Thursday, April 03, 2008

Patrick Cockburn on Sadrists and Iran

Patrick Cockburn says:
A lot of what the U.S. has done over the last five years is find a way in which Saddam is gone, but they don't have the alternative of a powerful religious Shia government backed by Iranian power. Moktada represents their worst nightmare. He is the guy who seems to be calling the shots in Iraq, is wearing a black turban, and looks and sounds a bit like the Ayatollah Khomeini. And whatever reason they overthrew Saddam for, it wasn't for that.
That's the bottom line: the US power elite don't want to withdraw US troops from Iraq until they succeed in eliminating or neutralizing Sadrists or Iran or both. If they eventually end up having to order the troops to retreat into the predominantly Kurdish area of Iraq, they will still leave behind the already 90,000-strong Sunni militias, so-called "Awakening Councils," who think that their main enemy is the Shia due to Shi'i militias' acitons during the Sunni-Shi'i civil war that began under the US occupation.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi there,

I think your blog is interesting. I would like to invite you to join our new online community at polzoo.com. We are a user generated political editorial and social network. We also choose from amongst our own bloggers to be featured on the front page. I think your voice would be a great addition to our site.

Polzoo

CEJ said...

Patrick Cockburn--along with Juan Cole--along with Michael Ware of CNN (always telling us like it is, yeah right) are major sources of disinformation about Iraq. It is the best interest of the US and its occupation collaborators to keep everyone believing that the Sunni and Shia Resistances are fighting each other. And I'm sure the US has actually done quite a lot to try and get them to go at it. But it is not a civil war.