Wed. August 24, 2005
Thousands of Americans & Iraqis Have Died for IRAN?
Through the foreign policy of George W. Bush the Islamic regime of Iran has now been able to achieve what it never could while Saddam Hussein, the secular leader of Iraq, was in power: Take over the entire southern region of Iraq which produces 80% of Iraqi oil. Peter Galbraith, the former Ambassador to Croatia who has spent many months in Iraq since the war began, states that Iran directly controls the entire southern Shi'ite sector of Iraq through the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq. This Council is Iranian based, was elected in Shi'ite areas and has shaped the Iraqi Constitution that is being ratified. Galbraith writes in the New York Review of Books (excerpted below), "Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern—and legislate—without authority from Baghdad."
Only American "patriots support the continued sacrifice of troops" on the colossal fiction that they are building and protecting a national Iraqi democracy. All evidence is that the Bush administration does not believe it. The Bush administration, its contractors and oil clients are aligned with the Shi'ite-Iranian based oil producing south and the Kurds in the North. They have all written off the oil-dry Sunnis in the middle; US soldiers in the Sunni areas are knowingly exploited by the Bush administration to protect what is left of the prevailing US domestic political myth of the American Right Wing: The Iraqi invasion was for US protection and Iraqi Democracy. Throughout Iraq it is well understood that Iran is already in control. -- Keni Washington
New York Review of Books article,
"Bush's Islamic Republic"
August 5, 2005
Excerpt...
A Shiite list won a narrow majority in Iraq's January elections. Sponsored by Iraq's leading Shiite, Ali al-Sistani (himself an Iranian who was therefore ineligible to vote for his own list), the list includes Shiite religious parties, some secular Shiites including the one-time Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi, and even a few Sunni Arabs. Real power in Shiite Iraq rests, however, with two religious parties: Abdel Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa ("Call," in English) of Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Of the two, SCIRI is the more pro-Iranian. Both parties have military wings, and SCIRI's Badr Corps has grown significantly from the five thousand fighters that harassed Saddam's regime from Iran in the decades before the war; it now works closely with Iraq's Shiite interior minister, until recently the corps' commander, to provide security and fight Sunni Arab insurgents.
SCIRI and Dawa want Iraq to be an Islamic state. They propose to make Islam the principal source of law, which most immediately would affect the status of women. For Muslim women, religious law—rather than Iraq's relatively progressive civil code—would govern personal status, including matters relating to marriage, divorce, property, and child custody. A Dawa draft for the Iraqi constitution would limit religious freedom for non-Muslims, and apparently deny such freedom altogether to peoples not "of the book," such as the Yezidis (a significant minority in Kurdistan), Zoroastrians, and Bahais.
This program is not just theoretical. Since Saddam's fall, Shiite religious parties have had de facto control over Iraq's southern cities. There Iranian-style religious police enforce a conservative Islamic code, including dress codes and bans on alcohol and other non-Islamic behavior. In most cases, the religious authorities govern—and legislate—without authority from Baghdad.
