Vol. 71/No. 38      October 15, 2007

At the same time, the political, military, and economic policies carried out by the U.S. occupation forces head in the direction of just such a partition.

The Senate resolution, approved 75-23, calls for “actively support[ing] a political settlement among Iraq’s major factions” that would “allow for the creation of federal regions.” The regions could be modeled after the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which the resolution calls “largely stable and peaceful.”

Rice acknowledged that Washington is promoting steps to give more power to regional governments, whether or not the Baghdad government decides to formalize them as national policy.

“[E]ven though they haven’t passed an oil law, they are on a budget basis distributing the oil revenues to the provinces by formula,” she told the New York Post. “We’re trying to solidify and indeed push forward this very positive trend toward local control, if you will, or local governance.”

Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company signed a production-sharing agreement with the KRG in northern Iraq in September. U.S. State Department officials said the deal may be at cross-purposes with the efforts of the national government to craft an oil law acceptable to the Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shiite sections of Iraq’s ruling class.

In the south of Iraq, the British force in Basra is being reduced by 1,000 and moving from a combat role to training and backup, British prime minister Gordon Brown announced October 2.

“[W]ithin the next two months we can move to provincial control,” Brown said, “that is Iraqis taking responsibility for their security in the whole of Basra.”

The Iraqis Brown refers to are wealthy capitalist families and their armed gangs working in collusion with imperialism.

“In the town of Abu Al-Khaseeb, south of the city, the newly rich are building palatial homes next to mud huts,” reported a September 19 Christian Science Monitor dispatch from Basra. “The mansions often belong to those who have been able to cash in on the brisk business in the town’s Abu Flous port, which is one of the province’s main four ports and is widely considered to be controlled by the mafialike family, Bayet Ashour, and certain militias.”

A local resident, Jalal Ali, told the paper, “You can only work at the port if you join a militia. I thought about it, but then my two cousins who had joined were badly wounded in a clash.”

Washington’s most recent military offensive has been based on the assumption—now affirmed in fact—that the occupation forces would find willing accomplices at the local level.

The plan was also based on the assumption that the two main contending factions in the Shiite ruling class—the Jaysh al Mahdi led by Moqtada al-Sadr, and the Badr Corps led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim—have little to gain from a continuing confrontation with U.S. occupation forces. They both have substantial influence in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government in Baghdad, and in southern Iraq, where the vast majority of the country’s oil reserves are located.

As a result, the offensive has focused mainly on the Sunni Arab and mixed neighborhoods in the capital city of Baghdad and surrounding provinces.

The offensive itself has extended the fragmentation of the country down to the level of the neighborhood. In the capital, U.S.-led forces have divided the city into separate districts and then set up small bases, called Joint Security Stations, in scores of neighborhoods. Since June, these operations have spread from Baghdad into Anbar province, Baqoubah, and Diyala.
 
 
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