In a rare admission, the Israeli army acknowledged on Sunday that it had intercepted two suspicious airborne objects coming from Iraq, but that there had been no casualties.

The attacks were claimed by the “Islamic Resistance of Iraq,” a coalition of three Shiite paramilitaries, who said that they had fired missiles and let loose unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at targets in Israel. They said that they fired “al-Arqab” advanced cruise missiles. They also said that they had targeted a military base in the northern Jordan Valley using drones, as well as trying to strike at southern Israel. The Resistance group said they would continue to attack the strongholds of the enemy “at an increasing pace in response to the massacres committed by the entity [Israel] against Palestinian civilians, including children, women and the elderly.”

The Lebanese Hezbollah itself launched dozens of rockets at Israeli munitions factories in North Haifa on Sunday, as well.

In related news, influential Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for a reduction in the status of the US diplomatic mission in Baghdad and for an Iraqi boycott of Arab countries that have recognized Israel.

The Islamic Resistance of Iraq comprises the Brigades of the Party of God, the Nobles (al-Nujaba’), and the Brigades of the Prince of Martyrs. All three have had sanctions placed on them by the United States.

The Shiite militias that helped Iraq defeat ISIL (ISIS, Daesh) in 2014-2018 have been recognized as a sort of national guard by the Iraqi Parliament, which helps fund them and put them under the authority of the National Security Advisor, who is nowadays Qasim al-Araji, who hails from one of the groups, the Badr Corps. He is a former Interior Minister (equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security).

He oversees the groups making up the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), including the Badr Corps, the League of the Righteous, the Imam Ali Brigades, and the Brigades of the Army of the Imam.

The three groups making up the Islamic Resistance of Iraq are technically part of the PMF, but they do not accept a command line to al-Araji.

These paramilitaries typically also field political parties in Iraqi elections, with PMF-allied parties gaining 43 seats in parliament in the most recent elections — a significant bloc of the ruling coalition. Prime Minister al-Sudani is therefore beholden to them, and indeed is said to be close to the PMF — though he is closer to the Badr Corps and the civilian bloc of Nouri al-Maliki than to the Islamic Resistance of Iraq.

Al-Mada quoted former member of parliament Mithal al-Alusi as saying that he believed the US had pressured Israel not to retaliate against Iraq. He added that these attacks by the Shiite militias would make it difficult for Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani to maintain his government’s studied neutrality on the Israel-Hamas war.

The Iraqi government is said to be annoyed by the militias’ participation in the Israel-Lebanon fighting.

Abu al-Ala’ al-Wala’i, the leader of the Brigades of the Prince of Martyrs, said after Israel’s booby trap attack on Hezbollah (and anyone around a pager or walkie-talkie), “A flood of Iraqi human beings will come, crowding the borders and trenches of Lebanon. If Hezbollah loses a thousand martyrs, we will provide it with a hundred thousand heroes.”

Although these numbers are of course a vast exaggeration, a multi-national coalition of Shiite parties did help bring down the Sunni fundamentalist rebellion in Syria, and their sheer person-power shouldn’t be underestimated. The PMF claims 230,000 fighters, compared with little Lebanese Hezbollah’s likely 45,000. Iraq’s population is nearly ten times that of the citizen population of Lebanon. So an actual investment in the Lebanese front by the Shiite militias of Iraq would be significant.

On Friday, Iraq’s Brigades of the Party of God announced that an Israeli strike on Damascus had killed its member, Abu Haydar al-Khafaji, who had been forwarded to Damascus as a security counselor.

Prime Minister Sudani is expected to announce a two-phase withdrawal of the 2,500 US troops in Iraq. The Iraqi parliament demanded this move in January 2020, but al-Sudani is the first prime minister to make it a priority, given his closeness to the PMF. A handful of troops will remain after 2026 to liaise with the 900 US troops in Syria.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Oneindia News: “Israel Under Attack! Iraqi Fighters Team Up with Hezbollah, Multiple Drone Bomb Key IDF Airbase”

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an international norm for states to prevent genocide, mass atrocities, and war crimes, in response to the failure to do so in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The US airdropped food to trapped refugees on nearby Mount Sinjar, but sat on the sidelines as the massacre ensued in this village. Ten years later, the international community still has a Responsibility to Remember (R2R) to the Yazidis who died, to those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to the more than 2,000 who are still missing, and to the other victims of war who are only increasing in number in the 21st century – from the north of Iraq to Ukraine to Gaza. The United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) was a dedicated R2R body. Yet, its mandate will soon be terminated.

Murad was able to escape and arrived in Germany in 2015. She was one of the fortunate also appointed as a UN goodwill ambassador, the first to represent “Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.” Murad was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iraqi to ever receive it.

In 2016 she met the Beirut-born British barrister Amal Alamuddin Clooney, who agreed to represent Murad. Both addressed the United Nations, advocating that the ISIS campaign be designated as a genocide. Their work was essential to the Security Council agreeing to establish UNITAD in 2017.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

In the lobby of the United Nations General Assembly, a replica of Picasso’s Guernica mural hangs above the podium where international figures field questions from the media, a form of R2R for the multilateral body, as the failure of the world community to act after Guernica eventually led to World War Two. By bearing witness to Guernica, UN diplomats would work to ensure it would not happen again. Yet, Guernica did happen again: in Halabja at the end of the 20th century, and Kocho was the Guernica of the 21st century. 

