Irak 86

De onafhankelijke Amerikaanse journalist Chris Floyd schrijft: 'Everybody Knows: Storms of Horror in a Tormented Land.


The last few weeks have seen disastrous news breaking over the Bush administration, like Katrina come again. This time, though, it's not hurricane winds and surging seas, but waves of innocent blood overtopping the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates to turn the White House crimson. Report after report of horrific atrocities — long held back by a levee of lies, fear, obfuscation and the natural confusion of war — has broken through, flooding the imperial capital with the reeking, corpse-filled backwash of the vast criminal folly committed by its grubby little Caesar. So great is the stench of moral corruption that even America's corporate media, for so long a simpering handmaiden to the ruling thugs, have been forced to take notice, just as they did, all too briefly, during the Bushist abandonment of New Orleans. New sites of shame have entered the American lexicon: Haditha, Ishaqi, Hamdaniyah, Samarra — places where horrors large and small, confirmed and alleged, comprehensible and unfathomable, have marked this beginning of the fourth year of occupation. Meanwhile, this week's reported killing of the man identified as Abu Musab al-Zaqarwi will be the spark for another spiral of bloodshed – and not just from the followers. Zarqawi, whose power and influence was wildly – and deliberately – exaggerated by Pentagon propagandists, was almost certainly betrayed by his ostensible allies in the insurgency: the local Sunni-led nationalists, along with members of his own organization. He had already been "demoted" by the Iraqi resistance for his mad-dog ways; even al Qaeda leaders were disassociating themselves from him, denouncing his mass-murdering attacks on fellow Muslims, as the Christian Science Monitor reported weeks ago (and Eric Garris of Antiwar.com reminded us this week). Now that he's gone, the nationalist insurgents have pledged to intensify their attacks on Americans, to show that Zarqawi was nothing, that they are the ones who have been doing the real fighting, as Juan Cole reports. The frenzy of death and darkness savaging Iraq will only grow, despite the PR blip (see the New York Times regurgitating the whole Pentagon fabrication of Zarqawi's supposed central role in the entire insurgency here) of the Zarqawi hit.
Indeed, as the tormented land flails in agony — racked by civil war, unbounded corruption, religious repression, infrastructure collapse, the violent subjugation of women and all the other evils introduced by President George W. Bush's war of aggression — U.S. forces seem to be gripped by an increasing frenzy of their own. In just the last three months, a string of incidents has seen Iraqi civilians gunned down by U.S. soldiers in outbursts of fury and panic, as Scotland's Sunday Herald reports. The innocent victims include unarmed women (one of them a pregnant woman trying to reach a hospital), infants, children, the elderly and the mentally handicapped. In May alone, Iraqi government officials charged that 32 civilians, including women and children, were killed in airstrikes on houses, an airstrike on a car and Baghdad house raids, AFP reports. These allegations come from the Iraqi Islamic Party, which has cooperated with the American occupation and "forms the core of the Iraqi Accord Front, the Sunni religious coalition that holds 44 seats in parliament," along with "a vice president, a vice premier, four cabinet members and the speaker of the house," as Juan Cole reports. "So these charges are originating not with hardliners or radicals outside the new system, but with…de facto allies of the United States," Cole notes.' Lees verder:
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php