IRAQ’S election commission has barred almost 500 candidates and many parties from running in the ‘national’ elections on 7 March.
A parliamentary committee says that some of those banned had ties to the Ba’ath party which ruled Iraq before 2003.
Among those banned are prominent Sunni politicians, including the Defence Minister Abdulqadir al-Obeidi and the nationalist politician Saleh al-Mutlak.
The end result of the banning will be a Sunni boycott of the election and the continuation of a government of leaders most of whom spent the years between 1979-2003 in Tehran.
Saleh al-Mutlak heads the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue and is a former Ba’ath party member, who has formed an electoral alliance with other prominent Sunni politicians, and the former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who is a secular Shi’ite.
Allawi was also a Ba’athist, but broke with Saddam and became an agent of the CIA. He returned to Iraq along with the American tanks and was made Prime Minister by the US colonial governor, Paul Bremmer.
Allawi was the Prime Minister who took the leading role in the crushing of the insurgency in Fallujah, involving the use of all kinds of banned weapons to destroy the city.
He is, however, a secular politician and made way for the Shi’ite religious parties who were allowed back to Iraq from Iran and became the mainstay of the US-UK occupation.
Allawi now finds himself in alliance with other ex-Ba’athists and with those whose loyalty continues to be to Saddam Hussein. He is still very close to the CIA.
The end result of the US and UK imperialist policy to overthrow Saddam – their ally at the time of the 1979 war against Iran, and to kill one million Iraqis, turning four million into refugees and smashing Iraq’s infrastructure – has been the elevation of Iran into the major power in the Gulf and the bringing of a pro-Iranian regime to Iraq!
Now with imperialism planning a war with Iran, the US is finding that it has more and more in common with the Ba’athists, who have now returned to leading positions in the armed forces and who are volunteering to fight al Qaeda in the Yemen. Members of the puppet regime now consider that the US may well be a party to a military coup to overthrow it and restore an anti-Iranian regime in Baghdad led by Ba’athists and ex-Ba’athists. This debacle is what millions of people were killed and made refugees for!
Saddam’s second in command, Hassan Ali al Majid, who commanded the defence of Basra in 2003, is living a charmed life in the custody of the US occupiers, after three death sentences were passed on him by the Iraqi puppet government’s judiciary.
Meanwhile, President Obama has pledged to withdraw all US combat troops from Iraq by the end of August 2010.
A US commander has, however, expressed his fears about the situation. Admiral Mike Mullen said that he had spoken to Iraq’s defence minister, about Iranian incursions into Iraq and the seizure of part of an Iraqi oil field, but it was for leaders in Tehran and Baghdad to resolve the dispute. Iranian troops are believed to have now left the Fakkah oil field, which is close to the Iranian border.
‘All of us are concerned about the influence of Iran,’ Admiral Mullen told a news conference in Baghdad.
The former British ambassador to Baghdad, John Jenkins went further. He told the Chilcot inquiry: ‘Iraq faces a real possibility of a military coup. . . you only need look at the history of Iraq to understand that a realistic threat still exists.’
With imperialism’s forces being stretched from Iraq to the Gulf and from Pakistan to the Yemen, the conditions are being created for the overthrow of the puppet regime in Iraq and for the Iraqi people to take back control over their country and their oil wealth.
They must, however, refuse to play the game of US imperialism. They must establish an agreement with the Iranian government and people to unite to drive imperialism out of the Middle East and the Gulf.
