Washington's Iraqi Counteroffensive
American hawks have commanded their agents in Iraq to raise anti-government insurgency
The “generally accepted version” of what is happening in Iraq looks simple: the attack of “jihadists”, the Sunnis against the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the US intervention to assist in combating the terrorist threat and the “balkanization” of the country, the arrival in the country the first 130 of 300 US military advisers to help the authorities in the fight against the militants ...
But in this version of the situation unfolding before our eyes, there are too many inconsistencies and nuances. Too close intertwining of interests and the clash of contradictions between regional players, special services, transnational corporations and international "puppeteers" does not allow one to unconditionally take it as a basis.
Iraq "flared" as soon as possible. But now the benefits of the fire that flared up there are not “jihadists”, but completely different forces — the US hawks, the Saudis, the anti-Syrian coalition, transnational oil corporations and ... Israel.
The crisis in Iraq has become a real gift for those in the CIA and the Pentagon who are desperate to get Barack Obama and John Kerry to understand the US policy towards Syria from the point of view of these “hawks”.
This policy is the expansion of military support for the rebels, the creation of no-fly zones and the bombing of the government army and Hezbollah units, successfully grinding the pro-Western "fighters for democracy". Today, the “hawks” have a great opportunity - under the pretext of “fighting Islamic terrorism” - to start openly operating on the borders with Syria.
The crisis in Iraq was a gift for the decrepit Saudi dynasty. Its main rival in the region, Tehran, a virtuoso diplomatic game has achieved a way out of international isolation. So, it is again capable of an offensive foreign policy, of implementing the concept of “Islamic Awakening”, which for the monarchies of the Persian Gulf means only one thing - the loss of power. Today, the Saudis have a chance to draw Iran into a long-term conflict for the preservation of Shiite shrines in Iraq and for ensuring the security of the Iraqi Shiites.
The crisis in Iraq means that the nationalized Iraqi oil becomes the production of those who will control the territories of Iraqi oil fields, “field commanders” with whom oil corporations are much easier and cheaper to negotiate than with the central government. Due to the resistance of the trade unions and part of the Iraqi political elite, the government of Nuri al-Maliki failed to pass a law on denationalization through parliament, which was lobbied by transnational corporations. Today, the central government is rapidly losing control over oil reserves, and those who are more favorable to the concessions to the West will dispose of them.
Jihadist's steamroller is rolling along Iraq, and Israel has already received the first batch of crude oil from Iraqi Kurdistan. John Kerry 24 held talks in Erbil with Kurdish President Massoud Barzani in June. Officially, he called on Iraqi Kurds to support Baghdad, to unite with government forces in the fight against "Islamists." M. Barzani replied that "we are facing a new Iraq," that Iraq is falling apart, and the Kurds are not to blame. And "under the guise of" gave the order to strengthen the protection of the Kurdish armed detachments "disputed territories." That is, in fact, it fully established control over Kirkuk and the Kirkuk oil fields, which the central government in Baghdad has always opposed.
“Jihad Islamists”, the struggle for the creation of a “cross-border Sunni caliphate” takes on a completely unexpected color.
All the efforts of the "fighters for the Caliphate" bring benefits to those who publicly position themselves as the main fighters against the "Islamist threat", terrorism and extremism - Washington, Tel Aviv, Western companies "and Riyadh that joined them".
Of course, the list of beneficiaries basking in the flames of the Iraqi fire does not end there. The Turkish special services, royal Jordan, the American weapons companies, Qatar. But they are only a "second tier", while performing auxiliary functions. For now, it means until the jihadists' “steam rink” stops, in the trajectory and construction of which there are also more than enough oddities.
To date, the Islamists have achieved the greatest success in the western province of Anbar, bordering with Syria and Jordan. The victory of jihadists 24 June ended a ten-day battle for the largest oil refining complex in Baiji in Iraq, producing one third of the purified fuel in the country. Two days ago, Iraqi Army Command confirmed that Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - ISIL - also captured a military airfield in the strategically important city of Tal Afar, 60 kilometers from the Syrian border. Not far from it passes the highway connecting Syria with Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, which is also captured by jihadists. Last weekend, ISIS detachments took control of four cities - Al Qaim, Rava, Ana and Rutwa, and captured all the checkpoints on the border with Syria and Jordan.
