Ersatz Apocalypto: The Battle of Najaf

The Battle of Najaf, the January 28 bloodbath in which a fanatical apocalyptic cult stormed the holy city, is being called the greatest one-day battle in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The story line is that anywhere between 200 and 400 cultists were killed by Iraqi troops and American airstrikes, the later turning a sure defeat for the Iraqi army into a hollow victory.

The mainstream media has done little follow-up coverage and what little bit there has been sheds little light on the battle. But Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque fame has put together a detailed, cogent and edgy account that is a must read.

Writes Floyd:

[A]s with so much else in the blood-soaked annals of the Bush Administration's disastrous Babylonian Conquest, it appears this neat story masks a far grimmer, grubbier truth: a mass slaughter of civilians, caught in the toxic fog of hair-trigger tension, sectarian hatred and violent political ambition unleashed by the U.S. invasion.

Floyd notes that accounts of the battle:

[M]orphed from an eruption of yet another level of sectarian strife threatening to overwhelm the tottering Iraqi government into a bravura display of the wonder-working power of Bush's "New Way Forward." Yet the only certainty that could really be gleaned from the official accounts ricocheting around the Western media was that when the smoke finally cleared from the palms and the fields, the ground was littered with scores of burnt and mangled corpses.

Floyd concludes that:

It is also now apparent that the battle – however it originated, either through the escalation of a shooting incident or by the deliberate design of Iraqi and American forces – is being used by both Baghdad and Washington as a vindication of their disastrous policies. Bush gets to tout a "victory" by Iraqi forces (not against the real insurgents, true, but any port in a PR storm will do); while Maliki gets to pretend that he is even-handedly cracking down on Shiite militias – not by touching the death squads of his political supporters, which operate with impunity outside and inside the government, but with blunderbuss assaults on tiny fringe groups and recalcitrant tribes that, conveniently enough, oppose his collaboration with both the Americans and the Iranians.

The incident in Najaf will soon be forgotten, drowned out by the Administration's beating of war drums against Iran. But in its cynical deceptions and its murderous chaos, it is yet another microcosm of the overarching hell that Bush has made of Iraq.

More here.