This is what the new American-sponsored democratic Iraq looks like

Gareth Porter, a long-term investigative journalist and historian, has written yet another incisive article about the disturbing strategy of the US military to incite sectarian violence, thus keeping Iraqis divided among themselves and undermining Iraqi-Arab nationalism.

The US wants to create a subordinate Iraq, a country bereft of any political and educated leadership that can challenge its puppets in Baghdad. One of the ways the US does this is instigate horrifying sectarian hatred, like this example documented by Gareth Porter. The US military deliberately pitted Shias, Kurds and Sunnis against each other, to stoke the fires of sectarian hatred and poison relations between these communities. Like a noxious weed, the US and its proxies have spread their malignant hate to new fields.

General Petraeus was hailed (and still is regarded) as the man to bring stability to Iraq. We can see from this evidence that all he did was escalate the Iraq war to new levels of horrifying violence. He is a terrorist and war criminal who should be put on trial for his crimes against humanity.

As Porter documents, "the U.S. military command issued “FRAGO [fragmentary order] 242″, which provided that no investigation of detainee abuse by Iraqis was to be conducted unless directed by the headquarters of the command, according to references to the order in the Wikileaks documents.

The order came immediately after Gen. Petraeus took command of the new Multi-National Security Transition Command in Iraq (MNSTC-I). It was a clear signal that the U.S. command expected torture of prisoners to be a central feature of Iraqi military and police operations against Sunni insurgents."

So Petraeus is a mass murderer and torturer who will go down in history as a butcher, an execrable criminal-general whose name emits the same foul stench as his fellow war-criminals Franco, Pinochet and Rodolfo Graziani.

If anyone thought that the US can play the role of a peacekeeper in Iraq, or was motivated by a desire to bring peace to the Middle East, then this essay by Porter should give them pause for thought. And such crimes by the committed United States military and political authorities (along with their Iraqi auxiliaries) underscores the necessity for a strong antiwar movement in Australia.