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Dahlia Wasfi and the Tragedy of Iraq, Part 4: Survival, Women's Rights and Death Squads

Dahlia Wasfi, MD (photo by Mac McKinney)

I ended Part 3 of my series on Dr. Dahlia Wasfi with glimpses into her powers of observation and analysis of the strategies underlying the American-led Coalition's attempted pacification of Iraq, which to this day is still suffering from brutal internecine warfare. In this piece we will explore this and the effects of the war on Iraqi society more thoroughly, but first we must recount Dahlia's reflections on her second trip to war-torn Iraq.

To see my three earlier pieces on her (and Ross Caputi in Part 1), CLICK HERE for Part 1, CLICK HERE for Part 2, and CLICK HERE for Part 3.

2nd Trip to Iraq

Dahlia's first trip to Basra to see her extended family in Iraq had lasted 19 days, with only six actually spent in Basra, but she had promised to return, and then, some 22 months later, she did. Returning to my interview with her, I asked:

Mac: Let's talk about your second trip to Iraq. Give me a little chronology of when you went and what really stood out on this trip.

Dahlia: I finally arrived there on Christmas day, 2005. I got to Basra and stayed there until March 27th, 2006. So it's been five years now.

I would say certainly on a day to day basis that there were certain experiences that stand out, but overall - my overall sense (and I have, obviously, the view of someone who knew she was leaving so that as bad as things got, it was like just wait another couple of months, just wait another couple of weeks and I'll get to go back home) was: I don't know how people with no way out, I don't know how they survive. My family, I don't know how they do it.

Basra during the American occupation (Photobucket Commons)

On a daily basis, just the struggle for survival, with the lack of electricity, the lack of portable water, now the destruction of the health care system, the destruction of the education system; there's no jobs, rising unemployment; HIV has now come to Iraq, and while prostitution emerged during the sanctions period, it increased significantly with the presence of the US military, as it does everywhere else around the world, and drug abuse - now I wasn't witnessing all that, that I would say would be my reading about it - but just my own experience, just trying to make it through each day, trying to get meals cooked, you have to make a choice. Are you going to do laundry today or does somebody get to take a shower? And this is coming from a society that was First World status. 

That it's now Third World, that's it's meeting Third World parameters is purely because of American foreign policy. So that's what struck me. So it's much different from, say, a country in sub-Saharan Africa which was not ever at a First World level. It's a different survival approach, so - and call me paranoid, which I am - it seemed to me a purposeful disruption of daily living because people cannot regroup and move forward. They cannot recover from the destruction to put their lives back together and to basically put their country back together the way they want it, and certainly we [the Us Govt - Mac] don't want it the way they want it, so it keeps people weak, and I found it extraordinarily difficult as an American used to 24 hours of electricity with your occasional once or twice a year thunderstorm that takes it out. 

But I have never - I got sick while I was there - been so sick in my entire life, and I literally told my [Iraqi] family, and this will be in the book [Dahlia is writing a book on her experiences - Mac], since I thought I was going to die, please tell my parents a good story. Tell them I attacked the British. Tell them I was a martyr, but please don't tell them I died from diarrhea, please that would be the worst thing. And all I could think about at the time were the stories I read from after the first Gulf War when cholera became endemic in Iraq, and I read an account of somebody saying there's nothing worse than dehydrating to death and the only water you have to drink  is the same dirty water that made you sick, and I felt so lucky when I was there - I had access to bottled water; I had access to antibiotics, but oh my God, I've never been so sick! Everyone in the Administration should have to have a bout of some GI pathogen like that to see what they're doing to people. That was hard for me to come to terms with. So it was basically my personal experiences, basically my version of Survivor. 


But for my family, there was no way out. This is what they had to live with everyday...and I tell you...the two times that I have gone have been in the wintertime. I tell my family that I will never visit you in the summer because I will lay down on the floor and die. In Basra especially, because they have the humidity from the....river, the waterway, it gets to be over a 115 degrees Fahrenheit plus humidity. And they don't have the electricity to run a ceiling fan, let alone air-conditioning .


