The Reagan Era Death Squads Surface Again, This Time In Iraq. Which Ones are on "Our Side"? Good Question.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.com

November 28, 2007

You can excuse BuzzFlash for being confused sometimes as to what militias in Iraq the Bush Administration is currently backing. After all, Bush reportedly didn’t even know there was a difference between Shiites and Sunnis until well after the Iraq War started, so cut us some slack.

We do know this, as we read about new killings in Iraq, we just have to wonder which death squads the White House is arming and aiding.

That is why we don’t necessarily follow the conventional wisdom that a recent slaughter of 11 family members (including 7 children) of a "troublesome" Iraqi journalist in Jordan was the work of the Muqtada al Sadr Mahdi army.

Curiously, McClatchy news service (providing the most reliable mainstream news out of Iraq), notes: "Iraqi police and U.S. military officials said they had no record of the killings. But family members confirmed that the killings took place on Sunday." The news report also notes, "It was the third mass killing reported in Baghdad since Friday, underscoring the fragility of recent declines in violence."

We have to remember that many key members of the Bush Administration past and present – including Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, and Otto Reich (now a "consultant") – were key advocates and enablers of the Central and South American "death squad" strategy during the Reagan years.

It is more than likely that their views – and the outlook of the Cheney wing -- on such tactics have not changed, and that many of the masked men running around killing targeted Iraqis and family members – as well as pesky journalists -- are being financed and supplied by the United States. The trick is figuring out which ones are "ours," and which ones are home grown insurgents (who are still managing to come up with U.S. weaponry, some speculate supplied by sympathetic members of the Iraqi Police and army.) Giving the shifting alliances of the ever-shifting Bush non-strategy, the death squads that they support today may be the ones that they have our soldiers battling tomorrow – or just killing each other.

The Sunday Times of London took a crack at sorting out the White House backed-mayhem in a November 25th article entitled, "American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq." Right now, The Times speculates, the Petraeus strategy is to back the Sunni militias as a counterweight to the allegedly Iranian aligned Mahdi Army.

But what is curious about that is that in the first Gulf War, Bush the First championed the liberation of the same Shiites that the White House is now demonizing. Of course, a Bush being a Bush, Bush the First urged the Shiites to rise up against the Sunni Saddam rule, only to abandon thousands upon thousands of them to be slaughtered by Hussein as Poppy Bush refused to protect the same people he was exhorting to take on Saddam.

Needless to say, Iraq remains a powder keg, as the Sunday Times article indicates, because the death squad policies of the Bush Administration (which, of course, you don’t hear about at Pentagon or White House briefings) are inevitably setting up all sides against the middle.

Bush is doing what he always does: what is most expedient to save his butt.

In the end, he is creating a Somalia style nation of warlord enclaves, each with their own militias.

The death squad strategy was the pride and joy of the neo-cons who cut their teeth in the Reagan Administration. If Blackwater can get away with murder, don’t you think that death squads operating with U.S. military and CIA support can carry out dirty deeds with impunity?

We just can never figure out, given our government’s deception on this issue, which death squads are on "our side."

You need to know who the "good bad guys" are, right?

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL