"To the hell that is Iraq?" New study on deaths.

[JackRiddler]

The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria
Two Arab countries fall apart
An extreme Islamist group that seeks to create a caliphate and spread jihad across the world has made dramatic advances on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border
Jun 14th 2014 | From the print edition

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-ea ... fall_apart

WHOEVER chose the Twitter handle “Jihadi Spring” was prescient. Three years of turmoil in the region, on the back of unpopular American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have benefited extreme Islamists, none more so than the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), a group that outdoes even al-Qaeda in brutality and fanaticism. In the past year or so, as borders and government control have frayed across the region, ISIS has made gains across a swathe of territory encompassing much of eastern and northern Syria and western and northern Iraq. On June 10th it achieved its biggest prize to date by capturing Mosul, Iraq’s second city, and most of the surrounding province of Nineveh. The next day it advanced south towards Baghdad, the capital, taking several towns on the way. Ministers in Iraq’s government admitted that a catastrophe was in the making. A decade after the American invasion, the country looks as fragile, bloody and pitiful as ever.

After four days of fighting, Iraq’s security forces abandoned their posts in Mosul as ISIS militiamen took over army bases, banks and government offices. The jihadists seized huge stores of American-supplied arms, ammunition and vehicles, apparently including six Black Hawk helicopters and 500 billion dinars ($430m) in freshly printed cash. Some 500,000 people fled in terror to areas beyond ISIS’s sway.
In this section



The scale of the attack on Mosul was particularly audacious. But it did not come out of the blue. In the past six months ISIS has captured and held Falluja, less than an hour’s drive west of Baghdad; taken over parts of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province; and has battled for Samarra, a city north of Baghdad that boasts one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines. Virtually every day its fighters set off bombs in Baghdad, keeping people in a state of terror.

As The Economist went to press, it was reported to have taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town, only 140km (87 miles) north-west of Baghdad. The speed of ISIS’s advance suggested that it was co-operating with a network of Sunni remnants from Saddam’s underground resistance who opposed the Americans after 2003 and have continued to fight against the Shia-dominated regime of Nuri al-Maliki since the Americans left at the end of 2011.

It was barely a year ago, in April 2013, that ISIS announced the expansion of its operations from Iraq into Syria. By changing its name from the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) by adding the words “and al-Sham”, translated as “the Levant” or “Greater Syria”, it signified its quest to conquer a wider area than present-day Syria.

Run by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi jihadist, ISIS may have up to 6,000 fighters in Iraq and 3,000-5,000 in Syria, including perhaps 3,000 foreigners; nearly a thousand are reported to hail from Chechnya and perhaps 500 or so more from France, Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

It is ruthless, slaughtering Shia and other minorities, including Christians and Alawites, the offshoot to which Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, belongs. It sacks churches and Shia shrines, dispatches suicide-bombers to market-places, and has no regard for civilian casualties.

Its recent advances would have been impossible without ISIS’s control since January of the eastern Syrian town of Raqqa, a testing ground and stronghold from which it has made forays farther afield. It has seized and exploited Syrian oilfields in the area and raised cash by ransoming foreign hostages.

Rather than fight simply as a branch of al-Qaeda (“the base” in Arabic), as it did before 2011, it has aimed to control territory, dispensing its own brand of justice and imposing its own moral code: no smoking, football, music, or unveiled women, for example. And it imposes taxes in the parts of Syria and Iraq it has conquered.

In other words, it is creating a proto-state on the ungoverned territory straddling the borderlands between Syria and Iraq. “This is a new, more dangerous strategy since 2011,” says Hassan Abu Haniyeh, a Jordanian expert on jihadist movements. If ISIS manages to hold onto its turf in Iraq, it will control an area the size of Jordan with roughly the same population (6m or so), stretching 500km from the countryside east of Aleppo in Syria into western Iraq.

It holds three border posts between Syria and Turkey and several more on Syria’s border with Iraq. Raqqa’s residents say Moroccan and Tunisian jihadists have brought their wives and children to settle in the city. Foreign preachers have been appointed to mosques. ISIS has also set up an intelligence service.

The regimes of Mr Assad in Syria and Mr Maliki in Iraq have played into ISIS’s hands by stoking up sectarian resentment among Sunni Arabs, who are a majority of more than 70% in Syria and a minority of around a fifth in Iraq, where they had been dominant under Saddam Hussein. But Mr Assad has cannily left ISIS alone, rightly guessing it would start fighting against the more mainstream rebels, to the regime’s advantage. And he has highlighted the horrors of ISIS to the West, as the spectre of what may come next were he to fall.

Two ogres versus a bunch of thugs

Mr Maliki has been less brutal but more crass than Mr Assad. By the end of 2011 American forces had almost eradicated ISI, as it still was, in Iraq. They did so by capturing or killing its leaders and, more crucially, by recruiting around 100,000 Sunni Iraqis to join the Sahwa, or Awakening, a largely tribal force to fight ISI, whose harsh rules in the areas they controlled had turned most of the people against it.

But after the Americans left, Mr Maliki disbanded the Sahwa militias, breaking a promise to integrate many of them into the regular army. He purged Sunnis from the government and cracked down on initially peaceful Sunni protests in Ramadi and Falluja at the end of last year. Anti-American rebels loyal to Saddam and even Sahwa people may have joined ISIS out of despair, feeling that Mr Maliki would never give them a fair deal. In 2012 Tariq al-Hashemi, the vice-president who was Iraq’s top Sunni, fled abroad, and was sentenced to death in absentia. Sunnis feel they have no political representation, says Mr Haniyeh. “ISIS and al-Qaeda are taking advantage and appropriating Sunni Islam.”

Some countries in the region, loathing Mr Assad’s brutality against civilians and Mr Maliki’s brand of Shia triumphalism, initially indulged ISIS. Turkey let a free flow of foreign fighters cross its borders into Syria until the end of last year. Some Gulf states, such as Kuwait and Qatar, were slow to clamp down on private citizens who have funded ISIS and at first tolerated or even applauded its sectarian ire.


Smoking will be punished: ISIS burns cigarettes in Raqqa

The carnage in Iraq, though not as numerically horrendous as in Syria, has been growing ferociously, leaving 5,400 people dead this year alone. According to some estimates, ISIS has been responsible for 75% to 95% of all the attacks. It has organised a number of prison breaks, such as one in 2013 from Abu Ghraib, whence several hundred jihadists escaped to join the fray; this week ISIS may have freed some 2,500 hardened fighters from jail in Mosul.

Whether in Iraq or Syria, ISIS has sought to terrify people into submission. On June 8th, as a typical warning to others, it crucified three young men in a town near Aleppo for co-operating with rival rebels. It has kidnapped scores of Kurdish students, journalists, aid workers and, more recently, some Turkish diplomats.

Even al-Qaeda has deemed ISIS too violent. Ayman Zawahiri, leader of the core group, has long disagreed with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s leader, warning him that ISIS’s habit of beheading its opponents and posting such atrocities on video was giving al-Qaeda a bad name.

