-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: February 27, 2007 12:38:40 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Looking Back at US Fear of a Shi'ite Government in Iraq
THE COMING SHI'ITE SHOWDOWN
by Gareth Porter
Antiwar.com, May 13, 2005
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=5940
Even as the Bush administration was hailing the heroism of the
Iraqi Shi'ite majority for going to the polls last Jan. 30, it was
secretly preventing the new Shi'ite government from having full
control over its own intelligence services. The reason, it has now
been revealed, is that the administration fears that the Shi'ites
will be too friendly with Iran.
A Knight Ridder report from Baghdad and Washington confirms that
the CIA has refused to hand over control of Iraq's intelligence
services to the newly elected government, because of worries that
the new government's ties to Iran would be so close that
intelligence secrets would be leaked to Tehran.
According to Iraqi officials quoted in the report, immediately
after the election, U.S. put sensitive intelligence files in U.S.
military headquarters to keep them out of the hands of the newly
elected Shi'ite-led government. The concern about a Shi'ite-led
government's relations with Iran was confirmed by an administration
official working on Iraq.
The U.S. effort to check Shi'ite power over the Iraqi security
structure began even before the handing over of limited authority
to an interim government last summer, but after the Bush
administration knew it faced the prospect of a militant Shi'ite
ticket winning the national elections.
The CIA set up intelligence agencies in both the Defense and
Interior ministries, according to the Knight Ridder report, each
led by Kurdish officials considered politically reliable. These
officers reported directly to the CIA's favorite Iraqi political
figure, Iyad Allawi.
The most important move before the handover of power, however, was
the formation by the CIA of a secret police organization
(Mukhabarat) under a Sunni general (who collaborated with the CIA
in a coup attempt in the mid-1990s) who staffed it primarily with
Sunnis.
This secret police force is still funded entirely by the CIA and
reports directly to the CIA, not to any Iraqi government agency or
official.
The intelligence agencies are not the only card that Washington has
to play against the Shi'ites, however. The New York Times Magazine
recently revealed the existence of a counterinsurgency force of
"special police commandos" with 5,000 elite troops under a former
Ba'athist Sunni general . The parallel with right-wing paramilitary
forces supported by the United States in El Salvador has been noted.
What has passed unnoticed, however, is that this force was created
by the CIA advisers to the Ministry of Interior, which was the
stronghold of Allawi and the former Ba'athist generals.
The commandos are only a counterinsurgency force, of course, but
they are yet another means of countering the power of the Shi'ites
within the government. The elected Shi'ite leaders are
understandably extremely suspicious of the U.S. nurturing of a
force that they doubt will have any loyalty to the new government.
This behind-the-scenes struggle between the Bush administration and
the Shi'ites helps to explain the extraordinary public warnings
from Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials to the new government
last month not to purge Sunnis from the government's security
services.
Although the ostensible reason for the U.S. insistence that former
Ba'athists must not be ousted from positions in these agencies is
that their competence must not be lost, the administration also
seeks to use them as a check on Shi'ite power.
Even the nearly three-month delay in naming a new cabinet after the
Shi'ite electoral victory cannot be separated from the fierce
maneuvering over a security structure, which is certainly
intertwined with the effort by the Bush administration to retain a
check on the Shi'ites. What one Western official called a
"filibuster" by Kurds and the followers of interim Prime Minister
Iyad Allawi has been responsible for the delay.
These are the very forces, of course, that had been working closely
with the CIA for several months to build intelligence and
paramilitary forces that could be used in the future as a form of
pressure against the Shi'ites.
The Bush administration's effort to prevent the Shi'ites from
coming to power in Iraq precedes the U.S. occupation of the
country. In planning its postwar administration, the last thing the
neocons wanted was an Iraqi government controlled by the major
Shi'ite exile organizations, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its close Shi'ite ally, the Dawa
Party. They knew that SCIRI was not only founded with Iranian
patronage but that its military wing, the Badr Brigade, was created
with assistance and training from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
After Bush included Iran in his "axis of evil" in mid-2002, SCIRI
had begun opposing a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. Tensions
between SCIRI and the Bush administration surfaced at the London
conference of opposition groups in December 2002. Bush's envoy to
the conference, Zalmay Khalilzad, expressed reservations about
giving a strong voice to an exile forum that the administration
considered to be "too influenced by Iran."
A few weeks after the occupation began, Gen. Jay Garner, the first
U.S. proconsul in Iraq, organized his own conferences for exiles
and handpicked the participants. SCIRI and Dawa boycotted it and
organized 20,000 Shi'ite supporters to protest outside the
conference, chanting "Yes to freedom! Yes to Islam! No to America!
No to Saddam!"
Garner decided to hold local elections in the Shi'ite stronghold of
Najaf. Three weeks later, however, Paul Bremer arrived from
Washington with orders to reverse Garner's decision and effectively
replace Garner. As Bremer explained to the Washington Post, "In a
postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections, the
people who are rejectionists tend to win." Bremer and other
officials made it clear that they were particularly concerned about
Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, the SCIRI founder-leader.
That was the beginning of the U.S. effort to avoid democratic
elections in Iraq in order to deny the Shi'ites political power.
First they proposed a "partial election," with candidates limited
to figures handpicked by the Americans. Then Bremer tried to impose
his solution on the Governing Council of handpicked Iraqis.
Bremer accepted democratic elections only in January 2004, after
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani gave the orders for a demonstration
by as many as 100,000 Shi'ites in Baghdad, shouting "Yes, yes to
elections! No, no to occupation!"
Iraq is the natural counterweight to Iran in the Middle East. For
the Bush administration, the idea of a Shi'ite-controlled Iraqi
government that is chummy with Iran is an intolerable threat to
U.S. strategy in the region.
But the Iraqi Shi'ite leaders are insisting on their right to have
warm relations with Iran. Hadi al-Amerim, the commander of the Badr
Brigade, the former military wing of the SCIRI and a member of the
new parliament, told Knight Ridder that it was high time for the
Bush administration to accept the long-standing friendship between
the leaders of the new Iraqi government in Baghdad and the Iranian
mullahs.
As the Shi'ites continue their determined march to consolidate
political power in Iraq, another showdown with the Bush
administration seems almost certain.
We should not be surprised if the Shi'ites ultimately take their
cause to the streets, as they did in deciding the last showdown
with Washington over democratic elections.
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