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Whose Bombs were they?
By Mike Whitney
02/25/06 "ICH"
-- -- “We should stand hand in hand to prevent the danger of a
civil war. We are facing a major conspiracy that is targeting Iraq’s
unity.” Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
There’s no telling who was behind the bombing of the al-Askariya
Mosque. There were no security cameras at the site and it’s doubtful
that the police will be able to perform a thorough forensic
investigation.
That’s too bad; the bomb-residue would probably provide clear
evidence of who engineered the attack. So far, there’s little more
to go on than the early reports of four men (three who were dressed
in black, one in a police uniform) who overtook security guards at
the mosque and placed the bombs in broad daylight.
It was a bold assault that strongly suggests the involvement of
highly-trained paramilitaries conducting a well-rehearsed plan.
Still, that doesn’t give us any solid proof of what groups may have
been involved.
The destruction of the Samarra shrine, also known as the Golden
Mosque, has unleashed a wave of retaliatory attacks against the
Sunnis. More than 110 people were reported killed by the
rampaging Shia. More than 90 Sunni mosques have been either
destroyed or badly damaged. In Baghdad alone, 47 men have been found
scattered throughout the city after being killed execution-style
with a bullet to the back of the head. The chaos ends a week of
increased violence following two major suicide bombings directed
against Shia civilians that resulted in the deaths of 36 people.
The public outrage over the desecration of one of the country’s
holiest sights has reached fever-pitch and it’s doubtful that the
flimsy American-backed regime will be able to head-off a civil war.
It is difficult to imagine that the perpetrators of this heinous
attack didn’t anticipate its disastrous effects. Certainly, the
Sunni-led resistance does not benefit from alienating the very
people it is trying to enlist in its fight against the American
occupation. Accordingly, most of the prominent Sunni groups have
denied involvement in the attack and dismissed it as collaboration
between American and Iranian intelligence agencies.
A communiqué from “The Foreign Relations Department of the Arab
Ba’ath Socialist Party” denounced the attack pointing the finger at
the Interior Ministry’s Badr Brigade and American paramilitaries.
The Ba’ath statement explains:
“America is the main party responsible for the crime of attacking
the tomb of Ali al-Hadi…because it is the power that occupies Iraq
and has a basic interest in committing it.”
“The escalation of differences between America and Iran has found
their main political arena in Iraq, because the most important group
of agents of Iran is there and are able to use the blood of Iraqis
and the future of Iraq to exert pressure on America. Iran has laid
out a plan to embroil America in the Iraqi morass to prevent it from
obstructing Iran’s nuclear plans. Particularly since America is
eager to move on to completing arrangements for a withdrawal from
Iraq, after signing binding agreements on oil and strategy. America
believes that without the participation of “Sunni” parties in the
regime those arrangements will fail. For that reason ‘cutting Iran’s
claws’ has become one of the important requirements for American
plans. This is what Ambassador Zalmay spoke of recently when he
declared that no sectarian would take control of the Ministries of
the Interior or Defense. Similarly, America has begun to publish
information that it formally kept hidden regarding the crimes of the
Badr Brigade and the Interior Ministry.”
Whether the communiqué is authentic is irrelevant; the point is well
taken. The escalating violence may prevent Iraq from forming a
power-sharing government which would greatly benefit the Shia
majority and their Iranian allies. Many critics agree that what is
taking place Iraq represents a larger struggle between the United
States and Iran for regional domination.
This theory, however, is at odds with the response of Iran’s Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei following the bombing. Khamenei said,
“The occupation forces and Zionism, which seeing their plans
dissolve, have planned this atrocity to sew hate between Muslims and
fuel divisions between Sunnis and Shiites….Do not fall into the
enemy trap by attacking mosques and sacred places of your Sunni
brothers….The enemy wants nothing more than weakening of the Islamis
front right as Muslims with a single voice have been protesting
against the continual provocations of their enemies.”
The belief that the attack was the work of American and Israeli
covert-operations (Black-ops) is widespread throughout the region as
well as among leftist political-analysts in the United States.
Journalist Kurt Nimmo sees the bombing as a means of realizing “a
plan sketched out in Oded Yinon’s “A
Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” (the balkanization of Arab and Muslim society and
culture.) Nimmo suggests that the plan may have been carried out by
“American, British or Israeli Intelligence operatives or their
double-agent Arab lunatics, or crazies incited by Rumsfeld’s
Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) designed to ‘stimulate’
terrorist reaction.”
Nimmo is not alone in his judgment. Other prominent analysts
including, Pepe Escobar, Ghali Hassan, AK Gupta, Dahr Jamail, and
Christian Parenti all agree that the Bush administration appears to
be inciting civil war as part of an exit strategy. Certainly, the
Pentagon is running out of options as well as time. Numerous leaked
documents have confirmed that significant numbers of troops will
have to be rotated out of the theatre by summer. A strategy to
foment sectarian hostilities may be the last desperate attempt to
divert the nearly 100 attacks per day away from coalition troops and
finalize plans to divide Iraq into more manageable statlets.
The division of Iraq has been recommended in a number of
policy-documents that were prepared for the Defense Department. The
Rand Corporation suggested that “Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab
divides should be exploited to exploit the US policy objectives in
the Muslim world.” The 2004 study titled “US Strategy in the Muslim
World” was to identify key cleavages and fault-lines among
sectarian, ethnic, regional, and national lines to assess how these
cleavages generate challenges and opportunities for the United
States.” (Abdus Sattar Ghazali; thanks Liz Burbank)
This verifies that the strategy to split up Iraq has been
circulating at the top levels of government from the very beginning
of the occupation. A similar report was produced by David Philip for
the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) financed by the Lynde and
Harry Bradley Foundation a conservative think-tank with connections
to the Bush administration and the American Enterprise Institute.
According to Pepe Escobar:
“The plan would be ‘sold’ under the admission that the recently
elected, Shi’ite dominated Jaafari government is incapable of
controlling Iraq and bringing the Sunni-Arab guerillas to the
negotiating table. More significantly, the plan is an exact replica
of an extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq—an essential
part of the balkanization of the whole Middle East.”
Is the bombing of the Golden Mosque the final phase of a much
broader strategy to inflame sectarian hatred and provoke civil war?
Clearly, many Sunnis, Iranians, and political analysts seem to
believe so. Even the Bush administration’s own documents support the
general theory that Iraq should be broken up into three separate
pieces. But, is this proof that the impending civil war is the work
of foreign provocateurs?
The final confirmation of Washington’s sinister plan was issued by
Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a New
York Times editorial on 11-25-03. The CFR is the ideological
headquarters for America’s imperial interventions providing the
meager rationale that papers-over the massive bloodletting that
inevitably follow. Gelb stated:
“For decades, the United States has worshipped at the altar of a
unified 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.”
There you have it; the United States is only pursuing this genocidal
policy for ‘Iraq’s own good’. We should remember Gelb’s
statesman-like pronouncements in the years to come as Iraq slips
further into the morass of social-disintegration and unfathomable
human suffering.
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