Baghdad wall has nothing to do with protecting Iraqis

In Focus:

More than a wall

Walling in Al-Adhamiyah has nothing to do with protecting Iraqis

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When the Americans decided to build a wall around Al-Adhamiyah in Baghdad, they claimed that their main concern was to protect the inhabitants. Very noble of them, but was this the real reason? Are the Americans interested in protecting Al-Adhamiyah, or in protecting other areas from fighters based in Al-Adhamiyah? Before answering these questions, let's review a few developments that took place in Iraq of late.

The city of Kirkuk is being Kurdicised. Up until the occupation, ethnic Arabs mostly inhabited the city. Now the Kurds want to annex it to their province. Why is that? Because Kirkuk sits on a lake of oil, and the Kurds need to control the oil as part of their plan to secede from Iraq. The Kurdish scheme is so obvious that Turkey is already saying it cannot allow it to happen. The last thing the Erdogan government needs is a Kurdish state on its southern borders.

Meanwhile, plans are underway to declare a Basra Province in southern Iraq, although no attempts at secession have so far been made. The similarity between the situation in Kurdistan and Basra is worth examining. If things keep proceeding in this direction, Iraq would soon be partitioned into three mini-states. The "no fly" latitude lines the Clinton administration put in place several years ago would determine the borders of those mini-states. Kurdistan is already behaving as a semi-independent state. It is signing oil agreements with other countries, establishing political and economic ties with other nations, and generally ignoring the beleaguered government in Baghdad.

The Americans want to see Iraq divided; Kurdistan in the north, Basra in the south, and the Sunni triangle in the middle. But what does all this have to do with Al-Adhamiyah?

Well, let's not forget that the US administration is faced with a deepening crisis both at home and abroad. In Iraq, the US army is on the defensive. At home, the two houses of Congress, acting in defiance of President Bush, have made it clear that troops must be pulled out by September 2008 at the latest. Should the withdrawal take place -- and it most likely will -- then the whole Project for the New American Century would fall apart. All this planning, all these attempts to control oil resources, would come to nothing. It would be a disaster for the neo-cons. This is why the latter are determined to divide Iraq prior to withdrawal, the aim being to have two out of three mini-states under US control.

The Kurdish government would be pleased to forge a close alliance with the Americans. Such an alliance would offer the Kurds protection from the Turks, the Iranians and the pan-Arab government that may emerge in central Iraq. The southern province would also rush into US arms, for more or less the same reasons. Iraq would thus be reduced to the same status as any of the Gulf states, just another group of sheikhdoms reliant on oil and foreign backing.

This scenario wouldn't be easy to carry out so long as the resistance is going strong. So the fighters must be isolated in their strongholds: in Al-Anbar, Tel Afar, Al-Qaim and Al-Adhamiyah. Furthermore, some effort must be exerted for national unity, through the integration of former Baathists and army personnel into the system. The US administration is already moving in that direction. Also, the Americans claim to be succeeding in breaking the ranks of the Iraqi resistance. Still, why Al-Adhamiyah?

Let's go back to history. Founded at the time of Caliph Abu Jaafar Al-Mansour, Baghdad was built on the opposite banks of the Tigris. The west bank of the river was known as Al-Karkh, the east bank as Al-Rasafa. Until recently, the centre of the city was divided equally between the two banks. The mausoleum of Abu Hanifa was in Al-Rasafa, and that of Imam Al-Kazem was in Al-Karkh, with the Imamayn (two imams) Bridge connecting the two. Al-Adhamiyah took its name from the words "Al-Imam Al-Adham", or Abu Hanifa, a leading Sunni doctrinaire. During the Ottoman era, Al-Adhamiyah had a reputation for rebellion that continued even during the communist tide of the 1960s. Since the fall of Baghdad, Al-Adhamiyah has been active in resistance.

In the early days of the occupation, it was said that Iraq's political elite, Saddam's Hussein included, took refuge in Al-Adhamiyah. At one point, it was said that Saddam attended prayers at the mosque of Al-Imam Al-Adham. US forces reacted to the rumours by shelling the mosque. The main minaret of that mosque still bears the marks of shelling. For the past four years, Al-Adhamiyah has been a hotbed of resistance. The Americans repeatedly declared the area "liberated" from the resistance. But when the Americans tried to send the Iraqi army -- the new one they had created -- to its first real test in Al-Adhamiyah, dozens of Iraqi and US troops were killed. After this, the Americans tried to send troops in dinghies across the river, but suffered further losses.

