Redefining Iran as the Enemy in Iraq.

This is from consortiumnews.comconsortiumnews.com. As this article points out the emphasis upon Al Qaeda in Iraq is now being very much downplayed by the administration. This is possible because the U.S. is financing former insurgent Sunnis through the awakening movement directed against Al Qaeda. This has hurt Al Qaeda in some areas. The enemy now is Al Sadr and Iran which to some degree supports his Mahdi Army. However, other militias such as the Badr brigades that support Maliki are supported even more by Iran. The contradiictory nature of U.S. policy re Iran is simply ignored by mainstream media. Both Iran and the U.S. support the Maliki government. Maliki has good relations with Iran much to the chagrin of the U.S. You would think that a few reporters would take a bit more interest in the fact that Maliki has very good relations with the country that the U.S. now defines as the main enemy of Iraq!

Redefining Iran as the Enemy in Iraq

By Ivan Eland
April 26, 2008

Editor’s Note: In Washington and Tel Aviv, war drums are beating again regarding Iran, as the Bush administration and Israel’s Olmert government see the window closing on the time frame for confronting Teheran with George W. Bush in the White House.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland looks at how – in support of this political need – the ever-shifting enemy in Iraq has become Iran:

According to General David H. Petraeus’s progress report to Congress on Iraq, the latest worst threat to the shaky U.S. position is Iranian-backed “special groups.”

This label refers to parts of Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his security forces ham-handedly sought to confront and undermine in Basra before the fall local elections.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is so passé.

This repeated allegation during the congressional hearings and the firing of Admiral William Fallon as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East, who was an opponent of any attack on Iran, should again raise worries to war-weary Americans about a cowboy attack on Iran before the Bush administration leaves office.

On cue, administration surrogates, such as former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, repeated Petraeus’s charges: “...despite undeniable progress against Sunni radicalism [read: al-Qaeda], events in Iraq are still inseparable from the actions and attitudes of Shiite militias armed and directed by Iran—an influence that America failed to confront for many years.”

Not only has America failed to confront these Shiite militias, the Bush administration has been enabling them.

The congressional hearings failed to bring out, because of administration intention and Democratic ignorance, that Maliki’s security forces are infested with Shiite Badr Brigade militias that Iran prefers over the Iraqi nationalist Mahdi Army.

The confused milieu of Iraq, an administration with no coherent strategy to improve the conditions in that country, has always tried to downplay that the U.S.-backed Shiite government and its associated militias are the same ones backed by its archenemy, Iran.

But the hearings once again confirmed that the administration, always better at politics than at governing, does have a strategy: hold the lid on violence in Iraq until the Bush administration leaves office, and then blame any subsequent deterioration or loss in Iraq on the next administration.

This tack will be similar to the ludicrous argument that Henry Kissinger, who has been advising both the administration and presidential candidate John McCain, still uses about the Vietnam War: we were winning until the Democrats cut off funding for the war.

This explains Bush’s acceptance of Petraeus’s troop-withdrawal pause, which will undoubtedly continue until January of 2009. Of course, retaining a high level of U.S. forces, and the troop surge that preceded it, really has just been an insurance policy and a macho way to mask the real U.S. strategy of paying off the Sunni and Mahdi Army enemies.

This libertarian strategy ordinarily might be smart, except that bolstering these militias will, in the long run, exacerbate any civil war when they again begin to fight each other.

At the congressional hearings, however, there were signs that the latest botched Iraqi government offensive in Basra, the most important city in Iraq because it’s in a region containing 60 percent of the country’s oil and has Iraq’s only access to the Persian Gulf to ship that oil (why the U.S. let less capable British forces try to secure this city has been an unexplored administration blunder), was beginning to flip a few Republicans against the war.

This movement was indicated by some Republicans adopting the Democrats’ argument that Iraqis were failing to do enough to become democratic.

Although it is grossly unfair to invade a country, destroy its social fabric and economy, and then expect people who have had no experience in democracy to quickly become democrats, if it takes those rhetorical gymnastics to justify a more rapid U.S. withdrawal, then I guess it’s an improvement.

But unfortunately, as the hearings showed, progress toward a U.S. exit is very slow indeed.

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland has spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His books include The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

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Attack on Green Zone kill U.S. soldiers.

This is from AP by Yahoo. Although there is supposed to be an Iranian brokered truce there still seem to be clashes between Shiite militias and the U.S. Iraqi forces and Sadr's militias seem to be keeping apart for now for the most past. Maliki and the U.S. claim to be after criminal gangs and rogue elements of the Mahdi army but certainly earlier operations were designed to disarm the Mahdi army period. There are no reports of clashes with any militias but those of Sadr. The Badr brigades are left untouched. In fact this whole operation for Maliki was an attempt to weaken Sadr before the coming elections in the fall.

By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer
24 minutes ago



BAGHDAD - The U.S. military says rocket or mortar attacks against the U.S.-protected Green Zone and a military base elsewhere in Baghdad have killed three American service members and wounded 31.



A military official says two U.S. troops were killed and 17 wounded when rockets struck the Green Zone in central Baghdad. The official says another American service member died and 14 were wounded in another attack on a military base in the southeastern area of Rustamiyah.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to release the information.

The attacks come amid fierce clashes between Shiite militia fighters and U.S.-Iraqi forces.