So far ISIS has been effectively challenged only by fellow Sunnis. It is locked in battle with Jabhat al-Nusra, which al-Qaeda recognises as its affiliate in Syria. The two groups are tussling over Deir ez-Zor, a provincial capital between Raqqa and Anbar, leaving 600 fighters dead in the past six weeks. Since the start of the year, mainstream Syrian rebel groups, who at first welcomed ISIS for its fighting ability, have battled against it, forcing it out of areas in the north-western province of Idleb and the city of Aleppo. Kurdish forces in the north-east have done the same.

Some reckon that ISIS’s recent push in Iraq may be intended to bolster its rearguard, enabling it to replenish its coffers and armoury, before striking back at the rebel opposition in Syria. The more moderate rebels are ill-equipped to fight for ever against ISIS; they say that half their forces have already been diverted from the fight against Mr Assad to hold ISIS at bay.

The forces best equipped to face down ISIS may be Kurdish ones: the Peshmerga guerrillas, who have protected Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region for the past two decades, and the People’s Protection Units, better known as the YPG, the armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which dominates north-eastern Syria. The Kurds’ regional government in Iraq has mobilised its forces on the east side of the Tigris river, which runs through Mosul, and may well block ISIS from heading east and north into Kurdish territory; on June 12th the Kurds captured all of Kirkuk city from fleeing Iraqi forces. Yet Mr Maliki may have to call on the Kurds to help him out against ISIS.

Don’t come back home

Western governments are fretting about the threat from some of their own citizens who have joined the likes of ISIS and may come home to make trouble. On May 28th Barack Obama asked for an additional $5 billion for counter-terrorism programmes. ISIS people have not hidden their intention to carry out attacks in the West in the name of jihad. The man accused of killing four men dead in Belgium’s Jewish museum on May 24th was a veteran of Syria’s war. ISIS runs training camps in the desert of eastern Syria. Jordan and Turkey are worried too.

But few governments, except perhaps Iran, are keen to arm Mr Maliki’s increasingly nasty and incompetent regime. Last year the United States did agree to sell Iraq more weapons, including F-16 fighter jets. The threat of terrorism against the West may prod Western governments into giving more arms and help to the anti-ISIS Syrian rebels. But helping Mr Maliki more wholeheartedly is another matter. Mr Obama has refused to hit ISIS with drones.

In the long run the biggest hope for containing ISIS lies in its lack of a broadly popular base. After all, al-Qaeda itself dismally failed to capture Arab minds during the Arab spring. Most Syrian and Iraqi Sunnis do not wish to be ruled by extremists. Mosul and other areas may yet return to the hands of the government. Yet Syrians and Iraqis are both trapped between dictators on the one hand and extremists on the other. An unhappy choice.

From the print edition: Middle East and Africa

[JackRiddler]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/13/ ... ters/print

Weekend Edition June 13-15, 2014

No Peace and No Democracy
Two Occupations Ending in Hopeless Disasters

by GARY LEUPP

U.S. military occupations typically have two aspects, which are, at least theoretically, destructive and productive respectively. The classic U.S. occupation—the one held up as the model by those urging more—was that of Japan, from 1945 to 1952. Its two main missions were “demilitarization” following defeat in war and “democratization.” The latter meant the acceptance of a U.S.-dictated new constitution and at least the appearance of popular rule, and general incorporation into the U.S.-led imperialist camp.

Before and during the occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003, some neocons and President Bush himself offered this supposedly grand success story as the template for that project. (John Dower, a leading scholar on the Japanese occupation, pointed out from before the war the absurdity of assuming that the course of events in an advanced, industrialized country of ethnically homogeneous people could be replicated in a developing, ethnically and religiously divided society like Iraq. Bush, he argued, was misusing historical analogy for propaganda’s sake.)

The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.

Witness now, eleven years after the Iraq invasion, two and half years of the Pentagon’s sulky withdrawal, the fruits of that imperial project. Where is the demilitarization, the pacification, the law and order? Where is the “democracy,” or even any credible claim to central authority?

The lid that the secular Baathists had kept on the simmering historical conflicts between Shiite and Sunni, Arab and Kurd, religious and irreligious, was blown off by the occupier, who presided over the de facto division of the country into a quasi-independent Kurdistan seeking ever more autonomy, and the rest of Iraq divided through ongoing ethnic cleaning into exclusively Shiite and Sunni Arab communities.

Estimates of civilian deaths caused by the war between 2003 and 2011 are as high as over half a million. Over half the country’s Christians have fled. Over four out of twenty-three million Iraqis have fled the country or are internal refugees. The position of women in society has obviously declined; today headscarves and conservative attire are, if not legally mandatory in public, necessary to escape hostile attention. The Guardian reported in 2007 that Iraqi women’s lives had “become immeasurably worse, both rapes, burnings and murders a daily occurrence.” Gay people have it worse. A 2012 Reuters piece notes that while “many gays…had been able to live fairly comfortably in Iraq under Saddam’s largely secular rule,” hundreds have been murdered since the invasion and regime change of 2003—14 young men in eastern Baghdad alone in three weeks in 2012.

According to a recent article in Lebanon’s Daily Star, entitled “Once an Arab model, Baghdad now the world’s worst city”: “Massive concrete walls, designed to withstand the impact of explosions, still divide up confessionally mixed neighborhoods [in the capital of Baghdad], while the government sits in the heavily fortified Green Zone, which is also home to parliament and the U.S. and British embassies, access to which is difficult for ordinary Iraqis…”

According to Amir al-Chalabi, head of an NGO working to improve Baghdad urban services, the city which was once the wonder of the world “has become deserted, and it suffers from instability. At night, it turns into a ghost town because of the lack of lighting.” The standard of living attained under the vilified Baathists has collapsed, and while the oil sector has revived, it provides little employment, now (if we can believe the CIA) at 15%.

The U.S. game plan in Iraq was not to install what would look like a multi-party democratic system post-haste; Paul Bremer, commissar of the “Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq” from May 2003 to April 2004, publicly opined that a rush towards democracy might damage U.S. interests. (He had initially said, “We’re going to be running a colony almost.”) It was not U.S. benevolence but massive pro-democracy, anti-occupation demonstrations that forced the U.S. to gradually allow “free” elections (but minus the banned Baathist party, how could they be free?) and the more or less formal transfer of sovereignty in 2009.

The regime of Nuri al-Maliki midwifed into power by the U.S. is corrupt, dysfunctional, and unpopular. Sympathetic to and influenced by neighboring Shiite Iran, it has avoided complete U.S. domination. (It does not, for example, support the U.S. policy of toppling the Syrian regime.) But it is now appealing for U.S. aid in repressing its foes and is dependent on the U.S. for aid. The U.S. is providing $14 billion in F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters, Hellfire missiles and reconnaissance drones, and al-Maliki can’t bite the hand that feeds him.