Al-Adhamiyah is the link between the two banks of the Tigris and the gateway to Al-Waziriya, to the Ministry of Defence and the Green Zone. To isolate Al-Adhamiyah is to deprive the resistance of a vital asset. This is why the Americans built the wall. So there you have it. Al-Adhamiyah is part of the US drive to restrain, not protect, the Iraqis. This quest is likely to fail, as it did repeatedly in the past. The days of the occupation are numbered.

Galal Nassar

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Al-Ahram Weekly Online

Nasrallah on the Zionist Plan for the Middle East - A Must Read

Monday, February 26, 2007

In Seymour Hersh’s latest article passing on what the CIA thinks about the Middle East (I’m not being dismissive, as it is worth knowing what the CIA thinks), he does a cloak-and-dagger routine to meet the smartest man in the area (by far), Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah (my emphasis in red; super-emphasis in green):

“Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean ‘insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.’ ‘In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,’ he said. ‘I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.’ (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.)

Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was ‘the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war – there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.’

He went on, ‘I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’’

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country ‘into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.’ In Lebanon, ‘There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.’ But, he said, ‘I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.’ Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was ‘the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,’ which is dominated by Shiites. ‘I am not sure, but I smell this,’ he told me.

Partition would leave Israel surrounded by ‘small tranquil states,’ he said. ‘I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,’ he said. ‘In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.’

In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah’s belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy.

In the interview, Nasrallah made mollifying gestures and promises that would likely be met with skepticism by his opponents. ‘If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings,’ he said. ‘But, if their aim through this meeting is to impose their policy on us, it will be a waste of time.’ He said that the Hezbollah militia, unless attacked, would operate only within the borders of Lebanon, and pledged to disarm it when the Lebanese Army was able to stand up. Nasrallah said that he had no interest in initiating another war with Israel. However, he added that he was anticipating, and preparing for, another Israeli attack, later this year.”

It is wise for Arab leaders to memorize Yinon’s writings and Wurmser’s Zionist Plan for the Middle East. Saudi leadership, by falling for the Israeli idea that Iran is the real danger, are leading to their own destruction. The plan is to replace the current Iranian leadership and then take over the Saudi oil fields, leaving the current Saudi royals in charge of the oil-less Islamic holy areas. By supporting the Zionist campaign against Iran, the Saudis are just hastening their own marginalization as leaders of a ‘small tranquil’ statelet.

Hersh quotes Leslie Gelb, who has recently been shilling his infamous Yinon-inspired plan to break Iraq up into three statelets. In another ‘debate’ between ultra-ultra-ultra-Zionist Gelb, and ultra-Zionist Indyk (like the presentation recently arranged by House Democrats, where a group of ultra-Zionists ‘debated’ whether it would be better to kill the Palestinians by starving them to death, or shooting them), note the Gelb joke in response to a question:

“QUESTIONER: I’m Ragida Dergham, Al Hayat. Les, yes, I also have been speaking to several – I’m sure they are just as credible as the Kurds you’ve been speaking to, and are very afraid of a landlocked Kurdistan independent state at this point, in a very unfriendly neighborhood. So my question to you is, you must be aware of the fact that this idea of dividing Iraq into three states really has been going around in the last few months, from different circles. The fact that you put it in writing gave it a different dimension, in fact, a harmful one amongst Iraqis, they are interpreting it as, this is what the United States is going to do to us. And I’m wondering if you have given this a thought, knowing that the idea came from the neo-conservatives, extremists amongst them, you put it out there, and as a continuity of what has been heard in the Arab world, that Saudi Arabia will be next to be divided. This is what I’d like you to address, why on earth did you do it?

GELB: I actually did it as part of the neo-conservative, Zionist, Jewish conspiracy.”

It’s no joke – Gelb is the real deal, part of the Cabal. Gelb fits right in to the Big Conspiracy to remove the oil weapon from the Arabs and put Israel in permanent charge of the Middle East (if you want a laugh, read this article linked to in the piece by Larsson). The Muslims, and in particular the Saudis, should stop fighting each other, and recognize what Nasrallah knows, that their real enemy is, and always will be, Zionist Israel.

