Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Despite the dodgy conclusion echoing Bush and Blair, this Channel 4 documentary provides valuable insights into Iraq’s horrifying daily realities. The film fails, however, to link the activities encouraged by the Ministry of Interior to the supervising occupation authorities.  

Robert Fisk has been speaking for some time about an attempt by the occupation authorities to provoke a civil war in Iraq.

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much…We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested…Somebody is operating these people…Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians – Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis — suddenly all want to kill each other?…

We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we’re getting – that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide – is not possible, it’s not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq…something is wrong with the narrative we’re being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government.

Lets also not forget the event (which has since been swept under) of the two British SRS men, dressed as members of the Mahdi Army, who were captured with explosives in their car. There had already been talk of the Pentagon employing the Salvador Option to use Shia death squads against Sunnis. The appointment of John Negroponte, who oversaw death squad activity from Honduras in the ’80s, as US ambssador to Iraq did little to allay fears of US designs for instigating a civil war in Iraq. A civil war in Iraq serves the occupations interests in two important ways: one, Iraqi fire directed at each other takes the heat off the occupier; two, it furnishes the rationale for a continued presence of the occupiers who can then claim that their presence is necessary to prevent a civil war – a conclusion reinforced by this documentary.