Segregated Communities in Iraq

May Spell Trouble

As Iraqis who fled their homes during the war begin to return, some are finding it safer to move into areas inhabited by other members of their sect, creating segregated communities of Shia and Sunni Muslims at ever-increasing rates.
The country has seen a drop in sectarian violence as a result, but some observers are concerned by the trend's other possible consequences.

This does not bode well for a countries citizens, that once lived in relative comfort in a mixed religious/tribal sectarian society, under the rule of a dictatorship once propped up by the west.

Now, as Iraqis return -- due to the decline in violence or because they ran out of money or face new visa restrictions in other countries -- many cannot move back to their homes because they are destroyed or occupied by other families, or they are choosing to live elsewhere.

Ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and sections of the country, taking place under the control of an occupying military, may be bringing a calm to the destructive violence, but it leaves these area's wide open to control of sectarian groups and not a weak central government.

International Organization for Migration - Report {PDF}

And since about one-third of Iraqis are in mixed marriages, "we're getting reports of families who are being split up," Ferris noted.

We have already seen the reports of how our occupation is contributing by walling off neighborhoods of Baghdad, in that report as well as this and this one which also has this video slide show, Fortress Baghdad.

And as I was writing this {home with a flu bug} NPR aired this report:
Baghdad Neighborhoods' Future Security Uncertain

Morning Edition, February 14, 2008 · With the downturn in violence, some Baghdad neighborhoods have begun to spring back to life. Iraqi forces have been taking more responsibility for security. But with U.S. military officials committed to bringing some troops home by mid-summer, some Iraqis are beginning to ask what the city will look like a few months from now. Peter Kenyon
You can listen here

We created the extremely dangerous unstability by our invasion, in this War of Choice, and we have perpetuated that unstability by our longterm occupation and support of the puppet government!

Will what is taking place in Iraq, under the U.S. occupation, create an even more unstable country and regional problems leading to even more danger to the National Security of this country, and citizens of, and others than already may exist?

Time will tell, but I believe it will, for it was the failed foreign policies of the past and recent present that brought us to this evolving destructive point in todays World!

We aren't "Fighting them over there so as to not fight them here.", we are creating even more hatreds, in once innocent people in that country and enhancing the hatreds within the region, and for some they will lash out in the blowback of 'Criminal Terrorism', and already have!

Under the Ideologies of Conservative Republicanism and National Security this is the direction of this Countries Policies:

Enhance more Hatreds anywhere possible, through propaganda, destruction, mass death, under the terms 'Freedom' and 'Democracy' in order to Continue threats against from similar Failed Policies of Past!

Those Hatreds lead to 'Blowback' by recipients of the many Failed Policies called 'Criminal Terrorism'!

Take the word 'Terrorism', while practicing same, and paste it on any group needed to Enhance the Fear in Populations causing Perpetual Conflicts and Huge Profits for any Military Industrial Complex and Control by same for Further Policies set up to Fail!

And when 'Johnny and Jane' come Marching Home, Dump Them {that one cuts across all Political Ideology and This Society }

It's Not 'Strong on National Defense', it Destroys 'National Defense' and brings about more and more 'Conflicts of Choice' for Greed and Power!

If we don't hold those Responsible for the Wrath of Failed Policies Instituted than in the eyes of the World 'We Have Excepted All That Has Been Done In Our Names' and are thus Just As Guilty!

Watch the Video CBS NEWS won't put on TV

Even though CBS's Senior Foreign Correspondent in Baghdad, Lara Logan pleaded for them to air This Video Report From Iraq (may take a while to load so be patient), they were only willing to place it online at the CBS website. When you watch it you will see why. It doesn't fit the Bush/Cheney narrative to which the cowed (or complicit) corporate media news organizations have acquiesced.

Read Lara Logan's frustrated email about her bosses' refusal to air her report on any CBS newscast, and her plea to the online community to promote her story and provide links to it (via media channel dot org ) here:

From: lara logan
Subject: help
The story below only appeared on our CBS website and was not aired on CBS. It is a story that is largely being ignored, even though this is taking place every single day in central Baghdad, two blocks from where our office is located.

Our crew had to be pulled out because we got a call saying they were about to be killed, and on their way out, a civilian man was shot dead in front of them as they ran.

I would be very grateful if any of you have a chance to watch this story and pass the link on to as many people you know as possible. It should be seen. And people should know about this.

If anyone has time to send a comment to CBS – about the story – not about my request, then that would help highlight that people are interested and this is not too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore.

Many, many thanks.

The Next Jihadists: Iraq’s Lost Children

Newsweek has another Powerful Report coming out in it's Jan 22nd Issue.
Many, well before this Debacle started, and in the lead up to and since, were warning about this scenario of the youth growing up under Occupation, Death, Destruction of their Country and their People and what it might bring in the future.
This is Much Worse than Vietnam, than they only wanted us Out Of Their Country, now National Security, not only here but Around The World, are The Aces In The Deck!!
And those Aces have already been dealt!

Not only the young of Iraq and possibly Afganistan, but the youth of that whole region, and the children they may have will share in the hatreds that have been wrought!

The 64 thousand dollar question is "For How Many Generations?"!

My belief now is that it has gone way to far and will be an extremely long time, if ever, when the realities and common sense can bring about change in peoples minds and hearts, especially in that region but also here!

The universal question in the U.S., after 9/11, was "Why Do They Hate Us So?". That question was easy to answer than, if one wasn't apathedic of world affairs, because of our failed foreign policies for decades in that region, and it's even easier to answer now, it's laid out before us! Not just in a War Waged for Absolutely NO REASON, but also in the rethoric of hate and childish hateful name calling spoken on our public airways and read on many of these online boards and in the main stream media as well! Not only as to those who are fighting our occupation and now their own sectarian griefs, but we lump a whole peoples, because of religious beliefs and regional ideologies into the same label 'Terrorists', which is a criminal act by the few, but growing number, and should be looked at as same, Criminal!

Iraq's Young Blood
There's also a photo gallery at the site with descriptions of each photo.

Newsweek

Jan. 22, 2007 issue - Ammar will tell you he's proud to be carrying a gun. His father was a brigadier in Saddam Hussein's Army, a man who saw combat in his country's several wars, and from an early age Ammar had accompanied him to the shooting range. "I got used to the sound of guns then," Ammar says. So he was ready, last fall, when the imam in his Baghdad neighborhood urged residents to take up arms against the invader—who in this case happened to be members of a Shiite militia trying to push into the predominantly Sunni area. Ammar joined the neighborhood watch, a ragtag bunch of men who stand guard nightly at improvised roadblocks and rooftop observation posts. In mid-October Ammar fought his first big battle against soldiers from the Mahdi Army—"the garbage collectors and robbers," as he contemptuously refers to the Shiite militia. He says he put his Kalashnikov assault rifle to good use: "I think I injured or even killed two of them. Our group killed more than six of them that night."

There is no need to brainwash a child into becoming, in that region, a Jihadist. they are there, it is their countries, it is their regions, they are living the hell 24/7, and many can't leave. They don't serve a tour of one year, they serve a tour of duration, if they survive!

Sectarian warfare is reshaping Iraq in all sorts of malevolent ways day in and day out. But it is also forging the future by poisoning the next generation of Iraqis. Like many of its neighbors, Iraq is a young country: nearly half the population is under the age of 18. And those children have had a particularly turbulent upbringing. Kids like Ammar were born in the aftermath of one debilitating war, against neighboring Iran, then suffered two others and years of impoverishing sanctions in between. They are especially vulnerable to the demons that now grip Iraq. Hassan Ali, a sociologist at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, estimates that at least 1 million Iraqi kids have seen their lives damaged by the war—they've lost parents and homes, watched as their communities have been torn apart by sectarian furies. "These children will come to believe in the principles of force and violence," says Ali. "There's no question that society as a whole is going to feel the effects in the future"—and not only Iraqi society. From the Middle East to Europe to America, violence may well beget violence around the world for years to come.

As generations grow farther away from old hatreds and failed policies they become very distant memories to each succesive generation, untill the fires are stoked, than those hatreds come roaring back and grip the newer generation into actions they never would have been involved in only a short time before. Than the Pandora's Box is completely broken, leaving nothing to encase those hatreds in, and they run rampant for long periods of time leaving death and destruction in their wake!

