After decimating Fallujah, what better way to further denigrate the Sunni Muslim population than by handing out coins featuring…

Side One: Where will you spend eternity?

Side Two: For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16.

That’s precisely what some Marines at the Western entrance to the city have been doing.

Numerous Marines posted at the Western entrance to the city have been distributing the coins to residents entering through the checkpoint, thrusting them into their hands. Fearing what might happen if they don’t accept them, most residents have accepted them without question, but the message that such an activity promotes has angered many of the city’s residents, forcing local commanders to investigate the matter.

To some this might not seem all that big a deal. After all, Christian missionaries do it on a daily basis throughout the world in nations where other religions are predominant. But given what befell the city of Fallujah as a result of operations Vigilant Resolve and Phantom Fury, you would think that something of this nature would be viewed as completely out of the question.

It is estimated that some 6,000 Iraqis died during the US assaults on Fallujah, displacing hundreds of thousands more. It also rendered much of the city damaged, destroying an estimated 10,000 homes and damaging two thirds of the city’s remaining buildings. The First and Second battles of Fallujah were the heavies urban military encounters since the Battle of Huế in Vietnam in 1968, according to the US military. To this day, residents must produce identification cards before being allowed to enter the city.

Ah, glorious liberation.

Remarks made recently by Dr. Dahlia Wasfi at the Iraq Forum (via YouTube)…

Of all those that served in the military in my family, the one common trait shared by all of them is that they did not like to talk about their experiences. My Grandfather and Great Uncles went to lengths to avoid the topic, and as an inquisitive youngster I was sometimes scolded for my curiosity. At the time, of course, I couldn’t understand why, but as a grown man it’s something that I do.

Other members of my extended family have also served and seen combat, among them a cousin who was a United States Marine and a Great Uncle who served in Korea. In fact, my father came within an inch of becoming a member of the US Air Force in the 60’s after writing multiple aptitude tests which would have led to his serving as a member of a B-52 crew during Vietnam, most likely as a Navigations Officer. Thankfully, my Grandmother was adamantly opposed to the idea and he eventually declined the opportunity.

Death is in the eyes. When you spend time with a veteran that has witnessed the horrors of conflict that reality is ever present in their gaze. My Grandfather had it, my Great Uncles had it, and so do some of my friends, among them Patrick Pitt, one of this website’s contributing authors, a CF Artillery Captain that served twice in Afghanistan and, prior to that, throughout the Balkans. Daniel Regelburgge, a one-time matthewgood.org author, veteran of Iraq and NATO operations throughout the Balkans, and currently stationed at The Pentagon, does as well. Added to this list is also another site author, Roy El-Saghir, who was a member of the 82nd Airborne in the 1980’s and served in locations where US personnel weren’t supposed to be active, let alone involved in combat operations.

I mention this because a very real schism exists between public perception of military service and the reality and confusion faced by those that serve during wartime. The more politically complex the conflict, the greater that schism becomes. An example of this exists in the position of pro-war pundits that have, over the last seven years, completely skewed the line between military service and government policy. It has become entirely commonplace to suggest that if one does not support the political objectives of those that have taken us to war that those that have been sent to implement such policies are somehow being dishonoured and betrayed. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as it is entirely possible to support the welfare of our soldiers while adamantly disagreeing with the policies that have placed them in harms way.

The media has, of course, played a leading role in blurring such lines, leading to the diminishment of any negative information conveyed by veterans with regards to their experiences. After seven years of fighting, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, US veterans were finally gifted the opportunity to address Congress last Thursday about their experiences. And while they might not represent the totality of all those in uniform, their testimonies should not be overlooked nor marginalized…

“Antiwar veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took their case to Capitol Hill Thursday, baring their souls with stories of killings of innocent civilians, torture, and wrongful detentions.

“On several occasions our convoys came upon bodies that had been lying on the road, sometimes for weeks,” said Marine Corps veteran Vincent Emanuele, who served in al-Qaim near the Syrian border in 2004 and 2005.

“When encountering these bodies standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq,” he told the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which organized the hearing.

Emanuele also said that U.S. military personnel often took “pot shots” at cars passing by.

“Our rules of engagement stated that we should first fire warning shots into the ground in front of the car, then the engine block, and the windshield. That is if the car was even moving in the first place,” he said. “Many times cars that actually had pulled off to the side of the road were also shot at.”

Thursday’s hearing was an outgrowth of an event in Maryland earlier this year called “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan - Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” For four days in March, dozens of veterans of the two wars testified about atrocities they personally committed or witnessed while deployed overseas.

At the time, many of the veterans expressed a desire to take their case to Capitol Hill. Thursday they got their wish.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, addressed a panel of veterans at the start of the hearing.

“We now have an opportunity to hear not from the military’s top brass but directly from you,” she said, “the very soldiers who put your lives on the line to carry out this president’s failed policies.”

Nine veterans of the Iraq war told their stories before members of Congress and a packed gallery. One of the veterans had also served in Afghanistan. About 40 veterans were in the audience.

The veterans spoke about extremely lax rules of engagement handed down by commanding officers, which they said virtually guaranteed atrocities would be committed, and which in turn created a violent backlash among Iraqi people and a continued cycle of violence.

Former U.S. Army Capt. Luis Carlos Montalvan served directly under Gen. David Petraeus in 2005 and 2006.

“We have beaten our drum to try to raise the issue of the dereliction of duty committed by a number of generals who have been promoted and promoted again and continue to perpetuate the lies [that] paint a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq,” he said.

Montalvan said he personally witnessed U.S. military personnel carrying out waterboarding, the mock-drowning interrogation technique that has long been considered torture by U.S. courts.

Former Srgt. Adam Kokesh presented a picture of himself standing, smiling, in front of a dead Iraqi civilian that another marine had shot.

“This is a picture that I’m very ashamed of, having posed with this dead Iraqi as a trophy picture,” he said. “But what felt awkward to me at the time was not so much that I was taking the picture, but the fact that I had not killed this man and I was taking a trophy from somebody else’s kill.”

