Amy Goodman interviewed Arun Gupta today, editor with The Indypendent newspaper, the newspaper of the New York Independent Media Center. He has the center spread in the current issue of the paper called "Bush's Exit Plan: Civil War." He wrote:"Civil war has already begun in Iraq." He says, quote, “With the war stalemated, repeated deployments wearing down morale of U.S. troops and too few new recruits to maintain force levels, the Bush administration may be deliberately provoking civil war as its exit strategy. The goal is not so much to exit Iraq, but leave behind a skeletal military force that would maintain the network of permanent bases under construction throughout Iraq while maintaining access to massive oil deposits in the North and South. Breaking Iraq into a series of mini-states, a strategy being pushed by some White House allies in the media, is seen as one way to insure these goals.”
here's the transcript link:
http://www.democracynow.org/print.pl?sid=05/08/03/1419259excerpts from interview:
According to a
Christian Science Monitor report,
since April alone, more than 1,000 people have been killed in Basra, where basically you have a theocracy that's come into power where all these different Shiite factions, parties and militias are vying for power. And according to the Monitor, the vast majority are Sunni Muslim, that there's a lot of revenge going on in return for the repression of the Shiites during the rule under Saddam Hussein.
...
AMY GOODMAN: Arun, you write that according to a number of reports, the Interior Ministry's Wolf Brigades are behind many of the
death squad killings on the Shiite side. Wolf Brigades?
ARUN GUPTA: Yes. This is one of the special forces that have been set up under the ministry. According to a number of reports, the Wolf Brigades, a lot of its commanders come from the Badr Brigades. The Badr Brigades are affiliated with SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. That was set up in Iran in the early 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. It's not indigenous to Iraq. And SCIRI was one of the big winners in the election. And they said, ‘Well, we're disbanding the Badr Brigades.’ All they did was they changed the name. They now call it the Badr Organization. The head of the Interior Ministry, Bayan Solagh, is a member of the Badr Brigades. The head of the Badr Brigades, according to Patrick Cockburn, is very influential in the Interior Ministry. And according to one report on the website, Jamestown.org, a lot of the commanders, something like 160 commanders, in the Interior Ministry forces have been fired since April, and many of them have been replaced by Badr Brigade members.
So, what you are seeing is really the increase of this sectarian conflict, and, you know, Patrick Cockburn, among others, writes how throughout Baghdad you can now see these militias openly traveling around. And they're considered the most effective of the security forces, because their loyalty is to the parties. But they're unaccountable. According to human rights monitors, they're running networks of secret prisons where they're torturing and, it looks like, killing detainees.
...
AMY GOODMAN: Many Sunnis assume if they're arrested, they're dead, killed by Shia police.
ARUN GUPTA: I think that's probably accurate at this point. I mean, part of the difficulty is getting the information, you know. It's like all of these bodies are turning up.
There are hundreds of bodies that are being found in rivers and lakes throughout Iraq. Nobody knows exactly where they come from. There are hundreds of bodies being -- unidentified bodies -- apparently something like up to one quarter of the bodies that turn up in the Baghdad morgues are unaccounted for. And nobody knows exactly where they're coming from. 
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