Blood and Memory: The Cycle Has Started
Iraq's vendettas could haunt the west for years.

Blood feuds flourish where family ties are strong and the rule of law is weak. Add the righteousness of competing faiths along with fierce memories of ancient wrongs and you have the makings of savage, seemingly endless conflicts from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, the lake regions of Africa to the arid Holy Land. And Iraq—well, Iraq is in a class by itself: a breeder reactor where explosive hatreds were both incited and contained by Saddam Hussein's brutality, only to become an uncontrolled chain reaction after the U.S.-led invasion liberated both the country and its vendettas. Arab culture cannot be solely blamed for the furies that have been unleashed in Iraq since 2003. But it guarantees they will not be soon, or easily, tamed.

We allowed the Flood gates to be open to these old hatreds and have made more growing hatreds the reality now. We invaded a country, once again for No Reason, we destroyed and killed and are still carrying out that death and destruction, we installed another puppet government, in a country we had already done the same before, we are picking sides in the sectarian violence that those who led the charge for this War had Absolutely No Understanding of before and still don't!

The tradition of "an eye for an eye" is so ancient and dangerously ingrained among the desert Arabs that 1,400 years ago the Qur'an called on good Muslims to forgo vengeance in order to expiate their sins. But the old codes of honor remained, and in the most troubled parts of Iraq today, increasingly, they prevail. When governments cannot or will not protect the people, then families, clans, tribes, gangs and militias will. (Indeed, among the Shiites of Karbala, gang rule has a history as old and complex as the mafia in Sicily.) As these groups gain strength, the central government and its modern institutions weaken further.

Blame for the Top Brass
And I would add to their title the Extreme Blame to the Civilian Leadership of This Country!

Given all the recriminations over the mess in Iraq, it is remarkable how little criticism has fallen on the U.S. military. Americans want to honor the sacrifice of the troops in the field and they may feel guilty about the cold reception given many veterans returning from the Vietnam War. But in the public blame game that's erupted on Capitol Hill and on the cable news talk shows, the armed services are largely given a free pass.
Some top soldiers, however, aren't so sure they should be let off the hook. Is there, NEWSWEEK asked retired Gen. William Nash, who commanded U.S. forces in Bosnia in the 1990s and remains plugged in, a sense within the Army of mistakes made in Iraq? "It's pervasive," he answered. Gen. Jack Keane, the Army vice chief of staff at the time of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, told NEWSWEEK: "Everyone recognizes that we made mistakes. The harder part is what to learn from them."

MISTAKES!!! The Mistake was going in in the first place The Mistake was not understanding that one does not Kill and Destroy others into their thoughts of 'Freedom' and their ideology of 'Democracy', especially as they redefine that 'Democracy' in their own land which is looking more and more like a redefined ideology of the old Fascisms that was thought to be beaten down!

A Defining Realignment

Ted Kennedy speaks with the voice of history. White-maned and nearing 75, the brother of two assassinated heroes and a veteran of 44 Senate years, he is—in defiance of the odds—again in his prime: a chairman in good health with a doting wife and a packed legislative agenda.
No one tells Ted Kennedy what to do; in any case, the Senate's Democratic leaders were fine with his plan to give a big speech two days before President George W. Bush announced a troop "surge" in Iraq. They are generally glad to let Kennedy play the role he relishes: Irish-American Isaiah, calling his party to account even as legislative insiders keep their distance.
This time party brass got more than they bargained for. Summoning the authority of his years as an intimate witness to history, Kennedy made an eloquent case for a Senate vote on the surge and for a court test of its legitimacy under the War Powers Resolution. "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam!" he thundered. "Echoes of that disaster are all around us today!"
It was, in its own way, a defining moment. He got a standing ovation and, the next day, congratulations all around on the Hill. By the end of the week—in the aftermath of Bush's tepid speech and Condi Rice's evasive testimony—Kennedy looked prescient.

The voices of intelligent experiances and lessons learned, not just a Kennedy but millions strong, were completely shut off, called 'Focus Groups' by what has been shown over and over an extremely unintelligent group of power brokers and their minions!
I believe these minions would follow this group into another 'Jonestown' if called upon, that's how empty headed they frankly are, empty words, empty rethoric, consistantly wrong, and consistantly biggotted!

