US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

The economic assault on Iraq is well underway. Visible unemployment stands at around thecatastrophic level of 28%, large parts of the state sector have already been sold off and wageshave fallen (often to less than half of their pre-war levels), thanks in part to the introduction ofthousands of cheap workers from Pakistan, India and the Philippines. These workers are oftentricked into coming and stripped of their passports, effectively working as slaves in order toundercut accustomed Iraqi living standards. Reconstruction projects are given almost exclusivelyto foreign (mainly US) companies, who pay a flat rate of 15% tax with no limits to repatriationof profits, while Iraq’s state-owned companies are excluded(http://www.antiwar.com/orig/shumway.php?articleid=3005 ). In the countryside, Iraqi farmersare now obliged to buy a licence to grow genetically modified seed and are prohibited fromresowing the seed developed by their ancestors in the cradle of civilisation(http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA501A.html ).The covert assault has also begun. Attacks on workers and trade unionists are becomingincreasingly common (http://www.iraqitradeunions.org/archives/000200.html ) and it isinstructive that the railway workers union, in an industry that has been slated for privatisation,seems to have been particularly targeted, with US administrators on the ground threatening tobring in Indian workers (http://www.iraqitradeunions.org/archives/000117.html ). Whilst theIFTU, the dominant, state-sanctioned new trade-union umbrella organisation, may have endorsedthe occupation, the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) has not; in anycase, ordinary Iraqi workers will find themselves increasingly at odds with the puppetgovernment as they try to defend even rudimentary living standards. Industrial action is alreadywidespread in Iraq, though little reported in the mainstream press.An even more frightening picture is emerging within the sector of higher education, where, sincethe beginning of the occupation, some 200 Iraqi academics have been murdered, while controland intimidation has become systematic. Many of the victims worked in the social sciences,where overlap with progressive social movements is unavoidable(http://www.newstatesman.com/200409060018 ).Unfortunately, in Iraq it is almost impossible to securely attribute any of the host ofassassinations and extra-judicial killings, while the US-UK propaganda campaign has left manyall too willing to believe in such bugbears as Al-Zarqawi (see Michel Chossudovsky’s article‘Who is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi?’ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO405B.html ).What we do know, however, is that hundreds of Iraqis are being murdered and thatparamilitary hit squads of the proxy government organized by US trainers with a fulsomepedigree in state terrorism are increasingly being associated with them.In the context of a country where good information is extremely scarce, disinformation and blackpropaganda are endemic and independent journalists and monitors are deliberately eliminated, itis vital to be able to model the situation in order to understand it and, hopefully, be effective.There are two principle dimensions to such modelling. In the first, Iraq has frequently beencompared to Vietnam. The similarity is that the US has well over 100,000 soldiers on the ground.88