Dealing with the devil

The US occupation of Iraq becomes even more of a farce by the day.

The US began by supporting the Shiite majority, along with the Shiite militias and death squads. Realising that no degree of firepower will make the Sunni insurgents go away, the occupation forces are trying a new strategy.

Apparently, U.S. forces have not only aligned themselves with dozens of Sunni militiamen, we’re also now cooperating with sectarian militias, working outside the Iraqi security forces, that include insurgents that have attacked Americans in the past. What’s more, we’re allowing them to procure weapons and we’re granting them the power to arrest other Iraqis.

As we have seen with the unintended consequences in Northern Lebanon, this is an extremely risky venture.

The dynamic is not without complications. Joshua Partlow’s report explained that “fighters on both sides appeared nearly identical,” using the same weapons and wearing similar clothes. “Now we’ve got kind of a mess on our hands,” a leader of a U.S. Stryker team remembered thinking. “Because we’ve got a lot of armed guys running all over the place, and it’s making it very hard for us to identify which side is which.”

You’d think that after 9/11, the US might have learned a lesson or two about dealing with the enemy of their enemy. Apparently not. After all, the Sunni insurgents have tolerated the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq to further their aims of removing the occupation, but once that is achieved, it is a certainty that they will evict them, so why would they follow this strategy with the US forces?

Might these militias turn on the U.S. sometime soon? No one knows. Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman, a Sunni militia leader said, “Let’s be honest, the enemy now is not the Americans, for the time being.” (emphasis added)

What could possibly go wrong?

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