The Strategy of Disintegration:
False flags, dirty tricks and the
dismemberment of Iraq
The erosion of a target country’s
integrity and viability has always been a conscious goal
of the Western colonial project. Creating instability
and dissatisfaction with existing reality was a
necessary prerequisite to “tame” and then integrate
native peoples into the dominant hierarchical model.
Today, of course, we are told that colonialism is a
thing of the past. The leading nations of the
international community no longer seek to enslave their
less fortunate neighbours, but rather pursue policies of
world benefaction - within the limits imposed by healthy
competition, of course. When this miraculous conversion
took place we are not told, but perhaps it occurred
incrementally, parallel to the increasing divide between
the world’s rich and poor. In any case, a casual glance
at the state of the Muslim world is enough to shatter
this foolish delusion.
As Iraqi society descends further and
further into mayhem, comedians, satirists and
commentators of all kinds have made great hay from the
supposed incompetence and stupidity of our leaders. But
as the Canadian Spectator suggested recently, if it
should happen that the United States is not run
by buffoons, “one must conclude that chaos,
impoverishment and civil war in the Muslim world…far
from being the unintended consequences, are precisely
the objectives of U.S. policy.” (1)
As with 9/11, the trigger event for
the War on Terror, incompetence is the preferred
explanation for the nightmare scenario in Iraq today.
Though counterintuitive to the domesticated populations
of the West, a plan to deliberately fragment Iraq along
ethnic lines is amply confirmed by the published record.
Resuscitating earlier Zionist schemes, the US Council on
Foreign Relations recently called for the dissolution of
the “unnatural Iraqi state.” (2) On the grounds of its
ethnic diversity, Iraq is said to be a false, artificial
construct, a product of arbitrary colonial decisions in
the early 20th century. It is a judgment that
could apply to many of the world’s countries, and yet
the theme is being enthusiastically adopted by reams of
‘experts’ who would never dream of questioning state
sovereignty in Quebec, the Basque Country or Northern
Ireland. In typical fashion, policy analyst Michael
Klare recently dismissed Iraq as an “invented country…to
facilitate their exploitation of oil in the region [the
British] created the fictitious “Kingdom of Iraq” by
patching together three provinces of the former Ottoman
Empire…and by parachuting in a fake king from what later
became Saudi Arabia.” (3) Accepting the Bush
Administration’s bogus rationale for the invasion, Klare
ascribed Sunni resistance to the desire for a bigger
share of oil revenues in the future partition of the
country. Missing is any idea that resistance extends
beyond “Sunnis” or could be motivated by Iraqi
nationalism or the need for self-determination.
Ultimately, the ease with which
Western academics casually decide to reshape the
countries of their choice owes itself to the continuing
legacy of Orientalism. In classic nineteenth century
style, the chattering classes suggest that Iraq, despite
its five thousand-year history, is now incapable of
managing itself, and so its fate must be decided by
outside powers. A country that held together in 1991
through six weeks of the most intensive bombing campaign
in history, (which according to the UN left Iraq in a
“pre-industrial age”) and continued to survive through
12 years of the most complete and devastating sanctions
ever imposed on any nation is now blithely consigned to
history by concerned Western experts. To bolster their
case, the myth of ancient sectarian hatreds, a staple of
the ‘humanitarian intervention’ crowd, is rehashed and
fed on a daily basis by journalists who neither question
the authorship of “sectarian” attacks nor report the
view of ordinary Iraqis, who blame the Occupation army
and its puppet government for the orchestrated chaos.
