continious guerilla war by communists since the Brits attempted (and failed) to control the country, which continued against the monarchy and into the Hussein Ba'ath regime.
Far from attempting to restore their supremacy, the capitalist class of Iraq is small and by any standards very lazy and unassertive. The real dynamic in the country thus far has been the attempts of the middle class (currently out of power) to manipulate and pacify the workers and (small holding) peasants. The policy of the Ba'ath party was to build a modern capitalist Iraq, but it failed. (There were many empty factories throughout Iraq before the sanctions.)
Oh aye, the USUK are going to write their constitution and force em to play nice but they're not a colony. The US has been pretty blunt - they're going to take the oil and use it how they like.
I've never stated that the different factions in Iraq don't have competing agendas, nor did I ever think that. I wonder where you derived this claim from.
the UK is subordinate to the US - the Iraqis were militarily conquered. The UK lets the US fly on its airstrips but the US did not write their constitution or take their natural resources. If you can't see the difference, you're not going to have much luck understanding Iraqi history. The people of Iraq and Kurdistan have been shaped by imperialism, and if you don't understand that fact, their history just looks like unexplainable chaos.
You might as well accept that, like every imperialist adventure in Iraq, this is most likely going to fail. God help us if the USUK barbarians win - this will be just the start so.
'...the proletariat, not wishing to be treated as a canaille, needs its courage, its self-esteem, its pride, and its sense of independence more than its bread.' Marx...★
★...★
........★....★
..........★..★ Starry Plough Magazine
'From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers' - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stop Killer Coke
Ahh. Civil war. of course.
Here's another take.
Chebol
Were British SAS Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra?
Tuesday, 4 October 2005, 12:18 pm
Opinion: Global Research
Global Research Feature Article
Were British Special Forces Soldiers Planting Bombs in Basra?
Suspicions Strengthened by Earlier Reports
by Michael Keefer
September 25, 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
Does anyone remember the shock with which the British public greeted the revelation four years ago that one of the members of the Real IRA unit whose bombing attack in Omagh on August 15, 1998 killed twenty-nine civilians had been a double agent, a British army soldier?
That soldier was not Britain’s only terrorist double agent. A second British soldier planted within the IRA claimed he had given forty-eight hours advance notice of the Omagh car-bomb attack to his handlers within the Royal Ulster Constabulary, including "details of one of the bombing team and the man’s car registration." Although the agent had made an audio tape of his tip-off call, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, chief constable of the RUC, declared that "no such information was received" (http://www.sundayherald.com/17827).
This second double agent went public in June 2002 with the claim that from 1981 to 1994, while on full British army pay, he had worked for "the Force Research Unit, an ultra-secret wing of British military intelligence," as an IRA mole. With the full knowledge and consent of his FRU and MI5 handlers, he became a bombing specialist who "mixed explosive and … helped to develop new types of bombs," including "light-sensitive bombs, activated by photographic flashes, to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices having their signal jammed by army radio units." He went on to become "a member of the Provisional IRA’s ‘internal security squad’—also known as the ‘torture unit’—which interrogated and executed suspected informers" (http://www.sundayherald.com/print25646). ADVERTISEMENT
The much-feared commander of that same "torture unit" was likewise a mole, who had previously served in the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Squadron (an elite special forces unit, the Marines’ equivalent to the better-known SAS). A fourth mole, a soldier code-named "Stakeknife" whose military handlers "allowed him to carry out large numbers of terrorist murders in order to protect his cover within the IRA," was still active in December 2002 as "one of Belfast’s leading Provisionals" (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997).
Reliable evidence also emerged in late 2002 that the British army had been using its double agents in terrorist organizations "to carry out proxy assassinations for the British state"—most notoriously in the case of Belfast solicitor and human rights activist Pat Finucane, who was murdered in 1989 by the Protestant Ulster Defence Association. It appears that the FRU passed on details about Finucane to a British soldier who had infiltrated the UDA; he in turn "supplied UDA murder teams with the information" (http://www.sundayherald.com/29997).
Recent events in Basra have raised suspicions that the British army may have reactivated these same tactics in Iraq.
Articles published by Michel Chossudovsky, Larry Chin and Mike Whitney at the Centre for Research on Globalization’s website on September 20, 2005 have offered preliminary assessments of the claims of Iraqi authorities that two British soldiers in civilian clothes who were arrested by Iraqi police in Basra on September 19—and in short order released by a British tank and helicopter assault on the prison where they were being held—had been engaged in planting bombs in the city
(See Global Research (1); Global Research (2); Global Research (3)).
