[Peace-discuss] Special Operations?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Some more of the argument on who was responsible for the
bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.  --CGE]

   Whose Bombs were they?
   By Mike Whitney

“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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