The power struggle in Iraq may be more about Exxon and other oil companies wanting contracts with the Kurdistan regional government than sectarianism

and the US and it’s allies have not tried to prevent sectarian violence, but encouraged it as a means to divide and conquer

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s sacking and arrest warrants for Iraqi Sunni Vice President Tareq Al Hashemi and the bombings happening at the same time are being talked of as sectarian politics resuming due to the withdrawal of US forces.

In fact the divisions in Iraq are about politics and power more than ethnicity or religion and the US government and American oil companies have encouraged them, partly to divide and conquer Iraqis and partly to get the power to negotiate oil contracts devolved to regional governments, which will give oil companies a stronger hand in negotiations than they would have with the central government. The current crisis has probably been triggered by the Maliki government’s decision to declare contracts between Exxon-Mobil and the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan, made in November 2010, illegal (1).

This and the fact that Maliki allied himself with Moqtadr Al Sadr’s party to get a majority after the 2010 elections may have led the Americans to go all out to try to get the opposition Iraqiya coalition, which includes their client Ayad Allawi, into government.

There are major divisions between Maliki’s Dawa party and it’s ISCI allies on the one hand and the third main Shia party in Iraq – Moqtadr Al Sadr’s; and as in the past Sadr is closer on many issues to two of the three Sunni parties in the Iraqiya opposition than to the Shia Dawa and ISCI.

During the build up to the 2004 Coalition offensive on Sunni rebels in Fallujah, Sadrists and other Shia in Najaf declared their support for the rebels and sent aid convoys of food and medicines to Fallujah (2). Sunnis and Shia have often marched together against the occupation over the last eight years (3) – (4).

In 2008 Maliki, a Shia, was leading the Shia ISCI and Dawa government in joint Coalition and Iraqi government offensives on Al Sadr’s Shia Madhi army militia in Baghdad, but not on other militias responsible for as much or more killing, including the ISCI’s Badr Brigades (5) – (6).

One reason was that Maliki was reliant on US support for his position; and Sadr and his party were allied to Sunni parties in opposing the presence of US troops, US influence in Iraq, and the oil law the US government wanted to get favourable contracts for it’s oil companies. Another was that Sadr was Maliki’s rival for Shia votes. (7)

The ISCI and Dawa are both closer to Iran’s government than Sadr and his party are – the Sadrists historically being strong Iraqi nationalists. The US government’s belief that all Shia are pro-Iranian or Iranian backed is also far from the truth. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s Khomeini hoped that Iraqi Shia would defect from Saddam’s forces. A few did and joined armed exile groups in Iran, but the vast majority of Shia conscripts fought loyally for Saddam, not because they supported him, but because they were Iraqi before they were Shia. Most Iraqis, with the exception of the Kurds, remain Iraqi first and whatever religious or ethnic group they are second.

The US and other Coalition governments are mostly net oil importers and their main aim in Iraq is to get their own oil companies contracts in Iraq on favourable terms. They are torn between on the one hand wanting to keep a strong central government in Iraq under their control ; and on the other wanting to weaken the central government so they can make separate contracts with regional governments like that of Iraqi Kurdistan. As long as Maliki remains allied to Sadr to stay in power the US has failed in it’s attempt to control the central government so will prefer strengthening the regional governments by dividing Iraqis.

However Sadr and Maliki are increasingly at odds again and the Sadrists’ call for early elections may be more about trying to gain seats from Dawa and the ISCI than about keeping Sunnis out of it, though the Sadrists will not be comfortable with all of the Iraqiya party as it includes former Baathist and then US client Ayad Allawi (8).

One Iraqi website quoting Sadr says he said that “The issue of Hashimy’s trial should take place under the auspices of the Parliament and the people….even the sacking of politicians from their posts must take place in a legal manner.”

“The issue of confessions against Vice-President, Tareq al-Hashimy and the raising of this issue at the current period may harm the country, its unity and security, including the downfall of the current political process and the security situation, along with harming the political process as well,” Sadr said.

