Adding Fuel to the Fire: 20,000+ Fresh Coalition Troops to Iraq. What Gives?

Well, pResident George Walker Bush, Jr., is an odd character. He's really tough to figure out. He appears to stupid to be worth my contempt, and his actions have definitely NOT earned him my trust. But is George Bush, Jr., so fallible to repeat the mistakes of history? Increasing the foreign military presence in Iraq will prove to be very negative towards finding a solution to the conflagration that started in April 2003.

Nadim Al-Jabari of ElectronicIraq.net states that

Increasing the U.S. troops will show Iraqis that the U.S. administration is against setting a timetable for withdrawing all the occupation forces. This will both increase and legitimize the Iraqi armed resistance to the occupation even more, and it will destroy all the other non-violent options. In addition, this will put an end to the participation of many Iraqi groups in the ongoing political process, because people like us will lose faith in achieving our goals and getting our country back through diplomacy.

The aim is to remove any political solution and force all parties in Iraq to resort to violent means, moreso to tear the country apart and enforce divisions. What makes this mess worse is that it might also involve the Peshmerga, elements of which have made their way into the ranks of the Baghdad Police.

Sending the Peshmerga, the Iraqi Kurdish militia, to fight Iraqi Arabs will activate other militias and justify forming even more militias in the middle and south of Iraq. This could lead to increasing the civil violence, and might even spark an Arab-Kurd civil war that will be added to the current civil conflict that was fueled by the destruction of the Shia Shrines in Samarra in February of last year.

Moreover,

The current political plan of President Bush and Prime Minister al-Maliki in establishing a US-backed coalition that includes the few Shia and Sunni parties that are justifying the occupation and working to divide Iraqi into three separate regions will do nothing other than increase the violence and confirm sectarian divisions.

Who knows? Maybe a feudalist solution is necessary for the continuation of Iraq's survival, but that place is rapidly decaying. There is no sense of nationhood. The Iraqi people are longing for freedom, and the Maliki puppet government was the form of freedom that the neocons had in mind. Oh, well, I guess hypocrisy still doesn't know any bounds.

A horrible find in Fallujah uncovered more of the Coalition's malicious intentions in Iraq, and how it seeks to further divide the religious unity in Iraq. According to Dahr Jamail,

A stepped up military offensive that targets mosques, religious leaders and Islamic customs is leading many Iraqis to believe that the US-led invasion really was a "holy war."

Photographs are being circulated of black crosses painted on mosque walls and on copies of the Quran, and of soldiers dumping their waste inside mosques. New stories appear frequently of raids on mosques and brutal treatment of Islamic clerics, leading many Iraqis to ask if the invasion and occupation was a war against Islam. Many Iraqis now recall remarks by US President George W. Bush shortly after the events of Sep. 11, 2001 when he told reporters that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while. Bush's tongue 'slipped' more than once when he spoke of 'fascist Islamists' and used other similar expressions that touched the very nerve of Muslims around the world," Sheikh Abdul Salam al-Kubayssi of the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a leading Sunni group, told IPS in Baghdad. "We wish they were just mere slips, but what is going on repeatedly makes one think of crusades over and over."

Occupation forces claim that mosque raids are being conducted because holy places are being used by resistance fighters. A leaflet distributed in Fallujah by US forces late November said mosques were being used by "insurgents" to conduct attacks against "Multinational Forces," and that this would lead to "taking proper procedures against those mosques." The statement referred to daily sniper attacks against occupation forces in Fallujah in which many US soldiers have been killed.

Local people refute these claims made by coalition forces. "Fighters never used mosques for attacking Americans because they realize the consequences and reactions from the military," a member of the local municipality council of Fallujah told IPS on condition of anonymity. "Nonetheless, US soldiers always targeted our mosques and their minarets."

During Operation Phantom Fury of November 2004, scores of mosques in Fallujah were damaged or destroyed completely. Fallujah is known as the city of mosques because it has so many. Many of these are Sunni mosques. AMS leaders are now enemy number one for US occupation forces as well as the Shi'ite-dominated government. Through continuous arrests of its members and the raids against mosques all over the Sunni areas of the country, including their headquarters on the outskirts of Baghdad, the AMS has often expressed feelings of persecution.

On the other hand, the occupation forces have been supportive of clerics who took part in the political structure that the US coalition created in Iraq. These include Shi'ite clerics and political leaders like current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of the Dawa Party. Maliki has called AMS leader Dr. Harith al-Dhari a "terrorist leader" and a murderer. Many Sunnis who are more secular also feel persecuted by the occupation.

"I am not a follower of al-Dhari or any other leader," Prof. Malik al-Rawi of the National Institute for Scientific Research of Baghdad told IPS. "In fact most Sunnis do not literally follow any leader for religious reasons. Yet after we found Americans targeting our religious symbols, we had to stand together around the man who did not sell us to the occupation."

Dr. Rawi, avowedly a secular Sunni, told IPS that the number of Iraqis who believe the occupation is waging a "religious war" increased dramatically after the 2004 attacks on Fallujah. "Those sieges, along with all the events that followed in Samarra, al-Qa'im, Haditha and now Siniya have led people to think of the crusades," he added. "Americans do hate us for some reason and we do not find any reason but religion."

It is not just Sunni Iraqis who claim that their mosques are not respected by occupation forces. The mostly Shi'ite city of Najaf was exposed to massive US military assaults during August 2004. Many attacks came dangerously close to the sacred Imam Ali shrine, damaging its outer walls. Other US raids on Shi'ite mosques in Baghdad have infuriated Iraq's Shi'ite population.

Some Iraqi analysts say the perceived religious conflict seems to have expanded as the occupation has progressed. "The world must be aware that this US administration is pushing the situation to the black hole of a new religious conflict by giving the green light to their soldiers to attack mosques and arrest clerics whenever they feel like it," Kassim Jabbar, an Iraqi political analyst from Baghdad University told IPS. "Even people with the highest education standards are wondering why US leaders have not restricted attacks upon religious symbols in our country."

Just to break that whole article for you, the U.S. is obviously fueling the flames for inter-religious conflict, and also making it appear that the Iraqis are being attacked for their religion, considering that many soldiers of the Coalition are anti-Islamic or anti-Arab racists, if not most of these soldiers. The image of the Coalition can't be restored at all.

But Bush has shown himself to be a complex character indeed... an odd character at best. I can't believe he went to the extent of sending many troops to Iraq. More troops means more trouble, not more order, which the Coalition has proven itself adept at destroying and corrupting. The fact that this came after the execution of Saddam will be nothing but ammunition to the Iraqis who believe, rightly so, that the Coalition is here to stay and control and colonialize Iraq at best with its military occupation, while the big fat-cat corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel continue to suck Iraq dry of its resources. When will this madness ever stop?

Salaam, from
Saracen