The postwar war in Iraq

Eric Ruder explains what we should – and shouldn’t – expect from the “end of combat operations” in Iraq proclaimed by the Obama administration.

from Socialist Worker US

“WE WON. It’s over, America. We brought democracy to Iraq.” Those were the words of a soldier from the 4th Stryker Brigade, supposedly among the last U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq, two weeks ahead of President Barack Obama's August 31 deadline for withdrawal.

This is a watershed moment for Iraq. But not because the U.S. occupation is over or any of the other reasons put forward by the mainstream media.

Taking action outside Fort Hood

Cindy Beringer reports from Texas on an antiwar action outside Fort Hood.
from Socialist Worker US

Protesters organized by Iraq Veterans Against War march outside Fort Hood in July 

(photo Madeleine Dubus)

 
WHEN THE buses carrying the first group of soldiers of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment (ACR) stealthily approached the gates of Fort Hood in Texas, the protesters waiting outside had already won a victory.

Members of the regiment have seen some of the worst fighting of the war in Iraq over the course of multiple deployments. At least 50 soldiers have physical and mental diagnoses that should prohibit their return to military duty, and many others probably have not sought treatment. And yet, the buses were there in order to deploy these soldiers again.

A protest campaign against the 3rd ACR's redeployment had already brought unwelcome attention to the military's lack of concern for its soldiers.

On August 22, activists and supporters were at it again. They gathered at Fort Hood in Killeen to be a part of a direct action against the redeployment of the first group of soldiers.

The new ‘forgotten’ war

Dahr Jamail, author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, looks at how the U.S. war on Iraq continues to decimate the country.

US Socialist Worker

 

A family of Iraqi refugees in Damascus (James Gordon)

The Western world that slaughtered Iraq and Iraqis, through 13 years of sanctions and seven years of occupation, is now turning its back on the victims. What has remained of Iraq is still being devastated by bombings, assassinations, corruption, millions of evictions and continued infrastructure destruction. Yet the world that caused all this is trying to draw a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq. -- Maki Al-Nazzal, Iraqi political analyst

AS AFGHANISTAN has taken center stage in the U.S. corporate media, with President Barack Obama announcing two major escalations of the war in recent months, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has fallen into the media shadows.

Marxism Alive 2009 conference video, Part 2

Several dozen activists attended Socialist Worker's Marxism Alive conference on June 27. It was broadest gathering of the Left in Auckland in recent memory. Over the course of the day-long educational forum, the panel speakers and participants contributed to a penetrating analysis of trends and charted moves to unify the Left. Here is the second in a series of video highlights from key conference debates.

Conference participants discuss Broad Left unity

Don Archer, Socialist Worker

David, Socialist Worker

Grant Brookes, Socialist Worker

Final Text of Iraq Pact Reveals a U.S. Debacle

by Gareth Porter from Information Clearing House 22 October 2008 The final draft of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the U.S. military presence represents an even more crushing defeat for the policy of the George W. Bush administration than previously thought, the final text reveals.

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Israel’s threat to Iran pressures US

from British Socialist Worker
8 July 2008

The US is so bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan that recent threats by Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear sites has sent waves of panic through the US military.

The top US commander Michael Mullen warned Israel at a recent high level meeting that he has serious doubts that any attack will succeed.

According to military analysts, any operation to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites will also have to target missile bases and other facilities. This would involve hundreds of warplanes.

Mullen is worried that an attack would rebound on the US’s troubled occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, which share long borders with Iran.

To add to US woes, Iran said that it will respond to any attack by closing the strategic Strait of Hormuz, choking off 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil.

Iran also warned that it will fire long range missiles at Israel, with the danger of sparking a regional war that could draw in Lebanon and Syria.

Following the meeting with Israeli military commanders, Mullen said, “Opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful on us, very challenging, with consequences that would be difficult to predict.

“This is a very unstable part of the world and I don’t need it to be more unstable.”

Can the US empire strike back?

by Alex Callinicos from British Socialist Worker 10 June 2008 Imagine, in a galaxy far, far away, an empire in decline. A disastrous military adventure and the rise of new powers have exposed its weakness. To cap it all, the emperor himself is generally despised as a provincial clod. But now his successor has to be chosen. What better way to rehabilitate the empire in the eyes of others than to select as emperor an eloquent, dynamic, relatively young man – a man who, while being utterly safe, not only belongs to the group of imperial subjects who are victims of its greatest historical injustice, but whose father comes from a foreign country and who himself spent some of his childhood in another?

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Washington demands permanent bases to repress Iraqis, launch new Middle East wars

by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site 6 June 2008 The United States is demanding that Iraq grant it the authority to establish 50 permanent military bases scattered across the country, as well as other sweeping powers that would extend the present US military occupation indefinitely and formalize the country’s status as an American semi-colony.

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Israeli press reports US pledge of war on Iran—is Bush preparing an October Surprise?

by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site 21 May 2008 An Israeli press report that US President George W. Bush intends to launch a military attack on Iran before he leaves office at the beginning of next year prompted a heated denial from the White House Tuesday. The article, which appeared in Tuesday’s Jerusalem Post, cited a report on Israeli Army Radio, quoting Israeli officials who had met with Bush and his delegation during their visit to Israel last week. “A senior member of the president’s entourage said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for,” the article quoted an Israel official as saying. The report cited the US official as stating that “the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” had delayed a decision on military action against Iran. The recent crisis in Lebanon and the evident ease with which the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement seized control of Beirut, according to the report, had placed a US attack on the Islamic Republic back on the front burner.

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Dockers shut down US West Coast ports in protest at Iraq War

by Todd Chretien and Adrienne Johnstone from Socialist Worker, United States 2 May, 2008 Tens of thousands of West Coast dockworkers protested the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by refusing to work on May Day. Despite threats from the bosses of the Pacific Maritime Association and a decision by an arbitrator that the union couldn't officially schedule its monthly stop-work meeting (which allows the union to call a meeting during a normal shift), rank-and-file workers didn't show up to work, paralyzing billions of dollars worth of cargo up and down the coast. "Longshore workers are not slaves," International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! "They can't make us work." Dockworkers organized actions in almost 30 ports along the coast, from Washington to San Diego, and their protest coincided with demonstrations by tens of thousands of people around the country who marched and rallied on May 1, International Workers' Day, to support immigrant rights. The ILWU action had solidarity from around the world, including in Iraq itself--dockworkers shut down the crucial port of Basra for several hours in support of the West Coast work stoppage. On the other side of the U.S., in New Jersey, port truckers protested. In Britain, a member of parliament introduced a resolution of support for the ILWU. "It's really important that the ILWU is showing solidarity with all the working people, workers all over the world know about this," said Allan Bradley, who spoke at the march on behalf of himself and other members of the Freightliner 5, UAW members from Cleveland, N.C., who were unjustly fired from their jobs at their truck plant. "The ILWU stood up today, and I'm glad about it." The ILWU action got support from local port truckers as well as antiwar activists. According to Robert Irminger, vice chair of the Inland Boatman's Union for the San Francisco Region, "This morning, about 50 of us went down to the docks with Direct Action to Stop the War and picketed the Union Pacific rail yard. We blocked two gates, and the rail workers held up work for about two hours." ILWU MEMBERS have participated in antiwar protests before, but this was the first large-scale work action by them or any group of union workers in opposition to the war in Iraq. As ILWU Local 34 President Richard Cavalli told a crowd of nearly 1,000 workers and antiwar activists, "George Bush's daughters get married in the White House, and our sons and daughters get buried in Iraq." The ILWU, a multiracial union with a high percentage of Black workers, has long been the target of right-wing politicians and corporations bent on breaking the power of organized labor on the docks, a chokepoint for the globalized economy. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security tried to impose new background checks that threaten the jobs of many workers, justifying these moves with rhetoric about fighting the "war on terror." But ILWU members also made a connection between these attacks and the war. As ILWU Local 10 business agent Trent Willis told the rally, "It doesn't matter if you're a dockworker, a school teacher or a garbage worker--an injury to one is an injury to all. The people who are going to end this war are working people." The work stoppage was the first of several May Day activities in the Bay Area making the link between workers rights and immigrant rights. Local marches took place later in the day in Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, San Jose and Santa Cruz. Antiwar activist and independent congressional candidate Cindy Sheehan, who is challenging Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in November, made the connection, as well. "We have to hurt them in the pocketbooks," Sheehan said, "because they'll never be hurt like my family was, like Iraqi families, like families that have to come across the border." In New Zealand it's illegal for workers to take strike action for political reasons, as these US workers have done. The Labour government has kept in place the harsh restrictions on the right to strike that were first introduced by a National government in 1991.

