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ARE WE SEEING THE BEGINNING OF THE END IN IRAQ ?

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 29 March 2008
1 comment

Wars and conflicts International

ARE WE SEEING THE BEGINNING OF THE END IN IRAQ AS AN ALLIANCE OF SHIITE INSURGENTS JOIN FORCES AGAINST THE U.S.?

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Last October, 2007, Moktada al Sadr and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, two of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders, agreed to put their differences aside in an effort to confront their common enemy, the US occupation. For a while the two groups pulled their heads in while they reconfigured their approach to the problem.

It seems now that they are ready to take on the US and the Iraqi puppet government. With the support of Iran, who are backing and supplying the insurgent Shiite forces opposed to the US occupation and the Quisling-style Iraqi government, Shiite fighters have launched attacks against the Iraqi Army and US and allied forces in Basra and Baghdad.

Contrary to the obfuscating nonsense that some right-wing propagandists are saying, Iran has not given the go-ahead to the Iraqi puppet government led by Nouri al-Maliki to attack al Sadr and his Mahdi Army but, rather, is actually supporting the coalition between Moktada al Sadr and Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and their fight against the US occupation.

The situation is rapidly beginning to resemble a Vietnam-style civil war where, one might recall, a US-backed puppet government tried to fight off a concerted insurgency using a US-trained Vietnamese army – and lost. Like Vietnam, where the insurgents were supported by North Vietnam, the Shiite insurgents in Iraq are being supported by their Iranian Shiite comrades. The only difference here, however, is that it is unlikely that Iranian regular troops will be directly helping out Iraqi insurgents on the battlefield; that would be exactly the kind of excuse the US are looking for to attack Iran.

Iraqi puppet government leader, al Maliki, at first promised to crush the militia insurgents once and for all but has since found that this is easier said than done, even with air support from the US and Britain, and that this is unlikely to happen and so instead is now offering cash to insurgents that hand in their weapons. Insurgents, however, have dug in rather than give in and are now regrouping after having beaten back the initial US-backed Iraqi forces attacks against them.

While the situation provides an excuse for the US to remain in Iraq, the US is unlikely to find the insurgents easy to beat. They are well armed and well trained, and have been around longer than US-backed Iraqi army. Sending in US troops to deal with the insurgency will be an embarrassment for the Iraqi puppet government and a slap in Bush’s face after he told the world that everything is under control in Iraq and that the Iraqis are able to look after themselves.

Apparently not but some interesting days ahead

Damian Lataan

 http://lataan.blogspot.com/2008/03/...

Forum posts

  • Mr.Lataan, like so many analysts who only look at the military aspects of a global conflict, is blind to many of the global economic factors that are having an enormous impact on the ability of the US to wage war and occupy sovereign nations half a world away.

    After all, nations go to war for economic reasons, for gold and gain, & not to fight off abstractions, such as ’terrorism’ or to fight for even more untenable abstractions such as ’freedom’ or ’democracy’.
    Those words are propaganda devices that war-making nations use to fool their populations into believing their wars are just.
    If you know enough history, you will find the statement above quite obvious.

    First of all, the US national debt reached $9.2 trillion last fiscal year, up over $700 billion from 2006. The US Federal Government’s 2008 budget is over $3.1 trillion. If we look at total revenues, as reported by the IRS last year, $2.55 trillion, we will see that the government’s deficit for this year is over $600 billion. I doubt very much that the IRS will even collect the same total revenues as last year’s, due to the fact that our economy is contracting. Be that as it may for the sake of argument let’s say that they will collect the same total revenues.

    Now, it’s important to remember that the Federal Government must pay at least the interest on its debt, which is about 2.96%, or no foreign bank would ever bother to invest in the US treasury. This payment of debt amounts to $276 billion. Subtract $276 billion from the total revenues of $2.55 trillion and you will have a deficit of nearly $880 billion.

    In the past decade these enormous government deficits, generated every year for at least the last five years if not longer, were easily paid for by foreign central banks, such as China and Japan, investing heavily in US treasury notes.

    But that was yesterday, this is now. If you haven’t kept up with current events, foreign banks have left the US treasury in droves, for a very good reason.
    They aren’t idiots and they don’t like losing their hard earned funds by investing into an economy and a central government whose total combined debt is nearly $55 trillion, a debt that any sane mind can see is impossible to pay back.

    What kind of moron would keep investing their money into an economy whose fiat currency has dropped 30% of its value in five years, and only pays back an investor with a paltry 2.2% rate?
    Talk about throwing out the baby with the bath water.
    Talk about burning your cash.

    The war of occupation in Iraq amounts to over $8 billion a month. The Federal Government, through the Federal Reserve Board, has already spent about $500 billion in bailing out failing Wall Steet banks. So much of the federal budget for this fiscal year has already been burned.
    The possibility of the US federal government going bankrupt sometime next year is very, very real, people, if not SOONER.

    Without foreign investment in the US treasury, how is the Federal Government going to pay for its operations next year if it continues to spend so much money on a military machine that has done absolutely nothing to this nation’s economy but draw it deeper into a black hole?

    Like I’ve written before on this web site, just a few months ago, the economic reality of a giant Federal Government going bankrupt amounts to endgame people, endgame for the neocons, endgame for their imperial fantasies, endgame for the political parasites that have leeched all they can from the American middle class.

    Without a vibrant economy a giant military machine is nothing but a hulking wreck around a nation’s neck. Either we save our economy by dropping this hulking wreck, or at least reducing it to a size that is both financially feasible and whose objectives are for the common defense of America, and not for the sake of a fascist dream, or we will end up with a third rate economy without the capacity of maintaining a global empire any way.