Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Poodle’s little political gimmick, withdrawing 1600 troops from Iraq, has already had some unforeseen consequences: the Danes and Ukrainians are also hinting retreat. The Iraqi resistance has just shot down the 8th US helicopter since the beginning of the year. In the meanwhile, the US-UK-Israel engineered civil war in Baghdad rages on.

By all accounts, it is an unmitigated success. While all the rapes so far had been committed by the occupiers, it would appear its puppets in the Iraqi Vichy government have also joined the sport. The puppet government of al-Maliki was already fending off allegations of rape (by commending the alleged rapists), only to be hit by another.

Four Iraqi soldiers have been accused of raping a 50-year-old Sunni woman and the attempted rape of her two daughters in the second allegation of sexual assault leveled against Iraqi forces this week, an official said Thursday.

Brig. Gen. Nijm Abdullah said the attack allegedly occurred earlier this month in the northern city of Tal Afar during a search for weapons and insurgents.

A lieutenant and three enlisted men denied the charge but later confessed after they were confronted by the woman, a Turkoman. Abdullah said a fifth soldier suspected something was wrong, burst into the house and forced the others at gunpoint to stop the assault.

Nowhere To Hide

The latest issue of the London Review of Books (a publication I highly recommend), carries an excellent report by Patrick Cockburn on the developments in Baghdad. Here are some excerpts:

Baghdad is now effectively a dozen different cities; they are all at war. On walls there are slogans in black paint saying ‘Death to Spies’. A Shia caught in a Sunni district will be killed and vice versa…Between thirty and fifty bodies, often mutilated, are picked up by the police every day…According to the UN, 3000 people are murdered, mostly for sectarian reasons, in Iraq every month.

Everybody in Baghdad is frightened. There are few friends of mine left in the city. One day I got a phone call from Hussein, a businessman I had known since the US invasion, who had remained an optimist longer than most. He now spoke in a frightened voice, and from London. I hadn’t heard from him for a while, he said, because he had been kidnapped last summer. He came from a well-known Shia family and was lucky to be alive. His kidnappers whipped him, and then ‘came back to apologise because a cleric at their mosque told them it was wrong to whip anybody over 40 years of age’; he was released after handing over all his money. He was told to leave the country, which he did, but he has no residence permit and can’t stay in Britain or Jordan indefinitely. He doesn’t know what to do.

Bombs, kidnappings and sectarian killings: these are what people talk about in Baghdad. There is not much Iraqis can do about these threats, except run away. I am always talking to people about how to get to Jordan or Syria, and about the chances of getting asylum in the UK or elsewhere in Europe. Out of a population of 27 million, four million Iraqis – more than the population of Ireland – have fled their homes. This is the biggest exodus of refugees in the Middle East since Palestinians were forced from their homes in 1948. Many left after finding a bullet in an envelope slipped under the door or a death threat scrawled on the front of their house. There are relatively safe areas inside Iraq to which the Shia can flee; the Sunni are in danger wherever they go unless they leave the country altogether…

Just how dangerous Baghdad is for Americans was underlined last month when a helicopter belonging to the US security company Blackwater was shot down as it flew over the Sunni area of al-Fadhil close to the central market. The US army immediately sent in a rescue team, but by the time it arrived four of the five members of the helicopter’s crew had been executed by shots to the head (the fifth died in the crash); within hours their identity cards were being shown on insurgent websites. The lack of US control is even more apparent in the provinces. Recently US and Iraqi commanders gave a self-congratulatory press conference on the situation in Baquba, the capital of the fruit-growing province of Diyala. ‘The situation in Baquba,’ they claimed, ‘is reassuring and under control’; nasty rumours, they said, were being ‘circulated by bad people’. A few hours later insurgents stormed Baquba’s mayoral office, kidnapped the mayor and blew up the building. The local council’s response was to sack 1500 members of the Diyala police force on grounds that they had failed to resist the insurgency. The council now complains that insurgents are in effective control of Baquba and that Nouri al-Maliki’s government, which is preoccupied with the Baghdad security plan, has sent them no help.

