Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States
Rock Creek Free Press
Vol. 3, No. 2 February 2009
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Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States |
Iraq has been united until recently, with ethnically mixed neighborhoods. It was the West who suggested dividing Iraq, not the Iraqis. L. H. Gelb, a high ranking Council on Foreign Relations member and contributor to The New York Times pushed hard for the "Three-State Solution" in an article dated November 25, 2003. He claims that a unified Iraq has been "possible in the past only by the application of overwhelming and brutal force." In May 2006 Senator Joe Biden, now Vice President, also suggested dividing Iraq into three states.
[However,] the Prime Minister of Iraq in 1958, Abdel-Karim Qasim, had a Sunni father and a Shiite mother who was also part Kurd. Diverse ethnicities and secular principles were the norm in Iraq until the US placed Saddam Hussein in power. Saddam was recruited by the CIA in the US Embassy in Cairo after his exile from Iraq in 1960. The CIA helped Saddam come to power with its support for the 1968 coup. Yet even under Saddam the various Iraqi sects lived together relatively peacefully in the same neighborhoods until the 2003 US invasion.
The Iraq Study Group Report released December 6, 2006 by James Baker and Lee Hamilton claims Iraq cannot be sectioned because "Iraq's population is not neatly separated, regional boundaries cannot be easily drawn. All eighteen Iraqi provinces have mixed populations, as do Baghdad and most other major cities in Iraq" (page 31). According to an NPR April 9, 2007 story, "Four years after the American invasion, sectarian tensions have turned formerly mixed neighborhoods into exclusively Sunni or Shiite enclaves." Mixed families and mixed marriages were once normal, according to NPR's "All Things Considered," July 7, 2008. Ms. Ekhlas Ali, now divorced, says, "He was a Sunni and I'm Shiite. It was 1992, we married and we lived a very nice life for more than 15 years." Then what happened?
Nothing exposes American misunderstanding of Iraqi violence better than the February 2006 bombing of the Samarra shrine, the event our media claimed most escalated sectarian tensions. The Washington Post headline reads: "Attack on Shiite Shrine Sets Off Protests, Violence." Then later, a CNN article describing retaliations for the mosque attack reads: "Sunni mosques hit after blast at Samarra shrine."
For Westerners this story might make sense, but Iraqis know that this Samarra "Shiite" Shrine was in reality a Sunni shrine. According to an Iraqi, Raed Jarrar, on air on February 24, 2006 on "Democracy Now," "The shrine that is in Samarra...was actually controlled by Sunnis and claimed by Sunnis. The people who run the shrine are Sunnis." Why would Sunnis bomb their own shrine, and then receive retaliation for the attack? Iraqis are fully aware that reporting of these events is a lie because they know who controls their famous shrines. But for those ignorant of Iraqi culture, this is a plausible story.
Joost Hilterman, the Middle East Project Director of International Crisis Group, on the February 27, 2006 "Diane Rehm Show" said on air, "There's a widespread conspiracy theory inside Iraq, among Iraqis of all kinds, that in fact from the beginning the United States wanted them to break up." Minutes later, another guest, A. Heather Coyne of the Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution said, "The Iraqis, when I first got to Iraq three years ago, liked to talk about themselves as Iraqis first. They did not think of themselves as Sunni and Shiite. Over the last year, that's become a more acceptable part of the political dialogue....reality has started to set in."
But whose reality? Who benefited? Iraqis don't benefit from blowing up their own mosques and markets, but terrorism has helped strengthen support for the US occupation. One Iraqi claimed on the September 4, 2008 NPR "Morning Edition" show, "When my country became occupied, I exercised my legal and legitimate right to fight the occupiers," Shihab says. "When al Qaeda started killing innocent people in this country, I turned against them and began working with the Americans."
US General Myers in September 2004 said, "There's not much evidence to support Iraqis involved in suicide operations. It's counter to their culture. They have a relatively secular society.... This doesn't compute." But what can explain the anomalous violence? "US trainers of the 1980s El Salvador death squads are now training squads in Iraq" (Newsweek, 1/14/05). An article in The Guardian on September 19, 2005 claimed "two British soldiers, allegedly dressed as Arabs, opened fire on a police patrol killing one officer and wounding another." In the British Sunday Times of March 19, 2006, a British agent reveals MI5 detonators purchased in America used in Northern Ireland are the origin of the Iraq roadside bombs. Referring to the terrorism in Iraq, Iran's Ayatollah said in August 2005, "There are some signs which point to the spy services of the US." What's the role of Al Qaeda? The front page of The Washington Post on April 10, 2006 stated, "The US military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program."
