*Kurt Nimmo: Democrats want more troops for Iraq

First: I suppose we'll find out soon enough what's behind Rep Silvestre Reyes' call for MORE troops to go to Iraq. Is he simply taking marching orders from the Lobby and Nancy Pelosi? Did he take a stupid pill? It's like people marching backward off a cliff. Well (they might be thinking), I know that this isn't going to be good for me, but...

We know that Bush could care less, but what can be motivating the Democrats? It's not a secret that they came into power because the Iraq situation has gone way beyond spin. So what are they expecting the public to say in a few months if not much earlier? You'd think they were in on Bush's plan (hope?) to distract them with a new war against Iran. Bush/Rove may suspect that hitting the public in the head with a hammer so they'll forget their sore toe will once again do the job!

Second, Nimmo does an important job in citing Stephen There's No Such Thing as the Lobby Zunes (of all people) who points out that the purpose of the Iraq war was to destroy Iraq by splitting it into its ethnic sects so as to create chaos and instability in the Middle East and to make it impossible for a unified Iraq to stand up to Israel's relentless pursuit of Middle East dominance. (Zunes leaves out the purpose of the policy.)

Third: Nimmo points to A.K. Gupta's very important article for Z Magazine and emphasizes that it's the US military who is behind the death squads and the sectarian violence. The US has funded the death squads, trained them, ordered them on both sides to create a civil war. Nor is this a secret --although it's not mentioned in polite company. So what do Reyes and McCain expect to happen when 30,000 or 90,000 troops get to Iraq (no matter that such numbers are apparently not available)?

I can't resist mentioning Maureen Dowd's December 6 column, "Goodness Gracious! The Truth," where she writes that the Bush administration has gone from "democracy promotion to conflagration avoidance."

No Maureen, they're not putting out the fires, they're making sure the fires last for as long as their power and our political system will tolerate -- just as, Nimmo points out, Nixon did in Vietnam. He made it last as long as he could.

The disheartening thing is either that Dowd refuses to acknowledge this truth or is not allowed to by virtue of her real estate at the NYT. So once again, the best lack the ability to point to reality, the same charge we've been laying at Bush's doorstep.

Late word. As of 12.7.06, Democracy Now hasn't gotten to the point of acknowledging US responsibility, training and financing the Iraqi death squads of any and all sects. Clearly DN is going to lead on this issue so hopefully someone over there will begin the research.

Ronald
http://desip.igc.org
***


Kurt Nimmo wrote:
Democrat Calls for 30,000 More Troops to be Sent into the Iraqi Meat Grinder
Wednesday December 06th 2006,
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=689

As the so-called Iraq Study Group “recommendations” hit the street, dubiously entitled “The Way Forward: A New Approach,” Texan Democrat, soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, has called for sending more “dumb, stupid animals,” as Henry Kissinger once fondly called our soldiers, into the Iraqi meat grinder.

Reyes “wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops,” according to Newsweek. “We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq … We certainly can’t leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan,” apparently a reference to the presence of “al-Qaeda” and the Taliban, both created by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI.

As the corporate media suffers from acute amnesia, we hear nada about the established fact the Pentagon organized and unleashed many of the militias currently running amok in Iraq.

“Not only are many of these shadowy militias linked to Iraqi politicians, but the Pentagon is arming, training, and funding them for use in counter-insurgency operations,” writes A.K. Gupta. “What you’re seeing is, I think, really the fruition of U.S. strategy in Iraq,” Gupta told Democracy Now last December. The United States “set up these militias. They funded them. They armed them. They trained them. And a lot of this came out in the Pentagon’s own reports, Pentagon’s generals talking about how great they were over a year ago, how they really took the fight to the resistance. And so, what’s been going on is that the U.S. has set these up.”

And what is the “U.S. strategy in Iraq”? To foment as much sectarian strife, chaos, murder, and social collapse as possible. In the meantime, the Bush neocons have lambasted the “embattled prime minister,” i.e., puppet and fall guy, Nuri al-Maliki for not “disarming the militias, halting sectarian violence, and shouldering more responsibility for the country’s security,” according to the Guardian last October.