Sadr also stressed that the said case “had boosted the isolation of Iraq nowadays, including the transformation of the government into a single-party government and the imposition of its power on the necks of everybody.” (9)

The quotes seem to be confirmed by a CNN report that repeats part of the above and adds ‘Al-Sadr said the crisis could tarnish the prime minister's [i.e Maliki’s] reputation and result in the consolidation of power with one-man rule.’ (10)

An alliance between the Kurds and the Iraqiya party would suit the US as a potential alternative to the Iranian brokered alliance between Maliki’s Dawa, the ISCI and the Sadrists. If Maliki’s accusation that Hashemi and Mutlak were proposing an autonomous Sunni regional government , that would suit Exxon very nicely too (11).

Former Bush (senior) official Peter Galbraith wrote a book called ‘The End of Iraq’ advocating the break up of Iraq into three states – Kurdish, Sunni and Shia – but his motives were cast into doubt when it was found that he was receiving money from oil companies seeking contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan and had a 5% share of any profits in contracts on some  deals. A complete breakup of Iraq would not be needed to achieve the oil companies’ aims though – only a change to regional governments having the final say on oil contracts (12).

The Iraqiya party is made up of three parties. Two of them – Hashemi’s and Mutlak’s are Sunni parties and  have been as strongly opposed to the presence of US troops and US influence in Iraq as the Sadrists, but the third – Ayad Allawi’s party – are US clients and mostly secular (13) – (14).

Allawi, although a Shia, started off as a Ba’athist under Saddam , assassinating Iraqi dissidents who had fled to Europe. Later he fell out with Saddam, went into exile himself and was carried out car and cinema bombings in Baghdad with CIA support. He was appointed Interim Iraqi Prime Minister by Bush’s ‘Governor of Iraq’ Paul Bremer and oversaw El Salvador style US trained Iraqi death squads, along with the TV programme ‘Terrorism in the Hands of Justice’ in which torture victims confessed live to being terrorists (15) – (16).

In the first post-war elections Allawi was the candidate backed by the US and British governments, but he lost heavily. US support for Allawi has continued though under Bush and Obama. The Iraqiya coalition of parties did far better in the 2010 parliamentary elections and was initially thought to have won, but couldn’t form a working coalition.

The idea that the US government and military have been trying to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq , or that their withdrawal and a fall in US influence has been the cause of it, are also pretty far fetched.

The US government and other Coalition members have encouraged sectarian divisions and violence among Iraqis from the start, because unless Iraqis are divided and fighting one another for power, foreign powers can’t have that much influence in Iraq. In the first few years of the Iraq war they trained mostly Shia extremist units like the Wolf Brigade of the US trained ‘Special Police Commandos’ to target Sunnis, on the faulty logic that all Sunnis were Saddam supporters (17) – (19).

Then in 2007 came what Seymour Hersh called ‘the re-direction’. The US government had decided that Shia dominance of Iraq’s politics had given the Shia Iranian government too much influence in Iraq and began paying the same Sunni tribal militias that had been fighting US forces to fight Al Sadr’s Medhi army militia and the Sunni extremist Al Qa’ida instead (but not the Shia, pro-Iranian ISCI’s Badr Brigades, who didn’t oppose the oil law). This was on the dodgy theory that the Sadrists were proxies of the Iranian government, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy (20) – (22).

(1) = NYT 13 Nov 2011 ‘Iraq Criticizes Exxon Mobil for Its Deal With the Kurds’, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/world/middleeast/iraq-criticizes-exxon-mobil-for-its-deal-with-the-kurds.html?_r=1 ; ‘A deputy prime minister overseeing Iraq’s oil industry criticized Exxon Mobil on Sunday over its effort to expand into the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the country’s north…. The statement from the official, Hussein al-Shahristani, said the central government had cautioned Exxon against pursuing oil deals in Kurdistan. The government considers such agreements to be illegal until long-awaited rules can be worked that would divide revenues among Iraq’s fractious regions.