Equally successful for the rebels is the situation in the northern province of Ninawa, where Mosul is located, in the province of Salah al-Din, where ISIS troops have established control over the city of Al-Sharkat. Under the power of the rebels already a significant part of the north of the country, including Tikrit and Falluju. ISIS sabotage groups operate on the approaches to Baghdad and in the city itself, organizing terrorist attacks in Shiite neighborhoods.
Outwardly, everything looks in such a way that, as observers write, “the idea of creating a cross-border Sunni caliphate, which inspires Islamists, has become closer to reality.”
But in reality, firstly, a corridor has been broken through which groups of Syrian rebels have already begun to receive weapons paid by the Saudis and Qatar. Secondly, Iran’s ability to assist Bashar al-Assad has been reduced.
Third, the rebels cut off oil supplies to Syria.
And this is only one of the oddities of the jihadist's “steam-roller trajectory”. The main result of the onset of the rebels was the establishment of control over the two main oil pipelines. One supplies Syria, the other goes to Turkish Ceyhan. The first, as is obvious, is blocked, which caused electricity shortages in Syria. And the second is functioning very well with the help of the transnational oil company ARAMCO - shareholders from the United States and Saudi Arabia - supplying the oil of the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan to Israel through the company of the Turkish-Azerbaijani billionaire Mubariz Gurbanoglu.
Actually, following the results of a kind of “blitzkrieg”, the rebels managed to secure a solid financial base: the “initial capital” amounted to 425 million dollars and a significant amount of gold bars seized in banks in the territory controlled by them. All this, by a strange coincidence, none of the government officials to take out was not bothered. And current expenditures are oil revenues and financial subsidies from Saudi Arabia and Qatar for future export revenue sharing agreements that will be dealt with by the US-Saudi ARAMCO and the US-Qatar Exxon Mobil.
Against the background of the “weirdness” of the trajectories of the rebels' actions - which are not weird at all, but represent a clearly planned operation by competent general staffs, which the Islamists have never seen in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, or anywhere else - actions government army look "pale", or rather - to the obscenely strange.
The Iraqi command calls the surrender of all new territories to the Islamists "tactical retreat." Translated into normal language: the army does not want to fight, the morale of the security forces, even according to official statements, is “very low”, soldiers and commanders flee from the battlefield, leaving weapons and equipment to the Islamists. Councilor of the city of Ramadi, Sheikh Raad Suleiman, frankly stated that the success of the rebels is explained by the massive desertion in the Iraqi army: "Most of the soldiers and officers threw rifles, machine guns and cars and fled from Anbar."
A few months ago, in this very Anbar and its environs, the number of armed groups of ISIL did not exceed four thousand people. By the beginning of the event, it was eight thousand, and this two-fold increase was provided by the ISIL militants who had previously fought in Syria. For the 300-thousand Iraqi army and security forces, which are drawn by seven and a half thousand American advisers and about five thousand other "foreign specialists" in the field of security, the rebels of ISIL cannot be considered equivalent opponents. As the Syrian experience has shown, the ISIL militants do not possess any outstanding fighting qualities, they are not “sharpened” for not very complicated sabotage and cannot conduct large-scale actions.
But the fact is that today the ISIL militants are from the strength of the fifth to the sixth part of the rebel forces. Another third-tribal militia.
But the backbone of the "steam rink" is made up of Iraqi Baath activists who have emerged from the underground, officers of the army and special services of the ousted and executed Saddam Hussein.
The main part of the anti-government groups is united in the “General Command of Jihad and Liberation”, the backbone of which is the group headed by the former deputy of Saddam Hussein, General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri. Perhaps some of these "ex" sincerely believe that they are taking revenge for the occupation and destruction of Iraq by the Americans. But the rebellious leadership of the rebels is part of the CIA’s intelligence network, which is the very “deep state” that the Pentagon and Langley have long been organizing in the Middle East to “correct the anti-American actions of official governments.” To call the rebels "Islamists and Salafis" is too serious an exaggeration ...