Mac: Wow, 115!


Dahlia: On a good day, on a good day. You know, for someone like me, this is going to make me livid. If I had the energy for any emotion, it would make me furious and angry, but for old people, people with heart conditions, asthmatics, diabetics, for the little babies who are prone to the diarrheal diseases, this is deadly. This is deadly. And this is another reason why the death toll is so high, because when they do the calculations for say the Lancet Studies, it's overall what is the increased number of deaths, not just from military assault.....


Mac: Is cholera epidemic now, or just endemic?


Dahlia: It's considered endemic now. They still have epidemic episodes. The last one I know of was 2007. That's the last one I've documented, that I found the research on.


Mac: What about women's rights in Iraq right now?


Dahlia: We have set them back for decades if not centuries. And this is under the auspices of the new government, which is CIA-coordinated, but basically, prior to American involvement, Iraq was one of the most progressive countries in that part of the world in terms of women's rights, marital rights, property rights, educated women. Part of that can be attributed to [secular government], and I again have to make the qualifier that there's no question of the brutality of the dictatorship - if you became political you took your life and your family's life into your hands; you didn't know if you would be jailed, tortured....but first of all, there was free eduction, and everybody had access to it, and it was also a secular government, and it tends to be - when religion is involved in government - there tends to be a decline in women's rights, with more conservative leadership, but with a more secular government, that kind of restriction on women's rights did not happen, but also during the 1980s there was the Iran-Iraq War, and instead of bringing in foreign workers to replace the men who had left for war, they trained women, so that strenghtened the country itself. It's like what happened here in World War II when the women started to take the jobs in the factories. So women were in every aspect of society. Once we invaded, a big factor in the loss of women's rights was the influx of religious militias, religious groups and militias, from Iran [many of them having gone into exile under Saddam Hussein - Mac]........

Women and children in Iraq (Photobucket Commons)

 There are numerous militias, numerous parties that have moved in, based in Iran, and with the militias have come the loss of women's rights - restrictions on women's dress, restrictions on covering your hair, restrictions on wearing makeup. Now I don't mean to be critical, and I have to qualify this because I personally don't cover my hair....it's not my choice - but ever woman should have her choice, and in Iraq now since the invasion, they don't have a choice anymore. 


My cousins told me a story because my cousins in the south, they tell me stories of women getting harassed for not covering their hair, of women getting harassed for wearing makeup, and now it's become more and more difficult for women to attend university. Everything was co-ed. Now they're trying to separate out the sexes, so this influence came in since the invasion, and then with the new constitution, that opened the door for the use of Sharia Law, which again, depending on interpretation - and I'm not trying to be critical of Islam, but it's men who wrote it down and it's mostly men who are doing the interpretation - it opens the door for the loss of property rights and marital rights. And now there are between one and two million widows in Iraq, and with that, when you count as an orphan someone who has lost one or both parents, four to five million orphans [estimated], so we have devastated Iraq for the next generation at least. So this is the bottom line. This is the tragedy. 


********

These revelations by Dahlia certainly put a damper on more positive spins of the consequences of the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq. Even though the United States has allocated some 53 billion dollars to the reconstruction of Iraq, more than we spent on the reconstruction of Germany and Japan combined after World War II (even adjusting for inflation over time) progress overall is "spotty" at best in terms of stability, economic prosperity, human rights improvements and a society healing from the wounds of war. Yes, the backbone of the Iraqi economy, the oil sector, is gradually reviving, but there are still millions of Iraqis in external or internal exile, gross unemployment hovering, some reports say, around 30%, perhaps higher, perhaps lower. The huge number of widows and orphans, as Dahlia has mentioned, create a social nightmare for the present and the future, and terrorist bombs are still going off in Baghdad and elsewhere. Even an American convoy was hit as recently as June 23 in an attack that killed "international development and finance expert Dr. Stephen Everhart and wounded three others." (source)