Dismantling Iraq
The preparations for the occupation
of Iraq began almost immediately after the first assault
in 1991. With the imposition of no-fly-zones in the
north and south of the country and the western media
already dividing the country into three mutually
antagonistic regions, the stage was set. The first
glimpse of the organized plan to destroy Iraqi society
came with the organized sacking of museums (170,000
pieces lost) and burning of libraries following the fall
of the regime in 2003. The looting had two aspects, one
indiscriminate and spontaneous and a second, in which
organized trafficking network looted pieces from Uruk,
Nimrud, Niniveh, and the Nabi Jarjis Mosque. The theft
required a prepared, logistical infrastructure, whilst
the subsequent sale of the booty was facilitated by the
systematic destruction of archives, inventories and
museum records (4) Later, when the Occupation forces’
first chief, General Jay Garner, recommended maintaining
the Iraqi military and creating a coalition government,
defense secretary Rumsfeld removed him. His successor,
Paul Bremer, went on to dismantle the army and other key
national institutions, as well as ‘losing’ some $9
billion of Iraq’s oil revenues along the way. The
reconstituted puppet army was formed almost exclusively
from the Kurdish and Shia communities, a move
specifically designed to incubate sectarian tensions.
Meanwhile, anonymous assassins began targeting Iraq’s
academic community, eventually provoking a huge ‘brain
drain’ from the country and further debilitating the
country’s capacity to recover.
When the armed opposition groups
became active in the country, there then followed a
string of events bearing the hallmarks of undercover
operations designed to stoke up sectarian conflict and
taint the Iraqi Resistance. What follows is a brief
summary of the most suspicious incidents.
UN targeted, after 12 years in Iraq
When a truck bomb tore through U.N.
headquarters four months into the occupation, killing
special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 19 others,
pro-consul Bremer suggested two possible culprits:
“Saddam loyalists or foreign insurgents”. The interim
government’s Ahmed Chalabi, however, had received prior
notice of the attack the week before. Chalabi had been
warned that a “soft target” was to be attacked, although
it would be “neither the Coalition Authority nor
coalition troops”. But the UN, whose security had been
withdrawn that day, was never warned. (5)
Kerbala and Baghdad
By November 2003, with the guerilla
campaign inflicting heavy losses on US forces, the media
and interim governing authority began a steady drumbeat
of sectarian brainwashing. After weeks of scare
mongering about a civil war, coordinated explosions left
143 Shia civilians dead in Kerbala and Baghdad. The
blame fell on ‘Al Qaeda’, but journalist Robert Fisk
asked the obvious question: “If a violent Sunni group
wished to evict the Americans from Iraq…why would it
want to turn the Shia population…60 per cent of Iraqis,
against them?” No answer was provided, and the senseless
attacks increased. (6)
Al Iskandariya
In early February 2004 American
authorities claimed to have intercepted a message from
Iraq asking ‘Al Qaeda’ for help in fomenting a civil
war. Almost immediately, as if to underline the message,
an explosion killed 50 Shias in the small town of
Iskandariya. “Terrorists spark fear of civil war,”
announced The Independent, contradicting the
town’s residents who, without exception, attributed the
blast to an American air strike. “They heard a
helicopter overhead, and the whoosh of a missile just
before the blast.” The blast itself left a crater three
metres deep, more consistent with a missile than a car
bomb (7)
‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’
As with the parent organization,
nothing about this group rings true. Until 2004 ‘Al
Qaeda,’ a Sunni-only set up, had never uttered a word
against Shias. But as the Iraqi Resistance campaign
gained unstoppable momentum, the reportedly deceased
Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi suddenly
resurfaced. Calling for war against the ‘infidel’ Shia
community, he went on to wage a parallel campaign
characterized more by gratuitous attacks on civilians
than by ejecting the US from Iraq.
In the following years, wherever the US unleashed
massive assaults in Iraq, Zarqawi was conveniently
‘discovered’ to be hiding. The November 2004 assault on
Fallujah was waged with white phosphorous and left at
least 6,000 dead beneath the ruins, and yet US
surveillance was so sharp that Zarqawi, with his one
wooden leg, was apparently observed fleeing on the first
day! Amongst Iraqis, the
all-purpose Zarqawi was referred to as a kind of mobile
WMD able to appear wherever required. His story remained
incredible right up to the end, the released photo
evidence showing the lightly bruised body of a man
killed with a 500lb bomb. (8)
Nick Berg, Margaret Hassan and the
Abu Ghraib scandal
By April of 2004 the game was well
and truly up. Fallujah became the first major town to
come under the open control of the Resistance.