We Might 'Win', But Still Lose
Colonel Duke says the Mahdi Army is 'sitting on the 50-yard line, eating popcorn, watching us do their work for them.'
'Win', one does not win a Guerilla War, they may shutdown, for a short time, sectarian violence, but as has already been seen that violence will rear it's ugly head once again for the hatreds have been unleased and by us still being there and supporting our puppets those hatreds will remain!

Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's Rape Of Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +
Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America's Rape Of Iraq 3,017 - plus
The Rape of Iraq Costs $357,490,957,418 and counting by the minute
See the cost in your community

The Failed Policies will Haunt Us and the World for Decades!

Bush Iraq Policy Murky on the Real Enemy

Gareth Porter*, IPS-Inter Press Service



WASHINGTONM, Dec 28 (IPS) - This year saw the emergence of a sectarian civil war in Iraq and much more open Sunni-Shiite conflict in the Middle East. Sunni regimes in the region expressed acute anxiety both about the possibility of the Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq spreading to their own countries and about the growth of Iranian influence.

In that setting, the most striking thing about the George W. Bush administration's policy in 2006 has been its inability to identify the primary enemy in Iraq.

Is it al Qaeda in Iraq? Bush often implies that they are the real enemy, suggesting that the U.S. must fight the enemy in Iraq so it doesn't have to fight them at home.

Is it the armed Sunni resistance groups, who were the original target of a U.S. counterinsurgency war that is now an all but officially admitted failure?

Or is it the Mahdi army of Moqtada al Sadr, which has been implicated in large-scale killings of Sunnis in the Baghdad area and which is aligned with Iran in the conflict between Washington and Tehran?

And what about the Badr organisation, which is known to be responsible for mass kidnapping, torture and what many now call ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from predominantly Shiite neighbourhoods in Baghdad?

Is Iraq really about the global war on terror, the alleged threat from Iran, the danger emanating from sectarian war, or simply the administration's desire to claim success against the resistance to the occupation itself? The Bush administration has not been able to issue a clear policy statement on that question.

The original source of the administration's confusion over its primary enemy in Iraq was the decision to sell the counterinsurgency war in Iraq to the U.S. public in 2004-2005 as a struggle between a nascent democratic state and anti-democratic forces in the country.

That public line obscured the underlying reality of a sectarian struggle for power complicated by the desire of the militant Shiite parties for revenge against Sunnis for Saddam Hussein's abuses.

Unfortunately, the White House and the Pentagon seem to have internalised their own propaganda line. When unmistakable evidence of the Shiite militias' sectarian violence against Sunnis emerged in 2005, the administration was reluctant to admit that reality. Former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi lamented publicly in mid-2005 that U.S. officials "have no vision and no clear policy" on preventing a downward spiral of sectarian violence.

That deficit in U.S. policy was the consequence of the administration's focus on defeating the Sunni resistance -- an effort that required an alliance with the very militant Shiite forces who were behind the paramilitary violence against Sunnis.

But it became increasingly clear in 2005 that the alliance with Shiites against the Sunni resistance was not succeeding, because the resistance was growing stronger rather than weaker. In the latter half of 2005, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad became convinced that the United States had to win over Sunnis through a political compromise rather than defeating them militarily.

Other influential figures in the administration, apparently including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, argued that the Sunni resistance, which they called "rejectionists", merely wanted to regain power. That view, explicitly expressed in the administration's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" of Nov. 30, 2005, suggested that there could be no accommodation with the armed Sunni groups.

But Khalilzad had Bush's ear, and by January 2006, he was engaged in direct negotiations with a coalition of armed organisations claiming to represent the bulk of the anti-coalition Sunni forces. U.S. officials in Baghdad were going so far as to characterise the Sunni insurgents as legitimate nationalists who had sharp conflicts with al Qaeda. Those negotiations, never acknowledged by the Bush administration but confirmed by detailed accounts by Sunni negotiators, were aimed at ending the resistance in return for recognition of essential Sunni political interests and integration of the Sunni resistance forces into a new Iraqi army.