Kokesh said the person in the trophy photo was an innocent civilian whose car was accidentally “lit up” by marines.

Kokesh referenced similar photos that surfaced during and after the Vietnam war — some of which were presented at a “Winter Soldier” gathering organized by Vietnam veterans 37 years ago.

“At the first Winter Soldier investigation in 1971, one of the Vietnam veterans held up a similar photograph and said ‘Don’t ever let your government do this to you. Don’t ever let your government put you in a position where this attitude towards death and disregard for human life is acceptable or common.’ And we are still doing this to service members every day as long as these occupations continue,” he added.

Kokesh said his Marine Corps Civil Affairs team, including a major, was present when the trophy photo was taken. Numerous other marines also snapped their picture with the corpse, he said.

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hope this week’s hearing will spark an investigation by a full Congressional committee and speed the end of the wars.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) praised the veterans who spoke Thursday. “I want to thank you for having more courage than many members of Congress have — for coming here in defiance of what you have been instructed and taught to do,” she said. “They attempted to tell you that you should be satisfied by everything that you saw and everything that you did and everything you witnessed, but you’re not. I praise and honor you for that.”

The veterans’ testimony, however, may be overshadowed by an unrelated legislative maneuver that occurred just steps away from their hearing room Thursday: the House of Representatives defeated a $162.5 billion proposal to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Andrew Cockburn comments on a new US covert initiative that is truly frightening in its scope…

“Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, “unprecedented in its scope.”

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or “army of god,” the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border — whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law’s throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.

All this costs money, which in turn must be authorized by Congress, or at least a by few witting members of the intelligence committees. That has not proved a problem. An initial outlay of $300 million to finance implementation of the finding has been swiftly approved with bipartisan support, apparently regardless of the unpopularity of the current war and the perilous condition of the U.S. economy.

Until recently, the administration faced a serious obstacle to action against Iran in the form of Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon, who made no secret of his contempt for official determination to take us to war. In a widely publicized incident last January, Iranian patrol boats approached a U.S. ship in what the Pentagon described as a “taunting” manner. According to Centcom staff officers, the American commander on the spot was about to open fire. At that point, the U.S. was close to war. He desisted only when Fallon personally and explicitly ordered him not to shoot. The White House, according to the staff officers, was “absolutely furious” with Fallon for defusing the incident.

Fallon has since departed. His abrupt resignation in early March followed the publication of his unvarnished views on our policy of confrontation with Iran, something that is unlikely to happen to his replacement, George Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus.

Though Petraeus is not due to take formal command at Centcom until late summer, there are abundant signs that something may happen before then. A Marine amphibious force, originally due to leave San Diego for the Persian Gulf in mid June, has had its sailing date abruptly moved up to May 4. A scheduled meeting in Europe between French diplomats acting as intermediaries for the U.S. and Iranian representatives has been abruptly cancelled in the last two weeks. Petraeus is said to be at work on a master briefing for congress to demonstrate conclusively that the Iranians are the source of our current troubles in Iraq, thanks to their support for the Shia militia currently under attack by U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Interestingly, despite the bellicose complaints, Petraeus has made little effort to seal the Iran-Iraq border, and in any case two thirds of U.S. casualties still come from Sunni insurgents. “The Shia account for less than one third,” a recently returned member of the command staff in Baghdad familiar with the relevant intelligence told me, “but if you want a war you have to sell it.”

Even without the covert initiatives described above, the huge and growing armada currently on station in the Gulf is an impressive symbol of American power.”

If you’re labouring under the misconception that the Bush Administration is going to leave office without first confronting the Iranians, it’s time to start paying serious attention.

The propaganda machine is in full swing, led by a new report by the State Department that labels Iran the most active sponsor of terrorism. If you can believe it, the Sudanese government actually ranked lower despite the fact that it has been complicit in supporting the Janjiweed who have been responsible for a genocidal campaign in Darfur.

Falling conveniently in line with the State Department’s release, the United States has deployed a second US carrier group to the Gulf with the specific purpose of “developing new options for attacking Iran” - a directive issued directly by The Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is justifying the move as a response to what the United States now believes is official Iranian policy – “killing American servicemen and -women inside Iraq”. Michael Hayden, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recently asserted at a lecture at Kansas State University…

“It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq.”

It would seem that it is more than Mr. Hayden’s opinion, and a very crucial question has to be asked – why is the director of the CIA making such claims during a lecture? This is the same man whose agency provides the White House with a daily brief, which means that Hayden’s position has not only been presented the President, but also obviously adopted. If it hadn’t been, the White House would have condemned his assertion during that lecture, which it hasn’t, meaning that Hayden’s mentioning of it is being used as a tool with regards to circulating policy in the press without it coming directly from the President’s mouth.

Added to all of this, rather conveniently, is also another Pentagon assertion that the Iranians are directly aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, a claim that was originally made last year and denounced by both the Iranians and the Afghan government. It should also be noted that it was made around the same time as US allegations that the Iranians were also supporting Sunni extremists in Iraq, which were quickly attacked by various analysts as being utterly preposterous given the massive, and historic, ideological differences between the two. Not surprisingly, the promotion of that information was tracked back to the office of the Vice President.

On the nuclear front, the Israelis are playing their part, with Israeli Transportation Minister, Shaul Mofaz, claiming yesterday that Iran will likely possess the ability to produce a nuclear weapon before the end of 2008. His source? Israeli intelligence, of course. Ironically, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to comment on Mofaz’s claim, which is interesting being that his office is in direct control of the Israeli intelligence apparatus and has far more insight than that of the office of the Transportation Minister.

So what does all of this add up to? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Fishermen call it baiting a hook; the intelligence community refers to it as Psy-Ops. And if you think it’s the Iranians that are the target with regards to psychological initiatives employing the media as their primary conduit, think again. It is, in fact, the American people being targeted.

