His Grip on Iraq Tottering, al-Maliki Resorts to What He Knows Best: Committing Atrocities

As U.S.-installed dictator of Iraq Nuri Kamal al-Maliki loses his grip on more of Iraq, including the last border crossing with Syria, to the “Islamic State In Syria and Iraq” and other Sunni armed groups, including Baathists, he is falling back on the only thing he knows, besides blatant theft: namely murder.

A cryptic report on the BBC said that 70 “terrorist prisoners” were killed “in transit” when “gunmen” attacked. No guards reported killed, no gunmen reported killed, no explanation of who they were or why they attacked and killed prisoners, and why they were allowed to. No skepticism by BBC towards this extremely dubious claim by the Maliki regime.

One of two things happened: Maliki had the (Sunni political) prisoners killed by those transporting them, or it was arranged for a Shiite “militia” or some Malaki-regime U.S.-trained death squad to rendezvous with the guards and murder the prisoners.

And Maliki’s helicopters attacked civilian cars lined up at a gas station. (No doubt the pilots were Shiites, who wanted to kill Sunnis, any Sunnis.) Maliki’s regime called the victims “terrorists.” No word on BBC, NPR, et al. I only heard this on “alternative” (non-establishment) Democracy Now today, (Democracynow.org.)

Meanwhile Secretary of State John “I’m a Hawk Now!” Kerry flew into Baghdad to jawbone Maliki about being more “inclusive,” a joke almost as sick as Kerry’s “peace process” with Israel and the Palestinian “Authority.” At the same time, the Obama regime keeps dropping hints that maybe it would be better if someone else became “prime minister” of Iraq now. Typical Hamlet-like behavior by Obama.

On the other hand, Iran is clear and decisive (as in Syria too, also in contrast with the dithering, indecisive U.S.) The real boss of Iran, the Big Ayatollah, says Maliki must stay in power. This is a reflection of the fact that Maliki evolved into more of an Iranian client than a U.S. one, even though U.S. weapons, and training in murder and mayhem, still props up Maliki’s venal and cruel regime.

The U.S. has had similar relationships with Maliki, with Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and with the Pakistani military. In all three cases, the clients somehow seem to have had the upper hand in the relationships. The U.S. propped up, funded, and armed all of them, in return for consistent kicks in the teeth by Karzai and the Pakis, and cozying up to hated U.S. enemy and bete noire Iran in the case of Maliki. Perhaps the U.S. got into the bad habit of being others’ bitch from it relationship with Israel. [1]

If I were a U.S. media propagandist, I’d be tempted to resort to a superficial pop psychology explanation, as they do with Putin and leftist opponents, among others. One could liken the U.S. to a powerful man, a plutocrat or politician, with a hidden submissive sex life, who patronizes dominatrixes in secret. But I won’t, because that’s silly (if amusing). I think the actual explanation is complex, with many political factors, both domestic and international, exerting influences. A political analysis, not a psychological one, especially not a shallow and glib pop-psychological one, is what is called for here. Perhaps I will provide one at another time.

There is a parallel with “South” Vietnam, a U.S.-created artificial nation that came into being when the U.S. sawed Vietnam in half after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. That battle ended the attempt of imperialist France to reconquer its erstwhile Indochinese colonies, which Imperial Japan had seized in World War Two. (France wheezed another last gasp of its formal imperialism in Algeria, where through massive torture by the French army, the Algerian independence movement was temporarily suppressed.) At the ensuing Geneva, Switzerland, conference to decide Vietnam’s fate, China sold out the Vietnamese so-called “communists” and went along with a U.S. scheme to “temporarily” divide Vietnam in half, with elections to follow in two years, at which point the country would be “reunited.” Since Ho Chi Minh was projected to win 80% of the vote in a nationwide election, U.S. president Dwight “Watch Out For the Military-Industrial Complex!” Eisenhower made sure to subsequently kill the election and set up a permanent client regime in the southern half of the country. When two decades later, after slaughtering millions of Vietnamese, committing innumerable atrocities and war crimes, dropping three times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam as it dropped in World War II, and poisoning the land with dioxin, creating a toxic legacy that produces thousands of birth defects to this day from permanent damage to the human gene pool, the U.S. was forced to pull out its expeditionary force, the “South” Vietnamese army collapsed like a house of cards in a few weeks in 1975 when the northern half’s army launched an offensive. [2]

Likewise the “Iraqi” army of Nuri al-Maliki, 350,000 strong, built up at a cost of $42 billion in the last three years alone, is incapable of even fighting, much less defeating, a few thousand fanatical Islamofascist terrorists. Because, as in the “South” Vietnamese army’s case, conscripts won’t risk their lives fighting for a venal dictator for whom loyalty and service are one-way streets.

1] If one wanted to blame a single person for foisting both Karzai and Maliki on the United States, the culprit would be Bush family henchman Zalmay Khalilzad. As U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under the regime of Bush the Younger, Khalilzad tapped Karzai to be installed as president there. Later, when Bush moved him to the ambassador role in Iraq, he recommended Maliki to Bush as prime minister of Iraq. O for two, Zalmay.

