Divide and Conquer…

[Junkdrawer]

Suppose you have a country who sits on top of a huge pool of oil. Now, a minority dictator has total control of the country and he won’t give you control of the oil. What do do? :think:

Try this: invade the country and then provoke a massively bloody civil war. Should be easy because the former ruling minority will be scared to death of the majority and the majority will want to get even for the brutal decades long rule of the minority. Oh, you may have to blow up a mosque or two to get the fires raging to full fury, but the tinder is dry. Once each side has thoroughly decimated each other, it should be easy to install the government of your choice and pump the oil at leisure.

Original idea? Hardly. Goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire.

So excuse me if I’m a little skeptical when I hear talk of the goal being a stable Iraqi democracy. Color me cynical, but I just don’t think that was the plan.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

1. Gosh. I feel dumb I never thought of that.

Lip service, huh?

[Avalux]

2. You're right on - democracy was never the plan.

The PNAC objective has been and continues to be controlled chaos in the region.

[Junkdrawer]

3. A quick Google turned up this from Chomsky...

Divide and conquer

by Noam Chomsky
(interviewed by David Barsamian)

Talk about the divide-and rule policy of the British Raj, playing off Hindus against Muslims. You see the results of that today.

Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. For example, I think about 90% of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.

There's that astonishing statistic that at the height of British power in India, they never had more than 150,000 people there.

That was true everywhere. It was true when the American forces conquered the Philippines, killing a couple hundred thousand people. They were being helped by Philippine tribes, exploiting conflicts among local groups. There were plenty who were going to side with the conquerors.

But forget the Third World-just take a look at the Nazi conquest of nice, civilized Western
Europe, places like Belgium and Holland and France. Who was rounding up the Jews? Local people, often. In France they were rounding them up faster than the Nazis could handle them. The Nazis also used Jews to control Jews.

If the United States was conquered by the Russians, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Elliott Abrams and the rest of them would probably be working for the invaders, sending people off to concentration camps. They're the right personality types.

That's the traditional pattern. Invaders quite typically use collaborators to run things for them. They very naturally play upon any existing rivalries and hostilities to get one group to work for them against others.

....

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Divide.html