Simultaneously, US repression provoked an uprising by
the Shia Mehdi Army and the US found itself waging a war
on two fronts. Massive shows of inter-faith solidarity
ensued with 200,000 Sunnis and Shias on April 9th
gathering for collective prayers in Baghdad’s largest
Sunni mosque, where the lead preacher derided the
possibility of civil war as an American pretext for
extending the occupation. The US faced a chorus of
protest around the world as it bludgeoned Fallujah from
the air in a desperate attempt to retake the city. Then,
photographs of systematic torture in the Abu Ghraib
detention center were released to the press, finishing
off what little credibility the US retained in world
opinion. Detracting from the negative publicity,
however, previously unknown militant groups began
kidnapping foreign nationals and releasing gruesome
videos in which the kidnap victims were frequently
beheaded on camera when the kidnappers’ demands were not
met.
The first victim was businessman Nick
Berg, in an alleged ‘retaliation’ for Abu Ghraib. The
killing, said to be the work of al Zarqawi, came under
scrutiny when independent media questioned the execution
tape’s veracity. It was determined that the video had
first been uploaded to the Internet from London, and
after examination of the images by a Mexican forensic
surgeon, many observers agreed that the man shown in the
film was already a corpse when beheaded. (9)
Anglo-Irish aid worker Margaret
Hassan had lived in Iraq for 30 years and dedicated her
life to the welfare of Iraqis in need, fighting
tirelessly against UN sanctions and opposing the
Anglo-American invasion. So when she was kidnapped
on her
way to work in the autumn of 2004,
Iraqis were incredulous. Spontaneous public information
campaigns were started and a poster showing Mrs Hassan
holding a sick Iraqi child appeared on billboards across
the capital. “Margaret Hassan is truly a daughter of
Iraq,” it read. Patients of Iraqi
hospitals took to the streets in protest against the
hostage takers, and prominent Resistance groups, even
including the phantom Zarqawi, called for her release.
Her kidnappers did not issue any
specific demands, but in the captivity video Hassan
pleaded for the withdrawal of British troops.
In previous cases, the groups had
identified themselves and used the videos to make their
demands. But Margaret Hassan’s kidnapping was different
from the start.
This group used no specific
name and no banners or flags to identify itself. In
their videos appeared
none of the usual armed and hooded men or Koranic
recitations. Other abducted women, Robert Fisk noted,
were released “when their captors recognised their
innocence. But not Hassan, even though she spoke fluent
Arabic and could explain her work to her captors in
their own language.”
A video soon
surfaced purporting to show her execution and an Iraqi
man, Mustafa Salman al-Jubouri, was later sentenced to
life imprisonment by a Baghdad court for aiding and
abetting the kidnappers. To this date, no group has ever
claimed responsibility. (10)
The ‘Salvador Option’
Long after piles of corpses began
appearing by the roadsides, victims of anonymous
assassins, Newsweek magazine reported on a
Pentagon plan to use counterinsurgency death squads to
eliminate Iraqi Resistance fighters and their
supporters. The so-called ‘Salvador Option’, named after
a similar campaign in Central America in the 1980s, was
confirmed by later reports of Interior ministry
involvement in the burgeoning death squads. As the
victims mounted, the corporate media filtered the story
through its angle of Sunni fanatics targeting innocent
Shia civilians. But the facts showed a different story.
According to a report by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the bulk of resistance attacks
(75%) were on Coalition Forces, far exceeding that of
any other category in their survey (with attacks
organized by quantity, type of target, and numbers
killed and wounded). In sharp contrast to the corporate
media’s picture, civilian targets comprised a mere 4.1%
of attacks. After
300,000 Baghdad
Shias staged the largest popular demonstrations since
1958, M. Junaid Alam asked:
“Would such a massive number of Shiites have shown up to
protest the occupation if they thought that most of the
Sunni-based armed resistance, also opposed to the
occupation, was trying to kill them?” (11)
Car bombs
2005 saw a spectacular rise in the
use of car bombs, many directed against innocent
civilian targets. Though the Zarqawi network was said to
have no more than about a thousand men in Iraq, it
apparently had an endless supply of personnel ready to
sacrifice themselves for the holy war. Other accounts,
however, suggest a different explanation.