The Center for American Progress published an article and report entitled "The Iraq War Ledger, A Tabulation of the Human, Financial, and Strategic Costs" in May, 2010 that tallies up all the then costs and benefits, human, financial and otherwise in terms of American national security, and it is not a very pretty picture at all. You can read the pdf report HERE. To quote from some of the study's conclusions:

Seven years after that speech, Iraq has made progress, but still struggles with terrorism and deep political discord. Though the level of violence has declined from its 2006-07 peak—when dozens of bodies could be found on Baghdad’s streets every morning—Iraq still endures a level of violence that anywhere else in the world would be considered a crisis. Still, the end of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic allied with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future.

But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits. (.ibid) 

Death Squads


A key strategic cost worth emphasizing from the same report is this:

Loss of moral authority. While abuses are perhaps inevitable in any military occupation, the images and stories broadcast from Iraq into the region and around the world have done lasting damage to the United States’ reputation as a supporter of international order and human rights. Gen. David Petraeus acknowledges the damage done to the U.S. reputation by Abu Ghraib is permanent, calling it a “nonbiodegradable” event.

As Dahlia has already noted in previous statements in this series, the US Government stepped over into the dark side, as was also done, for example, in Vietnam and elsewhere to try to secure, if not victory at least "stability" in a target country. But how, as ethicists keep asking, can the ends justify the means when the means taint and subvert the ends, if not becoming the ends altogether? And this is where we must talk more about death squads and the Salvador Option in Iraq and how they wrecked further havoc, with yet unfinished consequences in that country.


Mac: Let's talk about death squads. I think I read that you were mentioning the Wolf Brigade. And I am also curious as to how many of these terrorist bombings might have been by the Americans and British.


Dahlia: I don't know, but the question is an important one. But you really did your homework. I referenced the Wolf Brigade, which was a brigade I believe I am correct in stating was a brigade in the Iraqi police that was basically organized by someone who was a high-ranking general under Saddam, and then became a high-ranking general under Donald Rumsfeld. The name was General Rashid Flayyih. But my resource for that is a journalist named Max Fuller. He's from Wales. He's done remarkable work that actually has shown that Operation Phoenix in Vietnam has been brought back.


Mac: Oh yeah, we've learned about that, the Salvador Option.

Death squads in Iraq (Photobucket Commons)

[For a riveting video and Max Fuller article posted right below it giving an in-depth look at death squads in Iraq, VISIT HERE.]


Dahlia: That's it.....Max Fuller has done like a fantastic fifteen minute video on the internet (Who is behind the death Squads in Iraq). But you may have heard of how in September 2005 in Basra there was a suspicious car that the Iraqi police approached, and when the police approached the car, the people in the car shot at the policemen, so they were detained immediately and brought to the police station, and what they found in the car was were that these two guys were British Special Operations. 


********

[Amazingly, The British military actually soon "sprang" the two from jail in, apparently, cowboy fashion. Here is an excerpt that posits one view of the entire event, that the Brits were actually involved in "False Flag" bombings, from a Raw Story article on this entire episode, although you will have to read the entire article to catch the various allegations against the British plus the latter's defense and explanations:

In an interview with Al Jazeerah TV, the popular Iraqi leader Fattah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqi National Assembly and deputy official in the Basra governorate, said that police had "caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market." Contrary to British authorities' claims that the soldiers had been immediately handed to local militia, al-Sheikh confirmed that they were "at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime." (source)]

********

Dahlia (cont'd): So as soon as you catch one [so to speak] "cockroach", there's a lot more behind them, so this opens the door for questioning what happens, but its the same tactic of divide and conquer, pitting Sunni against Shia. Yes, there was disagreement. Yes, there was conflict, and 1400 years ago the sects were established because of division, but not since that time has there been a split like this where people were being exterminated because of their religious sect. Not until after 2003.  Actually on my website, liberatethis.com, I have a section on the Salvador Option, and there's so many references there, and this is all from the 2005 and 2006 time period - I don't have that many more updated resoruces since then - but it's called Fake Terrorism is a Coalition’s Best Friend because you set up these explosions, and you tell the one group that the other group did it, boom! And then we set up the training; we fund the training.


