_____
From: bangla-vis...@yahoogroups.com [mailto:bangla-vis...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
Dick Eastman
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2008 10:50 PM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: [bangla-vision] Dahr Jamail: "The Policy of Divide and Rule" -- sectarianism
between the Sunni and Shia is as phony as the war on terror and 9-11
By Dahr Jamail
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19034.htm
January 9, 2008
THE MYTH OF SECTARIANISM
THE POLICY IS TO DIVIDE AND RULE
By Dahr Jamail
IF THE U.S. leaves Iraq, the violent sectarianism between the Sunni and Shia will
worsen. This is what Republicans and Democrats alike will have us believe. This key
piece of rhetoric is used to justify the continuance of the occupation of Iraq. This
propaganda, like others of its ilk, gains ground, substance, and reality due largely to
the ignorance of those ingesting it. The snow job by the corporate media on the issue of
sectarianism in Iraq has ensured that the public buys into the line that the Sunni and
Shia will dice one another up into little pieces if the occupation ends. It may be
worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq
there had never been open warfare between the two groups and certainly not a civil war.
In terms of organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the
largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia.
Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either. Soon after arriving in
Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was considered rude and socially graceless to
enquire after an individual's sect. If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the
question the most common answer I would receive was, "I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi."
On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received from an older
woman, "My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni, so can you tell which half of me is
which?" The accompanying smile said it all. Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in
Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one another's mosques. Secular Iraqis could form
lifelong associations with others without overt concern about their chosen sect. How did
such a well-integrated society erupt into vicious fighting, violent sectarianism, and
segregated neighborhoods? How is one to explain the millions in Iraq displaced from
their homes simply because they were the wrong sect in the wrong place at the wrong
time? Back in December 2003 Sheikh Adnan, a Friday speaker at his mosque, had recounted
a recent experience to me. During the first weeks of the occupation, a U.S. military
commander had showed up in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province located roughly
twenty-five miles northeast of Baghdad with a mixed Sunni-Shia population. He had asked
to meet with all the tribal and religious leaders. On the appointed day the assembled
leaders were perplexed when the commander instructed them to divide themselves, "Shia on
one side of the room, Sunni on the other."
It would not be amiss, perhaps, to read in this account an implanting of a deliberate
policy of "divide and rule" by the Anglo-American invaders from the early days of the
occupation. There have been no statistical surveys in recent years to determine the
sectarian composition of Iraq. However, when the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by
Paul Bremer, formed the first puppet Iraqi government, a precedent was set. The
twenty-five seats in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), were assigned strictly along
sectarian lines based on the assumption that 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20
percent Sunni, and 20 percent Kurds, who are mostly Sunni. For good measure, a couple of
Turkoman and a Christian were thrown in.
It is evident that this puppet troupe deployed at the onset of "democracy" in Iraq was
mandated to establish to the population that it was in the larger interest to begin
thinking, at least politically, along sectarian and ethnic lines. Inevitably, political
power struggles ensued and were cemented and exacerbated with the January 30, 2005,
elections.
Mild surface scratching reveals a darker, largely unreported aspect of the divisive U.S.
plan. A UN report released in September 2005 held Iraqi interior ministry forces
responsible for an organized campaign of detention, torture, and killing of fellow
Iraqis. These special police commando units were recruited from the Shia Badr
Organization and Mehdi Army militias. In Baghdad during November and December 2004, I
heard widespread accounts of death squads assassinating Sunni resistance leaders and
their key sympathizers. It was after the failure of Operation Phantom Fury, as the U.S.
siege of Fallujah that November was named, that the Iraqi resistance spread across Iraq
like wildfire. Death squads were set up to quell this fire by eliminating the leadership
of this growing resistance.
