On February 7, 2024, a U.S. drone assassinated an Iraqi militia leader, Abu Baqir al-Saadi, in the heart of Baghdad. This was another escalation by the United States in a major new front in the U.S.-Israeli war in the Middle East, centered on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but also including ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and the United States and United Kingdom’s bombing of Yemen.
This latest attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least thirty-nine people.
U.S. Department of State / Public domain
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is greeted by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Waleed Al-Khuraiji, on June 7, 2023.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring capitals in the region, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors.
What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israelis held in Gaza, but in no way leading to an end to the genocide. If the Palestinians freed all of their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle that seems to be restraining Israel from an even more catastrophic escalation of the genocide.
When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, U.S. President Joe Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.”
The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,900 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention.
Now Biden is asking Israel to “protect” civilians before launching an all-out assault on Rafah, but that is clearly impossible. By Israel’s own estimates, it has only killed or captured a third of Hamas’s forces and destroyed a third of its tunnels. If it is allowed to continue, the destruction and slaughter to come will be even worse than the unprecedented massacre it has already committed.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery.
Palestinian News & Information Agency, CC BY-SA 3.0
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023.
The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi militants’ attacks on U.S. bases. However, the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30 after they killed three U.S. soldiers, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.
A senior Iraqi military officer told the BBC’s Persian service that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2 had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani reportedly negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases.
Tragically, because the United States failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement did not prevent the wrong Iraqi forces from being attacked. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.”
From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.”
Voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns.
But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It has been twenty-one years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged it into seemingly endless violence, chaos, and corruption; twelve years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw ; and seven years since the defeat of ISIS, which had served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq, and later to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.
Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. However, the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces; at the same time, U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.
The real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all, but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in fourteen countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, its facilities in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran.
While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East.
After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neoconservatives who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this arrogance has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.
The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders.
While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East.