as well...
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/occupation/2006/1207civilwar.htmIraq: Not Civil War, Occupation
By Sami Ramadani
openDemocracy
December 7, 2006
How it started
Despite suggestions to the contrary, the answer to the first question hasn't changed ever since the United States-led forces occupied Iraq in March-April 2003: a war of bullets and politics between the occupying powers and most of the Iraqi people who want them out. The feelings of the Iraqi people towards the occupation became abundantly clear within two weeks of the fall of Baghdad to United States tanks on 9 April 2003.
According to the BBC, about 4 million people from all over Iraq marched on to Karbala to commemorate the anniversary of Islam's (particularly Shi'a Islam's) most famous martyr, Imam Hussain. The most popular slogans on that march, which was boosted by people from all religions and none, must have sent alarm bells ringing in Washington and London. For several days they chanted Kalla, Kalla Amreeka - Kalla, Kalla Saddam ("No to America, no to Saddam"). If this is how the Shi'a felt, how would the Sunni, not to mention the atheists?!
From that moment on most of the Iraqi people never ceased making their feelings clear towards the occupation. First they used words and engaged in peaceful protests, which quickly led to using bullets too. The latter Rubicon was crossed on 28 April 2003, one week after the march on Karbala, when US soldiers opened fire on parents and children who gathered in front of a primary school in Fallujah demanding the US forces stop using it as an outpost and to allow their children to go back to school. They killed eighteen of them in cold blood and injured about sixty others.
Until the killing of those demonstrators, not a single bullet had been fired at US soldiers in Fallujah or any of the cities north of Baghdad. This was the event that reverberated across Iraq and sparked the armed resistance to occupation. Fallujah being a predominantly Sunni town, and the occupation authorities' having a keen eye for attempting to split the opposition, led to the production of a myth as big as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) deception that launched the invasion and occupation of Iraq: the fiction that the armed resistance is predominantly Sunni and that they are in fight against the Shi'a.
The US-led forces responded by using even more bombs, bullets, warm words, and money to reverse the popular odds piling up against them. But within six months of the occupation the CIA boldly warned, "the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger." Despite attempts to muddy the waters of what is going on in Iraq, it is clear that the resistance is even broader, stronger and getting stronger with every passing day.
What of the mindless violence, terrorism and sectarian murders? This is where the occupation authorities and the establishment media have succeeded in convincing most of the public in the US and Britain that, after thousands of years of living together without even a whiff of communal civil war in their history, the people of Mesopotamia don't want to "live and let live" anymore, but have decided to kill each other instead. Add to this scenario the exaggerated presence of foreign terrorists led by al-Qaida, trying to take control of Iraq's oil according to George W Bush, and you have a distorted and highly misleading picture of Iraq. It appears that an irrational frame of mind has taken root in relation to Iraq; for some, the natives are at it again. In this mindset, the occupation forces are made to appear as a benign, almost virtuous presence in the middle of raging sectarian violence. They do not tell us about the "Salvador option" and the presence in Iraq of US death-squads, trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and Israel, nor will they spill the beans (as US generals have started to do).
They do not tell us about the secret militias trained and financed by the US, partly uncovered by the Wall Street Journal (in February 2005), but in any case common knowledge in Iraq.
They do not tell us why the occupying power should secretly smuggle 200,000 Kalashnikovs and tons of explosives into Iraq from Bosnia within one year (2004-05); nor to whom these weapons were supplied.
They do not tell us about the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on covert political operations and the backing of proxy political forces.
They do not tell us about continuing work on building the biggest US embassy in the world in Baghdad's Green Zone embassy (fortress), about the roughly fourteen permanent military bases (including four massive ones) being constructed.
They do not tell us about the post-Abu Ghraib contracting-out of most of the torture to the Iraqi state, the backing of Iraqi state-sponsored violence against civilians.
They do not tell us - last but very from least - about the silent killers of Iraqi people.
The country's infrastructure has all but been destroyed; people are exposed to the health danger of depleted uranium from US and British military ordnance; the health service is near collapse and hospitals have been reduced to impotence in the face of mounting injuries and disease, particularly water-born diseases affecting children. The electricity shortage is affecting the sewage plants, which are pumping raw sewage into the rivers.
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