Doug Lorimer
On March 2, a dozen suicide bombers killed 181 worshippers, injuring another 573, outside Shiite Muslim shrines in Karbala and Baghdad. US officials immediately claimed the attacks were part of a plot by Jordanian-born Islamic fundamentalist Abu Musaab al Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network to foment a "civil war" between Iraq's 15 million Shiites and its 10 million Sunnis.
The only evidence cited by US officials to support this claim is a memo allegedly written by Zarqawi, which the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) claims it found on January 23. The undated, unsigned, 17-page Arabic-language memo was made available to the New York Times on February 8 and English-language extracts have since been posted on the web site of the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
Since February 10, Washington has staged a major propaganda effort to convince the world that it has discovered a plot by Zarqawi and al Qaeda to plunge Iraq into a sectarian civil war. Such a war, it argues, can only be averted by the installation of an unelected Iraqi government backed up by the presence of the US occupation forces.
The February 10 Christian Science Monitor, for example, reported that at a Baghdad press briefing, "Dan Senor, senior adviser to the CPA, suggested that the memo reveals increasing desperation on the part of the terrorists . . . [they] 'recognise that as we politically empower the Iraqi people, the terrorists will be isolated and it will be harder and harder for them to operate'."
US officials' claims about the memo have come as Washington attempts to persuade leading Shiite clerics to abandon their calls for the CPA to hand over power to a popularly elected government. One argument is that national elections now might lead to violent conflict between Shiites and Sunnis.
Washington plans to formally handover "sovereignty" on June 30 to an Iraqi government whose members, either directly or indirectly, are handpicked by the CPA.
Some of the corporate news media — perhaps embarrassed by uncritical pre-war regurgitation of now discredited claims that Iraq possessed an arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction" — initially treated the letter with scepticism. The February 13 Newsweek, for example, commented: "Given the Bush administration's record peddling bad intelligence and worse innuendo, you've got to wonder if this letter is a total fake. How do we know the text is genuine? How was it obtained? By whom? And when? And how do we know it's from Zarqawi? We don't. We're expected to take the administration's word for it."
Parrots Bush propaganda
Curiously, the memo parrots all of the Bush administration's ludicrous propaganda claims about the situation in Iraq — particularly that the armed resistance consists only of a small number of foreign Muslim zealots who have little support among the Iraqi people.
It also claims that Iraq's Shiites "have supported the Americans, helped them and stand with them against" the armed resistance; that the resistance movement is shrinking; that, with "the spread of the [Iraqi] army and police, our future is becoming frightening"; and that once the US has handed over authority to an Iraqi "bastard government" on June 30, the resistance fighters will be so isolated they will have "no choice but to pack our bags and move to another land".
This makes it more than likely that the memo was concocted by a US government "dirty tricks" unit to help bolster the Republican administration's propaganda about the Iraq war. According to press accounts, that's how it was widely regarded by Iraqis, both Shiites and Sunnis, to whom the idea of a sectarian civil war between the two religious groups seems ludicrous.
Commenting on the memo, the February 13 Beirut Daily Star reported that "Sunnis and Shiites stress that relations between the two communities remain strong and dismiss notions of civil strife".
This was confirmed by the response of the large crowds of Shiite worshippers at Kazimiya shrine, the site of the bombings in Baghdad. "The bombings produced a wave of Shiite outrage — much of it directed at US troops in the Iraqi capital", Associated Press reported on March 2. "US soldiers who arrived at Kazimiya were attacked by angry crowds throwing stones and garbage, injuring two Americans...
"Stone-throwing Iraqis attacked US Army medics trying to help wounded at Kazimiya, driving the US troops back into their high-walled compound then trying to storm the gates. Soldiers threw smoke grenades and fired shotguns into the air to drive away the mob."
There were no reports at all of angry Shiites attacking Sunnis, and hundreds of Sunnis in Baghdad rushed to clinics and hospitals to donate blood for the injured and wounded.
Reuters reported on March 4 that at funeral processions in Baghdad, hundreds of "Shiites waved black flags of mourning and backed their clerics' plea for unity, chanting: 'We are brothers, Sunnis and Shiites, and we will not sell our country to foreigners'."
US to blame
The March 3 Washington Post reported that in Karbala, where 105 Shiites (49 of them Iranian pilgrims) were killed, "There was anger over the violence, over the perceived US inability to bring order, over still-mysterious enemies. 'You're the reason for the explosions!' one [Shiite] guard [at the shrine] shouted at foreign journalists...
"Down the street from the shrine, men gathered, speculating on who was to blame. 'We say America is responsible', said Abu Ahmed Husseini, 35. Some looked to Osama bin Laden's followers or Wahhabis, followers of the austere Sunni Muslim current that is dominant in Saudi Arabia... 'America is trying to create a conflict between Sunnis and Shiites', countered Ahmed Hassan, 35. 'This is the fundamental goal of America. America wants anarchy, America wants chaos'."
The March 4 New York Times reported that in the previous day's funeral processions in Baghdad "thousands of Iraqis shouted anti-American slogans and accused the United States of complicity in the attacks".
No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings. For its part, al Qaeda denied any involvement in the attacks on Shiite worshippers in Iraq. In an email message sent simultaneously to the London-based Al Quds newspaper and the Egyptian offices of Associated Press on March 3, al Qaeda stated: "We say to all Muslims: we had nothing to do with this act."
While many of the leaders of al Qaeda, including Bin Laden himself, are adherents of the Saudi Arabia-based Wahhabist sect which views the Shia interpretation of Islam as heresy, his organisation has no history of targeting Shiites for terrorist attacks.
In an article in the March 9 British Independent, Robert Fisk, the paper's highly respected Middle East correspondent, expressed incredulity at US claims that Sunni insurgents, allied with al Qaeda, could be behind the attack. "If a violent Sunni movement wished to evict the Americans from Iraq — and there is indeed a resistance movement fighting very cruelly to do just that — why would it want to turn the Shia population of Iraq, 60% of Iraqis, against them?" Fisk asked.
In fact, the only beneficiaries of the March 2 bombings have been the US occupation authorities and the Bush administration — providing them with "evidence" to support their claims that the "Zarqawi" memo is genuine, and bolstering their arguments against calls for the withdrawal of US troops and for handing over power to an elected Iraqi government.
US hand in bombings?
While there is no evidence that the US government had a hand in the bombings, it is not impossible.
In the early 1960s, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff authorised the drawing of plans, code-named Operation Northwoods, to US civilians in a wave of terrorist acts in US cities to create public support for a US invasion of Cuba. Documents containing these plans, which were submitted to US defence secretary Robert McNamara in March 1962, remained secret until 1992.
"We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba", the Pentagon documents suggested. "Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."
Other proposals included developing a fake "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington", and staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the US.
These plans were only abandoned after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when President John Kennedy's administration made a secret deal with the Soviet Union in which Washington agreed not to invade Cuba in exchange for Moscow's agreement to withdraw its nuclear-armed missiles from the island.
From Green Left Weekly, March 17, 2004.
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