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Iraq: "Made in the USA"

April 27, 2015 at 3:26 pm

The other day, US President Barack Obama declared that the world should not take Russia too seriously as “Russia doesn’t make anything“. Of course, this was in reference to major differences between Russia and America over crises such as the ongoing struggle in Ukraine, and a swipe at Russian economic production. However, if we take a careful look at what America produces politically, I am certain we can find much that we can mock.

The “Made in the USA” Iraq experiment has failed. A myriad of analysts and academics have claimed that the US made a mistake and miscalculation in their Iraq policy of exporting democracy. It was never an accident, error or miscalculation, but in fact the chaos and disintegration that has been going on in Iraq since 2003 was always part of a Western strategy to remove a recalcitrant regime that simply wouldn’t play ball and had grown too big for its shoes.

Whereas the Gaddafi regime in Libya could be cajoled into obedience and welcomed back into the fold of dictatorships that the West liked, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had committed the gravest of sins by striking Israel in 1991 with scud missiles, and daring to expand territory under his control that used to be part of the same land in the not-so-distant past anyway.

Even after long years of sanctions, Iraq heavily supported Palestinians by paying out approximately $35 million to the families of Palestinian martyrs. In one case $250,000 was distributed in one afternoon in Gaza alone. Destroying such a state, sending it back decades, and dividing it into rival warring factions to make sure it never stands against Western policy again is surely no accident.

Let us look at the “Made in the USA” Iraq of today. After 9/11, the Americans, with no shortage of irony, installed sectarian terrorist groups heavily linked to Iran in power (The Dawa Party of incumbent Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki used terrorist bombings in Kuwait and other places), Iraq has witnessed a glut of sectarian killings and government abuses including torture, rape, arbitrary arrests under a controversial terror law designed to persecute the Sunni population, and countless other crimes. Where terrorism did not exist before 2003, Iraq became a haven for it after the US-led invasion. The Americans dispossessed a large proportion of the Iraqi population, the Sunnis, and empowered the Shia in order to create sectarian rifts and to destroy the Iraqi national identity and cohesion that before saw Sunni Arab, Sunni Kurd, Shia, Christian and many others stand side by side and fight against Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempts to export the sectarian Iranian Revolution to Iraqi soil.

Having suffered for years under successive brutal governments in Baghdad and with the complete failure of the Iraqi parliament in conveying the concerns of large segments of Iraqi society (even amongst Sunni political groups such as the Iraqi Islamic Party and others), a primarily Sunni Arab protest movement formed in December 2012. These protests were peaceful, unarmed and non-sectarian, and were even backed by one of the main Shia clerics active in Iraq today, Muqtada Al-Sadr, although his reasons for supporting them could be because he despises Al-Maliki. Irrespective of his intentions, the fact that he supported the demonstrators’ “legitimate and popular” demands is an acknowledgement that their demands were non-sectarian.

Over the period of a year, and after Al-Maliki committed massacres against unarmed demonstrators in Hawija and other areas in Iraq, things finally came to a head when Al-Maliki sent in his army to violently disperse protesters in Ramadi, the capital of the Anbar Governorate, in December 2013. The Sunni Arabs erupted and took up arms, forming the General Military Council for the Iraqi Revolution (GMCIR), an umbrella group of various armed factions involving Sunni Arab tribes, officers and men from the original and US-disbanded Iraqi Armed Forces and groups that resisted the Western invasion of Iraq, in conjunction with fringe extremist groups such as the infamous Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

Here is where things get really messy for American imported terrorism. After a fairly slow six months of revolt, a blitzkrieg that spread from Mosul in northern Iraq and reached Samarra in the centre took place two months ago in June, forcing Al-Maliki’s forces to dissolve and hold a precarious line a mere hour’s drive from the capital Baghdad with most of northern, western, and large chunks of eastern and central Iraq in the hands of Iraqi revolutionaries.

This is when the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), who has relations with Israel, took advantage of the situation to move their militia, the Peshmerga, to take disputed territories between them and the defunct government in Baghdad. The KRG swiftly moved on Kirkuk and towns like Jalawla in an attempt to excise them from Iraq proper, and KRG President Massoud Barzani began to make preparations for Kurdish independence. What he and the KRG failed to understand is that they are not invincible. Small scale skirmishes between the Peshmerga and armed groups had been occurring since June, but last week saw the Peshmerga routed over the Mosul Dam, Zumar, Sinjar and other strategic areas.

The Kurds are now anxiously calling for help, and it is ironic who they have turned to. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, better known as PKK terrorists, who have killed countless innocents in Turkey, as well as their Syrian PYD comrades, have turned up to help shore up the Peshmerga who are taking a battering. This poses an interesting question for the US. What do they do in a country that is run by terrorists (the Dawa Party and its allies) that are supported by terrorists (the Lebanese Hezbollah, Badr Brigades, Mahdi Army and other Shia groups the US recognises as terrorists), whose prime minister is now militarily supporting the Peshmerga soon after he declared the Kurds of creating a “base for terrorism” in Erbil, and whilst the Peshmerga are fighting alongside yet more terrorists who are fighting ISIS terrorists? What can we call such a terrorist free-for-all, and are the Americans proud to say that this Frankenstein democracy was “Made in the USA”? Perhaps Obama’s time would be better spent looking at what America manufactures and exports around the world before attacking the exports of other countries.

The author is a freelance writer and PhD student in Strategy and Security at the University of Exeter.

 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.