Another Killing Spree in Mesopotamia: “Pacifying” Mosul

by Felicity Arbuthnot

Global Research, February 13, 2008

".....In the Orwellian world of the United States military, when a killing spree in Mesopotamia is embarked upon, it is called an “Iraq Pacification Operation'”. There have been hundreds of these (I abandoned counting at three hundred and eighty, with numerous more to go.).....

Having “pacified” Iraqis in to the grave, from Abu Ghraib to Falluja, from Ramadi to Tel Afar, with numerous other murderous stop offs across the land of Abraham, the crusading Christian soldiers are moving onwards to "cleanse" Mosul. That it was the puppet “Prime Minister”, Nuri Al Maliki who used the expression is as inconsequential as he is - his orders come from the pacifiers and their masters in Washington.

In words and deeds, happenings in Iraq are chillingly redolent of Nazi Germany. Neighborhoods walled in and “cleansed” of Sunnis, others of Shias, Christians and Iraq's richness of minorities ... people who have lived together and inter-married since time immemorial. The distinctions were imposed with the incoming tanks and troops - divide and rule writ large. In Falluja, Goebbel's ghost walks tall. The residents even have their own identifying arm patch to prove it. And it has certainly been cleansed, in uncountable thousands - exactly how many unknown, since in the words of General Tommy Franks it is not “productive” to count Iraqi deaths.

So how is Mosul to be purified? The most ethnically diverse city in Iraq, consisting of Arabs, Syriacs, Kurds, Armenians, Turcomans, Jews, Christians, Yazedi's, Muslims and a trading centre since the sixth century BC. Who will draw the short straw? Their slaughter justified in a search, of course, for “Al Qaeda” with the innocents “a mistake”, “regrettable” or “collateral damage”. Americas military planners have become the modern day equivalent of the child who repeatedly cried “wolf', they continually justify massacre by crying “Al Qaeda. In 1935, Major General Smedley Butler, referred to the '”racketeering” of the “military gang”. He described his military career as a: “... muscle man for big business, Wall Street and the bankers”. In Mosul's case, surrounded by and floating on oil, the “muscle” is for Chevron, Shell, Exxon Mobile..."