In May 2005,
former Iraqi exile Imad Khadduri, reported how a driver
whose license had been confiscated in Baghdad was
questioned for half an hour at an American military
camp, informed that there were no charges against him,
and then directed to the al-Khadimiya police station to
retrieve his license. "The driver did leave in a hurry,
but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car
was…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 … found
nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back
seat…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’”. (According to Khadurri, the scenario was
repeated again in Mosul, when a driver’s car broke down
on the way to the police station where he was sent to
reclaim his license. The mechanic he then turned to
discovered the spare tire to be laden with explosives.)
(12)
In the same
month, 64-year-old farmer Haj Haidar, who was taking his
tomato load from Hilla to Baghdad, was stopped at an
American checkpoint and had his pick-up thoroughly
searched. Allowed to go on his way, his 11 year-old
grandson then told him he saw one of the American
soldiers placing a grey melon-sized object amidst the
tomato containers. Realizing the vehicle was his only
means of work, Haidar fought his initial impulse to run
and removed the object from his truck, placing it in a
nearby ditch. He later learnt that it had in fact
exploded, killing part of a passing shepherd’s flock of
sheep. (13)
At this point, legendary Iraqi
blogger ‘Riverbend’ reported that many of the supposed
suicide bombings were in fact remotely detonated car
bombs or time bombs. She related how a man was arrested
for allegedly having shot at a National Guardsman after
huge blasts struck in west Baghdad. But according the
man’s neighbours, far from having shot anyone, he had
seen “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.” (14)
The SAS in Basra
In Basra on
September 19th 2005, suspicious Iraqi police
stopped undercover British soldiers in a Toyota
Cressida. The two men then opened fire, killing one
policeman and wounding another. Eventually captured,
they were identified by the BBC as members of the SAS
elite special forces. The soldiers were in wigs and
dressed as Arabs and their car
was packed with explosives and towing equipment. (15)
Fattah al-Shaykh, a member of the Iraqi National
Assembly, told Al-Jazeera TV that the car was
meant to explode in the centre of Basra’s popular
market. Before his thesis could be confirmed, however,
the British army’s tanks flattened the local prison cell
and freed their sinister operatives.
The phony ‘hostage crisis’
Plans to orchestrate sectarian chaos
became more obvious in the Occupation’s third year. In
one incident,
the Baghdad
police told commanders of the Shia Mehdi Army that
gunmen near the village of Madain were holding
150 Shia
civilians hostage. When the militia sent fighters to the
area to negotiate their release, they were fired upon,
losing at least 25 men. “I think it was a set-up; the
fire was too heavy,” said an aide said to the Mehdi
militia, adding the attackers used snipers and heavy
machineguns. (16) Local townspeople were unaware of the
supposed hostage crisis and no hostages were ever
discovered there.
“Could it be a good thing?” Samarra
and the ‘Civil War’
Although the incessant sectarian
brainwashing was clearly having an effect, Iraqis
continued to dismiss the idea of a civil war. (17) In
the wake of the destruction of Samarra’s Golden Mosque,
however, the scale of the killing in Iraq rose sharply.
Those responsible for this critical attack wore Iraqi
National Guard uniforms according to the mosque guards.
Joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans, patrolling the
surrounding area the whole while, went on to assist a
militia attack on a Sunni mosque in a pre-programmed
‘response’. The response of most ordinary Iraqis,
however, was quite different, According to Sami Ramadani
“None
of the mostly spontaneous protest marches were directed
at Sunni mosques. Near the bombed shrine itself, local
Sunnis joined the city's minority Shias to denounce the
occupation and accuse it of sharing responsibility for
the outrage. In Kut, a march led by Sadr's Mahdi army
burned US and Israeli flags. In Baghdad's Sadr City, the
anti-occupation march was massive.” (18) The
Western media, however, could now seize upon each and
every incident as evidence of an irreparable social
disintegration.
