Selling the War with Iran

Nir Rosen:

Moreover the dominant parties in the government and in those units of the security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today. Moreover, the Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don’t want them. So Iran is a convenient scapegoat to explain the strength of the Sadrists, a strength actually resulting from the fact that they are a genuinely popular mass movement. Blaming Iran also lets the Americans maintain the illusion that the Mahdi Army’s ceasefire is still in effect.

… To the Post as to most establishment officials in the media and government, all social and political movements in the Middle East are either al Qaeda or Iranian plots, or for Senator McCain, a bit of both. These people are unable to see social and political movements in the Middle East as the collective action of poor and oppressed people. People in the region were anti-American before Islamism became the dominant trend, and they were battling American imperialism as secularists and nationalists. During the cold war every popular movement was blamed on a Soviet conspiracy. Now people in the region battle American imperialism as Islamists, but it is the fight that created the movements, not the other way around. And the fight continues.

… Most of those who fight the Americans in Iraq do so not at the bidding of a foreign power but out of genuine and sincere opposition to the American occupation. The Americans never grasped this and always assumed it was about the money, or al Qaeda, and now part of a silly Iranian conspiracy. After at first siding with Iraq’s Shiites much to the consternation of America’s so called “moderate” Sunni allies, the Americans are now targeting Shiites and perhaps even Shiite Iran as Bush prepares for once last war on his path to the “New Middle East.” But without the help of an acquiescent media supplicating to Bush administration and US military officials they might not be able to go to war once again.

(Via A Tiny Revolution.)