The recipe for civil war ! Pepe Escobar! US to Bomb Mosul Next!

[leftchick]

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=4522

~snip~

Najaf was bombed in August. Samarra was bombed in September. Sadr City was bombed in October. Fallujah was bombed in November. Mosul may be bombed in December. And Kirkuk may be bombed in January.

This is the calendar in the runup to the Iraqi elections set for January 30 next year. Then there will be another set of questions. Will the Iraqi elections be stolen? Will votes "disappear"? Instead of Florida or Ohio, will there be demands for recounts in Fallujah and Samarra? Like Ukrainians in Kiev, will Sunnis in Baghdad take to the streets contesting the results of their elections? Will interim premier Iyad Allawi - with a little help from his Washington friends - prevail?

The mini civil wars Fallujah plus elections amounts to civil war. This tragic equation may come to life in Iraq in early 2005. The official American rationale for the Fallujah offensive was to "stabilize" the country before the elections. This strategy may have paved the way to civil war. Ample evidence suggests that the majority of Sunnis - up to 30% of the population - will boycott the elections and denounce them as illegitimate, while Shi’ites, for the first time in Iraq, will be in power.

Baghdad sources tell Asia Times Online an American assault on Mosul - a city of 1 million - is inevitable. Allawi does not control even a kebab stand in multi-ethnic Mosul. The west bank of the Tigris is under total control of the resistance. The east bank is controlled by both Kurdish political parties and their peshmergas (paramilitaries). And the Turkoman minority controls a few sectors inside the city. There’s a mini civil war already going on. Mosul is already the Iraqi Sarajevo

[Joy Anne]

1. IIRC, ironically

Mosul is the Christian capital of Iraq, with many old churches.

[Crunchy Frog]

2. Geeze, this makes me wonder

what they're planning on doing in this country to prepare us for the '08 elections.:nuke: :scared:

[LisaL]

3. They don't need to do nothing here.

They got Diebold. My guess is it's too expensive to send those down to Iraq.

[Crunchy Frog]

4. The Iraqis wouldn't fall for it

the way most Americans seem to have.

[izzie]

5. It seems Bush and the neo-cons will do anything to be right.

It is like they just do not see anything but what they want. Grown men do not seem to see how foolish it is to kill and bomb when it does not work. It has no logic at all.But then the people voted him in to play his winning ways. How come we have all these people in office that could not run a business yet each became richer than any thing we can hope for, and now are trying to run all these countries and can not seem to do it? Republicans just can not seem to make things work, yet they get rich doing it.

[G_j]

6. I may overuse this expression but

it has seemed to consistently apply to the Bush policy.

"If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"

just like Vietnam

[okieinpain]

7. I thought we broke the insurgents back in fallujah. I mean

isn't zarqwei baby calling out for help, because we killed and captured all of his troops. I thought I just heard on the local fox station that I could go back to sleep now, because the boogie man had been run out of the house.

this article has to be a lie, it just has to be. because if it were true then it would be on the MSM wouldn't it.

[leftchick]

8. More from Pepe... this is a must read...

<snip>
And Kirkuk is even worse Az-Zaman, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, recently detailed what’s happening in Kirkuk. Haweeja is the main Arab neighborhood in Kirkuk. More than 100 Haweeja tribal leaders and clerics have declared it off-limits to the Americans, and are taking all matters - from security to rebuilding - in their own hands. They have also vowed to take care of any infiltrating "armed groups". The problem is these "armed groups" are none other than Kurdish peshmerga, who swarm all over the city. The Kurds are extremely incensed. No wonder: Kirkuk, apart from being oil rich, is the Kurdish Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, in Fallujah, it’s not over yet. Sources in Baghdad close to the resistance swear the mujahideen still control at least half of the city - the whole southern part plus the alleyways. The Americans, desperate to impose some measure of control, have launched another massive offensive in the south of Baghdad, in the so-called "triangle of death", while at the same time they cannot even control the treacherous highway sector running from Baghdad airport straight to the Green Zone.

Thousands of Fallujah refugee families are living in dire conditions in makeshift shelters around the city. Those not lucky enough to have relatives in Baghdad are camping in places like the University of Baghdad campus. Nobody has received any aid from Allawi’s government and its Ministry of Health - no medicine, no doctors, although there has been a rhetorical promise. Baghdad is filled with refugees telling horror stories of fear under the relentless American bombing, of being sprayed with what they claim was poisonous gas, of snipers killing women and children or anyone trying to cross the Euphrates river, of no water, no electricity and no food. No Sunni in his right mind believes in the "reconstruction" of Fallujah: they point to the example of Sadr City - bombed in October and still in ruins. The Iraqi Red Crescent says all their relief teams are still blocked from entering Fallujah, while the Americans say the refugees will have to wait at least two more weeks before they can go back to their city in ruins.