¶ … Government Iraq is certainly a terribly divided society and outside political forces like Al Qaeda have certainly been attempting to exploit and exacerbate these religious and ethnic conflicts in order to turn it into a failed state. For practical purposes, the most significant divisions are between the Kurds and the Sunni and Shiite Muslims, with the Shiites having a clear majority of about 70% of the population. During the civil wars of the last eight years, Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites largely separated and segregated themselves, while other minority groups like the Christians have been terrorized by extremists and driven out of the country. Up to the 1950s, Iraq also had a large Jewish community but they were almost all expelled decades ago and are hardly likely to return. This is hardly an ideal situation, to put it mildly, and the chances of Iraq ever becoming a multiethnic, middle-class democracy would seem to be nil. Since the Kurds and Sunnis already have considerable local and regional autonomy in their separate enclaves, then the best solution...
A national government and parliament will continue to exist and control foreign affairs, but the semi-independent regions will be free to establish their own cultural, religious, educational and political institutions.
This includes putting in place international legal systems, dispute resolution mechanisms as well as cooperative arrangements.14 The call this approach social peace-building or structural peace-building. Such peace-building involves "creating structures -- systems of behavior, institutions, concerted actions -- that support the embodiment or implementation of a peace culture."15 This is what the author's call multi-track diplomacy. It involves individuals who are not normally involved in the peace process, particularly business
(MACV Dir 381-41) This document is one of the first confidential memorandums associated with the Phoenix Program, which details in 1967 the mostly U.S. involvement in counterinsurgency intelligence and activities and discusses the future training and development of South Vietnam forces to serve the same function, that had been supported by the U.S. In civilian (mostly CIA) and military roles. The document stresses that the U.S. role is to
This is to note that "Trinidad and Tobago alone account for 80% (1st quarter 2004) of all U.S. LNG imports, up from 68% in 2002. Therefore, any incident involving an LNG tanker along the Caribbean routes could harm not only U.S. energy security but also the economies of the Caribbean islands, affecting tourism and other industries." (Kelshell, 1) Such a trajectory has all the markings of an Al-Qaeda styled
These responsibilities notwithstanding, the American public was already being conditioned to view the war in Iraq as a battle against extremists, that is, against the Islamist radicals who had threatened the "American" way" of life on September 11, 2001. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had already inflamed America's own Christian fundamentalists with talk that the terrible events of that day were to blame in part on "the gays and
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