The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Divide and conquer

Divide and conquer
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Wednesday, March 25 2009, 4:11:50 (CET)
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A few days ago in the Middle East I met the leader or "emir" of one of the largest mainstream Iraqi resistance groups, the Sunni-based Islamic army. In his first interview with a western journalist, Sheikh Abu Yahya argued that the US had "suffered a historic defeat in Iraq, not only militarily, but also politically and morally". There was no question, he said, of the resistance following the path of collaboration taken by the highly unstable Awakening Councils, most of whose members only joined because of poverty and unemployment: "We will continue fighting until the last American soldier leaves Iraq, however long that takes."

But he accepted that the full-scale sectarian war unleashed in 2006-7, which he blamed on the US and Iran, had undermined the resistance and "reduced the scale" of America's defeat. "The mutual sectarian cleansing only happened after Negroponte arrived," Abu Yahya said, referring to the US ambassador to Iraq from 2004-5 who attracted notoriety as envoy to Honduras during the dirty war against the Sandinistas in the 1980s. "We think that when the US failed to beat the Sunni resistance, it decided to let the Shia wage war on us to neutralise the threat."

Describing how US troops would come to a resistance stronghold, search for arms, encircle the area with tanks and then allow government-armed Shia militias to infiltrate and kill, Abu Yahya remarked: "When the jihad started, we only fought the Americans - but when the militia came, we had to fight on two fronts." The creation of the Awakening Councils had caused even greater problems "because they came from within and were able to pass on details about the resistance".

The truth is that the US played the sectarian card from the first days of the occupation, creating an administration and constitution based on a Lebanese-style confessional and ethnic carve-up of government jobs - which, in the context of Iraq's complex and already damaged social fabric, laid the ground for a national maelstrom. That was fed by the vicious anti-Shia sectarianism of al-Qaida, brought to Iraq courtesy of the US invasion. The virus of Sunni-Shia confrontation then spread throughout the region, feeding the Arab "cold war" that now splits Lebanese, Palestinians and states across the Middle East.

This was a classic colonial divide and rule strategy that bought the US occupation time and brought Iraqis misery.


Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/19/iraq-occupation



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