> Fostering civil war is how the US has made Iraq hospitable to an
> 'enduring' American occupation; not by fighting an insurgency, a battle
> it lost two years ago, and certainly not by awaiting the functioning of
> a hopelessly disunited government.
[...]
> As the civil war unravels what's left of the Iraqi state, the fighting
> will become uglier (if that is imaginable) than now, as Donald Rumsfeld
> has reminded us. The Pentagon, in fact, has invested in the training of
> Iraqi death squads, a story from the autumn of 2004 that most have now
> forgotten.
I can't answer Car(r)ol's question as to whether the insurgency can find a way to unseat the US bases, but I will point out that Brightman too raises the notion that the US may in fact be fomenting civil war in Iraq; it was also the topic of a recent article by Robert Fisk:
May 6 / 7, 2006 Is The US Provoking Civil War in Iraq?
Through a Syrian Lens
By ROBERT FISK The Independent
In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.
The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."
Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.
"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."
Just who these "Americans" might be, my source did not say. In the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules.
[...]
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk05062006.html
Doug, you argued vehemently against this idea some weeks ago. Still think it is unthinkable?
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam