Don't shy away from calling Bush's surge fascist. Charles
The Battle of Baghdad By Chris Sanders Jan/12/2007 Ever loyal to his "base," US president Bush looks set to ensure that 2007 will be a bloody, bloody year. The widening of the war continues apace. If there is a surge in anything as this year begins, it is a surge in bad news. The war of our time is widening and deepening steadily. Indeed, the evidence accumulates so quickly it is hard to keep up. President Bush has replaced his theatre commanders in Centcom and Iraq with more politically correct men prepared to follow orders, both incumbents having opposed his desired troop "surge." He has moved John Negroponte to the State Department, replacing him with retired Vice Admiral John Michael McConnell, who, unlike Negroponte, can be relied upon to produce a national intelligence estimate on Iran to fit the plan as opposed to the facts. He has given the green light to the US military to commence covert operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. He has committed another aircraft carrier battle group to the theatre. He has ordered air strikes against targets in Somalia and backed the installation of a puppet regime in Mogadishu. And of course, he has announced to the world that he is going to send another 21,500 troops to Iraq, most of whom will be committed to the emerging Battle of Baghdad. And just to make sure that there is no mistaking who is next, American troops broke into the Iranian consulate in the northern town of Irbil and arrested six employees and diplomats. It is small wonder that only 26% of the American public views his handling of the war favourably (Gallup Poll January 5-7). What is a wonder to us is the insistent focus by so many on a supposed "civil war" in Iraq. This canard has more lives than a cat, and a surprisingly broad constituency. What passes for a civil war in Iraq is in fact a destabilisation exercise straight out of the manuals (Read Low Intensity Operations by Frank Kitson), with death squads and terror bombings deliberately organised by the occupation authorities. This is a tactic with a long pedigree in imperial "low intensity" warfare and can be summed up in a simple principle, divide and rule, and operationally is executed by the use of timely and well-targeted provocations. The US elevated this to a post industrial level in Vietnam, Nicaragua and El Salvador (read The Phoenix Project by Douglas Valentine). It has been assisted in this over the years by forces from "allied" states such as Israel, which provide covert operational capability in situations where deniability is desirable (Read Cocaine Politics by Peter Dale Scott). Not incidentally, it also has the collateral benefit of confusing the domestic debate at home. The current discussion in the US and the UK about the war is nothing if not confused, since the underlying premise is that the objective of the war was to create a stable democracy in Iraq and manifestly this has not happened, ergo the war is a failure and cannot be won. A perfect example of respectably confused, if not intelligent disinformation, is displayed by professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, former head of the Center for Middle East and North African Studies at that university and head of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Cole's successful career and regional expertise make him the expert of choice for many who question the war. He urgently criticises those who deny there is a civil war, posting that there is a Sunni insurgency fighting a predominately Shi'a government. This is innocuous at face value. Who could disagree with him? Well, actually there is a lot to disagree with. To begin with, if one accepts his argument, one tacitly accepts the legitimacy of the government in Baghdad installed by the Americans and which is commonly recognised to control nothing in Iraq. The rest of the world may choose to recognise that government, but it exists by the grace of American bayonets, and if a large proportion of the Iraqi population thinks it illegitimate, it is understandable. One does not customarily refer to French resistance to France's German occupiers and their French collaborators during World War Two as a "civil war." But even more important is the fact that it has been the Americans in the form of one Colonel James Steel, who, reporting to then ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, oversaw the training of the Shi'a death squads a.k.a. "security forces" that have been turned loose on the Sunni population, a project euphemistically termed "the El Salvador option." This is not, precisely, since Dr. Cole is so precise, a civil war so much as deliberate mayhem incited, aided and abetted by the occupying power with the objective of forcing the disintegration of the country. However, Cole's views dovetail nicely with the transparent attempt to regionalise the hoped for Iraqi civil war into a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi'a, pitting the two most important Gulf powers, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi'a Iran, against one another. The intention is a replay on a grander scale of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which both protagonists with the aid of the US fought each other to a standstill and in the process weakened themselves considerably. Today we can see the fruition of at least half the objectives of that exercise, the destruction of Iraq as a viable political and military force in Gulf affairs. It strikes us that it is quite unlikely that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and his government are so stupid as to be drawn into such a trap. On the contrary, America's offensive in the region has accomplished something that six years ago was thought by most analysts to be unthinkable, creating an alignment of Saudi and Iranian interests in the Gulf. This has happened as a direct result of the Bush regime's adoption of an essentially Israeli strategy for the American policy, and transformed the US from being a strategic interlocutor for its allies, Israeli and Arab, in the region, into a partisan protagonist. This has quite thoroughly destroyed the tacit regional alliance that existed through the 80s and most of the 90s between Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey under American sponsorship. To imagine that the present Saudi government would collaborate with America in a war on Iran as it did in the 1980s in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union is sheer fantasy. If it were to do so, and even assuming such a military campaign were successful, all that would remain for Saudi Arabia would be to fill the resulting void in the sights of the neocons' guns. This is the context in which the president is proposing to intensify military operations in Iraq, the centrepiece of which will be an assault on the resistance in Baghdad. This is reminiscent of the French operation during the Algerian war in the 50s that came to be known as the Battle of Algiers. French paratroops took control of the Casbah, centre of resistance operations, conducted house to house searches and raids, used torture and summary execution, and succeeded in winning the "battle" in a limited tactical sense. It did not destroy the resistance, and strategically it lost the war along with world and French domestic opinion, demonstrating in the process the futility of military "solutions" to what are fundamentally political and ethical problems. In his address to the US Congress, the president turned his back conclusively on the American establishment that bred him, and on the electorate that voted overwhelmingly in November against war. While making the obligatory nod in the direction of that establishment's sensibilities by noting the contribution of the Iraq Study Group chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, he emphatically rejected it by endorsing confrontation rather than dialogue with Iran and Syria. And to drive the point home, he showed the world the identity of his political base with gratuitous flattery of hard line Israeli-firster Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has set up a Senate bipartisan study group to meet behind closed doors using outside "experts" in a blatant challenge to the ISG and more particularly the establishment behind it. A more divisive speech could scarcely be imagined, a more reckless foreign policy could not be devised and a more clear exposition of the crisis in Washington could not be made. The security of Israel has been made the lens through which all major foreign policy decisions are filtered. For the United States this is more than the comparatively trivial matter of the war in Iraq. It represents a constitutional and even existential crisis. To conduct a wider and unnecessary war of uncertain duration and even more uncertain outcome with the approval of only 26% of the population can only happen using repression and intimidation. In short, what the president was really saying to the Congress and the American people is that he is bringing the war home, in order to wage it abroad. http://www.sandersresearch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=109 0 ____________________________________________________________________________ ________ Looking for earth-friendly autos? Browse Top Cars by "Green Rating" at Yahoo! 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