Foreign Fighter Myth Exposed Jim Krane

“Foreign Fighter” Myth Exposed

Jim Krane of AP is throwing cold water all over the repeated allegations of the Interim Governing Council that foreign fighters are playing any significant role in the Iraqi insurgency against the US. In fact, almost all the Fallujah fighters are Iraqis, and the US has captured no one there for sure who is a foreign guerrilla. The Muqtada al-Sadr movement is the farthest thing from being Iranian or foreign– it is homegrown ghetto Shiism. A prime source of the canards about foreign fighters is Dan Senor, CPA spokesman, who says he learned his politics while an intern at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (which now serves as the Likud Party lobby in the US Congress).

The author does not mention one important latent function of the falsehoods about foreign fighters. These are intended to lay the groundwork for US wars against, and occupations of, Syria and Iran. Note that if there are foreign fighters in Iraq at all, many of them have come in from Jordan. And yet, Jordan is never threatened with being invaded, because it is already seen as cooperative in Washington and Tel Aviv. Yet Washington’s sabres have already been rattled at Syria for supposedly not better policing its long and porous border with Iraq (as if the US does a good job with policing its own porous borders). If last Tuesday’s bombings in Damascus were the work of al-Qaeda, it is highly unlikely that Syria will allow armed Islamists to transit its territory. As Washington seems incapable of conceiving, the Baath Party is secular, and in Syria it is largely Alawi (think New Age Shiite) in character, and has crushed Sunni radicalism relentlessly.