A further article by Kurt Nimmo points to false-flag operations carried out by British special forces troops in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, and to Donald Rumsfeld’s formation of the P2OG, or Proactive Preemptive Operations Group, as directly relevant to Iraqi charges of possible false-flag terror operations by the occupying powers in Iraq ( Global Research (4)).
These accusations by Iraqi officials echo insistent but unsubstantiated claims, going back at least to the spring of 2004, to the effect that many of the terror bombings carried out against civilian targets in Iraq have actually been perpetrated by U.S. and British forces rather than by Iraqi insurgents.
Some such claims can be briskly dismissed. In mid-May 2005, for example, a group calling itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" accused U.S. troops "of detonating car bombs and falsely accusing militants" (LINK). For even the most credulous, this could at best be a case of the pot calling the kettle soot-stained. But it’s not clear why anyone would want to believe this claim, coming as it does from a group or groupuscule purportedly led by the wholly mythical al-Zarqawi—and one whose very name affiliates it with terror bombers. These people, if they exist, might themselves have good reason to blame their own crimes on others.
Other claims, however, are cumulatively more troubling.
The American journalist Dahr Jamail wrote in April 20, 2004 that the recent spate of car bombings in Baghdad was widely rumoured to have been the work of the CIA:
"The word on the street in Baghdad is that the cessation of suicide car bombings is proof that the CIA was behind them. Why? Because as one man states, ‘[CIA agents are] too busy fighting now, and the unrest they wanted to cause by the bombings is now upon them.’ True or not, it doesn’t bode well for the occupiers’ image in Iraq." (countercurrents.org)
Two days later, on April 22, 2004, Agence France-Presse reported that five car-bombings in Basra—three near-simultaneous attacks outside police stations in Basra that killed sixty-eight people, including twenty children, and two follow-up bombings—were being blamed by supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on the British. While eight hundred supporters demonstrated outside Sadr’s offices, a Sadr spokesman claimed to have "evidence that the British were involved in these attacks" (http://www.inq7.net/wnw/2004/apr/23/wnw_3_1.htm).
An anonymous senior military officer said on April 22, 2004 of these Basra attacks that "It looks like Al-Qaeda. It’s got all the hallmarks: it was suicidal, it was spectacular and it was symbolic." Brigadier General Nick Carter, commander of the British garrison in Basra, stated more ambiguously that Al Qaeda was not necessarily to blame for the five bombings, but that those responsible came from outside Basra and "quite possibly" from outside Iraq: "’All that we can be certain of is that this is something that came from outside,’ Carter said" (http://www.inq7.net/wnw/2004/apr/23/wnw_4_1.htm). Moqtada al-Sadr’s supporters of course believed exactly the same thing—differing only in their identification of the criminal outsiders as British agents rather than as Islamist mujaheddin from other Arab countries.
In May 2005 ‘Riverbend’, the Baghdad author of the widely-read blog Baghdad Burning, reported that what the international press was reporting as suicide bombings were often in fact "car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs." After one of the larger recent blasts, which occurred in the middle-class Ma’moun area of west Baghdad, a man living in a house in front of the blast site was reportedly arrested for having sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman. But according to ‘Riverbend’, his neighbours had a different story:
"People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb. Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion. Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued. He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it. He was promptly taken away."
(Baghdad Burning – May 18, 2005 )
Also in May 2005, Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi-exile physicist whose writings helped to discredit American and British fabrications about weapons of mass destruction, reported a story that in Baghdad a driver whose license had been confiscated at an American check-point was told "to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license." After being questioned for half an hour, he was informed that there was nothing against him, but that his license had been forwarded to the Iraqi police at the al-Khadimiya station "for processing"—and that he should get there quickly before the lieutenant whose name he was given went off his shift.
"The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him. He stopped the car and inspected it carefully. He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors. The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad. The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated ‘hideous attack by foreign elements’."
(Albasrah.Net – 16th May 2005)
According to Khadduri, "The same scenario was repeated in Mosul, in the north of Iraq." On this occasion, the driver’s life was saved when his car broke down on the way to the police station where he was supposed to reclaim his license, and when the mechanic to whom he had recourse "discovered that the spare tire was fully laden with explosives."