The firefighting team had at its helm the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, ably
assisted by retired Colonel James Steele, adviser to Iraqi security forces. In 1984-86
Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisory group in El Salvador. Between
1981 and 1985 Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighboring Honduras. In 1994 the
Honduras Commission on Human Rights charged him with extensive human rights violations,
reporting the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers. A CIA working
group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras has placed on record
documents admitting that the operations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out
by "special intelligence units," better known as "death squads," of CIA-trained Honduran
armed units which kidnapped, tortured, and killed thousands of people suspected of
supporting leftist guerrillas. Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year
from June 2004. The only public mention of any of this I have seen was in Newsweek
magazine on January 8, 2005. It quotes Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. secretary of defense at the
time, who discussed the use of the "Salvador Option" in Iraq. It compared the strategy
being planned for Iraq to the one used in Central America during the Reagan
administration:
"Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or
supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed
to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was
quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success-despite
the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
scandal." U.S.-backed sectarian death squads have become the foremost generator of death
in Iraq, even surpassing the U.S. military machine, infamous for its capacity for
industrial-scale slaughter. It is no secret in Baghdad that the U.S. military would
regularly cordon off pro-resistance areas like the al-Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad
and allow "Iraqi police" and "Iraqi army" personnel, masked in black balaclavas, through
their checkpoints to carry out abductions and assassinations in the neighborhood.
Consequently, almost all of Baghdad and much of Iraq is now segregated. The flipside is
that violence in the capital city has subsided somewhat of late now that the endgame of
forming the death squads, that of fragmenting the population, has been mostly
accomplished. Baghdad resident, retired General Waleed al-Ubaidy told my Iraqi colleague
recently, "I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and
that everything is fine, but the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a
dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq." Baghdad today is a divided city. Ahmad
Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad's municipalities told my colleague, Ali
al-Fadhily, "Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and neighborhoods.
There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with. Each is divided into
little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes."
Al-Adhamiyah, on the Russafa side of Tigris River, is now entirely Sunni, the other
areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except for Shula,
Hurriya, and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by Shia militias.
Not being privy to the U.S. machinations, Iraqis in Baghdad blame the Iraqi police and
Iraqi army for the sectarian assassinations and wonder why the U.S. military does little
or nothing to stop them. "The Americans ask [Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki to stop the
sectarian assassinations knowing full well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian
cleansing," says Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni
group. A more recent manifestation of the divisive U.S. policy has been the "purchase"
of members of the largely Sunni resistance in Baghdad and in al-Anbar province that
constitutes one-third of the geographic area of Iraq. Payments made by the U.S. military
to collaborating tribal sheikhs already amount to $17 million. The money passes directly
into the hands of fighters who in many cases were engaged in launching attacks against
the occupiers less than two weeks ago. Tribal fighters are being paid $300 per month to
patrol their areas, particularly against foreign mercenaries. Today the military refers
to these men as "concerned local citizens," "awakening force," or simply "volunteers."
Arguably, violence in the area has temporarily declined. "Those Americans thought they
would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and
tribes," announced a thirty-two-year-old man from Ramadi, who spoke with al-Fadhily on
terms of anonymity, "They know they are sinking deeper into the shifting sand, but the
collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy
against them." By the end of November 2007, the U.S. military had enlisted 77,000 of
these fighters, and hopes to add another 10,000. Eighty-two percent of the fighters are
Sunni. Politically, the U.S. administration maintains its support of the Shia-dominated
government in Baghdad. The fallout has been blatantly clear. On the first of December,
Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Accordance Front, which is the Sunni political bloc in the
Iraqi Parliament, was placed under house arrest by Iraqi and U.S. security forces in the
Adil neighborhood, west of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces also detained his son Makki
and forty-five of his guards. They were accused of manufacturing car bombs and killing
Sunni militia members in the neighborhood who have been working with the U.S. military.
Members of the Accordance Front, which holds 44 of the 275 seats in the Iraqi
Parliament, promptly walked out. Maliki has, several times in the last several weeks,
hurled public accusations and criticisms at al-Dulaimi, sending political and sectarian
shock waves, further crippling the crumbling political process.
It is important to mention that Maliki, a U.S. puppet par excellence, acts only as told.
