US now 'the common enemy'

[hedgetrimmer]

~SNIP~
From AFP
April 09, 2004
SUNNI and Shiite Muslims have found a common enemy in the US-led coalition occupying Iraq, while the violence raging across the country is partly linked to the approaching return of Iraqi sovereignty, experts said Thursday.

Any power occupying a foreign country has two options, said Nadim Shehadi, an expert from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

"You can divide and rule, or you can attack everybody and the effect is that you unite them against you," Shehadi told AFP.

The latter was the situation now faced by the United States and its allies in Iraq, he said.

... more ...

link: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9231678%255E2703,00.html

[PartyPooper]

1. Well, I guess this will all change and come together on June 30.

After all, Rummy and Junior said so!

:eyes:

[jean]

2. b*sh can claim he is a uniter, not a divider...and he's not talking math

[progressivebydesign]

3. Does this mean no civil war after all? N/T

[IndianaGreen]

5. "Civil war" is a claim being made by the people that said Iraq had WMDs

There is no civil war, and there won't be one. Iraqis are united against their common foe.

Rent the film Red Dawn, which deals with a Soviet occupation of the US, and you will see American patriots doing to the occupiers the same thing Iraqi patriots are doing to us.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

8. No.

Iraqis, first of all, are not "united." At least not yet. Even if their short term goal is the same - evicting the US from Iraq, there has been absolutely no movement whatsoever in the long-term goals of either group. Second, few if any believe that any newfound love between the Sunnis and Shiites would last beyond a theoretical eviction of US troops from the country. Since we're not leaving anyway, the most that can be said is that it's mutually beneficial to Sadr's milita and the Sunni insurgents to say publically that they're together, even if they're not in any ideological, political, factional, or tribal sense. You know, these folks understand public relations, too. They understand that by saying "we are united" to the media, it scares the piss out of everyone, even if it really isn't true. For the sake of argument, let's say that we get our butts roundly kicked and come home. Then what? The Sunnis and Shiites haven't given up their ambitions to dominate the political, economic, and religious life of Iraq. The Sunnis still have most of the trained soldiers and equipment. The Shiites still have more people. Al Qaeda is still there trying to destabilize things. There will be no government. The governing council exists only because we prop it up. Without the funamental insitutions of consensus-building, and with the ensuing poverty and almost inevitable interference by Iran and other 3rd parties, the country will inevitably descent into civil war and probably generate wider destabilization in the middle east as various governments and religious groups outside of Iraq are forced to take sides in the conflict.
But anyway, that's all besides the point, because we aren't leaving. I don't see how this can be any more clear - If we leave, Iran most likely gains control of about 1/3 of the physical area of Iraq, and probably a great deal of its oil, through assistance to the Iraqi Shiites. There's no universe in which any President of the United States, democrat or republican, would sit idly by while this happened.


(edits: grammar and clarification of a few points)

[TheWizardOfMudd]

9. yibbe

I have never read a more logical and cogent argument exemplifying why Bush was a total evil moron to ever go into Iraq with the intent to overthrow and install a new government.

Of course, anyone with half of a brain knew that before the words "Operation Iraqi Freedom" were ever uttered on the Fox News Network.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

11. Thanks.

Thanks. I was getting tired of all the 1-liner responses in these threads.

Yeah, Bush just got this one totally wrong. They went into a country where ethnic/tribal tensions were being held in check by fear and strong-arm tactics, and they got rid of the strong man. The genie is out of the bottle now. We had a chance in the last year to really make this thing work - to reduce tribal tension and get people to work together. Instead, what do we do? Insist on de-baathification (in other words, taking every Sunni with gov't experience out of the running for future gov't jobs), disband the army (most higher-ranking officers were Sunni,) and do nothing to help the poorer Shiite elements of society. We could have made progress towards healing these wounds. We didn't. Now everybody will pay the price.

[TheWizardOfMudd]

12. yibbe

You articulated that better than I have ever read, including facts of which I was previously unaware.

Thank you.

[pinniped]

10. Exactly! The gunnut bu$h repukes absolutely love that movie.

n/t

[ktranz]

4. "I'm a Uniter, not a Divider"

the damn bastard finally done it

[Maat]

7. That was the first thought that went through my head!

He is a Uniter!

[truthisfreedom]

6. well, aside from the insurmountable problems of bushco, how exactly

would YOU suggest that we divide and conquer in a country where division is the norm?

[radfringe]

13. it's been said that the quickest way to unite a people

is to give them a common enemy...

<<<sarcasm ahead>>>

way to go george! you are truely a uniter! You have exceeded the goals of the United Nations by uniting the world...against us......

[the_red_pill]

14. putting differences aside

Why can't people do this all the time rather than only when it is convenient? Just how different is Shiite from Sunni? Its amazing to me how throught human history, religion, which in itself should guide a person to do the right thing, is instead an excuse to hate someone.

[Hekate]

16. How different are any 2 sects of the same religion that kill each other...

...in the name of God?

European soil is soaked with the blood of "heretics" -- fairly ordinary Christians who had the gall to think differently than the Roman Catholic Church. Later, Protestants were persecuted by the Church; and later still the roles were reversed. Ireland has centuries of resentment built up over Protestant Britain persecuting/oppressing Catholic Ireland.

Thomas Jefferson and the rest knew this history intimately, and it had everything to do with their desire to keep religion out of government and government out of religious hands. (So Scalia can take his theocracy and shove it.)

Hekate

[newyawker99]

18. Hi the_red_pill!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Manix]

15. Yup.......Bring it on the imbecile said

[tlcandie]

17. Bush and Blair have lit a fire which could consume them /Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1188142,00.html
<snip>
Others, to judge by the performance of the neocon writer William Shawcross and Blairite MP Ann Clwyd, have been reduced to a state of stuttering incoherence by the scale of bloodshed and suffering they have helped unleash. Clwyd, who regularly visits Iraq as the prime minister's "human rights envoy", struggled to acknowledge in an interview on Monday that bombing raids by US F16s and Apache helicopter gunships on Iraqi cities risked causing civilian deaths, not merely injuries. The following day, 16 children were reportedly killed in Falluja when US warplanes rocketed their homes. And yesterday, in what may well be the most inflammatory act of slaughter yet, a US helicopter killed dozens of Iraqis in a missile assault on a Falluja mosque.

The attack on a mosque during afternoon prayers will, without doubt, swell the ranks of what has become a nationwide uprising against the US-led occupation. By launching a crackdown against the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - and, in an eloquent display of what it means by freedom in occupied Iraq, closing his newspaper - the US has finally triggered the long-predicted revolt across the Shia south and ended the isolation of the resistance in the so-called Sunni triangle. Bush, Blair and Bremer have lit a fire in Iraq which may yet consume them all. The evidence of the past few days is that the uprising has spread far beyond the ranks of Sadr's militia. And far from unleashing the civil war US and British pundits and politicians have warned about, Sunni and Shia guerrillas have been fighting side by side in Baghdad against the occupation forces.

This revolt shows every sign of turning into Iraq's own intifada, and towns like Falluja and Ramadi - centres of resistance from the first days of occupation - are now getting the treatment Israel has meted out to Palestinians in Jenin, Nablus and Rafah over the past couple of years. As resistance groups have moved from simply attacking US and other occupation troops to attempts to hold territory, US efforts to destroy them - as an American general vowed to do yesterday - have become increasingly brutal. Across Iraq, US soldiers and their European allies are now killing Iraqis in their hundreds on the streets of their own cities in an explosive revival of the Middle East's imperial legacy.
<snip>

[modaya]

19. my enemys enemy is my friend...