The regime is dominated by religious-sectarian (as opposed to more secular) Shiites who have elbowed aside top Sunni officials (on grounds of “terrorism”) and provoked a massive resurgence of Sunni resistance in the vast province of Anbar . That is where the famous “surge” of 2007 occurred: U.S. forces and Sunni mercenaries united against al-Qaeda, repressing them temporarily.

But all for naught. The al-Qaeda split-off faction called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has in recent days rapidly and dramatically taken the cities of Fajullah (site of the deadliest battle U.S. troops have fought since Da Nang, in November 2004), Tikrit (where government troops surrendered to ISIS at their officers’ command), and Mosul. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who had taken refuge in the latter city are now fleeing again for their lives.

ISIS now controls territory larger than Israel and Lebanon combined. The U.S. successfully, at the cost of 4488 U.S. soldiers’ lives, transformed a secular modern country in which al-Qaeda had no significant presence, and was seen as a terrorist threat to the Baathist state, into an al-Qaeda base a million times the size of bin Laden’s puny training camps in Afghanistan.

I wonder what extra dimension of meaning this adds to the many veterans of that imperialist war, effectively brainwashed at some point to think that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were comrades in arms, and that by toppling Saddam they’d dealt a big blow to al-Qaeda terrorism.

Instead, with the steady inspiring echo of “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!” in the background, their actions inflated bin Laden’s small group into the welter of jihadi armies now controlling sections of at least seven countries.

There is no end to the war launched by George W. Bush in 2003. No end to the pain nor the national humiliation. There is none of the demilitarization or democratization of the “successful” Japanese model. Secretary of State Colin Powell told George W. Bush in the war planning stage that the Pottery Barn rule pertained: “If you break it, you own it.” The U.S. has broken Iraq, and now awkwardly shares ownership with Iran, which Washington’s been trying to break for years. The war was a total disaster, a catastrophe, a colossal crime that the Obama administration refused from the get-go to investigate and punish. It is hard to see how it even enhanced the global position of U.S. imperialism; it has not even been a great boon for the energy companies. Its chief historical function has been to sicken and terrify the world, convincing it that that the U.S. is run by madmen. Don’t you dare fuck with us, is the message, because we are really crazy!

And witness now, eight years, eight months and four days after the invasion of Afghanistan, the fruits of that other imperial project. Let us ask the same questions. Where is the demilitarization, the pacification, the law and order? Where is the “democracy,” or even any credible claim to central authority?

The cruel peace that the Taliban imposed on Afghanistan (or at least, 90% of it) from 1996, following eighteen years of incessant civil war, was also destroyed by the occupier from late 2001. Disdaining to distinguish the Taliban from al-Qaeda, the U.S.-Coalition forces bombed them both, causing the Talibs on the plea of tribal elders to abandon the cities including their headquarters of Kandahar and fade into the countryside to regroup and fight another day. Al-Qaeda camps were leveled and an unknown quantity of these militants escaped into Pakistan, along with Taliban who quickly organized support in the latter country, which is now—thanks to the U.S. invasion of its neighbor—plagued with its own Taliban spin-offs fighting the Islamabad regime.

At least 20,000 civilians are thought to have died as a result of the ongoing war. But the Taliban has steadily regained strength and is now capable even of bold strikes in Kabul. It has forged alliances with erstwhile foes such as Hezb-e-Islami (headed by former CIA asset Gulbuddin Hekmatyar). Its success has persuaded military intelligence analysts and top generals that the Afghan War can’t be won militarily but there must be a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. (This is not what they were saying in the first years of the hopeless war, but a conclusion they’ve rationally drawn no doubt realizing that for many, many Afghans, the Taliban is far less onerous than the western infidel presence.)

Missile strikes “accidently” wiping out wedding parties. Night time home raids—doors kicked in and all. Drone strikes which, whether or not they hit innocent civilians, terrorize whole regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border causing sleepless nights, heart attacks, miscarriages… This terror-war causes Afghan parliamentarians to walk out and protest every so often. It causes current President Hamid Karzai (if only to affect a strident nationalism and save his own political ass) to periodically lash out at the U.S. The indifference of the foreign troops to Afghans’ lives and perceived insults to Afghan culture have produced the ongoing wave of “green on blue” attacks. In the crucible of war, U.S. trainers and the Afghan soldiers they train—the friendliest forces—have reached a toxic level of mutual contempt.

The U.S.-subsidized Afghan National Army, designed to establish and maintain peace, theoretically has 200,000 men (versus an estimated 25,000 Taliban). It is trained by the most modern army in the world. But its annual desertion rate is around 25%, and in serious encounters with the Taliban it’s had a tendency to crumble leaving most of the fighting to U.S. forces. It’s unlikely that, as the number of these U.S. forces reaches 10,000 or even zero (an unlikely though possible, as occurred in Iraq) and the Afghan army assumes full responsibility to handling the “insurgency,” the fighting will appreciably abate.

And democratization in Afghanistan? From the Loya Jirga farce in 2002, in which the U.S. envoy, Afghan-American State Department mentee of Paul Wolfwitz thrust the CIA asset down the Afghans’ throats, to the last election in 2009 so plainly fixed to favor Karzai that Peter Galbraith, a U.S. diplomat sent by the UN as a special envoy responsible for elections monitoring, was obliged to resign in protest. Elections in Afghanistan have been mere theatrical events, producing media images of inked thumbs and lines of voters, designed to legitimate the occupation.

Isn’t it wonderful, we’re supposed to think—whatever else has gone a little wrong—that the Afghan people can finally enjoy democracy? Soon another CIA asset, the winner in the last rigged balloting, Abdullah Abdullah, will ascend to power (or such power as is allowed him) having assured his sponsors that yes indeed, he will sign the agreement for the maintenance of U.S. military presence beyond this year, as demanded by the Obama administration.

As for women coming out from “behind the burqa” (the traditional Pashtun female outfit) thanks to the liberating progressive introduced by foreign occupiers? This is nowhere in sight. The current leadership shares the extremely conservative patriarchal mindset towards women we see in the Taliban. Many women remain in prison for the crime of deserting their husbands or refusing their parents’ marriage choices. The occasional death penalty decision meted out from the Afghan Supreme Court for such offenses as alleged conversion to Christianity tells us much about progress of “freedom” acquired under U.S. tutelage over the last dozen years.

No. The most creative defense lawyer trying to defend these two occupations—these twin crimes against humanity—will be hard-pressed to do so, or even to defend them as ultimately vindicated by results. The results, it turns out are horrific.

These occupations, conducted in the name of the people of this country, are a national shame. But they were not the decision of the people, however the people may have been misled by warmongers’ disinformation. They resulted from decisions based on geopolitical calculations underlined by an amoral and brainless commitment to U.S. exceptionalism, including the right to slaughter without any international legal consequences.

The consequences are unfortunately not felt at the Hague, in the International Court of Justice that the U.S. refuses to join (on the straightforward grounds that U.S. forces must never be tried by foreigners, possibly falling victim to anti-American sentiment).