Interview with US anti-war unionist

On May Day 25,000 US West Coast dockers went on strike for a day against the war in Iraq. All 29 ports along the West Coast of the United States were shut down. Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! spoke to Jack Heyman of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. This is a transcript of the interview that took place on 2 May. AMY GOODMAN: International Longshore and Warehouse Union brought the port operations to a halt from Long Beach to Seattle in defiance of their employers and arbitrators. We’re joined on the phone from San Francisco by Jack Heyman, an officer with the International. Welcome to Democracy Now! Jack Heyman. Can you talk about the significance of what happened yesterday? JACK HEYMAN: Well, yeah. We were really proud here on the West Coast, as far as the longshore union, the ILWU, making this stand, because it’s part of our legacy, really, of standing up on principled issues. And this, I think, is the first strike ever—well, I would call it a stop work, work stoppage, whatever you want—workers withholding their labor in demand—and demanding an end to the war and immediate withdrawal of the troops. AMY GOODMAN: What about the significance of the arbitrator saying that the longshoremen should not go out on strike? JACK HEYMAN: Well, you know, the interesting thing about this action is that not only did we defy the arbitrator, but in a certain sense we defied our own union officials. The union officials did not want to have the actions that we organized up and down the coast. And the arbitrator’s decision is simply—we don’t take our orders from the arbitrators. We don’t take it from judges. The rank and file goes out and does what it has to do. We did that in 1984, when the ship came in from South Africa, the Nedlloyd Kimberley. We refused to work that ship for, I think it was ten or eleven days. And that was in defiance of what an arbitrator said and also against what our union officials were telling us. So we’ve got a strong tradition in the ILWU of rank-and-file democracy, workers’ democracy, where we implement what we decide in a democratic fashion. And our action took place based on a motion that came out of our caucus, which is like a convention of all longshoremen represented up and down the coast. And we decided to stop work to stop this war, and that’s what was carried out. AMY GOODMAN: The action within Iraq in solidarity with your strike, can you talk about that? JACK HEYMAN: Well, I think that really was the icing on the cake, because we were appealing for solidarity actions. And I know there was some actions in New York with the college teachers at a New York community college and teach-ins with students and so forth; there were postal workers that had a few moments of silence, a few minutes of silence in New York, Greensboro, North Carolina, and out here in the Bay Area; but really, the most stunning solidarity came from the port workers in Iraq, who struck in solidarity with us. And that was really a very courageous move, because they’re literally under the gun of a military occupation there. AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans now? JACK HEYMAN: Well, what this action was was raising the level of struggle from protest to resistance, and we’re hoping that these kinds of actions will resonate to other unions and workers. It’s already catching on with some of the port truckers. Actually, they’ve been doing actions for quite awhile. While it’s not mainly based on the war—I think they’re very much affected by the high price of fuel—they’ve been shutting down ports over that issue, but also immigrant rights, because many of them are immigrant workers. And I hope that this will be an example to other workers that we have the power, we’ve got to use it. And that’s how we can bring this war to a halt.

Secret US plan for military future in Iraq

The US army is planning to stay in Iraq literally forever, for no better reason than to be able to throw their weight around in the Middle East. This certainly shows all those assurances of "ensuring peace and prosperity for Iraq" to be hypocrisy and lies. The American troops in Iraq - and Afghanistan - are there but nothing for selfish reasons. And the NZ troops in Afghanistan are there for nothing but sycophantic reasons - that if our sons and daughters weren't there in danger of being blown to pieces, the Americans might get grumpy with us. In fact, that's the main reason we even have an army - so the Americans can use our sons and daughters as cannon fodder in their imperial adventures. We should immediately scrap any military forces which aren't needed for the actual defence of New Zealand, and break all military ties with the Evil Empire.

Secret US plan for military future in Iraq

Document outlines powers but sets no time limit on troop presence by Seumas Milne 8 April 2008 The Guardian (UK) 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." It is also likely to prove controversial in Washington, where it has been criticised by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has accused the administration of seeking to tie the hands of the next president by committing to Iraq's protection by US forces. The defence secretary, Robert Gates, argued in February that the planned agreement would be similar to dozens of "status of forces" pacts the US has around the world and would not commit it to defend Iraq. But Democratic Congress members, including Senator Edward Kennedy, a senior member of the armed services committee, have said it goes well beyond other such agreements and amounts to a treaty, which has to be ratified by the Senate under the constitution. Administration officials have conceded that if the agreement were to include security guarantees to Iraq, it would have to go before Congress. But the leaked draft only states that it is "in the mutual interest of the United States and Iraq that Iraq maintain its sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence and that external threats to Iraq be deterred. Accordingly, the US and Iraq are to consult immediately whenever the territorial integrity or political independence of Iraq is threatened." Significantly - given the tension between the US and Iran, and the latter's close relations with the Iraqi administration's Shia parties - the draft agreement specifies that the "US does not seek to use Iraq territory as a platform for offensive operations against other states".

Petraeus Testimony Next Week Will Signal Iran Attack

by Paul Craig Roberts
ICH
5 April 2008.

Today the London Telegraph reported that "British officials gave warning yesterday that America's commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran's intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment."

The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney. Petraeus, together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that "the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq."

Don't expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million.

Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: "Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi'ite groups, whether they be political or military."

All Skelton knows is what the war criminal Bush regime tells him. If Iran really does have all these connections, then it behooves Washington to cease threatening Iran and to make nice with Iran in order to stabilize Iraq and extract the US from the nightmare.

Reporting from Tehran on April 4, Reuters quotes Mohsen Hakim, whose father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, an ally of the Maliki US puppet government in Iraq: "Tehran, by using its positive influence on the Iraqi nation, paved the way for the return of peace to Iraq and the new situation is the result of Iran's efforts."

Instead of thanking Iran and working with Iran diplomatically to restore stability to Iraq, the Bush regime intends to expand the nightmare with a military attack on Iran.

Ryan Crocker was quick to dispute Hakim's report that Iran had used its influence to end the fighting in Basra. Crocker alleged that Iran had started the fighting. The absurdity of Crocker's claim is obvious as even the neocon US media reported that the fighting in Basra was started by the US and Maliki in an effort to clear out the Shi'ite al-Sadr militias.

Most experts saw the attack on al-Sadr for what it was: an effort to remove a potential threat to the US supply line from Kuwait in the event of a US attack on Iran.

Crocker alleges that the rockets dropping on the Green Zone during the Basra fighting were made in 2007 in Iran. As should be obvious even to disengaged Americans, if Iran were to arm the Iraqi insurgency, the insurgents would have modern weapons to counter US helicopter gunships and heavy tanks. The insurgents have no such weapons.