The question is, have the people of the United States learned their lesson?

Iraq was invaded because they supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction, or, at the very least, were in the process of obtaining them.

After that justification fell through, the toppling of the regime of Saddam Hussein took its place, and human rights, liberty, and democracy became the bugle call.

After Hussein’s capture, and the continued occupation of the country to combat the insurgency, al-Qaeda was used as the primary justification despite the fact that their numbers in Iraq, which didn’t exist prior to the occupation, constituted less than 5% of the insurgency itself.

And so here we find ourselves, five years after the fact, with the Iranians having become the new justification. Like Hussein’s regime prior to the invasion, the Iranians are being accused of attempting to secure a nuclear weapon. Their intended target? Israel. The consensus, of course, is that were they to acquire one they would use it, that it would not be seen as the acquisition of a deterrent, but rather an offensive weapon.

In my next entry, although I have covered the subject before, I will delve into the reality of why that line of thought is based on nothing more than the desire to militarily confront Iran, not the Iranian regime’s desire to actually engage in a nuclear exchange.

Over at Tom Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt runs through 12 Answers To Questions No One Is Bothering To Ask About Iraq…

“1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military’s worst Iraq nightmare:

Few now remember, but before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, top administration and Pentagon officials had a single overriding nightmare — not chemical, but urban, warfare. Saddam Hussein, they feared, would lure American forces into “Fortress Baghdad,” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it. There, they would find themselves fighting block by block, especially in the warren of streets that make up the Iraqi capital’s poorest districts.

When American forces actually entered Baghdad in early April 2003, however, even Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard units had put away their weapons and gone home. It took five years but, as of now, American troops are indeed fighting in the warren of streets in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of two and a half million in eastern Baghdad largely controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The U.S. military, in fact, recently experienced its worst week of 2008 in terms of casualties, mainly in and around Baghdad. So, mission accomplished — the worst fear of 2003 has now been realized.

2. No, there was never an exit strategy from Iraq because the Bush administration never intended to leave — and still doesn’t:

Critics of the war have regularly gone after the Bush administration for its lack of planning, including its lack of an “exit strategy.” In this, they miss the point. The Bush administration arrived in Iraq with four mega-bases on the drawing boards. These were meant to undergird a future American garrisoning of that country and were to house at least 30,000 American troops, as well as U.S. air power, for the indefinite future. The term used for such places wasn’t “permanent base,” but the more charming and euphemistic “enduring camp.” (In fact, as we learned recently, the Bush administration refuses to define any American base on foreign soil anywhere on the planet, including ones in Japan for over 60 years, as permanent.) Those four monster bases in Iraq (and many others) were soon being built at the cost of multibillions and are, even today, being significantly upgraded. In October 2007, for instance, National Public Radio’s defense correspondent Guy Raz visited Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which houses about 40,000 American troops, contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees, and described it as “one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades.”

These mega-bases, like “Camp Cupcake” (al-Asad Air Base), nicknamed for its amenities, are small town-sized with massive facilities, including PXs, fast-food outlets, and the latest in communications. They have largely been ignored by the American media and so have played no part in the debate about Iraq in this country, but they are the most striking on-the-ground evidence of the plans of an administration that simply never expected to leave. To this day, despite the endless talk about drawdowns and withdrawals, that hasn’t changed. In fact, the latest news about secret negotiations for a future Status of Forces Agreement on the American presence in that country indicates that U.S. officials are calling for “an open-ended military presence” and “no limits on numbers of U.S. forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term U.S. security agreements with other countries.”

3. Yes, the United States is still occupying Iraq (just not particularly effectively):

In June 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), then ruling the country, officially turned over “sovereignty” to an Iraqi government largely housed in the American-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad and the occupation officially ended. However, the day before the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer III, slipped out of the country without fanfare, he signed, among other degrees, Order 17, which became (and, remarkably enough, remains) the law of the land. It is still a document worth reading as it essentially granted to all occupying forces and allied private companies what, in the era of colonialism, used to be called “extraterritoriality” — the freedom not to be in any way subject to Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever. And so the occupation ended without ever actually ending. With 160,000 troops still in Iraq, not to speak of an unknown number of hired guns and private security contractors, the U.S. continues to occupy the country, whatever the legalities might be (including a UN mandate and the claim that we are part of a “coalition”). The only catch is this: As of now, the U.S. is simply the most technologically sophisticated and potentially destructive of Iraq’s proliferating militias — and outside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, it is capable of controlling only the ground that its troops actually occupy at any moment.

4. Yes, the war was about oil:

Oil was hardly mentioned in the mainstream media or by the administration before the invasion was launched. The President, when he spoke of Iraq’s vast petroleum reserves at all, piously referred to them as the sacred “patrimony of the people of Iraq.” But an administration of former energy execs — with a National Security Advisor who once sat on the board of Chevron and had a double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named after her (until she took office), and a Vice President who was especially aware of the globe’s potentially limited energy supplies — certainly had oil reserves and energy flows on the brain. They knew, in Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s apt phrase, that Iraq was afloat on “a sea of oil” and that it sat strategically in the midst of the oil heartlands of the planet.

It wasn’t a mistake that, in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney’s semi-secret Energy Task Force set itself the “task” of opening up the energy sectors of various Middle Eastern countries to “foreign investment”; or that it scrutinized “a detailed map of Iraq’s oil fields, together with the (non-American) oil companies scheduled to develop them”; or that, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, the National Security Council directed its staff “to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ‘melding’ of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ‘the review of operational policies towards rogue states,’ such as Iraq, and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields’”; or that the only American troops ordered to guard buildings in Iraq, after Baghdad fell, were sent to the Oil Ministry (and the Interior Ministry, which housed Saddam Hussein’s dreaded secret police); or that the first “reconstruction” contract was issued to Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton, for “emergency repairs” to those patrimonial oil fields. Once in charge in Baghdad, as sociologist Michael Schwartz has made clear, the administration immediately began guiding recalcitrant Iraqis toward denationalizing and opening up their oil industry, as well as bringing in the big boys.