Similarly, the agent network involved in the current crisis includes key figures from the Iraqi army and security forces. Americans talked a lot and loudly about “debaasization” - by analogy with denacification in Germany, but they didn’t take it seriously, having limited themselves to top-level permutations up to the level of colonels. And thus tied to themselves those who remained in the service - which in the conditions of the East sometimes means not just the preservation of the workplace and social status, but also life. And those who, although they lost their jobs, managed to avoid reprisals and partially retained their property, connections and opportunities.
The plan of dividing Iraq into three states within the framework of the “Greater Middle East” strategy was not canceled, it was simply postponed.
The “hawks” at the Pentagon and Langley have long tolerated the obscure Middle Eastern peacekeeping of Barack Obama. But when he crossed a certain “red line” - “betrayed” the Syrian opposition, he too weakened sanctions against Iran, allowed the growth of Russia's authority in the Middle East - gave the command of one of his agents in Iraq to raise an anti-government insurgency. And the other is to do everything so that the government of Nuri al-Maliki cannot defeat this insurgency without American assistance.
Of course, the "hawks" all the one and a half term of Barack Obama’s presidency were not idle. They almost simultaneously succeeded in six years, first, to localize the Arab-Israeli conflict, transferring it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Secondly, to convince the world of the existence of a deep Sunni-Shiite conflict, which supposedly explains all the instability in the vast space from the Persian Gulf to Pakistan. They are Shiites and Sunnis who are cutting each other, American actions to preserve their own hegemony are not to blame, Washington is only a peacemaker.
I repeat: Iraq "flared" just when it was required by external puppeteers. And it was made easier by the fact that the “controversial” Nuri al-Maliki was at the head of the country.
The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, the first Muslim to make a successful career in the US diplomatic department, who put a lot of effort into the political career of the current Iraqi prime minister, accurately described Nuri al-Maliki as a person “independent of Iran and positioning himself as an Arab nationalist” . Nuri al-Maliki confessed the same principle of “equidistance” with respect to the United States, stating during his visit to Washington: “I consider myself a friend of the United States, but I’m not a American person in Iraq.”
With his inconsistency and multi-vector approach, Nuri al-Maliki brought matters to the point that both Shiites and Sunnis turned away from him. And they did not just turn away, but began to act together. Let me remind you: in December, 2012 in Iraq was swept by a wave of Sunni protests against their discrimination in the army and government. So, the justice of these demands was not enough that the leader of Shiites, the great Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and the Shiites followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shiites themselves, even expressing solidarity with the demands of the protesters, recognized and even participated in Sunni demonstrations.
“Explaining” the success of the rebels — while, despite the obvious facts, stubbornly continuing to call them “Islamists,” today they are talking about some kind of “suddenness factor.” There was no surprise in Iraq!
In just one 2013 year, at least 7818 civilians and 1050 security forces were killed in the country. The country has not seen such a number of victims since 2008, at which the peak of the power struggle between various political and confessional groups fell. In April of the same, 2013, Al-Qaida in Iraq conducted a kind of “rebranding”, having formed into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. And the head of the Iranian security ministry, Heidar Moslehi, who visited Iraq, met with Nuri al-Maliki and other top leaders of the state, offered Baghdad full and comprehensive security cooperation. First of all - in the organization of counteraction to jihadists from the "Islamic State". In response, a refusal followed.
In February of this year, the US Congress warned the outgoing director of the Intelligence Directorate of the US Department of Defense, General Michael Flynn, about the danger of Iraq’s seizure by the "Islamists". But this warning was ignored, now by Washington. Moreover, it was the congress that, at the suggestion of the “hawks” of the republics, which sharply criticized the obscenity of the Obama administration in the Middle East, blocked the deal to supply Iraq with the F-16 fighter jets and the Apache attack helicopters. This technique Nuri al-Maliki requested since 2011, it was to suppress the separatists and Islamists. And all three years, Washington explained its refusal by saying that "the US is not sure that the Iraqi Prime Minister does not use the weapons supplied to him for further oppression of the Sunni minority and for repressions against fighters for the rights of this minority."
Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil, a giant working in the oil fields of Iraqi Kurdistan, hired Jeffrey James, the former US ambassador to Iraq, as a consultant to 2013-2010 in 2012 in the year. It was he who formulated the idea that to protect the interests of Exxon Mobil, it is most advantageous to seriously weaken the central government of Iraq as a result of a conflict that would distract the attention of the Nuri al-Maliki team from Iraqi Kurdistan and its de facto independence.
