- Of all the war crimes that have flowed
from the originating crime of President George W. Bush's unprovoked invasion
of Iraq, perhaps the most flagrant was the destruction of Fallujah in November
2004. Now, as ignominious defeat looms for Bush's Babylonian folly, some
of the key players in fomenting the war are urging that the "Fallujah
Option" be applied to an even bigger target: Baghdad.
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- What these influential warmongers openly
call for is the "pacification" of Baghdad: a brutal firestorm
by U.S. forces, ravaging both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias in a
"horrific" operation that will inevitably lead to "skyrocketing
body counts," as warhawk Reuel Marc Gerecht cheerfully wrote last
week in the ever-bloodthirsty editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Gerecht's war whoop quickly ricocheted around the right-wing media echo
chamber and gave public voice to the private counsels emanating from a
group whose members now comprise the leadership of the U.S. government:
The Project for the New American Century.
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- As oft noted here, PNAC was founded by
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Zalmay Khalilzad
and the now-indicted Lewis Libby, among others. In September 2000, they
publicly called for sending U.S. forces into Iraq -- even if Saddam Hussein
was already gone -- as well as planting new bases in Central Asia, putting
weapons in space, building new nukes and funding a vast militarization
of American society. Being such savvy inside players and all, they recognized
that this lunatic program would not be accepted by the American people
-- unless, of course, the nation was struck by a "catalyzing event"
like "a new Pearl Harbor." Who says dreams don't come true?
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- Gerecht, an ex-CIA man, is a senior fellow
at PNAC. He was one of the many munchkins who laid the groundwork for the
mass deception that led to the war by constantly undermining any CIA report
that failed to conform to the warmongers' highly profitable fantasies of
America's imminent destruction by the broken, toothless regime of Saddam
Hussein. The intelligence services' many caveats about this bogus threat
were placed directly on Bush's desk, as the National Journal reports, but
the P-Nackers in the White House tossed them aside. They dreamed of war,
and they got it.
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- But the natives failed to play their
part in the imperial masque macabre. As noted here last week, they have
churlishly failed to show proper appreciation for being slaughtered, looted,
tortured and controlled. Even the Shiites, hailed by the Bushists just
a few weeks ago as salt-of-the-earth lovers of moderate democracy, are
now denounced as hate-filled sectarians, even worse than the Sunni insurgents
-- who are suddenly being courted by Bush's man in Baghdad, the P-Nacker
Khalilzad, the BBC reports.
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- Not that the Shiite death squads -- backed
by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government -- have been all bad, mind you. Sure,
they've been kidnapping Sunni civilians, drilling holes in their skulls,
beheading them and then dumping the corpses on city streets or burying
them in schoolyards. But all of this been "healthy," says Gerecht,
because it has made the Sunnis and Kurds fear "Shiite power."
Or something. To be honest, Gerecht's column is filled with so many canards,
delusions and logical inconsistencies that it often leaves the plane of
rational discourse altogether. But its import is clear: By daring to defy
Washington's edicts, the Shiites have gotten too big for their britches
and must be brought to heel, along with the rest of the scum who are making
the Dear Leader look bad back home.
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- You think that's a joke, but it's not.
One of Gerecht's main reasons for "pacifying" Baghdad in a hydra-headed
war on every ethnic faction is because "the U.S. media will never
write many optimistic stories about Iraq if journalists fear going outside"
the city's fortified Green Zone. There you have the Bushist vision in a
nutshell. The war is not actually happening in the real world, where real
people are dying by the tens of thousands; no, it's really being fought
on the monitors of Fox News, CNN and NBC, in the flimsy pages of The New
York Times and The Washington Post, and on the overheated airwaves of talk
radio. Baghdad must be pacified -- like Grozny, like Guernica -- so that
Americans can see a few more peppy stories on the tube on their way to
the ballgame or the mall.
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- The fate of Fallujah provides a template
of the grim fate awaiting Baghdad if Gerecht and the government P-Nackers
have their way. Fallujah was encircled in a ring of iron; water, electricity
and food supplies were cut off, a flagrant war crime. The city was bombed
for eight weeks, then hit by an all-out ground attack with both conventional
and chemical weapons -- white phosphorous and napalm -- that killed thousands
of civilians and left more than 200,000 homeless. Among the first targets
were Fallujah's hospitals and clinics, another flagrant war crime. Some
were destroyed, killing doctors and patients alike, others seized and closed,
all in order to prevent any stories about civilian casualties from reaching
the Western media, the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists
told The New York Times. Once again, manufactured image trumped bloodstained
reality.
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- Perhaps this cup will pass from Baghdad.
Perhaps Bush and his P-Nackers will instead move forward with their frenzied
plans for a nuclear strike on Iran, as The New Yorker reported last week.
But Gerecht's article is a perfect snapshot of the depraved minds that
now rule America. Somewhere, somehow -- and soon -- another city is going
to die.
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- http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/04/14/120.html
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