Did Washington use a false pretext for its bloody escalation in Iraq?
Iraqi officials indicate that ISIS - not Ketaib Hizbullah - attacked a US
military base in Iraq, setting off the escalation that led to the US
attacking the latter group and killing Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Were we
lied to again?
By Helena Cobban
This originally appeared at Just World Books
In a key piece of actual extensive, on-the-ground reporting, the New York
Times'sAlissa Rubin has raised serious questions about the official US
account of who it was that attacked the K-1 base near Kirkuk, in eastern
Iraq, on December 27. The United States almost immediately accused the
Iran-backed Ketaib Hizbullah (KH) militia of responsibility. But Rubin
quotes by name Brig. General Ahmed Adnan, the chief of intelligence for the
Iraqi federal police at the same base, as saying, "All the indications are
that it was Daesh" - that is, ISIS.
She also presents considerable further detailed reporting on the matter. And
she notes that though U.S. investigators claim to have evidence about KH's
responsibility for the attack, they have presented none of it publicly. Nor
have they shared it with the Iraqi government.
KH is a paramilitary organization that operates under the command of the
Iraqi military and has been deeply involved in the anti-ISIS campaigns
throughout the country.
The December 27 attack killed one Iraqi-American contractor and was cited by
the Trump administration as reason to launch a large-scale attack on five KH
bases some 400 miles to the west which killed around 50 KH fighters.
Outraged KH fighters then mobbed the US embassy in Baghdad, breaking through
an outside perimeter on its large campus, but causing no casualties. On
January 2, Pres. Trump decided to escalate again, ordering the assassination
of Iran's Gen. Qasem Soleimani and bringing the region and the world close
to a massive shooting war.
The new evidence presented by Rubin makes it look as if Trump and his
advisors had previously decided on a broad-scale plan to attack Iran's very
influential allies in Iraq and were waiting for a triggering event- any
triggering event!- to use as a pretext to launch it. The attack against the
K-1 base presented them with that trigger, even though they have not been
able to present any evidence that it was KH that undertook it.
This playbook looks very similar to the one that Ariel Sharon, who was
Israel's Defense Minister in summer 1982, used to launch his wide attack
against the PLO's presence in Lebanon in June that year. The "trigger"
Sharon used to launch his long-prepared attack was the serious (but not
fatal) wounding of Israel's ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, which the
Israeli government immediately blamed on the PLO.
Regarding London in 1982, as regarding K-1 last December, the actual
identity of the assailant(s) was misreported by the government that used it
as a trigger for escalation. In London, the police fairly speedily
established that it was not the PLO but operatives of an anti-PLO group
headed by a man called Abu Nidal who had attacked Argov. But by the time
they had discovered and publicized that fact, Israeli tanks were already
deep inside Lebanon.
The parallels and connections between the two cases go further. If, as now
seems likely, the authors of the K-1 attack were indeed Da'esh, then they
succeeded brilliantly in triggering a bitter fight between two substantial
forces in the coalition that had been fighting against them in Iraq.
Regarding the 1982 London attack, its authors also succeeded brilliantly in
triggering a lethal conflict between two forces (one substantial, one far
less so) that were both engaged in bitter combat against Abu Nidal's
networks.
Worth noting: Abu Nidal's main backer, throughout his whole campaign against
the PLO, was Saddam Hussein's brutal government in Iraq. (The London
assailants deposited their weapons in the Iraqi embassy after completing the
attack.) Many senior strategists and planners for ISIS in Iraq were diehard
remnants of Saddam's formerly intimidating security forces.
Also worth noting: Three months in to Sharon's massive 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, it seemed to have successfully reached its goals of expelling the
PLO's fighting forces from Lebanon and installing a strongly pro-Israeli
government there. But over the longer haul, the invasion looked much less
successful. The lengthy Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that followed
1982 served to incubate the birth and growth of the (pro-Iranian) Hizbullah
there.
Today, Hizbullah is a strong political movement inside Lebanon that
commands a very capable fighting force that expelled Israel's last presence
from Lebanon in 2000, rebuffed a subsequent Israeli invasion of the country
six years later, and still exerts considerable deterrent power against
Israel today.
Very few people in Israel today judge the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to have
been a wise move. How will the historians of the future view Trump's
decision to launch his big escalation against Iran's allies in Iraq,
presumably as part of his "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran?
Helena Cobban
Helena Cobban is a veteran writer on foreign affairs who is the founder and
CEO of Just World Books.
