US divide, rule tactics exposed
By Stephen Gowans
A US-financed programme to build a Sunni paramilitary Guardian organisation in
Iraq, and US proposals for a soft partition of the country, are the latest
steps in a divide and rule strategy the US is pursuing to keep Iraqis fighting
among themselves so they won't fight the occupation.
Sectarian strife also provides the US with the pretext it needs to establish a
long-term military presence in the country.
The US occupation authority has made ethnicity and religion salient in Iraq,
where once it was a matter of little moment in the daily political lives of
Iraqis.
The US organised elections and the army along sectarian lines. It decided which
parties could run in elections, favouring those that emphasised religious
affiliations (Sunni vs. Shia) and ethnicity (Arab vs. Kurd), while banning the
largest non-sectarian party, the Baath party.
Key government positions were doled out along sectarian lines.
The interior ministry was turned over to the Badr Brigade, a sectarian Shia
paramilitary organisation.
>From head to toe, Iraq has been transformed from a secular society into one in
>which religious and ethnic identity matter.
Imagine the Department of Homeland Security being turned over to the KKK, the
Pentagon to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, while the Democrat and
Republican parties are banned and replaced by religious and ethnic parties.
If ever there was a recipe to get people fighting among themselves, this is it.
The most recent manifestation of the US divide and rule policy is a programme
to create a Sunni paramilitary Guardian force whose mandate is to protect Sunni
neighbourhoods.
Imagine Washington creating a Black paramilitary Guardian force, a White
paramilitary Guardian force and a Hispanic paramilitary Guardian force in the
US.
The effect in sparking racial tension would be the same.
Now, some US policy makers are talking about partitioning Iraq into Kurd, Sunni
and Shia regions. Leading advocates include senior politicians and US ruling
class foundations.
Joseph Biden, chairman of the US Foreign Relations Committee and a candidate
for the Democratic presidential nomination endorses "soft" partition, as does
Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the influential Council on Foreign
Relations.
Last year, the two put together the Biden-Gelb plan, which calls for a "soft"
partition of Iraq.
Soft partition would see Iraq divided into three distinct ethno-religious
regions: Kurdistan, Shiastan and Sunnistan, held together by a weak federal
government.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues the
"time may be approaching when the only hope for a more stable Iraq is soft
partition."
The Brookings Institution, associated with the Rockefellers, is one of the most
influential US ruling class policy-making organisations.
Western politicians portray Iraq as a country whose simmering sectarian
tensions were held in check by the brutal repression of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni
who ruled on behalf of the Sunni population and its political vehicle, the
Baath party.
It's only now that Hussein's tyrannical rule has ended that sectarian conflict
has slipped its restraints and come to the surface. At least, that's the
favoured US view. Trouble is, it's a crock of shit.
When "the Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100 000 senior Iraqi
Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy government posts," 66 000 of them
turned out to be Shiites.
And anyone who cared to check the deck of cards used to list the 55 top Iraqi
officials the US invasion force wanted dead or alive, would discover that half
were Shiite, and the remainder a mix of Sunnis, Christians and Kurds.
The former Ottoman territory that is now Iraq was governed as a single
territory before 1880.
The three provinces that were pieced together in 1921 to form modern Iraq had
no "clear sectarian identities."
"For much of Iraq's history, the two communities (Shia and Sunni) co-existed
peacefully."
Partitioning the country would be no mean feat. "The geographic boundaries do
not run toward partition. There is no Sunnistan or Shiastan."
On the contrary, conditions are "highly commingled" with people "totally
intermixed, especially in the major cities."
Five million Iraqis would have to be moved were the country to be divided into
homogeneous ethno-religious slices.
More importantly, most Iraqis don't want their country partitioned.
"Apart from the Kurds in the north, there is no unanimous, popular demand for
federalism or soft partition or any partition at all."
The 1920 Revolution Brigades, one of three resistance groups to form the
political office of the Iraqi resistance, rejects the idea of a sectarian
division in Iraq.