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Leak: Iraq to be split into three regions

Sunday, February 18, 2007

The New Iraqi Oil: Leaked

The last few of weeks were very busy. I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia and South Korea, and I'll share two of my pictures with you below.Publish

But more importantly, I spent the weekend translating this leaked copy of the Iraqi oil law with niki (thank you salam for sending me the link). Translating legal documents can be really hard!

We just finished the translation, and you can download it by clicking here.

Please feel free to widely distribute this document. It's important to start a stronger debate and to try to educate Iraqis and Americans about this catastrophic law that will facilitate the further looting of Iraqi oil, and will achieve nothing other than increasing the levels of violence and anger in Iraq.

This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq's enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states.

Privatizing Iraq's oil and splitting Iraq into three regions are just two negative features of this 29 pages law. I am translating some important analysis written by Iraqis and other Arabs, and am also working with British and U.S. experts to publish more analysis soon.

John Bolton: US has 'no strategic interest' in united Iraq

Partition has always been the neocons' plan.
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The Associated Press
Monday, January 29, 2007
PARIS

Former U.S. envoy to the United Nations John Bolton said in an interview published in France that the United States has "no strategic interest" in a united Iraq.

Bolton, who resigned last month from his temporary appointment as U.N. ambassador, also told the French daily Le Monde that U.S. President George W. Bush's administration acted too slowly to hand power over to Iraqis after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"We did a disservice to Iraqis by depriving them of political leaders," Bolton was quoted as saying, adding that the Coalition Provisional Authority that initially ran Iraq allowed terrorists to regroup. Bolton was speaking in English, and the interview was published in French. An English-language copy of the interview was not available.

Bolton suggested in the interview that the United States shouldn't necessarily keep Iraq from splitting up. The Bush administration and the Iraqi government have said they don't want Iraq divided.

"The United States has no strategic interest in the fact that there's one Iraq, or three Iraqs," he was quoted as saying. "We have a strategic interest in the fact of ensuring that what emerges is not a state in complete collapse, which could become a refuge for terrorists or a terrorist state."

--MORE--

I submit Iraq is now a refuge for a terroist state - America.

Clutching at straws

The US has made a desperate attempt to divide and rule Iraqi Shias - but the White House is sorely mistaken if it thinks this will work.

Dilip Hiro

December 5, 2006 01:04 PM

President Bush's White House meeting with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim stems from a recommendation in a memo sent to him on November 8 by his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. The memo was published by the New York Times three weeks later.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, should free himself from the present narrow reliance on such radical Shia groups as the one led by Muqtada al-Sadr, suggested Hadley. One way to weaken the troublesome Sadr's political clout would be to isolate him within the Shia camp by bolstering the comparatively moderate Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) led by Hakim.

The advocates of this strategy stress that Hakim and Sadr are intense rivals, and that this rivalry dates back to the time when their fathers (Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim and Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr) vied for influence among Shias during the Ba'athist era.

They also note that in the Shia-dominated southern Iraq, the militias of Hakim (called Badr Brigades) and Sadr (called Mahdi army) have clashed occasionally.

Despite these differences, however, Sciri and Sadrists remain part of the ruling Shia bloc called the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which also includes al-Daawa al-Islamiya (The Islamic Call) to which Maliki and his predecessor Ibrahim Jaafari belong.

Unlike Sicri, established in Tehran in 1982, and the older al-Daawa - outlawed by the Ba'athist regime - whose leaders went into exile in Iran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, the Mahdi army lacks any historical linkage with Iran.

After Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and two of his sons were shot dead by government agents in February 1999, his youngest son, Muqtada, went underground. He resurfaced after the downfall of Saddam Hussein four years later when Saddam city - a district in Baghdad home to nearly 2 million Shias -was renamed Sadr city.

Sadr's faction has strong backing among young, underprivileged, urban Shias who form the bulk of the Mahdi army. It controls a bloc of 30 parliamentarians and six ministries. So it will be an uphill task to isolate Sadrists.

