"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement. "Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

divide and conquer in the war of terror:
(...) The Bush Administration has now embarked on its fourth "regime change" operation in its global "Terror War." Following the more direct overthrows in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the aggression by paid-for proxies in Somalia, we now have the civil war in Palestine, with U.S. arms and money backing the armed overthrow of the democratically elected Hamas government. As in Somalia, where the American-trained army of the Ethiopian dictatorship joined up with Somali warlords in the pay of the CIA, the latest regime change is being carried out by a combination of foreign and native proxies: the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.
(...) The civil war in Palestine is of course a long-held dream of the American and Israeli Right. Israel first secretly supported the sectarian Hamas in order to undermine the secular nationalists of Arafat's PLO; now they openly take sides with Arafat's successors in the Palestinian Authority against Hamas, which -- as always happens -- escaped the control of the puppet-masters who sought to exploit the group for their own ends. But the long-term aim has been achieved: a violently divided Palestinian society, broken down, killing each other off, leaving Israel free to continue its colonization of Palestinian land. As others have pointed out, it's no wonder that the United States so staunchly supports this policy: after all, it's what we did to the Native Americans.
(...) Now, it may be that in this particular historical instance, the Israelis will not be strong enough or numerous enough to overwhelm the Palestinians in the end. But they need only look to their chief mentors and benefactors, the United States, to see that it is indeed possible to destroy and dispossess a divided native people, take their land and build your own society on top of it.
(...) the "Palestinian Pinochet": Mohammed Dahlan, nominally the "National Security Adviser" of the hapless sad sack now clinging to the office of the Palestinian presidency, Mahmoud Abbas. As Karon points out, Dahlan is actually a freebooting warlord foisted upon the Palestinian government by the Bush Administration -- in much the same way that the Bush Administration planted longtime CIA asset Mohammed Shahwani as head of the American-created "Iraqi National Intelligence Service," which is still funded by Washington, outside the control of the nominally sovereign Iraqi government. Dahlan instigated the latest fighting in a bid to thwart the unity government brokered by Saudi Arabia -- against Bush's wishes -- earlier this year.

civil war in gaza?:
Palestinian observers speaking to the Weekly attribute the infighting -- which forced Interior Minister Hani Al-Qawasmeh to resign on Sunday -- to three factors. First is the inability of Hamas's and Fatah's leaders to control their respective military wings, largely made up of young, inexperienced and undisciplined trigger-happy men. The repeated collapse of ceasefire agreements reached between the two sides over recent months supports such a view.
(...) But the situation is complicated by the overlap between factional and tribal concerns. Clans, many of which have their own militias, often carry out revenge killings, which draw factions into fresh clashes.
(...) Then there is Israel, which has a vested interest, fuelled by political and propaganda considerations, in pushing Gaza into civil war. Israeli tactics have increasingly been to use Palestinian infighting as a smokescreen to evade any serious peace process that would involve Israel giving up the spoils of the 1967 War. Israel's siege of Gaza, which has involved the confiscation of almost 50 per cent of Palestinian tax revenues, has been aided and abetted by Washington's blockade of the present government. The result has been to turn Gaza into a pressure cooker on the verge of explosion, with the Palestinian authorities unable to meet the basic needs of the population, be that paying employees their salaries or protecting them from Israel's attempts at ethnic cleansing.

divide and conquer?:
If the Bush administration is successful in its current efforts to divide Islam by pitting Shi'ites against Sunnis it will revitalize the old colonial tactic of divide and conquer, and maintain the domination of the Middle East by authoritarian elites allied with the U.S. and the international energy industry. Its vehicle, according to The New York Times, is an 'American backed alliance' of several Sunni-dominated regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, 'along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel.' The anti-Shiite front will also likely include Turkey and Pakistan.
(...) Suddenly, rhetoric like the 'eastern tide' and the 'Persian menace' have begun appearing in official newspapers in the region, although the average Arab does not view Iran as a threat. A recent Zogby International poll of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) found that roughly 80% of those polled considered the United States and Israel the biggest threats to their security, while only 11% listed Iran. Further, fewer than 25% believe Iran should be pressured to halt its nuclear program, while 61% think Iran has the right to a nuclear program even if it results in nuclear weapons.
(...) One major concern for the United States is oil. While oil production in the United States, Mexico, and the North Sea is declining, U.S. consumption is predicted to increase by one-third over the next 20 years. By 2020, two-thirds of all U.S. oil will be imported, and since 65% of the world's remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East, one doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude a strategy of divide and conquer is aimed at keeping strategic control of those resources.
(...) Keeping up tensions in the Middle East is also enormously lucrative for U.S. arms companies. Since 2006, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman have spent-or will spend over the next year- more than $60 billion on arms purchases.
(...) Who cannot remember that to contain the so-called 'Shiite Crescent' after the 1979 revolution, the extremism of the fundamentalist Salafi movement was nourished by the West-only to transform into Al-Qaeda and the Taliban?
(...) While the Shi'a are often represented as a single entity, there are in fact enormous differences among Shi'a communities. They are a majority in Iran, but Persians are ethnically different than Arabs. The Shi'a constitute the bulk of the Muslim population in Lebanon, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been sharply critical of Iraq's Shi'a government for working hand in glove with the U.S. occupation. Yemen. Traditionally they 'are under represented,' according to Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'Socially and economically, Shi'a communities are more marginalized, less educated, and poorer.' The fact that Shi'a communities-particularly in Lebanon and Iraq, but also in Saudi Arabia-are suddenly on the radar screen has less to with any kind of Iran-driven conspiracy than with growing resistance to the sect's traditionally second-class status in the Middle East. The 'divisions' are political and economic, not sectarian, says Abdel-Latif.
(...) As London School of Economics Middle East expert Fred Halliday points out, the distinctions 'are small, far less than those between Catholics and Protestants in Christianity,' and conflict between the two is 'essentially a recent development, a product of the Middle East political crisis in recent decades.' For instance, Shi'ites and Sunnis have intermarried and shared holy sites for centuries.
(...) Halliday argues that the wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan encouraged the division because militant Sunni groups were the heart of the resistance. The real divisions may be small, but religious conflict has always been a surrogate for something else. In Ireland it divided native Irish from Protestant settlers and kept the two at one another's throats. In Egypt, the British manipulated Copts against Muslims, Christian Greeks against Muslim Turks in Cyprus. As the Irish found out to their woe, small differences, if linked to a wider policy, can turn esoteric matters of theology into a life and death matter. 'These fires, once lit, can destroy forms of co-existence that have existed for centuries,' points out Halliday.