Secondly, I don’t know what you’re referring to when you write “Strangely, the concept that America would use bombs to kill Arabs seems to drive you insane.” How’s that? Here I thought that’s what the whole show was about. (I admit I’m tired of going around and around with you over this, but then again I do it for the same reason I ask the questions to the guests – to learn it better for myself for later.)

Even if it’s true that the pentagon set off bombs to frame the Sunni insurgency, you just imply that all bombs blamed on al Qeada in Iraq must then be the same. From the very beginning I saw through and called out the propaganda that all Sunni resistance is “al Qaeda terrorism” based on the Zarqawi myth. But you imply that for me to think that he ever existed and/or ever blew up any Shia in Iraq is to fall completely for the whole line of B.S., which I think is a red herring.

I have plenty of reason to believe that it was Zarqawi’s strategy to prolong the war and occupation. As we all know, they did not, could not, exist in Iraq under Saddam, and as they knew, they would be out of a job if a state came into existence where his used to be. I take “discovered documents” with a grain of salt too, but it’s obvious isn’t it that if the occupation govt. had been able to bring in the leaders of the Sunni resistance, as they had the Sadrists, that their plan to attempt to create the “Islamic State of Iraq” over the Sunnis would be over before it started? (Turns out it was over shortly after it started, but still.) Zawahiri recently complained that he didn’t want to see us go until a few hundred thousand Americans had been killed so that we’d finally leave for good when we left. Now maybe a CIA puppet master was writing his lines for him – or doing the translating – but it makes sense.

They always agree with what the Republicans want, but for different reasons. They wanted us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, North Africa, because that’s where they can get close enough to shoot and bleed the empire dry. Osama explained the whole thing in October, 2004.

You never address the fact that the insurgency was in fact predominately Sunni, just as their and Petraeus’s Concerned Local Citizens are now, nor the fact that they have, over the past couple of years, turned on and purged the very al Qaeda in Iraq you say never existed. Nor do you ever acknowledge that the Mahdi Army and Badr Corps are Shia and have their own interests. Everyone knows Iraqi Arabs were quite intermarried, but as you well know, purple fingers and opinion polls do not dictate the policies of the Badr Corps or Zarqawi style crazies any more than they do those of the American pentagon.

So you say it’s a divide and conquer strategy, I say that there are Iraqis who play their parts to make it happen. So, I’m sorry, I guess.

Many Iraqis blame the occupation for the bombings:“I do not believe it is al-Qaeda any more,” a woman weeping near the scene of the bombing told IPS. “I do not care any more, I am just losing my loved ones. The last explosion hit my husband, and now he is disabled, and this one took my son’s life.”

“I noticed that security officers did not carry out any site investigation,” a former police officer who lives in a neighboring area told IPS, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “I have also noticed that no such crime has been solved since the first days of the occupation.”

Iraqis also doubted the existence and motives of “Zarqawi” The view on-the-ground in Iraq, among both Sunnis and Shi’ites, is worth noting. Sheikh Jawad al-Kalesi, the Shi’ite Imam of the al-Kadhimiyah mosque in Baghdad, told Le Monde: “I don’t think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi exists as such. He’s simply an invention by the occupiers to divide the people.”

Iraq’s most powerful Sunni Arab religious authority, the Association of Muslim Scholars, concurs, condemning the call to arms against Shi’ites as a “very dangerous” phenomenon that “plays into the hands of the occupier who wants to split up the country and spark a sectarian war.” In colonial terms, the strategy is known as “divide and rule.”

The impetus to force the Arab population into concrete and barbed wire prisons with limited access to food, fuel, and electricity doesn’t come from the Arabs. It comes from the occupation. The exact same thing is done in Palestine for the exact same reason. It isn’t to protect them from ‘sectarian violence’ either. The ethnic cleansing is done with the active assistance of the American military: “They [death squads] evicted many of our good Sunni neighbors and killed many others,” Abu Riyad of the predominantly Shia Shula area told IPS. “We protected them for a while, but then we could not face the militias with all the support they had from the Iraqi government and the Americans. It is a terrible shame that we have to live with, but what can we do?”

“It is true that our neighbors did not evict us, but then the Americans swept the area and local fighters had to disappear from the streets,” Hussein Allawi, a Shia who lived in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood told IPS. “A group of masked strangers then entered the town right under American soldiers’ eyes. Only then did we realize that we must leave, and that our good neighbors could not help us any more.” Many such stories are told around Baghdad.

371 returns. Who’s better on who’s backing who in Iraq than us?

I’ve always said that there was no such thing until after the invasion, that in fact, Zarqawi didn’t declare himself “al Qaeda” until the end of 04, that they were always the tiniest percentage of the insurgency, that the locals only tolerated them only while they were helping fight Americans and that if we left they would be gone overnight.

We disagree about the degree to which his groups’ role was played up by pentagon propaganda – I think a hell of a lot, you think completely.

And I think they did have an interest – they thought – in prolonging the war. That is still a far cry from I (or anyone at Antiwar.com) believe and recite every pentagon report about every attack attributed to them.

I do believe Patrick Cockburn when he explains how they did exist, and were such tyrants with their rules for personal behavior and overreached so badly with the “Islamic State in Iraq” umbrella group that they’ve been run out of town even while the occupation continues.

I wish I’d asked Dahr about that, sorry.