The neocon lie that Iran is the cause of the Iraqi insurgency is just another Bush regime lie like the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda and the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan attacked the US.

The Bush regime will tell any lie and orchestrate any event in order to "finish the job" in the Middle East.

"Finishing the job" means to destroy the ability of Iraq, Iran, and Syria to provide support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Syria might simply give up and become another American client state. With Iraq and Iran in turmoil, Israel can steal the rest of the West Bank along with the water resources in southern Lebanon. That is what "the war on terror" is really about.

The entire world knows this. Consequently, the US and Israel are essentially isolated. The US can only count on the support that it can bribe and pay for.

At the NATO-Russian summit in Bucharest, Romania, on April 4, Russian President Putin said: "No one can seriously think that Iran would dare attack the U.S. Instead of pushing Iran into a corner, it would be far more sensible to think together how to help Iran become more predictable and transparent."

Of course it would, but that is not what the warmonger Bush regime wants.

Perhaps the British government has derailed the plot to attack Iran by leaking in advance to the London Telegraph the disinformation Cheney has prepared for Petraeus and Crocker to deliver to the complicit US Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday.

On the other hand, the US puppet media is likely to bury the real story and to trumpet Petraeus claims that Iran has, in effect, already declared war on the US by sending weapons to kill US troops in Iraq.

By next Thursday we will know from how the Petraeus-Crocker dog and pony show plays in the US Congress and media whether the Bush Regime will commit yet another war crime by attacking Iran.

Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March, 2008.

Iran torpedoes US plans for Iraqi oil

by M K Bhadrakumar

Asia Times 3 April 2008

In the highly competitive world of international politics, nation states very rarely miss an opportunity to crow about success stories. The opportunity comes rare, mostly by default, and seldom enduring. By any standards of showmanship, therefore, Tehran has set a new benchmark of reticence.

By all accounts, Iran played a decisive role in hammering out the peace deal among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week of human killing on the Tigris River ended on Sunday. Details are sketchy, however, since they must come from non-Iranian sources. Tehran keeps silent about its role.

The deal was brokered after negotiations in the holy city of Qom in Iran involving the two Shi'ite factions - the Da'wa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) - which have been locked in conflict with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in southern Iraq. It appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personally mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations. Suleimani is in charge of the IRGC's operations abroad.

US military commanders routinely blame the Quds for all their woes in Iraq. The fact that the representatives of Da'wa and SIIC secretly traveled to Qom under the very nose of American and British intelligence and sought Quds mediation to broker a deal conveys a huge political message. Iran signals that security considerations rather than politics or religion prevailed.

But the politics of the deal are all too apparent. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who was camping in Basra and personally supervising the operations against the Mahdi Army, was not in the loop about the goings-on. As for US President George W Bush, he had just spoken praising Maliki for waging a "historic and decisive" battle against the Mahdi Army, which he said was "a defining moment" in the history of a "free Iraq". Both Maliki and Bush look very foolish.

But why isn't Tehran in any hurry to claim victory? After all, rubbishing the Bush presidency has been the stuff of Iranian rhetoric. Perhaps, Iranians had shut down over Nauroz new year festivities. They do take the joyful advent of spring very seriously. Or maybe, Suleimani's involvement makes the subject a no-go area for public discussion. Third, Iranians should know better than anyone that the intra-Shi'ite rivalries are far too deep-rooted to lend themselves to an amicable settlement in a day's negotiations.

The turf war in the Iraqi Shi'ite regions has several templates. Iraq's future as a unitary state; the parameters of acceptable federalism, if any; attitude towards the US; control of oil wealth; overvaulting political ambitions - all these are intertwined features of a complex matrix. Therefore, the fragility of the newfound peace is all too apparent. Tehran will be justified in estimating that it is prudent to wait and watch whether peace gains traction in the critical weeks ahead.

But the most important Iranian calculation would be not to provoke the Americans unnecessarily by rubbing in the true import of what happened. Tehran would be gratified that in any case it has made the point that it possesses awesome influence within Iraq. Anyone who knows today's anarchic Iraq would realize that triggering a new spiral of violence in that country may not require much ingenuity, muscle power or political clout.

But to be able to summarily cry halt to cascading violence, and to achieve that precisely in about 48 hours, well, that's an altogether impressive capability in political terms. In this case, the Iranians have managed it with felicitous ease, as if they were just turning off a well-lubricated tap. That requires great command over the killing fields of Iraq, the native warriors, and the sheer ability to calibrate the flow of events and micromanage attitudes.

Conceivably, Tehran would have decided with its accumulated centuries-old Persian wisdom that certain things in life are always best left unspoken, especially stunning successes. Besides, it is far more productive to leave Washington to contemplate over happenings and draw the unavoidable conclusion that if it musters the courage to make that existential choice, Iran can be an immensely valuable factor of stability for Iraq.

But it wasn't a matter of political symbolism, either. Tangible issues are involved. Questions of vital national interests. Clearly, Tehran had genuine concerns over the developing situation in southern Iraq close to its border. Tehran viewed the flare-up involving the Shi'ite factions with great disquiet. This was apparent from the speech by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who led the prayer sermon in Tehran on Friday. He bemoaned, "Iraq is currently entangled in many problems." But Jannati explicitly didn't take sides between the warring factions.

On the one hand, he advised the Mahdi Army ("Iraqi popular armed forces") and Maliki ("Iraqi popular government") to hold talks. But he also advised the "popular armed forces present in Basra" (read Badr Organization, Da'wa, the smaller Fadhila party, etc.) to intervene with the "Iraqi popular government". Third, Jannati also called on Maliki to "heed the [popular] forces' views and solve problems eventually in a way that would be to the interest of all."

Curiously, he criticized the silence on the part of the Muslim world - "especially the Organization of the Islamic Conference" (OIC) - over the "enormous brutality and oppression in Iraq". He said, "It is not clear why Muslim states, especially the OIC, do not show any reaction against so much injustice and oppression in Iraq, while such measures could be easily prevented through unity and solidarity." The remark contained a barely disguised barb aimed at Saudi Arabia for hobnobbing with the US. (US Vice President Dick Cheney had visited Riyadh and Baghdad barely one week before Maliki launched the offensive in Basra.)

Yet, all in all, Jannati politely refrained from expressing Iran's complete disapproval of the conduct of Maliki in carrying out the offensive as part of the US game plan to establish control of Basra, which is the principal artery for American oil majors to evacuate Iraqi oil. The Sadrists oppose the current plans for opening up the nationalized Iraqi oil industry to foreign exploitation.
However, the day after Jannati spoke, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini came down hard on the Maliki government. He deplored the use of American and British air power against the Sadrist militia - "waves of US-UK air raids on civilians". He called on the Shi'ite factions to end the fighting as "continued fighting only serves the interests of the occupiers ... and give pretexts to occupiers to continue their illegitimate presence" in Iraq.

Most important, he called for negotiations - which had already commenced in Qom by that time - "in a friendly and goodwill atmosphere". As for the Maliki government, Hosseini expressed the hope it would "exercise wisdom, cooperation, mutual understanding, patience, calm and contacts with Iraqi political leaders to overcome the current crisis period". Plainly put, Hosseini asked Maliki not to be dumb enough to sub-serve US interests and to realize where his own political interests lay. He pointedly drew a line of distinction between Maliki and the powerful Iraqi Shi'ite leadership.