UNITAD was an attempt to prevent future Guernicas. The Iraqi judicial system lacked the infrastructure to investigate and try all the members of ISIS responsible for these crimes; hence, Baghdad requested the aid of the UN in the form of UNITAD, which has been collecting evidence since 2017.

Yet, the Iraqi government sought to terminate this body’s mandate in 2024 due to conflicts with the UN team investigating the crimes. This denies justice to the survivors of ISIS atrocities. Closing such a body is not only a loss for the female survivors of gender-based violence, the Yazidis, as well as the Iraqi nation in general, it sets a tragic global precedent;  a dedicated UN body is imperative to document genocidal and gendercidal violence, and victims of war.

The genocidal rampage that ensued in Kocho in August 2014 continued for the women in captivity.  To forge homogeneity within their “Islamic” state, ISIS sought the erasure of a pre-Islamic past by destroying pre-Islamic antiquities and what it deemed as “pre-Islamic peoples,” expelling Christians from Mosul, or enslaving Yazidi women to ensure that they could not give birth to future Yazidi children, a form of genocide specifically targeted against one gender, in what can be more specifically called a gendercide. Their captivity not only led to their estrangement from other Yazidis, but any future children born out of this slavery would not be considered part of the endogenous community.

The work of lawyers or human rights investigators is like a historian, trying to collect material from the past from primary sources to construct a narrative in the present. Primary sources, in this case, include the videos and documents produced by ISIS itself documenting their genocide, as well as the testimonies of the victims.

R2R is a reminder, as well, to the damage done to the spiritual heritage of Yazidi temples and Christian churches by ISIS, in addition to forced expulsion. Both physical reconstruction and investment in mental healthcare infrastructure, which Iraq lacks, are still needed.
UNITAD sought to deliver justice. It is a body that needs to be replicated for those who suffer due to decisions made by terrorists, warlords or politicians who will never be held accountable for their actions all the way from Kocho to the fighting in Ukraine and Gaza.
 
As a historian, these deaths and victims inspired me to advocate for R2R for the victims of war. Life is one episode in this greater history of soldiers and civilians from the north of Iraq and Syria under ISIS, to Ukraine to Gaza, who have died or endured trauma and PTSD, internally displaced peoples and refugees, child soldiers, the victims of gender-based violence during conflict, the kidnapped and tortured, those maimed by landmines or IEDs and amputees, many reliant on prosthetics, landscapes poisoned by depleted uranium, to animals and domesticated pets caught up in conflicts that they had no role in creating.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from Rudaw.net

Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza, boasted of destroying the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that would have resulted in a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories by 1997. He has consistently attempted to annex Palestinian private property and covertly has paid for a movement of Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land. He has engaged in collective punishment of innocent noncombatants in order to quash any resistance to his vast acts of grand larceny. He bankrolled Hamas for a decade with Egyptian and Qatari funds deposited in Israeli accounts, which he transferred to Gaza, in hopes of taming the organization by giving it Gaza as a fief. He thereby hoped to continue to split the Palestinians, most of whom support instead the secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization. Most Israelis recognize that Netanyahu’s brain-dead policies led to the October 7 terrorist attack.

One of the twenty-first century’s worst war criminals, responsible for more deaths of innocents and children than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu needs a bright shiny object to distract the world from the threat his racist, fascist Likud-led government, armed with 200 nuclear devices, poses to the planet.

Ben Norton at The Real News Network has reviewed Netanyahu’s long history of blatant warmongering lies:

In 1990, when Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister of Israel, he alleged that Iraq’s nuclear program was “fast accelerating.” In December, 1990, he said on the NBC News Today Show of Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein: “The question is, really, how do we ensure that these weapons of destruction, these missiles, these chemical weapons, the nuclear program that is fast accelerating in Iraq, that these do not pose a threat in the aftermath of the crisis, assuming, assuming it gets out of Kuwait? This is an issue for the entire international community.”

Iraq’s chemical weapons were used on Kurds and on Iranian troops but were not in a form where they could be deployed outside the country. Iraq engaged only in anemic and sporadic nuclear experimentation that never amounted to anything (they did not have centrifuges, then or later). Iraq was a ramshackle third world country, not a threat to Europe or the United States. Netanyahu just had a wish list of wars he wanted other people to fight for him, and his exaggerations and fantasies were tools toward that end.

Netanyahu addressed a US Congressional hearing September 2002, saying:

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone. There is a new age, something new is happening.”

Actually, all the Arab countries are dictatorships, monarchies or failed states after the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which left tens of thousands of veterans wounded and killed 4,492 US military personnel. The US operation in Iraq gave rise to ISIL, which roiled the region for several years and conducted terrorism against France, Belgium and other countries to which Saddam Hussein had posed no challenge.

As for Iran’s ayatollahs, the US destruction of the Baath regime in Iraq and the installation of a Shiite-majority government strengthened them enormously.

Netanyahu told Congress:

“Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam’s nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation. But today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do, because Saddam’s nuclear program has fundamentally changed in those two decades. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He could produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country. And I want to remind you that Iraq is a very big country.”