The consequences are rather felt in the innumerable ways rage and hatred express themselves, when the most arrogant and vicious attack the most weak and vulnerable. By inflicting such ongoing pain throughout the “Greater Middle East,” those secretly praying for another 9/11 seem hell-bent on provoking one, following their last gangbang in Libya and the abortion of the planned Syria assault last August based (once again) on lies. Their failures never deter them. They know they need never apologize. They are assured of employment as cable news “foreign policy experts,” fawning interviews and sometimes book sales.

These occupations have been failures, even if if judged by the occupiers’ expectations and plans. If judged by common global moral standards, they are world-class atrocities. That they should be followed by an al-Qaeda faction’s conquest of much of Iraq and Syria, and the prospect of a Taliban return to power in Afghanistan, is deeply troubling.

But hardly less so than the prospect of an ongoing U.S. berserker rampage designed to instill fear and obedience in a world less and less inclined to fear, respect or obey the exceptional nation, and the One Percent who drive its global aggression.

GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

[JackRiddler]

(Atlantic cover to J. Goldberg story, Jan 2008.)

That map of war crimes future (2008 thread)
viewtopic.php?t=19073&p=522993


(The Ralph Peters ethnic cleansing map.)

SNIP

The map [published in the Armed Forces Journal] generated sufficient controversy in the Middle East that Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the Saudis to assure them that this was not official US policy.

She talks, but others plan.

My favorite of the Ralph Peters Countries is the generic "Arab Shia State" that happens to incorporate all of the richest oil areas of both Iraq and Iran, and wraps around most of the Gulf Coast, completely surrounding yet bizarrely avoiding the incorporation of Kuwait, the only country left untouched by the plan. The US already owns that piece, of course, and presumably Peters doesn't want to antagonize them.

"Arab Shia State." Do I see an important future ally to the American interest in stability and democracy, blah blah? This Peters -- who I think may qualify under the Nuremberg Principles as a planner of war crimes and genocide just on the basis of proposing this map as the region's better and inevitable future -- he can't even come up with a name for it! That's how much he cares.

The "Clean Break - Securing the Realm" document prepared by Perle and Co. for Netanyahu in 1996.

The PNAC plan for the Middle East, involving all of the key Bush regime figures and top architects of the later Iraq invasion.

Ralph Peters with the above map.

Now Goldberg chimes in, as an "analyst" from the "independent" media.

It's going to happen, and "we" will have nothing to do with it. (Sort of like Yugoslavia?)

They do not keep their idea secret: the ME should be broken up into new, smaller, more manageable states who are at war with each other. The US will attempt to manage this checkerboard, and make sure the units who control the most oil are peaceful and "friendly."

Never mind that this is hubris and it's not going to work. The heart of the matter is that this was always the plan. There may have been a Plan A, to be sure: "they will greet us with flowers," "our grandchildren will sing of our glory."

But failing that, and it has of course failed, here is the Plan B that was on its way all along, from many of the men who made up the original Team B under Bush Sr. at the CIA.

The Iraqi "civil war" is the intended result of US policy in Iraq. It is what Cheney and Rumsfeld expected (surely understanding the greeted-with-flowers scenario as more bullshit to sucker Americans).

The invasion,
the killing of untold thousands by bombing from the air, still ongoing,
the poisoning of the country with depleted uranium,
the destruction of the energy and water infrastructure and cultural treasures,
the torture of civilians and its reception in Iraq, an outrageous affront to their identity and dignity,
the British and presumably American false-flag attacks,
the lies about foreign insurgents and the propaganda construct "Zarqawi",
the likelihood of false-flag attacks on the Iraqi Shia attributed to "Zarqawi" (whether he ever existed or not),
the creation of death-squads in an Interior Ministry known to be infiltrated by Shi'a militias,
the arming of different factions by Saudi and Iranian backers,
the Saddam execution...

all of this was arranged, expected, encouraged, and welcomed by the real US policy.

The idea was always to create a situation in which the Iraqi people kill each other, and then to pretend that "golly gee, we were incompetent and accidentally started a civil war among these crazy ethnic groups we didn't even know existed!"

And as these maps show, it's supposed to go beyond Iraq's borders, break up Turkey and Iran and the rest. A hundred years of war, with 14 gargantuan US bases at its geographic center in Iraq, from which the "forces of order" can intervene and undermine anyone who builds up too much power in any given center.

And the reality: Given this course of murder and hubris, isn't likeliest that within 10 years the US will be driven entirely out of the Middle East, left only with the unsinkable aircraft carrier in Israel?

Oi! I forgot about this one - 2013, a map in NYT shows a prospective "Sunnistan" corresponding exactly to the area of Syria and Iraq now covered by ISIS, as well as the corresponding "Shiitestan," "Alawistan," and Kurdistan, not to mention Saudi and Libya broken up into many small convenient countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013 ... me-14.html

[8bitagent]

Watch as most of Hollywood's "Liberal" Elite boo Michael Moore off the stage in 2003 for having the courage to say that the US was about to make a huge mistake going into Iraq, alluding
to the reasons being fictitious and even Bush's legitimacy being fictitious.

Yeah who is laughing now?



How can people say support the military with a straight face? Even tho it strangely left out Saudi's direct role in 9/11, Fahrenheit 9/11 should have been an eye opener to every human with a brain when it came out.

Also reading Jack's news links about ISIS, reminds me of how the former school of americas trained forces in Mexico formed the Zetas and ended up being the most dominant ruthless terror cartel in Mexico in recent years.

I've long felt maybe the goal in Iraq wasnt simply to invade with oil in mind, but one giant endless sacrificial death pit of chaos.

[82_28]

I wrote this nearly a decade ago and found it when I was trying to find my blog post that resembled Jerky's that he posted in another thread. Now that you bring this up, I had this page still open and was able to easily access. This is from 2004. It was mostly Billmon though that had it in his comments section

What do the terms Khobar and FUBAR have in common? Well, for one, they slightly rhyme.

Billmon's back with a vengeance, finally. And the paranoid chatter on his comments board is also, as always, on full tilt.

Nicholas Berg sure got around. Now it turns out he was filmed as part of an interview for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, but this footage didn't appear in the final movie (he was - forgive me - left on the cutting room floor). How was it that this supposedly unknown freelance radio-tower technician/adventurer found himself being interviewed for a possible part in an important film by the most famous documentary maker in the world? Or, as William Brunch asks: "So, how would a completely unknown young wannabe contractor like Berg come to the attention of Moore, whose anti-President Bush screed 'Dude, Where's My Country?' was the best-selling book in the nation at the time?"

Apparently Moore's people attended a conference on business possibilities in occupied Iraq looking for interviews with those prepared to take advantage of the situation. These are the kind of people that Moore likes to feature in his films as they are apt to say telling things about the real state of the world. This was the same conference where Berg met Aziz al-Taee, his eventual business partner in Iraq. Two possibilities come to mind:


Berg was working for somebody who wanted him to watch a certain kind of person, which would include both Aziz al-Taee and Michael Moore (and Moussaoui's friend). It was widely known that Moore was working on an anti-Bush film, and not surprising that somebody would want to keep an eye on what Moore was doing. Berg's real job may have been to introduce himself to people like Moore to spy on them.

