Iraq is a horror show. But to believe that the U.S. is managing an orderly partitioning of the country is delusional. Bookmark this site: Empire Burlesque explains it all with such succinct and well-written ease.
Bush and Cheney have wrought unholy disorder and a hellish nightmare of unparalleled significance to the entire Middle East. The nightmare scenario is playing out into an endgame of more disorder of clashing tribes and Islamic sects to come for years throughout the region. It would be unsafe to leave, and it would be immoral not to do so immediately.
In a remarkable treatise, Chris Floyd offers a compelling snapshot of the hell that Bush has wrought on a nation that never attacked us and the endgame that must ensue for Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Iran...but there will nothing left of Iraq.
Read it. Weep for the expatriates, the civilian refugees whose fates have lined the pockets of Republican loyal Bushies. It will probably pay them dividends for years to come. It is a crime on the level of ethnic cleansing, and our leaders orchestrated it all from the start.
Ninth Circle: The Widening Gyre of Iraq's Death Spiral
Written by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 27 September 2007
If you would like a glimpse of the raging, death-clotted hell that George W. Bush and his willing executioners in the bipartisan American Establishment have created in Iraq, then steel yourself and plunge into Nir Rosen's shattering report in the latest issue of Boston Review: No Going Back.
Rosen, long one of the most dogged and fearless truth-tellers about Iraq, portrays a reality light-years away from the obscenely mendacious and ignorant American "debate" over Bush's rapine and its consequences. He takes as his theme the millions of Iraqis driven from their homes by the invasion and occupation – and by the Iraqi "government's" own "security forces." These ruthless militias – armed, trained, funded and empowered by the United States – are, as Rosen rightly terms them, death squads, carrying out a savage ethnic cleansing – with American connivance – while waging a multi-sided civil war, again with the eager assistance of the White House and its myrmidons.
You should read the whole piece – a deftly-woven tapestry of individual stories of the actual human beings whose lives and families have been ravaged by this war crime carried out in your name....
When we taxpayers complain that the U.S. cannot afford to continue this war, it is a skinned knee compared to the mortal suffering and devastation that has been achieved by a cadre of disreputable militarists who threaten our own legislature with acts of terrorism and their own citizenry with terrorist attacks.
This, from Rosen's writings, (as quoted by Floyd):
What will happen to Iraq? Think Mogadishu, small warlords controlling various neighborhoods, militias preying on those left behind, more powerful warlords controlling areas with resources, such as oil fields, ports, and lucrative pilgrimage routes and shrines. Irredentist Sunni militias will attempt to retake their lost land, but they will be pushed into the Anbar Province, Jordan, and Syria, where they may link up with local Islamist militants to destabilize Amman and Damascus. Some will look to fight elsewhere; unable to continue the jihad in Iraq they will find common cause with Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and others alienated from their societies and hateful of Shias. The new rump Shia statelet, including Baghdad and the South, will be quarantined by the Sunni states in the region and pushed inexorably into Iranian hands whether Shia Iraqis want this or not. It will be isolated and radicalized, and Shia militias loyal to Muqtada al Sadr, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, Muhamad al Yaqubi, and others will battle for power.
There is no "surge." At best it can be called an ooze, a slow increase of American occupying forces by a mere 15 percent, consisting of few new soldiers and many whose terms of service have been merely extended. Yet the U.S. has doubled the size of its mission, announcing it will also take on the Shia militias as well as the Sunni ones. On the ground, that means American soldiers secure areas and then hand them over to Iraqi security forces who impose a reign of terror on the inhabitants. In the Iraqi civil war the army and police are not the solution; they are combatants, fighting on behalf of Shia-sectarian Islamist parties. The vaunted efforts to train Iraqi security forces have merely trained better death squads. The Americans continue to imprison thousands of Iraqis, and kill many others. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations that would normally demand that the United States comply with international law and hand over imprisoned Iraqis to the "sovereign" Iraqi government are not doing so, knowing that their treatment at the hands of the government would be far worse than anything they would endure while in American captivity. The occupation is not benign. It is profoundly painful, humiliating, and lethal.
An American withdrawal would certainly lead other countries in the region, whether Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, to increase their involvement in Iraq. It would also mean an expedited removal of Sunnis in Baghdad. But all this is happening anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference in terms of the fate of Iraq whether American military forces stay or leave.
I am so deeply pessimistic. The humanitarian disaster harshly contrasts with the glorious opportunities for profitable arms sales and military trade that will go on for years. It is so dark and so many innocents are dying or needlessly suffering so that oil companies and loyal Bushies can prosper. It must end, but will we have the national will, even in a Gore administration, to get out?
Is this our foreign policy? Has there been any 'diplomacy' at all? Is this the "New American Century?" Would it not have been better to go in with a conscripted force, in force?
Or is this disorder, this horror, the very vision of American predominance that was planned?