Though rampant insecurity has kept the Western oil giants on the sidelines, the American-shaped “Iraqi” oil law quickly became a “benchmark” of “progress” in Washington and remains a constant source of prodding and advice from American officials in Baghdad. Former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan put the oil matter simply and straightforwardly in his memoir in 2007: “I am saddened,” he wrote, “that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” In other words, in a variation on the old Bill Clinton campaign mantra: It’s the oil, stupid. Greenspan was, unsurprisingly, roundly assaulted for the obvious naiveté of his statement, from which, when it proved inconvenient, he quickly retreated. But if this administration hadn’t had oil on the brain in 2002-2003, given the importance of Iraq’s reserves, Congress should have impeached the President and Vice President for that.

5. No, our new embassy in Baghdad is not an “embassy”:

When, for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, you construct a complex — regularly described as “Vatican-sized” — of at least 20 “blast-resistant” buildings on 104 acres of prime Baghdadi real estate, with “fortified working space” and a staff of at least 1,000 (plus several thousand guards, cooks, and general factotums), when you deeply embunker it, equip it with its own electricity and water systems, its own anti-missile defense system, its own PX, and its own indoor and outdoor basketball courts, volleyball court, and indoor Olympic-size swimming pool, among other things, you haven’t built an “embassy” at all. What you’ve constructed in the heart of the heart of another country is more than a citadel, even if it falls short of a city-state. It is, at a minimum, a monument to Bush administration dreams of domination in Iraq and in what its adherents once liked to call “the Greater Middle East.”

Just about ready to open, after the normal construction mishaps in Iraq, it will constitute the living definition of diplomatic overkill. It will, according to a Senate estimate, now cost Americans $1.2 billion a year just to be “represented” in Iraq. The “embassy” is, in fact, the largest headquarters on the planet for the running of an occupation. Functionally, it is also another well-fortified enduring camp with the amenities of home. Tell that to the Shiite militiamen now mortaring the Green Zone as if it were… enemy-occupied territory.

6. No, the Iraqi government is not a government:

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has next to no presence in Iraq beyond the Green Zone; it delivers next to no services; it has next to no ability to spend its own oil money, reconstruct the country, or do much of anything else, and it most certainly does not hold a monopoly on the instruments of violence. It has no control over the provinces of northern Iraq which operate as a near-independent Kurdish state. Non-Kurdish Iraqi troops are not even allowed on its territory. Maliki’s government cannot control the largely Sunni provinces of the country, where its officials are regularly termed “the Iranians” (a reference to the heavily Shiite government’s closeness to neighboring Iran) and are considered the equivalent of representatives of a foreign occupying power; and it does not control the Shiite south, where power is fragmented among the militias of ISCI (the Badr Organization), Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the armed adherents of the Fadila Party, a Sadrist offshoot, among others.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has been derisively nicknamed “the mayor of Kabul” for his government’s lack of control over much territory outside the national capital. It would be a step forward for Maliki if he were nicknamed “the mayor of Baghdad.” Right now, his troops, heavily backed by American forces, are fighting for some modest control over Shiite cities (or parts of cities) from Basra to Baghdad.

7. No, the surge is not over:

Two weeks ago, amid much hoopla, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker spent two days before Congress discussing the President’s surge strategy in Iraq and whether it has been a “success.” But that surge — the ground one in which an extra 30,000-plus American troops were siphoned into Baghdad and, to a lesser extent, adjoining provinces — was by then already so over. In fact, all but about 10,000 of those troops will be home by the end of July, not because the President has had any urge for a drawdown, but, as Fred Kaplan of Slate wrote recently, “because of simple math. The five extra combat brigades, which were deployed to Iraq with the surge, each have 15-month tours of duty; the 15 months will be up in July… and the U.S. Army and Marines have no combat brigades ready to replace them.”

On the other hand, in all those days of yak, neither the general with so much more “martial bling” on his chest than any victorious World War II commander, nor the white-haired ambassador uttered a word about the surge that is ongoing — the air surge that began in mid-2007 and has yet to end. Explain it as you will, but, with rare exceptions, American reporters in Iraq generally don’t look up or more of them would have noticed that the extra air units surged into that country and the region in the last year are now being brought to bear over Iraq’s cities. Today, as fighting goes on in Sadr City, American helicopters and Hellfire-missile armed Predator drones reportedly circle overhead almost constantly and air strikes of various kinds on city neighborhoods are on the rise. Yet the air surge in Iraq remains unacknowledged here and so is not a subject for discussion, debate, or consideration when it comes to our future in Iraq.

8. No, the Iraqi army will never “stand up”:

It can’t. It’s not a national army. It’s not that Iraqis can’t fight — or fight bravely. Ask the Sunni insurgents. Ask the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. It’s not that Iraqis are incapable of functioning in a national army. In the bitter Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Iraqi Shiite as well as Sunni conscripts, led by a largely Sunni officer corps, fought Iranian troops fiercely in battle after pitched battle. But from Fallujah in 2004 to today, Iraqi army (and police) units, wheeled into battle (often at the behest of the Americans), have regularly broken and run, or abandoned their posts, or gone over to the other side, or, at the very least, fought poorly. In the recent offensive launched by the Maliki government in Basra, military and police units up against a single resistant militia, the Mahdi Army, deserted in sizeable numbers, while other units, when not backed by the Americans, gave poor showings. At least 1,300 troops and police (including 37 senior police officers) were recently “fired” by Maliki for dereliction of duty, while two top commanders were removed as well.

