We not only haven’t met the enemy, we haven’t any clue. . .
So it’s the Mahdi Army and their Iranian backers causing all that violence in Iraq, says the Army:
Nearly three-quarters of the attacks that kill or wound American soldiers in Baghdad are carried out by Iranian-backed Shiite groups, the United States military said Wednesday.
Senior officers in the American division that secures the capital said that 73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called “special groups.”
The American military uses that term to describe groups trained by Iran that fight alongside the Mahdi Army but do not obey the orders of the militia’s figurehead, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, to observe a cease-fire. But Col. Allen Batschelet, the Baghdad division’s chief of staff, conceded that there was overlap between the groups.
“These two groups are so amorphous; they go back and forth between one another,” the colonel said at a briefing in Baghdad.
“We see evidence of a guy who might be working very hard inside Jaish al-Mahdi to present himself as a mainstream, kind of compliant person,” he said, using the Arabic name for the Mahdi Army, “yet we have other indicators that will show him kind of working the night job doing special group, criminal kind of stuff.”
And yet:
Iran’s foreign minister, Manuchehr Mottaki, strongly backed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s attack on the Mahdi Army militia on Wednesday. He said, “Weapons should be only in the hands of the Iraqi army.” The Iraqi army appears increasingly to be dominated by cadres of the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and it and ISCI are key Iranian clients in Iraq. What Mottaki said therefore makes complete sense. What doesn’t make sense is the Bush administration’s long-term effort to misrepresent the nativist Sadr Movement and its Mahdi Army, based in Iraq’s festering slums, as Iran-backed.
Meanwhile, General Petraeus, who in testimony to Congress blamed Iranian special forces for directing Mahdi Army attacks in Iraq has been slotted to replace Admiral Fallon, who reportedly was hostile to the administration’s interest in attacking Iran, as commander of CENTCOM, the military command responsible for military action in the Middle East theater of operations which includes both Iraq and Iran.
Tim, from Balloon Juice adds:
I bet those nefarious Iranian agents are in the east, west, south and north of Baghdad.
Wait, no they’re not. The string-pulling Persians are sitting in the Green Zone lunching comfortably with the Iraqi Prime Minister, whose Badr-allied security forces they control more than he does. After the Basra crackdown Iran sided decisively with Nouri al-Maliki and against Muqtada al-Sadr. It’s Sadr, the nationalist partisan of Iraq’s internal debate over Iranian influence vs. home rule, who has a wide lead in American casualties. Calling Sadr the Iranian stooge is like denouncing the Democratic party for supporting torture.
For all this blathering about Iranian influence in Iraq, are these people really so dumb that they can’t figure out the key figures in Iraqi government we are supporting spent a decade or more in Iran, as special guests of the mullahs?
