Doug Henwood wrote:
> > No doubt with much American encouragement and inducement, its
> > called "divide and rule," a classic tool of imperial occupiers
>
> How do you know this is the strategy? On the public record, the US
> authorities have been trying to prevent sectarianism, not encourage
> it. They may be lying, but what's your source?
You only have to look at the policies: putting Ahmed Chalabi in charge of the Higher National Committee for the Eradication of the Ba'ath Party as his personal patrimonial plaything was one thing; integrating the Badr into the security services another; pushing through a sectarian constitution was the decisive political moment in the development of the civil war dynamic.
The US has pursued sectarianism in order to create a state with weak capacity and legitimacy, (but with a strong counterinsurgency stance), so that it would be accountable principally to the occupiers who pervade every embassy and who dish out funds to managers of the state institutions that they created, and which are not susceptible to representative control.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/11/lessons-of-iraq-state-building.html _________________________________________________________________ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d