Though American training began in 2004 and, by 2005, the President was regularly talking about us “standing down” as soon as the Iraqi Army “stood up,” as Charles Hanley of the Associated Press points out, “Year by year, the goal of deploying a capable, free-standing Iraqi army has seemed to always slip further into the future.” He adds, “In the latest shift, the Pentagon’s new quarterly status report quietly drops any prediction of when local units will take over security responsibility for Iraq. Last year’s reports had forecast a transition in 2008.” According to Hanley, the chief American trainer of Iraqi forces, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, now estimates that the military will not be able to guard the country’s borders effectively until 2018.

No wonder. The “Iraqi military” is not in any real sense a national military at all. Its troops generally lack heavy weaponry, and it has neither a real air force nor a real navy. Its command structures are integrated into the command structure of the U.S. military, while the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy are the real Iraqi air force and navy. It is reliant on the U.S. military for much of its logistics and resupply, even after an investment of $22 billion by the American taxpayer. It represents a non-government, is riddled with recruits from Shiite militias (especially the Badr brigades), and is riven about who its enemy is (or enemies are) and why. It cannot be a “national” army because it has, in essence, nothing to stand up for.

You can count on one thing, as long as we are “training” and “advising” the Iraqi military, however many years down the line, you will read comments like this one from an American platoon sergeant, after an Iraqi front-line unit abandoned its positions in the ongoing battle for control of parts of Sadr City: “It bugs the hell out of me. We don’t see any progress being made at all. We hear these guys in firefights. We know if we are not up there helping these guys out we are making very little progress.”

9. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and fragmentation:

The U.S. invasion and the Bush administration’s initial occupation policies decisively smashed Iraq’s fragile “national” sense of self. Since then, the Bush administration, a motor for chaos and fragmentation, has destroyed the national (if dictatorial) government, allowed the capital and much of the country (as well as its true patrimony of ancient historical objects and sites) to be looted, disbanded the Iraqi military, and deconstructed the national economy. Ever since, whatever the administration rhetoric, the U.S. has only presided over the further fragmentation of the country. Its military, in fact, employs a specific policy of urban fragmentation in which it regularly builds enormous concrete walls around neighborhoods, supposedly for “security” and “reconstruction,” that actually cut them off from their social and economic surroundings. And, of course, Iraq has in these years been fragmented in other staggering ways with an estimated four-plus million Iraqis driven into exile abroad or turned into internal refugees.

According to Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times, there are now at least 28 different militias in the country. The longer the U.S. remains even somewhat in control, the greater the possibility of further fragmentation. Initially, the fragmentation was sectarian — into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia regions, but each of those regions has its own potentially hostile parts and so its points of future conflict and further fragmentation. If the U.S. military spent the early years of its occupation fighting a Sunni insurgency in the name of a largely Shiite (and Kurdish) government, it is now fighting a Shiite militia, while paying and arming former Sunni insurgents, relabeled “Sons of Iraq.” Iran is also clearly sending arms into a country that is, in any case, awash in weaponry. Without a real national government, Iraq has descended into a welter of militia-controlled neighborhoods, city states, and provincial or regional semi-governments. Despite all the talk of American-supported “reconciliation,” Juan Cole described the present situation well at his Informed Comment blog: “Maybe the US in Iraq is not the little boy with his finger in the dike. Maybe we are workers with jackhammers instructed to make the hole in the dike much more huge.”

10. No, the U.S. military does not stand between Iraq and civil war:

As with fragmentation, the U.S. military’s presence has, in fact, been a motor for civil war in that country. The invasion and subsequent chaos, as well as punitive acts against the Sunni minority, allowed Sunni extremists, some of whom took the name “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” to establish themselves as a force in the country for the first time. Later, U.S. military operations in both Sunni and Shiite areas regularly repressed local militias — almost the only forces capable of bringing some semblance of security to urban neighborhoods — opening the way for the most extreme members of the other community (Sunni suicide or car bombers and Shiite death squads) to attack. It’s worth remembering that it was in the surge months of 2007, when all those extra American troops hit Baghdad neighborhoods, that many of the city’s mixed or Sunni neighborhoods were most definitively “cleansed” by death squads, producing a 75-80% Shiite capital. Iraq is now embroiled in what Juan Cole has termed “three civil wars,” two of which (in the south and the north) are largely beyond the reach of limited American ground forces and all of which could become far worse. The still low-level struggle between Kurds and Arabs (with the Turks hovering nearby) for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the north may be the true explosion point to come. The U.S. military sits precariously atop this mess, at best putting off to the future aspects of the present civil-war landscape, but more likely intensifying it.

11. No, al-Qaeda will not control Iraq if we leave (and neither will Iran):

The latest figures tell the story. Of 658 suicide bombings globally in 2007 (more than double those of any year in the last quarter century), 542, according to the Washington Post’s Robin Wright, took place in occupied Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly Iraq. In other words, the American occupation of that land has been a motor for acts of terrorism (as occupations will be). There was no al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia before the invasion and Iraq was no Afghanistan. The occupation under whatever name will continue to create “terrorists,” no matter how many times the administration claims that “al-Qaeda” is on the run. With the departure of U.S. troops, it’s clear that homegrown Sunni extremists (and the small number of foreign jihadis who work with them), already a minority of a minority, will more than meet their match in facing the Sunni mainstream. The Sunni Awakening Movement came into existence, in part, to deal with such self-destructive extremism (and its fantasies of a Taliban-style society) before the Americans even noticed that it was happening. When the Americans leave, “al-Qaeda” (and whatever other groups the Bush administration subsumes under that catch-all title) will undoubtedly lose much of their raison d’être or simply be crushed.

As for Iran, the moment the Bush administration finally agreed to a popular democratic vote in occupied Iraq, it ensured one thing — that the Shiite majority would take control, which in practice meant religio-political parties that, throughout the Saddam Hussein years, had generally been close to, or in exile in, Iran. Everything the Bush administration has done since has only ensured the growth of Iranian influence among Shiite groups. This is surely meant by the Iranians as, in part, a threat/trump card, should the Bush administration launch an attack on that country. After all, crucial U.S. resupply lines from Kuwait run through areas near Iran and would assumedly be relatively easy to disrupt.