He told Congress before the Iraq War, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons. No question whatsoever. And there was no question that once he acquires it, history shifts immediately. There is no question that he had not given up on his nuclear program. None whatsoever. There is also no question that he was not satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had and was trying to perfect them constantly. Saddam is hellbent on achieving atomic bombs, atomic capabilities as soon as he can.”

Netanyahu also said, “The two nations that are vying, competing with each other, who will be the first to achieve nuclear weapons, is Iraq and Iran. And Iran, by the way, is also outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that they hope will reach the Eastern seaboard of the United States within 15 years. Now, the question is what’s your next step, knowing that three of these nations are developing nuclear weapons? This is not a hypothesis. It is fact. Iraq, Iran, and Libya are racing to develop nuclear weapons.”

None of them were racing to develop nuclear weapons. None. And none have the capacity to hit the US with missiles. It is all intense and delusional fearmongering.

Once the US military was on the ground in Iraq, it became clear that it had never had a serious nuclear weapons program, and the little it had was mothballed by UN inspectors in 1995. At the time that Netanyahu was speaking, Iraq had no centrifuges or any enrichment program of any sort. It was all smoke and mirrors, as tissue-thin and insubstantial as a paranoid nightmare. All those “no questions” were expressions of a false certainty or outright lies.

Here’s an interview Norton pulled up that Netanyahu gave on Iraq after 9/11:

INTERVIEWER: “You’re making a connection between the Taliban and Iraq.

NETANYAHU: Yes, I am. I’m saying that the, if you look at those who harbor terrorists, and those who support terrorists, and-.

INTERVIEWER: I guess I was looking for a connection between September 11, and my understanding why we went to the Taliban is it was a connection there, they were harboring somebody that we believed did the act of September 11.

NETANYAHU: Yes, that’s the first reason why you did it, and-.

INTERVIEWER: Now you’re going to take me from September 11 to Iraq, somehow?

NETANYAHU: Yes, but I’m saying something else. I’m saying the connection is not whether Iraq was directly connected to September 11, but how do you prevent the next September 11? . . . And to the various critics, especially overseas, believe that a clear connection between Saddam and September 11 must be established before we have a right to prevent the next September 11, well, I think not.”

I once saw on the web a captured Iraqi document from Saddam’s secret police warning of how dangerous Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were and putting out an all points bulletin for any al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Saddam was afraid of those people, not in cahoots with them. We know that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had absolutely no plans or possibly even the capacity to stage a terrorist attack on the United States homeland. Iraq was secular and Arab nationalist. There was no connection with or resemblance to the fundamentalist Pushtun-speaking Taliban or the equally fundamentalist al-Qaeda. Netanyahu was just pulling things out of his ass, to drag the U.S. into a Middle East war that would break the legs of Iraq, then a significant military power. As Norton pointed out, he even asserted that the US needed no casus belli to go to war with Iraq. Apparently paranoid suspicions are sufficient. Which explains a lot.

Iraq was not the only butt of his calumnies. In 2012, Norton shows, Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly, “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.”

Iran has had a civilian nuclear enrichment program since 2000. If it wanted a nuclear weapon, it could have one by now. In fact, the CIA has repeatedly assessed that Iran has no military nuclear program and cannot be shown to be trying for a bomb.

Netanyahu has long tried to get the US into a war with Iran: “Obviously we’d like to see a regime change, at least I would, in Iran, just as I would like to see in Iraq. The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed? It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out, but when should it be taken out? It’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it. The application of power is the most important thing in winning the war on terrorism. The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes. The first victory in Afghanistan makes a second victory in Iraq that much easier. The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier, too.”

Those “victories” in Afghanistan and Iraq turned quickly to dust in America’s mouth, and if the US government ever allowed the wily Netanyahu to trap it into a war with Iran, it might well bankrupt the Republic for no gain.

Netanyahu tried to derail the 2015 UNSC nuclear deal with Iran, in which it mothballed 80% of its nuclear enrichment program in return for sanctions relief. Netanyahu successfully pushed US Republicans to refuse the sanctions relief, helping derail the treaty. He then went before the UN again, saying, “Well, tonight I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time. After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files.”

UN inspections repeatedly showed that Iran was carefully abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal. Netanyahu was just making shit up again. Norton quotes Robert Kelley, the former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the falsity of Netanyahu’s claims: “I thought many of the things that he presented were very childish. I would think that a country like Israel that has its own nuclear weapons, and has scientists who must be pretty competent, would be able to look at the information we were shown and say right away, well, this is garbage. He presented very early in the presentation a drawing which was supposed to be an illustration of a nuclear device. And you look at that drawing, it’s a cartoon, it’s a joke. You look at this and you see it’s completely amateurish, completely childish, and trying to make something very important out of something that’s not important at all.”

When Trump got in, Netanyahu whispered into his ear that he should rip up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump did with alacrity. As a result, Iran felt stabbed in the back. It never got sanctions relief. Its leaders felt free to enrich uranium to higher levels than the treaty had allowed.

Having destroyed the best chance for denuclearizing Iran, Netanyahu will now tell Congress to go to war against that country because “there is no question” that Tehran is attempting to get a nuclear bomb with which to attack the United States.

