False Flags: Not Just For America, Anymore

Aside from the obvious, there's something very deeply disturbing about the mass slaughter that occurred in the Baghdad suburb of Hawr Rajab last Friday night.

According to the sketchy reports, up to a dozen gunmen dressed in American and Iraqi military uniforms and black ski masks and arriving in a minibus and Iraqi police vehicles, entered a house and murdered 19 men and six women. Witnesses said some of the men spoke "passable English" and sported M16s such as the kind still in use in the US military.

After assuring the frightened children that everything would be OK, the victims were led upstairs and systematically shot in the head execution style while others had their throats slit. As a parting gesture, they walked away with about $9000 in booty plus all the family's gold jewelry.

All 19 of the slain Iraqi men ranged in age from adolescence to men in their 70's and all belonged to either Iraqi security forces or the Awakening Council that are coordinating with American forces.

This has all the earmarks of an al Qaida in Iraq false flag operation. The family members were all Sunni and some were even of the previously untouchable Dulaimi tribe. The Awakening Council as well as American-trained security forces have in the past been branded by al Qaida as "traitors."

And the disturbing part is that US military spokespeople, obviously mindful of what happened in Afghanistan on February 12, are only further implicating themselves by claiming that American forces were not involved.

It's readily apparent that we weren't involved in this. Anyone who knows anything about Iraq knows that American military uniforms and M16's can be had on the black market. It's just as obvious that this is a false flag operation in which Sunnis are slaughtering Sunnis en masse with the intention of inflaming even more anti-American sentiment than already exists. The al Qaida wannabes in Iraq are perhaps hoping to stoke the resentment to 2006-2007 levels.

And it's the historical context that everyone must keep in mind in the wake of this mass murder: Arabs are nothing if not keenly mindful of history. It was no coincidence that Iraqis in Fallujah six years ago chose a certain bridge to hang the charred and dismembered remains of those Blackwater mercenaries. It was that bridge that was targeted but missed by George HW Bush during the first Iraq War, the missiles errantly going into the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, instead, and killing scores of innocents.

It was the uptick in violence by American forces, mercenaries, al Qaida in Iraq, the Mehdi Army, various government-issued death squads and homegrown insurgents that finally penetrated the bubble of George W. Bush and led to the February 2007 surge that claimed to pacify a country already quieted through ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The slaughter of this family last Friday, however successful its propaganda aims, still serves as a reminder of the recklessness and irresponsibility of us invading a country already divided into three major factions (Shia, Sunni and Kurd) by a simpleton who thought they were all simply fellow Muslims and egged on by idiots like Paul Wolfowitz who thought that Saddam's secular Ba'athist Party was representative of a secular nation.

It serves to remind us that with one trip to a house in the nation's capital, Sunni extremists can visit death by the dozens and make headlines from 6000 miles away in a nation already sickened and weary of mass murders. And if the violence continues unabated and unpunished, especially in the Sunni Triangle, how long will it be before Obama decides that it's not such a good idea, after all, to leave Iraq?