We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Iraq: After the Americans

Click here to access 25:00m video from Al Jazeera's Frontline program. 
In a special two-part series, Fault Lines travels across Iraq to take the pulse of a country and its people after nine years of foreign occupation and nation-building.
Now that US troops have left, how are Iraqis overcoming the legacy of violence and toxic remains of the US-led occupation, and the sectarian war it ignited? Is the country on the brink of irreparable fragmentation?
This 25 minute video presentation provides an assessment of the US Empire's "nation building" program in Iraq by a journalist on a return visit to that country. It is a terribly disturbing and depressing experience for any decent American to view--it certainly was for me. It provides a condensed case study of the "Salvador Option" and divide and conquer strategy that are the methods of choice in bringing foreign countries under the control of the Empire. 

The Salvadore option is essentially a terrorist operation and was first systematically employed by US agents in Vietnam, then in El Salvador, and in many places in Latin America including Chile, Columbia, and Argentina. References to these terrorist operations are fast disappearing from the internet. Here are some that I've found: here (unfortunately this has been removed from their website), here, here, and here

In Iraq we see that Empire agents have combined this terrorist operation with divide and conquer strategies by appointing different agencies under the control of different religious sects. For example, the Ministry of the Interior which directed their police-terrorist operations were placed under Sunni control with close supervision by Empire agents. Other branches of government were placed under Shia control. Another way to divide Iraqis was to give the Kurds in the oil-rich Kurdistan Province of Iraq considerable independence from the central government.