The US Is a Nation of Occupation

The Shiite government in Iraq is being hard pressed by ISIL troops, but it doesn’t want help from just anyone.

Iraq’s Shiite government is in hot water up to its chin in the battle against the ISIL Sunnis. But it’s not a religious war — at least, not yet.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the combat force of Sunni guerrillas from every imaginable Islamic nation, is taking the fight to the Iraqi army — or whatever is left of it. Iraq’s poorly led and poorly motivated soldiers have been outclassed by the ISIL warriors and have often fled the battlefield en masse, leaving their recently U.S.-supplied modern weaponry behind.

The Shiite government, led by Nouri al-Maliki since 1996, has harshly discriminated against the Sunni population and excluded [Sunnis] from any significant government posts. This followed the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, which may have had a rebalancing effect at the outset since Saddam, nominally a Sunni, had oppressed the Shiites.

But it’s far too early to call what’s happening in Iraq a religious war. At most, sectarian beliefs are once again being misused in an attempt to make the political power struggles less obvious to the world. Neither the Shiites nor the Sunnis in Iraq, especially, could even remotely be called monolithic blocks.

This is currently noticeable among the Shiites. “Their” Prime Minister al-Maliki may have already used up much of the confidence Iraqis have in him. On the other side, however, Saddam’s former Sunni elites — officials, local politicians and officers — can hardly be considered allies of ISIL. It’s possible some of them feel a certain satisfaction after years of humiliation from al-Maliki’s clique — the far-from-religious former followers of Saddam can only shudder at the thought of how a Sunni return might turn out.

The currently popular western European impression that the oppressed Shiites long for a U.S. attack on their behalf is, however, just a pipe dream not all Shiites share. That may be the case for al-Maliki and others who might profit from an American occupation, but the majority of Shiites would probably prefer to go it alone, and if outside help is needed, then preferably it should come from their religious brethren in Iran rather than from the American “infidels.”

Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of a former grand ayatollah and influential Shiite cleric, was already a sworn enemy of the U.S. Army on Iraqi soil. On Wednesday, he gave a vehement speech objecting to the presence of even U.S. military advisors. Al-Sadr called the United States a nation of occupation and said he would accept only “international assistance to the Iraqi army that didn’t come from occupiers.” The Shiite leader thus effectively killed any U.S. notion of providing military advisors to help fight ISIL, the first contingent of which took up duties on Tuesday.

During the occupation, al-Sadr’s Mahdi army of some 60,000 troops provided the bulk of lengthy and fierce opposition to U.S. troops. The Mahdi army wasn’t dissolved until early 2008, when al-Sadr founded a political movement.