Mr. Shahristani’s office issued its statement after Exxon, whose headquarters are in Irving, Tex., became the first major international oil company to sign a contract in Kurdistan.’

(2) = http://www.juancole.com/2007/01/muqtada-al-sadr-and-sunnis-mickey-kaus.html

(3)  = Guardian 10 Apr 2004, ‘Sunni and Shia unite against common enemy’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/apr/10/iraq.rorymccarthy1

(4) = Guardian 10 Apr 07, ‘Moqtada rallies Shia to demand withdrawal of foreign troops’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2053247,00.html

(5) = Washington Post 26 Mar 2008 ‘U.S. Armor Forces Join Offensive In Baghdad Against Sadr Militia’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/27/AR2008032700781.html?hpid=topnews

(6) = HRW 28 Oct 2006 ‘Iraq: End Interior Ministry Death Squads’, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2006/10/28/iraq-end-interior-ministry-death-squads

(7) = BBC News 3 July 2007, ‘Iraqi cabinet backs draft oil law’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6264184.stm

(8) = NYT 26 Dec 2011 ‘In Blow to Government, Sadr Followers Call for New Elections’, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/world/middleeast/moktada-al-sadr-followers-call-for-new-election-in-iraq.html

(9) = the iraqidinar.com 25 Dec 2011 ‘Shiite Cleric, al-Sadr, calls for trial of Iraq’s Vice-President Hashimy under Parliament’s auspices’, http://theiraqidinar.com/2011/12/25/shiite-cleric-al-sadr-calls-for-trial-of-iraqs-vice-president-hashimy-under-parliaments-auspices/

(10) = CNN 26 Dec 2011 ‘Al-Sadr's bloc calls for dissolution of Iraqi parliament’, http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/26/world/meast/iraq-politics/

(11) = Al Jazeera 25 Dec 2011 ‘Iraqi VP refuses to face court in Baghdad’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/12/20111224191245752178.html ; ‘Maliki convened a meeting of his crisis-response cell on Saturday, his office said. …In separate comments on Saturday, Maliki warned that any efforts to create an autonomous Sunni region within Iraq would cause deep divisions in the country and lead to "rivers of blood".’

(12) = NYT 11 Nov 2009 ‘U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits’, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/middleeast/12galbraith.html

(13) = Al Jazeera 28 Oct 2008 ‘Iraq Sunni party severs US ties’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2008/10/2008102644323791621.html  ; ‘But the IIP has been locked in a bitter rivalry with the Sunni tribal leaders who joined forces with the US and that has raised concerns that the political tensions could spark violence and disrupt the Awakening Councils.’

(14) = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_National_Movement

(15) = Times 01 May 2005 ‘West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work’, http://www.infowars.com/articles/iraq/west_turns_blind_eye_saddams_torturers_at_work.htm

(16) = NYT magazine 01 May 2005 ‘The Way of the Commandos’, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ARMY.html

(17) = BBC News 11 Jun 2005 ‘Profile: Iraq's Wolf Brigade’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4083326.stm

(18) = See (14) above

(19) = Guardian.co.uk 28 Oct 2010 ‘Iraq war logs: 'The US was part of the Wolf Brigade operation against us'’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/28/iraq-war-logs-iraq

(20) = The New Yorker 05 Mar 2007 ‘Annals of National Security - The Redirection’, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

(21) = NPR 17 July 2008, 'U.S. Trains Ex-Sunni Militias as Iraqi Police', http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11240000

(22) = Sunday Times 25 Nov 2007, ‘American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq’, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3076670

Iyad Allawi is back as Saddam Mark II

but don’t worry, his torturers and death squads are secular like Saddam’s, not like that scruffy, rabble rousing ‘sectarian’ Sadr

