Creative Fence-Sitting

By Cernig

This would be funny if the situation weren't so dangerous.

Iraq on Sunday appeared to distance itself from U.S. accusations of Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs, saying it would not be pushed into conflict with its neighbor and wanted its own inquiry into the evidence.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had ordered the formation of a special committee comprised of representatives of the various security ministries "to document any intervention in Iraqi affairs."

"The reason behind forming this committee is to find tangible information and not information based on speculation," Dabbagh told a news conference in Baghdad.

The Iraqis have repeatedly said they do not want their territory to become a battleground for a proxy war between the United States and Iran. The arch-foes are at loggerheads over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

"We don't want to be pushed into any conflict with any neighboring countries, especially Iran. What happened before is enough. We paid a lot," Dabbagh said, referring to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war in which an estimated 1 million people died.

"It happened because the others pushed Iraq to take an aggressive stance with Iran. We want to organize relations with all neighboring countries to preserve the interests of Iraq."

Wouldn't the best time to have had such an investigation been before those with a vested interest in seeing Sadr's Mahdi Army attacked as Iran's primary proxy opened their mouths to parrot the American line? Maybe Western media outlets should have listened last week, when Maliki's spokesman also announced that pronouncements from the likes of al Ibadi, his co-delegationist who happens to be the head of the rival Badr Brigade militia, or al-Rubaei, the fanatically pro-American national security spokesman installed at Washington's behest, didn't have the weight of official Iraqi government policy behind them. Unfortunately, that cat is already out of the bag, with the Western media and pro-occupation rightwing pundits leading on the news that the supposedly Iraqi government-approved delegation was sent to Iran "to confront the country's involvement in recruiting, arming, and training Shia militias that have attacked the Iraqi government and security forces and Coalition forces."

"[The delegation] presented a list of names, training camps and cells linked to Iran," Haidar al Ibadi, a member of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party, told Reuters. "The delegation also carried evidence of the smuggling of weapons and training of individuals in Iran to enter later into Iraq."

The Iranians denied any involvement in Iraq, as they have in the past. "The Iranians did not confess or admit anything," Ibadi told Reuters. "They claim they are not intervening in Iraq and they feel they are being unfairly blamed for everything going on Iraq," he said of Tursday's talks.

The Iraqi government changed its view of Iran's involvement after evidence of Iranian weaponry manufactured in Iran was confiscated during operation in Basrah. "Basra changed it for the Iraqis," an anonymous US military officer told Reuters. "I'm not sure they believed it before. But they went to Basra and saw it first hand."

This new announcement suggests that they don't believe it now.

Dabbagh declined to talk in detail about the delegation's visit, saying only that it had expressed "fears, suspicions and news about Iranian involvement in Iraq." "I believe the delegation received clear answers from the Iranians," he said.

Neither do British intelligence, who according to the London Times' Michael Smith today have said they think U.S. claims of Iranian meddling are exaggerated. Iran's "clear answer" is that they know who is doing most killing of Iraqis and it isn't either their own proxies or even Al Qaida.

As to Maliki's investigative committee, they're going to be faced with an interesting problem in creative fence-sitting. They will want to paint Sadr's movement as receiving Iranian aide so that the U.S. keeps on providing Maliki's ISCI allies with political supremacy among Shiite voters at gunpoint but they won't want to go as far as being honest about ISCI's and Maliki's own Dawa Party's even closer ties to Tehran. Neither will they want to go so far as to give the Bush administration another excuse for airstrikes into Iran. It may well be too late to prevent that, though, as yet again the Bush administration seem to want to believe their own propaganda and act upon it as if it were reality. It'll be a cakewalk, honest!

Update Chris LeJeune from VetVoice adds some history:

News like this always grabs my interest, just for the sheer irony of it.  Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is the Secretary General of the al-Dawa Party, a group that was headquartered in Tehran from 1979-2003.  During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran backed the Dawa insurgency against Saddam Hussein.  Because the US was supportive of Iraq during that conflict, the Dawa Party was considered a terrorist organization. "In 1983 Dawa simultaneously bombed the American and French embassies in Kuwait and several other domestic and foreign targets in Kuwait."...the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), or Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC).  SIIC was formed in 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war...Hadi al-Ameri, the chairman of the Iraqi Parliament's defense and security committee, is also the leader of the Badr Organization, a militia that was also formed in Iran...it was Iranian-backed militias that put Maliki into power, and continue to keep him there.

Comments

[Ron Beasley]

Yes the Bush administration talks about the threat that Iran represents and at the same time spends our blood and treasure to support and defend Iran's proxy government in Iraq. On the surface it may not make sense but when you realize that all they are interested in is to have the US in a constant state of war it's not so puzzling.