More on that Ugly American policy, as practiced in urban warfare. And with the latest news that the Iraqi
parliament has failed again to form a unity government, as expected, and 47
soldiers killed this month already, the failed conduct and execution Bush’s War
will remain the defining, crippling crises to the US being able to conduct
itself as a global citizen in good standing.
Note Annotated links below to the Fallujah story. kwc
GLOBAL EYE
Dead Cities: The Fallujah Option in Baghdad?
By Chris Floyd, in The Moscow Times, April 14,
2006
Of all the war
crimes that have flowed from the originating crime of President George W. Bush's
unprovoked invasion of Iraq, perhaps the most flagrant was the destruction of
Fallujah in November 2004. Now, as ignominious defeat looms for Bush's
Babylonian folly, some of the key players in fomenting the war are urging that
the "Fallujah Option" be applied to an even bigger target: Baghdad.
What these influential warmongers openly call for is the
"pacification" of Baghdad: a brutal firestorm by U.S. forces,
ravaging both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in a "horrific"
operation that will inevitably lead to "skyrocketing body counts," as
warhawk Reuel Marc Gerecht
cheerfully wrote last week in the ever-bloodthirsty editorial pages of The Wall
Street Journal. Gerecht's war whoop quickly ricocheted around the right-wing
media echo chamber and gave public voice to the private counsels emanating from
a group whose members now comprise the leadership of the U.S. government: The
Project for the New American Century.
As oft noted here, PNAC was founded by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Zalmay Khalilzad and the now-indicted Lewis Libby,
among others. In September 2000, they publicly called
for sending U.S. forces into Iraq - even if Saddam Hussein was already gone -
as well as planting new bases in Central Asia, putting weapons in space,
building new nukes and funding a vast militarization of American society. Being
such savvy inside players and all, they recognized that this lunatic program
would not be accepted by the American people - unless, of course, the nation
was struck by a "catalyzing event" like "a new Pearl
Harbor." Who says dreams don't come true?
Gerecht, an ex-CIA man, is a senior fellow at PNAC. He was one of the many
munchkins who laid the groundwork for the mass deception that led to the war by constantly undermining any CIA
report that failed to conform to the warmongers' highly profitable fantasies of
America's imminent destruction by the broken, toothless regime of Saddam
Hussein. The intelligence services' many caveats about this bogus threat were
placed directly on Bush's desk, as the National Journal reports, but the
P-Nackers in the White House tossed them aside. They dreamed of war, and they
got it.
But the natives failed to play their part in the imperial masque macabre. As
noted here last week, they have churlishly failed to show proper appreciation
for being slaughtered, looted, tortured and controlled. Even the Shiites,
hailed by the Bushists just a few weeks ago as salt-of-the-earth lovers of
moderate democracy, are now denounced as hate-filled sectarians, even worse
than the Sunni insurgents - who are suddenly being courted by Bush's man in
Baghdad, the P-Nacker Khalilzad, the BBC reports.
Not that the Shiite death squads -- backed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi
government -- have been all bad, mind you. Sure, they've been kidnapping Sunni
civilians, drilling holes in their skulls, beheading them and then dumping the
corpses on city streets or burying them in schoolyards. But all of this been
"healthy," says Gerecht, because it has made the Sunnis and Kurds
fear "Shiite power." Or something. To be honest, Gerecht's column is
filled with so many canards, delusions and logical inconsistencies that it
often leaves the plane of rational discourse altogether. But its import is
clear: By daring to defy Washington's edicts, the Shiites have gotten too big
for their britches and must be brought to heel, along with the rest of the scum
who are making the Dear Leader look bad back home.
You think that's a joke, but it's not. One of Gerecht's main reasons
for "pacifying" Baghdad in a hydra-headed war on every ethnic faction
is because "the U.S. media will never write many
optimistic stories about Iraq if journalists fear going outside" the city's fortified Green Zone. There you have the Bushist
vision in a nutshell. The war is not actually happening in the real world,
where real people are dying by the tens of thousands; no, it's really being
fought on the monitors of Fox News, CNN and NBC, in the flimsy pages of The New
York Times and The Washington Post, and on the overheated airwaves of talk
radio. Baghdad must be pacified - like Grozny, like Guernica - so that
Americans can see a few more peppy stories on the tube on their way to the
ballgame or the mall.
The fate of Fallujah provides a template of the grim fate awaiting Baghdad if
Gerecht and the government P-Nackers have their way. Fallujah was encircled in a ring of iron;
water, electricity and food supplies were cut off, a flagrant war crime. The
city was bombed for 8 weeks, then hit by an all-out ground attack with both
conventional and chemical weapons - white phosphorous and napalm - that killed
thousands of civilians and left more than 200,000 homeless. Among the first targets were Fallujah's hospitals and
clinics, another flagrant war crime. Some
were destroyed, killing doctors and patients alike, others seized and closed,
all in order to prevent any stories about civilian casualties from reaching
the Western media,
the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told The New York
Times. Once again, manufactured image trumped bloodstained reality.
Perhaps this cup will pass from Baghdad. Perhaps Bush and his P-Nackers will
instead move forward with their frenzied plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, as
The New Yorker reported last week. But Gerecht's article is a perfect snapshot
of the depraved minds that now rule America. Somewhere, somehow - and soon -
another city is going to die.
Chris Floyd is an American journalist with a
weekly political column in The Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times and a
regular contributor to the Ecologist, The Nation,
CounterPunch, Christian Science Monitor, Bergen Record, Columbia Journalism
Review and elsewhere. His blog is Empire Burlesque http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/04/14/120.html
Annotations
Returning to the Scene of the Crime
(Fallujah) TomDispatch, April 4, 2006
Can the Shiite Center Hold? Wall
Street Journal, April 3, 2006
The
Iran Plans The New Yorker, April 10, 2006
US 'in talks with Iraq militants' BBC,
April 7, 2006
Fallujah: The Flame of Atrocity Empire
Burlesque, Nov. 11, 2005
Ring of Fire: The Fallujah Inferno Empire
Burlesque, Nov. 19, 2004
Cutting
and Running in Iraq TomDispatch.com, April 6, 2006
Rebuilding America's Defenses Project
for a New American Century, September 2000
Inside Fallujah: One
Family-s Diary of Terror Scotland Sunday Herald, Nov. 14, 2004
Iraq Hospitals Could be Used as Propaganda Centers, says Pentagon New York Times, Nov. 8, 2004
US
Strikes Raze Fallujah Hospital
BBC, Nov. 6,
2004
Ghost
City Calls for Help BBC, Nov. 13, 2004
Fallujah
a Sea of Rubble and Death After Offensive Reuters,
Nov. 14, 2004
A City lies in Ruins, Along with the Lives of the Wretched Survivors The Independent, Nov. 15, 2004
Running Out of Patients: Fallujah Hospital Bombing The Village Voice, Nov. 7, 2004
Smoke
and Corpses BBC, Nov. 11, 2004
20 Doctors Killed in Strike on Clinic: Red Crescent UN Integrated Regional Information Network, Nov. 10, 2004
US Rolls out Nuclear Plan
Los Angeles
Times, April 6, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/04/14/120.html