Columnist Daniel Pipes
approvingly observed that sectarian conflict would
reduce attacks on US forces as Iraqis fought each other.
His comments were then reflected on Fox News
with onscreen
captions that read: “Upside To Civil War?” and “All-Out
Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?” (19)
History as mystery
The key to justifying the horrendous
colonial assault on Iraq was the non-stop manufacture of
lies. Zionist cheerleader Thomas Freidman had likened
Saddam’s Iraq to an ethnically segregated Alabama in the
era of lynchings, where Shia and Kurds held sub human
status. That the Minister of Health was Kurdish, that
the regime had two Shia Prime ministers (Sadoun Humadi
and Mohammed Al-Zubaidi), or that the Vice President was
a Christian, never intruded on Freidman’s ‘analysis’. In
fact, Iraqis rarely asked about the religion or
ethnicity of the leaders and functionaries they reported
to. It was simply not a matter of concern for them.
Meanwhile, for the ‘human rights’
brigade, propagandists such as The Independent’s
Johann Hari would hash out a two-dimensional caricature
of a country in which a hellish regime murdered, each
year, 70,000 of its own citizens (without anyone really
noticing). In spite of the Ba’ath government’s admitted
crimes, however, a visitor could pass through Baghdad in
the 1990s without coming across tanks, car bombs,
kidnappings, air strikes, fuel shortages (!) power cuts
and vast detention gulags. And whatever the scale of
Saddam’s crimes, they pale next to those of the
Occupation. As Mike Whitney has said “Saddam had no
intention of dismantling the government, the army, the
civic institutions; of looting the museums and killing
the teachers and intellectuals, of ethnic cleansing the
Christians and the Sunnis, and inciting violence between
the sects. Saddam had no plan to increase malnutrition,
to reduce the flow of clean water, to cut off the
electricity, to remove the social-safety net, to
increase the poverty and unemployment, or to set Iraqi
against Iraqi in a vicious struggle for survival. Saddam
did not abide by the neoconservative theory of “creative
destruction,” which deliberately plunged an entire
nation into chaos destroying the fabric of Iraqi society
and leaving the people to flock to militias for safety.”
(20)
The truth is that the approaching
peak of global oil production threatens to fatally
weaken the US power bloc. (21) Hence, Saddam’s Iraq, an
independent, oil-rich state in the most geostrategically
important region on earth could not be allowed to
survive. But the intractable resistance to the
Occupation has obligated the US to turn to its
contingency plan (officially, of course, it didn’t have
one) In this plan, something similar to Oded Yinon’s
tripartite balkanization of the country is being
thrashed out. (22) Existing independent states are to be
broken up and replaced by a cluster of weak and pliant
protectorates. The particulars may be very different,
but the engineered breakup of Yugoslavia undoubtedly
serves as the model for this dismemberment. “In the
1990s” wrote Diana Johnstone, “the US-led International
Community was no longer interested in state-building.
Nation-state deconstruction was more compatible with
economic globalization measures.” (23) To this end, in
Iraq as in Yugoslavia, the US has allied itself with
“state-splitters” and sectarian bigots, all the while
publicly claiming to uphold national sovereignty. In
case of any misunderstanding, neocon ideologues have
clarified matters: ‘natural’ sectarian tensions, they
say, will inevitably arise in the absence of a
repressive state to subdue them. Therefore, under their
benevolent guidance, Iraq must be allowed to devolve
into its ethnic components.