The Iranian accounts of the fighting have shown a distinct sympathy for the Sadrist militia, highlighting that the Mahdi Army was being "unfairly singled out" for attack by government forces; that the Sadrists' quarrel with Maliki was that he "refused to set a deadline for US and coalition troops to leave"; that US troops were providing the government forces with "intelligence, surveillance and occasional air strikes and raids"; and that Iraqi troops were refusing to obey orders to fight the Sadrist militia. The Iranian official news agency quoted Muqtada as comparing Maliki to Saddam Hussein. "Under Saddam's rule, we complained about how the government distanced itself from the people and operated under dictatorial terms. Now the government is also dealing with people on such terms," he was quoted as saying.

Out of the dramatic developments of the past week, several questions arise, the principal being that the Bush administration's triumphalism over the so-called Iraq "surge" strategy has become irredeemably farcical, and, two, US doublespeak has become badly exposed. What stands out is that Washington promoted the latest round of violence in Basra, whereas Iran cried halt to it. The awesome influence of Tehran has become all too apparent. How does Bush come to terms with it?

What has happened is essentially that Iran has frustrated the joint US-British objective of gaining control of Basra, without which the strategy of establishing control over the fabulous oil fields of southern Iraq will not work. Control of Basra is a pre-requisite before American oil majors make their multi-billion investments to kick start large-scale oil production in Iraq. Iraq's Southern Oil Company is headquartered in Basra. Highly strategic installations are concentrated in the region, such as pipeline networks, pumping stations, refineries and loading terminals. The American oil majors will insist on fastening these installations.

The game plan for control of Basra now needs to be reworked. The idea was to take Basra in hand now so that the Sadrists would be thwarted from taking over the local administration in elections in October - in other words, to ensure the political underpinning for Basra. All indications are that the Sadrists are riding a huge wave of popular support. They have caught the imagination of the poor, downtrodden, dispossessed masses in the majority Shi'ite community. They are hard to replace in democratic elections. The sense of frustration in Washington and London must be very deep that Basra is not yet fastened. Time is running out for Bush to make sure that his successor in the White House inherits an irreversible process in the US's Iraq policy.

Indeed, in his first comments, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown initially refused to say on Tuesday whether the government's plans to cut the number of troops in Iraq to 2,500 from 4,000 were on course. He simply said British troops were facing "difficulties" in Basra. This was followed by Defense Secretary Des Browne saying that return of 2,500 troops from southern Iraq this spring had been placed on hold indefinitely.

Bush hasn't yet spoken. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put on a brave face, saying first-hand information was limited, but based on that, "they [Iraqi troops] seem to have done a pretty good job". To be sure, Cheney must be furious that Tehran torpedoed the entire US strategy for Big Oil. He has had a hard time shepherding the pro-West Arab regimes in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, up to this point.

Besides, nothing infuriates Cheney more than when US oil interests are hit. Thus, the most critical few weeks in the decades-long US-Iran standoff may have just begun. Last week, five former US secretaries of state who served in Democratic and Republican administrations - Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright and Colin Powell - sat at a round-table discussion in Athens and reached a consensus to urge the next US administration to open a line of dialogue with Iran.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

US general's glum message to Senate links into crisis times for late capitalism

by Grant Morgan
Chair of RAM - Residents Action Movement


With practical military precision, retired US general William Odom told the Senate foreign relations committee on 2 April that Washington's Iraq strategy is doomed to fail.

Rather than creating a centralised political stability in Iraq suitable for US corporates to exploit Iraqi oil and for the US state to expand control over the Middle East, the general explained why that Washington's strategy was spreading political instability, bolstering the strength of regional militias and their political allies, and pushing Iran into the role of a regional power-broker utterly hostile to America.

The general is, of course, speaking for what he sees as being in the best interests of the US state - not in the interests of grassroots people. However, as an experienced military leader he knows what works and what doesn't.

Odom's Senate testimony exposes the huge divisions within America's elite circles over how to preserve US economic, political and military mastery over the world at a time of growing crisis for the US state.


GLOBAL TSUNAMIS

Washington is facing not only the unravelling of its Iraq strategy, but also:
• The rise of the European Union and, especially, China as economic super-rivals to America.
• The return of Russia as a nuclear-armed energy giant linking up with Beijing in a contra-US alliance.
• The threat of international financial meltdown on the back of a credit crunch, weakening stock market values and a faltering US dollar.
• Venezuela's "socialism of the 21st century", a political challenge to corporate imperialism which is infecting much of Latin America.
• The global uncertainties of an accelerating climate crisis that threatens human extinction unless there is an emergency mobilisation detrimental to market forces.
• The de-legitimisation of neo-liberalism as both an ideology and a political strategy which is spreading like a virus around the world.

In short, global tsunamis of a size that could swamp even the "unsinkable" USS Imperial are being whipped up by the storms of late capitalism. That forecast, given the central role of Washington in the way the world is run, has huge implications for the global system itself, not just the US state.

Naturally, ruling circles everywhere will try to escape the consequences of their own crises by trying to do what they've always done - shove the crisis burdens onto the backs of the world's majority: the workers, small farmers, professionals, homemakers and other grassroots people who do society's useful work for very little pay and even less say in how society is governed.


BROAD LEFT ALTERNATIVE

But it's not all doom and gloom for the grassroots. In many places in many countries, broad left parties are starting to arise which look likely to mobilise the mass forces needed to put humans at the centre of society, not the dollar.

Important successes are being won by broad left parties like the 5-million strong United Socialist Party of Venezuela, The Left in Germany and the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece.

And important moves towards the creation of broad left parties are happening in countries like Indonesia, France and Malaysia, led by groups of socialists.

A similar process is underway even in New Zealand, sparked by the decision of RAM (Residents Action Movement) to spread nationwide from its Greater Auckland base and to contest parliamentary as well as council elections. (For more on RAM, email grantmorgan@paradise.net.nz or go to UNITYblog sidebar feature "Do we need a broad left party?" - www.UNITYblogNZ.com)

It is a global contest between the oppressive anarchy of system crisis, on the one hand, and the humanistic plan of broad left unity, on the other. Who will win this global contest? That is not pre-determined. Late capitalism's institutional insanity can be overcome through grassroots people uniting for a co-operative, democratic and ecological world.

Our progressive vision stands in stark contrast to the growing crises plaguing even late capitalism's heartland - the US state.

Below is a full reprint of general Odom's testimony to the US Senate. As well as exposing the US state's strategic incoherence, it reeks of a systemic decay that refuses any political quick-fix. Read it and get a better understanding of the system's crises so that people like us are in a better position to mobilise for a grassroots alternative.


US general William Odom tells Senate:
Rapid Withdrawal is Only Solution

TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE ON IRAQ


By William E. Odom, LT General, USA, Ret.

2 April 2008

Good morning Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It is an honor to appear before you again. The last occasion was in January 2007, when the topic was the troop surge. Today you are asking if it has worked. Last year I rejected the claim that it was a new strategy. Rather, I said, it is a new tactic used to achieve the same old strategic aim, political stability. And I foresaw no serious prospects for success.

I see no reason to change my judgment now. The surge is prolonging instability, not creating the conditions for unity as the president claims.

Last year, General Petraeus wisely declined to promise a military solution to this political problem, saying that he could lower the level of violence, allowing a limited time for the Iraqi leaders to strike a political deal. Violence has been temporarily reduced but today there is credible evidence that the political situation is far more fragmented. And currently we see violence surge in Baghdad and Basra. In fact, it has also remained sporadic and significant inseveral other parts of Iraq over the past year, notwithstanding the notable drop in Baghdad and Anbar Province.

More disturbing, Prime Minister Maliki has initiated military action and then dragged in US forces to help his own troops destroy his Shiite competitors. This is a political setback, not a political solution. Such is the result of the surge tactic.

No less disturbing has been the steady violence in the Mosul area, and the tensions in Kirkuk between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen. A showdown over control of the oil fields there surely awaits us. And the idea that some kind of a federal solution can cut this Gordian knot strikes me as a wild fantasy, wholly out of touch with Kurdish realities.