Without the U.S. military in Iraq, there can be no question that the Iranians would have real influence over the Shiite (and probably Kurdish) parts of the country. But that influence would have its distinct limits. If Iran overplayed its hand even in a rump Shiite Iraq, it would soon enough find itself facing some version of the situation that now confronts the Americans. As Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the Nation recently, “[D]espite Iran’s enormous influence in Iraq, most Iraqis — even most Iraqi Shiites — are not pro-Iran. On the contrary, underneath the ruling alliance in Baghdad, there is a fierce undercurrent of Arab nationalism in Iraq that opposes both the U.S. occupation and Iran’s support for religious parties in Iraq.” The al-Qaedan and Iranian “threats” are, at one and the same time, bogeymen used by the Bush administration to scare Americans who might favor withdrawal and, paradoxically, realities that a continued military presence only encourages.

12. Yes, some Americans were right about Iraq from the beginning (and not the pundits either):

One of the strangest aspects of the recent fifth anniversary (as of every other anniversary) of the invasion of Iraq was the newspaper print space reserved for those Bush administration officials and other war supporters who were dead wrong in 2002-2003 on an endless host of Iraq-related topics. Many of them were given ample opportunity to offer their views on past failures, the “success” of the surge, future withdrawals or drawdowns, and the responsibilities of a future U.S. president in Iraq.

Noticeably missing were representatives of the group of Americans who happened to have been right from the get-go. In our country, of course, it often doesn’t pay to be right. (It’s seen as a sign of weakness or plain dumb luck.) I’m speaking, in this case, of the millions of people who poured into the streets to demonstrate against the coming invasion with an efflorescence of placards that said things too simpleminded (as endless pundits assured American news readers at the time) to take seriously — like “No Blood for Oil,” “Don’t Trade Lives for Oil,” or “”How did USA’s oil get under Iraq’s sand?” At the time, it seemed clear to most reporters, commentators, and op-ed writers that these sign-carriers represented a crew of well-meaning know-nothings and the fact that their collective fears proved all too prescient still can’t save them from that conclusion. So, in their very rightness, they were largely forgotten.

Now, as has been true for some time, a majority of Americans, another obvious bunch of know-nothings, are deluded enough to favor bringing all U.S. troops out of Iraq at a reasonable pace and relatively soon. (More than 60% of them also believe “that the conflict is not integral to the success of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.”) If, on the other hand, a poll were taken of pundits and the inside-the-Beltway intelligentsia (not to speak of the officials of the Bush administration), the number of them who would want a total withdrawal from Iraq (or even see that as a reasonable goal) would undoubtedly descend near the vanishing point. When it comes to American imperial interests, most of them know better, just as so many of them did before the war began. Even advisors to candidates who theoretically want out of Iraq are hinting that a full-scale withdrawal is hardly the proper way to go.

So let me ask you a question (and you answer it): Given all of the above, given the record thus far, who is likely to be right?”

The Bush administration is running out of time. Since President Bush singled out Iran as a member of his auspicious Axis Of Evil, the gears have been turning with regards to how best to confront the Iranians. Obviously, condemnation of Iran’s nuclear program was never going to provide substantial pretext given the precedent set during run up to the invasion of Iraq and the wholly erroneous information provided the Security Council, and others, pertaining to Iraq’s quest for nuclear materials, among other things. The best that the administration could hope for to do with that avenue is its use as an exploitative psychological mechanism with regards to American domestic perceptions.

Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the US, besides perceptions to the contrary, has been baiting the Iranians at every conceivable turn. For example, they parked a carrier group just off the Iranian coast (just far enough out to remain in international waters) and then proceeded to conduct exercises, flying sorties obviously geared towards the possibility of striking Iranian targets. The Pentagon categorized the exercises as being a necessary step in containing Iranian powers.

Given that the clock is running out on the Bush administration, and one of the Democratic Presidential frontrunners has claimed that he would attempt to begin a dialogue with Tehran, the need to find a way in which to confront the Iranians openly has been accelerated, and recent events in southern Iraq have provided the pretext that the administration has been seeking.

Ryan Crocker has openly claimed that Iran is engaged in a full-fledged proxy war against the United States in Iraq. Given that, and recent events in southern Iraq, the Bush administration has been provided the pretext that is has been seeking to accelerate plans to target Iranian facilities near the Iraqi border and perhaps beyond. As to when such operations might begin is anyone’s guess.

Stepping back for a moment, it should be said that, given Iran’s position in the region, it is by no means a stretch to think that they have engaged in supporting Shi’ite militias and possess influence within the ranks of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. It should also not be overlooked that, despite the views of many ordinary Iranians, the government of Iran remains co-opted by a hard line element that has only been emboldened by the occupation. In fact, when one views the similarities between Tehran and Washington they are eerily similar in many ways. The occupation of Iraq is viewed by both as an opportunity to strengthen regional influence, both have used highly conservative bases that include zealous religious support to maintain their positions, though it should certainly be said that the Iranian government is structured to ensure that reality on a permanent basis while the overt exploitation of the religious right in the United States was a political phenomenon that was, in truth, a component of a premeditated political strategy.

In the end, what this all boils down to is - is the United States is willing to take that first step into the unknown. The US Military is utterly overextended, meaning that operations against targets inside Iran will most assuredly be undertaken by air forces and off shore missile strikes. That, of course, will lead to the Iranians countering such incursions with force, employing surface to air missiles and other counter measures, such as retaliatory strikes on US vessels in the Gulf from which missile attacks emanate, or locations in Afghanistan used for the same purpose. And that, no matter how you want to look at it, is war.

Were such a scenario to unfold, the United States would find itself militarily engaged from Afghanistan to Iraq. One would like to think that the Pentagon, and the President’s advisors, aren’t that stupid. Unfortunately, their track record to this point doesn’t leave one with any real sense optimism. Given the overly aggressive tenets of the current foreign policy doctrine of the United States, it cannot be discounted that those who support it want to squeeze every last ounce of opportunity from it prior to the exit of the current administration. And that is a scary prospect indeed.