So Iyad Allawi (or Ayad Allawi), the man groomed by the Bush administration and Blair government to be their client Prime Minister in Iraq, seems to have won the latest elections there. He was first appointed as unelected ‘Interim Prime Minister’ by the Iraqi Governing Council in 2004 (that Council having been appointed by US ‘governor’ of Iraq George Bremer), but lost elections to a Shia list, with the first two elected Prime Ministers since the invasion having been first by Ibrahim al Ja’afari and then Nouri Al Maliki, who both formed a coalition government largely made up of the Iranian backed ‘Supreme council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq’ and it’s successors, along with the Kurds ;and an uneasy and unstable alliance with the Sadrists (also Shia, but less willing to accept the continuing presence of foreign troops).

Allawi lost the first national elections despite the Bush administration providing him with covert aid and conspiring with him to rig the election (according to UN officials), despite Blair sending Labour party official Margaret McDonagh to advise Allawi in his election campaign; and despite some officials under Allawi , threatening to cut food rations to people who didn’t turn out to vote (There was also rigging on the part of the Shia list and the Kurds according to UN staff in Iraq). (1) , (2)

There has been some condemnation of former Ba’athists being banned from standing and even some being threatened with having their candidacies revoked retrospectively after they’ve been elected. Most of these are Sunnis on Allawi’s secular electoral list. This is due to what Seymour Hersh called “the redirection” in US policy in Iraq when the focus switched from using Shia proxies to target Sunnis who were seen as ‘dead enders’ for Saddam and Ba’athism, back to using Sunnis and secular Iraqis to target Shia who are simplistically seen as all ‘pro-Iranian’. Certainly not all Ba’athists were murderers – anyone wanting a career under Saddam had to become a Ba’athist or else hope they could flee into exile without being killed. Allawi does not seem to have been a great democrat or interested in upholding the law or his people’s basic rights either under Saddam or since his overthrow. (3), (4)

There’s been little discussion of Allawi’s own past. Seymour Hersh interviewed former CIA agents and Iraqis who knew Allawi in the 1960s and 70s. They said he was involved in helping Saddam into power and posed as a doctor to assassinate Iraqi dissidents under Saddam from at least 1971 till 1975 (the CIA also having been involved in backing Saddam in the 1960s through till 1991). This is supposedly a sin washed away by his break with Saddam and Saddam subsequently sending assassins to try to kill him, most famously in a failed attempt with an axe in London in 1978. From exile in the 1990s Allawi ran a programme of bombings of cars, cinemas, newspaper offices and Ba’ath party offices in Baghdad as a CIA proxy. Under Allawi as ‘Interim Prime Minister’ (and under his successors Ja’afari and Al Maliki) US-trained ‘police commandos continued the torture methods used under Saddam (even employing many of Saddam’s former Mukhabarat secret police and torturers) and began the ‘Terror in the hands of justice’ TV programme in which torture victims confessed live on television to being terrorists before being executed.(5) – (12)

Some western diplomats say they also ,witnessed Allawi personally shoot six suspected insurgents in front of them(13).

Saddam was also ‘secular’, also relied heavily on the Sunni minority for support and was also backed by the US, British and French governments right up until the invasion of Kuwait - all through the period in which he gassed the Kurds in his genocidal (but secular) ‘Anfal’ campaign and invaded Iran (leading to the deaths of millions, but never mind, he was secular). After the 1991 Gulf War he switched all oil contracts to Russian, French and Chinese firms and their governments became his supporters.