Overall, the UIA remains committed to establishing an Islamic regime and was instrumental in the adoption of article two in the Iraqi constitution: "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: no law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam."

Moreover, the leaders of UIA constituents understand only too well that if they do not stay together they will end up suffering separately. In theological and hierarchical terms, Hakim, Sadr and other religious Shia leaders are duty bound to obey Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

In August 2004 there was a fortnight-long standoff between the 3,000 US marines and 1,500 Mahdi army militiamen when the marines tried to regain the Shia holy shrine of Imam Ali, where several hundred Mahdi militiamen were ensconced. It ended after a meeting between Sadr and Sistani on the latter's return from London following eye surgery. Sadr agreed to let Sistani's representatives take charge of the shrine while his militiamen and US marines left the city. (See page 547 of my book Secrets and Lies: the true story of the Iraq war.)

Following the parliamentary poll under the new constitution in December 2005, Jaafari was re-elected UIA leader, beating his rival by one vote. Even though he remained unacceptable to the Kurdish and Sunni MPs as well as Washington and London, he refused to step down. The ensuing crisis paralysed the government. Jaafari was unmoved. But when Sistani privately advised him to step down he did it instantly.

Sistani remains the single most important personality in Iraq today. He was the primary force behind the formation of the Shia-dominated UIA. And it was his endorsement of the UIA that gained it overwhelming popularity among Shias and turned it into the governing alliance.

Sistani refrains from interfering in day-to-day affairs of Iraq. Instead, he takes a public stand on such significant issues as the relationship with the occupying forces (he has refused to meet American or British officials), looting public and private property, and participating in elections and referendums.

"I want to see Iraq ruled by Iraqis and not by Americans," Sistani declared at the start of the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. To achieve his aim, Sistani called on all believers to participate in the elections and referendums. Shias followed his call almost to the last voter. In the final analysis, therefore, it is Sistani, and Sistani alone, who counts. And he shows no sign of reversing his policy of rebuffing emissaries of the American or British government.

De Facto Partition Takes Hold in Iraq

By HAMZA HENDAWI

The Associated Press
Sunday, December 3, 2006; 7:07 PM

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- For months, the Waheed brothers steadfastly endured the killings raging around them in their mainly Sunni district, staying put as fellow Shiites packed up and left.

Finally, a death threat persuaded Majed and Mondhir Hatem Waheed to leave the neighborhood of Dora where they grew up and, together with their wives and children, join 24 relatives in an uncle's house in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr city district.

"At least, we are safe," 25-year-old Mondhir Hatem Waheed said.

In the 43 months since Saddam Hussein's ouster, entire Iraqi provinces have become virtually off-limits to one or another sect, mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods are slowly disappearing, and a Kurdish region in the north appears to have all but seceded.

In many ways, Iraq is breaking up, though not in a way in which a well-defined boundary could be established to ensure peace. It is happening amid a debate on whether partitioning this ethnically and religiously diverse nation could provide a way out of the growing sectarian violence tearing it apart.

The debate on partitioning Iraq has touched on such sensitive issues as the distribution of the country's oil wealth and how far plans for a federal system of government should go. Also at the forefront is the likely influence of neighboring powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria should the country be carved into Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab mini-states.

Embittered by the loss of their dominance under Saddam and worried they may be left isolated and bereft of resources in Iraq's mostly arid central and western parts, Sunni Arabs have warned that federalism will lead to the breakup of the country.

"I believe some Kurds and some (Shiite) Arabs in the south have been promoting federalism to pave the way for the larger goal of dividing Iraq," said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a senior member of the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni Arab political party.

"This catastrophic sectarian tension is only a step to justify partition," he added.

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, a senior Shiite politician who is federalism's chief advocate in Iraq, sought to allay these fears on a visit last week to neighboring Jordan, which is mostly Sunni.

"We reject any notion of partitioning Iraq," he said Saturday. "The federalism that Iraqis have accepted ... will not be built on sectarian basis."

But sectarian bloodshed has skyrocketed since the Feb. 22 bombing of a key Shiite shrine north of Baghdad that sparked retaliatory attacks. The numbers are staggering.

The U.N. says violence now claims up to 100 Iraqi lives daily. A total of 1.6 million people have been displaced inside Iraq and a similar number have fled the country since the U.S.-led invasion. Estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed since 2003 range from 50,000 to 600,000.

