Ten years ago, more or less to the day, I wrote the following on the then Signs of the Times page:
Ten years ago today, the US and British military (with a posse of cowed ‘allies’ in tow) launched ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ aka ‘Shock and Awe’ aka, ‘Operation Destroy the Critical Infrastructure of Iraq and Initiate an Overt Decade-long Attack on – and Occupation of – the Iraqi People.’ To date, at least 1.5 million Iraqi civilians have been murdered, and at least 5 million displaced from their homes as a direct result of ‘liberation’. This on top ofmillions killed and impoverished by US-led economic sanctions in the preceding decade. Deadly car bombings continue to this day. Suffice to say, Iraq was not liberated: it was destroyed, and destroyed deliberately.
Last week, the UK Guardian newspaper published the results of a 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. Euphemistically titled ‘James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq‘, the video report presents fairly damning evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, the US Govt. and military began to assemble a 10,000 strong ‘Shia militia’ that, under US command, would be used to do three things:
- Kidnap, torture, murder and maim members of the Iraq resistance and those members of the Iraqi population that supported them.
- Plants bombs that targeted predominantly Sunni and Shia areas in an effort to divide the population and thereby any unified resistance to the US occupation.
- Create the impression of a ‘civil war’ in Iraq that could be used by the US and European governments and militaries to justify the continued occupation of Iraq for ‘peace-keeping’ purposes.
While the 50 minute documentary is proof enough that Rumsfeld, Cheney, General Petraeus, and all the other NeoCon warhawks and CIA monsters consciously employed the services of former US Army Colonel James Steele in the organisation of death squads against the Iraqi grass-roots resistance (a tactic that he, Steele, had used against resistance movements in South America in the 1970s and 90′s), it panders to the official narrative that ‘sectarianism’ in Iraq was the root cause of the carnage that unfolded.
The so-called ‘Shia militia’ used by the American government (with the help and advice of British and Israeli counter-insurgency ‘experts’) were recruited directly by the CIA and people like James Steele to carry out extra-judicial murders of anyone they could loosely identify as ‘resistance’. In order to cloak this strategy, indiscriminate attacks on Iraqi civilians, Shia and Sunni alike, were carried out on a massive scale. Some of these individuals, in another setting, would be called ‘al-Qaeda’. Their usefulness in the employ of US warhawks in the Pentagon was doubly valuable because they both justified continued US occupation andprovided ‘proof’ for the American War on Terror mythology, ex post facto, that the US was at war with the perpetrators of 9/11.
Whereas before the invasion in 2003 there was absolutely nothing to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the creation of death squads (real) labelled ‘al Qaeda in Iraq’ (fictitious) ‘made real’ the lie that America and all Western civilization was at war against hordes of irrational and violent Muslims, and became the template for instigating terrorism to suppress popular uprisings in Yemen, Mali and elsewhere. Once they have people violent, they can wear down and manage the national popular resistance, ensuring no opposition to the real strategic objectives (namely the control of Middle Eastern oil). The US forces of occupation, along with their British counterparts, had long experience in what actually happens when you militarily invade and occupy a sovereign nation: the people resist, and not just one ethnic or religious group, but more or less the whole population. There is nothing quite like a foreign occupation for uniting a country.
The British pursued this policy in Northern Ireland. First they sought the ‘Criminalisation’ of the conflict (presenting all resistance as ‘terrorists’) and then the ‘Ulsterisation’ of the conflict, which sought to create the impression among the wider British and world public that the struggle in Northern Ireland was an internal ‘sectarian conflict’, with the British playing the role of the frustrated ‘peace-keepers’. Both strategies were outlined in an unpublished 1975 British strategy paper titled ‘The Way Ahead‘. As part of the effort to create the reality of a ‘civil war’, death squads were used to attack civilians from both communities (Catholic and Protestant).
In Iraq, these US-controlled ‘Shia’ death squads have been operating in much the same way, and while the media is content to portray them as ordinary Shias motivated by religious bias, they are in fact hired thugs who value only the money they are paid by their US masters and the promise of positions of power in a future Iraqi government. Like the rank and file of the ‘Libyan rebels’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’, these people form the dregs of Arab and Middle Eastern societies. Led by spellbinders who veil their barbaric actions with religious prose, secular leaders in the region, like Ghaddafi and Assad, and Nasser and Arafat before them, struggled in vain to keep them at bay. The reason for this is because the US, Britain, France and Israel have consistently supported – in the form of weapons, money, training and blatant lies – the extremists against the rational voices.
Throughout the US occupation of Iraq, the main representative of Shias in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr, has repeatedly called for unity among Shia and Sunni Iraqis in the face of foreign occupation and deception in the form of efforts to divide the resistance. These efforts included the bombing of bridges in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in an effort to prevent communication between Iraqis, the use of widespread terror tactics to force Sunni and Shia Iraqis to flee their homes, and the bombing of religious shrines, either Shia or Sunni, in an effort to create the reality of ‘sectarian strife’.
Iraq today is in ruins. The country has been ripped apart socially, mainly by way of the literal ripping apart of tens of thousands of civilians, with many being first brutally and systematically tortured by US-sponsored death squads. Hundreds of thousands more have been summarily murdered, either by the bombs of US aircraft, the bullets of US soldiers, or those ubiquitous and very effective ‘car bombs‘ planted by US and British operatives and their hired thugs.
‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ brought death and destruction to an entire country of 26 million people. It is among the world’s worst crimes against humanity and it was deliberately and meticulously planned that way.
Joe Quinn is the co-author of 9/11: The Ultimate Truth (with Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 2006) and Manufactured Terror: The Boston Marathon Bombings, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting and Other False Flag Terror Attacks (with Niall Bradley, 2014), and the host of Sott.net’s The Sott Report Videos and co-host of the ‘Behind the Headlines’ radio show on the Sott Talk Radio network.
An established web-based essayist and print author, Quinn has been writing incisive editorials for Sott.net for over 10 years. His articles have appeared on many alternative news sites and he has been interviewed on several internet radio shows and has also appeared on Iranian Press TV. His articles can also be found on his personal blog JoeQuinn.net.
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