Divide And Rule, 'Ethnic Cleansing Works'
****************************************************

Posted Online on Saturday, 14 October 2006 23:59 IST
By Enver Masud
The Milli Gazette Online

Polls by the State Department and independent researchers show that Iraqis favor an immediate U.S. pullout, meanwhile, an "independent commission", according to the Sunday Times, "may recommend carving up Iraq into three highly autonomous regions".

We believe that the commission's recommendation will have little to do with the welfare of the Iraqis. Their recommendations will have much to do with expanding U.S. control of the energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia.

In a letter to President Clinton in 1998, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) -- the global domination project of the neoconservatives -- urged him to remove Saddam Hussein from power in order to secure "our vital interests in the Gulf" that holds "a significant portion of the world's supply of oil."

This probably wouldn't happen, they said, unless "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor" took place. September 11, 2001 became the new Pearl Harbor.

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the Bush administration in September 2002, said: "The events of September 11, 2001, opened vast, new opportunities."

But the decision to invade Iraq had been made much earlier.

White House counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke revealed in 2004 that on September 11, 2001 -- while he was briefing President Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and other high officials -- "the Bush administration was considering bombing Iraq in retaliation. . . .

Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said. "We all said, 'But no, no, al-Qaida is in Afghanistan.'"

Thus began a campaign to deceive the world, and in particular the American people -- the high point of which was Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

To justify the invasion of Iraq "evidence" of Iraq's possessing weapons of mass destruction was conjured up by the neocon-established Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon.
In May 2005, the Sunday Times revealed the secret Downing Street memo: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In June 2005, the Sunday Times revealed: "Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal."

Now a U.S. commission is about to recommend carving up Iraq as the solution to Iraq's "sectarian violence". Iraq's sectarian bloodshed is "Made in the USA" say Erik Leaver and Raed Jarrar.

Writing in Asia Times they say, "Iraq never had a history of sectarian conflicts. U.S. policy choices provided a perfect road map for starting one." The policy choices appear to have been calculated, and deliberate.

Thomas H. Henriksen wrote in the Hoover Digest, "From the founding of the United States, the federal government has relied on subterfuge, skullduggery, and secret operations to advance American interests. . . . The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, . . . Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam, U.S. elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level."

Investigative reporter and author James Bamford writes in "A Pretext for War", "Oddly, among the things they were trained to do at Harvey Point was practice blowing up busses -- Palestinian-terrorist style.

"We made a school bus disappear with about twenty pounds of U.S. C-4," said former CIA officer Robert Baer. . . . "We were also taught some of the really esoteric stuff like E-cell timers, improvising pressurized airplane bombs using a condom and aluminum foil, . . . By the end of the training, we could have taught an advanced terrorism course."

Pepe Escobar writing in Asia Times says, "Pentagon financing of these myriad [Iraqi] militias and the active involvement of Allawi in all these operations suggest that the Pentagon itself is destabilizing the country it is supposed to control. Destination: civil war."

Robert Dreyfuss, covers national security for Rolling Stone, has "repeatedly written about Shiite death squads and about abuses by the paramilitary Badr Brigade, the secret army trained and run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi Sunnis and opposition leaders . . . have charged that the Iraqi government has been running assassination teams." The U.S., with its advisors, control of finances, and by the security it provides, controls the Iraqi government.

Journalist, author, film-maker, John Pilger, writing in the New Statesman says,"in contrast to the embedded lie that the killings are now almost entirely sectarian, 70 per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the resistance in July [2006] were directed against the American occupiers and 20 per cent against the puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted to 10 per cent.

In other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out by the US, such as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the resistance is fighting basically a military war and it is winning. That truth is suppressed, as it was in Vietnam.

"According to a poll released last month by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, "Six in 10 Iraqis approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, . . . Nearly eight in 10 say the U.S. presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it's preventing". And it is clear that it is chiefly the U.S. installed government, not the Iraqi people, that would like the U.S. to stay longer. "

Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president, has asked for a long-term US military presence in Iraq, saying his country needs two permanent US air bases to deter what he calls foreign interference." These bases are under construction.

So now we have this "independent commission" -- the Iraq Study Group, that wants to carve up Iraq into three regions. The Iraq Study Group is led by co-chairs James A. Baker, III, a former Secretary of State, and Lee H. Hamilton, former Congressman. Other members of the study group include: Robert M. Gates, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Edwin Meese III , Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon E. Panetta, William J. Perry, Charles S. Robb, and Alan K. Simpson.

None among this group would appear to have a real appreciation for the Iraq's culture and history, its needs, and the aspirations of the Iraqi people. The group does have experience in espionage, and in increasing profits for multinational corporations, and the military-industrial complex.

History leads us to believe that the recommendations of this "independent commission" will be designed to further the interests of their constituencies, and not of the Iraqi people.

Most of today's conflicts in present day Asia and Africa may be traced to imperial/colonial powers that occupied these lands, and carved them up for the benefit of the conquering Europeans.

Carving up Iraq will continue this policy of divide and rule."The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our [U.S.] economy and open to our cultural assault.

To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing", wrote Ralph Peters in the U.S. Army War College Quarterly in the Summer 1997.

In August 2006, Ralph Peters, writing in the Armed Forces Journal, recommended: "As for those who refuse to 'think the unthinkable,' declaring that boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).""

Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works", says Peters.

The Iraq war has taken the lives of well over 100,000 Iraqis and Americans, maimed and wounded countless others, and the unexploded shells and depleted uranium will continue to take their toll.

The Iraq war's cost to the American taxpayer "is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion," according to a report written by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist, and Linda Bilmes, a Harvard budget expert. For the sake of the Iraqi people, and the American taxpayer, the U.S. should leave Iraq.

A reasonable timeline -- say 16 months, prepared with the assistance of the international community, should be presented to the Iraqis so that they may prepare as best they can.

No doubt, there will be chaos and more killing, but in the long run the continued U.S. presence will do more damage than that the Iraqis will do to themselves - there's no way of avoiding that after the destruction of their society and institutions.

And one more thing, like Iraq paid for its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the U.S. should pay reparations for its war of aggression against Iraq.

THIS ARTICLE and more at:
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2006/1010-Regions.html

THE WISDOM FUND News & Views:
http://www.twf.org

Latest Indian Muslim Islamic News
Latest Indian Muslim Organisation Press Releases / Statements

Subscribe to the PRINT edition NOW: Get the COMPLETE picture32 tabloid pages choke-full of news, views & analysis on the Muslim scene in India & abroad...Delivered at your doorstep, Twice a month