You may recall that, after their lies about WMDs were exposed, the US pretended to want to bring democracy to Iraq and used that as a retroactive excuse for their 2003 invasion. Given this, if the American people had better memories, they would see that they had been manipulated back then by the democracy narrative, because now, in light of the Pentagon’s recent refusal to honor the Iraqi parliament’s decision to expel all American troops from the country, the bullshit is laid bare for all to see. When anyone sees a disconnect between the US government’s actions and their stated goals, they should point it out. This is how we erode trust in the system, and that’s a crucial early step to bringing it down.
Let’s rewind a bit and examine the events that got us to the impasse of 2020. First off, what actions did the US perform to install a democracy in Baghdad, and exactly how democratic was it meant to be?
Let’s be honest here, the US never had any interest in Iraqi democracy. In a country that is 60% Shiite, they knew that a democratic Iraq is an Iran-allied Iraq. They wanted to cause chaos like they later did in Libya, dividing the country into three or more smaller nations, or install another Sunni strongman.
The January 2005 elections were not America’s doing. It was set up by Shiite leaders who had recently returned from exile after the fall of Saddam Husein’s regime. Only when the US realized the situation was beyond their control, did they reluctantly legitimize the election by placing an ally in the fight. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go well for them. The CIA asset, Ayad Allawi, received only 14% of the vote, while the Shiite, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and the Kurdish, Jalal Talabani, received 48% and 25% respectively. Since Kurdistan was, and still is, a de facto independent state, Talabani’s votes cannot be viewed as reflective of the political landscape of Iraq proper, but may have contributed to a few concessions in the subsequent constitution, such as Kurdish being an official language and the Lebaneseesque decree that all future Iraqi presidents must be Kurdish. The results of the election on Baghdad policy have been nothing short of Sunni-CIA humiliation.
Ever since, Baghdad has had to walk a tightrope. They had to placate the Pentagon, which was dumping American taxpayer money into Iraqi hands in amounts vastly exceeding the country’s own GDP, but they also knew where they stood on the whole “Wahhabists killing all Shiites” thing, and it wasn’t necessarily alongside their American benefactors.
The West’s only remaining option to keep Iraq fractured, weak and out of Iranian hands was to look the other way as ISIS formed. They want us to believe that they could take out Qasem Soleimani with surgical precision while he was riding in a truck in an urban area, but that taking out thousands-strong ISIS Toyota caravans crossing the open desert was beyond their capability.
ISIS was the gift package the Shiites got for voting wrong and America’s plan B after losing the reins of Iraq’s democratic process. The Western narrative managers had to work overtime to whitewash this debacle. Not only did they have to paint the Iraqi Shiite militias fighting ISIS as “terrorists,” but also somehow “Iranian.” This may seem like a tall task, but never underestimate the gullibility of the American people.
And that brings us to the recent events. The tsunami of propaganda surrounding the Soleimani assassination and how effective it has been on the non-thinking masses has been depressing. The claim is that this man, who 98% of Americans had never heard of before his death, was a “terrorist” with the blood of more than “600 Americans” on his hands.
You can find a good breakdown of the claims and why they’re false in this brilliant article by Craig Murray, but I want to share an important bit here.
Well over 90% of them (Americans killed by Muslims since 9/11) have been killed by Sunni Muslims financed and supported out of Saudi Arabia and its gulf satellites, and less than 10% of those Americans have been killed by Shia Muslims tied to Iran.
This is a horribly inconvenient fact for US administrations which, regardless of party, are beholden to Saudi Arabia and its money. It is, the USA affirms, the Sunnis who are the allies and the Shias who are the enemy. Yet every journalist or aid worker hostage who has been horribly beheaded or otherwise executed has been murdered by a Sunni, every jihadist terrorist attack in the USA itself, including 9/11, has been exclusively Sunni, the Benghazi attack was by Sunnis, Isil are Sunni, Al Nusra are Sunni, the Taliban are Sunni and the vast majority of US troops killed in the region are killed by Sunnis.
Murray went on to explain that the ‘600’ claim came from the fact that, out of all Americans killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, 83% were killed by Sunnis while 17% were killed by Shiites. This 17% adds up to 607. Now we know where we got the number. Even for the casual mainstream news consumer, there should be some very obvious plot holes in this narrative. First of all, killing enemy combatants who have invaded your country does not fit any definition of “terrorism.” Secondly, all of those 603 soldiers were killed by IRAQI militias, which formed naturally to protect their communities since the national army wasn’t going to rise to the occasion. Not a single one of them were killed by Iran, much less a single general. It should also be noted that many of these Iraqi militia, such as the largest one, which is run by politician-cleric-warlord Muqtada al-Sadr, are quite critical of Iranian influence and would vehemently reject the characterization of them working for Soleimani.
I cannot stress enough that any claim of “Iranian terrorist” or “Shia terrorism” should set off any well-informed person’s bullshit meter. It’s just not a think. It’s about as common as “Catholic terrorism.” If you heard on the news that Vatican-backed terrorists killed 600 Americans, this you sound absurd to you. You should respond proportionally to claims of Shia terrorism. The fact that people don’t respond rationally to such absurdities is a result of several factors. Namely: the rampant anti-intellectualism that has taken root in America more so than any other western society, the deliberate dumbing down of all foreign policy issues by the media, and Islamophobia which leads people to say, “a Muslim is a Muslim and that’s it.”
So, here we are back at the Iraqi democracy issue. The tightrope has come to an end, and there is a mob forming outside. Baghdad realizes they can’t continue bowing down to the American empire and maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people. So the parliament voted to expel US troops. This was the right choice, but now the ball is in America’s court, and it’s obvious, yet very informative, what Washington’s next move will be. Now they can’t pretend to care about Iraqi democracy anymore.
Add to this, what we learned in a recent Trump interview with Laura Ingram on Fox News where he openly admitted we “took the oil” in Syria. In another part of the interview he admitted that Saudi Arabia gave him $1 billion so he gave them three thousand US troops. Trump’s sycophantic fans are apparently fine with American troops being used as paid mercenaries for A REAL terror state.
The good-guy narrative is dead. We are entering a dark new phase of US militarism. Dare I say…fascism?
Peace and Rights 