Netanyahu has all the variation in his speeches of a myna bird, and squawks just as annoyingly. After his decades of lies, misrepresentations, undermining of the US government’s foreign policy, and now his maniacal genocide, no one in Washington should be willing to listen to a word he says.

Note that Netanyahu was afraid of having any layovers on his way to Washington in any civilized countries for fear he’d be dragged off to the Hague for trial. Congress has brought eternal and indelible shame on itself by inviting this war criminal to address it.

He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Cross’s estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.

The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”

On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.

Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.

Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagon released a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.

The Road to Abu Ghraib

”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.

As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.

Buy the Book

Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.

In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.

In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”

Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Simulating Atonement

Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”

As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.

In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.

In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”

True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.

Weapons of American Imperialism

On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”

There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”

Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.

When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.

In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”

As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)

Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice

What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.

One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.

Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.

Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.

Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.

Copyright Maha Hilal 2024

Tomdispatch.com

The US was rebuked by China, according to Akmal Dawi at VOA: “‘Security Council resolutions are binding,’ Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday.”

Beijing is correct on the law, and the Biden administration is being disingenuous. If President Biden did not want a ceasefire resolution to pass, he should have vetoed it. By abstaining and letting the world community vote on the matter, Biden has elicited a binding decision, and his officials should stop dancing around it.

The law here is clear.

Article 25 of the UN Charter, to which the US, China and Israel are all signatories, says, “The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”

Moreover, we could consider the actual language of the resolution, in which the UNSC

“Demands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs, and further demands that the parties comply with their obligations under international law in relation to all persons they detain”

You’d have to twist yourself into a pretzel to avoid concluding that the Security Council sees the ceasefire as binding, given the use of the verb “demand.” The UNSC isn’t suggesting. It isn’t hoping. It isn’t imploring. It is demanding.

BBC News Video: “Gaza: Fighting continues despite UN Security Council resolution calling for ceasefire | BBC News”

Washington’s hypocrisy on this matter is legendary and stunning.

After the Gulf War of 1990-1991 the UN Security Council passed resolutions demanding the disarmament of Iraq. We now know that Iraq complied. But the US and other major powers refused to believe Baghdad’s assertions or even documents in this regard.

One of the grounds that George W. Bush put forward for invading Iraq was precisely its failure to abide by those UN Security Council resolutions. He actually represented the US not as acting unilaterally for narrow American purposes but as upholding the authority of the UNSC.

Robert McMahon at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty wrote in 2002, “Expressing frustration and alarm, U.S. President George W. Bush says Iraq’s long defiance of United Nations disarmament resolutions has placed the UN’s credibility in question.”

So disobeying the UNSC according to Washington is so serious a matter that it could get you invaded and your government overthrown. I guess that’s not non-binding.

In 2007, the UNSC, disappointed in Iran’s non-compliance with demands for it to cease its civilian nuclear enrichment activities, imposed an embargo on weapons sales by Tehran. To enforce economic sanctions against Iran, the UNSC even allowed the boarding of vessels on the high seas suspected of carrying Iranian weapons.

The UNSC also allows ships carrying North Korean goods to be boarded. Ordinarily freedom of navigation on the high seas is an absolute right in international law. But the UNSC can do as it pleases. It has placed extensive economic sanctions on Pyongyang.

The only real sense in which UNSC Resolution 2728 is “non-binding” is not a legal one but a practical one. Since the US has a veto, if the UNSC tries to sanction Israel for its defiance, as it did Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the Biden administration would use its veto to protect the fascist government presently ruling Israel. But that action is not high diplomacy, just arbitrary and disgusting partisanship that makes a mockery of international law and of ethical principles.

Finally, consider the legislative history. What did the UNSC members intend? The UN News tells us.

Russian ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said, “‘Those who are providing cover for Israel still want to give it a free hand,’ he added, expressing hope that the wording contained in the resolution ‘will be used in the interests of peace rather than advancing the inhumane Israeli operation against the Palestinians’”.

He opposed the Biden administration’s granting of a free hand to Israel to thumb its nose at the resolution.

Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana: “‘This demand [by the Council] comes at a significant time as Palestinians are observing the holy month of Ramadan,’ she said, noting continuing deaths in the enclave and a growing number of families left homeless.”

She called it a demand, and said that said that “after more than five months of a ‘war of utter terror and destruction’, a ceasefire is the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and others.

Doesn’t sound like a mere polite suggestion to me.

China’s Zhang Jun said, “The current draft is unequivocal and correct in its direction, demanding an immediate ceasefire, while the previous one was evasive and ambiguous.”

I note the term “unequivocal.”

Hwang Joonkook of South Korea said, “The situation must be different before and after this resolution. This will only be possible when both Israel and Hamas respect and faithfully implement this resolution.”

So, not voluntary. Binding.

What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

Both were 22-year-olds. Their deaths in 2023 serve as a reminder on International Women’s Day that the tragedies of femicide and gender-based violence (GBV) will continue into 2024. “Honor killings” need to be recognized as problems that are not only confined to the global south and developing world.

 While governments often react to direct violence, this problem will not end unless both state and society recognize endemic structural and cultural violence that enable femicide. The failure to act on these problems becomes a form of “necropolitics,” where the states allow women to succumb to the fate of femicide.

