This:
More and more Americans regret that we ever started the war in Iraq. Many of the government and media executives who sold us this war in the first place are now admitting that it was a serious mistake and some, like Richard Perle, have brazenly acknowledged that it is an outright violation of international law. (The Guardian, 11/20/03) What few of them will concede is that we now have any choice but to "stay the course" or to "win," whatever that may mean and whatever horrors it may involve. They insist that the alternative is unthinkable, and assert that Iraq minus U.S. occupation would quickly descend into "civil war."
Like "Weapons of Mass Destruction," "Liberation," and "Spreading Democracy" before it, preventing this hypothetical conflict is the new imperative for carrying on with the real one. Is there any rational basis for this, or are we once again confronting "inherent, even unavoidable institutional myopia" that makes "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles," as Gabriel Kolko put it so eloquently in Century of War?
One of the most insidious aspects of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, or of any hostile military occupation for that matter, is that it forces every citizen in the country under occupation to make the wrenching choice between collaboration and resistance. Although 70 percent of Iraqi civilian casualties are inflicted directly by U.S. forces, according to a recent Iraqi Health Ministry report (Miami Herald, 9/25/04)*, there are also daily acts of violence committed by Iraqis against other Iraqis. The question is whether these are essentially a by-product of our military occupation, or whether they are the expression of a latent competition for power between Sunni and Shia ethnic groups that would erupt into civil war if the occupation were to end now.
<snip>
The greatest danger in Iraq today is that the United States will be partially successful in building and arming such a force, and that, with U.S. support, this force will continue to wage war against its own people, gradually destroying more of the country and continuing the "decomposition" of Iraqi society that former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin correctly predicted would occur without a true restoration of sovereignty in August 2003.
<snip>
Americans have been led to believe that the persistent failures of U.S. military ventures in the "Third World" have been attributable to a lack of commitment of either money, blood or political will, and that, given sufficient investment of these commodities, there are no limits to American power. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is myth, not history. In reality, it is in the countries where the United States has made its most extensive commitments that it has experienced its greatest failures, from China in the 1940s to Korea, Lebanon (twice), Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Iran, Somalia and now Iraq. In each case, policy has been formulated around myths of democracy and American power in place of accurate analyses of resources and interests relative to the history, politics and culture of the country in question, even though such analyses were always readily available. The result has been that popular movements in all these countries have frustrated American ambitions and won military and political victories in spite of huge economic and military imbalances in favor of the United States (Confronting the Third World, Gabriel Kolko, 1988). The only exceptions to this record of failure during the past half-century have been in small countries in the Caribbean basin that already had quasi-colonial relationships with the United States.
Link to;
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/020505Davies/020505davies.htmlAnd This:
Neither Sunni nor Shia Islam in Iraq has any tradition of hostility toward the other. The only force for sectarian violence in the country now is the few hundred foreign terrorists of the Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam, which regards all Shiites as apostates and as enemies of Islam. They have killed more than 200 Shiite worshippers and injured many more in mosque bombings alone.
In a country deeply divided along religious lines, such terrorist attacks could have brought it to the brink of sectarian bloodshed. In Iraq, however, the strong anti-sectarian standpoint of both Sunni and Shia leaders has been a powerful brake on any such tendency. The leading organization of Sunni Clerics, the Association of Muslim Scholars, with oversight over several thousand mosques across the country, has supported the resistance to the occupation, but has also strongly condemned foreign terrorists for trying to foment war between Sunnis and Shiites. And Shiites have identified their enemy as the foreign Wahhabis, not Sunnis in general. At the funeral procession following the mosque bombing in Baghdad, thousands of Shiite mourners did not call for vengeance against the Sunni. Instead they chanted slogans accusing the United States of being complicit in the bombing.
<snip>
The real threat of civil war in Iraq comes not from Sunni-Shia conflict but from the Kurdish- Arab tensions that have been stoked by the U.S. strategy of “Iraqification.” For the past year, the U.S. military has been trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to fight the insurgents along with U.S. troops. But the only Iraqi troops willing to participate in the war in any numbers have been the Kurds.
Reliance on the Kurds as auxiliaries to the U.S. occupation is a dangerous strategy. Neither Sunnis nor Shiites have forgotten that the Kurds supported Iran in the war between Iraq and Iran in the early 1980s. Arab animosity toward the Kurds has been deepened by Kurdish demands for autonomy and control over the oil wealth of Northern Iraq. Nevertheless, the U.S. command decided in September to rely even more heavily on Kurdish troops to keep order in several major cities. Kurdish units who were given control over the Eastern sector of Mosul openly continued to wear their Kurdish militia uniforms. Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the top U.S. commander in the North, has concluded that ethnic war is possible there.
The United States is not playing the role of disinterested trustee in Iraq, allowing Sunnis and Shiites or Arabs and Kurds to work out their differences. Instead, the counterinsurgency war prevents the Sunnis and Shiites from negotiating a new arrangement for power sharing. Such negotiations will only happen if and when it is clear to Iraqis that the United States is on its way out. Americans who are worried that an early withdrawal would be irresponsible should reexamine the question of which course is most likely to contribute to violence, and which one has the best chance of minimizing it.
Link to:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0120-26.htm
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