Brilliant journalist Nir Rosen sets the record straight on Iraq.
Portion below; whole article here: http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/05/selling_the_war/
Salah al Ubaidi, Muqtada al Sadr's spokesmen recently admitted that his movement was not getting along with Iran. Iran had helped them in the past but accounts of large Iranian arms shipments were "greatly exaggerated." Muqtada refused to be a slave to Iran he said, implying that other Iraqi Shiite leaders were. In fact Mahdi Army members in Iraq have taken to blaming the actions of their more notorious members on Iran, adopting a position similar, if disingenuous, to that of Iraq's Sunnis. Al Ubaidi also recently denounced Iran, accusing it of sharing control of Iraq with the Americans and criticizing Iran for not objecting to the long term security deal the Americans and Prime Minister Maliki are working on, to make the American military presence a permanent one.
There is no proxy war in Iraq, because the US and Iran share the same proxy and the US installed that proxy and empowered it. Today, to the extent that we can talk about an Iraqi "state," it is dominated by the Supreme Council and its Badr militia. The Sadrist movement of which the Mahdi Army is a loose militia is also the largest humanitarian organization in Iraq, providing homes, security, rations, clothes and other services to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It is a complex movement and certainly is as guilty of crimes as all the other groups that took part in the Iraqi civil war, including the Americans.
But it is also the most popular and legitimate movement in Iraq, and the one sure to outlast the others, despite predictions by former Bush lackeys such as Dan Senor that it was losing ground. The American and Iraqi Army attacks only increased support for the Mahdi Army, justifying the feeling many poor Shiites have that they are marginalized and threatened. Now that they have walled off the Sadrist Shiite strong hold of Sadr City in Baghdad, the Americans are only increasing the feeling among Muqtada's supporters that they are targeted just as they were under Saddam, who also besieged that area. The fact that the Americans are routinely killing civilians, including children, in Sadr City, will not win their Iraqi proxies any new supporters.
To the Post as to most establishment officials in the media and government, all social and political movements in the Middle East are either al Qaeda or Iranian plots, or for Senator McCain, a bit of both. These people are unable to see social and political movements in the Middle East as the collective action of poor and oppressed people. People in the region were anti-American before Islamism became the dominant trend, and they were battling American imperialism as secularists and nationalists. During the cold war every popular movement was blamed on a Soviet conspiracy. Now people in the region battle American imperialism as Islamists, but it is the fight that created the movements, not the other way around. And the fight continues.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice pressured Iraq's Arab neighbors to shield Iraq from Iran's "nefarious influence." Perhaps she was unaware that her government had introduced that influence when they anointed the Dawa party and the Supreme Council as the official Shiite parties in 2003. The idea that the Sunni dominated states around Iraq, which dislike Shiites, and which warned Bush not to invade Iraq because they feared a Shiite dominated states, would now persuade Iraq's Shiite leaders not to have a strong relationship with their Iranian friends shows some lack of understanding. Moreover, a recent University of Maryland poll shows that most Arabs do not view Iran as a major threat but that they are overwhelmingly hostile to the Unites States in fact.
Lebanese Hizballah is not part of an Iranian conspiracy, it is a massively popular political party with more legitimacy than most other movements in Lebanon, and it is the only serious political party in Lebanon that is not built around one personality, but rather around enduring institutions. It is also a successful resistance movement admired throughout the region for defeating the Israelis while defying the Americans and thwarting undemocratic Saudi and American plans for Lebanon. One could just as easily say that the sectarian Sunnis and former warlords who control the Lebanese government are paralyzing that state by refusing to allow a more representative and legitimate distribution of power that would include Hizballah and its Christian allies.
Sunnis in the region have a racist sort of habit of viewing all Shiite Arabs as Persian, Safavid, Iranian disloyal fifth columnists. Like the Americans, they ignore the Lebanese nationalism of Hizballah and the Iraqi nationalism of Muqtada al Sadr and the Mahdi Army. Both movements are local and not part of any Shiite crescent. And if Hamas's militancy is a problem then perhaps the 60 years of Israeli occupation and Palestinian dispossession should finally be addressed. There has not been a Hamas "buildup" in Gaza, as the Post states. Like Hizballah, like the Mahdi Army, like other popular social movements, it is part of the people and their struggle.
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