Khadduri mentions, as deserving of investigation, a "perhaps unrelated incident" in Baghdad on April 28, 2005 in which a Canadian truck-driver with dual Canadian-Iraqi citizenship was killed. He quotes a CBC report according to which "Some media cited unidentified sources who said he may have died after U.S. forces ‘tracked’ a target, using a helicopter gunship, but Foreign Affairs said it’s still investigating conflicting reports of the death. U. S. officials have denied any involvement."
Another incident, also from April 2005, calls more urgently for investigation, since one of its victims remains alive. Abdul Amir Younes, a CBS cameraman, was lightly wounded by U.S. forces on April 5 "while filming the aftermath of a car bombing in Mosul." American military authorities were initially apologetic about his injuries, but three days later arrested him on the grounds that he had been "engaged in anti-coalition activity"
( huffingtonpost.com).
Arianna Huffington, in her detailed account of this case, quite rightly emphasizes its Kafkaesque qualities: Younes has now been detained, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, for more than five months—without charges, without any hint of what evidence the Pentagon may hold against him, and without any indication that he will ever be permitted to stand trial, challenge that evidence, and disprove the charges that might at some future moment be laid. But in addition to confirming, yet again, the Pentagon’s willingness to violate the most fundamental principles of humane and democratic jurisprudence, this case also raises a further question. Was Younes perhaps arrested, like the Iraqi whose rumoured fate was mentioned by ‘Riverbend’, because he had seen—and in Younes’ case photographed—more than was good for him?
Agents provocateurs?
Spokesmen for the American and British occupation of Iraq, together with newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, have of course rejected with indignation any suggestion that their forces could have been involved in false-flag terrorist operations in Iraq.
It may be remembered that during the 1980s spokesmen for the government of Ronald Reagan likewise heaped ridicule on Nicaraguan accusations that the U.S. was illegally supplying weapons to the ‘Contras’—until, that is, a CIA-operated C-123 cargo aircraft full of weaponry was shot down over Nicaragua, and Eugene Hasenfus, a cargo handler who survived the crash, testified that his supervisors (one of whom was Luis Posada Carriles, the CIA agent responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner) were working for then-Vice-President George H. W. Bush.
The arrest—and the urgent liberation—of the two undercover British soldiers in Iraq might in a similar manner be interpreted as casting a retrospective light on previously unsubstantiated claims about the involvement of members of the occupying armies in terrorist bombing attacks on civilians.
The parallel is far from exact: in this case there has been no dramatic confession like that of Hasenfus, and there are no directly incriminating documents like the pilot’s log of the downed C-123. There is, moreover, a marked lack of consensus as to what actually happened in Basra. Should we therefore, with Juan Cole, dismiss the possibility British soldiers were acting as agents provocateurs as a "theory [that] has almost no facts behind it" (http://www.juancole.com)?
Members of Britain's Elite SAS Forces
It appears that when on September 19 suspicious Iraqi police stopped the Toyota Cressida the undercover British soldiers were driving, the two men opened fire, killing one policeman and wounding another. But the soldiers, identified by the BBC as "members of the SAS elite special forces" (BBC News), were subdued by the police and arrested. A report published by The Guardian on September 24 adds the further detail that the SAS men "are thought to have been on a surveillance mission outside a police station in Basra when they were challenged by an Iraqi police patrol" (Guardian Unlimited).
As Justin Raimondo has observed in an article published on September 23 at Antiwar.com, nearly every other aspect of this episode is disputed.
The Washington Post dismissively remarked, in the eighteenth paragraph of its report on these events, that "Iraqi security officials variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives" (SF Gate). Iraqi officials in fact accused them not of one or the other act, but of both.
Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV on September 19 that the soldiers opened fire when the police sought to arrest them, and that their car was booby-trapped "and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market" (quoted by Chossudovsky). A deliberately inflammatory press release sent out on the same day by the office of Moqtada al-Sadr (and posted in English translation at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog on September 20) states that the soldiers’ arrest was prompted by their having "opened fire on passers-by" near a Basra mosque, and that they were found to have "in their possession explosives and remote-control devices, as well as light and medium weapons and other accessories" (http://www.juancole.com).
What credence can be given to the claim about explosives? Justin Raimondo writes that while initial BBC Radio reports acknowledged that the two men indeed had explosives in their car, subsequent reports from the same source indicated that the Iraqi police found nothing beyond "assault rifles, a light machine gun, an anti-tank weapon, radio gear, and medical kit. This is thought to be standard kit for the SAS operating in such a theater of operations" (http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7366).
