Why may it look like there is a more stable Iraq with less violence today? Because the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites have moved from neighborhoods to a large-scale conflict.
Seymour Hersh: Bush 'Has Accepted Ethnic Cleansing' in Iraq
Spiegel Online: A lot of people have been saying that the US presence there is a big part of the problem. Is anyone in the White House listening?
Hersh: No. The president is still talking about the "Surge" as if it's going to unite the country. But the Surge was a con game of putting additional troops in there. We've basically Balkanized the place, building walls and walling off Sunnis from Shiites. And in Anbar Province, where there has been success, all of the Shiites are gone. They've simply split.
Spiegel Online: Is that why there has been a drop in violence there?
Hersh: I think that's a much better reason than the fact that there are a couple more soldiers on the ground.
Spiegel Online: So what are the lessons of the Surge?
Hersh: The Surge means basically that, in some way, the president has accepted ethnic cleansing, whether he's talking about it or not. When he first announced the Surge in January, he described it as a way to bring the parties together. He's not saying that any more. I think he now understands that ethnic cleansing is what is going to happen. You're going to have a Kurdistan. You're going to have a Sunni area that we're going to have to support forever. And you're going to have the Shiites in the South.
Spiegel Online: So the US is over four years into a war that is likely going to end in a disaster. How valid are the comparisons with Vietnam?
Hersh: The validity is that the US is fighting a guerrilla war and doesn't know the culture. But the difference is that at a certain point, because of Congressional and public opposition, the Vietnam War was no longer tenable. But these guys now don't care. They see it but they don't care.
There is also some talk about Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad worth reading:
Spiegel Online: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Once again, he said that he is only interested in civilian nuclear power instead of atomic weapons. How much does the West really know about the nuclear program in Iran?
Seymour Hersh: A lot. And it's been underestimated how much the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) knows. If you follow what [IAEA head Mohamed] ElBaradei and the various reports have been saying, the Iranians have claimed to be enriching uranium to higher than a 4 percent purity, which is the amount you need to run a peaceful nuclear reactor. But the IAEA's best guess is that they are at 3.67 percent or something. The Iranians are not even doing what they claim to be doing. The IAEA has been saying all along that they've been making progress but basically, Iran is nowhere. Of course the US and Israel are going to say you have to look at the worst case scenario, but there isn't enough evidence to justify a bombing raid.
Spiegel Online: Is this just another case of exaggerating the danger in preparation for an invasion like we saw in 2002 and 2003 prior to the Iraq War?
Hersh: We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad.
Times: Iraqi police ‘linked to ethnic cleansing’
THE soulful sound of koranic recitals for the dead reverberated from 22 homes lining a narrow, dimly lit street in the old Baghdad neighbourhood of Iskan in the early hours of yesterday morning.
In one house after another, the soothing voices mingled with the sobs of wives, mothers and sisters over a hum of visitors’ murmured condolences.
The walls of a small nearby mosque were draped with 22 black cloths on which the names of the husbands, sons and brothers being mourned will be inscribed in white paint, as is the custom in Iraq.
The grieving families in this predominantly Shi’ite district had collected their dead — all Sunnis — on Friday amid fury at the execution-style murders of the men and terror at the spread of sectarian killings in the run-up to this Saturday’s referendum on a new constitution.
Many believe the killers’ aim is to drive them out in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that is polarising communities, casting suspicion on the Iraqi police and undermining confidence in the ability of the Baghdad government to maintain security.
Some relatives of Iskan’s dead have already packed up and moved to Sunni areas where they feel safer.
The murdered men’s bodies were shrivelled beyond recognition when they were found where they had lain for a month in the desert more than 70 miles away, near the town of Badra.
But the blindfolds wrapped around their heads were intact, along with the cuffs of metal, plastic and rope used to bind their hands. One or two shots fired into each man had ended their lives.
“Why were they killed? What did they do?” shrieked one mourner as he prepared for a street procession of coffins to their place of burial on Friday.
The answer is difficult to discern. What is known is that all the Sunni victims were married to Shi’ite women. However, this is not uncommon in Iraq and is thought unlikely to be the motive for their murder.
One clue may lie in the alleged presence of Iraqi police officers when the men’s killers came to take them away. According to witnesses, about 40 police vehicles and four-wheel drives from the interior ministry stormed the district in the early hours of August 8.
This is really not news. Note the date on the article below.
Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold
Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.
By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq Published: 20 May 2006
The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.
Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.
The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.
In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last week ordered people off a bus, separated the men from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been paid.
The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely reported but the provinces around the capital are now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were slaughtering each other in his home province. "Whoever is in a minority runs," he said. "If forces are more equal they fight it out."
It was impossible to travel to Baquba, the capital of Diyala, from Baghdad without extreme danger of being killed on the road. But I thought that if I took the road from Kurdistan leading south, kept close to the Iranian border and stayed in Kurdish-controlled territory I could reach Khanaqin, a town of 75,000 people in eastern Diyala. If what the army captain said about the killings and mass flight was true then there were bound to be refugees who had reached there.
I thought it was too dangerous to go beyond the town into the Arab part of Diyala province, once famous for its fruit, since it is largely under insurgent control. But, as I had hoped, it was possible to talk to Kurds who had sought refuge in Khanaqin over the past month.
Andra bloggar om: etnisk rensning, Irak, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, USA, media, Seymour Hersh, politik - Intressant
Technorati: Ethnic Cleansing, Iraq, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Media, Seymour Hersh, USA, Politics
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