After talks in Jordan on Thursday, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said they rejected a partition, a course of action some candidates in last month's U.S. congressional elections floated in their campaigns as one way to stabilize Iraq and allow a drawdown on U.S. troops deployed here to begin.

"The prime minister made clear that splitting his country into parts, as some have suggested, is not what the Iraqi people want, and that any partition of Iraq would only lead to an increase in sectarian violence," Bush said Thursday.

Partitioning Iraq as a solution to its deep predicament has never found much public support in Iraq. It is not expected to be among recommendations made in a U.S. bipartisan commission report on policy options in Iraq, which is due out Wednesday.

But there seems to be very little at the moment that Bush, al-Maliki or the 140,000 American troops and their Iraqi allies can do to stop Iraq's gradual slide into de facto partition, with Iraqis like the Waheed brothers fleeing their neighborhoods and bodies of apparent victims of sectarian death squads turning up by the dozens every day.

As Baghdad's mixed districts slowly disappear, the Tigris River is emerging as an unofficial barrier in the capital, flowing between a mostly Shiite eastern bank and a mainly Sunni western side.

It is not uncommon now for residents, especially men and boys of fighting age, to refuse to take jobs in areas dominated by members of one of the two sects. People who do travel through different areas often carry fake IDs to hide any hint of their sect, which is often reflected in names.

Outside the capital, Shiites and Kurds rarely venture into the Sunni-dominted Anbar province west of the capital, a bastion of Iraq's insurgency. In the volatile and largely Sunni provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala, north and northeast of Baghdad, some areas are deemed too dangerous for members of the other sect to go.

Sunni Arabs stay away from the mainly Shiite south of Iraq, where militias linked to Shiite political parties are active or virtually in control of some areas.

To the north, the 15-year-old autonomous Kurdish region has begun to show signs of independence. Authorities there enforce rigid security regulations for non-Kurdish Iraqi visitors that are more suited for foreigners than citizens of the same country.

These include a security interview on arrival and registering with police when taking up residence or finding employment. Visitors traveling by road are stopped at three checkpoints before entering Kurdistan.

Amr Hamzawi, a Middle East expert at Carnegie Endowments, a Washington think tank, says partitioning could be a solution to Iraq's problems, noting the country was cobbled together from three separate Ottoman provinces barely a century ago.

"If the violence continues at this level, it could take between two and four years for Iraq to break up," he said.

Sheik Ahmed al-Lami, representative of anti-American Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr in a town south of Baghdad, agreed.

"It will happen, without a doubt," he said from Mahmoudiyah, where a Shiite militia loyal to al-Sadr has been battling Sunni militants. "God will not punish us for partitioning Iraq, but will certainly punish us for allowing so many Iraqis to die."

