I'm trying to get others to know of evidence that Rumsfeld intentionally started the civil war in Iraq through the Badr Brigade. Derek Harvey, who later served on Trump's National Security Council, told Reuters in 2015 that in 2003 and 2004 we had released assassins from the Badr Brigade who had target lists of Baathists because his superiors said that this stuff "had to play itself out". A May 28 2003 cable notes Badr revenge killings at the beginning of the occupation and a strong public SCIRI/Badr presence. The Coalition captured a letter which they published in February 2004 from Zarqawi to Al Qaeda in which Zarqawi says that jihadis need to start a more open civil war against the Shia to mobilize Sunnis. Zarqawi cited only the Badr Brigade assassinations as a contemporary reason to bomb Shia, yet I have not found any news report mentioning this specific reference. We learned that Badr members were placed in special police commando units to form death squads before and especially after a Badr commander, Bayan Jabr, was appointed to the head the Interior (police) Ministry by the new government in 2005. Jerry Burke, an adviser to the Interior Ministry, said that the top brass prevented an attempt to surveil and stop these special police death squads. When Rumsfeld was pushed out and we started the surge, gun deaths immediately dropped in Baghdad. Half a year later, overall Iraq Body Count civilian deaths were dramatically cut in half over the course of two months, and notably just before the 23% increase in troops was fully completed. Rumsfeld maintained that he wanted to leave as soon as we trained the security forces, even before we quelled violence. Everyone besides the neocons started to fight his policy and eventually won out over him. This evidence shows that Rumsfeld could not have believed that Iran was using its proxies to kill Americans, because he wouldn't have released members of, and stopped investigations into, the Badr Brigade. You can search the hashtags Rumsfeld, Badr and MEK on Twitter to find the full essay.