Chris Floyd
Lew Rockwell.com
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Less than a mile from where British prime minister Tony Blair
was gripping and grinning during a surprise visit to Baghdad on
Sunday, agents of the extremist factions that he and George W.
Bush have empowered, paid, and heavily armed were raiding the
offices of the Iraqi Red Crescent Agency and rounding up some
of the few remaining relief workers in the country who attend
to the suffering of all sides. This bold, broad-daylight assault
came less than 48 hours after top Red Crescent officials publicly
accused US military forces of conducting a series of attacks on
the agency's offices around the country during the course of the
war.
As the New York Times reports, the Sunday raid followed a grim
pattern that is by now well-established in the bloodsoaked capital,
and is likely to have the same grim conclusion. The usual "armed
men dressed in police commando uniforms" descended on the
Red Crescent office just outside the Coalition's Green Zone island
of virtual reality and methodically went through the building
and seized all the male employees. Seven men were later released,
while the rest were taken off to an unknown location.
The "armed men in police commando uniforms" were, of
course, police commandos, in this case almost certainly under
the control of the Interior Ministry, one of the Shiite enclaves
in the sectarian-riddled government. As the NYT notes, "Control
of the district, in the heart of Baghdad, was given to the Iraqi
police in November." The Interior and Defense Ministries,
which control the bulk of Iraq's security forces, are in the hands
of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI),
the militant Shiite party whose leader, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, was
given a warm White House welcome by Bush earlier this month. SCIRI
was formed in Iran by Iraqi exiles and touts Khomeini-style clerical
rule. Yet because of its long-time willingness to wheel and deal
with America's "security organs," it has been a favorite
of the invaders throughout the occupation. In a recent TomPaine.com
article, Robert Dreyfuss provides this concise summary of the
violent extremist's present position in Iraq: "Today al-Hakim
controls the SCIRI militia, the Badr Brigade, the Iraqi interior
ministry and many of Iraq's feared death squads. Not to put too
fine a point on it, Hakim is a mass murderer."
The Red Crescent raid was a leisurely affair, carried out by
dozens of men who arrived in two police cars and about 20 other
vehicles, the Los Angeles Times reports. In order to reach the
normally quiet area where the Red Crescent offices are located,
the raiders had to pass through several checkpoints controlled
by SCIRI's "official" government security forces. Once
in, the attackers fanned out to warn local shopkeepers to stay
inside, then entered the building and began a room-by-room search.
They were evidently not worried about interference from local
law-enforcement officials
Female employees of the agency said the raiders were apparently
looking for Sunnis; they asked for family names (one of the quickest
ways to discern Shiite from Sunni) and tribal identifications.
One woman said the men told her: "You work with bad people."
Again, the excellent NYT article by Sabrina Tavernise gives the
background: "The Red Crescent, part of the International
Red Cross movement, is well known in Iraq for its activity in
Sunni Arab areas. It is one of the few aid organizations that
provide relief in Anbar province, and it recently assisted Sunnis
driven out of Hurriya in Baghdad."
Seven men were released unharmed just after the raid; the NYT
reported that at least one of these was a Shiite. The rest of
the captives were taken to an unknown location. By mid-week, a
total of 17 of the captives had been freed. As in previous such
raids, it is likely that the Shiite militia/policemen will release
any other Shiites and non-Sunnis remaining among the captives,
then torture and kill any Sunnis, dumping their bodies elsewhere
in the city later. These quasi-official death squads – who
receive most of their training, money and weapons from the United
States and Britain – have been increasingly brazen in carrying
out a broad-based ethnic cleansing campaign in Baghdad. Their
Sunni equivalents – with less official backing – are
carrying out a similar if smaller-scale consolidation in the areas
they control.
Just as Sunnis were the apparent target of Sunday's raid, the
fact that the Red Crescent does relief work for Sunnis has also
been the main impetus behind the American attacks on its offices.
In fact, Jamal al Karbouli, Red Crescent vice president, said
that US forces had attacked the agency's Baghdad headquarters
– site of Sunday's raid by US-backed Iraqi police commandos
– several times since the 2003 invasion, Reuters reports.
The building is often ransacked by American troops, employees
are detained or taken away, and other materials destroyed, he
said. Such incidents have occurred throughout the country, most
recently in Fallujah, where earlier this month American forces
raided the agency's Fallujah office, detained volunteers and staff,
and "burned the cars and even the building, which belongs
to us," Karbouli said.
The raids are apparently based on false information accusing
the agency of collaboration with Sunni insurgents, Karbouli said.
"Four to five times they have attacked the headquarters –
they break doors and windows, just to see. And they didn't find
anything, and they left. We don't know the reason behind it; is
it to scare us or decrease our work or another reason, as they
mention, fear of terrorists? We don't know. The Iraqi Red Crescent
is the only Iraqi body working all over Iraq. Because of this,
they are suspicious," he told Reuters. American officials
said that US forces don't "attack" the agency's offices,
but carry out careful and respectful investigations of credible
intelligence reports.