Also disturbing is Turkey¹s military incursion to destroy Kurdish PKK groups in the border region. That confronted the US government with a choice: either to support its NATO ally, or to make good on its commitment to Kurdish leaders to insure their security. It chose the former, and that makes it clear to the Kurds that the United States will sacrifice their security to its larger interests in Turkey.

Turning to the apparent success in Anbar province and a few other Sunni areas, this is not the positive situation it is purported to be. Certainly violence has declined as local Sunni shieks have begun to cooperate with US forces. But the surge tactic cannot be given full credit. The decline started earlier on Sunni initiative. What are their motives? First, anger at al Qaeda operatives and second, their financial plight.

Their break with al Qaeda should give us little comfort. The Sunnis welcomed anyone who would help them kill Americans, including al Qaeda. The concern we hear the president and his aides express about a residual base left for al Qaeda if we withdraw is utter nonsense. The Sunnis will soon destroy al Qaeda if we leave Iraq. The Kurds do not allow them in their region, and the Shiites, like the Iranians, detest al Qaeda. To understand why, one need only take note of the al Qaeda public diplomacy campaign over the past year or so on internet blogs. They implore the United States to bomb and invade Iran and destroy this apostate Shiite regime. As an aside, it gives me pause to learn that our vice president and some members of the Senate are aligned with al Qaeda on spreading the war to Iran.

Let me emphasize that our new Sunni friends insist on being paid for their loyalty. I have heard, for example, a rough estimate that the cost in one area of about 100 square kilometers is $250,000 per day. And periodically they threaten to defect unless their fees are increased. You might want to find out the total costs for these deals forecasted for the next several years, because they are not small and they do not promise to end. Remember, we do not own these people. We merely rent them. And they can break the lease at any moment. At the same time, this deal protects them to some degree from the government¹s troops and police, hardly a sign of political reconciliation.

Now let us consider the implications of the proliferating deals with the Sunni strongmen. They are far from unified among themselves. Some remain with al Qaeda. Many who break and join our forces are beholden to no one. Thus the decline in violence reflects a dispersion of power to dozens of local strong men who distrust the government and occasionally fight among themselves. Thus the basic military situation is far worse because of the proliferation of armed groups under local military chiefs who follow a proliferating number of political bosses.

This can hardly be called greater military stability, much less progress toward political consolidation, and to call it fragility that needs more time to become success is to ignore its implications. At the same time, Prime Minister Maliki¹s military actions in Basra and Baghdad indicate even wider political and military fragmentation. What we are witnessing is more accurately described as the road to the Balkanization of Iraq, that is, political fragmentation. We are being asked by the president to believe that this shift of so much power and finance to so many local chieftains is the road to political centralization. He describes the process as building the state from the bottom up.

I challenge you to press the administration¹s witnesses this week to explain this absurdity. Ask them to name a single historical case where power has been aggregated successfully from local strong men to a central government except through bloody violence leading to a single winner, most often a dictator. That is the history of feudal Europe¹s transformation to the age of absolute monarchy. It is the story of the American colonization of the west and our Civil War. It took England 800 years to subdue clan rule on what is now the English-Scottish border. And it is the source of violence in Bosnia and Kosovo.

How can our leaders celebrate this diffusion of power as effective state building? More accurately described, it has placed the United States astride several civil wars. And it allows all sides to consolidate, rearm, and refill their financial coffers at the US expense.

To sum up, we face a deteriorating political situation with an over-extended army. When the administration¹s witnesses appear before you, you should make them clarify how long the army and marines can sustain this band-aid strategy.

The only sensible strategy is to withdraw rapidly but in good order. Only that step can break the paralysis now gripping US strategy in the region. The next step is to choose a new aim, regional stability, not a meaningless victory in Iraq. And progress toward that goal requires revising our policy toward Iran. If the president merely renounced his threat of regime change by force, that could prompt Iran to lessen its support to Taliban groups in Afghanistan. Iran detests the Taliban and supports them only because they will kill more Americans in Afghanistan as retaliation in event of a US attack on Iran. Iran¹s policy toward Iraq would also have to change radically as we withdraw. It cannot want instability there. Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and they know that Persians look down on them. Cooperation between them has its limits.

No quick reconciliation between the US and Iran is likely, but US steps to make Iran feel more secure make it far more conceivable than a policy calculated to increase its insecurity. The president¹s policy has reinforced Iran¹s determination to acquire nuclear weapons, the very thing he purports to be trying to prevent.

Withdrawal from Iraq does not mean withdrawal from the region. It must include a realignment and reassertion of US forces and diplomacy that give us a better chance to achieve our aim.


A number of reasons are given for not withdrawing soon and completely. I have refuted them repeatedly before but they have more lives than a cat. Let try again me explain why they don¹t make sense.

First, it is insisted that we must leave behind a military training element with no combat forces to secure them. This makes no sense at all. The idea that US military trainers left alone in Iraq can be safe and effective is flatly rejected by several NCOs and junior officers I have heard describe their personal experiences. Moreover, training foreign forces before they have a consolidated political authority to command their loyalty is a windmill tilt. Finally, Iraq is not short on military skills.

Second, it is insisted that chaos will follow our withdrawal. We heard that argument as the ³domino theory² in Vietnam. Even so, the path to political stability will be bloody regardless of whether we withdraw or not. The idea that the United States has a moral responsibility to prevent this ignores that reality. We are certainly to blame for it, but we do not have the physical means to prevent it. American leaders who insist that it is in our power to do so are misleading both the public and themselves if they believe it. The real moral question is whether to risk the lives of more Americans. Unlike preventing chaos, we have the physical means to stop sending more troops where many will be killed or wounded. That is the moral responsibility to our country which no American leaders seems willing to assume.

Third, nay sayers insist that our withdrawal will create regional instability. This confuses cause with effect. Our forces in Iraq and our threat to change Iran¹s regime are making the region unstable. Those who link instability with a US withdrawal have it exactly backwards. Our ostrich strategy of keeping our heads buried in the sands of Iraq has done nothing but advance our enemies¹ interest.


I implore you to reject these fallacious excuses for prolonging the commitment of US forces to war in Iraq.

Thanks for this opportunity to testify today.

