Iraq: Whose Fault, Obama’s or Maliki’s?
By Taj Hashmi
10 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org
It’s good news that within four weeks of ISIS (aka ISIL) takeover of Mosul, Tikrit and some other towns in northern Iraq, know-little analysts in the East and West have taken a break from their sensational speculations about the future of Iraq and the entire regions in the near future. However, the Fox TV channel and conservative print media in the U.S., along with Dick Cheney, John McCain and their likes, are exceptions in this regard. While Neo-cons blame Obama for the crisis in Iraq, others point fingers at Prime Minister Maliki, in this regard.
One retired U.S. general told his interviewer on Fox TV last weekend that not only Iraq and the entire region but also America were going to face the ISIS-sponsored terrorist attacks “in months”. We also hear that a) Iraq is going to be fragmented into three entities – the Kurdish north, Sunni central, and Shiite south – and that b) eventually an ISIS-led caliphate will transcend the entire region from Turkey to Iraq, and Egypt to Yemen, and beyond.
We have, however, no reasons to believe that Iraq is going to be divided into three independent entities. Although Iraqi Kurdistan will remain a totally autonomous sub-region, and will possibly control oil-rich Kirkuk as well, but an independent Kurdistan is not on the card as Turkey is not going to accept such an entity to the detriment of its own stability. It does not want its Kurdish minority to live in an autonomous territory. The so-called caliphate will never emerge as a reality.
Iraq has possibly the most blood-soaked history in the world since 680. The killing of Hussein, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, by a rival claimant of the Caliphate at Karbala in Iraq signaled the beginning of the Shia-Sunni conflict. However, the present sectarian conflict in Iraq and elsewhere are more geopolitical than religious by nature.
Iraq went through brutal sectarian and tribal warfare, state- and non-state-actors-sponsored terrorism and ethnic cleansing during the successive Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates (661-1258). In 1258, Mongols destroyed Baghdad, killed tens of thousands of people, and signaled the end of the Abbasid Caliphate. Iraq suffered a lot under British occupation for decades following World War I. Iraq’s suffering did not end with the end of British rule. Tens of thousands of Iraqis got killed after the Military takeovers between 1958 and the formal ascendancy of Saddam Hussein to power as a civilian autocrat in 1979. More than a million Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasions of the country since 1991. More than 2,400 Iraqis got killed in this June alone. One can only assume the turmoil in Iraq is not going to be over in months.
The proponents of the doomsday scenario in Iraq may be divided into (at least) four schools. The first traces the present crisis in Iraq, Syria and adjoining states to the League of Nations’ Mandate, which legitimized the Anglo-French occupation and division of Greater Syria and Iraq after World War I. The second holds the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate responsible for destabilizing the entire region by its unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003. The third solely blames Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for his divisive sectarian policy, said to have alienated and antagonized Iraqi Sunnis to such an extent that they sided with the ISIS rebels, which led to the humiliating defeat of Iraqi soldiers. Several reports indicate that thanks to rampant corruption, cronyism and inefficiency of Maliki’s generals, Iraqi troops failed to resist the handful of ISIS fighters as they had no water and food to sustain.
The hardcore Republicans, who represent the fourth group, squarely blame President Obama for the Syrian and Iraqi crises. They believe by listening to Vladimir Putin, Obama abandoned the promised air attacks on Syria, and also failed to arm the “secular and liberal” Free Syrian Army to topple the Assad regime. They believe had Assad been removed by force; there would not have been any militant Islamist upsurge in Syria and Iraq. They also blame Obama for his “hurried” and complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Interestingly, they do not blame Nouri al-Maliki who did not want any U.S. troop in Iraq beyond 2011.
There is yet another school of thought that attributes the crises in Syria and Iraq to Obama’s support for various al Qaeda- and Islamist-sponsored “jihadist” groups, including the Jabhat-ul-Nusra, to topple the Assad regime. Some reports reveal direct U.S. involvement in arming and training the ISIS. Hillary Clinton once publicly stated that the U.S. “unfortunately” had been supporting the “wrong people” to overthrow Assad. What was even laughable was the way the White House recently told the Congress that the ISIS takeover of northern Iraq had caught it by surprise.
As Bush was responsible for the ongoing, post-invasion civil war in Iraq, so is Obama responsible for the messy situation in Syria, Iraq and the entire region. History has proven Bush wrong. Neither the emergence of “a free Iraq” has become a “watershed event in the global democratic revolution”, nor has Obama been proven right that the Saudi-sponsored insurgency in Syria would stabilize the entire region. It is time that Obama admit ISIS fighters are his chickens, now roosting in Syria and Iraq. It seems, like Bush, he will be also remembered for his obtrusive foreign policy in the Muslim World. It is, however, altogether a different story if what Obama is doing to Syria, Iraq and Iran merely reflects the post-World War II U.S. policy of making the Israeli, Saudi and its own Military-Industrial Complex happy, albeit to the detriment of freedom and human rights everywhere.
The writer teaches security studies at Austin Peay State University. Sage has recently published his Global Jihad and America: The Hundred-Year War Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
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