© 2006 The Associated Press

The Balkanization of Iraq

November 29, 2006

by Loretta Napoleoni

While ethnic cleansing plagues "liberated Iraq," Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shi'ite Mahdi militia, has issued an ultimatum to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Sadr warned that if Maliki met President Bush in Jordan this week, the cleric and his 30 followers in Iraq's parliament would pull out of the shaky ruling coalition, effectively ending (or so Sadr hopes) the first democratically elected Iraqi government. The meeting's agenda includes a discussion of the role that Iran and Syria can play in pacifying Iraq. Sadr objects to Bush's involvement because, he claims, U.S. forces are backing the Sunni insurgency. The young Shi'ite leader accuses Americans of being complicit in the killing of thousands of innocent Shi'ites in Iraq. Yet, until recently, America considered Sadr a man they could work with. One can only imagine Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in his comfortable position in the Jihadist Martyrs' Paradise, laughing at the latest twist in the Iraqi saga. Of course, Sadr has never been a loyal U.S. ally. How many now remember that the Iraqi insurgency began in April 2003 in Sadr City, the miserable Shi'ite suburb of Baghdad? Under the leadership of Sadr, residents took up arms against coalition forces to protest the lack of basic infrastructure: water, electricity, and security. In June 2003, after similar uprisings erupted across the country, Sadr formed the Mahdi Army, whose task was to foment violence against Coalition forces and against Iraqi Sunnis, especially former members of the Ba'ath Party. Yet, the Shi'ite insurgency went unpunished. Protected by religious leaders such as Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and politicians close to Washington such as Ahmed Chalabi, Sadr was able to unleash his militia across Iraq. In August 2003, when Zarqawi entered the Iraqi arena, the country was already in the grip of the Shi'ite insurgency. Like Sadr, the Jordanian fought on two fronts: he targeted both Coalition forces and his Iraqi religious enemies, as evidenced by his spectacular first attacks. In August 2003, Zarqawi masterminded the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing several members of the UN delegation, and the suicide attack against the Imam Ali Mosque, which killed, among many others, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Both Sadr and Zarqawi used powerful rhetoric to justify the targeting of Iraqi civilians. While Sadr attacked the Sunnis, accusing them of being Saddam's henchmen, Zarqawi drew analogies to the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Iraq, which was backed by the Iraqi Shi'ites. Zarqawi wrote to bin Laden that Sadr and his political backers had allied with Coalition forces, i.e., the new Mongols, to force Iraq into chaos in order to take control of its resources. Sadr's recent attempts to carve a Shi'ite state out of Iraq, cutting the Sunni population out of oil and gas revenues, seem to validate this analysis. From summer 2003 to summer 2004, Coalition forces battled against both Shi'ite and Sunni militias. Yet, because of the strategic alliance between Washington and the Iraqi Shi'ite leadership, the Mahdi militia went systematically unpunished while the Sunni resistance was criminalized. Zarqawi was wrongly portrayed as the leader of the Sunni insurgency, while in reality he headed a very small group of mostly foreign jihadists. Fed information by the U.S. Army, the media depicted Zarqawi as the new Saddam, the butcher of Nicholas Berg, the leader of the Islamist Republic of Fallujah, the ultimate international terrorist. So blind was U.S. policy that, in August 2004, after Sadr's militia ignited violent clashes against coalition and Iraqi police forces in Najaf, Karbala, and Sadr City, killing hundreds of people, Ayatollah Sistani was given the go-ahead to broker a deal on behalf of the Americans with Sadr. The Mahdi militia, under siege in Najaf by coalition and Iraqi forces, walked free with their weapons, tramping on the bodies of the people they had killed. A few days later, Iyad Allawi, the Shi'ite interim prime minister of Iraq, issued an ad hoc amnesty to clear Sadr and his militia of all wrongdoing. This allowed the Shi'ite cleric to participate in the forthcoming election and win a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Thanks to that seat, he can today throw down the gauntlet to Maliki. As it did during the bloody war in the Balkans, in Iraq the West is constantly entering into alliances, including with terrorist organizations, as if a clear divide existed between the good and the evil, and the West knew which was which. In Iraq, as in the Balkans, this "divide" shifts daily. In 1998, in Kosovo, following the attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against Serbian police and civilians, the U.S. accused the KLA of being a terrorist organization. The British followed suit. Then, in March 1999, foreign policy in the U.S. and the UK underwent a radical shift and both governments condemned the Serbs. Suddenly, members of the KLA were no longer terrorists but freedom fighters, and the KLA was summarily removed from the U.S. State Department's terror list. American politicians even praised the organization. The new status was then reversed when, a few months later, the KLA supported an Islamist insurgency against the government of Macedonia – a U.S. ally – and it was once again listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department. One wonders how many times since George Bush declared 'Mission Accomplished" in Iraq should the Mahdi Army have been entered and erased from this list. The Balkanization of Iraq goes well beyond homegrown ethnic cleansing and civil war. It springs from the willingness of countries such as America and the United Kingdom to police the Middle East. It is proof that Western intervention can destabilize entire regions now that the world is no longer trapped in the Cold War Manichean straitjacket. Iraq's future may well replicate the end of the Vietnam War, when America declared victory and airlifted its people out, leaving the country in the hands of a "neighboring power," i.e., the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese Army. Only this time, Iraq will be ravaged by voracious ethnic militias – backed by foreign countries militarily and politically too weak to impose their own rule – not because America withdrew, but because the U.S. invaded the country in the first place, unleashing these forces. Today, almost four decades after the end of the war, Vietnam is a leading exporter and an emerging economy because North Vietnam was able to impose peace, which eventually led to prosperity, safely locked within China's sphere of influence. Today, Iran and Syria's involvement in the Iraqi civil war will continue to drag the country further into sectarian warfare and may even give al-Qaeda the longed-for opportunity to carve out their own state. This is the terrifying legacy of this unjust and illegal war, a legacy that should not be hidden by political propaganda. Nevertheless, the sooner the West pulls out of Iraq, the better the chances Iraqis will find their own way out of the present morass. The danger, of course, is that peace in Iraq will come only when nothing is left standing but the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Born and raised in Rome, Loretta Napoleoni was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics (LSE). She has an M.Phil. in Terrorism from LSE, a Master's in International Relations from SAIS, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rome. Napoleoni is an expert on the financing of terrorism and is well known internationally for having calculated the size of the terror economy. She is the author of the best-selling book Terror, Incorporated (Seven Stories Press), which was translated into 12 languages. Her latest book is Insurgent Iraq : Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation. Visit her Web site. http://www.antiwar.com/orig/napoleoni.php?articleid=10079