After the January 2005 elections, the government that came into power had chosen Ibrahim
al-Jaafari as its prime minister. When Jaafari refused to toe the U.S./UK line,
Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart Jack Straw flew to Baghdad, and before their
short trip ended Jaafari was out and Maliki was in as prime minister. In the context of
these facts let us now return to the big question: Will Iraq descend further into a
sectarian nightmare if the occupation ends? An indicator of how things will likely
resolve themselves upon the departure of foreign troops may be drawn from the southern
city of Basra. In early September, 500 British troops left one of Saddam Hussein's
palaces in the heart of the city and ceased to conduct regular foot patrols. According
to the British military, the overall level of violence in the city has decreased 90
percent since then.
This may or may not be a guarantee of a drop in sectarianism upon the departure of the
invading armies, but it does prove that when the primary cause of the violence,
sectarian strife, instability, and chaos is removed from the equation of Iraq, things
are bound to improve rapidly. Are we still going to believe that the occupation is
holding Iraq together?
Dahr Jamail, who spent eight months in Iraq as an independent journalist, is author of
Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
(Haymarket Books, 2007). The New York Times' Stephen Kinzer describes his writing as
"international journalism at its best." Dahr is currently on a national speaking tour
sponsored by Haymarket and his articles can be found at http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/ .
__._,_.___
*** exposing the hidden truth for further educational research only *** CAVEAT LECTOR
***
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes.
NOTE: Some links may require cut and paste into your Internet Browser.
Please check http://groups.google.com/group/total_truth_sciences/topics?gvc=2 more real
news posts and support the truth! (sorry but don't have time to email all posts)
<http://blogs.albawaba.com/alexanderjames/> http://blogs.albawaba.com/alexanderjames/
<http://blogs.albawaba.com/Alexanderjames/page/links>
http://blogs.albawaba.com/Alexanderjames/page/links
<http://www.lulu.com/content/165077> http://www.lulu.com/content/165077;
<http://www.lulu.com/browse/book_view.php?fCID=165077&fBuyItem=5>
http://www.lulu.com/browse/book_view.php?fCID=165077&fBuyItem=5
<http://bb.domaindlx.com/alexjames999> http://bb.domaindlx.com/alexjames999
*** Revealing the hidden Truth For Educational & Further Research Purposes only. ***
Welcome to Real News Edited excerpts, non-partisan, pro-truth-honesty-peace, and
anti-war-lies-crime. The purpose is to expose corruptions, frauds, deceptions, lies,
criminal plans, cover-ups and free-speech silencing by powerful people in governments,
foundations, corporations and media, which are done using the name of democracy, human
rights, false interpretations of religions, cults, occults, patriotism, economy,
business, media, elections, justice, charity, etc., and are used to trick the public
into hatred & wars and out of their lives, money and freedoms, while the propaganda we
are subjected to makes us believe that we have evolved to where such things cannot
happen [remember slavery, apartheid.]. Please share what you learn with others who do
not have access to the internet. This is only a tip of the iceberg. Stop the hatred that
is used to promote the dehumanization of the victims of predatory aggressions;spread the
truth;free your mind from being a Zioncon occupied territory of the neo-feudal lords by
rejecting the mainstream news propaganda. Caution: real news may induce a kind of
schizophrenia because it provides a true vision of reality which is so different from
the one we are presented by the mass media spins. Latest real infonews available at
alternate news. ***** Check whatreallyhappened . com & other alternative news sites for
latest news flashes. In Truth We Trust! The opinions expressed herein contain positions
and viewpoints that are not necessarily those of the recipient, disseminator or others
mentioned in the information. These are offered as a means to stimulate dialogue and
discussion.
NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency (NSA) may
have read emails without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any
judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse, nor protection.......... IF
anyone other than the addressee of this e-mail is reading it, you are in violation of
the 1st & 4th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Patriot Act 5 & H.R.
1955 Disclaimer Notice: This post & all my past & future posts represent parody & satire
& are all intended for entertainment and amusement only.
To be removed from the list, please reply with the subject line "REMOVE"
To receive email at another address, please reply with subject line "CHANGE"
To receive email, please reply with "WEEKLY"
