Jonathan Steele (The Guardian): US allies are behind the death squads

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Guardian Unlimited (London)
Dated Friday April 14

US allies are behind the death squads and ethnic cleansing
Iraq's American overlords at last seem to have grasped the danger posed by their friends' militias. But it may be too late
By Jonathan Steele in Baghdad

Much ink, as well as indignation, is being spent on whether Iraq is on the verge of, in the midst of, or nowhere near civil war. Wherever you stand in this largely semantic debate, the one certainty is that the seedbed for the country's self-destruction is Iraq's plethora of militias. In the apt phrase of Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Baghdad, they are the "infrastructure of civil war".

He is not the first US overlord in Iraq to spot the danger. Shortly before the formal transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis, America's then top official Paul Bremer ordered all militias to disband. Some members could join the new army. Others would have to look for civilian work.

His decree was not enforced and now, two years later, this failure has come back to haunt Iraq. "More Iraqis are dying from militia violence than from the terrorists," Khalilzad said recently. "The militias need to be under control."

His blunt comment came in the wake of over 1,000 abductions and murders in a single month, most of them blamed on Shia militias. Terrified residents of Baghdad's mainly Sunni areas talk of cars roaring up after dark, uninhibited by the police in spite of the curfew. They enter homes and seize people, whose bodies turn up later, often garotted or marked with holes from electric drills - evidence of torture before assassination.

Read more.

[Erika]

1. Iraq was a western civilization creation.

Their religious differences never gave them a solid base for a government. To expect something different now is insane.

As Michael Savage says, release Saddam to control them.

[bemildred]

2. Sigh.

:banghead: