The Bush Admin's How-to Guide for Using Religious Warfare to Destroy Iraq

Here's a thought exercise.

Imagine if the greatest minds this country has to offer were assembled in a conference room and tasked with drawing up a post-invasion plan that would lead to sectarian bloodshed in a country like Iraq -- where different groups had long lived side-by-side, intermarried and thought of themselves first and foremost as Iraqis, rather than as Shiites and Sunnis.

Their first recommendation would probably be to create an environment in which conflict would be likely to flourish. It would be a good idea to go into the country with enough heavy weaponry and air power to defeat the national army, but too few troops to provide security on the ground after the fact. When anarchy reigns, people look inward -- to their family, neighborhood and, yes, their religious community -- and develop a distrust of members of other communities.

If some military experts -- say the Army Chief of Staff -- said that the planned force would be insufficient for providing day-to-day security, one would probably want to humiliate and undermine him publicly. Maybe announce his successor 14 months before the end of his term so that he appeared before the world as some batty lame duck without any support from his superiors.

Then, dismantle the entire government, instead of just the senior leadership, and fire all of the country's bureaucrats, police and security personnel -- even if there were a half-million of them. But don't disarm them -- those weapons will come in handy later.

It would be good to destroy the country's infrastructure, too -- people get pissed off when they lack reliable electricity, working sanitation facilities, clean running water and the like. Make sure not to get those things up and running within five years of the invasion, either. That's a challenge, especially if one wants shovel tens of billions of dollars of American tax-payers' cash into the reconstruction effort.

The best way to achieve that trick would be to create enormous umbrella contracts with dozens of projects within their scope -- far too many for any firm to complete without farming out projects to dozens of subcontractors -- and hand those out to well-connected firms -- firms with terrible track records if possible. Make those contracts "cost-plus" - guaranteeing a profit regardless of the quality of the work -- add in minimal oversight and you've created excellent incentives for graft, corruption and incompetence (this solution would likely come from an economist sitting on that prestigious panel).

While you're at it, it would probably be best to rapidly privatize the large state-run companies that guaranteed employment for a large portion of the population. Make sure to ship in tens of thousands of foreign guest workers from places like India and the Philippines, and, if possible, pass a binding law that prevented any new government from giving preference to domestic firms or firms that employ large numbers of locals in its contracting. Otherwise, with a huge influx of foreign investment coming in, it's unlikely that there'd still be an unemployment rate of between 25-50 percent five years after the invasion.

If a working group within the government -- say at the State Department -- recommended that a job program be created for the newly-unemployed -- including those heavily armed members of the former regime's security forces -- ignore it at all costs. Idle hands are, after all, the Devil's tools.

When chaos first breaks out, as it inevitably will, dismiss it with a sound-byte -- maybe just say, "democracy is messy."

Make sure to leave dozens of large weapons caches unguarded for easy looting -- they'll come in handy later.

With the stage set, now comes the tricky part. How would that group of August thinkers replace a strong national identity -- one of the strongest in the region -- with a fractured sectarianism?