The American-trained extremist militias embedded in Iraq's official
security forces obviously don't feel bound by such legal niceties.
II.
The juxtaposition of Sunday's events was deeply revelatory of
the split between the reality of Iraq today and the meaningless
and literally murderous blather being offered up by the pious
chieftains of the occupying "Coalition." In his brief
visit – just two days after he'd become the first sitting
UK prime minister to be questioned in a criminal investigation
for allegedly selling peerages in exchange for underhanded campaign
cash from fat cats – Blair doled out the usual weedy echo
of Bush's usual codswollop: "British troops will remain until
the job is done, and that job is building up the Iraqi capability."
Blair, vowing never to "cut and run," emphasized the
need for increased US-UK training and funding of "Iraq's
security forces" – in other words, the same groups
that carried out Sunday's raid and have been summarily executing
thousands of Iraqis in the past year.
Later, when asked about the Red Crescent attack and the rising
violence in Iraq, Blair skittered away into that inner Green Zone
of fortified fantasy where the war's backers increasingly dwell.
"There is innocent blood being spilled, but it's not being
spilled by the Iraqi government," he told the NYT.
Yet it beggars belief to imagine that Blair and Bush (or at least
the latter's chief advisers) do not know that they have helped
form many of the very militias they now rail against daily, and
that their much-trumpeted support for Iraq's "security forces"
is in fact one of the main engines driving the sectarian civil
war. One can only conclude from this that Bush and Blair have
decided that the sectarian war should be played to their own advantage,
and pushed toward the only result that now offers even the slightest
chance of "success" in their war of aggression: the
triumph of a Shiite extremist faction willing to cut an acceptable
deal on the all-important "oil law" and perhaps allow
a continued US military presence in the country, if only a few
"lily-pad" skeleton bases.
These have always been the main goals of the Bush Faction's warmongers,
even before the administration took power in the 2000 judicial
coup: to open Iraq's oil fields to cronies of the conquerors,
and to plant a US "military footprint" in this strategic
heart of the Middle East. They have hewed toward these goals with
a remarkable, ruthless focus. This is one key reason why the occupation
of Iraq has been such a slap-dash affair; its authors didn't really
care what sort of regime sprang up in the wake of the invasion,
or how it got cobbled together, as long as it played ball on oil
and military bases. (A third main goal of the operation –
war profiteering on an unprecedented, almost unfathomable scale
– has already been accomplished.)
They would have done better to pay more attention to "side
issues" like the security of the Iraqi people and the provision
of essential services, of course. But the Bush-led warmongers
are, after all, a collection of stunted intellects, stupefied
by greed and primitive ideologies. Now, facing the imminent ruin
of their reckless and misbegotten enterprise, they are down to
their last card: the wheelers and dealers of SCIRI.
In these past weeks following the November elections, Bush and
Blair have set about trying to build a new coalition around Iraqi
prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is dependent for his political
power on the support of hardline Shiite cleric and fierce nationalist
Motqada al-Sadr and his mass "Mahdi Army," which already
controls several areas of the country, including large swathes
of Baghdad. Sadr, who along with his martyred family stayed in
Iraq and fought Saddam's repression, has long been at odds with
Hakim and SCIRI, who fled to Iran and whose forces even fought
for Iran against their fellow Iraqis in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.
This conflict has often flared into violent battles, especially
in the last year, forming yet another front in Iraq's multi-sided
civil war. Sadr, whose army has already led two uprising against
American forces, will never accept a continued US presence in
the country. Nor is anyone with his nationalist beliefs to be
trusted to do right by Bush's oil patrons.
Thus it seems increasingly clear that Bush and Blair have decided
to wage all-out war on Sadr, with the help of the "surge"
troops now being put together. This will be the "New Way
Forward" that Bush's mouthpieces have been talking about.
American soldiers will fight for SCIRI and its allies, and for
any other faction that seems likely to acquiesce in some measure
to the Coalition's twin war aims. The fact that this will be yet
another strategic mistake of horrendous proportions will not stop
the stunted intellects from giving it a try. Sadr, who commands
the fanatical devotion of millions of Iraqis – millions
of armed Iraqis – cannot be defeated militarily without
a bloodbath that would make even the utter hell of present-day
Iraq look mild by comparison.
Sunday's attack on the Red Crescent is a harbinger of what's
to come, and a microcosm of the great atrocity that is the war
itself: a vicious assault by torturers and murderers on innocent
people while self-proclaimed liberators look on, mouthing pieties,
talking tough, and daintily cleansing their hands of blood.
This article originally appeared on Truthout.org.
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