Washington Still Doesn’t Understand Iraq
May 20, 2018 in Economics
Ted Galen Carpenter
The results of Iraq’s parliamentary elections confirm that U.S.
leaders and the American news media still don’t have a clue about
the complex political dynamics in that country. Experts and pundits
expected U.S.-backed incumbent Prime Minister
Haidar al-Abadi’s party to prevail. Instead the party headed by
radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr won a plurality of the votes. Sadr is a
long-time U.S. nemesis who opposes Washington’s Middle East policy
agenda and especially the presence of American troops in Iraq.
Indeed, during the years immediately following Washington’s war to
depose Saddam Hussein, Sadr’s armed followers frequently clashed
with U.S. occupation forces.
His resurgent political prominence is more than a little
worrisome to Trump administration officials. But from their
standpoint, Sadr does have one virtue: he dislikes Iranian influence in his country
almost as much as he does U.S. influence. His stance is solid
evidence that Shiite solidarity goes only so far. Despite the
mutual religious identity, there still is a significant, historical
tension between Arabs and Persians that surfaces from time to time.
Sadr epitomizes that ethnic distrust.
A more worrisome aspect of the election results from
Washington’s perspective is that the party finishing second
in the balloting, the Fatah (Conquest) Coalition, does not share
Sadr’s wariness of Iran. Indeed, that Shiite bloc represents
the interests of pro-Iranian militias that Tehran has funded
generously, supplied with military hardware, and even provided
direct assistance with its own “volunteers” on
occasion. The bottom line is that the two strongest political
factions in Iraq are both vehemently anti-America, and one also is
strongly pro-Iran. One could scarcely envision a worse result in
terms of Washington’s policy goals.
To the surprise of Western observers, Abadi’s party
finished an anemic third. That disappointing performance is merely
the latest in Washington’s long record of choosing Iraqi
clients with weak public support. George W. Bush’s
administration and its neoconservative allies assumed that Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi
National Congress, would be Iraq’s new leader once Saddam was
overthrown. Indeed, the United States provided millions of dollars
to the INC in the years leading up to the 2003 invasion and
occupation. Yet when parliamentary elections occurred,
Chalabi’s party garnered a pathetic 0.5 percent of the vote.
Washington’s next client was Nouri al-Maliki. His tenure
in office was characterized by a relentless drive to marginalize
and alienate the country’s Sunni minority that had been the
political base for Saddam’s Baathist ruling party.
Maliki’s vengeful approach, combined with his
administration’s legendary corruption, paved the way for the
rise of ISIS and that extremist faction’s shocking initial
military victories in Iraq’s civil war.
Not …read more
Source: OP-EDS
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