NEARBY NATIONS DREADING IRAQ'S DISINTEGRATION

Posted on Thu, Nov. 23, 2006

Civil war could ripple outward

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post


BAGHDAD, Iraq - While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already under way, and that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries.

Whether the U.S. military departs Iraq sooner or later, the United States will be hard-pressed to leave behind a country that does not threaten U.S. interests and regional peace, according to American and Arab analysts and political observers.

``We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups'' growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

``The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body,'' Hiltermann said.

``All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state,'' Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said earlier this month at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

As Iraq's neighbors grapple with the various ideas put forward for solving the country's problems, they uniformly shudder at one proposal: dividing Iraq into separate regions for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and then speeding the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

``To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision `ethnic cleansing' on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale,'' Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said Oct. 30 at a conference in Washington. ``Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.''

``When the ethnic-religious break occurs in one country, it will not fail to occur elsewhere, too,'' Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told Germany's Der Spiegel newsweekly recently. ``It would be as it was at the end of the Soviet Union, only much worse. Large wars, small wars -- no one will be able to get a grip on the consequences.''

In an analysis published last month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Obaid said sectarian conflicts could make Iraq a battleground for the region.

Obaid described widespread interference by Iranian security forces within Iraq. He urged Saudi Arabia, which is building a 560-mile wall on its border with Iraq, to warn Iran ``that if these activities are not checked,'' Saudi Arabia ``will be forced to consider a similar overt and covert program of its own.''

In Damascus, a Syrian analyst close to the Assad government warned that other countries would intervene if Iraq descended into full-scale civil war. ``Iran will get involved, Turkey will get involved, Saudi Arabia, Syria,'' said the analyst, who spoke on condition he not be identified further.

``Regional war is very much a possibility,'' said Hiltermann, the analyst for the International Crisis Group. Iraq's neighbors ``are hysterical about Iranian strategic advances in the region,'' he said.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad last month ranked Syria and Iran with Al-Qaida in Iraq, one of the country's principal Sunni Arab insurgent groups, in terms of destabilizing influences in Iraq. Despite that assessment, the United States has not held substantive talks with Syria regarding Iraq since 2004 or with Iran since the war began in 2003.

Diplomats and analysts increasingly are urging the Bush administration to reach out to both countries as part of a regional approach to quelling Iraq's troubles. Former Secretary of State James Baker, leader of a panel preparing a set of policy recommendations for the Bush administration, already has endorsed the idea of seeking the help of Iran and Syria.

``The thing is, because Iran and Syria both have spoiling power in Iraq, if you could neutralize them,'' it would ease some of the many pressures within Iraq, Hiltermann said. But he said the two countries may demand a mighty trade-off: for Syria, U.S. help with its biggest stated aim, winning back the Golan Heights from Israel; for Iran, U.S. compromise over its nuclear program.

Hiltermann acknowledged the difficulty. ``I'm saying it's required,'' he said. ``I'm not saying it's possible.''

In Baghdad's Shiite stronghold of Sadr City late last month, aides to one of the country's leading Shiite clerics held a rally to urge followers to bide their time until the American forces leave the country. The rally was called by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, a strongly anti-occupation figure who is one of the leaders in the current Shiite-led government and one likely claimant to power should the Americans withdraw.

