By Robert Scheer
San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005
So, it is Mission Impossible that Bush has accomplished: A terminally inept U.S. occupation of Iraq now threatens to make the despot we overthrew look good by comparison. But don't take my word for it; hear it from the United States' No. 1 ally in that increasingly nightmarish land.
"
are doing the same as Saddam's time and worse," former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi told the London Observer, of human-rights abuses by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. "It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things." Allawi, one of Hussein's victims, became a trusted CIA asset and later was handpicked by the United States to be the leader of the new Iraq. He now is the leading secular alternative to the Shiite theocrats expected to win the Dec. 15 election.
What Allawi decries is the brutal behavior of new security forces empowered by the U.S. invasion but beholden, according to most reports, to Shiite religious parties intent on controlling Iraq. To accomplish their mission, they're using the kind of "ethnic cleansing" terror seen so recently in Rwanda and the Balkans.
"We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated," said Allawi. "A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Shariah courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/11/30/EDGTSFVEO01.DTL
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