The only major difference between Saddam and Allawi is that Allawi is from a Shia family rather than a Sunni one (though, like Saddam, his family is not a religious one) and has some claim to be democratically elected, though his methods in government are likely to continue to be those of Saddam – torture, murder and execution without fair trial (often with the conviction based on a confession made under torture). It’s true that he hasn’t attempted wholesale genocide against the Kurds, but then he doesn’t have the free hand, nor the huge flow of money and arms that the governments of most of the world (especially the US) gave Saddam during the Anfal and the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s

Moqtadr Al Sadr is meanwhile demonised as a man “who maintains an overlord's hold over more than two million Shia Iraqis”, despite the fact this “overlord’s hold” is based on his widespread popularity among the poorer Shia of Baghdad, who do not see their interests being represented by the main Shia list of Iranian backed politicians from wealthier backgrounds, nor by Allawi with his links to the occupying forces. Could the hostility to him in the media be anything to do with briefings against him by British and American government and military spokespeople? Could those have anything to do with his opposition to the presence of foreign forces in Iraq? A balanced account of Sadr does not suggest that he is either particularly pro-Iranian (though US attempts to capture or assassinate him forced him into exile in Iran) and he seems to have tried to restrain Sectarian violence by his followers against Sunnis, with many of those responsible having broken away from his organisation (For details and sources on Sadr and the Sadrists go to http://www.duncanmcfarlane.org/GetSadr/) (14).

Propaganda from the British and US governments has now come full circle from lauding Saddam for his ‘secularism’ against Iranian extremism in the 1980s to condemning him for his unprovoked aggression against Iran in 2001 till the last couple of years and now back to supporting Allawi as a new ‘ secular strong man’ who will ‘oppose extremism’ and ‘provide stability’. Sceptics might wonder whether being tortured or summarily killed without any trial by Allawi’s death squads who are ‘anti-sectarian’ or ‘secular’ is really that different from being tortured by those who justify their actions on religious grounds, or if the governments of the ‘free world’ just prefer Allawi because he’ll do their bidding by giving their firms oil contracts and opposing the Iranians just as Saddam did – plus allowing them military bases in Iraq to secure it’s oil and make it easier to get hold of Iran’s in future.

(1) New Yorker Magazine 25 Jul2007 ‘Get Out the Vote -
Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq’s election?’ by Seymour Hersh ,http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725fa_fact?currentPage=4

(2) = Dahr Jamail / IPS 01 Feb 2005 ‘Some just voted for food’, http://www.countercurrents.org/jamail010205.htm

(3)= Guardian Comment Is Free 29 Mar 2010 ‘Iraq's new ruling elite show contempt for voters’, by Toby Dodge, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/29/iraq-elite-contempt-voters

(4) = New Yorker magazine ‘The Re-direction’ by Seymour Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh

(5) = New Yorker magazine 28 Jan 2005
, ‘Annals of National Security : Plan B’ by Seymour Hersh’, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628fa_fact?currentPage=5

(6) = Aburish, Said K (1997) ‘A Brutal Friendship’ , Indigo, London, 1997&1998, paperback, pages136-143

(7) = Aburish, Said K (2001) ‘Saddam Hussein – The Politics of Revenge’, Chapter2, esp p54-9

(8) = New York Times 9 Jun 2004 ‘THE REACH OF WAR: NEW PREMIER; Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks’ ,http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FB0912F83D540C7A8CDDAF0894DC404482

(9) = Human Rights Watch 25 January 2005 ‘Iraq: Torture Continues at Hands of New Government -
Police Systematically Abusing Detainees’ ,http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/01/26/iraq10053.htm

(10) = Amnesty International 6 Mar 2006 ( AI Index: MDE 14/001/2006 ) ‘Beyond Abu Ghraib: detention and torture in Iraq’ ,http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde140012006

(11) = Amnesty International 20 Apr 2007( AI Index: MDE 14/020/2007 ) ‘Iraq: Televised 'confessions', torture and unfair trials underpin world's fourth highest executioner
’ ,http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE140202007

(12) = Times 07 Jul 2005 ‘West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article541123.ece

(13)= Sydney Morning Herald 17 Jun 2004‘Allawi shot prisoners in cold blood: witnesses’ ,http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/16/1089694568757.html

(14) = guardian.co.uk 28 Mar 2010 ‘Exiled Iraqi sheikh may hold key to power in Iraq’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/28/iraq-al-maliki-shia-al-sadr