I haven't spoken to him in a long, long time, but I have a contact who was with IVAW (Iraqi Veterans Against the War) and he said his job was training soldiers in Tikrit, and he said when they brought the soldiers in, they divided them up, Sunni and Shia. That's our architecture; that's our artificial divisions. And in terms of the Salvador Option, it [an article] just came out relatively recently that proved that the Americans were tied to the training and funding of the Wolf Brigade. 



Mac: How many people do you think might have been murdered by the Wolf Brigade?


Dahlia: I don't know. I don't know. I mean it got to a point - I met a woman who, she was an environmental engineer in Iraq and now she's outside of Iraq, one of the refugees - and she talked about how when she was still in Iraq, they [hit men - Mac] would just walk into a room, they would call out a name - and you turn around when you hear your name - whoever it was who turned around, the person who called out their name shot them, no accountability. And this was [told me] in 2007 in a conference in Madrid, it's kind of a long story, but I got to go to the conference, and I met her there, and she was talking about how these death squads were now spilling over into Syria and Jordan where all the refugees were, so this is anecdotal evidence, but the money's coming from somewhere. And unfortunately, there's always the possibility of another Iran-Contra situation, but if we could cut the funding, once the funding for the death squads will go away these people don't have an incentive to do that work anymore, so you hope that with the withdrawal of the occupation, no more funding and training of armies.


Mac: How many people do you think died in Iraq, your personal opinion.


Dahlia: Since 2003, I would say close to one-and-a half-million people. But that is only since 2003. We are also responsible for the 1.2 and and 1.8 million who died during sanctions. This was because of lack of medical care, because of lack of antibiotics, lack of medicine, lack of insulin - this is overall, and people starving to death.


********

It is indeed a tragedy what has been wrought in Iraq, all of which has, as has been rather thoroughly exposed, been based on lies and propaganda, and the wages of lies can be death, and in the case of Iraq, in spades! There were no WMDs or viable ties between bin Laden's al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. "Al Qeada in Iraq" metamorphosed later in response to the occupation, a self-fulfilling prophecy. 


Settling on "removing the dictator" became a final excuse to justify what was already a done deal, the invasion, and there was nothing organic about it, meaning that the Iraqi people had not gotten to the historical point yet of widespread rebellion or revolution against their own tyrant. 


Meanwhile, what we have put in Saddam's place is more or less a wild-card Frankenstein monster of a government, with close ties to Iran, that is still under attack from dissident forces within Iraq, an ongoing hornet's nest of intrigues and conflict as that country lurches along.



There is more to my interview with Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, but at this point I am starting to steal her thunder since she is in the process of writing a book on her and her family's experiences in Iraq and America. So we will end this series now with one final question I posed to her during our interview:


Mac: Well let me ask you one final question. Have you got any closing remarks for me, to sum this all up?


Dahlia: Immediate, unconditional withdrawal. I've been calling for that since 2004, so we could have definitely had a seven year phased withdrawal by now, but clearly that's not the objective, but I would emphasize, because again Obama had his "mission accomplished moment" without the banner saying that we've withdrawn combat forces, but there continue to be over 50,000 US soldiers and Marines on the ground in Iraq, and thousands more mercenaries, and many, many, many CIA, and that's the Mothership, still the Green Zone with the largest embassy in the world, "embassy" since we have diplomatic relations. So basically I'm still calling for our ending our presence in Iraq, and Afghanistan too. Everything that is happening to the people of Iraq is also happening to the people of Afghanistan, same use of depleted uranium, same bombardment, same trauma to civilians. We're killing families, here and abroad. So the bottom-line is "bring the troops home."

