Thursday, April 12, 2007

A Mammoth Problem In The Iraqi Tar Pits

The secret ingredient in Thursday's lunch meat at the Iraqi parliament building cafeteria was explosive. A suicide bomber detonated in the cafeteria killing two lawmakers and injuring ten others. Forgive me for sounding a little unsympathetic but this is just another attack within the protected green zone that republicans such as our president and Senator John McCain have raved about in terms of safety.
"I am standing now at the site of the explosion and looking at the severed legs of the person who carried out the operation. If this tells us anything, it tells us that security is lax," said Mohammed al-Dayni, a member of the National Dialogue Front.
Also, another suicide bomber destroyed the al-Sarafiya bridge in Baghdad killing 10 people and injuring 26 others as cars drove into the river amidst the explosion. And with all of this violence continuing in Iraq, who do we blame? Certainly not ourselves. No. We blame Iran.
"We know that there are [EFPs-explosively formed penetrators] being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country [Iraq], and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees' debriefs," said Major General William Caldwell, the U.S. military spokesman.
If these detainees' reports are even accurate, citing previous methods by the military to extract information from prisoners (Abu Ghraib), then what exactly is the issue here? I wish that I could simply believe the intelligence but our government's intelligence gathering sources have been--how should I say--completely inaccurate and biased to the administration's agendas up to this point.
The spokesman of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, General Ramazan Sharif said in response to Caldwell's accusations, "This sort of news and information is planned by occupier [U.S.] forces in Iraq as part of their psychological operations against Iran."
Now, for starters, Bush has been the boy who cried war since 9/11. We had sketchy intelligence pushed by the Bush Administration that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and so we went to war where we found nothing. Oops. Speed up to today and we have once again more intelligence coming in that now Iran is supporting the insurgency within Iraq.
This is where I play the devil's advocate for just a moment. What is Iran doing that the U.S. is not? Assuming that the intelligence (if that's what it is) is correct, Iran is interested in training and arming the Shiite Iraqis because Iran itself is a Shiite nation surrounded by Sunnis. If the armed and trained Shiites succeed in taking the country and kicking out all memories of the U.S. in a traditional Iranian fashion then Iran will have a new neighboring ally in the Middle East which can prove most useful with the growing tensions between them and the west. The U.S. is arming and training Iraqis as well with the hopes of protecting their interests that they have invested so heavily in. If Iraq's oil fields are open to the U.S. then having Iraqis in power who are friends (in debt?) to the United States will prove very useful as well.
Either way, oil is at the base here. The U.S. doesn't want Iraq befriending Iran because then the majority of the world's oil supply is in the hands of our enemies and let's be real--the U.S. needs its oil. Gobble, gobble, gobble. This is all about power and money and who will be the ones reaping the benefits. Unfortunately, neither of these wolves in sheep's' clothing care about the Iraqis themselves. To whom the oil fields are open to and to whom this new nation will ally itself with in the coming conflicts brewing in the sands of the Middle East are the only issues on the tables of Iran and the U.S. Meanwhile, the people of Iraq are suffering as these two powers fight over the right to abuse and exploit these people once stability is restored.
The innocent people of Iraq are drowning in the oil the rest of the world so desperately covets and I'm afraid that despite whoever wins over Iraq, the nation will very soon become nothing more than a tar pit filled with the remains of those who fought for a better life and in return found themselves in over their heads.