The Sept. 15th anti-war march was timed to coincide with the report to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus. We answered Bush’s lies and propaganda in the streets, but it is worth taking a moment to assess and dissect the real military strategy behind the so-called surge that Petraeus is commanding.
Bush, Petraeus and the war machine have already sent an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq, bringing the U.S.
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Petraeus asserts that this heavier U.S. military presence in Baghdad has created what he calls an “improved security situation” so there can be “national reconciliation” between Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish forces. That is the line.
That is the myth.
The other part of this propaganda is that if the United States were to leave Iraq, it would stimulate an awful, perhaps genocidal, ethno-sectarian conflict.
But here are the facts. It was Petraeus and the U.S. military occupation forces—as a matter of strategy and policy—that armed, financed, backed and stimulated the ethno-sectarian conflict, which is now being used as the justification for the occupation.
Before March 2003, when the United States invaded, almost all Iraqis—with the exception of a handful of political operatives and certain reactionary political parties —refused to identify themselves as Shiite or Sunni. Instead, they proclaimed, “we are all Iraqis.”
In 2004 and 2005, Petraeus created the National Police Commando Unit, which today is called the Iraqi National Police. That commando unit quickly showed itself to be an instrument of Shiite death squads, carrying out ethnic cleansing and purging of Sunni Arabs from mixed neighborhoods. It was a reign of terror; hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded. Four-and-a-half million Iraqis—out of a total population of 25 million—fled their homes and became refugees. That is one in five.
Baghdad—a city of 6 million—became a stronghold of reactionary Shiite death squad commando units loyal to Petraeus. This in turn fueled the formation of a Sunni-based armed movement that was partly directed against the U.S.-British occupation forces, and partly functioned as self-defense units against the National Police Commando Unit.
Over the the last six months, Petraeus has gone to these very same Sunni-based tribal leaders who were reacting with fear and in self-defense, and provided them with weapons and money. In other words, he financed the Shiite death squads and then moved in to buy out and institutionalize the leaders of the Sunni resistance to those same death squads.
In the South, where Basra and half the country’s known oil supply are located, Petraeus stimulated a Shiite-versus-Shiite civil war as part of the “surge.”
Three weeks ago, the Badr Brigades—associated with a Shiite political party—carried out large-scale attacks on the Mahdi Army, which is associated with another Shiite political party. As they fought, Petraeus ordered air attacks to carry out massive bombing and strafing of the Mahdi Army. Thus Petraeus has created another Shiite military proxy force—the Badr Brigades—in the southern part of the country, loyal to him and the Pentagon.
In the northern part of the country, known as Kurdistan, Petraeus and the army have financed and armed a Kurdish army, the Peshmerga. In turn, the Kurdish government in the north is independently signing oil contracts with Hunt Oil and other U.S. oil companies.
Iraq’s precious national resource, oil, was nationalized up until now, and provided the revenue formally for free education, low-cost housing and other vitally-needed social programs. Now it has been turned over to local control under the authority of a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia.
It is clear that instead of holding the country together, as the pro-war pundits claim, Bush, Petraeus and the Pentagon have acted as the central forces in organizing the destruction of Iraq as a unitary society. It is the occupation that has plunged that country into the worst kind of ethno-sectarian civil war.
Although they are profoundly aware of this history, the warmakers cite the existence of a civil war as the foundational pretext for why U.S. forces must remain in Iraq. This manipulation could be easily exposed by the mass media, except for the fact that the same corporations and banks that hope to become the new colonial overlords and profiteers in Iraq also own the mass media.
The Pentagon has succeeded in carrying out a terrible crime against Iraq. But the Iraqi people as a whole—because of their strong anticolonial tradition and hatred of foreign occupation—are struggling heroically to overcome ethno-sectarian conflict. This struggle is directed against the U.S. occupation forces.
The main goal of the United States now is to avoid the perception that they have been defeated by an armed, united Arab resistance movement. They know that such a perception would likely stimulate other Arab resistance movements in this oil-rich region.
As a matter of holding on, they have resorted to the most criminal, genocidal divide-and-conquer strategy, similar to what Hitler used in the Balkans, and the European settlers used when they invaded this continent over 300 years ago.
