Once they had consolidated control over Mosul and the surrounding area, the Kurds imposed what essentially was a police state on the Sunni majority in Nineveh province. Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru of the Washington Post reported last August that Kurdish security forces had abducted hundreds of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen from the city, transferring them to secret prisons in Kurdistan. The Post quoted a June State Department memo noting that Kurdish abductions had "greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines."

American officers in Mosul, however, were not concerned with ethnic strife but with winning a war, or at least staunching their losses, and the peshmerga seemed like the only effective Iraqi instrument in sight for doing so. "They're well-organized, fierce and get the job done," a U.S. company commander in Mosul rhapsodized about them.

Later, the Kurdish militiamen would be joined by the fierce Shiite "Wolf Brigade," whose founder reportedly considered the Sunni members of the Association of Muslim Clerics to be "infidels". That unit tortured innocent Sunnis to force them to confess to being part of insurgent organizations -- confessions which the local authorities recognized as having been coerced once the Brigade left the city. Nevertheless, in December 2005, NBC's Richard Engel reported that the Wolf Brigade was considered to have been effective in Mosul.

The US command still prefers Shiites and Kurds to police Sunni cities and towns. According to journalist Chris Allbritton, for instance, members of the city council in Fallujah requested the responsible U.S. commander to allow local people to replace Shiite units from the south that are still occupying the city and substituting for the police. The Americans refused, charging that local officials were still "turning a blind eye to insurgent activities." In November, local Sunni leaders in Ramadi demanded that U.S. troops be withdrawn from the city and be replaced with security forces raised by local tribal leaders. Instead, the U.S. command sent the Wolf Brigade into Ramadi in advance of the December elections.

Not only the Embassy but the U.S. military was quite conscious of the serious consequences of its sectarian-ethnic strategy. Last May, for instance, Washington Post reporter Ann Scott Tyson wrote that "U.S. military analysts" conceded that, "by pitting Iraqis from different religious sects, ethnic groups and tribes against each other," the U.S. strategy "aggravates the underlying fault lines in Iraqi society, heightening the prospects of civil strife."

With the Sunni community even more overwhelmingly behind the anti-occupation armed struggle than was the case a year ago, the U.S. command feels it has no choice but to depend on just such sectarian or ethnic units to help put down the Sunni insurgency. But even if they do not explicitly admit it, U.S. commanders know that this is a brutal and cynical policy. Thus, they have had to find a way to justify it to themselves. In October, a "senior military official in Baghdad" was quoted in another Tom Lasseter piece saying, "Maybe they just need to have their civil war. In this part of the world it's almost a way of life." That official was unconsciously echoing the words of General William Westmoreland, the former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, who rationalized the hundreds of thousands of deaths inflicted on the Vietnamese by the U.S. intervention in an infamous statement: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner... Life is cheap in the Orient."

There is no doubt that the history of violence among the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds made for strong tendencies toward sectarian-ethnic violence in post-Saddam Iraq. But the fact that a senior American military official would resort to such a racist explanation to evade responsibility for creating civil-war conditions in Iraq only underlines the depths to which the United States has descended.

Gareth Porter, a historian and political analyst, now writes regularly on Iraq. He is the author of several books on the Vietnam War, most recently Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

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