Direct Violence

Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung’s Triangle of Violence begins with “direct violence,” which often gets the most attention.

The father of Tiba Al-Ali projected direct violence against his daughter by strangling her. The last thing Tiba saw was the eyes of her father before she died.

Turetta projected direct violence against Giulia, a video camera capturing him beating her, and then later stabbing her 20 times to the neck and head. The last thing Giulia saw was the eyes of her ex-partner.

Tiba chose to defy her father.  Giulia chose to leave Filippo and she was graduating before him, which he could not accept.

Structural Violence

Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe defines “necropolitics” as how political actors allow certain demographics to die. When states fail to prevent femicide that is a form of necropolitics, or what Galtung would call “structural violence.”

Ali’s murder is part of the rise of GBV due to a revival of tribal culture that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein encouraged after the 1991 Gulf War to maintain domestic order, as his security forces were diminished. Iraq’s gendered insecurity continued unabated as the security sector collapsed after the 2003 invasion.  The US touted post-Saddam Iraq as a model state that would inspire a wave of democratization in the region. Yet Articles 41 and 409 of the Iraqi Penal Code, to this day, permits males to “punish” female members of a household. Those codes are a form of structural violence and necropolitics, enabling “honor killings.” It allows “practices of patriarchy” at the state level.

Women’s rights in Iraq • FRANCE 24 English Video

Structural violence and state patriarchy is evident by the security sector failing to address this issue, as the police allegedly knew beforehand that Al-Ali’s life was at risk and failed to take action.

Let us turn to Europe. Surprisingly, the Italian state engages in necropolitics by not legally recognizing “femicide” as a separate crime. Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, referred to this problem when said, “Femicide is a murder committed by the state because the state doesn’t protect us.” The state’s failure in this case to prevent direct violence is itself a form of violence. In the absence of the state Elena refers to the need for Italian civil society and NGOs to step in: “We need to fund anti-violence centres and give the possibility to those who need to ask for help.”

After the murder, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would increase funds to women’s shelters and anti-violence centers. However, Meloni was also part of the problem, since her misogynistic right-wing politics and “Brothers of Italy”(Fratelli d’Italia) party enabled gendered cultural violence in Italy.   

Cultural Violence

After the murder in Iraq, a twitter user, Ali Bey, wrote that women should “behave or face the same fate as Tiba Al-Ali,” along with a series of other voices in the Iraqi cybersphere condoning, if not celebrating the murder. These outbursts are examples of cultural violence or societal patriarchy that enables such crimes.

Elena links the murder of her younger sister to the patriarchal culture of violence that pervades Italy, a form of cultural necropolitics, which normalises the toxic behaviour of men like Turetta and eventually commits femicide. She said “Turetta is often described as a monster, but he’s not a monster.”  She then addresses cultural elements: “A monster is an exception, a person who’s outside society, a person for whom society doesn’t need to take responsibility. But there’s a responsibility. Monsters aren’t sick, they’re healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture.” 

Meloni promised promised a new educational campaign in schools to eradicate “the toxic culture of violence” in the country. While Meloni had condemned sexual violence in the past, it was usually when a migrant committed GBV, to support the anti-immigrant politics of her party.

In 2023 I conducted two digital autopsies on Tiba’s YouTube account and Giulia’s Instagram account. Both were beautiful souls that made the earth a better place. Tiba’s vibrant videos described her new life in Istanbul, to pursue her education. Guilia loved her mom, had a collection of beer bottle tops, and apparently had a fear of going to the hospital alone, but overcame her fear.  That fear apparently had to do with the fact that she was taking care of her mom who eventually died of cancer.

The triangle of violence and necropolitics offers a nuanced means of analyzing the agents of patriarchy.  But a simple linguistic exercise can also achieve this goal, using patriarchy as a verb instead of an abstract noun. We must each ask ourselves “Who or what has patriarched me or others in the past, present, and future?” and “Who or what have I patriarched?” Difficult questions, yes, but by bringing them into focus we can begin to identify the active agents and institutions that have patriarched and continue to patriarch in Iraq, Italy and the world.  On this International Women’s Day, Iraq and Italy have failed to ensure gendered security.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an improvement, the US embassy stepped in and calmed restless audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. “We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our special relationship,” posted the US embassy in London in January 2024. The embassy noted that “the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”

There was never a risk of a diplomatic conflict, of course, because two countries that agree to jointly strike Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen continuously for almost two months are not likely to create a tempest in a teapot. The long-running dynamics in the US-UK relationship that help explain their joint strikes in Yemen, not frivolous discussions on tea, are part of Tom Stevenson’s latest book, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony”, a collection of articles published by the author over the years for the London Review of Books (LRB).

Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, discusses Yemen in the book concerning the US-UK support for the bombing operations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have carried out in Yemen for seven years. Stevenson obviously could not have had the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis in mind when his book went to press at some point in mid-2023. Still, his assertion that, within the British establishment, “nostalgia for global influence has produced a compulsive Atlanticism and a reflexive resort to military actions that the UK is near incapable of actually performing”[1], could also serve as a clever analysis of the most recent events.

Facing its decline as a global power, “the dominant trend of late twentieth-century Britain was not resurgence as an independent power but a new surrogacy” to the US.[2] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed “end of history”, following Washington’s lead seemed more self-evident than ever. This was the case even if it implied invading Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire:British Illusions and American Hegemony. Click here.