The Western empires have a history of fomenting new divisions, such as the creation of Pakistan in India, and the sponsoring of African tribal wars. "The question is who is committing these crimes. It's an attempt to make us assume that the Sunnis are committing these crimes, but it is not," an Iraqi government advisor said in a May 17, 2005 CNN article. Kubba continues, "We know it is a very small group that specifically wants to provoke that sectarian strife." And of course to find the culprits we should always follow the money. "Money given out by coalition forces to fund rebuilding projects in Iraq is instead being used to finance resistance attacks" says The London Telegraph, July, 12, 2003. Is US funding, arming, and training of terrorists a result of military incompetence? Is it a coincidence that these series of controlled blunders resemble the divide and conquer strategy of European empires?
And what of the suicide bombers, who often when captured seem drugged and brainwashed? Many "al Qaeda" operatives are the results of policies at Guantanamo Bay. According to The New York Times article on July 2, 2008, titled "China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo," the US interrogation techniques used "reduces [the] prisoner to 'animal level' concerns" where they are "brainwashed." Is it possible to use torture and coercion to create a suicide bomber? Even mainstream critics of Guantanamo Bay claim that these oppressive detention tactics are creating more enemies.
So the only question is: incompetence or by design? According to a June 17, 2008 article of the McClatchy Newspapers titled, "Militants found recruits among Guantanamo's wrongly detained," one former detainee asked "if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?" But according to the article, Jihad recruitment was happening inside of the Guantanamo prison right under our watchful eye. One detainee with no terror ties when captured in 2002 became a well-known militant after he was released in 2003. Is this incompetence or by design?
After the Iraq invasion, the Guantanamo-type torture methods expanded tremendously, and in the same proportion as did terrorism in Iraq. Opportunities to expand the terrorism recruitment program during the war were vast. Referring to US run prison facilities in Iraq, US Marine General Douglas said in an April 28, 2008 CNN article, "It most assuredly was a jihadist university." General Douglas cleaned up two major facilities in May 2007, coincidentally one month before "The Surge" had been fully implemented. A major reduction in the violence in Iraq was caused by shutting down the US run "Al Qaeda Universities" in addition to the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr US ceasefire. Was "The Surge" timed to allow the US to take credit for the reduction in violence, or is it just another coincidence?
How the Islamic State [ ISIS ] evolved in an American prison
By Terrence McCoy
November 4, 2014
From the ashes of what former inmates called an "al-Qaeda school" rose the Islamic State. Indeed, when those inhabitants freed [ from U.S. Prison Camp Bucca ] in 2009 returned to Baghdad, The Post reported, they spoke of two things: their conversion to radicalism -- and revenge.
By The Associated Press on June 21, 2014
"Back in 2006, I didn't meet a single Iraqi who thought the Biden plan [partition Iraq into 3] was a good idea," Mansoor (Retired Army Col. Peter Mansoor) said in an interview.
"it took eight years of authoritarian governance under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for Iraqis to begin seriously wondering whether they'd be better off without a unified Iraqi state"
The Fog Machine of War
The U.S. Military's Campaign Against Media Freedom
By CHELSEA MANNING
JUNE 14, 2014
If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq. .... Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed.
Early that year, I received orders to investigate 15 individuals whom the federal police had arrested on suspicion of printing "anti-Iraqi literature." I learned that these individuals had absolutely no ties to terrorism; they were publishing a scholarly critique of Mr. Maliki's administration. I forwarded this finding to the officer in command in eastern Baghdad. He responded that he didn't need this information; instead, I should assist the federal police in locating more "anti-Iraqi" print shops.
I was shocked by our military's complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media's radar.
December 12, 2011
Obama and Iraqi Premier Signify Shift to a Postwar Partnership
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON -- President Obama, welcoming Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq to the White House on Monday, said that after nearly nine years of war, Iraq had become a "sovereign, self-reliant and democratic" country that could serve as a model for aspiring democrats across the Middle East.
By Ali Khedery July 3, 2014
Ali Khedery is chairman and chief executive of the Dubai-based Dragoman Partners. From 2003 to 2009, he was the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, acting as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and as a senior adviser to three heads of U.S. Central Command. In 2011, as an executive with Exxon Mobil, he negotiated the company's entry into the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
I argued that Maliki would continue to consolidate power with political purges against his rivals; .... The crisis now gripping Iraq and the Middle East was not only predictable but predicted -- and preventable. By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated.
World News 07.08.14
Iraq's Vice President: This Is a Full On Sunni Revolt
"Definitely we consider all this military support to Nouri al-Maliki an alliance with Iran against the Arab Sunnis" he said.