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Shia Autonomy
A recipe for desaster: Shi’ites demand autonomy as Iraq awaits charter
With four days left until
Iraq’s leaders have promised a draft constitution, powerful Islamist leaders made a dramatic bid on Thursday to have a big, autonomous Shi’ite region across the oil-rich south.
The head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) spelled out his demands to tens of thousands of chanting supporters in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf.
But minority Sunni and secular opponents, as well as rival Shi’ite Islamists in the coalition national government, swiftly poured cold water on an idea that fueled fears about sectarian battles over oil and Iranian-style religious rule in the south.
This would result in a landlocked Kurdish province in the north, with the not-so-friendly neighbors of Turkey, Syria and Iran, all of these suppressing their Kurdish minorities. In the south the new united Shia provinces would be more or less an annex to Iran and in the middle the Sunni provinces and the multi ethic capital of Baghdad would depend on small trickles of oil revenue from the north and the south or, more probable, fight the other entities.
This may have been the wet dream of some Neocon planers who would like all bigger Middle East countries splittered into small, powerless statelets. But as the situation looks now, this will dramatically increase the strategic role of Iran and there seems to be no workable plan to deny it that role. Or is there?
To understand what is happenning and what has happened, sometimes it helps to work backwards. If you assume that the plan was to actually break up Iraq into three parts, (with US bases and a client state in Kurdistan, a hot bed of geo-political intrigue involving Iran and Saudi Arabia in Shia’Land, and absolute mayhem involving AlQaeda, PsyOps/BlackOps operatives, and Mosad in the SunniLand), what is happening now should be clear enough.
We went in there to break up the country, thus there was no need for a large enough force to control the country after the governing structure fell apart. Looting and lawlessnes guaranteed ethnic rivalries and religious tensions (Shias are less likely to loot/rob/kill shias in the absence of a legal authority). Rumsfeld said, “freedome is messy!”. We did not need a reconstruction plan because we had no plan to reconstruct, hence state dept’s reconstruction plan was tossed aside, if somebody knows of an alternate reconstruction plan please enlighten me(the one cited here and there is actually an arabic/english translation of the post WWII reconstruction of Germany!). I remember talking to a lefty after the invasion and he was concerned that things were going so well in Iraq that Bush will be hailed as a hero and everybody else will look like a loser, that was until Bremer decided to fire the entire Iraqi army (BTW they were allowed to keep their weapons!). Then came the torture and abuse shitstorm which provided the final nail in the coffin of a united Iraq. Reconstruction was a facade, a way to line the pockets of wealthy Bush contributers. Reports from Jordan talked of brand new materials showing up in scrap heaps from Iraq. First we blow the place to smithereans, then we sell big reconstruction contracts with lots of building materials and labor, then we take the same building material and sell it as scrap to some Jordanians, what a scam! Of course nothing got built but we did paint a lot of schools, on the outsides only! AlQaeda is inserted there to rob the Sunni populaton of any legitimate leadership. Do you see why we didn’t take care of Zarqawi’s group (Ansarul Islam) when he was openly training cadres in the Kurdish areas under our watch!!!??? There is a concerted effort to destroy Sunni intelligentsia and middle class by both, AlQaeda and US operatives.
Mo Mowlan, a very bright Irish MP, said that the real aim of this war is Saudi Arabia and its oil. The problem with this thesis is that Saudi oil is already ours. Under an agreement Saudis are bound to purchase US treasury bills with the oil proceeds and the interest on these bills is used for construction projects in Suadi Arabia (guess who gets all the construction projects?). I think the real game is to draw Iran into a long and bloody skirmish, with our Saudi pawns, in the Shia and Sunni lands (since we can’t take them out in an all out war) and meanwhile create another client state in Kurdistan which is surrounded by enemies and fully depends on us for protection, just like Israel.
So rest assured, if the constitution does appear it will only delay the inevitable by a few years, which maybe our plan. This way we can escape the blame of breaking up Iraq and point the finger at somebody not living up to the constitution or some such garbage.
Remember this about Iraq,
-a majority of Saddam’s ruling click was Shias not Sunnis.
-the most well known face of Iraq in the world, after Saddam, was a christian Tariq Aziz.
-women could vote, drive, go to college and universities in Saddam’s Iraq.
-Dr. Germ, the famous Iraqi microbiologist dubbed a chemical weapons experts by the US, is a woman and there were many more successfull women.
Saddam was and is a butcher and deserve what come his way, but he is safe and secure in his little bungalow, while poor Iraqis are dying by the hundereds everyday. And what we are creating in place of a secular Iraq is a religious/fascist state not much different from Saudi Arabia.
