Iraq’s prime minister has turned toward enlisting the assistance of Shiite militias, the Iranian Shiite regime and Russia.

More... (http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/27/iraq-j27.html)

As 300 American special forces personnel arrive in Iraq, ostensibly to advise the beleaguered Iraqi military, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is defying the outpouring of recriminations from the Obama administration and American foreign policy establishment over the collapse of his government’s control over large areas of Iraq’s west and north to ISIS and the Sunni rebellion. He has dismissed Washington’s accusations that his regime’s persecution of Sunni political parties is to blame and rejected US pressure that he stand down as prime minister to enable the formation of a “national unity” government. Instead, he has turned toward enlisting the assistance of Shiite militias within Iraq, the Iranian Shiite regime and Russia.
Maliki’s rhetoric toward the Obama administration has become increasingly bitter since he held talks with Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday. On Wednesday, he labelled the US calls for a “national unity” government as plans for a “coup.” Everything points to Shiite political factions using the July 1 sitting of the Iraqi parliament to assemble another Shiite-dominated government, whether headed by Maliki or another figure. Most Sunni politicians will not attend, and representatives of the Kurdish nationalist parties that rule Iraq’s Kurdish north as an autonomous region have declared that they will most likely boycott the parliament.
Yesterday, in an interview with the BBC’s Arabic service, Maliki denounced the US for failing to provide Iraq with the F-16 jet fighters that it ordered after the US military withdrawal in 2011. “I’ll be frank and say that we were deluded when we signed the contract,” Maliki said. “We should have sought to buy other jet fighters, like British, French and Russian, to secure the air cover for our forces. If we had air cover, we would have averted what had happened.”
Maliki declared that his government has made an emergency purchase of jet fighters from Russia and Belarus and that they would “arrive in Iraq in two or three days.” He proceeded to praise air strikes carried out by the Syrian air force on Tuesday against ISIS forces holding the key Iraq-Syrian border crossing of Qaim, in Iraq’s western Anbar province. While Maliki insisted that the strikes had only been made on targets on the Syrian side of the border and that his government had not requested them, he stated: “[W]e welcome this action. We welcome any Syrian strike against ISIS because this group targets both Iraq and Syria .... The final winners are our two countries.”
The Sunni extremist fighters that ISIS has poured into Iraq since the beginning of the year were assembled and armed in Syria, and were part of the forces that the US, the European powers, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are using to try and overthrow the Iranian-backed regime of President Bashir al-Assad. Assad’s traditional support base is among Syria’s large Alawite minority. ISIS and other Sunni-based rebels have conducted their insurrection with the openly sectarian perspective of purging Alawites from power.

The Trots are one of the few sources for honesty on this particular issue. The US may not be angling for a war, but if they were so angling, they could do little better than this...

http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/mother-of-all-battles/article6185067.ece

A large number of national surveys have been conducted in Iraq over the decade since the U.S. invasion, between 2003 and 2013, and some of the results are as follows, in averaged estimates:

1. Support for the idea that Iraq would be a better place if religion and politics were to be separated has grown among Sunnis from 60 per cent in 2004 to 81 per cent in 2013. They have obviously drawn some lessons from the rule of the sectarian militias and the consequent mass killings. The ISIS, with its freshly minted caliphate, is supposed to represent these people, “the Sunni community” as mediatic discourse calls them. Among the Shias, such percentages are lower but still hover around 50 per cent.

2. Recognition of Iraqi identity as primary—and religious, sectarian or even Arab identity as secondary—was 22 per cent among Sunnis in 2004 but rose to 80 per cent in 2008. Among the Shias the corresponding figures are 28 per cent in 2004 and 72 per cent in 2007. On both sides of the supposed sectarian divide, the sense of a secular national identity of Iraqiness has grown dramatically precisely during the years when a sectarian Constitution, with mandatory sectarian affiliation of political parties, was being imposed by the Americans and large-scale sectarian violence was getting organised. Only among the Kurds was a sense of Iraqi national identity quite weak, but then, interestingly, their militia, the Peshmargas, visualise themselves as a “national” Kurdish militia, not a religious-sectarian one.

3. In a national survey conducted in 2011, 86 per cent among the Sunni Arabs, 75 per cent among the Shias, and 91 per cent among the Kurds preferred a government that obeyed people’s wishes over one that enforced the Sharia. The same applied when it came to the choice of leaders, with secular nationalist leaders preferred over religious ones by that same overwhelming margin.

4. Around 90 per cent of both Shias and Sunnis do not want to have Americans as their neighbours. After the sanctions, the invasion, the occupation, and the destruction of their country, this shared sentiment makes sense.

5. Interestingly, a much lower percentage but still a majority of both Shias and Sunnis do not want Iran as a neighbour either. This sentiment is harder to interpret. I am persuaded to believe, however, that the sentiment has to do with bitter memories of the Iran-Iraq war in which, as predictable patriots, they blame Iran (justly or not). It is also conceivable that as an overwhelmingly secular population, they do not particularly like Irani clerical regime and its religion-ridden world view.

These figures are an extraordinary tribute to a people who have been subjected to such extremes of sectarian violence and manipulation and have yet persisted in their modern, secular, nationalist beliefs. They are also a tribute to the persistence of deeply ingrained civilisational values that were greatly strengthened during the republican period and which survived even so brutal an invasion and the fraternal genocides that were deliberately unleashed soon thereafter.

Sectarianism is not a social value among the great majority of Iraqis, nor is religion a part of their sense of desirable kinds of polity and state. State religiosity and sectarianism came with the U.S. invasion. The U.S. occupiers came armed with Orientalist knowledge which claimed that Muslims were a hyper-religious people and that modern secular political values were alien or an elite imposition on them; they will consider you a legitimate occupier only if you organise their polity on religious and sectarian lines. This older knowledge was supplemented with the more recent Western knowledge production, deeply influenced by monarchical and clerical elites of the region, which said that the Shia-Sunni divide is the basic divide in Islam and in Iraq most certainly; that the Saddam government was a “Sunni” minority regime oppressing the Shia majority; and that the U.S. troops would be greeted with flowers if they were to be seen as liberators of the Shia majority. They also came armed not only with the prior experience of their co-invaders, the British, who had occupied Iraq in the past and had made much use of the various sectarian elites, but also with the knowledge of the confessional Constitution that France had devised for Lebanon and which has made it impossible for Lebanon to have either a stable government or a modern, secular constitutional structure. They foisted something resembling the Lebanese dispensation on Iraq, a perfect recipe for “Divide and Rule”, with the office of the Prime Minister permanently assigned to the Arab Shia (majority), the much less meaningful office of the Speaker of Parliament to Arab Sunnis (minority), and the largely symbolic office of the President to the Kurds (not a religious but an ethnic minority, mostly Sunni but also with a significant Shia component). The American occupation was thus the death knell of the republican, modern, secular, nationalist Iraqi state, and a deliberate attempt to undermine all such solidarities by institutionalising perennial sectarian conflicts.

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