We hope 2020 is when the American public finally looks at the fateful choice between war and peace with 20/20 vision, and we will start severely punishing Trump and every other U.S. politician who opts for threats over diplomacy, war over peace.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies – January 2, 2020
Itās a new year, and the U.S. has found a new enemyāan Iraqi militia called Kataāib Hezbollah. How tragically predictable was that? So who or what is Kataāib Hezbollah? Why are U.S. forces attacking it? And where will this lead?
Kataāib Hezbollah is one of theĀ Popular Mobilization UnitsĀ (PMU) that were recruited to fight the Islamic State after the Iraqi armed forces collapsed and Mosul, Iraqās second-largest city, fell to IS in June 2014. The first six PMUs were formed by five Shiite militias that all received support from Iran, plus Muqtada al-Sadrās Iraqi nationalist Peace Company, the reincarnation of his anti-occupation Mahdi Army militia, which he had previously disarmed in 2008 under an agreement with the Iraqi government.
Kataāib HezbollahĀ was one of those five original Shiite militias, and it existed long before the fight against IS. It was a small Shiite group founded before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was part of the Iraqi Resistance throughout the U.S. occupation. In 2011, it reportedly had 1,000 fighters, who were paid $300 to $500 per month, probably mainly funded by Iran. It fought fiercely until the last U.S. occupation forces were withdrawn in December 2011, and claimed responsibility for a rocket attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Baghdad in June 2011. Since forming a PMU in 2014, its leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, has been the overall military commander of the PMUs, reporting directly to the national security adviser in the prime ministerās office.
In the fight against IS, the PMUs proliferated quickly. Most political parties in Iraq responded to a fatwa by Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani to form and join these units by forming their own. At the peak of the war with IS, the PMUs comprised about 60 brigades with hundreds of thousands of Shia fighters, and even included up toĀ 40,000 Sunni Iraqis.
In the context of the war against the Islamic State, the U.S. and Iran have both provided a great deal ofĀ military supportĀ to the PMU and other Iraqi forces, and the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga have also received support from Iran. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif in New York in September 2014 to discuss the crisis, and U.S. Ambassador Stuart Jones said in December 2014, āLetās face it, Iran is an important neighbor to Iraq. There has to be cooperation between Iran and Iraq. The Iranians are talking to the Iraqi security forces and weāre talking to Iraqi security forcesā¦ Weāre relying on them to do the deconfliction.ā
U.S. officials and corporate media are falsely painting Kataāib Hezbollah and the PMUs as independent, renegade Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, but they are reallyĀ an official partĀ of the Iraq security forces. AsĀ a statementĀ from the Iraqi prime ministerās office made clear, the U.S. airstrikes were an āAmerican attack on the Iraqi armed forces.ā And these were not just any Iraqi military forces, but forces that have borne the brunt of some of the fiercest fighting against the Islamic State.
Open hostility between U.S. forces and Kataāib Hezbollah began six months ago, when the U.S. allowed Israel to use U.S. bases in Iraq and/or Syria to launchĀ drone strikesĀ against Kataāib Hezbollah and other PMU forces in Iraq. There are conflicting reports on exactly where the Israeli drones were launched from, but the U.S. had effective control of Iraqi airspace and was clearly complicit in the drone strikes. This led to a campaign by Shia cleric/politician Muqtada al-Sadr and other anti-occupation parties and politicians in the Iraqi National Assembly to once again call for the expulsion of U.S. forces from Iraq, as they successfully did in 2011, and the U.S. was forced to acceptĀ new restrictionsĀ on its use of Iraqi airspace.
Then, at the end of October, U.S. bases and the Green Zone in Baghdad came under a new wave ofĀ rocket and mortar attacks. While previous attacks were blamed on the Islamic State, the U.S. blamed the new round of attacks on Kataāib Hezbollah. After aĀ sharp increaseĀ in rocket attacks on U.S. bases in December, including one that killed a U.S. military contractor on December 27, the Trump administration launched airstrikes on December 29 that killed 25 members of Kataāib Hezbollah and wounded 55. Prime Minister Abdul-MahdiĀ calledĀ the strikes a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and declared three national days of mourning for the Iraqi troops that U.S. forces killed.
The U.S. attacks also led toĀ massive protestsĀ that besieged the U.S. Embassy and former U.S. occupation headquarters in the Green Zone in Baghdad. U.S. forces at the embassyĀ reportedlyĀ used tear gas and stun grenades against the protesters, leaving 62 militiamen and civilians wounded. After the siege, the Trump administration announced that it would send more troops to the Middle East. Approximately 750 troopsĀ are expectedĀ to be sent as a result of the embassy attack and another 3,000 could be deployed in the next few days.
