Bush's Bloodbath in Babylon: 'Coincidence' and Consequences

Neighbors are Killing Neighbors (Washington Post): After more than a week of some of the most vicious sectarian violence of the war, Baghdad is a skeleton of a city: Many of its shops are shuttered, its streets drained of people. The violence erupted July 9 when Shiite Muslim militiamen rampaged through the al-Jihad neighborhood and killed dozens of Sunni Arabs. By Friday, the sixth day, the death toll in Baghdad stood at 628 people, according to Brig. Gen. Mahmoud Nima of the Interior Ministry, citing a figure that far exceeded the numbers previously suggested by news reports.

Iraq Draws First Front Line of Civil War (Sunday Telegraph): …Many of the recruits to Iraq's fledging armed forces are drawn from al-Sadr's militias. As Iraqi security forces and the US military are accused of turning a blind eye to the slaughter, observers fear that the country has reached a third, even more intractable, phase in the recent conflict, beyond insurgency and beyond even combat between organised armed groups.

"What we're now seeing has no shape whatever," a Western diplomat said. "It's just everyone fighting everyone. Anarchy."

Bush wants big bucks [the request was for $500 million] to run 'counter-insurgency' and 'counter-terrorist' operations in 'ungoverned areas' of the world – and in the hinterlands of nations providing 'sanctuary' for terrorists. Making copious citations from Bush's 2002 'National Security Strategy' of unprovoked aggressive war against 'potential' enemies, Howlin' Wolf proposed expanding the definition of "terrorist sanctuary" to any nation that allows clerics and other rabble-rousers to offer even verbal encouragement to America's designated enemies du jour.

Any rogue state that countenances such freedom of speech within its borders will become a prime target for 'the path of action,' said Wolf, quoting Bush's most ringing Hitlerian phrase from the 2002 manifesto. To relieve the overstretched U.S. military, the 'action' will be carried out largely by Bush's new hired guns: religious and ethnic militias, tribal forces, mercenaries, cultists, insurrectionists, druglords, pirates – basically anyone willing to slit throats and terrorize populations at the order of the Oval One.

Not only will U.S.-directed agents infiltrate existing terrorist groups and provoke them into action; the Pentagon itself will create its own terrorist groups and "death squads." After establishing their terrorist "credentials" through various atrocities and crimes, these American-run groups will then be able to ally with – and ultimately undermine – existing terrorist groups.

Top-level officials in the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence services and the Bush administration confirmed to Hersh that the plan is going forward, under the direction of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – just as we noted here in November 2002. Through a series of secret executive orders, George W. Bush has given Rumsfeld the authority to turn the entire world into "a global free-fire zone," a top Pentagon adviser says. These secret operations will be carried out with virtually no oversight; in many cases, even the top military commanders in the affected regions will not be told about them. The American people, of course, will never know what's being done in their name.

The covert units – including the Pentagon-funded terrorist groups and hit squads – will be operating outside all constraints of law and morality. "We're going to be riding with the bad boys," one insider told Hersh. Another likened it to the palmy days of the Reagan-Bush years: "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador? We founded them and we financed them. The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it"…

Incredibly, as Hersh notes, the Bushists are now openly citing a sinister role model for their campaign: Britain's brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya during the 1950s, when British forces set up concentration camps, created their own terrorist groups and killed thousands of innocent civilians in putting down an "insurgency" against their colonial rule. And in fact, Rumsfeld and other Bush officials increasingly talk of combating not just terrorism but a "global insurgency" – as if the whole world is now an American colony, filled with recalcitrant "natives" rising up against their rightful masters.