Pressing business elsewhere precludes me from giving proper attention to this, but I must take a moment to urge you to read -- immediately -- the new article by Gareth Porter at Antiwar.com: "Torture Orders Were Part of US Sectarian War Strategy."



Porter delves into the latest Wikileaks trove to find new and detailed evidence of how the vicious sectarian civil war in Iraq in 2004-2008 -- which killed thousands of people, subjected thousands to brutal and macabre tortures, drove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes -- was deliberately seeded and constantly fueled by the leaders of the American occupation.



More specifically, Porter shows that the instigation and exacerbation of civil war and sectarian "cleansing" was the brainchild of the supposed master of "counterinsurgency," the bemedalled darling of the bipartisan political and media establishments, General David Petraeus -- the same man whom the progressive Peace Laureate now in the White House has put in charge of Afghanistan. Petraeus, we are told -- always in gushing, adulatory prose (with Obama himself as Gusher-in-Chief) -- is now striving mightily to produce in Afghanistan the "same results" he got in Iraq.



We've been noting here for years how American leaders deliberately fomented the unimaginable hell that the unprovoked, illegal invasion and rapacious occupation inflicted on the people of Iraq, how with death squads and torture -- both directly and by proxy -- they deliberately, knowingly, willingly deepened the sectarian divides in Iraqi society, how they armed, funded and empowered some of the most retograde extremist factions to do the dirty work for the imperial masters, and how this strategy led to the rise of violent extremism to counter the American-led assault. Porter, working with the invaluable Wikileaks documents and also doing valuable research in media archives, brings us fresh and damning confirmation of this genuinely evil strategy.



Again, time prevents me from giving this article its due, but please head there as soon as you can and read the whole thing. And as you read, remember that the president and party that you are being urged to "save" at the polls today have, of their own free will, taken the same promulgators of this evil strategy and placed them in charge of yet another brutal and aggressive occupation of foreign lands, with, indeed, the "same results": thousands and thousands of innocent dead, vast ruin, vast ruin, the ever-increasing exacerbation of violent sectarianism, tribal conflict and intolerant religious extremism. This is precisely what you are voting for, if you vote Democrat -- or Republican, for that matter -- today.



For more background, see also:

A Furnace Seal'd: The Wondrous Death Squads of the American Elite

Darkness Renewed: Terror as a Tool of Empire

Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq



Details Written by Chris Floyd Category: Articles Published: 02 November 2010 Hits: 11255