Don’t tell me that this wasn’t the plan from the beginning! Years ago in my Statistics class we studied a technique called “The decision tree”, where you take a situation and map all outcomes, then you assign a numerical probability to every outcome and then you map all possible outcomes of the earlier outcomes and assign them probabilities. The probability of an end event is then calculated as the multiple of all up stream outcomes. If you already familiar with this then I apologize but if not, then you may want to look it up. Pentagon lives and dies with numbers, simulations, and model building. Don’t tell me that nobody did a decision tree on invading Iraq, not stopping the looting, laying off the entire army, not guarding the weapons depots and all other crossroads which we have crossed and so badly screwed up. It is time to realize that things are going as planned and that is why nobody has lost their job or is proposing a change in direction. It is all part of the plan, it just gets messy sometimes!
Posted by: Max Andersen | Aug 13 2005 3:52 utc | 64
from truthout
How Can the US Ever Win, When Iraqi Children Die like This?
By Robert Fisk
The Independent UK
Saturday 13 August 2005
There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans – if you are lucky.
Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and – this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year – they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he’s the one who still cannot believe his son is dead – or what the Americans told him afterwards.
“It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: “There is a boy under this vehicle.”
According to Selim al-Sammerai, the Americans’ first reaction was to put handcuffs on the two other boys. But a Lebanese Arabic interpreter working for the Americans arrived to explain that it was all a mistake. “We don’t have anything against you,” she said. The Americans produced a laminated paper in English and Arabic entitled “Iraqi Claims Pocket Card” which tells them how to claim compensation.
The unit whose Bradley drove over Yassin is listed as “256 BCT A/156 AR, Mortars”. Under “Type of Incident”, an American had written: “Raid destroyed gate and doors.” No one told the family there had been a raid. And nowhere – but nowhere – on the form does it suggest that the “raid” destroyed the life of the football-loving Yassin al-Sammerai.
Inside Yassin’s father’s home yesterday, Selim shakes with anger and then weeps softly, wiping his eyes. “He is surely in heaven,” one of his surviving seven sons replies. And the old man looks at me and says: “He liked swimming too. ”
A former technical manager at the Baghdad University college of arts, Selim is now just a shadow. He is half bent over on his seat, his face sallow and his cheeks drawn in. This is a Sunni household in a Sunni area. This is “insurgent country” for the Americans, which is why they crash into these narrow streets at night. Several days ago, a collaborator gave away the location of a group of Sunni guerrillas and US troops surrounded the house. A two-hour gun-battle followed until an Apache helicopter came barrelling out of the darkness and dropped a bomb on the building, killing all inside.
There is much muttering around the room about the Americans and the West and I pick up on this quickly and say how grateful I am that they have let a Westerner come to their home after what has happened. Selim turns and shakes me by the hand. “You are welcome here,” he says. “Please tell people what happened to us.” Outside, my driver is watching the road; it’s the usual story. Any car with three men inside or a man with a mobile phone means “get out”. The sun bakes down. It is a Friday. “These guys take Fridays off,” the driver offers by way of confidence.
“The Americans came back with an officer two days later,” Selim al-Sammerai continues. “They offered us compensation. I refused. I lost my son, I told the officer. ‘I don’t want the money – I don’t think the money will bring back my son.’ That’s what I told the American.” There is a long silence in the room. But Selim, who is still crying, insists on speaking again.
“I told the American officer: ‘You have killed the innocent and such things will lead the people to destroy you and the people will make a revolution against you. You said you had come to liberate us from the previous regime. But you are destroying our walls and doors.'”
I suddenly realise that Selim al-Sammerai has straightened up on his seat and his voice is rising in strength. “Do you know what the American said to me? He said, ‘This is fate.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘I am very faithful in the fate of God – but not in the fate of which you speak.'”
Then one of Yassin’s brothers says that he took a photograph of the dead boy as he lay on the ground, a picture taken on his mobile phone, and he printed a picture of it and when the Americans returned on the second day they asked to see it. “They asked me why I had taken the picture and I said it was so people here could see what the Americans had done to my brother. They asked if they could borrow it and bring it back. I gave it to them but they didn’t bring it back. But I still kept the image on my mobile and I was able to print another.” And suddenly it is in my hands, an obscene and terrible snapshot of Yassin’s head crushed flat as if an elephant had stood upon it, blood pouring from what had been the back of his brains. “So now, you see,” the brother explains, “the people can still see what the Americans have done.”
In the heat, we slunk out of al-Jamia yesterday, the place of insurgents and Americans and grief and revenge. “When the car bomb blew up over there,” my driver says, “the US Humvees went on burning for three hours and the bodies were still there. The Americans took three hours to reach them. Al the people gathered round and watched.” And I look at the carbonised car that still lies on the road and realise it has now become a little icon of resistance. How, I ask myself again, can the the Americans ever win
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 14 2005 1:30 utc | 96
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