Obama’s Charge

The U.S. president indeed celebrated the exodus from Iraq; however, in fact, he relinquishes there a time bomb which may be a pain for Israel, too.

In his solemn address of the last day, Barack Obama issued a few words that might prove to be disastrous for him. Words we could still hear about in the GOP election broadcasts — and if not there, then in the history books. So the American president said: “…we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

This is one of the most inaccurate sentences concerning the Iraq of our days, perhaps, except for the part regarding the representative government (yet this does not inspire hope either). Iraq is not sovereign — on the contrary. The state there is not holding the monopoly on the use of violence; it is certainly dependent on others — before, on the United States, nowadays increasingly on Iran; and it is not enjoying stability, but rather suffering from the trappings of a failed state.

Obama was the one to lead the departure from Iraq and the wrap-up of the war — you can’t take this from him — but he is also the one to bear responsibility should this powder keg blow up and also set on fire the oil barrels of the Persian Gulf.

There are plenty of reasons for such an explosion and for a possible disconnection between the new Iraq and America its patron. The first rationale is political-demographical. Iraq, dominated for years and years by Sunnis, is a Shiite-majority country — that, for the hour, relishes in finding release from the oppression of ages.

Iraq is not Iran, it is an Arab country with a completely different heritage and very unlike; nevertheless, the Shiites are looking right now for an identity for the new Iraq. It seems more and more like they found it — Shia-stan. To them, this is a historical justice: the place where the Shia was established is currently becoming a Shiite homeland.

Iraq Is Liquidated at the Price of the Blood of Western Fighters

The Iranians are taking great pleasure in this development. The range of their influence has doubled in the course of the decade. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — secular, Sunni and Ba’athist — is replaced by a weak and needy Shiite rule. The Americans and George Bush, the big Satans, brought them a blessing. Iraq was eliminated at the expense of the death toll of the soldiers from the American Midwest; the Sunni elite were expelled courtesy of Rumsfeld’s militant Pentagon — and what’s left is the playground for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

About two weeks ago, it was laid out on these [Maariv’s] pages about someone who is considered, at least as of the moment, the most powerful man in Iraq. Without this man’s approval nothing in the country can get done. This person is not an Iraqi. Neither is he the American ambassador. It’s General Qassem Suleimani, the head honcho of the Quds Force, the elite unit in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

When General David Petraeus, the supreme commander of the United States’ troops in Iraq, arrived to the country, he received an odd memo. An Iraqi higher-up of Shiite origin pulled out a cell phone at the meeting with him. On the screen, there appeared a text message in English: “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza,and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.” That was Suleimani’s way to mark territory, to inform the [most] senior military representative of the United States that Iraq is a domain of the Army of the Guardians.

This is how the American adventure in the Middle East ends up. America entered Iraq in order to depose a dictator who, she claimed, had a weapon of mass destruction in his possession. Almost a decade later, the real dictatorship rises eastward as we speak; its weapons of mass destruction are not some sort of lie, but an ominous truth instead. When the [Israeli] Prime Minister Sharon paid a visit to Washington on the eve of the Iraq war, he warned his friend Bush that the Americans were on their way to fight the wrong war. Sharon was right, and the price is likely to be paid (as well) by Israel.