Tony Blair was perfectly content to become George Bush’s junior partner. He was not alone among European leaders in embracing America’s turbocharged bellicosity after the 9/11 attacks. In Spain, for instance, Prime Minister José María Aznar from the center-right Popular Party was only too happy to meet Bush and Blair in the Portuguese Azores archipelago four days before the invasion to support the US-UK alliance. The Spanish press referred to Bush, Blair, and Aznar as “El Trío de las Azores” (The Azores Trio) and Spain sent 2,600 soldiers to Iraq between August 2003 and May 2004. Eleven of them would die there.

The Spanish participation in the Iraq War ended after the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who had campaigned on the promise to withdraw the troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in the national elections of March 14, 2004. The Iraq War was key in Zapatero’s victory. It will soon be exactly two decades since March 11, 2004, when Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks in commuter trains that killed 193 people.

Aznar’s government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the attacks despite knowing early on that everything pointed at al-Qaeda. The terrorist group had attacked Spain due to its involvement in the Iraq War. When the truth was eventually revealed right before election day, Zapatero’s Socialist party won a surprise victory. In an interview three years ago, Aznar continued to defend that his decision to join the conflict in Iraq “represented Spain’s most important role in many decades.”

In the early 2000s, the UK was not the only country with a vanished empire overplaying its relevance at the international level by seeking to stay close to the US. Whereas Spain soon shifted course, the UK has tied its future even closer to the US after Brexit, notes Stevenson. One of the examples the author provides is the trend in British weapons acquisitions. During the last twenty years, the UK has almost uninterruptedly procured more than 50% of its weapons imports from the US. However, this has recently only intensified. The data offered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that in the period from 2020 to 2022, the last year for which data is available, weapons imports from the US represented 95% of British total expenditure on weapons produced abroad.

One of Stevenson’s main arguments regarding the US-UK relationship is that London has often been conducting a foreign and defense policy that makes little sense in terms of promoting British national interests. For instance, Stevenson points to Britain’s commitment to deploy patrol vessels and a frigate in the Indo-Pacific area with the vague objective of “projecting power.” This is the kind of investment London has often committed to despite it more likely benefiting the US than the UK, if at all.

In this sense, the case of the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis is exceptional. If we accept, for the sake of the argument, that US-UK attacks against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen are the most effective way to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, then it would be the UK that would profit more from this. The economic interests of the US are hardly directly affected by the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, whereas the Suez Channel is a key trade artery for cargo either coming from or going to Europe.

Some exceptions notwithstanding, there is a clear general dynamic of British subordination to Washington. As Stevenson argues, this can also be observed in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that comprises the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Whereas the US National Security Agency (NSA) automatically receives the feed from intelligence stations in other countries, the NSA “sometimes withholds what it knows.”[3]

Stevenson discusses the changing character of war from the perspective of the US and the UK. The author is deeply knowledgeable of varied topics such as the overuse of economic sanctions by Western countries, the details of nuclear competition, or the militarization of space, with satellites and space missions becoming increasingly important.

But Stevenson often pushes too far the book’s generally convincing main argument, that Britain has become subservient to American power. For instance, he writes that “one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all itself.”[4] “Someone Else’s Empire” also tends to overplay the influence of Washington, and by implication London, in the Middle East. Writing about the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Stevenson argues that “since the West installed the monarchs, and its behavior is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as colonial.”[5]

It is difficult to see how a colonial power would not have replaced Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman following his implication in the murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Bin Salman’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi was a huge embarrassment for his Western supporters. Neither would a colonial power have allowed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose a blockade on Qatar, a Western ally, between 2017 and 2021.

Stevenson is sometimes hyperbolic about US power. Still, it is true that, for all talk of American decline, “the shadow of American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.”[6] The UK has been enveloped by this shadow while also contributing to making it larger. From Iraq to Yemen and, once the controversy around Britain’s national drink has been happily resolved, over a cup of tea.

[1] Tom Stevenson, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony” (London: Verso, 2023), p. 4.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3] Ibid., p. 55.

[4] Ibid., p. 234.

[5] Ibid., p. 160.

[6] Ibid., p. 232.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the midst of Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979, Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a significant fashion across the region. It’s a story that needs to be told.

“Hit Iran now. Hit them hard” was typical advice offered by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a drone flown by an Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militia killed three American servicemen in northern Jordan on January 28th. The well-heeled Iran War Lobby in Washington has, in fact, been stridently calling for nothing short of a U.S. invasion of that country, accusing Tehran of complicity in Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.

No matter that the official Iranian press has vehemently denied the allegation, while American intelligence officials swiftly concluded that the attack on Israel had taken top Iranian leaders by surprise. In mid-November, Reuters reported that Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei informed a key Hamas figure, Ismail Haniya, that his country wouldn’t intervene directly in the Gaza war, since Tehran hadn’t been warned about the October 7th attack before it was launched. He actually seemed annoyed that the leadership of the Hamas paramilitary group, the Qassam Brigades, thought they could draw Tehran and its allies willy-nilly into a major conflict without the slightest consultation. Although initially caught off-guard, as the Israeli counterattack grew increasingly brutal and disproportionate, Iran’s leaders clearly began to see ways they could turn the war to their regional benefit — and they’ve done so skillfully, even as the Biden administration in its full-scale embrace of the most extreme government in Israeli history tossed democracy and international law under the bus.

