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Ref. : Local Newsbriefs
Ref. : Letters to the editor
06.24 Mr. Holder, You Must Hold Torturers Accountable
06.29 Thinking about Climate
06.26 False Health-Scare Ad on CNN
06.25 Louella Learns the Limits of Medicare
06.23 The Simple Answer to America’s Health Care Crisis: Medicare for All
06.23 Tell ABC: Include Single-Payer in Healthcare Debate
06.23 Serving the Medical-Industrial Complex
06.22 Thinking about Recoveries
06.20 Obama's Health Care Waterloo
06.15 Obama, Like Clinton Before Him, is Blowing the Chance for Real Health Care Reform
06.11 Two Key Health-Care Numbers
06.10 Big Breakthroughs for Single Payer Health Care
06.10 Readying Americans for Dangerous, Mandatory Vaccinations
06.29 WP's Connolly Back, on Health Reform
06.17 Hypocrisy and Hope: Western Coverage, Iranian Courage
06.15 Excusing Outrages of the Right
06.11 Tying Obama to Bush's Budget Mess
06.30 Obama's Torture Hypocrisy
06.30 Court Circular: Annals of Imperial Continuity
06.29 Obama, They Want You to Fail
06.26 Who to Trust on a Truth Commission?
06.26 Tarnished Shields: The Morally Bankrupt 'Family Values' Republican Leadership
06.25 America's "Bases of Empire"
06.24 Twelve Angry White People: Jury Nullification in a Pennsylvania Coal Town
06.24 Touring Empire's Ruins
06.23 Employers are Undermining the Economic Stimulus Program
06.19 Criminalizing Dissent: Obama Pot Calls Iranian Kettle Black
06.17 Afghanistan's Operation Phoenix
06.16 Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?
06.13 Where's the Anger as the Wheels Come Off Obama's and the Democrats' Recovery Program?
06.10 Waiving the Rules for Old Glory
06.10 Obama's Era of Openness Is Closed
07.03 Reviewing Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd's "Rules of Disengagement"
07.01 Iraq: A Bitter Strategic Failure
06.25 It's All Good, Again: 'Uptick' in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq
06.22 Obama Opposes Plame-gate Release
06.21 Dexter's Legions: The "Good" Killers of the "Good" War
06.18 Extending the Tradition: Proudly Taking American Torture Into the Future
06.15 New UN Report Denounces America's Human Rights Record
06.14 Fear Rules
07.01 Michael Hudson's "Super Imperialism:" The Economic Strategy of Imperial America
06.23 Obama's Financial Reform Proposal - A Stealth Scheme for Global Monetary Control
06.10 Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney
07.01 Pirates of the Mediterranean
06.29 Color Revolutions, Old and New
06.25 Iran Divided & the 'October Suprise'
06.23 Astringent Corrective: AbuKhalil on Iran's Turmoil
06.20 Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated “Color Revolution?”
06.20 Through a Glass Darkly: Sifting Myth and Fact on Iran
06.19 Iran's Election and US - Iranian Elections
06.16 The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters
06.12 Israeli War Crimes Against Children During Operation Cast Lead
COMMENTARY:
Bipartisan Paradise: Liberals, Bush Unite in Ethnic Cleansing of Iraq
The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves...The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.
This serves two main purposes: first, as noted above, it will help shake the country out, eventually, into more manageable enclaves -- each one stronger and more cohesive than the current government (which is largely a fictional notion at this point), yet weaker, and more malleable, than any stable and legitimate central government would be. And since the only kind of central government that could achieve stability and legitimacy in the eyes of all Iraqis would be one which was genuinely sovereign, truly independent from American domination, we will never see such a government in Baghdad as long as U.S. troops are in Iraq.
Which brings us to the second purpose of the "surge's" arming of sectarian gangs: to maintain a level of violence and chaos that would "justify" the continuing presence of American troops in Iraq. A permanent military presence is one of the overriding goals of the invasion, set down long before the war, before 9/11, even before the loser Bush was given the presidency by five Supreme Court justices (two of whom had family members working for the Bush operation). Therefore, to the Bushists, any measure is justified that will keep American troops in Iraq -- including fomenting bloody sectarian conflict and carrying out ethnic cleansing.
