On 3/7/06, Colin Brace <cb at lim.nl> wrote:
> Interview, Lateline - ABC Australia, 03/02/2006:
>
> The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying
> to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda,
> it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death
> squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of
> Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays
> the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation
> authorities.
>
> [...]
>
> Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society. People are
> intermarried. Shiites and Sunnis marry each other. It's not a question
> of having a huge block of people here called Shiites and a huge block
> of people called Sunnis any more than you can do the same with the
> United States, saying Blacks are here and Protestants are here and so
> on. But certainly, somebody at the moment is trying to provoke a civil
> war in Iraq. Someone wants a civil war. Some form of militias and
> death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in
> Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are
> trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al
> Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the
> death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry
> of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who
> pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the
> occupation authorities. I'd like to know what the Americans are doing
> to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems
> to me not very much. We don't hear of any suicide bombers being
> stopped before they blow themselves up. We don't hear of anybody
> stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads
> all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad.
> Something is going wrong with the Administration. Mr Bush says, "Oh,
> yes, sure, I talk to the Shiites and I talk to the Sunnis." He's
> talking to a small bunch of people living behind American machine guns
> inside the so-called Green Zone, the former Republican palace of
> Saddam Hussein, which is surrounded by massive concrete walls like a
> crusader castle. These people do not and cannot even leave this
> crusader castle. If they want to leave to the airport, they're
> helicoptered to the airport. They can't even travel on the airport
> road. What we've got at the moment is a little nexus of people all of
> whom live under American protection and talk on the telephone to
> George W Bush who says, "I've been talking to them and they have to
> choose between chaos and unity." These people can't even control the
> roads 50 metres from the Green Zone in which they work.
>
> [...]
>
> We discovered here in Lebanon - and this city I'm talking to you from
> - that, during the civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990 and
> killed 150,000 people, that there were many outside powers involved in
> promoting death squads and militias here, and paying militias, not
> just Arab powers, but European powers were involved in stirring the
> pot in Lebanon. I think we're being very naive. Just because I can't
> give you the detail, like, of who ordered this death squad, doesn't
> prevent us saying that something is wrong with the narrative we're
> being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the
> Iraqi Government. There is something going wrong. Iraqis are not
> suicidal people. They don't go around blowing up mosques every day.
> It's not a natural thing for them to do. It's never happened before. I
> can't say to you, "Well, ok, here is the person who killed this
> person, or here's the person who left this explosive truck." All I am
> saying to you is that it is time we said, "Hang on a minute, this is
> not how it looks."
>
> [...]
>
> full: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12137.htm
> --
> Colin Brace
> Amsterdam
>
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