The US occupation of Iraq has been, from the beginning, an exercise in plugging holes, ones that continue to spring up in a variety of different areas only to be met with more corks, more excuses, and the ultimate reality that the United States is responsible for plunging a nation, and a region of the world, into disarray while its own population, for the most part, goes on with their daily lives oblivious to the traumatic realities in what has become one of the most dangerous and troubled nations on earth in which to live.

Thus far, the United States has pumped $25 billion dollars into attempts to reconstitute various elements of Iraq’s infrastructure. Unfortunately, despite that fact, 43% of the Iraqi population lives in poverty, 28% of Iraqi children suffer from malnutrition (prior to the invasion 19% suffered from malnutrition and that was while UN sanctions were in place that, over a decade, aided in the deaths of approximately 1 million Iraqis), only 30% of Iraqi children currently attend school at the elementary level (last year 75% of them did), and 70% of Iraqis do not have access to clean water (which is up 20% post invasion). Electricity and basic sanitation are still precarious at best in numerous locations, as is access to fuel.

Those that have fled the country, or are displaced within it, number in the millions, and the civilian death toll, which the Pentagon thought best not to bother keeping track of, is devastating. And while an entire generation of Americans will live with the traumatic remembrance of September 11th, an entire generation of Iraqis will spend the rest of their lives traumatized by years of bloody conflict that is not limited to the immediate first hand experience of the population of a single city, but a nation as a whole. Unlike the majority of Americans that watched the events of September 11th on their televisions, the majority of Iraqis have had to only open their front doors.

One of the most dangerous aspects of a reckless foreign policy doctrine is the politicization of war. Iraq provides one of the best examples of this reality in US history, even more so than Vietnam.

The politicization of the war in Iraq is entirely prevalent when one examines the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, two men who, for all intents and purposes, are not testifying objectively before Congress, but rather defending the politicization of a war that is, by no means, anything less than an utter disaster. Their unwillingness to admit as much only proves the point all the more.

One of the key elements of their testimony is the inclusion of anti-Iranian rhetoric that supports the current administration’s position to the letter. The assertion that the United States, and the current Iraqi government, are now confronting Iranian proxy forces in Iraq is not merely a slippery slope given the fact that President Bush has more than half a year left in the Oval Office, but one that could lead the United States into an open conflict with a nation that, no matter the Bush administration’s view of it, represents a far more dangerous affair than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

It has been suggested that a US assault against Iran would be primarily limited to aerial operations, which obviously speaks to the reality of the present condition of US ground forces, that being that they are in a state of serious over extension. Thus, a ground assault against the Iranians is not a realistic option that Washington can consider, and if the Bush administration is, then the loss of US lives in such an operation would make the war in Iraq look like a mild affair. I, for one, would not put it past those neoconservative Beltway voices that have been routinely relied upon to produce some of the most ridiculous analysis regarding US operations in the Middle East to suggest that Iran be ‘dealt with’ before a Democrat secures the White House and the opportunity is lost. In fact, I would expect no less of them or others in Washington with similar views.

Such voices, of course, represent a chorus of individuals that do not have to enact the policies that they engineer from the safety of their offices. That particular task is left to others whom they then have the audacity to call heroes who have been, from the get go, nothing but fodder for what is arguably one of the most dangerous and highly politicized foreign policy doctrines in American history.

With regards to the testimony of Petraeus and Crocker, take the following into account…

“Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were critical of Iran when they testified Tuesday before the Senate, barely giving credit for an Iranian-brokered cease-fire that curbed the killing after a week of Shiite-on-Shiite bloodshed in southern Iraq and Baghdad.

As they spoke, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr threatened to unleash his Mahdi Army militia against U.S. and Iraqi forces. Once again, it was Iran that stepped into the political vacuum and urged a halt to militia attacks into the heavily fortified Green Zone, where U.S. and Iraqi officials, including Petraeus and Crocker, have their offices.”

Of course, if objectivity is to be employed, the Iranians could very well be playing both sides of the fence – a tactic cultivated and perfected by the Americans and Russians on a global scale over the last sixty-one years. All one need do is employ a Google search to confirm that. And if the Iranians are dealing with both hands in two different fashions, it’s not as if they wrote the playbook on how to do it. Therein lies one of the immense ironies of this fiasco.

The ramifications of Petraeus and Crocker’s testimony may very well affect Americans more than they realize. And in doing so, the politicization of a conflict that has not only devastated a nation, but the lives of thousands of American families, may very well aid in not only prolonging the war, but perhaps even expanding it. There are those that will argue that it has been worth it, and that a confrontation with Iran is an unavoidable necessity. Such are the voices of those that have the luxury of creating and supporting wars that they do not have to fight. That, in the end, will never have to take their children to a monument so that they might run their fingers over the name of a father or mother that, when all is said and done, died for nothing more than the opportunistic ideology of individuals no better than those they perceived as enemies.

As expected, the testimony of both General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker today was predictable.

First, Petraeus recommended that planned US troop withdrawals in July be postponed to ensure that ‘gains’ made are not jeopardized. He also claimed that security in Iraq is currently better than it was when he last testified before Congress in September of 2007. Unfortunately, when one looks at the numbers, that simply isn’t the case. Attacks against US forces and Iraqi security forces this month are higher than they were in February of 2007, and significantly higher than they were in September of last year when Petraeus first appeared before congress. Iraqi civilian deaths increased in March by 43% compared to February. Ironically, such data may very well be used to support Petraeus’ position that troop withdrawals be suspended.

That said; and of considerably more import, as Gareth Porter rightfully points out today…

“A key objective of the congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus this week will be to defend the George W. Bush administration’s strategic political line that it is fighting an Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq.

