"Meet the New Boss " - Pitt on the Iraqi election

Meet the New Boss
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 14 December 2005

There is an election taking place in Iraq on Friday. According to those who still maintain some kind of hope that the wretched situation over there can be salvaged at the ballot box, this election will be a turning point. "If the result is seen to be fair and the government elected for the next four years is accepted as broadly representative of the interests of most Iraqis," writes Liz Sly in the Chicago Tribune, "there is a real chance that the insurgent violence and the sectarian rivalries that are pushing the country close to civil war will abate."

...Paul Mulshine, writing last week for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, encapsulates this amazing turn of events. "What would you call someone who wants to hand over control of Iraq to a group of terrorists that first made its reputation by blowing up a couple of American embassies?" wrote Mulshine. "I'd call him President Bush. The group is called the Dawa party. In the early 1980s, Dawa terrorists bombed our embassies in Kuwait and in Lebanon. They were universally recognized as vicious America-hating, Iranian-supported terrorists. Now they're part of the coalition that is expected to win control of the new Iraqi parliament in Thursday's elections."

"The other coalition partners aren't much better," continued Mulshine. "The sanest group on the Shi'a side is the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. A 1984 Washington Post story portrayed the group, known by its initials SCIRI, as 'a kind of parent organization for four operational terrorist groups.' SCIRI was founded in Iran a couple of years earlier by the Ayatollah Khomeini with the goal of taking control of Iraq. Now, they're about to do so, courtesy of George W. Bush."

...In his testimony, Gasiorowski stated, "From the early 1980s until about 1996, Iran was directly involved in a wide variety of terrorist activities. It provided extensive support to Islamist terrorist groups such as Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Afghan Northern Alliance and its precursors." Gasiorowski goes on to state that Iran continues to support several terrorist groups, and includes SCIRI among them. "They are most strongly committed to Hezbollah and SCIRI," said Gasiorowski, "with which they have worked closely for over 20 years."

...Saddam Hussein was our terrorist in Iraq for years, so long as he directed his terrorism primarily at Iran. Osama bin Laden was our terrorist in Afghanistan for years, so long as he directed his terrorism at the Soviet Union. Anyone seeing a pattern developing here?

http://peacejournalism.com/ReadArticle.asp?ArticleID=7479


Referenced btw by Juan Cole:

"William Rivers Pitt is good on the contradictory desires in the Iraqi public with regard to the future, as revealed by the recent ABC/Time poll."

http://www.juancole.com/