MATTHEWGOODONLINE

I would assume that many of you have been following what has been transpiring in Southern Iraq recently. Regarding the violence that has broken out, one of the most quintessential articles about it that is an absolute must read was recently penned by an acquaintance of mine, Raed Jarrar, and fellow author Joshua Holland entitled Five Things You Need to Know to Understand the Latest Violence in Iraq.

Jarrar and Holland present a very lucid argument regarding not only the impetus of sectarian violence in Iraq, but also how the mainstream media routinely misconstrues it. An excerpt…

“Iraq, which had experienced little or no sectarian-based violence prior to the U.S. invasion, has been plagued with sectarian militias fighting for the streets of Iraq’s formerly heterogeneous neighborhoods, and “sectarian violence” has become Americans’ primary explanation for the instability that has plagued the country.

But the sectarian-based street-fighting is a symptom of a larger political conflict, one that has been poorly analyzed in the mainstream press. The real source of conflict in Iraq — and the reason political reconciliation has been so difficult — is a fundamental disagreement over what the future of Iraq will look like. Loosely defined, it is a clash of Iraqi nationalists — with Muqtada al-Sadr as their most influential voice — who desire a unified Iraqi state and public-sector management of the country’s vast oil reserves and who forcefully reject foreign influence on Iraq’s political process, be it from the United States, Iran or other outside forces.

The nationalists now represent a majority in Iraq’s parliament but are opposed by what might be called Iraqi separatists, who envision a “soft partition” of Iraq into at least four semiautonomous and sectarian-based regional entities, welcome the privatization of the Iraqi energy sector (and the rest of the Iraqi economy) and rely on foreign support to maintain their power.

One of the ironies of the reporting out of Iraq is the ubiquitous characterization of Muqtada al-Sadr as a “renegade,” “radical” or “militant” cleric, despite the fact that he is the only leader of significance in the country who has ordered his followers to stand down. His ostensible militancy appears to arise primarily from his opposition to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

He has certainly been willing to use violence in the past, but the “firebrand” label belies the fact that Sadr is arguably the most popular leader among a large section of the Iraqi population and that he has forcefully rejected sectarian conflict and sought to bring together representatives of Iraq’s various ethnic and sectarian groups in an effort to create real national reconciliation — a process that the highly sectarian Maliki regime has failed to accomplish.

It’s vitally important to understand that Sadr’s popularity and legitimacy is a result of his having a platform that’s favored by an overwhelming majority of Iraqis.

With the exception of their opposition to Al Qaeda, the five major separatist parties — Sunni, Shia and Kurdish — that make up Maliki’s governing coalition are on the deeply unpopular side of these issues. A poll conducted last year found that 65 percent of Iraqis think the Iraqi government is doing a poor job, and Maliki himself has a Bush-like 66 percent disapproval rate.

As in Vietnam, the United States is backing an unpopular and decidedly undemocratic government in Iraq, and that simple fact explains much of the violent resistance that’s going on in Iraq today.

Every headline this week has featured some variation of the storyline of “Iraqi security forces” battling “Shiite militias.” But the reality is that it is a battle between Shite militias — separatists and nationalists — with one militia garbed in Iraqi army uniforms and supported by U.S. airpower, and the other in civilian clothes.

It has always been the great irony of the occupation of Iraq that “our” man in Baghdad is also Tehran’s. Maliki heads the Dawa Party, which has long enjoyed close ties to Iran, and relies on support from SIIC, a staunchly pro-Iranian party, and its powerful Badr militia. The “government crackdown” is an escalation of a long-simmering conflict in the south between the Badr Brigade, the Sadrists and members of the Fadhila Party, which favors greater autonomy for Basra but rejects SIIC’s vision of a larger Shiite-dominated regional entity in Southern Iraq.

Basra has been engulfed in a simmering conflict since before the British pulled their troops back to a remote base near the airport and turned over the city to Iraqi authorities. But the timing of this crackdown is not coincidental; Iraqi separatists — Dawa, SIIC and others — are expected to do poorly in the regional elections, while the Sadrists are widely anticipated to make significant gains. It is widely perceived by those loyal to Sadr that this is an attempt to wipe out the movement he leads prior to the elections and minimize the influence that Iraqi nationalists are poised to gain.

The United States, for its part, continues to take sides in this conflict — in addition to providing airpower, U.S. forces are enforcing the curfew in Sadr City — rather than playing the role of neutral mediator. That’s because the interests of the Bush administration and its allies are aligned with Maliki and his coalition. That they are not aligned with the interests of most Iraqis is never mentioned in the Western press, but is a key reason why Bush’s definition of “victory” — the emergence of a legitimate and Democratic state that supports U.S. policy in the region — has always been an impossible pipedream.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:25 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.