One might well wonder, with Raimondo, whether an anti-tank weapon is "standard operating equipment"—or what use SAS men on "a surveillance mission outside a police station" intended to make of it. But more importantly, a photograph published by the Iraqi police and distributed by Reuters shows that—unless the equipment is a plant—the SAS men were carrying a good deal more than just the items acknowledged by the BBC.
Image from Albasrah.net
I would want the opinion of an arms expert before risking a definitive judgment about the objects shown, which could easily have filled the trunk and much of the back seat of a Cressida. But this photograph makes plausible the statement of Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, a spokesman for Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia:
"What our police found in their car was very disturbing—weapons, explosives, and a remote control detonator. These are the weapons of terrorists. We believe these soldiers were planning an attack on a market or other civilian targets…" (quoted by Raimondo)
The fierce determination of the British army to remove these men from any danger of interrogation by their own supposed allies in the government the British are propping up—even when their rescue entailed the destruction of an Iraqi prison and the release of a large number of prisoners, gun-battles with Iraqi police and with Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, a large popular mobilization against the British occupying force, and a subsequent withdrawal of any cooperation on the part of the regional government—tends, if anything, to support the view that this episode involved something much darker and more serious than a mere flare-up of bad tempers at a check-point.
US-UK Sponsored Civil War
There is reason to believe, moreover, that the open civil war which car-bomb attacks on civilians seem intended to produce would not be an unwelcome development in the eyes of the occupation forces.
Writers in the English-language corporate media have repeatedly noted that recent terror-bomb attacks which have caused massive casualties among civilians appear to be pushing Iraq towards a civil war of Sunnis against Shiites, and of Kurds against both. For example, on September 18, 2005 Peter Beaumont proposed in The Observer that the slaughter of civilians, which he ascribes to Al Qaeda alone, "has one aim: civil war" (Observer).
But H. D. S. Greenway had already suggested on June 17, 2005 in the Boston Globe that "Given the large number of Sunni-led attacks against Shia targets, the emerging Shia-led attacks against Sunnis, and the extralegal abductions of Arabs by Kurdish authorities in Kirkut, one has to wonder whether the long-feared Iraqi civil war hasn’t already begun" (Bodton Globe).
And on September 21, 2005 Nancy Youssef and Mohammed al Dulaimy of the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau wrote that the ethnic cleansing of Shiites in predominantly Sunni Baghdad neighbourhoods "is proceeding at an alarming and potentially destabilizing pace," and quoted the despairing view of an Iraqi expert:
"’Civil war today is closer than any time before,’ said Hazim Abdel Hamid al Nuaimi, a professor of politics at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. ‘All of these explosions, the efforts by police and purging of neighbourhoods is a battle to control Baghdad.’"
(Realcities.com)
Whether or not it has already begun or will occur, the eruption of a full-blown civil war, leading to the fragmentation of the country, would clearly be welcomed in some circles. Israeli strategists and journalists proposed as long ago as 1982 that one of their country’s strategic goals should be the partitioning of Iraq into a Shiite state, a Sunni state, and a separate Kurdish part. (See foreign ministry official Oded Yinon’s "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s," Kivunim 14 [February 1982]; a similar proposal put forward by Ze’ev Schiff in Ha’aretz in the same month is noted by Noam Chomsky in Fateful Triangle [2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999], p. 457).
A partitioning of Iraq into sections defined by ethnicity and by Sunni-Shia differences would entail, obviously enough, both civil war and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But these considerations did not deter Leslie H. Gelb from advocating in the New York Times, on November 25, 2003, what he called "The Three-State Solution". (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/iraq/three.htm).
Gelb, a former senior State Department and Pentagon official, a former editor and columnist for the New York Times, and president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is an insider’s insider. And if the essays of Yinon and Schiff are nasty stuff, especially in the context of Israel’s 1981 bombing attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, there is still some difference between speculatively proposing the dismemberment of a powerful neighbouring country, and actively advocating the dismemberment of a country that one’s own nation has conquered in a war of unprovoked aggression. The former might be described as a diseased imagining of war and criminality; the latter belongs very clearly to the category of war crimes.
Gelb’s essay proposes punishing the Sunni-led insurgency by separating the largely Sunni centre of present-day Iraq from the oil-rich Kurdish north and the oil-rich Shia south. It holds out the dismembering of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s (with the appalling slaughters that ensued) as a "hopeful precedent."