Iraq: Sadr's Brief Uprising Bloodies Maliki's Nose (and Bush's)

Note that this offensive by the U.S. and Maliki was not against militias but against the Mahdi militia of Sadr. The Badr brigades a militia associated with another party in Maliki's government was not touched! From Maliki's point of view the operation was meant to curb Sadr's growing influence before the next elections and enable rivals to control Basra. It didn't work. Furthermore the U.S. air operations will turn many more against the U.S. Many families will seek vengeance for deaths of family members. The U.S. mode of operation is probably more effective than any insurgent recruiting drive could be.
Fortunately for Maliki Sadr has called off his militia but obviously this can only last as long as the U.S. and Maliki cease their offensive. There was no uprising by Sadr by the way. Sadr was keeping to the ceasefire. It was Maliki and the U.S. that started the operation. Let sleeping militias lie unless you want to be bitten.

Iraq: Sadr's Brief Uprising Bloodied Maliki's Nose (and Bush's)

By Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation. Posted April 1, 2008.




More stories by Robert Dreyfuss



At the start of the military offensive launched last week into Basra by U.S. -trained Iraqi army forces, President Bush called the action by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki "a bold decision." He added: "I would say this is a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq."

That's true -- but not in the way the President meant it. As the smoke clears over new rubble in Iraq's second city, at the heart of Iraq's oil region, it's apparent that the big winner of the Six-Day War in Basra are the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army faced down the Iraqi armed forces not only in Basra, but in Baghdad, as well as in Kut, Amarah, Nasiriyah, and Diwaniya, capitals of four key southern provinces. That leaves Sadr, an anti-American rabble rouser and nationalist who demands an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and who has grown increasingly close to Iran of late, in a far stronger position that he was a week ago. In Basra, he's the boss. An Iraqi reporter for the New York Times, who managed to get into Basra during the fighting, concluded that the thousands of Mahdi Army militiamen that control most of the city remained in charge. "There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will," he wrote.

The other big winner in the latest round of Shiite-vs.-Shiite civil war is Iran. For the past five years, Iran has built up enormous political, economic and military clout in Iraq, right under the noses of 170,000 surge-inflated U.S. occupying forces. (For details, see my March 10 Nation article, "Is Iran Winning the Iraq War?") Iran has strong ties to Iraq's ruling Shiite alliance, which is dominated by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, whose militia, the Badr Corps, was armed, trained, financed and commanded by Iranians during two decades in exile in Iran. Since then, hedging its bets, Iran built a close relationship to Sadr's Mahdi Army as well, and Sadr himself has spent most of the time since the start of the U.S. surge last January in Iran*. In addition, Iran has armed and trained a loose collection of fighters that U.S. military commanders call "Special Groups," paramilitary fighters who've kept up a steady drumbeat of attacks on American troops. Thus, it was no surprise when Hadi al-Ameri, the commander of the Badr Corps and a leading member of ISCI, traveled over the weekend to Iran's religious capital of Qom to negotiate the truce with Sadr that resulted in a shaky ceasefire in Basra.

That Sadr emerged victorious, and that Iran succeeded in brokering the deal that ended the fighting, is a double defeat for the United States. It is also a catastrophe for Maliki, and there is already speculation that his government could collapse. An ill-timed offensive, poorly prepared and poorly executed, resulted in an embarrassing defeat for Maliki.

Why was the offensive launched in the first place? By all accounts, Maliki, his faction of the ruling Islamic Dawa party, and ISCI intended to crush Sadr in Basra for reasons both political and strategic. Political, because Sadr's movement is positioned to register a massive win at the polls in Basra and throughout southern Iraq in provincial elections scheduled for October, an electoral defeat that would portend the end of the Dawa-ISCI regime. Strategic, because Basra is the economic engine of all of Iraq. The city controls Iraq's South Oil Company, which pumps and exports the vast majority of Iraq's oil -- and for years Basra has been under the control of militias loyal to Sadr and to a Sadrist splinter party, the Fadhila (Virtue) party. By controlling the Oil Protection Force, a quasi-military force, and through its own militia, Fadhila is an important player in Basra, too, and Basra's governor is a Fadhilist. Though Fadhila has had its own clashes with Sadr's Mahdi Army, Fadhila kept its powder dry in the recent fighting, and there is no doubt that Fadhila is a bitter opponent of the Dawa-ISCI alliance. Last year, Maliki tried to oust the governor of Basra, Mohammed al-Waeli, who defied Maliki and refused to step down.

Maliki, miscalculating badly, flew to Basra last week from Baghdad to personally oversee the assault on Sadr's forces. In so doing, he staked his prestige on the offensive. If indeed it has failed, Maliki has lost face. That the ceasefire ending the fighting was worked out in Qom, Iran, and mediated by Tehran, is doubly embarrassing for him.

But it's far worse for the United States. President Bush strongly backed Maliki since the Battle of Basra started. According to Steve Hadley, the president's national security adviser, the decision to act in Basra was taken jointly between Washington and Baghdad. And U.S. air power and even some ground units supported the floundering Iraqi forces, whose weakness and incompetence were revealed for all to see. After five years of massive U.S. training and equipment, the Iraqi armed forces weren't even able to take control of Iraq's second-largest city.

Adding to Bush's utter humiliation, the Iranian-negotiated truce was mediated by the commander of the so-called Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, who brought Sadr's representatives together with Hadi al-Ameri, the Badr Corps commander and the leading aide to Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the ISCI leader. The Quds Force, you will recall, was only last year designated as a "terrorist" entity by the U.S. government. So President Bush's "defining moment" is this: the head of an Iranian "terrorist" force has brokered a deal between the two leading Shiite parties in Iraq, Sadr's movement and ISCI.

*Sadr's supporters have repeatedly denied that he's sought shelter in Iran, and charge that the claim is an attempt by his opponents to undermine his credibility as a fierce nationalist.



See more stories tagged with: iraq, basra, nouri al-maliki, mahdi army, shiite, iran

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

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