From: Juan Cole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >We know Iraq has been the scene of several wars in recent years. But it seems >increasingly clear that it has been a set of dirty wars.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Ali al-Lami, an Iraqi politician, protege of Ahmad Chalabi,and member of the Debaathification Committee,is being charged by a high unnamed American official with providing information on Iraqis to the "special groups" (Iranian-run cells within Iraqi Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army), which was useful to them in assassinating these individuals. Now that is "debaathification" with extreme prejudice! The official said al-Lami made regular trips to Iran, Lebanon and Russia (?!) in support of the aims of Iranian intelligence. So what is being alleged is essentially that the United States (Rumsfeld & Paul Bremer) installed on the Debaathification Commission a secret agent of Iran who was running Iran-backed death squads based on the information to which he became privy by virtue of being on the commission! The same article carries allegations by Ahmad Chalabi that the car used in the attempted assassination against him last week came from an Iraqi government ministry. This isn't a government,it is a mafia movie: The Godfather IV! So you've been having Iran-backed assassination teams running all over the place killing Sunnis and helping ethnically cleanse them so Iran can nail down Baghad as a Shiite city, extending the region of Shiite dominance in Iraq west and north. And they have been working out of government ministries and agencies! Of course we knew about the Sunni Arab death squads, which the US calls "al-Qaeda" if they are anti-American and "Sons of Iraq" if they take our money. Now for yet another set of death squads. It is increasingly clear from press reporting, and from Bob Woodward's new book, that the Surge was not just 30,000 extra troops building blast walls. The Surge was a dirty war. It was a vast effort at identifying, finding and assassinating the leaders of the Sunni Arab resistance. Robert Parry writes: >> A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, >> was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed >> for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to >> withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to >> undercut their continuing success.<< That is, US officers in Baghdad were playing Col Mathieu in a rerun of the Battle of Algiers, tracking down and killing the members of the Sunni resistance cells with ever increasing efficiency. Crowing about the success of Surge wouldn't look so pretty if you were actually celebrating an assassination campaign. Or, since the originally US-appointed Ali al-Lami was helping the Iranians to kill Sunni guerrillas, as well, we should say assassination campaigns in the plural.< -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