And when everything happened according to the scenario that Jeffrey James wrote, Barack Obama was faced with the fact - either to “tie” with peacemaking, or to completely derail the situation in the Middle East, “surrendering Iraq to international terrorism”.
The US President is still trying to get out and limit himself to half measures. Three hundred military advisers are a drop in the ocean, and his call for Nuri al-Maliki to "establish a more inclusive and unified political and military structure, which is a prerequisite for US military assistance to Iraq" is another example of verbiage. The Hawks demand that the White House administration return to Iraq. They demand, as did the speaker of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, John Beyner, to put forward a "comprehensive strategy on the Iraq issue", which will include both the Syrian and Iranian issues, as well as measures against the growth of Russian influence in the Middle East.
The highly experienced “President of Kurdistan” M. Barzani, who spoke about the “new Iraq”, is thousands of times right. No matter how things develop in the near future, whoever becomes the government in Baghdad is the coalition government or the rebels, but the directors of the Iraqi crisis achieved their goals.
Already today, the idea of building the Iranian gas pipeline South Pars, the world's largest gas field of the same name, which was supposed to pass through the territory of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and connect the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, becomes impracticable.
Accurately between Syria and Iran, there is a "hot spot", which, in any event, will create threats to these two allies of Russia.
American oil companies have strengthened their positions in Iraq, and all the rest: partly the British, partly the Turks, and to a large degree the Chinese, have significantly lost.
Nuri al-Maliki will remain in power, or in a coalition government, the formation of which should be completed by 1 July, he will not find a place, will not play a significant role, the entrance of Russian gunsmiths, gas workers and oil workers to the Iraqi market will be blocked with tenfold forces.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Israel, the entire clientele of Washington in the Middle East can breathe easy: the operation in Iraq has once again confirmed that Washington is not going to curtail its control over the region. Nor is it going to curtail control over the international energy markets.
But events in Iraq are only the beginning of the American counter-offensive, the objectives of which are Damascus, Tehran and, as an apotheosis, the complete elimination of the Russian and Chinese presence in the Middle East.
The “generally accepted version” of what is happening in Iraq looks simple: the attack of “jihadists”, the Sunnis against the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the US intervention to assist in combating the terrorist threat and the “balkanization” of the country, the arrival in the country the first 130 of 300 US military advisers to help the authorities in the fight against the militants ...
But in this version of the situation unfolding before our eyes, there are too many inconsistencies and nuances. Too close intertwining of interests and the clash of contradictions between regional players, special services, transnational corporations and international "puppeteers" does not allow one to unconditionally take it as a basis.
Iraq "flared" as soon as possible. But now the benefits of the fire that flared up there are not “jihadists”, but completely different forces — the US hawks, the Saudis, the anti-Syrian coalition, transnational oil corporations and ... Israel.
The crisis in Iraq has become a real gift for those in the CIA and the Pentagon who are desperate to get Barack Obama and John Kerry to understand the US policy towards Syria from the point of view of these “hawks”.
This policy is the expansion of military support for the rebels, the creation of no-fly zones and the bombing of the government army and Hezbollah units, successfully grinding the pro-Western "fighters for democracy". Today, the “hawks” have a great opportunity - under the pretext of “fighting Islamic terrorism” - to start openly operating on the borders with Syria.
The crisis in Iraq was a gift for the decrepit Saudi dynasty. Its main rival in the region, Tehran, a virtuoso diplomatic game has achieved a way out of international isolation. So, it is again capable of an offensive foreign policy, of implementing the concept of “Islamic Awakening”, which for the monarchies of the Persian Gulf means only one thing - the loss of power. Today, the Saudis have a chance to draw Iran into a long-term conflict for the preservation of Shiite shrines in Iraq and for ensuring the security of the Iraqi Shiites.
The crisis in Iraq means that the nationalized Iraqi oil becomes the production of those who will control the territories of Iraqi oil fields, “field commanders” with whom oil corporations are much easier and cheaper to negotiate than with the central government. Due to the resistance of the trade unions and part of the Iraqi political elite, the government of Nuri al-Maliki failed to pass a law on denationalization through parliament, which was lobbied by transnational corporations. Today, the central government is rapidly losing control over oil reserves, and those who are more favorable to the concessions to the West will dispose of them.