Why al-Maliki attacked Basra

The three reasons the Iraqi prime minister launched his ill-fated assault on the Sadrists of southern Iraq. By Juan Cole 2/4/08 "Salon" -- - Why did Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attack the Mahdi army in Basra last week? Despite the cease-fire called Sunday by Shiite leader Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the millions-strong Sadr Movement, last week's battles between the Mahdi army and the Iraqi army revealed the continued weakness and instability of al-Maliki's government. Al-Maliki went to Basra on Monday, March 24, to oversee the attack on city neighborhoods loyal to al-Sadr. By Friday, the Iraqi minister of defense, Abdul Qadir Jasim, had to admit in a news conference in Basra that the Mahdi army had caught Iraqi security forces off guard. Most Sadrist neighborhoods fought off the government troops with rocket-propelled grenades and mortar fire. At the same time, the Mahdi army asserted itself in several important cities in the Shiite south, as well as in parts of Baghdad, raising questions of how much of the country the government really controls. Only on Sunday, after the U.S. Air Force bombed some key Mahdi army positions, was the Iraqi army able to move into one of the Sadrist districts of Basra. By the time the cease-fire was called, al-Maliki had been bloodied after days of ineffective fighting and welcomed a way back from the precipice. Both Iran, which brokered the agreement, and al-Sadr, whose forces acquitted themselves well against the government, were strengthened. As of Tuesday morning in Iraq, the truce was holding in Basra, and a curfew had been lifted in Baghdad, though sporadic fighting continued in the capital. Estimates of casualties for the week were 350. The campaign was a predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States. So why did al-Maliki do it? With no obvious immediate crisis in Basra that called for such desperate measures, what could have motivated the decision to attack? Three main motivations present themselves: 1 Control of petroleum smuggling. 1 Staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it). 2 The achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections. The Sadr Movement leaders themselves are convinced that the recent setting of a date for provincial elections, on 1 October 2008, and al-Maliki's desire to improve the government's position in advance of the elections, precipitated the prime minister's attack. It is widely thought that the Sadrists might sweep to power in the provinces in free and fair elections, since the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the performance of the major incumbent party in the southern provinces, the Islamic Supreme Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Provincial elections could radically change the political landscape in Iraq. Both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadr Movement sat out the last round, in late January 2005. Thus, governments in the Sunni Arab areas are unrepresentative and in one case a Sunni-majority province, Diyala, is actually ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), which Sunnis tend to see as a puppet of Iran. Likewise in the Shiite south, the ISCI, led by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is largely in power, even though probably a majority of the population favors Sadr. To have a minority in power and the majority feeling disenfranchised is especially dangerous in a violent society such as Iraq. The disjuncture has contributed to endemic fighting in the capital of Qadisiya Province, Diwaniya, for instance, between Sadr's Mahdi army and the paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council, or Badr Corps. In many provinces, ISCI has infiltrated members of its Badr paramilitary into the police and security forces, thus giving them the presumption of legitimacy and allowing the branding of the Mahdi army as violent militiamen with no popular mandate, won at the polls. That the week's fighting was intended to bolster pro-government forces in preparation for the October provincial elections is at least plausible. During the fighting, the Iraqi army was allied with the Badr Corps paramilitary of the ISCI, which was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. ISCI, the leading Shiite political party in parliament, is now al-Maliki's main backer in the government, along with his own smaller Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party. And U.S. military spokesman Major-General Kevin Bergner told a news conference on Wednesday that the Iraqi army's military operation, which U.S. forces aided, was aimed at improving "security" in the city ahead of provincial elections. Then there is the super-province. On the same day that Bergner spoke, a Sadrist leader told the Times of Baghdad: "The objective of the operations in Basra is to impose a provincial confederacy on the south, which the Sadr Movement opposes." The reference to a provincial confederacy, confusingly called "federalism" in Iraq, is about the plan of ISCI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to establish an eight-province regional government for the Shiite south. Were the Sadrists to win the southern provinces in October's provincial elections, they would halt any move toward such a confederacy, since they favor strong central government on the French model and view al-Hakim's plan for a Shiite super-province as the first stage in a soft partition of Iraq. The issue of whether to create a Shiite super-province and risk a soft partition of Iraq is not the only source of conflict between the Sadrists and the Iraqi government. The Sadr Movement demands the setting of a timetable for the departure of U.S. troops, a demand supported by a majority of the members of parliament but which is not shared by most ministers in the Iraqi cabinet. Indeed, the Sadr Movement, which helped bring al-Maliki to power in spring of 2006, broke with him precisely over his refusal to demand that the U.S. set a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq. The Sadrists also objected to al-Maliki's direct meetings with Bush, which they saw as a humiliating capitulation to colonialism. In summer of 2007, the Sadrists withdrew their ministers from al-Maliki's cabinet. The Bush administration wants its current partners to stay in power in the Shiite areas, since ISCI and al-Maliki's Da'wa party support a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq. Washington would probably therefore have preferred that the provincial elections in the Shiite south be postponed. Yet the administration knows that there is little hope of mollifying the Sunni Arabs unless they have an opportunity to vote for their own provincial leadership. The very step that might help calm down the Sunni Arab provinces, however, may inflame tensions in the Shiite south, if the Sadrists toss ISCI out on its collective ear. The upcoming provincial elections are a potential public relations nightmare for both the Iraqi government and its allies in the Bush administration. What if fighting breaks out in September between the Badr Corps and the Mahdi army? They are the paramilitaries of the two major parties that will be heatedly contesting the south. A campaign now might weaken the Mahdi army, suggesting to the electorate in the south that the Sadrists cannot protect them. Iraqi Shiites appear mainly to vote for parties that they hope can protect them and establish security. Other issues, such as petroleum smuggling, are also bound up with the power struggle. The various political parties in Basra are using their paramilitaries to capture and smuggle Iraqi government gasoline and kerosene, worth billions, which allows them to build up big war chests for fighting the elections and doing charitable work in rundown neighborhoods. A decisive defeat of the Mahdi army in Basra now would possibly have deprived the Sadrists of the funding they need to win the October elections. If the Sadr Movement rules most Shiite-majority provinces, including Baghdad, that will make it difficult for the U.S. military to remain in the country. It will stop any move toward a soft partition of the country of the sort endorsed by the U.S. Senate. It will ensure that the Sadr Movement can continue to siphon off billions in petroleum revenue through smuggling, strengthening it for the future. The survival of the current Iraqi government, based on rivals to the Sadrists such as ISCI and the Da'wa Party of al-Maliki, hangs in the balance. Clearly, al-Maliki felt that the operation had to be launched, and may well have thought that it is better to do it now, so that it will not be fresh in the minds of the Iraqi or American electorate when they go to the polls in the fall. Now that al-Maliki's campaign has gone so badly, it raises the question of whether there will be a sympathy vote for al-Sadr in October. The Iraqis, a majority of whom say they want a short timetable for U.S. withdrawal, may well have an opportunity to elect provincial governments that, practically speaking, want the same thing, in October. If that happens, it is hard to see how the U.S. presence can last, since the U.S. needs bases in Shiite provinces like Baghdad so as to function.

Understanding the violence in Iraq

Five Things You Need to Know To Understand The Latest Violence in Iraq

By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar

29/03/08

Heavy fighting has spread across Shia-dominated enclaves in Iraq over the past two days. The U.S.-backed regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered 50,000 Iraqi troops to "crack down" - with coalition air support - on Shiite militias in the oil-rich and strategically important city of Basra, U.S. forces have surrounded Baghdad's Sadr City and fighting has been reported in the southern cities of Kut, Diwaniya, Karbala and Hilla. Basra's main bridge and an oil pipeline connecting it to Amara were destroyed Wednesday. Six cities are under curfew, and acts of civil disobedience have shut down dozens of neighborhoods across the country. Civilian casualties have reportedly overwhelmed poorly equipped medical centers in Baghdad and Basra. There are indications that the unilateral ceasefire declared last year by the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is collapsing.

"The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," one militiaman loyal to al-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor's Sam Dagher by telephone from Sadr City. Dagher added that the "same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store. A political track is also in play: Sadr has called on his followers to take to the streets to demand Maliki's resignation, and nationalist lawmakers in the Iraqi Parliament, led by al-Sadr's block, are trying to push a no-confidence vote challenging the prime minister's regime.

The conflict is one that the U.S. media appears incapable of describing in a coherent way. The prevailing narrative is that Basra has been ruled by mafia-like militias - which is true - and that Iraqi government forces are now cracking down on the lawlessness in preparation for regional elections, which is not. As independent analyst Reider Visser noted:

On closer inspection, there are problems in these accounts. Perhaps most importantly, there is a discrepancy of Basra as a city ruled by militias (in the plural)... [and the] facts of the ongoing operations, which seem to target only one of these militia groups, the Mahdi Army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Surely, if the aim was to make Basra a safer place, it would have been logical to do something to also stem the influence of the other militias loyal to the local competitors of the Sadrists, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq [SIIC], as well as the armed groups allied to the Fadhila party (which have dominated the oil protection services for a long time). But so far, only Sadrists have complained about attacks by government forces.

