There have been persistent but unverified reports that the car bombs we keep hearing about in Baghdad may not be entirely the work of whom we have been led to believe.
Last year, Robert Fisk reported that young Iraqi men were being trained to drive and unwittingly used as couriers to transport explosive laden cars into populated areas:
One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: ‘Come back in a week.’ When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn’t get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up.
More recently, this scenario raises its ugly head:
Iraqirabita tell a story about an Iraq interpreter working in an American military base was sent to the city by his bosses to by computer hardware, he took the car but he stopped by friends.
He got suspicious because the Americans call him every now and then asking him if he already in the market, he parked the car in the middle of nowhere ans answered yes, few minutes after that the car exploded.
Now looking back a year to the bombing of Samarra’s Golden Dome Mosque, one has to ask, cui bono?
The blast is frequently pointed to as the event which transformed the conflict from an armed struggle against foreign occupation into a civil war. This change in the narrative has had some real benefits for the Bush administration by diverting attention from the nonstop fighting between American troops and the Sunni-led resistance.
Apart from the 140,000 US troops stationed in Iraq, there are 120,000 private military contractors that receive virtually no media attention. In fact, had it not been for the murder of 4 of these contractors in Fallujah, few of us would have heard of them. These companies essentially sell their services to the highest bidder, and are not constrained by the rules of war, or international law, which is probably why Donald Rumsfled was so fond of including them in Iraq. The other piece of the puzzle is the Salvador Option, and we are left with a compelling case that the sectarian strife ensuing in Iraq was not an accident:
There’s no doubt that the Bush administration is engaged in a secret war in Iraq. A great deal has already been written about “the Salvador Option” which involves the arming and training of death squads for spreading terror among sympathizers of the resistance. But it is also likely that many of the bombings we see are, in fact, false flag operations intended to pit Arab against Arab, and thereby undermine the greatest threat of all, Iraqi nationalism.
This begs the question, what does this achieve?
One cannot overestimate the depths of the ideological delusion that afflicted the neocons when they believed that the US would be greeted as liberators. Having been forced to swallow a healthy dose of reality, the neocons jettisoned the plan to democratize Iraq and opted for the age old recipe of divide and rule.
Four large permanent military bases having been illegally built in Iraq (illegal because there is no Status of Force Agreement between Iraq and the US) , and US oil companies poised to lift as much of Iraq’s oil as possible, is it any wonder that the occupation would rather have Iraqis fighting among themselves than resisting the occupation as a united front?