Gelb’s essay has been widely interpreted as signaling the intentions of a dominant faction in the U.S. government. It has also, very appropriately, been denounced by Bill Vann as openly promoting "a war crime of world-historic proportions" (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/no...gelb-n26.shtml).
Given the increasing desperation of the American and British governments in the face of an insurgency that their tactics of mass arbitrary arrest and torture, Phoenix-Program or "Salvadoran-option" death squads, unrestrained use of overwhelming military force, and murderous collective punishment have failed to suppress, it comes as no surprise that in recent military actions such as the assault on Tal Afar the U.S. army has been deploying Kurdish peshmerga troops and Shiite militias in a manner that seems designed to inflame ethnic hatreds.
No one, I should hope, is surprised any longer by the fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—that fictional construct of the Pentagon’s serried ranks of little Tom Clancies, that one-legged Dalek, that Scarlet Pimpernel of terrorism, who manages to be here, there, and everywhere at once—should be so ferociously devoted to the terrorizing and extermination of his Shiite co-religionists.
Should we be any more surprised, then, to see evidence emerging in Iraq of false-flag terrorist bombings conducted by the major occupying powers? The secret services and special forces of both the U.S. and Britain have, after all, had some experience in these matters.
*************
Global Research Contributing Editor Michael Keefer is Prfoessor of English at the University of Guelph. He is a former President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. His most recent writings include a series of articles on electoral fraud in the 2004 US presidential election published by the Centre for Research on Globalization
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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© Copyright Michael Keefer, GlobalResearch.ca, 2005
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The SAS have a well documented history of this. We'll see more of this as the Force Research Unit, the branch of British intellegence that ran counter insurgency operations against republicans in the six counties, has relocated to Iraq.
'...the proletariat, not wishing to be treated as a canaille, needs its courage, its self-esteem, its pride, and its sense of independence more than its bread.' Marx...★
★...★
........★....★
..........★..★ Starry Plough Magazine
'From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers' - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stop Killer Coke
You're free to hold that peculiar belief....but if anybody in the Iraqi "resistance" agrees, they're not acting on it.
And in fact it's not just "spectaculars" which are targeting the Shi'a population of Iraq. "Resistance" gunmen are also doing so, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house.
Shiites fleeing Sunni dominated neighborhoods of Baghdad
The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods is proceeding at an alarming and potentially destabilizing pace.
....
In some Baghdad neighborhoods, residents are finding death threats under their doors or fliers signed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Iraq's most wanted terrorist, calling on Iraqis to kill their Shiite brethren. Others said their family members have been killed and that insurgents in Sunni neighborhoods have threatened Shiite clerics and shut down mosques.
A 22-year-old Baghdad University student said that in June, a Sunni militia group threatened to kill her family if they didn't move out of their home in Ghazilyah, a mostly Sunni neighborhood.
....
Riath Noori, 38, a street vendor fled Tal Afar two weeks ago and moved into the hotel in Najaf. He has no plans to move his family of 11 back home.
"We had two choices - leave the city or take revenge. Our ayatollah said we cannot take revenge, and I don't want to go back to a city that reminds me of my pain."
In some areas, Sunnis are escaping Shiite neighbors, although that trend is less pronounced.
One Sunni cleric who asked to be identified as Abu Yasser said he recently left New Baghdad after armed men appeared before his house, carrying AK-47s. The men threw a grenade at his house, he said. Suspecting they were Shiite militiamen, Abu Yasser fled to Fallujah.
It's only that the "spectaculars" receive more headlines internationally.
I'm glad I have your permission. :P
Actually there was a statement put out by one of the resistance groups that called for Iraqis to reject sectarianism and work together. And some of the latest rounds of violence have been shiite. So not all the resistance accepts a-q's sectarianism.
I say that a-q are not a resistance group because they appear to not be organising to defeat the occupation but to use it as a platform to promote their ideology. They're not organised as they were in the Afghan civil war, into companies of 100 men. They're organised in small cells who kidnap and murder on film.
'...the proletariat, not wishing to be treated as a canaille, needs its courage, its self-esteem, its pride, and its sense of independence more than its bread.' Marx...★
★...★
........★....★
..........★..★ Starry Plough Magazine
'From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers' - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stop Killer Coke
A statement by one.
