Nir Rosen on the Zarqawi hit:
“Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. This civil war may have begun the day the Americans overthrew the old order in Iraq and established a new one, with Shias on top and Sunnis on the bottom, or it may have begun more specifically in 2005 when Iraq’s police and army finally retaliated against the Sunni population for harboring the resistance, insurgency and the terrorists like Zarqawi who targeted Shia civilians. Sectarian cleansing began to increase and suddenly Sunnis felt targeted and vulnerable for the first time. Sunni militias that targeted the Americans became the Sunni militias that defended Sunni neighborhoods from the incursions of Shia militias and they began to retaliate following Shia attacks. But the Shias of Iraq have the police and army at their disposal, not to mention the American military, which has become merely one more militia among the many in Iraq, at times striking Shia targets but still mostly targeting the Sunni population, as the Haditha affair demonstrates.”
Read more in The Washington Note. And click here for Alexander Cockburn’s intriguing take on the Zarqawi story in Counterpunch.
