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The Mustafa Mosque
Massacre was No Accident or Error
By DAVE LINDORFF
Events in Iraq are giving the lie to
administration claims that all it wants to do is create a stable,
democratic Iraq, and then leave.
The U.S. assault on the Mustafa
Mosque, and the deaths of, variously, 16 insurgents or 37 unarmed
worshippers (depending upon whether you believe the Pentagon
or Iraqi police), has prompted calls from the Iraqi government
for the U.S. to hand over control of security in Iraq to the
local government.
Now, if this is what the U.S.
government is trying to do anyway, the Bush administration and
the Pentagon should be very happy. They've just been told, pretty
clearly, that they're no longer wanted and they can pack up and
go home, right?
But they're not doing it.
Why?
Because the Bush administration
has no intention of leaving Iraq, particularly in the hands of
its elected Shi'ia-led leadership.
Note also that the Iraqi "government,"
supposedly sovereign (remember all that talk of handing over
sovereignty two years ago?), is asking the US to turn over control
of security in the country to it, not telling it to. Note also
that Bush and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq have told the country's
Shi'ia leaders that they don't want the elected prime minister-designate,
Ibrahim al-Jafari, to be prime minister.
Some sovereignty!
The truth is that the U.S.
is running Iraq from the giant U.S. Embassy compound in the Green
Zone, and the Iraqi "government" remains a puppet regime.
The truth is also that the U.S. has been spending billions of
dollars not on Iraq reconstruction, which in any case is not
being
phased out if it ever was being attempted, but on building several
large, permanent military bases inside Iraq, from which the U.S.
has no intention of budging in the foreseeable future. (Want
to guess where some of that "missing" $9 billion in
U.S. reconstruction money has really gone?).
The Mosque attack also shows
the terrible morass that American troops have been dumped into.
They're getting shot at from all over the place--probably from
mosques as much as anywhere--but if they shoot back, they end
up killing innocents. And even when they kill people who were
actually shooting at them, those people have families and friends
who consider their deaths to be heroic and patriotic. So a blood
feud against the American occupiers is made all the more bitter.
Senate visitors like Russ Feingold
(D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) don't seem to get it. They see
that the U.S. has become the focus of Iraqi hatred, and correctly
argue that therefore the U.S. should leave as soon as possible,
but they miss the point that the Bush administration has no intention
of leaving.
President Bush doesn't have
the political huevos to tell the American people this fact, and
instead just continues the deception, saying that U.S. troops
will be in Iraq until at least 2009, when the Iraq War will still
be our and their problem, but not his. In reality, unless the
impeachment movement and a reincarnated Democratic opposition
drives him out before the end of his term in 2008, Bush will
be simply handing the next president a hostile, occupied country
with several islands of huge military outposts to maintain indefinitely.
Let's be clear: the attack
on the Mustafa mosque was no accident, nor was it some stupid
move by a low-ranking officer who didn't know the implications
of what he was doing. The attack was a deliberate act of intimidation
and provocation directed against the Shi'ia majority by U.S.
occupation authorities. It will not be the last.
The U.S. has no interest in
a successful Iraq government, since it is now clear that such
a government will be Shi'ia led, and close to Iran politically.
Therefore, my guess is that the fallback strategy is to rev up
the Shi'ia militants, stir up civil strife, and perhaps even
to get the Sunni minority, long the heart of opposition to the
U.S., to turn to the U.S. for help, as the Kurds did years back.
Any way you look at it, this
is a horrible mess--one that at $500 billion and counting, is
bankrupting this country, destroying its image around the world,
and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
U.S. troops have had a bit
of a respite as Iraqi fighters were focused on other Iraqis in
recent months, but the mosque attack, and word of several other
massacres of innocents by U.S. forces, is sure to bring a renewed
focus by Iraqi fighters on American soldiers. We can expect the
body count, already past the 2300 mark, to start soaring.
CounterPunch
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