Free Iraq

"With the war stalemated, repeated deployments wearing down troop morale and too few new recruits to maintain force levels, the Bush administration may be provoking civil war as its “exit strategy.” The goal would be to break up Iraq into mini-states to allow a reduction in U.S. troops while retaining access to massive oil deposits in the North and South.
“Every single thing the U.S. did led to civil war,” says Christian Parenti, author of “The Freedom,” his account of occupied Iraq, “The failure of reconstruction, the firing of the army, the blatant theft of Iraqi oil money, the use of the Badr Brigade, the use of Peshmerga, the use of death squads, the use of indiscriminate detention and torture, the destruction of Falluja and other towns in Al Anbar province,” explains Parenti, created a raging insurgency and sparked civil war.
... Once the victorious Shiite parties cobbled a government together in April, they placed the Interior Ministry under the control of the Badr Brigades, the military arm of the powerful Shiite-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. As for the army, a report in The Guardian states bluntly, “Both Iraqi and American officers say that the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad has fallen under the control of Kurdish political parties.”The result has been a wave of death-squad killings. Since April, “nearly 1,000 people - most of them Sunni Muslims” killed in the southern city of Basra alone, according to the Christian Science Monitor. In May, at least 10 Sunni and Shiite clerics were assassinated.Writing in The Independent, Patrick Cockburn, reports, “Many Sunni military officers and Baathist officials believe they are on a death list of the Badr Brigade which is operating through the [police] commandos… an aggressive paramilitary force controlled by the Interior Ministry.”The Times of London noted on July 18: “hardline Shia militias… are patrolling large parts of Baghdad, often rounding up suspected Sunni insurgents and imprisoning or even killing them.” The U.S. took the sectarian strategy a step further in May with “Operation Lightning,” using 40,000 mainly Shiite troops to sweep through Baghdad and round up hundreds of Sunni males."
Civil War In Iraq, Made In the USA August 6, 2005

"The occupation's sectarian discourse has acquired a hold as powerful as the WMD fiction that prepared the public for war. Iraqis are portrayed as a people who can't wait to kill each other once left to their own devices. In fact, the occupation is the main architect of institutionalised sectarian and ethnic divisions; its removal would act as a catalyst for Iraqis to resolve some of their differences politically. Only a few days ago the national assembly members who had signed the anti-occupation statement met representatives of the Foundation Congress (a group of 60 religious and secular organisations) and the al-Sadr movement and issued a joint call for the rapid withdrawal of the occupation forces according to an internationally guaranteed timetable.
There is now broad agreement in Iraq to build a non-sectarian, democratic Iraq that guarantees Kurdish national rights. The occupation is making the achievement of these goals more difficult.
Every day the occupation increases tension and makes people's lives worse, fuelling the violence. Creating a client regime in Baghdad, backed by permanent bases, is the route that US strategists followed in Vietnam. As in Vietnam , popular resistance in Iraq and the wider Middle East will not go away but will grow stronger, until it eventually unites to force a US-British withdrawal.
How many more Iraqis have to die before Bush and Blair admit the occupation is the problem and not part of any democratic solution in Iraq?"
It is not withdrawal that threatens Iraq with civil war, but occupation. July 5, 2005

An Update:
This is an an aptly put scientific scenario for Condi's mushroom cloud:

"Iraq is dangerously close to the threshold - the point of no return at which an ideological-sectarian chain reaction is triggered and a rapidly accelerated disintegration along sectarian lines occurs. The blinding flash of Iraq's disintegration will be followed closely by a powerful shockwave radiating outward in all directions, then by an irresistible reverse force that will pull Iraq's neighbors into the vortex. That is the point at which the US begins to suffer an irreversible forfeiture in Iraq.
The political detonation described here, in which Iraq's enriched, fissionable sectarian factions or elements are rammed together forcefully by the current US-driven political process, finally reach critical mass and then detonate to cause Iraq's violent disintegration, is imminent. Consequently, not only has the US finally uncovered Iraq's political WMSD (weapons of mass self-destruction) but it is also, knowingly or unknowingly, racing toward the triggering of a political fission bomb of enormous yield with widespread regional and even global fallout."
Weapons of self-destruction August 10, 2005

"The American way of warfare was designed to win huge land wars, such on the European theater against masses of Russians with huge tank armies. America needed massive firepower because of being outgunned in that potential theater of war. In Iraq, America has the advantage in numbers of men AND firepower, but little room for maneuver and little initiative. Americans are on their heels and when they do try to take the initiative they fire into buildings long after the battle is over.
This war cannot be won by America. Those pathetic Iraqis just will not stand and fight toe to toe. For some strange reason, the Iraqis are fighting to win, not to meet American wishes and expectations. Every day that Americans are in Iraq fighting the insurgency is another day that George Bush is losing ground. Every death of an American soldier is a nail in the coffin of the American Empire."
Bad Anti-Insurgent Strategy -- Hit 'em Where They Were August 9, 2005

American Foreign Policy in Iraq