The only way Iraq can overcome its many ethno-sectarian and tribal divisions and remain unified is if a massive and prolonged civil war occurs, and the winning faction holds the fractured country together by force.

Congratulations on writing the dumbest statement I’ve ever seen on this site! Care to explain why Iraq has never had a “civil war” before and why America has been unable to ‘hold the fractured country together by force’? They’ve murdered and exiled about a quarter of the Iraqi population and blockaded much of the rest in concrete and barbed wire prisons, but they still can’t seem to stamp out that pesky guerrilla war ‘sectarian violence’!

For anyone who cares: Iraq has never had a “civil war”. It has no history of religious violence. The Baath Party was explicitly secular and mainly Shia. One of the vice presidents was Christian. Iraqis are intermarried, though the colonial policy to segregate them into religious ghettos has amusingly only targeted the Arabs and not the Kurds.

The ongoing failure of the puppet army & puppet government is due to them being puppets. The violence will continue as long as the occupation continues. Just like in Vietnam, no change in colonial policy will fix this. As far as “ethnic cleansing”, “sectarian bombings” and the mythical al qaeda in Iraq goes…well lets hear what the Iraqis have to say about them!

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."

She referred to a similar bombing two-and-a-half months ago at the same market that killed 137 and wounded many more.

U.S. leaders and Iraqi government officials again accused "terrorists and the Saddamists" of the bombing. But many people around Baghdad are blaming the occupation forces and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.

"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 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?"

On the other hand, many Sunni Iraqis seemed unwilling to evict their Shia countrymen – for a while. But people in one mixed area of Baghdad described strange developments.

"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.