On Nov 21, 2006, at 3:14 PM, www.leninology. blogspot.com wrote:
> 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.
I forwarded this to Christian Parenti - who, for those who don't know his work, spent about three or four months reporting in Iraq. and wrote an excellent book on the topic (The Freedom) - who comments:
> I think that the US went it with very little in the
> way of strategy and that the Shia pushed alot of what
> happened, like the elections and the constitution...
> but the Kurds (US tools) did put in the most sectarian
> parts about three province veto, etc. de-bathification
> was from Bremer, as far as I know, and was the result
> of ideological zeal by a dude who knew fuck all about
> iraq and was now acknowledged by all, left right and
> center, to have been part of the US imperial suicide.
>
> Yes it seems that divide and rule would have made
> sense but this is meltdown and defeat....