Reply #16: I visited an Iraqi-Australian friend [View All]

last night. Chatted with his newly-arrived brother about the dire situation in their homeland. :(

They are upper-middle-class Sunni Arabs, but they have another brother married to a Kurdish woman, and cousins who married Shi'a. What is surprising is not the fact small, state-sponsored fanatic groups have plunged that country into sectarian civil war, but that it took this long.

It would be even easier to set up ethnic war in Australia or the US. Give a few small groups of bigots weapons, uniforms and encouragement, and reprisal and counter-reprisal will generate its own momentum.

When police can set up roadblocks to execute people in broad daylight for being the wrong sect, and a nine-year-old girl next door is blown up by an IED aimed at a US patrol, it's time to get out...

On a positive note (if you can call it that), the more desperately they fight each other, the less they can fight us. Bush* might still pull this off - balkanization is a desperate tactic, but it worked for the French in Indochina for a century, and in Lebanon for 25 years. They'll need to kill Moqtada al Sadra though - with Sunni organizations smashed by the counter-insurgency, many Sunni look to him as a protector.