“One of the long-standing goals of such neoconservative intellectuals has been to see the Middle East broken up into smaller ethnic or sectarian mini-states, which would include not only large stateless nationalities like the Kurds, but Maronite Christians, Druze, Arab Shi’ites, and others,” writes Stephen Zunes. “Such a policy comes not out of respect for the right of self-determination—indeed, the neocons have been steadfast opponents of the Palestinians’ desire for statehood, even alongside a secure Israel—but out of an imperial quest for divide-and-rule. The division of the Middle East has long been seen as a means of countering the threat of pan-Arab nationalism and, more recently, pan-Islamist movements. Given the mosaic of ethnicities and sects in the Middle East, with various groupings having mixed together within both urban and rural settings for many generations, the establishment of such ethnic or sectarian mini-states would almost certainly result in forced population transfers, ethnic cleansing, and other human suffering.”

“At the outset of the Occupation, it was clear that the U.S. would rule Iraq by breaking the country into mini states or regions and dividing the Iraqi population on ethnic and sectarian lines,” Ghali Hassan wrote in February. “The Occupation-orchestrated violence between Iraqis was meant to provide a pretext for the long-term occupation of Iraq, and direct Iraqis anger away from the brutality and violence of the Occupation.”

To cement these divisions within Iraqi society, the U.S. and its allies staged illegitimate and fraudulent elections. The latter were designed to establish sectarianism—not ‘democracy’—as well as legitimize the Occupation. Iraqis were promoted and encouraged to vote based on their religious and ethnic affiliations. Both the electoral system and the methods of voter mobilization applied by major players were meant to fan the flames of sectarianism rather than contribute to national unity and liberation. There were no candidates or political parties with political ideologies, just religious and ethnic slates. In addition, the U.S.-drafted Constitution was there to cement and legitimize these various divisions.

Few seem to remember the “Salvador Option,” actually proposed by the Pentagon last year. “Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen,” Michael Hirsh and John Barry wrote for Newsweek. Or does the corporate media care to recall the fact two Brits, members of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, were caught disguised as Arabs with a car full of weapons and explosives (see my British “Pseudo-Gang” Terrorists Exposed in Basra).

For regular readers of this blog, all of this comes as no surprise. It is part and parcel of the ongoing plan, forged decades ago by the Israelis and later adopted by the Israel First neocons, to fragment the Arab and Muslim Middle East into a mosaic of weak and politically and ethnically divided Bantustans. According to the Israeli strategist Oded Yinon, after the Arabs are splintered “into ethnically or religiously unique areas,” there will need be “garrisons” established to “prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together,” as Zbigniew Brzezinski would have it.

Initially, the Israelis figured they’d be the ones to set-up and man these garrisons, but as their recent experience in Lebanon demonstrated, they are not up to the task. Instead, thanks to the handiwork of the neocons, these garrisons, now known as “enduring camps” in Pentagon parlance, are scattered around Iraq with a massive, billion dollar plus “embassy” in Baghdad that will ultimately coordinate operations across “Haddadland,” as the Israelis called southern Lebanon under their brutal occupation, that is before Hezbollah kicked them out.

Thus more troops are required, as Rep. Silvestre Reyes demands, regardless of the conclusions of the Iraq Study Group.

In the months ahead, we should expect the Democrats to follow the script, as authored by the neocons and the Israelis, albeit with possible management style tweaking. More troops will be sent to Iraq and vague assurances of “withdrawal,” probably with “honor,” as Nixon claimed during a previous war.

In fact, Nixon is the template here, as he promised peace with honor in 1968, although he never offered to end the war in Vietnam, prompting Democrat nominee Hubert H. Humphrey to allege that he must have had some “secret plan.” It took seven agonizing years from Nixon’s promise to Operation Frequent Wind, when evacuees scrambled to Air America (CIA) helicopters for a mad dash out of the country.