Playing the Al-Qaeda Card to the Last Iraqi
International,
regional and internal players vying for interests, wealth, power or
influence are all beneficiaries of the “al-Qaeda threat” in Iraq and in
spite of their deadly and bloody competitions they agree only on two
denominators, namely that the presence of the U.S.-installed and
Iran–supported sectarian government in Baghdad and its sectarian
al-Qaeda antithesis are the necessary casus belli for their proxy wars,
which are tearing apart the social fabric of the Iraqi society,
disintegrating the national unity of Iraq and bleeding its population to
the last Iraqi.
The Iraqi people seem a passive player, paying in their blood for all this Machiavellian dirty politics. The
war which the U.S. unleashed by its invasion of Iraq in 2003
undoubtedly continues and the bleeding of the Iraqi people continues as
well.
According to the UN
Assistance Mission to Iraq , 34452 Iraqis were killed since 2008 and
more than ten thousand were killed in 2013 during which suicide bombings
more than tripled according to the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Brett McGurk’s recent testimony
before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The AFP reported that
more than one thousand Iraqis were killed in last January. The UN
refugee agency UNHCR, citing Iraqi government figures, says that more
than 140,000 Iraqis have already been displaced from Iraq ’s western
province of Anbar .
Both the United States and
Russia are now supplying Iraq with multi–billion arms sales to empower
the sectarian government in Baghdad to defeat the sectarian “al-Qaeda
threat.” They see a casus
belli in al–Qaeda to regain a lost ground in Iraq, the first to
rebalance its influence against Iran in a country where it had paid a
heavy price in human souls and taxpayer money only for Iran to reap the
exploits of its invasion of 2003 while the second could not close an
opened Iraqi window of opportunity to re-enter the country as an
exporter of arms who used to be the major supplier of weaponry to the
Iraqi military before the U.S. invasion.
Regionally, Iraq’s ambassador to Iran Muhammad Majid al-Sheikh
announced earlier this month that Baghdad has signed an agreement with
Tehran “to purchase weapons and military equipment;” Iraqi Defense
Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi signed a memorandum of understanding to
strengthen defense and security agreements with Iran last September.
Meanwhile Syria , which is totally preoccupied with fighting a three
–year old wide spread terrorist insurgency within its borders, could not
but coordinate defense with the Iraq military against the common enemy
of the “al-Qaeda threat” in both countries.
Counterbalancing politically and militarily, Turkey and the GCC
countries led by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in their anti-Iran proxy wars
in Iraq and Syria, are pouring billions of petrodollars to empower a
sectarian counterbalance by money, arms and political support, which end
up empowering al–Qaeda indirectly or its sectarian allies directly,
thus perpetuating the war and fueling the sectarian strife in Iraq, as a
part of an unabated effort to contain Iran’s expanding regional sphere
of influence.
Ironically, the Turkish member of the U.S.–led NATO as well as the
GCC Arab NATO non–member “partners” seem to stand on the opposite side
with their U.S. strategic ally in the Iraqi war in this tragic drama of
Machiavellian dirty politics.
Internally, the three major partners in the “political process” are
no less Machiavellian in their exploiting of the al-Qaeda card. The
self–ruled northern Iraqi Kurdistan region, which counts down for the
right timing for secession, could not be but happy with the
preoccupation of the central government in Baghdad with the “al–Qaeda
threat.” Pro-Iran Shiite sectarian parties and militias use this threat
to strengthen their sectarian bond and justify their loyalty to Iran as
their protector. Their Sunni sectarian rivals are using the threat to
promote themselves as the “alternative” to al-Qaeda in representing the
Sunnis and to justify their seeking financial, political and
paramilitary support from the U.S. , GCC and Turkey , allegedly to
counter the pro-Iran sectarian government in Baghdad as well as the
expanding Iranian influence in Iraq and the region.
Exploiting his partners’ inter-fighting, Iraqi two–term Prime
Minister Nouri (or Jawad) Al-Maliki, has maneuvered to win a
constitutional interpretation allowing him to run for a third term and,
to reinforce his one-man show of governance, he was in Washington D.C.
last November, then in Tehran the next December, seeking military “help”
against the “al-Qaeda threat” and he got it.
U.S. Continues War by Proxy