Based on preliminary indications of his spin on the surprisingly effective armed resistance to the joint U.S.-Iraqi Operation Knights Assault in Basra, Petraeus will testify that it was caused by Iran through a group of rogue militiamen who had split off from Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and came under Iranian control.

But the U.S. military’s contention that “rogue elements” have been carrying out the resistance to coalition forces was refuted by Sadr himself in an interview with al-Jazeera aired March 29 in which he called for the release from U.S. detention of the individual previously identified by Petraeus as the head of the alleged breakaway faction.

The idea of Iranian-backed “rogue” Shi’ite militia groups undermining Sadr’s efforts to pursue a more moderate course was introduced by the U.S. military command in early 2007. These alleged Iranian proxies were called “Special Groups” – a term that came not from Iran or the Shi’ites themselves but from the Bush administration.

In April, after U.S. forces captured a former spokesman for Sadr, Qais al-Khazali, Petraeus himself announced that they had detained “the head of the secret cell network, the extremist secret cells,” he said. Petraeus referred to it as “the Khazali network.”

U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner asserted in early July that Khazali’s network was a “Special Group,” which was financed, armed, and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and in some instances was even “directed” by it. He said Iran was using a Hezbollah operative to organize such groups to do its bidding in Iran.

The identification of Khazali as head of a “rogue” faction was highly suspect, however. One of Sadr’s most trusted aides, Khazali had played a key role in recruitment for the Mahdi Army in its formative stage in 2003. He had gone underground in late 2004, just after heavy fighting in which the Mahdi Army had suffered heavy casualties and just as Sadr was entering into a long period of retreat from military operations.

In a March 30, 2007, press briefing, Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero of the U.S. Joint Staff said both Khazali and his brother were linked with the “Sadr organization.”

A pro-war military blogger named Bill Roggio, who maintains close relations with the U.S. command in Baghdad, revealed in February 2007 that the real purpose of the line about Iranian-controlled “Special Groups” was to facilitate Petraeus’ strategy of dividing the Mahdi Army. “The ‘rogue element’ narrative provides Mahdi Army fighters and commanders an ‘out,’” wrote Roggio. A Mahdi Army unit commander could either “choose to oppose the government and be targeted,” he observed, “or step aside and join the political process.”

Not surprisingly, that was exactly the position taken by both Crocker and Petraeus today…

“Iran came in for condemnation in both testimonies.

Gen Petraeus accused it of funding and training Shia militias through cells the US terms “special groups”.

On top of all of this is an article that has surfaced in today’s Guardian…

“A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.

The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to replace the existing UN mandate and authorises the US to “conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security” without time limit.

The authorisation is described as “temporary” and the agreement says the US “does not desire permanent bases or a permanent military presence in Iraq”. But the absence of a time limit or restrictions on the US and other coalition forces - including the British - in the country means it is likely to be strongly opposed in Iraq and the US.

Iraqi critics point out that the agreement contains no limits on numbers of US forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term US security agreements with other countries. The agreement is intended to govern the status of the US military and other members of the multinational force.

Following recent clashes between Iraqi troops and Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Basra, and threats by the Iraqi government to ban his supporters from regional elections in the autumn, anti-occupation Sadrists and Sunni parties are expected to mount strong opposition in parliament to the agreement, which the US wants to see finalised by the end of July. The UN mandate expires at the end of the year.

One well-placed Iraqi Sunni political source said yesterday: “The feeling in Baghdad is that this agreement is going to be rejected in its current form, particularly after the events of the last couple of weeks. The government is more or less happy with it as it is, but parliament is a different matter.”

Yesterday, the Iranian government conceded the fact that it played a role in mediating the ceasefire between Iraqi forces and Shi’ite militias, that has, given events yesterday, seemingly crumbled. Despite this, US General David Patraeus is expected to include in his upcoming testimony before Congress that Iranian forces were directly involved in the recent unrest in Basra, operating at a tactical command level. The presentation of such information will, without question, be used to argue that US troop levels in Iraq remain at current strength, the concern being that if numbers are reduced the Iranians will be able to exploit the situation and increase their collusion with those in Iraq with which their interests are aligned.

I’ll not argue that US intelligence could be accurate with regards to Iranian involvement. Then again, given the position that the United States has taken with regards to Iran, it also could be a case of convenience, and therein lays the danger. Using this situation to make inroads that might suggest openly confronting the Iranians should not be discounted given the precedents set by the current administration. There is also no questioning the fact that Patraeus has become a highly politicized military commander, one whose objectivity and impartiality must be questioned given his initial testimony to Congress in September of last year. At the time, the Surge was hailed as a resounding success, but one that was little more than a mirage – and that fact has become resoundingly clear over the last few months. Violence in Iraq did indeed decrease for a time; building walls to physically separate communities within the same city will do that for a time. But such measures do not, by any means, provide lasting results, as has been proven. Therefore, some justification is required to maintain current troop levels, and the use of Iranian involvement in Iraq, be it particularly accurate or not, provides pretext.

Given the fact that the majority of Iraq’s population is Shi’ite, and that Iran is a predominantly Shi’ite nation, it only stands to reason that, given its own interests in the region, Iran is not in the position to simply sit on the sidelines and watch a foreign power – one that has labeled it one of the world’s foremost dangers - attempt to ensure the instillation of a lasting pro-Western government through a prolonged military occupation. The truth of the matter is; the United States has a long and sordid history of backing Latin American strongmen and paramilitary groups to ensure that its influence in the region is maintained – which is no different than Iranian collusion with Shi’ite militias in Iraq. With regards to US – Latin American policy history, a tradition of supporting wholly corrupted and undemocratic governments is the norm. Therefore, the argument that Iranian influence in Iraq is undermining the growth of a US supplanted democracy becomes moot. Because the reality is that, in the end, it isn’t about freedom, only the presence of a government that is aligned with the foreign policy objectives of a foreign power. In that sense, both the United States and the Iranians are equally suspect.