> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > By the way, reading Patrick Cockburn's book, which
> > I'm doing in small
> > chunks, makes it clear that the sectarian & ethnic
> > violence in Iraq
> > began almost immediately after Saddam fell. Lots of
> > very bad shit was
> > bottled up under his reign.
> >
> >
>
> Think maybe that has something to with why Saddam was
> such a hardass, and not just because he was, like,
> evil and stuff?
>
>
That is a popular interpretation. I wonder how much Saddam's mode of rule
exacerbated those tensions. Looking at the case of the Kurds seems to
suggest that it is because Saddam increased those tensions he had to rule
with a perpetual Iron fist.
I do not know. My non-Kurdish Iraqi friends seem to indicate that by all accounts Saddam was pretty secular and even handed with carrots and the sticks. OTOH my Kurdish friends are pretty sure they got only the sticks. What we need is some adequate history of the country which is not overly biased with respect to the causes of the day.
Travis
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