Robert Fisk - 03 March 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=497268
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5805.htm (Full Story)
Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war. Click Here for Full Story
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Robert Fisk - 03 March 2004
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5805.htm
Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I
have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.
Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida is a
Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have
been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been
written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally
sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war.
Somehow I don't believe it. No, I don't believe the Americans were behind
yesterday's carnage despite the screams of accusation by the Iraqi survivors
yesterday. But I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think that their own
actions might produce what the Americans want: a fear of civil war so intense
that Iraqis will go along with any plan the United States produces for
Mesopotamia.
I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among France's
Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the French
authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim which led to half a
million dead souls.
And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland and the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan
in 1974, which, as the years go by, appear to have an ever closer link, via
Protestant "loyalist" paramilitaries, to elements of British military security.
But the bombs in Karbala and Baghdad were clearly co-ordinated. The same brain
worked behind them. Was it a Sunni brain? When the occupation authorities'
spokesman suggested yesterday that it was the work of al-Qa'ida, he must have
known what he was saying: that al-Qa'ida is a Sunni movement, that the victims
were Shias.
It's not that I believe al-Qa'ida incapable of such a bloodbath. But I ask
myself why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing so hard. Let's turn
the glass round the other way. If a violent Sunni movement wished to evict the
Americans from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement fighting very
cruelly to do just that - why would it want to turn the Shia population of Iraq,
60 per cent of Iraqis, against them? The last thing such a resistance would want
is to have the majority of Iraqis against it.
So what about al-Qa'ida? Repeatedly, the Americans have told us that the suicide
bombers were "foreigners". And so they may be. But can we have some identities,
nationalities? The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has talked of the
hundreds of "foreign" fighters crossing Saudi Arabia's "porous" borders.
The US press have dutifully repeated this. The Iraqi police keep announcing that
they have found the bombers' passports, so can we have the numbers?
We are entering a dark and sinister period of Iraqi history. But an occupation
authority which should regard civil war as the last prospect it ever wants to
contemplate, keeps shouting "civil war" in our ears and I worry about that.
Especially when the bombs make it real.
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