This in turn is tied to another of the chief war aims: the "oil law" that will open Iraq's sumptuous resources to predatory Western investors. This can only be can only be guaranteed by the presence of American troops, backing up some compliant puppet state or "semi-autonomous enclave." Again, a genuinely sovereign, truly independent government would never give away the nation's patrimony to Bush and Cheney's oil baron cronies and their European comrades.
And so the strategy behind the "surge" becomes clear: A united, independent Iraq cannot be allowed to exist, because such a state would not permit a permanent American military presence nor sign away the nation's oil wealth. Therefore, Iraq must be torn apart -- by sectarian strife, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and "counterinsurgency" warfare. And violence must continue until this shake-out is completed, in order to justify the continuing American presence.
While Bush pursues ethnic cleansing by stealth in Iraq -- or rather, pursues it quite openly, but just doesn't call it ethnic cleansing -- the Democrats and their outriders, the "liberal hawks" (or "humanitarian interventionists" or "Wilsonian idealists" or whatever tag they're wearing these days) are championing the policy in the public sphere. The idea of a three-way split of Iraq between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds has long been mooted in some quarters -- Joe Biden and "liberal" intellectuals like Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith were early enthusiasts -- and it is now gaining force within the foreign policy "clerisy" that Glenn Greenwald and Arthur Silber have been dissecting in recent days. Firedoglake points us to the incisive commentaries of Reidar Visser, "an actual expert on the regional aspects of Iraq and its history," who has lately been debunking the deeply ignorant and murderously arrogant "partition" proposals of Galbraith and others.
Visser takes aim at one of the most hideous of these proposals: "The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq," by respected "scholars" Michael O'Hanlon (see A Tiny Revolution for more on this fine mind of our time) and Edward Joseph. When I first read of these gentlemen's work, I thought it must surely be a parody, a take-off on the deadly serious, genocidal fantasies of Philip Atkinson, who, on a website hardwired to the rightwing power grid of Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey and Dick Cheney, called for Bush to nuke Iraq, repopulate it with Americans and declare himself President-for-Life. The O-Hanlon-Joseph piece for the highly respectable Brookings Institution partakes of that same kind of murderous fantasy. As Visser notes:
...using cool academic language, the authors review the nuts and bolts of relocating somewhere between 2 and 5 million Iraqis in order to create new ethnic federal entities. Snippets from this part of the report probably speak best for themselves: “we advocate where possible dividing major cities along natural boundaries” (p. 16); “on the actual day of the relocation operation, Iraqi and US-led coalition forces would deploy in sufficient numbers to look for snipers, cover the flanks of the civilian convoys, inspect suspicious vehicles for explosives and conduct similar tasks” (p. 17); and finally, on p. 24, “this [internal border] control system would place some burdens on Iraq’s internal trade and other aspects of its economy. It would complicate the efforts of individuals to cross from one region to another to visit family and friends. For the most part these burdens would be bearable. For individuals or businesses that need to make frequent crossings across Iraq’s new internal borders, or those willing to pay for the privilege, an EZ pass system [sic] might be developed to expedite movements for those with important and regular business to conduct.”"On the actual day of the relocation operation...." Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by "Iraqi and US-led coalition forces." Actually it's not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah," and "Schindler's List." Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the "relocations" of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the "Trail of Tears," the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.
These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O'Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: "For the most part these burdens would be bearable."
I have a suggestion for Mr. O'Hanlon. I propose that he subject himself to such a regimen, then come back and tell just us how "bearable" it is. He doesn't even have to move five million Iraqis under armed guard to participate in this experiment: he can go to Palestine right now, where the people already live under his kind of "soft partition." Let him try it on for himself, just for a few months -- not the lifelong sentence he proposes for the Iraqis. We can even give him an "EZ Pass" to expedite any "important business" he needs to do.
This is what we've come to -- or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing -- and in Bush's case, inflicting -- vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them. And all of this done for no other reason but to enhance the coddled elite's power, privilege and pleasures.
Chris Floyd is an American journalist and the Editor and co-founder of the Atlantic Free Press. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation, CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.This column originally appeared on Chris Floyd's site, and is republished here with the permission of the author.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on August 24, 2007.