The gut-wrenching Hamas attacks on civilians at a music festival and those living in left-wing, peacenik Kibbutzim near the Israeli border with Gaza on October 7th initially left Iran in an uncomfortable position. It had allegedly been slipping some $70 million a year to Hamas — though Egypt and Qatar had provided major funding to Gaza at Israel’s request through sanctioned Israeli government bank accounts. And after decades of championing the Palestinian cause, Tehran could hardly stand by and do nothing as Israel razed Gaza to the ground. On the other hand, the ayatollahs couldn’t afford to gain a reputation for being played like a fiddle by the region’s young radicals and so drawn into conventional wars their country can ill afford.

The Adults in the Room?

Despite their fiery rhetoric, their undeniable backing of fundamentalist militias in the region, and their depiction by inside-the-Beltway war hawks as the root of all evil in the Middle East, Iran’s leaders have long acted more like a status quo power than a force for genuine change. They have shored up the rule of the autocratic al-Assad family in Syria, while helping the Iraqi government that emerged after President George W. Bush’s invasion of that country fight off the terrorist threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In truth, not Iran but the U.S. and Israel are the countries that have most strikingly tried to use their power to reshape the region in a Napoleonic manner. The disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and Israel’s wars on Egypt (1956, 1967), Lebanon (1982-2000, 2006), and Gaza (2008, 2012, 2014, 2024), along with its steady encouragement of large-scale squatting on the Palestinian West Bank, were clearly intended to alter the geopolitics of the region permanently through the use of military force on a massive scale.

Channel 4 News Video: “Iran will back Israel-Gaza ceasefire if Hamas do, says Foreign Minister”

Only recently, Ayatollah Khamenei bitterly asked, “Why don’t the leaders of Islamic countries publicly cut off their relationship with the murderous Zionist regime and stop helping this regime?” Pointing to the staggering death toll in Israel’s present campaign against Gaza, he was focusing on the Arab countries — Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates — that, as part of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” had officially recognized Israel and established relations with it. (Egypt and Jordan had, of course, recognized Israel long before that.)

Given the anti-Israel sentiment in the region, had it, in fact, been rife with democracies, Iran’s position might have been widely implemented. Still, it was a distinct sign of terminal tone deafness on the part of Biden administration officials that they hoped to use the Gaza crisis to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, while sidelining the Palestinians and creating a joint Israeli-Arab front against Iran.

The region had already been moving in a somewhat different direction. Last March, after all, Iran and Saudi Arabia had begun forging a new relationship by restoring the diplomatic relations that had been suspended in 2016 and working to expand trade between their countries. And that relationship has only continued to improve as the nightmare in Israel and Gaza developed. In fact, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi first visited the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November and, since the Gaza conflict began, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has met twice with his Saudi counterpart. Frustrated by a markedly polarizing American policy in the region, de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resorted to the good offices of Beijing to sidestep Washington and strengthen their relations further.

Buy the Book

Although Iran is far more hostile to Israel than Saudi Arabia, their leaderships do agree that the days of marginalizing the Palestinians are over. In a remarkably unambiguous statement issued in early February, the Saudis offered the following: “The Kingdom has communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all the Israeli occupation forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.” Significantly, the Saudis even refused to join a U.S.-led naval task force created to halt attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Houthis of Yemen (no friends of theirs) in support of the Palestinians. Its leaders are clearly all too aware that the carnage still being wreaked on Gaza has infuriated most Saudis.

In late January, President Raisi also surprised regional diplomats by traveling to Ankara for talks on trade and geopolitics with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, another sign of his country’s changing role in the region. At the end of the visit, while signing various agreements to increase trade and cooperation, he announced: “We agreed to support the Palestinian cause, the axis of resistance, and to give the Palestinian people their rightful rights.” That’s no small thing. Remember that Turkey is a NATO member and considered a close ally of the United States. To have Erdoğan suddenly cozy up to Iran, while denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza as a Hitlerian-style genocide, was an unmistakable slap in Washington’s face.

Meanwhile, Iran, Turkey, and Russia recently issued a joint communiqué that “expressed deep concern over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and stressed the need to end the Israeli brutal onslaught against the Palestinians, [while] sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.” From the Biden administration’s point of view, Moscow’s bombing of civilian sites in Ukraine and Iran’s role in crushing Sunni Arab rebels in Syria had been the atrocities that needed attention until Netanyahu suddenly pulled the rug out from under them by upping the ante from mere atrocities to what the International Court of Justice has ruled can plausibly be labeled a genocide. One thing was clear: Washington’s long struggle to exclude Iran from regional influence has now visibly failed.

