• John McCain may not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite but rest assured that the people in Iraq know, the people in Iran know and Al Qaeda knows. You can also bet that the cynics in the White House and the Pentagon who are planning and executing our strategy in the region know as well.
Iraq is Shi’ite dominated. The Maliki government in Iraq is Shi’ite dominated, thus the close connections between Al Maliki and Iran as witnessed during the congenial meetings recently between Al Maliki and Ahmadinejad of Iran. As Joe Lieberman whispered to McCain this week when McCain failed to understand that Iran was Shi’ite dominated and Al Qaeda is Sunni dominated, there is no love lost between Shi’ite Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda.
So who is the US now arming in an effort to bring stability to Iraq? The Sunnis, the party of Al Qaeda. That’s right, we’re arming the guys affiliated with Al Qaeda in an effort to counter the growing influence of Iran in Iraq’s Shi’ite led government. And at a cost of 4000 lives and $12 billion a month, you are paying for the whole sorry thing!
As reported today by Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy:
“Until now, I was told, Iran has been actively helping the United States to stabilize Iraq during the “surge” by reducing its weapons inputs to Shi’ite militias, including the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, who has ordered a cease-fire under Iranian pressure. But the message was clear: Unless Petraeus drastically cuts back the Sunni militias, Tehran will unleash the Shi’ite militias against US forces again and step up help to Maliki’s intelligence service, the Ministry of National Security. The United States has created a rival agency under Sunni control, the National Intelligence Service.
“The tensions building between the Maliki government and the Bush administration over Iran’s role in Iraq were underlined recently when Maliki, with visiting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran at his side, said that Iran “has been very helpful in bringing back security and stability to Iraq.” Two days later, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the retiring deputy commander of US forces in Iraq, criticized Iran for continuing to “train surrogates, fund surrogates, and supply weapons to them.”
“The burgeoning US-sponsored Sunni militias so far number some 90,000 US-equipped fighters who are each paid $300 a month. This is euphemistically called the “Sunni Awakening.” The militias pose a growing challenge to the dominance of Maliki’s predominantly Shi’ite army, with its authorized strength of 186,000. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the key Shi’ite leader backing Maliki, has repeatedly complained that “weapons should be in the hands of the government only, and the government alone should decide who gets them. The alternative will be perpetual civil war.”
“Iran’s former deputy foreign minister, Mahmoud Vaezi, told me that arming the Sunnis “suggests to us that the US is deliberately seeking to keep them strong enough to undermine al-Maliki and contain our influence. It will be impossible for us to cooperate in stabilizing Iraq if this goes on. If you shift power to the Sunnis, then some Shia groups will say, ‘If we can get more power through terrorist tactics, why not?’ ”
“President Bush attempts to justify an indefinite US military occupation of Iraq as a counter to Iranian influence. But the reality is that Iran will have dominant influence in Iraq whether or not a stable government emerges in Baghdad and whether or not US forces remain. History and ethnic arithmetic make this the inescapable legacy of the US invasion.
“Shi’ites make up 62 percent of the Iraq population. Yet for five centuries, the Ottoman and British invaders who preceded Saddam Hussein, using classic divide-and-rule tactics, installed successive Sunni minority governments to contain the Shi’ite majority. By destroying the Sunni-dominated Hussein regime, Bush gave the Iraqi Shi’ites an unprecedented opportunity to rule that they are now determined to exploit.”
So we have switched from our strategy of arming both sides in the Iraq civil war, now we are backing the guys nominally aligned with Al Qaeda so we can counter Iran’s growing influence in Iraq. Despite the wonderful rhetoric from the impotent Bush yesterday, this is what our Iraq strategy has wrought, and what our boys are dying for.
Instead of defending ourselves from Al Qaeda we have painted ourselves into a corner where we need to fund people aligned with Al Qaeda, the guys who attacked us on 9/11, in order to counter the influence of Iran in the region. And you guys say we’re winning?