It is hard to see why Bush’s surge into areas of Iraq that the US army has failed to pacify should succeed this time. Sunni insurgents and Shia militias will simply move elsewhere, or fight back using guerrilla tactics. If the US puts pressure on the Mehdi Army in Baghdad then the long and vulnerable US supply lines to Kuwait – the convoys run through the Shia provinces of southern Iraq – will come under attack, threatening the effective functioning of US forces in the capital…

The enormity of the decisions about future US policy that Bush announced in January has still not sunk in outside the US – and perhaps not even there. The implications are considerable. Bush’s plan is a total rejection of the sensible proposals of the Baker-Hamilton report, which recommended talks with Iran and Syria. He means instead to escalate and widen the war. ‘Shia extremists backed by Iran’, Bush said, were now an enemy as significant as al-Qaida. His demonisation of Iran – the hidden hand controlling the Shia militias – was an expression of the same paranoid fervour that four years ago drove his denunciations of Saddam for building weapons of mass destruction to threaten the Middle East. The level of mendacity about the relationship between Iran and the Iraqi Shia is even greater. The Shia of Iraq – who make up 60 per cent of the population – needed nobody’s prompting to take power through victory in the elections of 2005. Perhaps the most dangerous misconception in the Middle East is to see the Shia of Iraq or Lebanon as the pawns of Iran.

Target Iran

While the most recent antiwar rally in Washington (organized by United For Peace and Justice, a Democratic Party front) ignored the threats against Iran altogether, since most leaders of the Democratic party are as hawkish, if not more, on Iran as the Bush junta, the intellectual luminaries of the antiwar movement have been equally remiss in emphasizing the dangers. Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former US air force officer, instructor at various war colleges, who has carried out war games with Iran as the target warns: “We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq…It is an air operation.”

Only two days back, the BBC reported:

US contingency plans for air strikes on Iran extend beyond nuclear sites and include most of the country’s military infrastructure, the BBC has learned.

It is understood that any such attack – if ordered – would target Iranian air bases, naval bases, missile facilities and command-and-control centres…senior officials at Central Command in Florida have already selected their target sets inside Iran.

That list includes Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Facilities at Isfahan, Arak and Bushehr are also on the target list, the sources say.

Two triggers

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the trigger for such an attack reportedly includes any confirmation that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon – which it denies.

Alternatively, our correspondent adds, a high-casualty attack on US forces in neighbouring Iraq could also trigger a bombing campaign if it were traced directly back to Tehran.Long range B2 stealth bombers would drop so-called “bunker-busting” bombs in an effort to penetrate the Natanz site, which is buried some 25m (27 yards) underground.

It is well understood in the ranks of the military, diplomatic and financial elite that a war against Iran would be disastrous. Most are opposing it vocally for this reason. The American congress on the other hand is playing to a very different tune. While it may not support Bush if the US leads the attack on Iran, there is hardly anyone in the congress who will raise a bleat if Israel joins the fight first. As we saw during Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, in both houses of congress, there was only a single individual who had the courage to utter mild words of criticism — and it was a Republican! Other than Chuck Hagel, everyone else, including the most progressive fringe of the Democratic Party lined up behind Israel. Liberals, such as Nancy Pelosi refused to attend a speech by puppet Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki when criticised Israel during his visit to Washington. Howard Dean went further and declared him an “anti-Semite” for refusing to acknowledge Israel’s right to bomb any civilian population its leaders wished.

These cretinous cowardly politicians are aided in their war mongering by the so called “antiwar” movement, which sanitizes its message in accord with the Democratic party’s wishes, and chose to exclude Iran, and Israel’s role in instigating the war, altogether from the agenda of its recent star-studded march in Washington. It even brought “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, a woman who had visited Beirut in 1982 with her husband Tom Hayden to cheer on Ariel Sharon as he proceeded to destroy Lebanon and murder 18,000 of its civilians. (To his credit, Tom Hayden apologized for his craven behavior last year, and als explained the circumstance that dictated his behavior).