An agreement with the Sunni leaders would have suggested that the real enemy was not the Sunni resistance but sectarian Shiites aligned with Iran. At a time when the Bush administration was seeking to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme by suggesting that the "military option" was still on the table, the U.S negotiations with the Sunni resistance were apparently spurred by a common concern with Iranian influence in Iraq, which was believed to be exercised through those Shiite groups that had been trained in Iran or had gotten Iranian financial support during the election campaign.

The Sunnis claimed they proposed to Khalilzad taking on the Shiite militias in Baghdad with U.S. support. Khalilzad's public pressures on the Shiites in late 2005 and early 2006 to curb the sectarian militias seemed to suggest just such a realignment.

The Sunni demand for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, however, apparently scuttled the deal, even though it was flexible and related to a timetable for building the new Iraqi army. Despite a three-month flirtation with a Sunni strategy, Bush decided in March 2006 not to pursue it.

But from then on, the administration's definition of the enemy was no longer so clear. Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey reached a remarkable agreement on a joint statement that bore all the earmarks of a compromise on that issue. In an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times in April, they said "the principle threat to stability is shifting from an insurgency grounded on rejection of the new political order to sectarian violence grounded in mutual fears and recriminations."

That carefully-worded formula allowed the military to continue its counterinsurgency war against the Sunni resistance, while supporting Khalilzad's argument that the main problem for the United States in Iraq was not the Sunni resistance but al Qaeda terrorists on one side and the extremist Shiites on the other. It came in the wake of the first major escalation of sectarian violence in the Baghdad area in late February and early March. The number of civilian victims of sectarian violence increased from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, according to the United Nations.

The general agreement that Iraq was already engulfed in a sectarian civil war put intense pressure on the administration to show that it was doing something about that problem. Over the summer, the U.S. military command in Iraq and its Iraqi counterpart mounted what was touted as a decisive new security plan for Baghdad and put 15,000 additional U.S. troops in the capital.

But the intensified security operations in Baghdad did not focus on sectarian militias. A U.S. command spokesman admitted that U.S. and Iraqi forces were continuing to round up suspected Sunni insurgents in Baghdad, even though they are not believed to be involved in terrorism against Shiite civilians. The United Nations reported last month that civilian deaths from sectarian violence reached 3,709 in October.

Even after the Iraq Study Group's recommendation for a major withdrawal of U.S. forces in 2007, Bush appears to be poised for a "surge" or even a "big push", sending as many as 40,000 additional troops to Iraq. But Bush has been unwilling to identify which of the several forces in Iraq would be the target of those additional U.S. forces.

The administration has also warmed up to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the militant Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq in the hope of politically isolating the more openly anti-U.S. Moqtada al-Sadr. Al-Hakim and SCIRI, which are linked to the sectarian violence of the Badr brigade and are ideologically aligned with Iran, have been the strongest political force for sectarian war against Sunnis. They were the main target of Khalilzad's anti-sectarian rhetoric a year ago.

Since Bush has touted the occupation of Iraq as the frontline in the war on terror, he might be expected to focus like a laser on al Qaeda as the primary enemy. After all, he routinely cited the threat of creating a "terrorist haven" in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw without "victory". But by continuing a war against the Sunni resistance forces and providing unconditional support for largely Shiite military and police forces, the administration has effectively taken the pressure off al Qaeda in Iraq.

The major Sunni resistance organisations, which have already been in an undeclared war with al Qaeda since before the 2005 constitutional referendum, would appear to be in the best position to defeat the al Qaeda networks in Iraq if they could focus their efforts on that foe. But their main concern remains the war being waged by the U.S., Shiite and Kurdish forces against them.

Bush's de facto support for militant Iraqi Shiites against the anti-jihadist Sunni resistance has been a losing proposition from every perspective. It has increased regional tensions by appearing to strengthen Iraqi forces aligned with Iran, fueled sectarian war and eased the pressure on the one enemy on which most U.S. citizens might agree should be targeted -- al Qaeda in Iraq. Clarifying the murky logic driving that policy and its consequences may be a major preoccupation of U.S. Senate committees in 2007.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in June 2005. (END/2006)