Jihadist's steamroller is rolling along Iraq, and Israel has already received the first batch of crude oil from Iraqi Kurdistan. John Kerry 24 held talks in Erbil with Kurdish President Massoud Barzani in June. Officially, he called on Iraqi Kurds to support Baghdad, to unite with government forces in the fight against "Islamists." M. Barzani replied that "we are facing a new Iraq," that Iraq is falling apart, and the Kurds are not to blame. And "under the guise of" gave the order to strengthen the protection of the Kurdish armed detachments "disputed territories." That is, in fact, it fully established control over Kirkuk and the Kirkuk oil fields, which the central government in Baghdad has always opposed.
“Jihad Islamists”, the struggle for the creation of a “cross-border Sunni caliphate” takes on a completely unexpected color.
All the efforts of the "fighters for the Caliphate" bring benefits to those who publicly position themselves as the main fighters against the "Islamist threat", terrorism and extremism - Washington, Tel Aviv, Western companies "and Riyadh that joined them".
Of course, the list of beneficiaries basking in the flames of the Iraqi fire does not end there. The Turkish special services, royal Jordan, the American weapons companies, Qatar. But they are only a "second tier", while performing auxiliary functions. For now, it means until the jihadists' “steam rink” stops, in the trajectory and construction of which there are also more than enough oddities.
To date, the Islamists have achieved the greatest success in the western province of Anbar, bordering with Syria and Jordan. The victory of jihadists 24 June ended a ten-day battle for the largest oil refining complex in Baiji in Iraq, producing one third of the purified fuel in the country. Two days ago, Iraqi Army Command confirmed that Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - ISIL - also captured a military airfield in the strategically important city of Tal Afar, 60 kilometers from the Syrian border. Not far from it passes the highway connecting Syria with Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, which is also captured by jihadists. Last weekend, ISIS detachments took control of four cities - Al Qaim, Rava, Ana and Rutwa, and captured all the checkpoints on the border with Syria and Jordan.
Equally successful for the rebels is the situation in the northern province of Ninawa, where Mosul is located, in the province of Salah al-Din, where ISIS troops have established control over the city of Al-Sharkat. Under the power of the rebels already a significant part of the north of the country, including Tikrit and Falluju. ISIS sabotage groups operate on the approaches to Baghdad and in the city itself, organizing terrorist attacks in Shiite neighborhoods.
Outwardly, everything looks in such a way that, as observers write, “the idea of creating a cross-border Sunni caliphate, which inspires Islamists, has become closer to reality.”
But in reality, firstly, a corridor has been broken through which groups of Syrian rebels have already begun to receive weapons paid by the Saudis and Qatar. Secondly, Iran’s ability to assist Bashar al-Assad has been reduced.
Third, the rebels cut off oil supplies to Syria.
And this is only one of the oddities of the jihadist's “steam-roller trajectory”. The main result of the onset of the rebels was the establishment of control over the two main oil pipelines. One supplies Syria, the other goes to Turkish Ceyhan. The first, as is obvious, is blocked, which caused electricity shortages in Syria. And the second is functioning very well with the help of the transnational oil company ARAMCO - shareholders from the United States and Saudi Arabia - supplying the oil of the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan to Israel through the company of the Turkish-Azerbaijani billionaire Mubariz Gurbanoglu.
Actually, following the results of a kind of “blitzkrieg”, the rebels managed to secure a solid financial base: the “initial capital” amounted to 425 million dollars and a significant amount of gold bars seized in banks in the territory controlled by them. All this, by a strange coincidence, none of the government officials to take out was not bothered. And current expenditures are oil revenues and financial subsidies from Saudi Arabia and Qatar for future export revenue sharing agreements that will be dealt with by the US-Saudi ARAMCO and the US-Qatar Exxon Mobil.
Against the background of the “weirdness” of the trajectories of the rebels' actions - which are not weird at all, but represent a clearly planned operation by competent general staffs, which the Islamists have never seen in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, or anywhere else - actions government army look "pale", or rather - to the obscenely strange.
