PRIME Minister Blair yesterday had a meeting with the long standing CIA agent and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, who is now posing as the ‘President of Iraq’, the country which US and British forces are currently occupying.
The nature of the meeting was more a faction meeting than a meeting of government leaders since both men are long term servants of US imperialism.
As predicted they saw eye to eye on everything, with Blair declaring to Talabani that British troops will stay in Iraq ‘as long as he wants them’.
This highly personalised approach can be explained by the fact that both Talabani and British imperialism have fallen out with the Iraqi Prime Minister, and Dawa Party leader, Jaafari.
Talabani has threatened to split with Jaafari, and split the puppet regime, after denouncing the Shi’ite leader’s ‘high handed’ approach to government, while Britain no longer trusts the Shi’ite parties in southern Iraq that it once relied on to run the area for them.
Blair then issued a warning to Iran not to interfere in Iraq, following earlier press briefings by a British official that insurgents were now using ‘shaped explosives’ of the type used by the pro-Iranian movement, Hezbollah, in the Lebanon, and that Iran was responsible for the latest deaths of British troops in southern Iraq.
Chastened, or even demoralised by his experiences over lying claims over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Blair’s warning was rather more half hearted.
He said that the devices which killed British troops looked like those used by Iran but stressed ‘we cannot be sure’.
However, what we can be sure about is that British policy in southern Iraq has come unstuck. It was the British government that welcomed the Badr Brigade, the Dawa Party and SCIRI back to Iraq in May 2003, from over 20 years of exile in Iran, and gave them the job of running southern Iraq for British imperialism, a position which they sued to become the backbone of the puppet government of Iraq.
However, the deal made by Britain with Iran that allowed it to carry out this tactic is over, scotched by the US led drive to prevent Iran having a nuclear programme for providing an alternative source of energy.
The result has been a spectacular collision between the British army and its one time puppet forces in the south.
This saw the Basra police and militias seizing two SAS men in plain clothes, who they claimed were transporting bombs to explode amongst the local Shi’ites so as to raise sectarian tensions in Basra.
The British army decided to rescue the duo from a local police station and in the ensuing battle up to 12 British armoured cars were left burning.
Since then the British army’s chief of staff, Walker, has said that Blair and Bush will have to be content with a less than complete victory in Iraq, in other words its strategic aim will not be achieved.
Since then Britain has been accused of more dirty trick operations in southern Iraq.
Meanwhile the reality is, that as the conflict with Iran sharpens, more British soldiers in southern Iraq are going to die, with casualties perhaps moving towards American proportions.
The British imperialist adventure in Iraq, built on lies and a very temporary alliance with the Shi’ite movements is over.
However, quitting Iraq will be much more difficult than entering it. And, even if British troops manage to get out more or less intact, they will leave behind the biggest oil producing region in the world, in flames, intense enough to devour the entire world capitalist economy.
