On Iraq, Non-Interventionists Told You So

Sheldon Richman|Jun. 19, 2014 10:30 am

Contrary to popular belief, there is no satisfaction in being able to say, "I told you so." This is especially so with Iraq, where recent events are enough to sicken one's stomach. Yet it still must be said: those who opposed the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in March 2003 — not to mention his father's war on Iraq in 1991 and the sanctions enforced through the administration of Bill Clinton — were right.

The noninterventionists predicted a violent unraveling of the country, and that's what we're witnessing. They agreed with Amr Moussa, chairman of the Arab League, who warned in September 2002 that the invasion would "open the gates of hell." There was no Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) or al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein's Iraq before the U.S. invasion.

Once again, the establishment news media have ill-served the American public. In the buildup to the 2003 bipartisan war on Iraq — which was justified through lies about weapons of mass destruction and complicity in the 9/11 attacks — little time and ink were devoted to the principled opponents of intervention.

Maybe war builds circulation, ratings, and advertising revenues. Or maybe corporate news outlets fear losing access to high-ranking government officials. Whatever the explanation, far more media resources went toward hyping the illegal aggressive war than toward the case against it.

OP-ED: Let the Islamists Have Their Caliphate—Then Bomb Them

A desperate proposal for a desperate time

There is "absolutely" a link between the invasion of Iraq and the rise of terror group Isis, for which Tony Blair bears "total responsibility", says a leading academic who advised the then prime minister in the run-up to the war.

Speaking exclusively to The Huffington Post UK, Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University said Tony Blair had a "shallow mind" and had refused to heed his warnings of post-war chaos and sectarianism in Iraq.

In November 2002, Joffe was one of three Iraq experts invited into Downing Street to brief Blair on the potential fallout from an Anglo-American attack on Baghdad.

"We were not allowed to talk about whether or not it was a good idea to invade, but only about what the aftermath would be," he told HuffPost UK, adding: "It was clear that the decision had already been made.. to invade Iraq”.

Joffe says Blair wasn't interested in listening. In response to warnings from the Cambridge academic and the two other Iraq experts, Dr Toby Dodge and Dr Charles Tripp, that the country could descend into civil war and a Sunni-led insurgency, Blair merely responded, in reference to Saddam Hussein, "But the man's evil, isn't he?"

According to Joffe, Blair "personalised" the whole issue in the form of Hussein and thus "the whole structure of Iraq was utterly irrelevant.. It was very two-dimensional." (...)

Iran has decided to intervene directly in Iraq and has already sent fighters to the front, according to the Wall Street Journal, based on Iranian sources. It is alleged that Iranian special forces have helped the Iraqi army push back in Tikrit, the birth place of Saddam Hussein that was overrun earlier this week by ISIS, which captured the city’s police force. These reports come on the heels of President Hassan Rouhani’s pledge on Thursday that Iran would not stand by and allow terrorists to take over Iraq. The hyper-Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and Syria fighters are closing in on a major Shiite shrine in Samarra and have pledge to take Baghdad, the capital, itself.

Iran has allegedly supplied small numbers of advisers and even hired Afghan fighters to the Syrian regime, and encouraged Lebanon’s Hizbullah to intervene in Syria to prevent the fall of Homs to Sunni extremists. These Iranian interventions in Syria did shore up the al-Assad regime and reverse rebel momentum. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps may believe it can use the same tactics to roll back ISIS in Iraq. Iran is largely Shiite and has a Shiite religious ideology as the basis of the state. Iraq is 60% Shiite and the ruling government since 2005 has come from that community. Sunni Arabs in Iraq are probably only 17% or so, but had been the elite for most of Iraq’s medieval and modern history, until George W. Bush overthrew the predominantly Sunni Saddam Hussein regime and allowed the Shiites to come to power.

Iraqi Shiites predominate in Baghdad and parts south. Shiites are more like traditional Catholics in venerating members of the holy family and attending at their shrines. Contemporary Salafi Sunni Islam is more like the militant brand of Protestantism of the late 1500s that denounced intermediaries between God and the individual and actually attacked and destroyed shrines to saints and other holy figures, where pleas for intercession were made. The shrine in Samarra is associated with the 12th in the line of vicars of the Prophet Muhammad, called Imams in Shi’ism, Muhammad al-Mahdi, a direct descendant of the Prophet himself. Shiites have a special emphasis on a millenarian expectation that the Twelfth Imam will soon return to restore justice to the world (rather as Christians believe in the return of Christ). When the Samarra shrine was damaged by Sunni militants in 2006, it threw Iraq into civil war, in which 3000 civilians were being killed every month. Baghdad was ethnically cleansed by 2008 of most of its Sunnis, becoming a largely Shiite capital. ISIS wants to reverse that process. Baghdad was founded by the Abbasid caliphate, who claimed to be vicars of the Prophet, in 762 AD and is a symbol of the glories of early Islam. ISIS leaders are threatening also to destroy the shrine of Ali in Najaf and the shrine of Husain in Karbala (Najaf for Shiites is the equivalent of the Basilica of St. Peter for Catholics).

The specter of Iranian troops on Iraqi soil can only recall the first Iran-Iraq War.

From September of 1980, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Iran’s oil-rich Khuzistan Province, until summer 1988 when Ayatollah Khomeini finally accepted an armistice, Iran and Iraq fought one of the Middle East’s longest and bloodiest wars. Its trench warfare and hidden naval encounters recalled the horrors of World War I, as did the Iraqi Baath government’s deployment of mustard gas against Iranian soldiers at the front and sarin gas against Kurdish civilians suspected of pro-Iranian sentiments.

The Reagan administration in the United States largely backed Iraq from 1983, when Reagan dispatched then Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld to shake Saddam’s hand. This, despite Iraq being the clear aggressor and despite Reagan’s full knowledge of Iraqi use of chemical weapons, about which George Schultz at the State Department loudly complained until he was shushed. Then, having his marching orders straight, Schultz had the US ambassador to the UN deep-six any UN Security Council resolution condemning Iraq for the chemical weapons deployment. The US navy fought an behind the scenes war against Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf, becoming a de facto appendage of the Baath military.

Just because the Reagan administration was so Machiavellian, it also gave some minor support Iran in the war. Reagan stole anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry from the Pentagon storehouses and illegally sold them to Khomeini despite Iran being on the US terrorism watch list. He then had Iran pressure the Shiite militiamen in Lebanon to release American hostages. Reagan sent the money received from Iran to death squads in Nicaragua fighting the people’s revolution there against a brutal American-installed dictatorship. This money was sent to Nicaragua in defiance of the Boland Amendment passed by Congress forbidding US monies to go there. Ollie North, whom you see prevaricating on Fox News these days, was a bag man for the operation. (...)

 
What a hatchet job by Neil Munro.  Absolute drivel.

Assails Kerry for reciting Maya Angelou poetry at a global summit on curbing rape as part of warfare while war atrocities are being committed elsewhere, most particularly in Iraq.  Should he not have attended the summit?  Attended but not cited Maya Angelou?  What, exactly?

Note the third paragraph in this inflammatory lede about this being a "long-planned summit."

Jihadis are advancing on Baghdad, and yet the nation’s foreign policy chief today flew to London for the chance to recite a poem by Maya Angelou.

“Out of the huts of history’s shame / I rise / Up from a past that’s rooted in pain / I rise,” Secretary of State John Kerry intoned at the “Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict.”

Kerry’s poetic foray capped off his scheduled speech at the long-planned summit, where activists and diplomats met to push for new spending programs to curb rape in warfare.

This kind of "analysis" does nothing; it is solely for  political purposes, feeding red meat to those wed to the short view.