The conflict doesn't conform to the analysis of the roots of Iraqi instability as briefed by U.S. officials in the heavily-fortified Green Zone. It also doesn't fit into the simplistic but popular narrative of a country wrought by sectarian violence, and its nature is obscured by the labels that the commercial media uncritically apply to the disparate centers of Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

The "crackdown" comes on the heels of the approval of a new "provincial law," which will ultimately determine whether Iraq remains a unified state with a strong central government or is divided into sectarian-based regional governates. The measure calls for provincial elections in October, and the winners of those elections will determine the future of the Iraqi state. Control of the country's oil wealth, and how its treasure will be developed, will also be significantly influenced by the outcome of the elections.

It's a relatively straightforward story: Iraq is ablaze today as a result of an attempt to impose Colombian-style democracy on the unstable country: Maliki's goal, shared by the like-minded allies among the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities that dominate his administration, and with at least tacit U.S. approval, is to kill off the opposition and then hold a vote.

To better understand the nature of this latest round of conflict, here are five things one needs to know about what's taking place across Iraq.

1. A visible manifestation of Iraq's central-but-under-reported political conflict (not "sectarian violence")

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 semi-autonomous 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.

We've written about this long-standing conflict extensively in the past, and now we're seeing it come to a head, as we believed it would at some point.

2. U.S. is propping up unpopular regime; Sadr has support because of his platform

Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and George W Bush

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.

Most Iraqis:

1. Favor a strong central government free of the influence of militias.
2. Oppose, by a 2-1 margin, the privatization of Iraq's energy sector - a "benchmark towards progress" according to the Bush administration.
3. Favor a U.S. withdrawal on a short timeline (most believe the United States plans to build permanent bases - both are issues about which the Sadrists have been vocal.
4. Oppose al Qaeda and the ideology of Osama Bin Laden and, to a lesser degree, Iranian influence on Iraq's internal affairs.

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.

3. "Iraqi forces" are, in fact, "Iranian- (and U.S.-) backed Shiite militias"

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.

4. Colombia-style democracy

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.

5. Chip off the old block: Maliki's attempt to criminalize dissent

It's unclear whether Sadr has lifted the cease-fire entirely, or simply freed his fighters to defend themselves. He continues to call for peaceful resistance.Whatever the case may be, it's not entirely accurate to say that he "chose" this conflict. The reality is that while his army was holding the cease-fire, attacks on and detentions of Sadrists have continued unabated. Sadr renewed the cease-fire last month, but he did so over the urging of his top aides, who argued that their movement was threatened with annihilation. He later authorized his followers to carry weapons "for self-defense" to head off a mutiny within his ranks.

Ahmed al-Massoudi, a Sadrist member of Parliament, last week "accused the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, his Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) of planning a military campaign to liquidate the Sadrists."

The lawmaker told Voices of Iraq that Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim's "SIIC and the Dawa Party have held meetings with officers of the militias merged recently into security agencies to launch a military campaign outwardly to impose order and law, but the real objective is to liquidate the Sadrist bloc." "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is directly supervising this scheme with officers from the Dawa Party and the SIIC," he added. Despite his close ties with Tehran and deep involvement in Shiite militia activity, Hakim has been invited to the White House, where he was feted by Bush himself.

Sadr called for nationwide civil disobedience that would have allowed his followers to flex some political muscle in a nonviolent way. His orders, according to Iraqi reports were to distribute olive branches and copies of the Koran to soldiers at checkpoints.

The Maliki regime responded by saying that individuals joining the nationwide strike would be punished and that those organizing it are in violation of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Act issued in 2005. A spokesman for the prime minister promised to punish any government employees who failed to show up for work.

This is consistent with a long-term trend: the U.S.-backed government's obstruction of Iraqi efforts to foster political reconciliation among diverse groups of Iraq nationalists.

Propaganda and the surge

The Maliki regime has set an ultimatum demanding that the militias - the nationalist militias - lay down their arms within the next two days or face "more serious consequences." Al-Sadr has also issued an ultimatum: The government must cease its attacks on his followers, or his followers will escalate. It is an extremely dangerous situation, especially given the fact that the main U.S. resupply routes stretch from Baghdad through the Shia-dominated southern provinces.

But the precariousness of the situation appears to be of little concern to the military command, which issued a statement saying that the violence was a result of the success of the U.S. troop "surge" (Bush called the "crackdown" a "bold decision'' that shows the country's security forces are capable of combating terrorists). It's yet another example of the administration putting U.S. geostrategic (and economic) interests ahead of Iraqi reconciliation and democratic governance.

The much-touted troop "surge" had little to do with the drop in violence in recent months - it didn't even correlate with the lull chronologically and was certainly a minor causal factor at best. A number of factors led to the reduced violence, but Sadr's cease-fire had the greatest impact. Nonetheless, the Maliki regime, backed by the United States, continued a campaign of harassment and intimidation against Sadr's followers, denied them space to peacefully resist the occupation and forced his hand.

Given the degree to which the coalition has continued to stir a hornets' nest, we may be seeing a perfect illustration of the dangers of believing one's own propaganda play out as Iraq is once again set aflame.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. Raed Jarrar is Iraq Consultant to the American Friends Service Committee. He blogs at Raed in the Middle.

Peace March in Auckland

Saturday 15th March – GPJA Peace March on anniversary of invasion of Iraq. Gather Aotea Square, Auckland, 12noon for march to US Consulate. This protest will also highlight the Israeli invasion of Gaza and brutality towards Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces. Bring banners and placards!

