After Saddam, a Sunni-Shiite Thirty Years’ War? is written by Iason Athanasiadis at World Politics Watch. In fact, they liked my piece here and sent me the link.

Although he got a lot right in that piece, I have a few problems with what he said. Over half the piece seizes the opportunity to bash the “neocons”, but that’s not an honest review of the situation, and politicizes an otherwise pretty accurate overview.

He goes to great lengths with an unparalleled eloquence, to discuss the sectarian divides in Iraq, and how the Shia execution of Saddam Hussein fueled even more problems in the Arab world. All of this I pointed out earlier here. But then he takes a turn into oblivion when he makes this statement.

In 21st century Iraq, ordinary people are outraged at the manner in which the United States has insisted on viewing society through the filter of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish sections, delineating divisions that were dormant.

Emphasis mine. Huh? What in the hell is he talking about “divisions that were dormant”? In Saddam’s Iraq, the Shia were not allowed any of their religious customs. And so, Saddam encouraged those divisions, inflamed them, and exascerbated them.

Saddam’s own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world’s most modern societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq’s economy.

When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been transformed from among the region’s most prosperous people to some of its most impoverished.

Those divisions have been very much alive since Saddam was deposed, but were not ‘dormant’ during Saddam’s regime. These ‘divisions’ were a headache the Americans inherited when Saddam was deposed, and this is one of the big issues we walked into during the early hours of the Iraq war. The Iraqi people are unable to resolve conflicts between groups. For example, the Kurds went to reclaim their homes in Northern Iraq not long after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.

What the writer at World Politics may have forgotten is Saddam’s Arabization program, which added fuel to the fire. As long as he could keep them fighting each other, he would have complete control. In addition to his getting rid of generations within families where there might be a hint of opposition.

Kurds and Arabs were calling on the coalition forces, to settle issues that are similar to domestic problems where people call the police here in the US. The difference is-these disputes were between families of the different factions that Saddam purposely kept segregated like penned animals.

Here at CNN there is a transcript that spells it out:

As Kurds throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, one of the most important history lessons, repeated here to U.S. General Jay Garner, that the Iraqi regime expelled Kurds from Kirkuk and other cities.

Kirkuk is the heart of Iraq’s northern oilfields, and in the hearts of all Kurds, they see it as their ancestral home and future capitol. Once majority Kurdish with a large percentage of Turkoman, over the years the Ba’ath Party expelled Kurds and encouraged Arabs to move in.

When Iraqi forces withdrew from Kirkuk three weeks ago, Kurdish soldiers and ordinary Kurds rushed in, some to try to reclaim their homes by force.

It’s calmed down considerably since then. The U.S. Army is trying to deal with some of those claims, at least by listening to them. It’s doing the paperwork, but doesn’t have an answer.

So we inherited a sectarian headache which we’re now helping to diffuse.

After Saddam was deposed, people assumed there were new playing rules which were more fair. They simply went back to claim property they had been thrown out of by the Baathist Regime ruled over by Saddam when he instituted his Arabization program of the 1980’s. You can read about that here at CNN. But you know the real reason for this piece at World Politics Watch is for some Bush bashing, so he continues with his little diatribe:

“One might well be forgiven for surmising that the current thrust of U.S. policy in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world is to exacerbate and instrumentalize Sunni-Shia divisions,” said Fred Reed, a specialist on Middle East politics and author of “Shattered Images: The Rise of Militant Iconoclasm in Syria.”

Actually I don’t think this is true in the least. What Iraqis are finding out is that Americans don’t view these sectarian differences as important enough to kill each other over, and Iraqis still do. But this is nothing really new in the Arab world when they have public beheadings, hangings and stonings. Saddam kept Iraq segregated and separated, that’s how he could wage a campaign against the kurds without moving anyone out of the North; only kurds lived there! So only kurds would die from sprinkling deadly chemicals on them.

Blaming it all on the neocons is how the piece finishes up, which is hardly a truthful analysis about the regime before we liberated Iraq versus now. Taqiyya, what do you expect. You’d think that there were white doves peacefully flying through the air,and things were beautiful until the evil Amerikans went there and destroyed all this lovely torture, murder and mayhem, brought to you by the Arab Hitler, Saddam Hussein. There are some survivors of Saddam’s Abu Ghraib who have very different stories to tell. Unfortunately, we will never hear them from Iason Athanasiadis at World Politics Watch.