By Abdullah Iskandar
Al-Hayat, Lebanon, 14 March 2006
It seems that the US didn't "discover" that there was sects and races in Iraq until it crashed into the Iranian nuclear file. It considered that the mounting Iranian power in Mesopotamia, buttressed by nuclear potential, represents a threat for its strategic interests on the long run.
The US invaded all parts of Iraq, occupied it, dismantled its central authority, and scattered its armed forces and its administration with a decision it deemed justified and safeguarded by the might. Everybody could do nothing but acquiesce. It also considered that another decision establishing a new regime should be endorsed by everyone in Iraq and outside, irrespective of the historical and social situation. The US believed that the practices of the former regime, and the ensuing opposition and rebuff thereof inside and outside, are enough to justify all its goals in Iraq.
It did not realize that the gap produced with the collapse of the regime and the state in Iraq as a result of its policies and decisions, alien to any path related to the Iraqi situation, will be filled by the forces that were gearing up and getting ready before the invasion, especially the militias that were formed in Iran, Kurdistan, and Afghanistan. When the US Ambassador Zalmay KhalilZad announces that the Iraqi leaders (to avoid admitting that some of them are actually militia leaders) were only concerned with their own interests, he was also revealing the extreme vulnerability of the State's foundations, sponsored by his country, and the justifications derived from this vulnerability to launch all forms of violence.
The current US call for a meeting of those leaders outside Baghdad, or outside Iraq, is proof that a US decision is no longer solely capable of halting the drift into a civil war, which will be the label of the major US failure in this war, and the failure in achieving the proclaimed goals.
To disavow the ensuing disaster of the US war in Iraq, Washington is heading towards an easy victim perfectly embodied by Iran. After laying the blame of the practices of the "expiatory" [takfirioun] on the Iraqi neighborhood to avoid admitting the failure of his forces from the onset in providing security and stability, Rumsfeld discovered, a few days ago, for instance, that there was a "Revolutionary Guard" in Iran that is meddling with Iraqi affairs. As though he was not aware that the militias, which took over the governance and the security institutions in Iraq by a US decision, were set up and trained in Iran and are organically tied to its regime, based on the common hostility towards the previous regime.
However, with or without Iran's help, these militias will not renounce the gains they achieved by an early decision, then validated by a vote that stirred countless reservations. This is reflected by the maneuvers related to appointing the Prime Minister and forming the Cabinet and its reference.
If the Kurds succeeded in stretching the power of their local institutions over the Northern area, where they enjoy an absolute power, due to the facts of demography and the repercussions of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, they did not succeed in turning the experience of authority via election and agreement into a supporting factor in the rest of Iraq. The experience started with a bloody nature, during which the Kurdish militias fought fiercely, before the two main Kurdish parties found out the absurdity of this fighting and became convinced of the need for reconciliation and renunciation to illusions of victory and eradication.
Today, the US administration is laying the responsibility for the failure of this experience in all parts of Iraq on Iran. At the same time, it is striving to place the Iraqi neighborhood, especially the Arab one, in confrontation with the new situation, after it overlooked all the warnings and reservations of this neighborhood on its management of the invasion and the restructuring of the Iraqi State.
If the neighborhood is not convinced of the Iranian "intervention" in Iraq, and still considers that the US administration should correct the blunders it committed in this country, the administration is resorting to the Iranian nuclear file that has been referred to the Security Council. The purpose is to place Tehran in the line of the major threat in the region, with all the associated tensions, hostilities, and obsessions…so that the Iraqi dilemma could become part thereof and not an independent dilemma linked to the fate of a country and State.
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Citation: Abdullah Iskandar. "The US, Iraq and Iran," Al-Hayat, Lebanon, 14 March 2006.
Original URL: http://www.arab2.com/n/newspaper/uk-alhayat.htm
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