Final Text of Iraq Pact Reveals a U.S. Debacle

by Gareth Porter from Information Clearing House 22 October 2008 The final draft of the U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the U.S. military presence represents an even more crushing defeat for the policy of the George W. Bush administration than previously thought, the final text reveals. The final draft, dated Oct. 13, not only imposes unambiguous deadlines for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011 but makes it extremely unlikely that a U.S. non-combat presence will be allowed to remain in Iraq for training and support purposes beyond the 2011 deadline for withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces. Furthermore, Shiite opposition to the pact as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty makes the prospects for passage of even this agreement by the Iraqi parliament doubtful. Pro-government Shiite parties, the top Shiite clerical body in the country, and a powerful movement led by nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that recently mobilised hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in protest against the pact, are all calling for its defeat. At an Iraqi cabinet meeting Tuesday, ministers raised objections to the final draft, and a government spokesman said that the agreement would not submit it to the parliament in its current form. But Secretary of Defence Robert Gates told three news agencies Tuesday that the door was "pretty far closed" on further negotiations. In the absence of an agreement approved by the Iraqi parliament, U.S. troops in Iraq will probably be confined to their bases once the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31. The clearest sign of the dramatically reduced U.S. negotiating power in the final draft is the willingness of the United States to give up extraterritorial jurisdiction over U.S. contractors and their employees and over U.S. troops in the case of "major and intentional crimes" that occur outside bases and while off duty. The United States has never allowed a foreign country to have jurisdiction over its troops in any previous status of forces agreement. But even that concession is not enough to satisfy anti-occupation sentiments across all Shiite political parties. Sunni politicians hold less decisive views on the pact, and Kurds are supportive. Bush administration policymakers did not imagine when the negotiations began formally last March that its bargaining position on the issue of the U.S. military presence could have turned out to be so weak in relation with its own "client" regime in Baghdad. They were confident of being able to legitimise a U.S. presence in Iraq for decades after the fighting had ended, just as they did in South Korea. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates had declared in June 2007 that U.S. troops would be in Iraq "for a protracted period of time". The secret U.S. draft handed to Iraqi officials Mar. 7 put no limit on either the number of U.S. troops in Iraq or the duration of their presence or their activities. It would have authorised U.S. forces to "conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain certain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security", according to an Apr. 8 article in The Guardian quoting from a leaked copy of the draft. When Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki demanded a timetable for complete U.S. withdrawal in early July, the White House insisted that it would not accept such a timetable and that any decision on withdrawal "will be conditions based". It was even hoping to avoid a requirement for complete withdrawal in the agreement, as reflected in false claims to media Jul. 17 that Bush and Maliki had agreed on the objective of "further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq" rather than complete withdrawal. By early August, however, Bush had already reduced its negotiating aims. The U.S. draft dated Aug. 6, which was translated and posted on the internet by Iraqi activist Raed Jarrar, demanded the inclusion of either "targeted times" or "time targets" to refer to the dates for withdrawal of U.S. forces from all cities, town and villages and for complete combat troop withdrawal from Iraq, suggesting that they were not deadlines. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad Aug. 21, the United States accepted for the first time a firm date of 2011 for complete withdrawal, giving up the demand for ambiguous such terms. However, the Aug. 6 draft included a provision that the U.S. could ask Iraq to "extend" the date for complete withdrawal of combat troops, based on mutual review of "progress" in achieving the withdrawal. Because it had not yet been removed from the text, U.S. officials continued to claim to reporters that the date was "conditions-based", as Karen DeYoung reported in the Washington Post Aug. 22. The administration also continued to hope for approval of a residual force. U.S. officials told DeYoung the deal would leave "tens of thousands of U.S. troops inside Iraq in supporting roles...for an unspecified time". That hope was based on a paragraph of the Aug. 6 draft providing that the Iraqi government could request such a force, with the joint committee for operations and coordination determining the "tasks and level of the troops..." But the Oct. 13 final draft, a translation of which was posted by Raed Jarrar on his website Oct. 20, reveals that the Bush administration has been forced to give up its aims of softening the deadline for withdrawal and of a residual non-combat force in the country. Unlike the Aug. 6 draft, the final text treats any extension of that date as a modification of the agreement, which could be done only "in accordance to constitutional procedures in both countries". That is an obvious reference to approval by the Iraqi parliament. Given the present level of opposition to the agreement within the Shiite community, that provision offers scant hope of a residual U.S. non-combat force in Iraq after 2011. Another signal of Iraqi intentions is a provision of the final draft limiting the duration of the agreement to three years -- a date coinciding with the deadline for complete withdrawal from Iraq. The date can be extended only by a decision made by the "constitutional procedures in both countries". The final draft confirms the language of the Aug. 6 draft requiring that all U.S. military operations be subject to the approval of the Iraqi government and coordinated with Iraqi authorities through a joint U.S.-Iraqi committee. The negotiating text had already established by Aug. 6 that U.S. troops could not detain anyone in the country without a "warrant issued by the specialised Iraqi authorities in accordance with Iraqi law" and required that the detainees be turned over to Iraqi authorities within 24 hours. The Oct. 13 "final draft" goes even further, requiring that any detention by the United States, apart from its own personnel, must be "based on an Iraqi decision". The collapse of the Bush administration's ambitious plan for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq highlights the degree of unreality that has prevailed among top U.S. officials in both Washington and Baghdad on Iraqi politics. They continued to see the Maliki regime as a client which would cooperate with U.S. aims even after it was clear that Maliki's agenda was sharply at odds with that of the United States. They also refused to take seriously the opposition to such a presence even among the Shiite clerics who had tolerated it in order to obtain Shiite control over state power. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Can the US empire strike back?

by Alex Callinicos from British Socialist Worker 10 June 2008 Imagine, in a galaxy far, far away, an empire in decline. A disastrous military adventure and the rise of new powers have exposed its weakness. To cap it all, the emperor himself is generally despised as a provincial clod. But now his successor has to be chosen. What better way to rehabilitate the empire in the eyes of others than to select as emperor an eloquent, dynamic, relatively young man – a man who, while being utterly safe, not only belongs to the group of imperial subjects who are victims of its greatest historical injustice, but whose father comes from a foreign country and who himself spent some of his childhood in another? Maybe this seems too cynical a view of Barack Obama’s bid for the US presidency. The success of his campaign for the Democratic nomination has been driven by a huge popular revulsion against George Bush’s discredited administration and by the desire finally to heal the wound in US society caused by slavery and racism. But the real power of the US president lies abroad. President John F Kennedy asked Richard Nixon in 1961, “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25 in comparison to something like the confrontation between the US and Cuba.” And, on foreign policy, there seems to be a big divide between the two presidential candidates. John McCain, the Republican nominee, is in favour of keeping US troops in Iraq for “maybe one hundred years”. Obama, by contrast, gained his edge on Hillary Clinton in large part thanks to his opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is officially committed to withdrawing all US combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months of becoming president. But, in judging what Obama would actually do in the White House, it’s essential to remember what presidential elections are really about. Dominated by money – Obama’s victory over Clinton was clinched by his superior fund-raising – they are about choosing the leader who can best look after the global interests of US capitalism for the next four years. Long before President Jimmy Carter officially proclaimed it in January 1980, a key objective of US foreign policy has been militarily and politically to dominate the Middle East. The current surge in the oil price has made securing this objective even more important. So it’s striking, as the Washington Post has pointed out, that “when Mr Obama opened his general election campaign this week with a major speech on Middle East policy, the substantive strategy he outlined was, in many respects, not very much different from that of the Bush administration – or that of John McCain”. Obama made the speech to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the key pro-Israel lobbying organisations. He seems to have had two aims. The first was to ­reassure a suspicious audience that his opposition to the Iraq war did not in any way weaken his support for Israel. “Let me be clear,” Obama said. “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable, Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” He said he had been opposed even to letting Hamas contest the Palestinian elections in 2006 and promised Israel $30 billion US aid over the next ten years. Secondly, Obama sought to toughen his line on Iran. He has been attacked by Bush and McCain for “appeasement” for promising to negotiate with the Islamic Republican regime in Tehran. Not radical Obama’s position isn’t exactly radical. The December 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group, headed by Jim Baker, pillar of the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior, recommended negotiating with Iran as a way of getting out of the Iraq morass. But Obama was determined not to allow McCain to outflank him. “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told AIPAC. This would include “aggressive, principled diplomacy” backed up by tougher sanctions and the ultimate sanction of force: “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.” This change in tone isn’t just about defeating McCain in the general election. The military surge hasn’t brought peace or stability to Iraq, but it has bought the US time to pursue its long term plans for the country. The secret draft agreement for a “strategic alliance” between the US and Iraq revealed last week in Socialist Worker and the Independent indicate what these plans are – permanent US military bases in Iraq and the right for the Pentagon to pursue its operations without the say-so of its client regime. Democratic senators have denounced the proposal. Nevertheless, it is absolutely certain that Obama will fill what the Washington Post calls “the gap in his Middle East policy” by watering down his proposal to withdraw all US troops in Iraq. But if president Obama would probably offer only more of the same in the Middle East, what difference would he make overall to the US empire? After the Cold War, commentators talked about “the unipolar moment” – about overwhelming US global power. The Iraq debacle has reminded the world instead of US relative decline – a perception reinforced by the economic rise of China and the credit squeeze engineered by Anglo-American financial speculation. Instead of the swaggering arrogance of power symbolised by Bush, Obama would offer the world’s ruling classes a different face of the US – one ready to negotiate and to cooperate, and in particular to address the issue of climate change rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. But this more open stance would still rest on US military power – Obama wants to increase the size of the armed forces. He would make an attractive black emperor but he would still have his legions massed behind him.