A feeble straw to clutch at, as opposed to the actions of all.
It takes a lot of wishful thinking to go on supporting the Iraqi "resistance", after everything that's happened.
Hm...because some Shi'a are beginning to retaliate in kind...therefore the resistance's blatant mass murder doesn't matter. Something wrong with that reasoning. Seems to me that makes it matter more, that the provocations are working.
As I said from the beginning of this thread, that's true of the "resistance" as a whole. The Ba'athists who are its predominant element, want to regain power or as much power as possible....and as their history shows, they would have no objection to excercising power as Washington's clients if Washington would accept that.
It is primarily other Iraqis who will never accept that.
The civil war has arrived....and supporters of the "resistance" are backing the most reactionary of the many reactionary forces in it.
You're right - primary source evidence is the weakest.Who cares what they actually say as the American SWP's opinion carries far more weight.
If you're familiar with Iraqi history you'd know that a stable imperialist occupation is the most otherwordly option to choose. It isn't going to happen. Blame the sectarian religious bastards all you want, it's the occupation who made their reign of terror possible.
I honestly haven't a clue what you mean by that. Shi'ites have been fighting the Brits. The brits have been crying about how now they're hated in areas that were always passive till now.
You really haven't enough knowledge about Iraq to comment here, or you're just inserting what you want to be the truth - the Ba'athists are often working with the occupation and reforming the army. All throughout Iraqi history, imperialists have attempted to control Iraq, and all throughout its history there has been armed resistance to this, including to the puppet baathist regime. Communists have been fighting for decades. I don't know why you think they'll suddenly give up just because you've decided that they're reactionary.(!
'...the proletariat, not wishing to be treated as a canaille, needs its courage, its self-esteem, its pride, and its sense of independence more than its bread.' Marx...★
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..........★..★ Starry Plough Magazine
'From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers' - Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Stop Killer Coke
So what's Severian's latest justification for occupation? That the resistance are nothing but "unworthy terrorists?" "Sunni privilege" fighters? What's next buddy?
As opposed to the evidence you offered? Cherry picking an article from some local news site?
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
So there is some settling of scores going on? Civilian casualties are still rarely the primary target. Some of the attacks that seem to be directed at only civilians reflect sectarian religious provocations, not necessarily associated with the resistance.
Actually, Iraqi politicians on both sides are not really taking the bait. This is an indication that the nature of the Sunni-Shi'ites provocation is understood in Iraq. That nature being that it is mostly the work of provocateurs who are trying to start a civil war.
If there is sectarian and ethnic hatred in Iraq, this is thanks to the U.S., not the resistance. When Iraq was first occupied, the US had an anti-Ba'athist stance towards allowing people to join the provisional government. They either didn't understand or didn't care that almost all the capable technocrats in Iraqi society were practically forced to join Hizb ul-Ba'ath during the Saddam era in order to work. To be a Sunni during that era either meant you were in Saddam's party, or you were a "practicing" Sunni and thus forced underground. Now with Saddam out of the picture, allegiance to the Ba'ath party doesn't hold as much signifigance as it did before and non-Ba'athist, non-secular Sunnis are now "free to emerge" so the Americans would have us believe.
Now that they've all been effectively locked out of having any posts in the government, they don't have access to the largest employment sector in the land. Additionally they are subject to revenge attacks by the new, largely Shi'i Iraqi security and police forces who feel that they have been kept down by the Sunnis under Saddam. Where does this leave the average kid on the block? With a desire to get back at the Americans who made a situation that probably wasn't great to begin with worse, and to get back at the police he sees as corrupt collaborators.
Uh-huh, every single Iraqi fighting colonialism in Iraq is a Salafist loon or fighting for Sunni privilege? I don't think so. This remains a highly dubious and unproven hypothesis. The only evidence I've seen you substantiate this claim with was a study that demonstrated Sunni prominence. But Sunni prominence in the resistance still does not prove your theory that the Sunnis are fighting, not to oust the Americans, but to restore Baathist power over Iraq.
FYI, there are Iraqi Christians, atheists, agnostics and seculars in the resistance - that's been proven. I think you're just trying to fit the points together in a way that nicely fits with the American mythology of its noble 'liberation' of Iraq from Saddam.
¡Viva Palestina Libre!
<--- Restricted for recognizing Zionist influence. Can't let the truth out now, can we?
Revolutionary Left: more effective than the Government at hushing up facts.