Berg managed to have himself hired as a freelance investigator for Moore, saw something he shouldn't have at Abu Ghraib prison, and was detained and eventually killed because of what he saw.


Berg seemed to live quite a life of adventure with very marginal means of support. You have to wonder whether he had a secret sponsor. His propensity for 'running into' certain people is beginning to look like a pattern.
Posted by: Cloned Poster at May 30, 2004 03:39 AM

My how quickly "tin foil hat" has interjected itself into the English speaking lexicon. But that comment is simply chilling. Brrrrrrr!

Depending on whether Billmon updates with a new post or not today, I predict this one's going to have 700+ cogent comments by this time tomorrow. (Well maybe not that many. But the guy can post something and within an hour or so the post frequently nets a hundred or more extremely interesting, virtually all of them, comments. We'll see.)

That nauseating heaving you feel, is the harbinger of the Earth and it's human civilization violently shifting into something new and relatively unrecognizable as we speak.

As we speak.

I never NEVER understood why Moore got thrown under the bus by just about everyone for Fahrenheit 9/11.

[JackRiddler]

Wow, Chelsea Manning op-ed in NY Times.

The Fog Machine of War
The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom

By CHELSEA MANNINGJUNE 14, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opini ... eedom.html

A supporter of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki protested in Baghdad on March 26, 2010, with a poster depicting inked fingers being hanged and alleging voter fraud in Iraq’s general election. Credit Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — WHEN I chose to disclose classified information in 2010, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. I’m now serving a sentence of 35 years in prison for these unauthorized disclosures. I understand that my actions violated the law.

However, the concerns that motivated me have not been resolved. As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance.

If you were following the news during the March 2010 elections in Iraq, you might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers. The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq.

Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality.

Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed.

Early that year, I received orders to investigate 15 individuals whom the federal police had arrested on suspicion of printing “anti-Iraqi literature.” I learned that these individuals had absolutely no ties to terrorism; they were publishing a scholarly critique of Mr. Maliki’s administration. I forwarded this finding to the officer in command in eastern Baghdad. He responded that he didn’t need this information; instead, I should assist the federal police in locating more “anti-Iraqi” print shops.

I was shocked by our military’s complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media’s radar.

It was not the first (or the last) time I felt compelled to question the way we conducted our mission in Iraq. We intelligence analysts, and the officers to whom we reported, had access to a comprehensive overview of the war that few others had. How could top-level decision makers say that the American public, or even Congress, supported the conflict when they didn’t have half the story?

Among the many daily reports I received via email while working in Iraq in 2009 and 2010 was an internal public affairs briefing that listed recently published news articles about the American mission in Iraq. One of my regular tasks was to provide, for the public affairs summary read by the command in eastern Baghdad, a single-sentence description of each issue covered, complementing our analysis with local intelligence.

The more I made these daily comparisons between the news back in the States and the military and diplomatic reports available to me as an analyst, the more aware I became of the disparity. In contrast to the solid, nuanced briefings we created on the ground, the news available to the public was flooded with foggy speculation and simplifications.

One clue to this disjunction lay in the public affairs reports. Near the top of each briefing was the number of embedded journalists attached to American military units in a combat zone. Throughout my deployment, I never saw that tally go above 12. In other words, in all of Iraq, which contained 31 million people and 117,000 United States troops, no more than a dozen American journalists were covering military operations.

The process of limiting press access to a conflict begins when a reporter applies for embed status. All reporters are carefully vetted by military public affairs officials. This system is far from unbiased. Unsurprisingly, reporters who have established relationships with the military are more likely to be granted access.

Less well known is that journalists whom military contractors rate as likely to produce “favorable” coverage, based on their past reporting, also get preference. This outsourced “favorability” rating assigned to each applicant is used to screen out those judged likely to produce critical coverage.

Reporters who succeeded in obtaining embed status in Iraq were then required to sign a media “ground rules” agreement. Army public affairs officials said this was to protect operational security, but it also allowed them to terminate a reporter’s embed without appeal.

There have been numerous cases of reporters’ having their access terminated following controversial reporting. In 2010, the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings had his access pulled after reporting criticism of the Obama administration by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and his staff in Afghanistan. A Pentagon spokesman said, “Embeds are a privilege, not a right.”

If a reporter’s embed status is terminated, typically she or he is blacklisted. This program of limiting press access was challenged in court in 2013 by a freelance reporter, Wayne Anderson, who claimed to have followed his agreement but to have been terminated after publishing adverse reports about the conflict in Afghanistan. The ruling on his case upheld the military’s position that there was no constitutionally protected right to be an embedded journalist.

The embedded reporter program, which continues in Afghanistan and wherever the United States sends troops, is deeply informed by the military’s experience of how media coverage shifted public opinion during the Vietnam War. The gatekeepers in public affairs have too much power: Reporters naturally fear having their access terminated, so they tend to avoid controversial reporting that could raise red flags.

The existing program forces journalists to compete against one another for “special access” to vital matters of foreign and domestic policy. Too often, this creates reporting that flatters senior decision makers. A result is that the American public’s access to the facts is gutted, which leaves them with no way to evaluate the conduct of American officials.

Journalists have an important role to play in calling for reforms to the embedding system. The favorability of a journalist’s previous reporting should not be a factor. Transparency, guaranteed by a body not under the control of public affairs officials, should govern the credentialing process. An independent board made up of military staff members, veterans, Pentagon civilians and journalists could balance the public’s need for information with the military’s need for operational security.

Reporters should have timely access to information. The military could do far more to enable the rapid declassification of information that does not jeopardize military missions. The military’s Significant Activity Reports, for example, provide quick overviews of events like attacks and casualties. Often classified by default, these could help journalists report the facts accurately.

Opinion polls indicate that Americans’ confidence in their elected representatives is at a record low. Improving media access to this crucial aspect of our national life — where America has committed the men and women of its armed services — would be a powerful step toward re-establishing trust between voters and officials.

Chelsea Manning is a former United States Army intelligence analyst.

[Ben D]

America's Covert Re-Invasion of Iraq



ISIS has convoys of brand new matching Toyota's the same vehicles seen among admittedly NATO-armed terrorists operating everywhere from Libya to Syria, and now Iraq. It is a synthetic, state-sponsored regional mercenary expeditionary force.

[jingofever]

Everybody uses those Toyotas.

[Peachtree Pam]

http://iswiraq.blogspot.com/

This is the link to a serious analysis of the Iraq/Syria situation with technical updates on the fighting and on the positions of all the players involved of which there are many. This link was posted on Zero Hedge. Below is the situation as of today.

[JackRiddler]

The other side: a story not unlike in Syria. A peaceful movement expressing popular demand is attacked militarily by an autocrat. Space opens for extremist militias to lead a violent resistance, and set the agenda. See link to Times story.

