How the Shiites Alliance deceived the U.S.!

A let­ter pub­lished on the Lebanese news­pa­per An-nahar 23-10-2002 [still in the newspaper’s archive, $10 to pur­chase]. Although the U.S. admin­is­tra­tion was happy to hear that Shiite-parties are ready to coop­er­ate to top­ple Sad­dam, the U.S. rejected this offer at the begin­ning, and to be adopted later by Don­ald Rums­feld and the Pen­ta­gon as the only option to con­trol Iraq.

The let­ter con­tains two lies:

First is that these par­ties reflect the major­ity of Shi­ites in Iraq, who are are the most dis­ad­van­taged community.

The sec­ond con­firms that the lead­ers of these par­ties, espe­cially “Supreme Coun­cil” is ready to coop­er­ate with the U.S. and cut all ties with Iran.

Excerpts from the let­ter:

Iraqi Shi­ites case

Although the Shi­ites in Iraq are the major­ity, they never been in power for cen­turies, .… Since the inde­pen­dence of the mod­ern Iraqi state and that is sev­enty years ago, the coun­try has been ruled by Sun­nis who immu­nized them­selves by an all-Sunni army…most of the gov­ern­ment high offi­cial posts, police offi­cers and senior offi­cials of state are given to Sun­nis …Our posi­tion for the past years was against the British because they handed over the power to the Sun­nis after they with­draw from Iraq…

Rela­tion with the U.S.

As for the U.S. we do not have a direct rela­tion­ship with them, and that makes our hope with them very dif­fer­ent from the others…

Rela­tion with Iran

What dis­tin­guishes the Iraqi Shi­ites from Iran’s Shi­ite are:

- The Islamic gov­ern­ment in Iran is based on the “supreme jurist”, which is rejected by the Supreme reli­gious author­ity in Najaf.

The reli­gious author­ity in Najaf gives the peo­ple the free­dom to choose and select their own reli­gious ref­er­ences… Free direct elec­tion and free choice are the very foun­da­tions which dif­fers the Shi­ites of Iraq form the Iran­ian Shiites.

- Iraq is part of the great Arab nation and the Iraq’s Shi­ites are Arabs, shar­ing the same lan­guage, feel­ings and race. If Shi­aism has drafted the Iraqi indi­vid­ual and soci­ety, then Ara­bism for­mu­lated their personality.

- It is true, that many Iraqi Shi­ites Islamists live in Iran as a result of the Iraqi gov­ern­ment aggres­sion against the Shi­ites, but many of these Islamists do not share their fel­low Iran­ian Shi­ites ideas, goals and tac­tics. In addi­tion, par­ties and polit­i­cal groups are not all Mus­lims, there are Shi­ites patri­otic, nation­al­is­tic, left­ist and demo­c­ra­tic par­ties also.

The U.S. rec­om­men­da­tion was to form an alliance with Shi­ite par­ties and give them the priv­i­leges to dom­i­nate Iraq, regard­less of their links to Iran, and as the best allies of the United States to be used as a tool against the Arab countries.

Recent events related the SOFA showed that this alliance is non­sense, and the United Shi­ites Alliance returned to its Iran­ian bases. Just recently the U.S. dis­cov­ered that the delay in sign­ing the secu­rity agree­ment from the United Shi­ites Alliance is not based on national inter­ests but it is an Iran­ian demand [and the U.S. is sur­prised by this posi­tion as reported by the first sec­re­tary of the U.S. embassy in Iraq].

And this was the first decep­tion — There is sec­ond one.