Iraqi rogues and a false proxy
war By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A key objective of the
Congressional testimony by General David Petraeus
this week will be to defend the George W Bush
administration's strategic political line that it
is fighting an Iranian "proxy war" in Iraq.
Based on preliminary indications of his
spin on the surprisingly effective armed
resistance to the joint United States-Iraqi
"Operation Knights Assault" in the
Shi'ite-dominated southern city of Basra, Petraeus
will testify that it was caused by Iran through a
group of rogue militiamen who had split from
Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and came under
Iranian control.
But the US military's
contention that "rogue elements" have been
carrying out the resistance to coalition forces
was refuted by Muqtada himself in an interview
with al-Jazeera aired on March 29
in
which he called for the release from US detention
of the individual previously identified by
Petraeus as the head of the alleged breakaway
faction.
The idea of Iranian-backed
"rogue" Shi'ite militia groups undermining
Muqtada's efforts to pursue a more moderate course
was introduced by the US military command in early
2007. These alleged Iranian proxies were called
"special groups" - a term that came not from Iran
or the Shi'ites themselves but from the Bush
administration.
In April, after US forces
captured a former spokesman for Muqtada, Qais
al-Khazali, Petraeus himself announced that they
had detained "the head of the secret cell network,
the extremist secret cells". Petraeus referred to
it as "the Khazali network".
US military
spokesman Brigadier General Kevin Bergner asserted
in early July that Khazali's network was a
"special group" which was financed, armed and
trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps
(IRGC)and in some instances was even "directed" by
it. He said Iran was using a Hezbollah operative
to organize such groups to do its bidding in Iran.
The identification of Khazali as head of a
"rogue" faction was highly suspect, however. One
of Muqtada's most trusted aides, Khazali had
played a key role in recruitment for the Mahdi
Army in its formative stage in 2003. He went
underground in late 2004, just after heavy
fighting in which the Mahdi Army suffered heavy
casualties and just as Muqtada was entering into a
long period of retreat from military operations.
In a March 30, 2007, press briefing, Major
General Michael Barbero of the US Joint Staff said
both Khazali and his brother were linked with the
"Sadr organization".
A pro-war military
blogger named Bill Roggio, who maintains close
relations with the US command in Baghdad, revealed
in February 2007 that the real purpose of the line
about Iranian-controlled "special groups" was to
facilitate Petraeus's strategy of dividing the
Mahdi Army. "The 'rogue element' narrative
provides Mahdi Army fighters and commanders an
'out'," wrote Roggio. A Mahdi Army unit commander
could either "choose to oppose the government and
be targeted", he observed, "or step aside and join
the political process".
On this note,
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at the weekend said
that Muqtada must disband the Mahdi Army in order
to participate in provincial elections scheduled
for October.
At the same time, battles
between rival Shi'ite groups have spread from
Basra to Baquba in the north. Clashes between the
Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization militia of
the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) have been
reported in the predominantly Shi'ite district of
Hwaider in Baquba, the capital city of Diyala
province located 40 kilometers northeast of
Baghdad.
US ambassador Ryan Crocker's
first comment on the armed resistance in Basra in
a March 26 interview emphatically denied that the
forces resisting the Iraqi-US operation
represented Muqtada's Mahdi Army.
"What
you're seeing there is not a rising by Jaish
al-Mahdi [Mahdi Army]," Crocker insisted. It was
"a subset of Jaish al-Mahdi, the so called
'special groups' that really are basically just
criminal militias that are the difficulty here,"
according to Crocker.
An article by
neo-conservative military historian Kimberly Kagan
in the Wall Street Journal on April 3 suggests,
however, that Petraeus has slightly reformulated
the proxy war line in light of the obvious role
played by the Mahdi Army itself in limiting the
advance of the US-Iraqi operation.
Kagan
is married to Fred Kagan, one of the main author's
of Bush's "surge" policy, and is a full member of
the administration's team for conveying its
political-military thinking to the elite public.
Her article evidently reflects conversations with
Petraeus and other officials in Baghdad during the
previous week.
Kagan, unlike Crocker on
March 26, makes no effort to deny that the Mahdi
Army itself was fully involved in the armed
resistance in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere. But
she claims that it was "special groups" - not the
Sadrists - who "coordinated the unrest and attacks
of the regular Mahdi Army in the capital and
provinces".
Furthermore, Kagan describes
the Mahdi Army as "a reserve from which the
special groups can and will draw in crisis". And
Muqtada himself is dismissed as ultimately a
figurehead. "For all of his nationalist rhetoric,"
writes Kagan, "Mr Sadr is evidently not in control
of his movement ..."
The new version of
the proxy war narrative still attributes ultimate
control over the most powerful Shi'ite
political-military force in the country to the
shadowy "special groups".
But in an
interview with al-Jazeera taped just before the
Basra operation was launched and broadcast on
March 29, Muqtada demanded the release of Khazali,
whom Petraeus had identified as the head of the
alleged "special group" that had broken away from
Muqtada, from US custody.
That confirms
the earlier indications that Khazali was never
involved in a breakaway faction, and that what the
US command refers to as "Iranian-backed special
groups" never existed.
The March 30 story
by McClatchy's Leila Fadel on the ending of the
Basra crisis shows that Iran's real strategy in
Iraq bears no resemblance to the one portrayed in
the US proxy war narrative. Fadel reported that
Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani, commander of
the Quds (Jerusalem) brigades of the IRGC,
brokered a ceasefire with Muqtada after
representatives of the Shi'ite parties now
supporting the Maliki government traveled secretly
to Qom, Iran on March 29-30, to ask for his
intervention.
Suleimani's role in reducing
the violence in Basra underlines the reality that
Iranian power in Shi'ite Iraq is based on its
having worked with and provided assistance to all
the Shi'ite parties and factions. Iran's
determination to stay on good terms with all the
Shi'ite factions has made it the primary arbiter
of conflicts among them.
Iran has no
reason to look for a small splinter group to
advance its interests when it already enjoys a
relationship of strategic cooperation with the
government itself.
The Mahdi Army has
received training in both Lebanon and in Iran and
has undoubtedly used financial assistance from
Iran to procure weapons. But Muqtada revealed in
his al-Jazeera interview that he had told Iranian
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on a trip to Iran that
he did not agree with the "political and military
interests" that Tehran had pursued in Iran. That
was an apparent reference to Iran's pronounced
tilt toward Muqtada's Shi'ite rivals, who remain
in power with joint US-Iranian support.
Ironically, when Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad visited Iraq in early March, both
Maliki and SIIC chief Abdul Aziz al-Hakim publicly
dissociated themselves from the US "proxy war"
line, insisting that Iran was restraining Muqtada
rather than egging him on.
The interest of
the Bush administration in keeping the proxy war
line alive has nothing to do with Iraqi realities,
however. As a strategic weapon for justifying the
administration's policies toward both Iraq and
Iran, the theme of Iranian interference through
"special groups" is bound to be a central thread
in the testimony by both Petraeus and Crocker.
Gareth Porter is an
historian and national security policy analyst.
The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and
the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in
2006.
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