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Dahlia Wasfi and the Tragedy of Iraq, Part 3: Becoming a Spokeswoman for Justice for Iraq

Dahlia speaking in Norfolk, VA (photo by Mac McKinney)

We left off with Dr. Dahlia Wasfi discussing Islamophobia in Part 2 of my series. Now I want to explore what really drove her over the edge of inertia to become a powerful spokeswoman, even as I write, for ending the American occupation in Iraq, and a particularly well-versed one at that. To see my two earlier pieces on her (and Ross Caputi in Part 1), CLICK HERE for Part 1, CLICK HERE for Part 2.

A Crisis in Identity

We were still eating a leisurely dinner at the Pasha Mezze when I asked Dahlia “What led you to get involved with Iraq after 9/11 and the attack on Iraq?”

Dahlia: Iraq did not become an issue for me until I went to see my family and it was purely personal that I was going to see them. My life was falling apart at that point. I had taken leave from my residency and my full identification was as an MD. Outside of the hospital I had no idea who I was, and I really had become disillusioned, but also very depressed with the state of the world and the lack of control. I felt like I couldn’t control what was going on in my own life; I couldn’t stop the invasion from happening, so really there was a bit of passive suicidality in my first trip to Iraq. “Well, I’ll go see my family,” but in the back of my mind was the thought: “Take me out, because I don’t know what else to do. I don’t see myself going on. I don’t know who I am.”

I was miserable, and there was also Rachel’s (Corrie) experience. I was really bitter at that point, also questioning my sense of God, if there is a higher power. And if there was, I would have [inner] arguments: I saw Rachel, this very fair, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful young American woman, and she had the guts to go over there, and SHE didn’t get to live anymore, and I thought, “This is ridiculous! I don’t want to be here anymore! Why would you take her?” These were questions I asked in conversations with God in my own head.

“OK, I’m going to go to Iraq! The regime fell. I’ll go see the family,” and a lot of the family members I met, my cousins – this is the first time I’m meeting them because all of them were born after I left in 1977 – it was like those 6 days [the trip overall was a total of 19 days-Mac], those 6 days I had with my cousins in Basra, that was life-changing, sort of a slap in the face, a wake-up call, like there’s something beyond you here! “You’re really being selfish and self-absorbed,” I told myself. I expected them to resent me, wanted them to resent me because I was an American who was living the American dream, and my tax dollars had rained down misery on them, so I expected them to think, “Why would you want to have anything to do with an American?”

Basra, Iraq (Photobucket)

But they welcomed me as if they had known me their entire lives, and to know that in my own mind, then if I could just get Americans to see them as real people I could turn this thing around, a little bit naïve, so basically I came back after this trip and I just wanted to put a human face on the people, so I just started showing family photos, and eventually that became much more for me, political talks – I would get more political questions and would have to read a little bit more, and I never consciously said I was going to put my medical career aside and I’m going to be an activist on Iraq. This is where my life has taken me, and like I said, “I’m still making it up as I go along,” but it’s been far more fulfilling, definitely therapeutic. I’m the one who definitely gets the most out of what I do. I get to tell people my story, offer my perspective.....and nothing gets better for anybody else over there. They continue to suffer, unfortunately, but this is my baby Don Quixote-like effort to try to turn the windmills in another direction.

*********

Ashkenazi Jewish Heritage

Lest we forget, for those of you have read my earlier pieces in this series, and to enlighten those of you who haven’t, Dahlia is only Arab, or Arabian, on her father’s side of the family tree. Her mother is Jewish, raised in New York City, and whose own parents and grandfather actually were Ashkenazi Jews who had to flee from Nazi-occupied Austria during Hitler’s Anschluss, emigrating to the United States in 1938. So Dahlia is in the unique position of having a foot in three, not two worlds: the Arab Middle East, the United States, and the Jewish Diaspora. This enables her to look more closely at Israel’s history as well, as she described to me how her mother’s family barely got into the United States before the Roosevelt Administration began placing quotas on the number of emigrants who could enter the country from Germany and Austria. Consequently, as Dahlia pointed out, many Jews were channeled instead to Palestine, the “Anglo-Saxons’ dumping ground” for Jewish refugees, among other actors vying to direct Jews to Palestine, which, as the world knows, would not be without major consequences soon after World War II was over.