Iraq resists
After the 1991 bombing of Iraq, and
George Bush Sr.’s announcement of a ‘New World Order’ of
American hegemony, foreign policy forums effectively
proclaimed the nation-state obsolete. In fact, the
global imposition of the Western model of development
after WWII had already ended the traditional
independence of the State. The ‘new’ ideology was simply
a recognition of facts on the ground. After the Soviet
collapse, celebrated advocates of the anti-nation-state
ideology predicted an approaching ‘End of History’,
which would see all the world’s peoples integrate into a
globalized, urban, capitalist, consumer lifestyle. Thus,
the “chaotic diversity of cultures, values and beliefs
that lay behind the conflicts of the past” would be
removed in a general process of political and cultural
homogenization. (24) It is still too early to predict
the end of this delirious vision, but across the world,
people are opting to forge their own future,
increasingly deaf to the advice of the super elites. In
Iraq, consciousness of the big picture is greater than
anywhere. Thus, the planned breakdown into generalized
sectarian conflict has not materialized. As the armed
resistance intensifies its struggle against the US and
openly confronts the Salafi Jihadist terrorists (25), a
pendant has become extremely popular amongst Iraqis.
Seen on the streets and on television, anchorwomen wear
it while reading the news. The pendant has the form of
Iraq.
When TV stations showed
Kalashnikov-weilding teenagers going toe-to-toe with the
world’s most powerful army in Fallujah, the images
evoked a struggle of epochal significance. But alongside
the armed resistance, journalists, intellectuals, trade
unionists and Iraqis of all walks of life are, each on
their own terrain, facing off against military-corporate
rule. However we decide to contribute, it is incumbent
on all people of conscience to join them.
The author can be reached at
gnaoua22@yahoo.co.uk
Notes:
-
http://canadianspectator.ca/stuff/WWIII.html
-
http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=6559
-
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/1/154940/816
-
“Saqueo a la Arqueologia” Clio:
El Pasado Presente Madrid, #.20, June 2003
-
Asia Times, 20 August 2003
-
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles360.htm
-
“Terrorists spark fear of civil
war as 50 die in car bomb” The Independent,
Wednesday 11th February 2004
-
kurtnimmo.com/?p=419
-
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CAR405A.html
-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1353695,00.html
-
“Does the Resistance Target
Civilians? According to US Intelligence, Not
Really” M. Junaid Alam
Left Hook April 18, 2005
-
(http://www.albasrah.net/maqalat/english/0505/Combat-terrorism_160505.htm)
-
http://abutamam.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_abutamam_archive.htlm
-
http://riverbendblog.blogspit.com/2005_05_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#111636281930496496
-
www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0365.html
16. Omar al-Ibadi, (Reuters) Oct
28
17.
www.uruknet.info?p=12150
In Riverbend’s words: “Iraqis
have intermarried and mixed as Sunnis and Shia for
centuries. Many of the larger Iraqi tribes are a complex
and intricate weave of Sunnis and Shia. We don't sit
around pointing fingers at each other and trying to
prove who is a Muslim and who isn't and who deserves
compassion and who deserves brutalization.”
Regarding the lies about
ethnically-based oppression by the Ba’ath, see:
http://www.iraqresistance.net/article.php3?id_article=372
18. Sami
Ramadani, Friday February 24, 2006 The Guardian
19.
www.uruknet.info?p=20973
20.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_1341.shtml
21.
“Crossing
the Rubicon”, Michael C. Ruppert, New Society
Publishers, 2004
22.
Oded
Yinon “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”
http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0005345.html
23.
“Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western
Delusions”, Diana Johnstone, Pluto Press 2002
As
N. Hildyard once observed: “Scratch
below the surface of inter-ethnic conflict, and the
shallowness and deceptiveness of ‘blood’ or ‘culture’
explanations are soon revealed. ‘Tribal hatred’ (though
a real and genuine emotion for some) emerges as a
product not of ‘nature’ or of a primordial ‘culture’,
but of a complex web of politics, economics, history,
psychology and a struggle for identity.”
N. Hildyard, Briefing 11 – Blood and
Culture: Ethnic Conflict and the Authoritarian Right,
The Cornerhouse. 1999
24. “The
March of The Monoculture” Helena Norberg-Hodge, The
Ecologist, Volume 29, No.3 May/June 1999
25. “Anbar Revenge Brigade
Makes Progress in the Fight Against al-Qaeda”
http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2369940