Published on Sunday, June 15, 2014 by Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/15

Unthinkable Thoughts in the Debate About ISIS in Iraq
by Ross Caputi

What unites marginalized Sunnis in Iraq and the hardcore ideologues within ISIS is their desperation to be rid of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who has left them with no choice but to operate outside of the political system in order to better their lives. (Photo: EPA) This week Iraq emerged from the recesses of American memory and became a hot topic of conversation. Alarming headlines about ISIS’s “takeover” of Mosul and their march towards Baghdad have elicited a number of reactions: The most conservative call for direct US military action against ISIS to ensure that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki remains stable in Baghdad. The most liberal lament the ongoing violence and divisions in Iraqi society caused by the US occupation; though they make no attempt distinguish between the violence of ISIS and the violence of the Maliki government.

This range of ideas and perspectives is fascinating, and it says much about American war culture, but mostly for the ideas and perspectives that are omitted from this debate. Entirely absent is the perspective of Iraqis and the issues that are important to them: accountability, independence, and resistance. Moreover, the real complexities of this issue have been lost in a number of the Western media’s favorite binaries: terrorism vs. counterterrorism, good vs. evil, and insurgency vs. stability.

If we dare to take Iraqi voices seriously and think outside of the dominant framework presented to us by the mainstream media, a very different picture of the violence in Iraq emerges and a whole new range of options open up for achieving peace and justice.

The Rise of ISIS

One year ago ISIS was concentrated in Syria, with almost no presence in Iraq. During this time, a nonviolent protest movement, which called itself the Iraqi Spring, was in full swing with widespread support in the Sunni provinces and significant support from the Shia provinces as well. This movement set up nonviolent protest camps in many cities throughout Iraq for nearly the entire year of 2013. They articulated a set of demands calling for an end to the marginalization of Sunnis within the new Iraqi democracy, reform of an anti-terrorism law that was being used label political dissent as terrorism, abolition of the death penalty, an end to corruption, and they positioned themselves against federalism and sectarianism too. <

Instead of making concessions to the protestors and defusing their rage, Prime Minister Maliki mocked their demands chose to use military force to attack them on numerous occasions. Over the course of a year, the protestors were assaulted, murdered, and their leaders were assassinated, but they remained true to their adopted tactic of nonviolence. That is, until Prime Minister Maliki sent security forces to clear the protest camps in Fallujah and Ramadi in December of 2013. At that point the protestors lost hope in the tactic of nonviolence and turned to armed resistance instead.

It is important to note that from the beginning it was the tribal militias who took the lead in the fight against the Iraqi government. ISIS arrived a day later to aid Fallujans in their fight, but also to piggy-back on the success of the tribal fighters in order to promote their own political goals.

A command structure was set up in Fallujah within the first weeks of fighting. It consisted primarily of tribal leaders and former army officials and went by the name of the General Military Council for Iraqi Revolutionaries. This council was led by Sheikh Abdullah Janabi, who also led the the Shura Council of Mujihadeen in Fallujah in 2004. After the 2nd US-led assault on Fallujah, Janabi fled to Syria, but returned to Iraq in 2011. His calls for cooperation between the various militant factions in Fallujah was a significant unifying factor.

Yet despite the glaring differences between the various militant groups in Fallujah, the Iraqi government insists on treating all fighters as terrorists. A government official said it clearly to Reuters, “if anyone insists on fighting our forces, he will be considered an [ISIS] militant whether he is or not.” The Iraqi government launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign that to date has killed 443 civilians and has wounded 1657 in Fallujah, and has displaced over 50,922 families from Anbar Province as a whole. The Fallujah hospital has been targeted numerous times, and residential neighborhoods have been bombed and shelled daily for six months. Struan Stevenson, President of European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq, wrote an open letter calling the Iraqi government’s operation “genocidal”.

Over the course of the months of fighting with the government, ISIS has grown in strength. Their access to funds and weapons has made them an attractive group to young Sunnis who see no future for themselves in Iraq as long as Maliki remains in power. Many of the recruits who have joined ISIS are the same men who were nonviolent protestors one year earlier. Many of them remain opposed to the ideas of federalism and sectarians—ideas which are central to ISIS’s political platform. What unites them and the hardcore ideologues within ISIS is their desperation to be rid of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who has left them with no choice but to operate outside of the political system in order to better their lives in Iraq.

Insurgency or Revolution?

This week the media buzzed with the news that ISIS had captured Mosul, the 2nd largest city in Iraq, and was prepared to march towards Baghdad. Two assumptions in these reports went unexamined: that ISIS had been a lone actor and that Mosul had been “captured” rather than liberated.

While the first assumption is a matter of fact, the latter is a matter of perspective. It was noted in the New York Times that ISIS had collaborated with several local militias in Mosul, including Baathist and Islamist groups; although the significance of such a fact went understated. If one further acknowledges that ISIS has cooperated and continues to cooperate with several militias in several Iraqi cities, it begins to appear that ISIS is not a lone actor in Iraq, attempting to capture territory for a future Islamic state. Rather, it appears that ISIS is just one faction in a larger popular rebellion against the government of Nouri al Maliki.

When 500,000 residents of Mosul fled their city earlier this week, they did not do so out of fear that ISIS would subject them to sharia courts. They did so out of fear of their government’s reprisal. Many have even expressed gratitude towards the fighters who kicked Maliki’s security forces out of their city.

Here links to "Iraqis Who Fled Mosul Say They Prefer Militants to Government":

As many as 500,000 Iraqis fled Mosul this week after the city was besieged by the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, many of them Sunnis who seemed less fearful of the beheadings and summary justice that the group is known for than of their own government and the barrage it might unleash in an effort to take the city back.

That many Sunnis would prefer to take their chances under a militant group so violent it was thrown out of Al Qaeda sharply illustrates how difficult it will be for the Iraqi government to reassert control. Any aggressive effort by Baghdad to retake the city could reinforce the Iraqi Army’s reputation as an occupying force, rather than a guarantor of security. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/world ... .html?_r=0)

This loose coalition of militias—from the tribal militias in Fallujah, to Baathist militias like Naqshabandi, and Islamist groups like ISIS—have come to embody the hopes and aspirations of Sunnis in Iraq to one day be free of Maliki’s oppression. For them there is no other option, no other future is imaginable, and there is no turning back.

A Path Forward

President Obama has announced that the US would not intervene in Iraq until the Iraqi government made concessions to the disenfranchised Sunni community within Iraq. However, the US has already increased its “intelligence and surveillance assistance” and has shown no sign of decreasing its supply of arms to the Iraqi government. While publicly criticizing the Maliki government’s sectarian policies, the US has been aiding and facilitating this “genocide” against the Sunni population for months.

The impunity of the Maliki government is never questioned in the debate raging within the US. It is simply unimaginable within the limits of this debate that Maliki might be held accountable for the war crimes his regime has committed against his own people. Equally unimaginable is the notion that his regime should fall and that Iraqis should be able to dismantle the constitution and the institutions that the US-led occupation imposed on them.

