Robert Fisk: Is US Provoking Civil War in Iraq?
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2006-05-09 04:08. Media
The Independent
Behind these grave suspicions in Damascus lies the memory of Saddam's long friendship with the United States.
By Robert Fisk
In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States willfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/10131