The US and
Britain not only bathed Iraq in blood, they promoted a sectarian war that now
threatens the region
If anyone doubted what
kind of Iraq has been bequeathed by a decade of US-sponsored occupation and war,
today's deadly
sectarian bomb attacks around Baghdad against bus queues and markets should
have set them straight. Ten years to the day after American and British troops
launched an unprovoked attack on a false pretext – and more than a year since
the last combat troops were withdrawn – the conflict they unleashed shows no
sign of winding down.....
The evidence is now
indisputable that this went far beyond the promotion of a sectarian political
carve-up. As
the Guardian reported this month, US forces led by General Petraeus himself
were directly involved not only in overseeing torture centres, but also in
sponsoring an El
Salvador-style dirty war of sectarian death squads (known as "police
commando units") to undermine the resistance.
One outcome is the authoritarian Shia elite-dominated state run by Nouri al-Maliki today. His Sunni vice-president until last year, Tariq al-Hashimi – forced to leave the country and sentenced to death in absentia for allegedly ordering killings – was one of those who in his own words "collaborated" with the occupation, encouraging former resistance leaders to join Petraeus's "awakening councils", and now bitterly regrets it. "If I knew the result would be like this, I would never have done it," he told me at the weekend. "I made a grave mistake."......"
No comments:
Post a Comment