For nearly four years, the Bush administration has justified the occupation of Iraq with a series of fairy tales. The "weapons of mass destruction" story came first, and "exporting democracy" followed it. Today, "preventing civil war" is the new story, but this one is losing legitimacy with every passing car bomb. In fact, the United States is causing, not preventing, the sectarian violence in an effort to divide-and-rule Iraq so that they can privatize Iraq's oil industry uninhibited. The only possibility for stability is for the United States to withdraw immediately.
As in any country that is militarily occupied, the Iraqi people are resisting, and polls show that at least 65 percent of Iraqis believe that attacks on occupying troops are justified. After the November 2004 battle of Fallujah, the United States discovered it could not destroy the insurgency through sheer force. Generals were alarmed that Shiites had sent aid to Sunni fighters, and at the possibility of a united resistance. Two months later, Newsweek magazine revealed that the military was considering training squads of Kurds and Shiites to hunt and kill Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers. One general said, "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. … From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation." They referred to this plan as the Salvador option.
The Salvador option was named for the last time the United States sponsored death squads to quell an insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. The United States armed militias who wiped out the rebellion against El Salvador's military government by murdering tens of thousands of civilians and rebel sympathizers. Human rights advocate Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while he performed mass. The Reagan administration considered the policy in El Salvador a great success. One of the architects of the slaughter in El Salvador was then-ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte. In early 2005, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Iraq.
A year after the Newsweek story, the outgoing United Nations chief of human rights for Iraq revealed that Shiite and Kurdish death squads, operating out of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, were murdering hundreds of Sunnis per month. Iraq veteran Chanan Suarez Diaz recalled, "I remember how we worked with Kurdish commandos, who hated the Sunnis. I remember doing ops at night, and the commandos would come with us. For U.S. soldiers, mosques were a no-go zone, … but Kurdish forces were allowed to go in, and they didn't have any mercy. They were ruthless." As in El Salvador, the United States is using thugs to do its dirty work, and it could push Iraq into civil war.
Before the U.S. occupation, Iraq had no history of sectarian violence. Many Iraqi tribes are half Sunni and half Shiite, and even Saddam's Baath Party had high-ranking officials from both sects. When journalist Robert Fisk asked one Iraqi man about the possibility of civil war in 2004, the man replied, "Why do you and the Americans want us to have a civil war? … I am a Sunni married to a Shia woman. Do you want me to kill my wife?" Last year, after the bombing of a Shiite mosque at Samarra, tens of thousands of Shiite and Sunni protesters took to the streets, chanting "No Shia or Sunni, this country we shall not sell."
Despite the fact that sectarianism played little role in Iraq before the occupation, the United States made every effort to drive a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis. When the United States established the Iraqi Governing Council directly after the invasion in 2003, the council was not divided by political party, but by religion and ethnicity. In the October 2005 elections, Iraqis were unable to vote by candidate and were forced to choose from a list of parties divided by sect. The inevitable result was a "sectarian census" and deepened the divisions. Iraqi exile and journalist Sami Ramadini explains, "Any institution that [the United States] had a hand in forming had to be divided on a sectarian basis. This is completely alien to the country's general traditions over hundreds of years."
The tactic of divide-and-rule in Iraq is not new. The British also played different sects off one another during their reign after WWI. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George explained in 1920 that Iraq would slip into civil war if they left. Not only did this not occur, but Shiites and Sunnis united to drive the British from power. Although sectarianism in Iraq is increasing, civil war can still be avoided, but only if the source of the instability, the U.S. occupation, is removed. To further explore these questions and how we can end the war, the International Socialist Organization will be holding a meeting, "Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal" tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Humanities 1641.
Paul Pryce is a junior and a member of the International Socialist Organization.
