PRESIDENT Obama is to send 1,500 more troops to Iraq to boost the Iraqi forces fighting the Islamic State (IS) militants, nearly doubling the US presence.
The Pentagon said the troops would train and assist Iraqi forces throughout the country, and are in addition to the 1,600 US troops who are already there.
Obama authorised the deployment following a request from Iraq’s Shia government, and from the US general staff who have been insisting that the US must hold the line in Iraq and do whatever it takes in terms of troop numbers to do so.
IS militants control large areas of Iraq and Syria but have been targeted by hundreds of air strikes by a US-led coalition since August.
This has not been enough to turn the ISIS tide back, principally because the US occupation and the governments that followed on from its ending have all been anti-Sunni and dedicated to keeping the Sunni masses out of politics.
One of the first acts of the 2003 US occupation was to disband the Iraqi army and smash and destroy the Iraqi state apparatus.
Many atrocities took place under the US-UK occupation, from the rise of the Shia death squads to the US-organised Abu Ghraib torture chambers and the use of poison gas in big cities in the west of Iraq, such as Fallujah, where the people remained loyal to President Saddam Hussein.
This colossal resistance meant that the US had to leave Iraq and failed in its effort to keep several thousand US troops in the country, when the Shia government was unable to grant them immunity from Iraqi law.
The regime that the US left behind under Maliki was sectarian and ant-Sunni through and through – so when the ISIS forces, who had been training in Turkey intervened in Iraq, there were no armed forces there to stop them, and many Sunnis greeted them as the lesser evil than the Shia death squads.
Now the US is back with over 3,000 ‘trainers’ to be deployed.
Everyone knows what happened in Vietnam where groups of trainers gave way to more and more troops and then an entire army of occupation that was humbled by a historic defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese peasantry.
Now the US army is back in Iraq and will attempt to carry out training in western Iraq where US troops are unloved to say the least.
They will find that the Sunni masses will not flock to their banner and that millions of Shia workers and the poor who fought them under the banner of the Mahdi Army will not favour them either.
A statement from the Pentagon said the troops would be establishing several sites to train nine Iraqi army and three Kurdish Peshmerga brigades.
The US military would also be setting up two ‘advise-and-assist operations centres’ outside Baghdad and the northern city of Irbil, the statement added.
‘US troops will not be in combat, but they will be better positioned to support Iraqi security forces as they take the fight’ to IS, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. Presumably they will not be unarmed while they are giving this support, and the need for more of them is just par for the course of the campaign that has begun.
Earnest said President Obama would also be asking Congress for $5.6bn (£3.5bn) to support the ongoing operations against IS fighters in both Iraq and Syria.
The essence of the US intervention is not just to bar the way to ISIS but to bar the way to the Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers of ISIS who want to be able to partition Iraq and annex some of its richest oil bearing areas when the time comes for such an action.
It is not for nothing that the Iraqi government has forbidden the Gulf states airforces from overflying Iraq!
When the appropriate time arrives to dismember Iraq, including Iraqi Kurdistan, the US wants to have sufficient forces on the ground to play the decisive role. This is what this US intervention is about.
The way forward for the Iraqi masses is to unite to defend all of the Iraqi people through establishing a revolutionary government in Baghdad. This will oppose US imperialism, and the Gulf feudalists and act to defend the interests of the Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian people.
