Depends who you talk to...
Robert Fisk, a highly respected UK journalist, takes a look at Bush's Iraq when Seen through a Syrian lens:
The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."Mike Whitney takes the story a step further, citing the mysterious bombing of the Golden Dome mosque and the desperate jail-break of two British soldiers who were captured in a car packed with explosives.
Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable...
In the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules. No one can account for the murder of 191 university teachers and professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact that more than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their home towns in Iraq in the past three years.
There’s been a great deal of speculation on whether the US is directly involved in the massive terror campaign that is sweeping through the Sunni heartland....Are Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld an incompetent gang of homicidal criminals? Well, that would explain a lot, wouldn't it...?
Perhaps, as Fisk implies Bush is conducting a massive “dirty war” similar to earlier operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. After all, that’s where Negroponte, Cheney and Rumsfeld “cut their teeth” in the intricacies of clandestine warfare; learning the ropes of destabilizing regimes through the “application of extreme violence.”
