U.S. report justifies keeping troops in Iraq, points fingers at Iran

Stuart W. Bowen, Jr. Inspector General for Iraq

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

A conveniently timed report has emerged, months before the United States is supposed to pull 47,000 American troops out of Iraq. However, some officials in Iraq claim the report is exaggerated and that it is “not as bad as the report says it is.”

This report claims that over the past year the security of Iraq has deteriorated significantly, citing a statement from Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that June was the “deadliest month for U.S. troops in more than two years.”

Yet, Hussain al-Asadi, an Iraqi Member of Parliament told the New York Times, “Such reports have meaning inside America, but in Iraq it has no impact.”

The government in Iraq just cut a total of 14 different departments after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki gave a speech to Parliament on Saturday. Iraqi protests for more government accountability are cited by the New York Times as the driving force behind this move.

Investigators claim that corruption is a serious problem in the Iraqi government and that investigations are being thwarted by “political resistance and lack of capacity.”

The report also says that the investigators “have difficulty pursuing cases involving complex crimes and high-level officials.” The article does not make it clear if these investigators are from the United States or Iraq.

Corruption is not the only problem outlined in the report, Bowen claims that “[Iraq] is less safe, in my judgment, than 12 months ago.”

Some Iraqi officials have been arguing that Iraq is still in need of “trainers and experts.” Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told Agence France-Presse that he believed ‘some U.S. troops were needed beyond 2011 to train Iraqi forces.”

While I can understand that the Iraqi government would like to have some Special Forces and black ops “trainers and experts” around, the fact is that we can’t sustain our presence there. It is a simple matter of dollars and cents, something which cannot be argued from an ideological or political standpoint; we simply don’t have the money.

As I outlined in my article the black hole of war: where is the money going?, the numbers released in official government reports show that we cannot afford to continue our Middle Eastern imperialist adventures.

Like it or not, we cannot afford to keep training and arming Iraqi and Afghani forces, either. The international community and America along with it needs to just accept reality and pull out of these senseless conflicts.

The report doesn’t end with just drumming up support for continued funding and/or a delay of troop withdrawal; it also accuses Iran of training and arming Shia militias who are responsible for deadly attacks against U.S. troops.

The statement is left there without a single comment in the rest of the article. Where is the proof? What evidence is there than the Shia militias are trained and armed by Iranians? Furthermore, what evidence is there that it wasn’t just Iranians but “Iran” meaning the actual government of Iran.

In fact, this is the only time the word Iran appears in the entire article. These are some bold claims to put forth without providing a single thing to substantiate the allegations.

There are also apparently conflicts within the bureaucracy of Washington. The report claims that the State Department had blocked Bowen’s office’s attempts to audit their Iraqi redevelopment project. The State Department declined to comment but according to the New York Times, officials have contended that Bowen’s office does not have jurisdiction over State Department operations after October 1st.

Bowen claims that some local officials in the province of Diyala, east of Baghdad, are “extremely pessimistic about security and the economy.” Diyala has remained unstable and is described as “one of the most violent battlegrounds for sectarian violence.

According to another article published by UPI, however, Bowen said that “both Shiite militias and al-Qaeda are contributing to the violence.” Wait, I thought he said they were Shia militias trained and armed by Iran? Perhaps the New York Times just made a major spelling error and their editors didn’t manage to catch it?

Regardless, the other articles make no mention of the Shia-Iran connection and instead talk about Shiite militants. In fact, this article in The Washington Post does not even contain a single mention of Shia militants and only covers a, “resurgence in violence by Shiite militias.”