"Our position," says its spokesman, "is that there are two kinds of people in
Iraq: not Sunni and Shia, Kurdish and Arab, Moslem and Christian, but those who
are with the occupation and those who are against it."
Sectarian divisions in Iraq have been amplified, he says, "as part of the
'British imperial tactic of divide and rule.'"
The British employed the Roman principle of divide et impera to enslave
colonial peoples. The US has taken up the tradition.
"Our endeavour," remarked Lieutenant-Colonel Coke, Commandant of Moradabad
during the middle of the nineteenth century, "should be to uphold in full force
the (for us fortunate) separation which exists between the different religions
and races, not to endeavour to amalgamate them. Divide et impera should be the
principle of Indian government."
Lord Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay, seconded the motion.
"Divide et impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours."
Adumbrating US imperial tactics in Iraq, the British devised a system of
separate electorates in India and separate representation by religion, caste
and ethnicity.
Sound familiar? "The effect of this electoral policy," observed one
commentator, was "to give the sharpest possible stimulus to communal
antagonism."
Prior to British rule in India, there was no trace of the type of Hindu-Moslem
conflict that later emerged under British rule.
"There is no natural inevitable difficulty from the cohabiting of differing
races or religions in one country."
Moslem and Hindu lived side-by-side peacefully until the British arrived in
India; Sunni and Shiite commingled peacefully before the US imposed its
occupation on the country.
"The difficulties arise from social-political conditions.
"They arise, in particular, whenever a reactionary regime is endeavouring to
maintain itself against the popular movement."
In the USSR, diverse religions and races lived together amicably. Germans and
Jews lived together peacefully under Germany's Weimar Republic.
It wasn't until the Nazis emphasised national identity to weaken growing
working class consciousness that systematic persecution of Jews began.
The strategy is simple. The last thing an occupying power wants is for the
people it's dominating to recognise their common situation and interests. Were
they to do that, they might mobilise their energies to fight their common
enemy.
So occupied countries are organised by their occupiers along colour, religious
and ethnic fault-lines.
Iraqis mustn't think of themselves as Iraqis, but as Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds,
locked in a struggle with each other for access to resources. The same is true
within imperialist countries.
People who work for a living mustn't identify with their class, but with their
ethnic, religious or racial cohorts, or must be imbued with patriotism, so that
they equate their personal interests with those of their ruling class.
In this way, Americans and Britons who have nothing to gain personally from
their country's occupation of Iraq, and much to lose, are bamboozled into
supporting the war.
Likewise, employees who have much to gain from coming together as a class are
diverted by racism, religion and patriotism.
Another thing the US divide et impera tactic provides is an excuse to maintain
a military presence in Iraq, and therefore, the continued domination of Iraq by
Washington.
For liberals, the argument that the US can't leave Iraq now, otherwise a
full-scale civil war will erupt, is decisive.
But what this view ignores is that the possibility of a full-scale civil war is
the product of the occupation itself.
Had the US not fomented ethnic and religious divisions, the possibility of a
civil war would never have arisen.
On the other hand, were the US to cease efforts to pit Iraqi against Iraqi, the
occupation - already greatly challenged by the resistance, despite US divide
and rule tactics - would surely be defeated, an outcome the US will never
willingly consent to.
Soft partition, then, seems to those seeking both sectarian peace and US
withdrawal, to be the answer.
But slicing the country up into Sunnistan, Shiastan and Kurdistan, won't set
the stage for a US pull-out.
On the contrary, "senior military planners caution that partition should become
American policy, withdrawal almost certainly wouldn't. Partition would require
a stabilisation force - code for American military presence - of 75 000 to 100
000 troops for years to come."
Heads I win, tails you lose.
No matter what, the US figures to be hanging around Iraq for a long time, using
sectarian tensions as the justification for its ongoing presence.
What will foil these plans are non-sectarian groups, like the 1920 Revolution
Brigades, that recognise there are only two kinds of people in Iraq: those who
are with the occupation and those who are against it. - Trinicenter.com
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"
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