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Seen through a Syrian lens, 'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq

By Robert Fisk

04/29/06 "The Independent" -- - In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.

His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

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Originally posted by skeptikool:
Quite, quite believable. Stories have already been aired regarding both U.S. and U.K. operatives, allegedly in Arab garb placing car bombs and restrained by locals.

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There are lots of reports like that--the Najaf bombing for one. Note in that provocative bombing, all of the Iraqi players immediately denounced retailation from Zarqwi all the way to al-Sistani and al-Sadr. Even Iran pulled back on the rhetoric.

Why?

Because the players on the ground are well aware of the situation and who is involved, and much of the 'media propaganda' is merely for American consumption.

Afghanistan is the same thing:
"...This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban. They reason that America, with its power and riches, could bring an end to the "insurgency" in a month, if it so chose. They figure that America remains a close and munificent ally of Pakistan, the country that is sponsoring the "insurgency," and so the continuing violence must be a deliberate element of U.S. policy. The point is not whether there is any factual basis for this notion, it's that everyone here believes it. In other words, in a stunning irony, much of this city, the Taliban's former stronghold, is disgusted with the Americans not because of their Western culture, but because of their apparent complicity with Islamis.."

The Night Fairies

Additional piece by CSMonitor asks a good question as to why exactly the US annual report makes mention of, say Canada, but oddly leaves the Taliban off it's 'terrorist' list.

The Taliban, like the Ba'athists, have always been our allies so it does seem that the bulk of MSM reports are simply to allow people in particularly the US and Canada to continue to delude themselves...the anti-war mood has become a defining issue for Progressives, much to the chagrin of small 'l' liberals; it's a litmus test inasmuch as moral authority for most other positions in the West become dependent on it.

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Iraq's Shiites Now Chafe at American Presence
Perceived U.S. missteps, a torrent of angry propaganda and the sect's new political sway have fused to turn welcomers into foes.
By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
May 6, 2006

KARBALA, Iraq — A visitor need not go far or search hard to hear and see the anti-American venom that bubbles through this ancient shrine city, which once welcomed U.S. forces as liberators.

"The American ambassador is the gate through which terrorism enters Iraq," says a banner hanging from the fence surrounding the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, among the most revered martyrs of the Shiite Muslim faith.

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The US U.S. ambassador is Zalmay Khalilzad, "a Sunni born in Afghanistan, {and viewed} as anti-Shiite." There really are only a handful of neo-cons forking over our world.

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Today there are constant reports in the U.S. media on the growth of “sectarian violence” in Iraq, which has now come to dominate the military as well as political context of the occupation. Carefully sidestepped in most such reports, however, is the fact that these horrific developments are to a large extent the result of the active U.S. promotion of death squads in that country. In danger of losing the war for control of Iraq, Washington turned, as it had in Central America in the 1980s (and as it is in Colombia today), to developing terrorist armies that would do the job for it. On January 8, 2005, Newsweek cracked the story that the U.S. military was considering initiating the “Salvadoran Option” whereby the United States would train, arm, and finance Iraqi death squads, drawn principally from the Shiite and Kurdish militias: irregular military forces whose job would be to terrorize the Sunni population as a means of undermining the support for the insurgency. Soon after, the Wall Street Journal in its February 23, 2005, issue reported that the United States was already working at forming government-based paramilitary units or militias in Iraq that would carry out these objectives.

The single most important of these paramilitary units, consisting of thousands of troops, the Wall Street Journal declared, was the Special Police Commandos formed in September 2004 by General Adnan Thavit, uncle to Iraq’s interim interior minister and a former Baathist military intelligence officer. “This was a horse to back,” in the words of U.S. General David Petraeus, in charge of training Iraqi forces.

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Further,

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In its March 20, 2006, issue, Time magazine quoted U.S. authorities as declaring that the Police Commandos and other government-linked, Shiite-dominated, U.S.-trained militias are now “out of control,” kidnapping, torturing, executing, and committing mass atrocities in ways that give pause even to the U.S. occupying authorities.

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USA - Empire of barbarism!

If there is an all out civil war in Iraq it could turn in to a three way slug fest with some interesting international involvement.

There are a couple of interesting articles on recent Turkish and Iranian incursions in the area here:

Maybe these letters can help make the past a little more recent and tangible:

"15 September 1915
It was first communicated to you that the Government, by order of the Jemiet, had decided to destroy completely all Armenians living in Turkey. Those who oppose this order and decision cannot remain on the official staff of the Empire. An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, no regard must be paid to age, or sex, or to conscientious scruple.

(signed)Minister of the Interior, Talaat"

Here's a response to this letter:

"10 January 1916
Enquiries having been made it is understood that hardly ten percent of the Armenians subjected to the general transportation have reached their destinations; the rest have died from natural causes, such as hunger and sickness. We inform you that we are working to bring about the same result with regard to those who are still alive, by using severe measures.

(signed) Abdullahad Nouri"

What makes one event a Holocaust, and the other ancient history? Spielberg?