``Will America win?'' a speaker in a brown turban demanded before the more than 1,000 protesters, as a brewing storm whirled dirt and trash and pelted demonstrators with drops of cold rain. Loudspeakers shot his question back across the square.

The men thrust their fists in the air, shouting their answer out to a grim, gray sky: ``No, no! America will not win!''

Between 2 percent and 5 percent of Iraq's 27 million people have been killed, wounded or uprooted since the Americans invaded in 2003, calculates Anthony Cordesman of the Center for International and Strategic Studies.

``This is civil war,'' he said.

Since midsummer, Shiite militias, Sunni insurgent groups, ad-hoc Sunni self-defense groups and tribes have accelerated campaigns of sectarian cleansing that are forcing countless thousands of Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad to seek safety among their own kind.

Whole towns north and south of Baghdad are locked in the same sectarian struggle, among them the central Shiite city of Balad, still under siege by gunmen from surrounding Sunni towns after a bloody spate of sectarian massacres last month.

Even outside the center of sectarian strife in the central region of the country, Shiite factions battle each other in the south, Sunni tribes and factions clash in the west. Across Iraq, the criminal gangs that emerged with the collapse of law and order rule patches of turf as mini-warlords.

Since the war began, 1.6 million Iraqis have sought refuge in neighboring countries; at least 231,530 people have been displaced inside Iraq since February, when Shiite-Sunni violence exploded with the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra, according to figures from the United Nations and the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration.

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/world/16082761.htm

Curb unilateral decisions regarding Iraqis

IRAQ

By Raed Jarrar

November 22, 2006


The Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, is being portrayed as a magic wand that will conjure up a solution for Iraq the same way rabbits jump out of empty hats.

President George W. Bush seems to be giving the group enough space by making a number of surprisingly open-minded statements about changing the course in Iraq. And by nominating Robert Gates, a member of the group, as the next secretary of defense, he has raised its profile.

Many observers suspect that the latest flexibility in the administration's discourse is nothing more than a PR job attempting to draw a less stubborn image. Besides, Bush could always blame future failure on the group's nonpartisan recommendations and plans.

Reminding the Middle East region of a history of other ill-fortuned plans with two names, like the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 and San Remo conference in 1920, the Baker-Hamilton group appears to be intent on drawing more borders and partitions that will further fragment the region. It seems that the new group may recommend some kind of "divisions but not partitions" plan to cut Iraq into three regions.

Such partitionist ideas have been floating around lately and repeated by many U.S. lawmakers and analysts. Nevertheless, the majority of Iraqi leaders and analysts believe that any division plans, in addition to keeping foreign military presence in Iraq, are a perfect formula for creating a full-scale, long-lasting war between the different regions and factions fighting over territory and natural resources.

Ironically, the only people who seem to be working to cut Iraq into three states are the U.S, al-Qaida and Iranian politicians. The three enemies seem to have finally found some common ground.

The pro-Iranian parties in the Iraqi government, like SCIRI and Dawa, are working to create a Shi'a state in the south of Iraq. Al-Qaida wants to create a Sunni state in the middle, and the U.S., supported by some allies in the region, wants to cut Iraq apart into small fragments and run away. But the vast majority of Iraqi Sunni and Shi'a groups and leaders are working, without a foreign agenda, to protect their country's unity.

If the United States were really concerned about peace and stability in Iraq, it would stop interfering in Iraq's domestic politics and give Iraqi leaders the space to build their national government and armed forces.

It's shocking that the only times "diplomacy" is mentioned in dealing with Iraq, it's about negotiating with Iran and Syria instead of negotiating with Iraqis.

We all know there's a need to change course in Iraq, but the new course will not be any better if it is based on more unilateral decisions. The U.S. should learn from Israel's failed unilateral approaches to its conflicts with the Lebanese and the Palestinians. The only way out of Iraq will not be through more military and political unilateral solutions; it will be through giving Iraqis the time and space they need to rule their own country by themselves, and to take their own decisions when it comes to keeping their country's unity and sovereignty.


Raed Jarrar is the Iraq project director at Global Exchange and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, on the Web at www.fpif.org.


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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