Joe Biden and the False Iraq War Narrative (extract)
Gareth Porter, AntiWar.com, Sep 6 2010
The main Sunni armed resistance groups actually turned against al-Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the US to end the war. US ambassador Khalilzad actually entered into secret negotiations with the three major Sunni insurgent groups in Jan 2006, as later reported by the Sunday Times and confirmed by Khalilzad. The Sunni leaders even submitted a formal peace proposal to Khalilzad. They insisted on a “timetable for withdrawal” as part of the deal, but it was “linked to the timescale necessary to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces and security services,” according to the Sunday Times. Khalilzad cut off the negotiations in Feb 2006, because such an agreement would have conflicted with a broader strategy of standing up a Shi’a army to suppress the Sunni insurgency. The major Shi’a factions, determined to eliminate any possible threat to their power from the Sunnis in Baghdad, unleashed death squads, mostly from the Mahdi Army, in Sunni neighborhoods across the entire city in 2006 and early 2007. The result was the defeat of the Sunni insurgents’ political-military bases in Baghdad, and the transformation of the capital from a mixed Sunni-Shi’a city into an overwhelmingly Shi’a city.
The main Petraeus conceit about his strategy in Iraq is that it defeated a Shi’a insurgency that represented an Iranian “proxy war” in Iraq. But the main premise on which that claim was based, that Iran was backing “rogue elements” of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, was simply a psywar ploy by Petraeus and his staff. The objective of the “rogue elements” line was to divide the Mahdi Army, as military and intelligence officials admitted to pro-war blogger Bill Roggio. The official narrative suggested that Iran exerted political influence in Iraq by supporting armed groups opposing the government. In fact, however, Iran’s key Iraqi allies had always been the two Shi’a factions with which the US was allied against Sadr: SCIRI and Maliki’s Dawa Party. They had both gotten Iranian support and training during the war against Saddam, and the fiercely nationalist Sadr had criticized SCIRI leaders as Iranian stooges.
The Maliki government had no problem with Iranian training and financial support of the Mahdi Army in 2006, when the Mahdi Army was eliminating the Sunni threat from Baghdad. But once it was clear that the Sunnis had been defeated, the historical conflict between Sadr and the other Shi’a factions reemerged in spring 2007. The Iranian interest was to ensure that the Shi’a-dominated government of Iraq consolidated its power. Iran’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei told Maliki in Aug 2007 that Iran would support his taking control of Sadr’s strongholds. Later that same month, al-Maliki went to Karbala and gave the local police chief carte blanche to attack the Sadrists there. After two days of violence, Sadr declared a six-month “freeze” on Mahdi Army military operations Aug 27 2007.
By late 2007, contrary to the official Iraq legend, the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration were both publicly crediting Iran with pressuring Sadr to agree to the unilateral ceasefire, to the chagrin of Petraeus. Al-Maliki launched the attack on Mahdi Army forces in Basra in Mar 2008 in the knowledge that Iran would back him against Sadr. And when it went badly, he turned to Gen Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard official in charge of day-to-day Iraq policy, to force a ceasefire on Sadr. Soleimani told Iraqi President Talabani that Iran supported al-Maliki’s efforts to “dismantle all militias,” and Sadr agreed to a ceasefire within 24 hours of Iran’s intervention. So it was Iran’s restraint, not Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, that effectively ended the Shi’a insurgent threat. It was Soleimani who had presided over the secret Apr 2006 meeting of Shi’a leaders that had chosen al-Maliki as prime minister, after having been smuggled into the Green Zone without telling theUS. And that was only one of a several trips Soleimani made to the Green Zone over a two-year period without US knowledge.
I believe so, actually
Bill Roggio’s blog that’s linked suggests US and Iraqi forces performing the purging, rather than Sadrists. This is sort of an odd claim because I don’t know what the point of turning Bagdad Shi’a would be from their perspective, if they are indeed so opposed to Iranian/Sadrist forces. I can see some collaboration amongst the Sunni, Western and Iranian parties in engineering a desirable end result for the final annexation and division of the country, but then why would Sadrist forces not be engaged in the religious cleansing? And even if they weren’t, it’s hardly innocence on the Shi’ites part, as t
The reason I query it is this: as things stood before these events, the Sadrists had quite a claim on the support of western anti-imperialists, as being the most consistent defenders of Iraq’s independence. They consistently opposed all tendencies to collaboration on the part of other Shi’ite parties, and even seemed prepared to unite with Sunni nationalists to create a single anti-imperialist guerrilla underground, which would have been the ultimate nightmare for the US-UK occupiers. Then this happened, destroying that possibility.
That seems to imply a significant rift between Sadr and Iran, with Iran collaborating with the West to engineer their own goals for annexation, in opposition to whatever Sadr had in mind.
That is how I interpreted things at the time. It may have been simply a sort of naive wishful thinking on my part, with Sadr as a sort of Robin Hood figure.