Jerusalem, Palestine during the British Mandate in 1940 (Wikimedia Commons)

In her interview with me, Dahlia didn’t go too much into the details of what she eye-witnessed during her 19 day journey into war-torn Iraq for the first time. It would be in order, thus, to insert this brief summary of her trip from her website liberatethis.com to give you a broader perspective of what see experienced on her first return trip since childhood:

In February 2004, I made a 19-day journey to Iraq. I flew to Jordan and made the 10-hour car ride to Baghdad, whose airport was (and is) controlled by our military. In Iraq’s capital, a year after the invasion, damage from bombing raids was omnipresent. Iraq had been liberated from electricity, security, and potable water. “Democracy” meant sewage in the streets, rolling blackouts, shooting, and explosions. Basrah was much the same, except that the damage appeared to be more extensive; this city had been destroyed during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars, and sanctions and neglect had thwarted rebuilding.

Despite the desperation, the novelty of a visit from an American cousin brought us all joy. Getting to know each other for the first time, my cousins and I were like little kids, giggling and joking, whether the electricity was working or not. My stay was short because of the unpredictability of a country without law and order. I had to return to Amman via Baghdad to make my flight home, but I promised my cousins I would return for a longer stay soon, we hoped, when things were better. (source)

Becoming a Spokeswoman

And as she explained above, once back in the States, she eventually evolved into one of the most sought after public speakers on the realties of the Iraq war, inside and outside of Iraq in all its gruesome details and aspects, physical and geopolitical. Her first speaking gig was actually in Estes Park, Colorado in August of 2004 for an organization called Patriots for Peace, and from there, positive word of mouth brought here more and more invitations until she reached that snow-ball tipping point in a speaker’s career where she was constantly on the go with radio interviews and speaking engagements, always with the stipulation, however, that she would not become subordinated to anybody’s agenda. “You can’t tell me what to say,” she emphasizes.

Much of Dahlia’s mission is simply to explode stereotypes about Iraq that not only American citizens at home entertain, but also American soldiers, Marines and other personnel in Iraq and elsewhere abroad share, a situation where stereotypes can be deadly. For instance, she points out how we have constantly been fed the myth that Iraqi society simply consists of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, all three divisions continuously, or intermittently, at odds with each other to varying degrees of violence and hostility. Dahlia continues:

Dahlia: What we don’t really understand from a Western perspective is that there are all these extended family [her own extended family approaches a hundred relative-Mac], tribal connections that we just don’t have any idea about, what’s going on in neighborhoods, what’s going on in villages and how that extends out to the cities. Joe Biden broke it down for us as Sunni, Shia, Kurd. That’s it! It will never be that simple! It’s all of these extended interconnections, and tribal histories, especially in al Anbar Province, where Ross’s service was, that huge province with more extensive tribal histories, and we just have no idea what’s going on, but what we end up doing is that we go and ask who’s working for al Qaeda, and if there’s a battle going on between two families, one family might say, “Oh, well these people are connected to al Qaeda,” simply to have a vendetta carried out. This is happening in Iraq; this is happening in Afghanistan, and one family ends up with a whole lot of money from the Americans, and the other family ends up with dead relatives.

Mac: I’ve heard about that, calling in airstrikes on someone you don’t like.

Dahlia: Yeah. So it’s far more complicated than we understand, and I think that most of us want to understand, because…..there’s still this sense that we want to feel good about what we’ve done and what we’re doing. We just want do, and that’s understandable from a human perspective, but we have to stop and take stock of what we’ve done. And if we do look at that, then it gets really ugly really fast.