Here’s a portion of an interview on Democracy Now! with Harper’s magazine Washington editor Andrew Cockburn that is packed with information on Khalilzad and is a good description of the relevant history in a nutshell:

[ANDREW COCKBURN]: “Maliki is in power, really, thanks to the—thanks to the U.S. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the ambassador to Baghdad, in 2006 selected Maliki, much to everyone’s surprise, including Maliki’s. When Khalilzad said, "How would you like to be prime minister?" Maliki said, "Are you serious?" So, and then that was reaffirmed again in 2010 when Maliki had basically lost an election, and the U.S. and Iran, for that matter—further ironies here—really got—really rammed him back down the throats of the Iraqi people. So, now to be saying, you know, Maliki has to go, as I say, is rich with irony.

[JUAN GONZÁLEZ]: “And your article on Khalilzad also talks about his influence in Afghanistan, as well. Could you talk a little bit about his history?

[ANDREW COCKBURN]: “Well, Khalilzad, yeah, he’s been a sort of longtime foot soldier in the neocon, neoconservative, movement. I mean, he has a sort of pretty grisly pedigree. He, early on—I mean, he’s an Afghan, and then made his way to the U.S. as a young man, as a bright student. And from there, he fell under the influence of Albert Wohlstetter, who was a character in Chicago who was very influential in the movement, who also mentored Richard Perle.

“And then you see Khalilzad—from the beginning of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, he’s very much in the mix. He claims now to have been instrumental in sort of directing the whole policy, which I don’t think is really the case. But anyway, there he was signing all the resolutions, calling for war with—overthrowing Saddam, and so forth.

“And his moment came in 2001, or after 2001, when we, you know, successfully toppled the Taliban regime, and Khalilzad was really only the Afghan or sort of pretty much the only Muslim any of these people knew, and so they appointed him the overseer of the post-Taliban Afghanistan, from which position he selected one Hamid Karzai—again, much to the subsequent grief of U.S. administrations—really with the view of—a lot of Afghans I talked to at the time thought, well, Karzai was a fairly weak figure, and Khalilzad’s idea was that he, Khalilzad, would be the real ruler of Afghanistan and behave like that, really. He was bossing all them, and he restored—he fostered all these ghastly warlords and strongmen, with himself really as the biggest warlord of all. He’d threaten them with airstrikes and so forth. [U.S. power attracts gangsta wannabe types as imperialist apparatchiks- JZ.]

“So, after he had pretty much ensured that no stable settlement would emerge in Afghanistan, and really his actions had led to the revival of the Taliban, he failed upwards and was moved to Iraq, where the U.S. was trying to sort of put in place some kind of government that they could entrust Iraq to. And as I said, they didn’t like the man they had, a prime minister called Jaafari. And Khalilzad looked around and selected this character, al-Maliki, who was a fairly comparatively obscure figure in the—had been in the exiled opposition. He had lived in Damascus for most of his adult life, running a butcher shop. And suddenly, as I say, he called in al-Maliki.

“And, actually, I know quite a lot about the scene. He was with the British ambassador, and they started talking. And when the ambassador realized, the British ambassador realized that, my god, this character Maliki was being offered the job of leading Iraq, he started to protest, whereupon Khalilzad kicked him out of the room and then turned to Maliki and said, "Would you like to be prime minister?" And as I said earlier, Maliki said, "Are you serious?" And it turned out he was.

“So, there was Maliki in power, having made all sorts of promises, like they’re demanding now, that he would reach out to the Sunni minority, that he would respect human rights, he would stand up to Iran, and so forth—all of which promises, of course, he immediately broke. And, you know, he’s just a very narrow-minded, very sectarian, very paranoid character.”

- “Iraq’s Next PM? Ahmed Chalabi, Chief Peddler of False WMDs, Meets U.S. Officials as Maliki Falters,” Democracy Now!, June 20, 2014. Oh yeah, there’s talk of bringing back mega-embezzler and disinformation specialist Chalabi to take over Iraq. Just how bankrupt can U.S. policy get?

But that’s only if we believe the New York Times report on Chalabi meeting with U.S. officials, which Chalabi himself may have planted there, Cockburn speculates. You would HOPE that the NY Times, having made itself a platform for Chalabi-originated disinformation on Iraq in 2002-3 to provoke a U.S. invasion, would do some verification of a story from Chalabi, but knowing the Times, one never knows.

2] Here’s in part the version of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. State Department of the Geneva deal and what the U.S. did afterwards. It’s rather revealing:

“In the wake of the French defeat, the French and Vietnamese, along with representatives from the United States and China, met in Geneva in mid-1954 to discuss the future of Indochina. They reached two agreements. First, the French and the Viet Minh agreed to a cease-fire and a temporary division of the country along the 17th parallel. French forces would remain in the South, and Ho Chi Minh’s forces would control the North. The second agreement promised that neither the North nor the South would join alliances with outside parties, and called for general elections in 1956. Laos and Cambodia were to remain neutral.

“The United States did not sign the second agreement, establishing instead its own government in South Vietnam. As the French pulled out, the United States appointed Ngo Dinh Diem to lead South Vietnam. Like Bao Dai, Diem was an unpopular choice in Vietnam as he had waited out the nationalist struggle against France abroad. Diem had also collaborated with the Japanese occupation, but his Catholicism appealed to the Western powers. The United States also supported the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, designed to respond if there was an armed attack on any nation in the region.” [Emphases mine.]

Milestones: 1953–1960 Dien Bien Phu & the Fall of French Indochina, 1954.