The Iraqi command calls the surrender of all new territories to the Islamists "tactical retreat." Translated into normal language: the army does not want to fight, the morale of the security forces, even according to official statements, is “very low”, soldiers and commanders flee from the battlefield, leaving weapons and equipment to the Islamists. Councilor of the city of Ramadi, Sheikh Raad Suleiman, frankly stated that the success of the rebels is explained by the massive desertion in the Iraqi army: "Most of the soldiers and officers threw rifles, machine guns and cars and fled from Anbar."
A few months ago, in this very Anbar and its environs, the number of armed groups of ISIL did not exceed four thousand people. By the beginning of the event, it was eight thousand, and this two-fold increase was provided by the ISIL militants who had previously fought in Syria. For the 300-thousand Iraqi army and security forces, which are drawn by seven and a half thousand American advisers and about five thousand other "foreign specialists" in the field of security, the rebels of ISIL cannot be considered equivalent opponents. As the Syrian experience has shown, the ISIL militants do not possess any outstanding fighting qualities, they are not “sharpened” for not very complicated sabotage and cannot conduct large-scale actions.
But the fact is that today the ISIL militants are from the strength of the fifth to the sixth part of the rebel forces. Another third-tribal militia.
But the backbone of the "steam rink" is made up of Iraqi Baath activists who have emerged from the underground, officers of the army and special services of the ousted and executed Saddam Hussein.
The main part of the anti-government groups is united in the “General Command of Jihad and Liberation”, the backbone of which is the group headed by the former deputy of Saddam Hussein, General Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri. Perhaps some of these "ex" sincerely believe that they are taking revenge for the occupation and destruction of Iraq by the Americans. But the rebellious leadership of the rebels is part of the CIA’s intelligence network, which is the very “deep state” that the Pentagon and Langley have long been organizing in the Middle East to “correct the anti-American actions of official governments.” To call the rebels "Islamists and Salafis" is too serious an exaggeration ...
Similarly, the agent network involved in the current crisis includes key figures from the Iraqi army and security forces. Americans talked a lot and loudly about “debaasization” - by analogy with denacification in Germany, but they didn’t take it seriously, having limited themselves to top-level permutations up to the level of colonels. And thus tied to themselves those who remained in the service - which in the conditions of the East sometimes means not just the preservation of the workplace and social status, but also life. And those who, although they lost their jobs, managed to avoid reprisals and partially retained their property, connections and opportunities.
The plan of dividing Iraq into three states within the framework of the “Greater Middle East” strategy was not canceled, it was simply postponed.
The “hawks” at the Pentagon and Langley have long tolerated the obscure Middle Eastern peacekeeping of Barack Obama. But when he crossed a certain “red line” - “betrayed” the Syrian opposition, he too weakened sanctions against Iran, allowed the growth of Russia's authority in the Middle East - gave the command of one of his agents in Iraq to raise an anti-government insurgency. And the other is to do everything so that the government of Nuri al-Maliki cannot defeat this insurgency without American assistance.
Of course, the "hawks" all the one and a half term of Barack Obama’s presidency were not idle. They almost simultaneously succeeded in six years, first, to localize the Arab-Israeli conflict, transferring it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Secondly, to convince the world of the existence of a deep Sunni-Shiite conflict, which supposedly explains all the instability in the vast space from the Persian Gulf to Pakistan. They are Shiites and Sunnis who are cutting each other, American actions to preserve their own hegemony are not to blame, Washington is only a peacemaker.
I repeat: Iraq "flared" just when it was required by external puppeteers. And it was made easier by the fact that the “controversial” Nuri al-Maliki was at the head of the country.
The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, the first Muslim to make a successful career in the US diplomatic department, who put a lot of effort into the political career of the current Iraqi prime minister, accurately described Nuri al-Maliki as a person “independent of Iran and positioning himself as an Arab nationalist” . Nuri al-Maliki confessed the same principle of “equidistance” with respect to the United States, stating during his visit to Washington: “I consider myself a friend of the United States, but I’m not a American person in Iraq.”
With his inconsistency and multi-vector approach, Nuri al-Maliki brought matters to the point that both Shiites and Sunnis turned away from him. And they did not just turn away, but began to act together. Let me remind you: in December, 2012 in Iraq was swept by a wave of Sunni protests against their discrimination in the army and government. So, the justice of these demands was not enough that the leader of Shiites, the great Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and the Shiites followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iraqi Shiites themselves, even expressing solidarity with the demands of the protesters, recognized and even participated in Sunni demonstrations.