There is no reason why the American people should keep themselves in ignorance however. Here is Patrick Cockburn again: 

Confrontation with Iran makes little sense in terms of Iraqi politics. The most important elements in the Iraqi government are pro-Iranian, notably the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which used to be based in Iran. When I went to see one of its leaders in Najaf his guards spoke to me in Farsi. The Badr Organisation, SCIRI’s well-organised militia, was set up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war. It is inconceivable that SCIRI would switch its allegiance from Iran to the US. It’s worth noting that the Iraqi nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mehdi Army, prominent on the list of those denounced by Washington as creatures of Iran, have traditionally been anti-Iranian.

Bush’s new vision of Iran as the puppetmaster behind the Shia militias in Iraq is curiously close to that of the Baath Party, which also justifies its attacks on the Shia by claiming that the Shia are Iran’s instruments. The US overthrow of the Baathist regime was bound to benefit both Iran and al-Qaida. ‘We cannot reverse this outcome by more use of military force in Iraq,’ Lt General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘To try to do so would require siding with Sunni leaders and the Baathist insurgents against pro-Iranian Shia groups. The Baathist insurgents constitute the forces most strongly opposed to Iraqi co-operation with Iran.’ Because the Sunni insurgents – both the nationalists and those sponsored by al-Qaida – are fighting primarily in order to end the US occupation they cannot ally themselves with Washington as Saddam did during the Iran-Iraq war. The result is that inside Iraq Bush is alienating the Shia without necessarily gaining the support of the Sunni.

Bush’s confrontation with Iran makes some sense in the context of the politics of the wider Middle East. In Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan he is appealing to sectarian bigotry against the Shia in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere: a powerful sentiment among leaders and people alike. The Shia takeover of the Iraqi government in alliance with the Kurds is being portrayed as the sharp edge of Iranian imperialism. Sunni rulers realise that the success of Hizbullah, which had widespread popular support when it fought Israel to a standstill in Lebanon last year, shows up the impotence, incompetence and corruption of their own regimes. To avoid such damaging comparisons they are happy to join the US in stoking the anti-Shia and anti-Iranian flames.

The real reason for Bush’s anti-Iranian policy may be its effects on American domestic politics. Ever since the overthrow of Saddam was first planned the White House has shown itself more interested in holding power in Washington than in Baghdad. Bush went to war in Iraq in 2003 because, after overthrowing the Taliban so easily in Afghanistan, he thought he could win an easy victory there too, to his great political advantage at home. He was partly right: the Iraqis did not fight for Saddam. But they also soon made it clear that they did not intend to live under permanent US occupation. Spurious turning points were exaggerated or invented in an attempt to prove that progress was being made: Saddam was captured in December 2003; power was supposedly handed over to an Iraqi government in 2004; elections were held in 2005; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed by US bombs in 2006. None of these supposed successes made any real difference on the battlefield, but all were claimed as evidence that the US had put an end to the bloody stalemate. The moment American voters realised the extent of the failure in Iraq was postponed long enough for Bush to win the presidential election in 2004 and hold onto both Houses of Congress until 2006.

US confrontation with Iran will prolong the war in Iraq. ‘The Iranians can afford to compromise in Iraq, but they cannot afford to be defeated there,’ Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist, told me. If the US stages air-raids, assassinations or small-scale strikes against Iran then the difficulties it finds itself in in Iraq will only increase. Despite Washington’s claims, there is little evidence that Iran gives significant support to either Sunni insurgents or Shia militias. But if pressed it could do so. After spending four years failing to defeat the five million Iraqi Sunni the US could find itself fighting the 17 million Iraqi Shia as well.