Uke

The Battle for Iraq is About Oil and Democracy, Not Religion! By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, Posted September 10, 2007.



......... continued


The contours of these very real and very important conflicts are vital to understanding where the American project in Iraq is and where it's heading. But Americans aren't being given the whole picture. Consider how a few recent stories out of Iraq look in the context of a political rather than religious civil war:


The Petraeus report's "progress"

Although many are already skeptical of general Petraeus' widely anticipated testimony about the supposedly improving security situation in Iraq, understanding the full range of conflict that afflicts Iraq makes the White House's claim that its troop "surge" has reduced violence even more dubious. As Paul Krugman noted last week, only sectarian killings count in the Pentagon's books:


"Apparently, the Pentagon has a double supersecret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings [bad] from other deaths [not important]; according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told the Washington Post that "if a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian. If it went through the front, it's criminal." So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people."



So it's a "progress report" that ignores the fact that the thousands of Iraqis who were killed, and other millions who have lost their homes are victims of a separatist political agenda that had one major obstacle during the last years: the millions of Sunnis living in "Shiastan," Shia living in "Sunnistan," and Arabs living in "Kurdistan." Even the so called "sectarian deaths" are about implementing a political agenda.


Why "start over" with the Iraqi police, but not the army?

Last week, a U.S. commission studying the situation in Iraq suggested that the Iraqi police force "be scrapped" -- presumably putting 26,000 heavily armed men out of work -- and that a new force be built from scratch. The reason: It's infiltrated by "sectarian militias" and can't be trusted, according to the commission.

Sharp observers must have been dumbfounded: Analysts agree that the Iraqi army is just as deeply infiltrated with militia forces and, like the police, they are also Shiite militias accused of "sectarian violence." Among Iraqis, the two institutions are ranked similarly -- about six in 10 have confidence in both the police and the army.

What's really going on is a mystery to most news consumers: The Iraqi police force is deeply infiltrated by Shiite nationalists -- specifically members of the Mahdi Army -- and the army is essentially controlled by Shiite separatists, specifically the Badr Organization Linked to SIIC. This U.S. bias, supporting the Iraqi Army against the Iraqi police, is not new; in May, U.S. warplanes dropped leaflets on Al-Diwaniya, a Southern Iraqi city, asking the local police to "stay home" while the Iraqi army was attacking militia fighters in the city. The U.S. military didn't just threaten to kill any policemen who left their homes, it launched airstrikes against local police buildings when members of the Iraqi Army called for backup.


Factions battling in the "power vacuum" in Basra

Of the Shia-on-Shia conflict in the southern provinces, a conflict in which British defense officials estimate 5,000 people have been killed over the past two years, most reporting has been of a vague battle between generic Shiite "factions" over "power." That's true, but lacking the vital details: it is a civil war between Shiite separatists -- pro-Iranian parties led by SIIC and backed by al-Maliki's coalition and the United States -- and Shiite nationalists from the Al-Fadhila party allied to one degree or another with the fiercely nationalistic Muqtada al-Sadr.

In Najaf, SIIC and the Dawa Party seem to have the upper hand, but not in Iraq's eight other southern provinces. Separatist governors have been assassinated in two of those provinces in the past month, along with their bodyguards, and in both instances Sadrists were suspected of having carried out the attacks. They're members of the same Muslim sect fighting over earthly issues -- power, national identity, sovereignty and control of wealth. But the media won't tell the story in its complexity, as it doesn't fit the sectarian civil war narrative.


Political impasse, not sectarian divide, has brought al-Maliki's government to standstill

The media has made much of the fracturing of al-Maliki's governing coalition, but for the most part hasn't explained that his government has come apart along political lines -- with Iraqi nationalists of every sect and ethnicity distancing themselves from al-Maliki, a Shiite separatist. One of the first parties to abandon the coalition was al-Fadhila, a Shiite nationalist party that draws strength from the poor in the south of the country. It pulled out of the Shia coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, in March, joining other Sunni and secular nationalists. Reached by phone this week in Baghdad, the head of Fadhila, Nadim al-Jaberi, said that his party "was the pioneer in breaking up the sectarian-based coalitions in the parliament and government, and in calling for a new regrouping that's politically based regardless of sects and ethnic roots."

The Islamic Party, a Sunni separatist party, made a similar move. In joining other Shia and Kurdish separatist groups, the Islamic Party effectively broke up the largest Sunni block in the Iraqi parliament, the Accord Front. None of this fits into the neat sectarian conflict that's become the conventional wisdom about what's going on in Iraq.


Crazy ragheads

The frame of a religious civil war not only obscures the fact that the United States is backing a deeply unpopular side in Iraq's political strife -- that America is in fact an enemy of the Iraqi people, not of its "extremists" -- it also plays into the popular but profoundly wrong notion that the conflict in Iraq is based on an age-old and perfectly irrational dispute over Islamic theological issues. In the West, it's widely believed that religious wars are "primitive" -- something Europeans shook off during the Age of Enlightenment -- while the kind of struggles over land, wealth and power that are raging in Iraq, while unfortunate, are believed to be a necessary component of statehood. By ignoring the political divides that ultimately fuel the violence plaguing Iraq -- by focusing on the violent symptoms and ignoring the underlying disease -- the conventional wisdom plays perfectly into the widespread belief that the bloodshed in Iraq is being carried out by fanatical savages beyond our understanding.

That, in turn, diverts responsibility for the chaos that followed the U.S. invasion away from American imperial hubris. After all, how could rational, Western war planners in Maryland or Virginia possibly predict an orgy of sectarian violence when they decided to dismantle the Iraqi government and security forces and replace them with an occupation force with a "light footprint"?

But more importantly than that, the religious civil war narrative obscures the fact that the United States is not working towards political reconciliation in Iraq. As we've detailed before, Iraq's nationalist groups -- groups representing the majority of Iraqis -- have reached out repeatedly in a series of attempts to reach a peaceful, negotiated end to the occupation and have been rebuffed. Instead of supporting the very groups that aspire to an independent Iraq where Iranians would not interfere and groups like al Qaeda would find no shelter, we are riding the wrong horse.

__________________
A solar panel 100 miles by 100 miles (161x161km) in the Mojave Desert (USA) could replace all the coal now burned to generate electricity in the entire U.S.