I have argued that it's not by incompetence that the US invasion of Iraq is now leading to a civil war among the local factions. That was always the plan.
Now Daniel Pipes (below), one of the most influential neocons, provides the rationale. Pipes, who has always spoken of Muslims as subhumans, told Australian TV that he thinks civil war is a good thing. "There would be fewer attacks on our forces in Iraq as they fight each other... when one goes to war, one goes to defeat one's enemy not to rehabilitate them..." (Right, as though there was any justification for invading a helpless country that hadn't done anything against the US in the first place.) Democracy is bad, Pipes says, because the Muslim peoples are anti-American anyway.
We know the US supports Interior Ministry death squads and practices prisoner torture. We know the long history of imperial divide and conquer, by the Romans, the British, the French, in modern times the US in Vietnam and Latin America. There is no compunction about bombing civilians from the air. Are false-flag attacks in Iraq really off-limits to the US mil/intel apparatus? Please.
Every minute that the foreign forces remain only makes things worse for the Iraqi people.
Australian TV interview with Daniel Pipes - 02/03/06
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1582736.htmCivil war likely in Iraq: Pipes
TONY JONES: Tell me what sort of trends you're talking about? Because I'm still struggling to understand how it would be anything but a strategic disaster.
DR DANIEL PIPES: Well, in the first place, there would be fewer attacks on our forces in Iraq as they fight each other. More broadly outside Iraq. There would be fewer attacks on us as the Shi'ites and the Sunnis attack each other. The imperative that the US Government, in particular, has been following would be shunted aside - an imperative which I think has led to negative results, because the victors in democracy, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have in all these cases been our most extreme enemies - the Islamists. And I think as developments in Iraq slow down the democracy process, so it will elsewhere and we will be the better for it.
TONY JONES: I'll come back to this question about the democracy experiment in Iraq in a moment, because there is a change of mood, it seems, among a lot of commentators in the United States on this question, on both sides of politics. But first, if your strategic assessment is right, or even if it's right, surely the United States would have both a legal and a moral obligation to step in between the two sides and stop a civil war?
DR DANIEL PIPES: I don't think so. Let me give a bit of history. Post-World
War I the British and French victors, extracted, as historically victors
had, money and other benefits from the defeated German and other powers.
Post-World War II, the American and other victors did not extract money from
Germany and Japan, but gave them money and it worked. Germany and Japan were
rehabilitated. Since 1945, 60 years now, the notion that the victor pays,
rehabilitates has become an assumption. I have nothing against it. It worked
very well in 1945 but I don't believe it's a legal and moral obligation. I
believe when one goes to war, one goes to defeat one's enemy not to
rehabilitate them....
...TONY JONES: Isn't it far too cold-blooded a calculation for the invading
force to say, "Well if the Shi'ia and Sunni are shooting and killing each
other, at least they're not shooting at us?"
DR DANIEL PIPES: Let me emphasise I do not want them to be shooting each
other. I wish that the communities found a way to work together. I'm just
saying should there be a civil war, it is not necessarily all that bad for
our interests....
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