We must take seriously the legitimacy of Sunni resistance, while at the same time taking seriously the fear that a group like ISIS elicits in Shia Iraqis. These fractured communities within Iraq must decide their own future, without the interference of Washington or Tehran. Most importantly for us, as Americans, we must make an effort to analyze this issue outside of the paradigm of US political thought and try to see this issue through the eyes of those most affected by it. We must respect their ideas and values, their politics and culture, and their right to determine their own future, unimpeded by foreign interference.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Ross Caputi

Ross Caputi, 29, is a US veteran of the occupation of Iraq. He took part in the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. That experience led him to become an anti-war activist. Today he is on the Board of Directors of ISLAH and he directed and produced the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth.

[JackRiddler]

Speaking of possible psyops, here's a story wherein the incendiary headline (all that 90% will see or remember) is based solely on a Twitter post and directly contradicted by a government source in the second sentence.

Militants Claim Mass Execution of Iraqi Soldiers

By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBINJUNE 15, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world ... /iraq.html


BAGHDAD — Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

As we will see, that should actually read: "Someone..."

boasted on Twitter that they had executed 1,700 Iraqi government soldiers, posting gruesome photos to support their claim.

The authenticity of the photographs and the insurgents’ claim could not be verified, and Iraqi government officials initially cast doubt on whether such a mass execution took place. There were also no reports of large numbers of funerals in the Salahuddin Province area, where the executions were said to have been conducted.

If the claim is true,

Let's spend a few paragraphs pretending that it is. And we're off to the races!

it would be the worst mass atrocity in either Syria or Iraq in recent years, surpassing even the chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian suburbs of Damascus last year, which killed 1,400 people and were attributed to the Syrian government.

The latest attack, if proved, would also raise the specter of the war in Iraq turning genocidal, particularly because the insurgents boasted that their victims were all Shiites. There were also fears that it could usher in a series of reprisal killings of Shiites and Sunnis, like those seen in the Iraq war in 2005-7.

Now let's sneak in what would be an equally big story -- if the claim is false.

The office of the Shiites’ supreme spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Saturday night issued what amounted to a revision of the ayatollah’s call to arms on Friday, apparently out of concern that it was misinterpreted by many as a call for sectarian warfare.

The statement, billed as “clarifying the position on taking up arms,” implored Iraqis, “especially those living in mixed areas, to exert the highest level of self-restraint during this tumultuous period.”

The claim of the mass execution appeared on a Twitter feed previously used for ISIS announcements, so whether or not the executions were genuine, the organization certainly intended to boast of them.

“We’re trying to verify the pics, and I am not convinced they are authentic,” said Erin Evers, the Human Rights Watch researcher in Iraq. “As far as ISIS claiming it has killed 1,700 people and publishing horrific photos to support that claim, it is unfortunately in keeping with their pattern of commission of atrocities, and obviously intended to further fuel sectarian war.”

News was slow to circulate in Iraq, however, since the government last week blocked social network sites, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

An Iraqi military intelligence official confirmed that the military was aware of the reported executions in Salahuddin Province, which includes the key city of Tikrit, but he did not know how many there were. He spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with his agency’s rules.

Col. Suhail al-Samaraie, head of the Awakening Council in Samarra, a pro-government Sunni grouping, also confirmed that officials in Salahuddin were aware of large-scale executions having taken place last week, but he did not know how many. “They are targeting anyone working with the government side, anyplace, anywhere,” he said. He said the insurgents were targeting anyone with a government affiliation, whether Sunni or Shiite.

One of those executed by the insurgents was a police colonel named Ibrahim al-Jabouri, a Sunni official in charge of the criminal investigation division in Tikrit, according to Mr. Samaraie.

A local journalist familiar with the Iraqi military in Salahuddin Province said the Fourth Iraqi Army Division had collapsed as the insurgents advanced last week, and 4,000 soldiers were believed to have been captured. Local reports said many of the victims were Sunnis as well as Shiites, he added.

A New York Times employee in Tikrit said by telephone that residents spoke of seeing hundreds of prisoners captured when they tried to flee Camp Speicher, a former American military base and airfield on the edge of Tikrit that was turned into an Iraqi training center. Those who were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were taken to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in Tikrit, where they were said to be executed, their bodies dumped in the Tigris River, which runs by the palace compound.

The ISIS photographs appeared to have been taken at that location. However, the Times employee said he had not spoken to any witnesses who claimed to have seen the executions or bodies.

Graphic
In Iraq Crisis, a Tangle of Alliances and Enmities
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014 ... pe=nyt_now
The major players in the Iraq and Syria crisis are often both allies and antagonists, working together on one front on one day and at cross-purposes the next.
OPEN Graphic

The still photographs uploaded on the ISIS Twitter feed were bloody and gruesome, showing the insurgents, many wearing black masks, lining up at the edges of what looked like hastily dug mass graves and apparently firing their weapons into groups of young men who were bound and packed closely together in large groups.

The photographs showed at least five massacre sites, with the victims lying in shallow mass graves with their hands tied behind their backs. The number of victims that could be seen in any of the pictures numbered between 20 and 60 in each of the sites, although it was not clear whether the photographs showed the entire graves. Some appeared to be long ditches.

The photographs showed the executioners flying the ISIS black flag, with captions such as “the filthy Shiites are killed in the hundreds,” “The liquidation of the Shiites who ran away from their military bases,” and “This is the destiny of Maliki’s Shiites,” referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Many of the captions were viciously mocking toward the purported victims. In one photograph, showing 25 young men walking toward an apparent execution site, where armed, masked men awaited, the caption read, “Look at them walking to death on their own feet.”

And another showed a couple hundred prisoners, all of whom had been made to stand, bent over from the waist with their hands clasped behind their backs, as armed men guarded them. All were in civilian clothes, and the caption claimed they had jettisoned their uniforms. “They were lions in uniform, and now they are just ostriches,” it read.

Other photographs showed prisoners, mostly young men, stuffed in large numbers in dump trucks and pickup trucks. They appeared extremely frightened.

A senior Iraqi government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make press statements, said news of the executions was slow to circulate because Twitter had been blocked. “I don’t doubt they are real, but 1,700 is a big number,” he said. “We are trying to control the reaction. They are trying to bring back the 2005 to 2006 days.” Sunni and Shiite militias engaged in a wave of tit-for-tat killings of civilians during that period, killing tens of thousands.

Ayatollah Sistani’s statement late Saturday came only one day after his office had said it was the duty of every Iraqi to take up arms to support the government, which greatly accelerated the formation of volunteer groups, supplementing Shiite militias and planning to support the Iraqi Army.

Adamant that his words on Friday not be taken as a starting bell for a repeat of that period of bloody sectarian fighting or potentially something even more brutal, Ayatollah Sistani used plain language to make clear that he was opposed to and would condemn any sectarian behavior.

All citizens need “to steer clear from sectarian and untamed nationalistic discourse that is of detriment to Iraq’s national unity,” he said.

Both the Iraqi military and the informal Shiite militias already appear to have embraced each other, and in at least some cases, militia commanders are already working inside Iraqi Army bases, blurring the line between the government troops and informal squads of gunmen — some of whom may wear government uniforms but are not army soldiers.

