December 23, 2004 - It appears the residents of Mosul will be made to pay for the suicide bombing at Camp Ghazlaani. "U.S. forces have sealed off entire districts of the Iraqi city of Mosul and raided homes in a hunt for suspects following a guerrilla attack that killed 18 Americans and four Iraqis," writes Maher al-Thanoon for Reuters. "Mosul’s governor issued an order banning use of the five bridges that span the River Tigris in the city, and said anyone breaking the order would be shot. Residents said Iraq’s third city was a virtual ghost town, with no one in the streets." ( http://www.uruknet.info/?p=8314 ).

The eventual result of the resistance butchering four Blackwater mercenaries in Fallujah in March — in other words, for Fallujah’s defiance — was to flatten the city of 300,000 and turn it into a mini-Stalingrad and impose police state measures on returning residents.

On December 23, the Egyptian daily newspaper al-Ahram ( http://www.uruknet.info/?p=8366 )warned that "real concern after the attack that hit the U.S. base in Mosul is that the U.S. forces would carry out an all-out military operation against that city similar to the operation that took place against Fallujah." Such "an operation would further aggravate the security situation in Iraq and seriously jeopardize January’s planned elections," said the UPI, summarizing the article published in al-Ahram.

"We are conducting offensive operations to target specific objectives," Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hastings, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Mosul, told Reuters. According to witnesses, the U.S. has locked-down neighborhoods in western and south-eastern Mosul and raided homes. "They’re looking in the areas that are known hotspots," one resident in the west of the city said. In other words, they are attacking areas where Iraqis are active against the occupation.

If the United States "Fallujah-izes" Mosul—Iraq’s third largest city with a population of nearly 2 million—it will prove that Bush’s strategy is strictly punitive, inflicting punishment and retribution on the Iraqi people for the crime of resisting the illegal occupation of their country. Collective punishment is a war crime under article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention ), but then Bush doesn’t do the Geneva Convention, as his nominee for top cop, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, has said. ( http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=246536 ). Gonzales said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," thus rendering civilized law recognized by most of the world obsolete. Actually, collective punishment and total war ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war )is an old kind of war.

History serves, as usual. In 1942, Czech partisans killed the deputy chief of the Gestapo, Reinhard Heydrich, and the Nazis responded with a massive retaliation campaign against the civilian Czech populace. "The best known of these assaults occurred on June 9," explains Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice ). "German security police surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape. The Nazis chose this village because of its residents’ known hostility to the occupation and because Lidice was suspected of harboring local resistance partisans. The entire population was rounded up, and all men over sixteen years of age were put in a barn. They were shot the next day."

Of course, not even Bush and the Pentagon Strausscons would think of rounding up all males over sixteen in Mosul and shooting them—well, they might think about it but they wouldn’t actually do it—but if Fallujah is the template for Bush’s war against the Iraqi people, indiscriminate slaughter is hardly out of the question, as the sniping of men, women, and children (and bombing hospitals and killing medical staff) in Fallujah attest, not that the American people recognize this, as the German people didn’t realize—or if they did realize, not fully accept responsbility for—the crimes perpetuated against Poles and Russians until it was too late.

Naturally, the Bushites will justify their slaughter of the Iraqi people—as the Nazis did before them—by placing the blame on "terrorists," in other words those resisting occupation. In fact, the propaganda wheels are already turning.

"Perhaps the greatest concern for the U.S. military as it probes this week’s deadly attack on an American base in Mosul is just how little is known about the group that claims to have carried it out," writes Luke Baker for Reuters. "On Tuesday, [Ansar al-Sunna] claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a military mess hall that killed 22 people, including 18 Americans—the deadliest attack against U.S. forces since the beginning of the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein." ( http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L23647258.htm )

According to State Department—safely in the hands of the Strausscons now that the "moderate" Colin Powell has submitted his resignation—Ansar al-Sunna is an off-shoot of Ansar al-Islam and Ansar al-Islam "is believed to have ties to al Qaeda." In short, the deadly attack against the mess tent at Camp Ghazlaani is an al-Qaeda operation, or so the corporate media will claim, thus excusing any brutality against the residents of Mosul. In Fallujah the pattern was similar: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ("Iraq’s new Bin-Laden") and his "terrorist network" were said to be the target, even though, after the city was destroyed, it was claimed al-Zarqawi had escaped. Of course he did: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a U.S.-Israeli intelligence construct, must live on to provide a pretext for further brutality and violations of international law.

No doubt this pattern will repeat itself in Mosul. Killing American soldiers and contractors while they eat is, of course, a far worse crime than the slaughter of mercenaries in Fallujah and the response by the Bushcon Pentagon will be commensurate, if not even more strident and deadly.

As Americans are enjoying their Christmas holiday, "our troops" will be kicking in doors, terrorizing families, hooding and abusing "military age males" in Mosul, shooting civilians attempting to cross bridges, and preparing a new year of terror in Iraq in the name of Greater Israel and the neocon-neolib game plan, that is to "reshape" the Muslim Middle East through collective punishment, napalm, phosphorous bombs, depleted uranium, Abu Gharib torture and internment, and high-tech strategic hamlets. Of course, all of this will fail, and fail miserably.

Now is the time to get out of Iraq. Bush, however, will not do this, since his "war" is against "terrorism" and "we have only begun to fight." So look forward to another four years of brutality in Iraq, more Fallujahs, and more dead Iraqis and dead Americans, "our troops" who have no reason to be in Iraq and who are now beginning to speak out.