The United States has spent $19 billion on the Iraqi security forces since 2003. The results are blatantly illegal under the government's Leahy Amendment (1997), which forbids military assistance to known human rights abusers. Why hasn't that amendment been a greater focus of Congressional attention? A key Senate consultant suggested in an interview with The Nation that there is widespread Congressional avoidance of the Frankenstein problem. In any other conflict, a regime like Iraq's would be termed a police state. In America, such talk makes people cringe. The dominant paradigm is that the "new Iraq" is a fledgling democracy that needs our nourishing protection before it "stands up." Although political talk-shows frequently discuss Iraq's problems, rarely do they focus in depth on the death squads and militias embedded in the US-funded security forces.

Perhaps this is more than a case of avoiding an ugly, unwanted phenomenon that is difficult to shut down. One explanation is hard to discount, however unnerving it might be. Soon after the 9/11 terror attacks, Vice President Cheney spoke of working "the dark side," doing apparently unspeakable things "quietly, without any discussion." Neoconservative military analyst Robert Kaplan has argued that counterinsurgency should be conducted "off camera, so to speak." The divide-and-conquer strategy was articulated by President Bush himself, who declared in his 2001 address on confronting terrorism that the United States would "turn them one against another."

Bernard Lewis, perhaps the dominant neoconservative voice advocating the Iraq War, proposed dismembering Arab nationalism back in the early 1990s, writing that "if the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civic society...the state then disintegrates--as happened in Lebanon--into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, religions and parties." In 2005 a longtime Israeli foreign ministry official wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, titled "Israel Could Live With a Fractured, Failed Iraq," that "an Iraq split into three semi-autonomous mini-states, or an Iraq in civil war, means that the kind of threat posed by [Saddam] Hussein...is unlikely to rise again."

The specter of forced partition is directly accelerating with the US troop surge, and sectarian civil war is already at hand. What is lacking is recognition that the United States is the driver of both; the surge has doubled the number of Iraqi refugees, and the civil war features American funding, weapons and advisers on all sides. "We sit back and watch because that can only benefit us," said one top commander of insurgent groups battling each other in 2006.

More evidence for this exploitation of sectarian chaos comes from Stephen Biddle, a Harvard PhD now at the Council on Foreign Relations and an on-the-ground adviser to General Petraeus in Baghdad. The Biddle plan, as described in a 2006 Foreign Affairs essay, called for playing both sides of the sectarian divide, something like the colonial defense of occupation as the only way to keep the barbarians in balance. After the United States had put the Shiites (and Kurds) in power, Biddle advised manipulating their behavior by "a US threat to cease backing the Shiites coupled with a program to arm the Sunnis overtly or, in a semi-clandestine way...substantially reduce the Shiites' military prospects" against the Sunni insurgents.

Alternatively, Biddle proposed that the United States might unleash greater Shiite military power by providing tanks, armored personnel carriers, fixed-wing attack aircraft and the like to increase the Shiite capacity to "commit mass violence against the Sunnis dramatically." The reason? To provide an "important incentive for the Sunnis to compromise" on their longstanding demand for an American troop withdrawal.

This is dangerous territory, playing the "devil's game," in the apt phrase of author Robert Dreyfuss. One danger is that it can be played both ways. Iraqi militias are not only using the Americans to go after their rivals but seem to have turned their weapons on the occupiers. Just where and how did those 190,000 AK-47s disappear? After routing their local rivals, who might the Kit Carson Scouts turn against next?

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