Such groupings in 2005 to 2007 were responsible for much of the sectarian bloodletting, when as many as 1,000 civilians were being killed every week.


An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Tikrit, Iraq, and Tim Arango from Erbil, Iraq.

[8bitagent]

1. 82_28: Interesting read! You wrote that in 2004? I do recall them editing out Berg's spotlight in the wake of his execution. His whole story is so puzzling and Im surprised a documentary hasn't been made.
Especially how both his files and software belonging to the Paul Wellstone crash copilot were found on 9/11 suspect Zacharious Moussoui's laptop. Apparently both Berg and the Wellstone pilot had been in contact
with Moussoui, who was also living with WTC 1993/OKC bombing/911 connected Melvin Lattimore.

2. Jack: I've been reading articles in the mainstream attempting to figure out why Washington would focus all their energy into propping up an Iranian stooge. Remember the reports of CIA backed Jundullah terror atacks in Iran back in 2007, or Israeli backed MEK terrorism and assassinations in Iran...yet both Bush and Obama administrations have exhaustively and carefully put all their energy into Maliki, a man 100% bought and supported by Iran and Syria.
A guy they knew would purge and alienate Sunnis. Even using brutal paramilitary tactics against opponents. Before this we had the not so secret backing of both sides of the Sunni-Shiite civil war, and before that the purging of all Baathists and dismantling of the Iraqi army...not to mention the stand down of security and allowing of the the whole country being ransacked: including ancient priceless Babylonian, Sumerian and antiquated and ancient Iraq artifacts.

With the neocons, defense companies, oil, and Saudi Arabia doing everything in their power to lie their way into Iraq...why this almost seemingly intentional blunder? It seems like every measure was not a "cock up", but in hindsight almost intimately orchestrated to go south fast. More diabolical than Mr Mcgoo. But with what end? So bizarre to me.

And now the US backed Iraq now allowing Iran in to try and ward off this ISIS "super al Qaeda".

[JackRiddler]

8bit, since you're asking me, if you review this thread, you'd guess my answer. The endeavor was always mad, run by people who never had rational long-term imperial interest but their own gains and a completely mad geostrategy in mind, backed by the charming Ledeenesque philosophy that real superpowers are not pussies, they gamble with armageddon and play mad-dog. The main instigators still don't think they did anything wrong -- look at them, calling for U.S. military intervention NOW, including Blair.

Anyway, much as the neocons might have desired the world-ending fun of hitting Iran, the initial destruction in Iraq was followed by the inevitable uprising against the invaders, so the situation was always going to require a Plan B. Given Iraqi history, Sunnis will of course rise up first, but Shi'a are the majority. USG would either turn the Shi'a against the Sunnis, or lose. At one point in early 2004 you had Moqtada leading his own insurgency against the occupation! The Americans had to pacify the Shi'a power elites, find the worst of them, put them in charge, arm them, let them run ethnic cleansing and plunder the Sunnis -- or they would have lost. Literally, I mean: they would have been defeated militarily. At the same time, USG facilitated the creation of a mad-dog Sunni "AQI" as the necessary sectarian enemy, and this eventually became ISIS. So USG ended up in a de facto alliance with Iran, which received confirmation in late 2007 when the Pentagon itself put the kibosh on further neocon plans to hit Iran. And the same basic power constellation obtains now.

So USG (neocon) elements probably helped build ISIS in the first place but for the USG realist wing, the only option for an open alliance is with Maliki, while pretending this does not also mean an alliance with Iran. I think USG will pretend less and less. It's the one area where you can see a difference between Obama and the hardcore neocons, who still want eventually to hit Iran.

Not that I support any of them: U.S. out, period.

[Ben D]

And now the US backed Iraq now allowing Iran in to try and ward off this ISIS "super al Qaeda".

The Great Game of geopolitics is analogous to a chess game....some moves are mere feints...some are not...some moves are made involving a strategy that matures many moves ahead....some are defensive...etc.,....I have a feeling this situation unfolding in Iraq is more complex than it appears. Saudi and Qatar have been funding ISIS for yonks with US knowledge...it seems implausible that this sudden coordinated mass desertion from the Iraqi army of Sunni senior officers and men in Mosul, and probably other northern Sunni cities, to join ISIS was not known in advance by Saudi, Qatari, CIA, etc., intelligence services.

Speaking from the Kurdish city of Erbil, the defectors accused their officers of cowardice and betrayal, saying generals in Mosul “handed over” the city over to Sunni insurgents, with whom they shared sectarian and historical ties.

With Sunni insurgents now threatening the capital Baghdad the eyewitness accounts from the deserters’ reveal how sectarian enmity has, in the space of mere weeks, destroyed the Iraqi national army, which the US government spent billions of dollars to build.

Therefore, imho, whatever the talking heads are telling us is happening...behind the scenes, the US is playing a double game.

[8bitagent]

Thanks for the insight Jack and Ben D.

The Iran as a new ally angle is bizarre but not surprising...

The Obama administration is exploring possible direct talks with Iran over the deteriorating situation in Iraq, two senior U.S. officials tell CNN.

Both officials ruled out any type of teaming up with Iran because the United States and Iran don't have a lot of common interests -- other than a stable Iraq.

The United States is wary of furthering Iran's already considerable influence in Iraq. The Shiite Iranian regime is al-Malaki's closest ally in the region. Additionally the administration is concerned appearing to team up with Iran would both alienate Iraq's Sunni majority and worry Sunni allies of the United States in the region.

The State Department statement said the United States "will do its part to help Iraq move beyond this crisis," and a senior State Department officer told CNN that Kerry spoke to his counterparts from Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to discuss the threat posed by ISIS.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/15/world/mea ... ?hpt=hp_t1

RE: What Jack said in the origins of ISIS, it's interesting how just last year they and other linked groups were openly being financed to help take down Assad in Syria. I recall the US claiming it was "not directly" sending weapons to rebel groups but that Saudi, Qatar, etc were arming/financing these groups. Do they want us to believe Saudi, Qatar, etc stopped financing now that this predictable "blowback" is occurring?
This new narrative of "the group that scares al Qaeda" and is "rapidly set to take over all of Iraq and large parts of Syria to create the caliphate pipedream" is a narrative I see as playing to several groups:

1. To the liberals and anti war people who wanted the US to withdraw from Iraq. "See, this is what happens!"
2. To the al Qaeda/Sharia law obsessed conservatives(pre about face Little Green Football blog audience) and "security analysts/counter terror" talking heads.
The idea of you thought al Qaeda was bad, well here's the mutant godzilla that swallows al Qaeda!
3. Playing to the old school neocons who salivate at the thought of more more, more conflict. The Iraq war reunion!
4. The angle of "look at Obama meeting with Iran, we knew he couldn't be trusted"

There's still the neocons who dream of attacking Iran...but the game and angles always seem to change.

As well, playing to this weird new chessboard....last week they were enemies, now the US and Iran must team up to face..ISIS! *cue Inception trailer score and summer blockbuster effects*