PRESIDENT Bush has fallen out with the major section of his puppet regime in Iraq, that is the Dawa Party and the United Iraq Alliance movement, whose leaders spent many years in Iran, and returned to Iraq in the wake of the US and British armies in May 2003.
The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who used to be the US ambassador to Afghanistan, on Tuesday told a meeting of Shi’ite leaders that he had a personal message to pass onto them from President Bush. This was that Bush ‘doesn’t want, doesn’t support and doesn’t accept Jaafari as the next Iraqi Prime Minister’.
Haider Ubady, an aide to Jaafari, has responded by saying ‘How can they do this. An ambassador telling a foreign country what to do is unacceptable.’ The answer to the question of course, is that they can do it because the US and President Bush put these forces into power, and take it for granted that they must be replaced when their usefulness has ended.
Bush’s statement was made at the same time as US troops and Iraqi special forces organised an attack on the Al Mustafa mosque in Baghdad, and killed a number of Dawa party members, and supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr.
The latter opposes the occupation but is a leading supporter of the Dawa party and Jaafari as Prime Minister.
As a result of the raid, the Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance coalition, the dominant force in the new ‘parliament’, declined to attend talks on Monday to form the country’s long- awaited national unity government.
Instead, the party issued a statement condemning US forces for massacring Shi’ites in the mosque, while other party members have started linking US-led forces to death squads responsible for much of the sectarian killings ravaging the country.
It is now accepted that the occupying powers and the Iraqi ruling parties each have their own death squads.
Shi’ite officials have confirmed the Mosque and the compound was used by outgoing Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s Dawa party and the Mahdi Army militia belonging to Moqtada al-Sadr.
Khalilzad had earlier made repeated statements that a government of national unity should be formed as soon as possible and ministries should not be run on a sectarian basis. This was taken as a hit at the Shi’ite-run interior ministry and its connections with Shi’ite militias such as the Badr Brigade.
Now, Shi’ite politicians are accusing the US forces of organising their own death squads to conduct operations against Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, and also against Sunni opponents of the occupation, and of conspiring to bring back ex-premier Allawi to power, as the new Iraqi strongman.
Allawi, is a Shi’ite, and a former Ba’athist, who became a long standing CIA agent, and returned to Iraq with the US forces, where he was installed by Paul Bremer, the US dictator of Iraq, as Prime Minister.
He has little popular support, but has been outspoken on the issue that Iraq is descending into civil war and that it needs his strong, ruthless and counter-revolutionary leadership.
In the background is the war that the US is preparing against Iran, and presumably its desire to deal with the pro-Iranian wing of the Shi’ite leadership as the war with Iran approaches,
The prospect therefore is that the US is organising a coup to place its more reliable henchman into positions of power, brutally putting an end to any notion that it is nourishing some Iraqi democracy.
For the Iraqi insurgents of all religions and national groups the prospects have never been brighter,
With the imperialists and their agents falling out and fighting amongst themselves, the way is opening up for a massive growth of the insurgency and for the final push to drive the occupation armies out of Iraq.
This will allow the Iraqi people to decide on the government of their choice, and to use Iraq’s great natural resources to rapidly reconstruct the country and restore its position as the most advanced country in the Middle East.