The U.S. retaliation was bound to inflame tensions with the Iraqi government and increase popular pressure to close U.S. bases in Iraq. In fact, if Kataāib Hezbollah is indeed responsible for the rocket and mortar attacks, this is probably exactly the chain of events they intended to provoke. Incensed at the Trump administrationās blatant disregard for Iraqi sovereignty and worried about Iraq being dragged into a U.S. proxy war with Iran that will spiral out of control, a broad swath of Iraqi politicalĀ leadersĀ are now calling for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
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The U.S. military presence in Iraq was reestablished in 2014 as part of the campaign against the Islamic State, but that campaign has wound down substantially since the near destruction and reoccupation of Mosul, Iraqās second-largest city, in 2017. The number of attacks and terrorist incidents linked to the Islamic State in Iraq hasĀ declined steadilyĀ since then, from 239 in March 2018 to 51 in November 2019, according to Iraq researcher Joel Wing. Wingās data makes it clear that IS is aĀ vastly diminishedĀ force in Iraq.
The real crisis facing Iraq is not a growing IS but the massive public protests, starting in October, that have exposed the dysfunction of the Iraqi government itself. Months of streetĀ protestsĀ have forced Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi to submit his resignationāhe is now simply acting as a caretaker pending new elections. Severe repression by government forces left over 400 protesters dead, but this has only fueled even greater public outrage.
These demonstrations are not just directed against individual Iraqi politicians or against Iranian influence in Iraq but against the entire post-2003 political regime established by the U.S. occupation. Protesters blame the governmentās sectarianism, its corruption and the enduring foreign influence of both IranĀ and the U.S.Ā for the failure to invest Iraqās oil wealth in rebuilding Iraq and improving the lives of a new generation of young Iraqis.
The recent attack on Kataāib Hezbollah has actually worked in favor of Iran,Ā turning Iraqi public opinionĀ and Iraqi leaders more solidly against the U.S. military presence. So why has the U.S. jeopardized what influence it still has in Iraq by launching airstrikes against Iraqi forces? And why is the U.S. maintaining a reported 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, at Al-Asad airbase in Anbar province and smaller bases across Iraq? It already hasĀ nearly 70,000Ā troops in other countries in the region, not least 13,000 in neighboring Kuwait, its largest permanent foreign base after Germany, Japan and South Korea.
While the Pentagon continues to insist that the U.S. troop presence is solely to help Iraq fight ISIS, Trump himself has defined its mission as āalso to watch over Iran.ā HeĀ toldĀ that to U.S. servicemen in Iraq in a December 2018 Christmas visit and reiterated it in a February 2019Ā CBS interview. Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul-MahdiĀ has made clearĀ that the U.S. does not have permission to use Iraq as a base from which to confront Iran. Such a mission would be patently illegal under IraqāsĀ 2005 constitution, drafted with the help of the United States, whichĀ forbidsĀ using the countryās territory to harm its neighbors.
Under the 2008Ā Strategic Framework AgreementĀ between the U.S. and Iraq, U.S. forces may only remain in Iraq at the ārequest and invitationā of the Iraqi government. If that invitation is withdrawn, they must leave, as they were forced to do in 2011. The U.S. presence in Iraq is now almost universally unpopular, especially in the wake of U.S. attacks on the very Iraqi armed forces they are supposedly there to support.
Trumpās effort to blame Iran for this crisis is simply a ploy to divert attention from his own bungled policy. In reality, the blame for the present crisis should be placed squarely on the doorstep of the White House itself. The Trump administrationās reckless decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and revert to the U.S. policy of threats and sanctions thatĀ never worked beforeĀ is backfiring as badly as the rest of the world predicted it would, and Trump has only himself to blame for itāand maybe John Bolton.
So will 2020 be the year when Donald Trump is finally forced to fulfill hisĀ endless promisesĀ to bring U.S. troops home from at least one of its endless wars and military occupations?Ā Or will Trumpās penchant for doubling down on brutal and counterproductive policies only lead us deeper into his pet quagmire of ever-escalating conflict with Iran, with the U.S.ās beleaguered forces in Iraq as pawns in yet another unwinnable war?
We hope that 2020 will be the year when the American public finally looks at the fateful choice between war and peace with 20/20 vision, and that we will start severely punishing Trump and every other U.S. politician who opts for threats over diplomacy, coercion over cooperation and war over peace.
Featured image: US Embassy in Iraq under siege., Photo Credit: Creative Commons // Common Dreams
Medea Benjamin
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human right organization Global Exchange. Follow her on twitter at @MedeaBenjamin.
Nicolas Davies
Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on "Obama At War" in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader.