*******

Just how ugly did it get? Dahlia isn’t squeamish at all about pointing out that the US Government has been violating international laws by invading and occupying Iraq. In fact she had a short but somewhat strident interview earlier this same day with the host of a local Hampton Roads NPR affiliate radio show, “Hearsay with Cathy Lewis”, over this, which she recounted during our interview. It began when the host unknowingly said something in her introductory remarks that rubbed Dahlia the wrong way:

Dahlia: Basically, the introduction to my little blurb was [paraphrasing the host], “Well, it could be argued whether or not we should have done what we did, but we are where we are now.” And I said that you just can’t blow of international law!....When the Nazis were invading Europe, we just didn’t say, “Well, they are where they are now.”

So she took that as “Are you comparing what we did to what the Nazis did?”

So I said, “I’ll tell you the difference. Because of what the Nazis did, the international community organized certain bodies to pass certain laws to make sure that that would never happen again,” and I said it was the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Convention, the Geneva Convention, and so what we did was in violation of all those laws. We said we’re not going to pay attention to them.

And simply from these categorizations, of the collective punishment of a population, which is what we did to Fallujah and many cities, but Fallujah is the prime example of collective punishment, of death squads, of the use of chemical and depleted uranium weapons, but just from this tactical perspective we’ve killed a million people [this figure, quoted frequently in various media, cannot be confirmed however - Mac]. I mean there is nothing to feel good about. It’s very emotional, and I’m the one who brought up Nazis, so it’s a very emotional association with that, but if we want to assess what we’ve done in the region, we should ask the people who are living there and find out their stories.

********

Dahlia went on to underscore that, “as the occupying power, we are responsible for, by the Geneva Convention, the civilian population, so everything that happens is our responsibility.”

This is painful to acknowledge that, on one hand, America has had this responsibility to protect the civilian Iraqi population, while on the other hand we have been laying waste to a large percentage of the same since 2003. And there has been little accountability for, to again quote Dahlia, “how we affected ‘divide and conquer’, how before we showed up there were no Sunni neighborhoods, no Shia neighborhoods. THAT did not exist!

“In the recent demonstrations in Iraq that are capturing the fervor of the Revolution that going on throughout western Asia and North Africa, they’re pulling down these walls. They’re knocking down these walls that were set up by the Army Corps of Engineers. They don’t want them! They don’t want that division, but this is an age-old tactic.

Mac: Divide and conquer?

Dahlia: That’s it!

*******

Dahlia spoke at length about “divide and conquer” as a Coalition strategy in Iraq, correlating that with another strategy, the “Salvador Option”, both of which we will explore farther in my next article in this series, but suffice it to say at this point that, historically, the former refers to the British Empire’s strategy of dividing peoples and tribes against each others in those areas the British wanted to colonize, not that they, of course, are the only ones who have practiced this in history. Far from it! The later refers to the policy the US military supported in El Salvador in the 1980s,

For now, I will leave you, the reader, with an excerpt from an article written on Dahlia back in 2007 expounding upon these two subjects: 

In her presentation she exposed as a myth one encouraged by much of the mainstream media, the notion that U.S. forces need to remain in Iraq to quell the civil war. Wasfi argues that the occupation is actually driving the sectarian strife. The U.S. military machine has instigated sectarian warfare in Iraq, invoking the "Salvador Option." American Special Forces, she says, are using many of the same tactics that were previously used in the "dirty wars" of Latin America, including the recruitment and training of Iraqi death squads.
For decades Iraqi society was secular and many people are of mixed background. For example, Wasfi's grandfather was Shia, and her grandmother was Sunni and from the north of Iraq, "So she also had some Kurdish blood."
"There has never been a war between Sunni and Shia in the region of modern day Iraq since the sects were established 1400 years ago," says, "and the violence will dramatically fall once U.S. troops leave." For example, she notes, "2.5 million Iraqis have fled to neighbouring countries, and they didn't bring violence with them. The violence is centered in Iraq where the CIA, U.S. forces and Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] are fomenting it. The same people who are telling us that it's a civil war are the same people who told us that Saddam had WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda."
The present conflict in Iraq reminds Wasfi of a joke her father told her of Britain's earlier colonial strategy, "If you see two fish fighting in the sea, look around for the British guy who started it." It's the strategy of divide and conquer. (source)