Seth Ackerman wrote:
> This is a wrong on every count...
Okay, let's see how you do.
> 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;
> The US didn't put Chalabi in charge of de-Baathification. His newfound
> allies in the UIA did. A reminder: The US had tried to prevent the UIA
> from winning the Jan. 2005 elections.
No. The UIA did not place Chalabi in charge of de-Baathification. Chalabi was in charge of the de-Baathification committee under the IGC and was later restored in April 2005. It was occupation policy from day one to hollow out the Iraqi state.
The point here is that Chalabi et al were permitted to use the HNCEBP to pursue sectarian political agendas and exert patrimonial control: it isn't only that the US has supported religious sectarianism once it found it difficult to impose a weak despot.
> >> integrating the Badr
> >> into the security services another;
> >
> Again, this happened because decisions by the UIA Interior Minister
> after the elections.
Question-begging.
You assume the US can't stop the decisions of the appointed ministers resulting from in processes it determines: oooh no. The CIA would have found it impossible to stop the Badr Brigades from infiltrating their baby. Steve Casteel, a man with experience dealing with far right death squads, had no conception that such a thing could happen.
You are operating on the assumption that Iraqis determine what happens in the state constructed by America, which isn't a safe assumption, which means that an essential premise is stipulated in your conclusion.
Incidentally, if you want to know who are the main purveyors of sectarianism in the New Iraq, look at the Terror in the Hands of Justice series, run by the SPC, as an anti-Sunni drive.
> >> pushing through a sectarian constitution
> >> was the decisive political moment in the development of the civil
> >> war dynamic.
> >
> Who drafted the constitution? The Shiite and Kurdish parties. When the
> Sunnis objected and sought revisions, who advocated on their behalf? The US.
The US intervened to save the legitimacy of the constitution, not to dispense with it. There's a simple way to test this: did the US, in its interventions, override the commitment to dispersing the most vital powers to the regions? It did not.
> >> The US has pursued sectarianism in order to create a state with weak
> >> capacity and legitimacy, (but with a strong counterinsurgency stance)
> >
> Let's remember something. The US fought tooth and nail to prevent free
> elections.
Hence my talk of weak legitimacy.
> It was forced to allow them only after the Shiites threatened
> armed rebellion. During the election, most of the parties ran blatantly
> sectarian campaigns. Only a handful of parties campaigned on a
> cross-sectarian platform of national unity, notably Iyad Allawi's INA -
> i.e., the very party that the CIA was not-so-covertly aiding.
The INA was not endorsed as a party of national unity: it could not claim to be that, since it had the support of practically no one. It was endorsed as the pro-occupation party, one willing to raze Sunni areas to the ground at that. Nor did the CIA expect him to win, unless we simply assume that they had no polling. They simply wished to bolster the position of their most pliable allies, but had been working with the SCIRI since the war ended and fully expected to continue to do so.
> The
> non-sectarian parties got crushed and the Shiite parties swept the
> board. That didn't happen because of the US, it happened despite the US.
No, that's the wrong axis.
The parties with mass appeal won, and those without mass appeal did not, despite the US. The US had no particular hostility to sectarianism in Iraq: after all, they had been working with the SCIRI since the occupation began. It is incorrect to assume that the US backed Allawi because he was a nationalist, whatever that means. He fulfilled precisely the functions that the US would wish from a weak state: he was extremely repressive toward the domestic populace while being predominantly accountable to the US. _________________________________________________________________ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d