Iran’s Rising Popularity

At the Gulf International Forum (GIF) last November, Abdullah Baaboud, a prominent Omani academic, said that there had been a “very strong condemnation of Israel from Iran and Turkey, embarrassing some Arab countries that are not using the same language. My worry is that this conflict is leading to the empowerment of Turkey and Iran among the Arab public.” GIF’s executive director, Dania Thafer, concurred. Of that public, she said, “Grief and anger have reached unprecedented levels,” and added, “with each photo out of Gaza, Iran gains more influence across the region.” In short, at remarkably little cost, Iran is unexpectedly winning the battle for regional public opinion and its standing in the Arab world has risen strikingly. Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has been indelibly tarnished by Washington’s full-throated support for what most in the region do indeed see as a merciless slaughter of thousands of children and other innocent civilians.

A recent opinion poll of Arabs in 16 countries, conducted jointly by the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, found that 94% of them considered the American position on Israel’s war “bad.” In contrast, a surprising 48% of them considered the Iranian position positive. To grasp just how remarkable such a finding was, consider that a Gallup poll conducted in 2022 found that Shiite Iran’s name was mud in most Sunni Arab countries and approval of its leadership fell somewhere between 10% and 20%.

In recent months, Iran has made striking use of the weakness of Washington’s case in the region. While the State Department likes to contrast Iran’s “dictatorship” with Israel’s “democratic character,” only recently foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani observed, “The disaster in Gaza removed the mask from the face of the so-called advocates of human rights and showed the extent of vileness, brutality, and lies hidden within the nature of the Israeli regime, whose supporters used to refer to [it] as a symbol of democracy.” Although Iran has among the world’s worst human-rights records, Netanyahu has even managed to take the focus off of that.

Losing the Middle East, Washington-Style

Iran’s allies in the region include Iraqi Shiite militias like the Party of God Brigades (Kata’ib Hizbullah), which first gained prominence in the struggle against the ISIL terrorist group from 2014 to 2018. Those were years when the regular Iraqi army had essentially collapsed and was only gradually being rebuilt. Washington was also focused on destroying ISIL then and so developed a wary de facto alliance with them in its campaign to crush that “caliphate.” In January 2020, however, President Trump was responsible for the drone assassination of the group’s leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, along with Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, just after their arrival by plane at Baghdad International Airport in what was evidently an attempt to prevent them, through the Iraqis, from forging an agreement with Saudi Arabia to reduce tensions with Iran.

That assassination led to a long-running, low-intensity conflict between the Shiite militias of Iraq and the 2,500 remaining American troops stationed there. With the onset of the Gaza conflict last October, the Party of God Brigades began launching mortars and drones against Iraqi military bases hosting American soldiers, as well as against small forward operating bases in southeast Syria where some 900 U.S. military personnel are stationed, ostensibly to support the Syrian Kurds in mopping up operations against ISIL. After more than 150 such attacks, on January 28th one of their drones hit Tower 22, a support base where U.S. troops were stationed in northern Jordan, killing three American soldiers, while wounding dozens more.

Iran’s leaders generally back those Shiite militias, but whether they had anything to do with the attack on Tower 22 remains unknown. Officials in Tehran did, however, immediately recognize the danger of escalation once American troops had actually been killed. And indeed, the Biden administration responded with dozens of air strikes on bases and facilities of the Party of God Brigades in Iraq and Syria. Washington Post reporters were told by Iraqi and Lebanese officials that Iran had actually urged caution on the militias with clear effect. Their attacks on bases hosting U.S. troops ceased. At the same time, the Iraqi parliament and government complained bitterly about Washington’s violation of the country’s sovereignty, while heightening preparations to force the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from their land. In other words, President Biden’s fierce backing of Israel’s war, his decision to increase weapons shipments to that country, and his bombing of pro-Palestinian militias may have led to the achievement of a longstanding Iranian aim: seeing American troops finally leave Iraq.

Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon, where the militant group Hezbollah has been exchanging occasional fire with Israeli forces in support of Gaza, according to the Post reporters, one Hezbollah figure told them that Iran’s message was: “We are not keen on giving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any reason to launch a wider war on Lebanon or anywhere else.” Wars are unpredictable, and the Lebanon-Israeli border could still erupt dramatically. Moreover, Iranian pleas for restraint appear to have had far less effect on the Houthi leadership in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, leading to an ongoing American and British bombing campaign on that city and elsewhere in that country that has so far done little to stop Houthi missile and drone attacks against ships in the Red Sea.

So far, however, despite the Republican urge to devastate Iran, that country’s leaders have taken deft advantage of the butchery in Gaza (in which the Israeli military has killed more civilian noncombatants each day than belligerents have in any other conflict in this century). The ayatollahs have significantly increased their popularity even among Arab and Muslim publics that had not previously shown them much favor. They have strengthened their relationship with the Shiites of Iraq and may be on the verge of finally achieving their goal of ending the U.S. military missions in Iraq and Syria.

They have also achieved closer ties with Turkey, while improving relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab oil states. In doing so, they have distinctly blunted the Biden administration’s aim of isolating Iran while tying the wealthier Arab states ever more firmly to Israel through arms and high-tech deals.

In addition, through its backing of and weaponizing of Israel in these last grim months, Washington has made a mockery of the human rights talking points that the U.S. has long deployed against Iran. In the process, Joe Biden has done more than any recent president to undermine both international humanitarian law and democratic principles globally. With 94% of Arab poll respondents viewing American policy in the region as “bad,” one thing is clear: for the moment at least, Iran has won the Middle East.

Copyright 2024 Juan Cole

Tomdispatch.com