“Explaining” the success of the rebels — while, despite the obvious facts, stubbornly continuing to call them “Islamists,” today they are talking about some kind of “suddenness factor.” There was no surprise in Iraq!
In just one 2013 year, at least 7818 civilians and 1050 security forces were killed in the country. The country has not seen such a number of victims since 2008, at which the peak of the power struggle between various political and confessional groups fell. In April of the same, 2013, Al-Qaida in Iraq conducted a kind of “rebranding”, having formed into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. And the head of the Iranian security ministry, Heidar Moslehi, who visited Iraq, met with Nuri al-Maliki and other top leaders of the state, offered Baghdad full and comprehensive security cooperation. First of all - in the organization of counteraction to jihadists from the "Islamic State". In response, a refusal followed.
In February of this year, the US Congress warned the outgoing director of the Intelligence Directorate of the US Department of Defense, General Michael Flynn, about the danger of Iraq’s seizure by the "Islamists". But this warning was ignored, now by Washington. Moreover, it was the congress that, at the suggestion of the “hawks” of the republics, which sharply criticized the obscenity of the Obama administration in the Middle East, blocked the deal to supply Iraq with the F-16 fighter jets and the Apache attack helicopters. This technique Nuri al-Maliki requested since 2011, it was to suppress the separatists and Islamists. And all three years, Washington explained its refusal by saying that "the US is not sure that the Iraqi Prime Minister does not use the weapons supplied to him for further oppression of the Sunni minority and for repressions against fighters for the rights of this minority."
Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil, a giant working in the oil fields of Iraqi Kurdistan, hired Jeffrey James, the former US ambassador to Iraq, as a consultant to 2013-2010 in 2012 in the year. It was he who formulated the idea that to protect the interests of Exxon Mobil, it is most advantageous to seriously weaken the central government of Iraq as a result of a conflict that would distract the attention of the Nuri al-Maliki team from Iraqi Kurdistan and its de facto independence.
And when everything happened according to the scenario that Jeffrey James wrote, Barack Obama was faced with the fact - either to “tie” with peacemaking, or to completely derail the situation in the Middle East, “surrendering Iraq to international terrorism”.
The US President is still trying to get out and limit himself to half measures. Three hundred military advisers are a drop in the ocean, and his call for Nuri al-Maliki to "establish a more inclusive and unified political and military structure, which is a prerequisite for US military assistance to Iraq" is another example of verbiage. The Hawks demand that the White House administration return to Iraq. They demand, as did the speaker of the House of Representatives of the US Congress, John Beyner, to put forward a "comprehensive strategy on the Iraq issue", which will include both the Syrian and Iranian issues, as well as measures against the growth of Russian influence in the Middle East.
The highly experienced “President of Kurdistan” M. Barzani, who spoke about the “new Iraq”, is thousands of times right. No matter how things develop in the near future, whoever becomes the government in Baghdad is the coalition government or the rebels, but the directors of the Iraqi crisis achieved their goals.
Already today, the idea of building the Iranian gas pipeline South Pars, the world's largest gas field of the same name, which was supposed to pass through the territory of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and connect the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea, becomes impracticable.
Accurately between Syria and Iran, there is a "hot spot", which, in any event, will create threats to these two allies of Russia.
American oil companies have strengthened their positions in Iraq, and all the rest: partly the British, partly the Turks, and to a large degree the Chinese, have significantly lost.
Nuri al-Maliki will remain in power, or in a coalition government, the formation of which should be completed by 1 July, he will not find a place, will not play a significant role, the entrance of Russian gunsmiths, gas workers and oil workers to the Iraqi market will be blocked with tenfold forces.
Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Israel, the entire clientele of Washington in the Middle East can breathe easy: the operation in Iraq has once again confirmed that Washington is not going to curtail its control over the region. Nor is it going to curtail control over the international energy markets.
But events in Iraq are only the beginning of the American counter-offensive, the objectives of which are Damascus, Tehran and, as an apotheosis, the complete elimination of the Russian and Chinese presence in the Middle East.
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