MR. BFRY BREAKS DOWN YOUR WORLD

A number or trends in Iraq are really pointing to it eventually becoming like Iran... The Iranian hand in Iraq politics is growing and growing and we are doing nothing... but the mainstream media as of yet has not connected the dots. In fact, its pathetic that they BARELY talked about the mayor being ousted from yesterday, but instead talked about that studpid figitive couple who shot a an officer... god help us and our ignorance and stupidity.

So here is some illumination, and this is polished folks. Even spell checked. Consider yourself lucky ;-p

IRAQ/N

By Brian E. Frydenborg

The Iranian people, in the first decade of the 20th century, having seen their country’s regional influence fall to Russian imperial expansion to the north and British imperial expansion to its South, decided to take matters into their own hands when they felt that their Shah no longer was leading Iran; his office just a flicker of a shadow of what it once was, the Shah had become a puppet of, depending on what day of the week it was, the British or Russians or sometimes both. They wanted a constitution that would “protect” Islam from growing Western influence, and rose in a massive grassroots movement led by their religious leaders; many of whom were in Iraq. After all, Iran was a Shia Islam nation, and the holiest cities of Shia Islam, where the great heroes of Shiism were martyred at the hands of other Muslims who would later become known as Sunnis, were in Iraq: Najaf, Kufa, and Karbala, among others. So it was that Iranians had longstanding religious ties to these communities.
Iraq at this time was controlled by the vast (yet soon-to-be-dismembered by the Europeans) Ottoman Empire, run by Sunnis, which had oppressed Shias in Iraq for centuries. They treated the land of Iraq as buffer zone between their empire and their Shia rivals in Iran. This didn’t stop most Iranians from making pilgrimages to the holy cities in Iran, or from putting their life savings into assuring that they could be buried in these cities. A huge portion of Shia Iraq’s economy came from this dynamic. In fact, most of the major religious leaders in these Arab Shia communities were ethnically Persian (the ethnicity of Iran), and would be instrumental in helping to organize and energize the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.
Iran is only too happy today to return this favor.
Going from the early 1900’s to the 1970’s, we now have Saddam Hussein and a co ruler who finally resigns in 1979 in charge of Iraq; in Iran, a newly invigorated Shah is in power, having been re-empowered by a 1953 CIA coup which overthrew a government resistant Western interest, especially concerning control of oil.
In Iraq, oppression from Sunni Baathists drove Iraqi Shias even more to their religion and an underground movement al-Dawa al-Islamiyya (Islamic Call), which had been around since the late 1950’s, finally grew into a powerful grassroots force. At this time a Shia cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, rose to lead al-Dawa. Teaching Shia Islam in Iraqi schools became outlawed, and many Shia leaders, especially the Persians, were expelled form the country; it was in this climate that the Baathist government shut down the city of Karbala during a major Shia religious celebration there in 1977, in effect terminating the religious holiday. The Shias there had had enough, and engaged in furious rioting against Baathist police and mass civil disobedience. After days of rioting, only the arrival of the Iraqi army was able to restore order, using the most brutal of tactics.
Ayatollah Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran for working against the Shah’s government, was now residing in the Iraqi Shia holy city of An Najaf, where Iranians constantly called on him as a hero and potential savior. In 1978, the Iraqi government expelled Khomeini as part of its crackdown on Shias, which set in motion a series of events that would lead to his ascendancy in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, overthrowing Iran’s Shah. That same year, Saddam became the sole ruler of Iraq.
Soon after the Revolution, al-Sadr, who was now openly critical of the Iraqi government, asked that same government if he could lead a procession over to Iran to congratulate Khomeini; when he was refused, An Najaf and Karbala erupted in riots. Al-Dawa and its ties to Iran, now advocating a style of Islamic governance similar to what Khomeini had set up in Iran, was discovered by the Baathists. Khomeini’s calling for the taking of disputed border territory that Iraq controlled in addition to calling for a spread of the Iranian Revolution to Iraq alarmed Hussein, who feared even further instability in Shia Iraq that would upset the entire his Sunni-dominated system. A massive crackdown on al-Dawa and Shias in general began, and tens of thousands of Shias were arrested, tortured, executed, or expelled, and the remaining Shias would be prohibited from celebrating their most important religious holidays. Saddam virtually destroyed al-Dawa; al-Sadr—and his sister— were executed in 1980. He would go down a martyr and a legend.
The Iranian government actively tried to export its revolution to Iraq during the ensuing Iran-Iraq War, putting Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the son of a revered Iraqi hero who had fought the British colonialists in the 1920’s, in charge of a new “Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq” (SCIRI). The military arm of this movement, the Badr Brigade founded personally by al-Hakim, consisted of thousands of dedicated Iraqis, eventually reaching corps size. Immediately after the Gulf War in 1991, this same Badr Brigade, with our encouragement, took part in the failed Shia uprising in southern Iraq against Saddam, and was slaughtered by the elite units of the Republican Guard, along with tens of thousands of other Shias.
A few years later, Muhammad Sadeq al-Sadr, brother of the executed leader of al-Dawa, called on Hussein to release prisoners from the uprising. Saddam responded in 1999 by having al-Sadr gunned down, along with two of his sons. A third son, Muqtada, went into hiding. Al-Sadr was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

After our recent invasion, a lot of doors opened for Shias. Both al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr returned in 2003. Hakim was assassinated that August. Al-Sadr is wanted in the murder of a rival cleric and may have been involved in the murder of al-Hakim. His militia, the so called “Mahdi Army,” has clashed with aides to al-Sistani, the most prominent Shi religious leader in Iraq. And we all remember the brutal fighting with American troops and the odd decision for us to let him and his militia off the hook after al-Sistani brokered a truce that ended the siege of the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. Muqtada clearly wants power, and as a man who killed many American troops and the newest member in a family of legends among the Shia community, he is poised to grab just that.
The United Iraqi Alliance controls over 48% of the Iraqi National Assembly. The 1st, 2nd and 4th largest parties in the Alliance are as follows: Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, al-Dawa, and the Badr Organisation, formerly the Brigade. (#12 is the Hezbollah Movement in Iraq, incidentally, another Iranian government sponsored movement)
This past Wednesday, the Badr Organization illegally ousted the Mayor of Baghdad in an armed coup d’état. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has said he will not oppose this move. He is a member of al-Dawa, and recently met with al-Sadr, who has been talking about taking a more active role in politics instead of killing American soldiers now. He is hugely popular with disaffected Shias (growing in number daily) and upon his emergence from hiding, a huge slum of Baghdad was popularly renamed “Sadr City” in his honor. He talks openly of creating an Islamic theocracy, and has positioned himself as the 2nd most influential Shia cleric in Iraq. Al-Sistani, current #1, was born in 1930.

The new Iranian president is a hardliner, and we have recently confirmed that weapons and some of the bombs killing our troops are coming through the Iraqi-Iranian border.

The reason I have laid all this out in this manner is to connect the dots of these many disconnected (as reported by most media) stories for you, the readers. There are a lot of questions being asked as to what kind of an Iraq we can expect down the road. Now you can tell anyone who asks this, with confidence: just look to Iraq’s eastern neighbor.

Then you can turn to ask them, “Do you think Bush’s invasion was worth it when, years from now, it will have turned Iraq into Iran?”

# posted by Brian @ 10:15 AM