Bush just met with al-Hakim, leader of SCIRI, now SICI, the strongest Shia party in Iraq. They are close allies with Dawa, the organization that CREATED Hezbollah. Did Dawa bring Hezbollah to Iraq for training? Thats kinda like asking if George has the family over to the ranch! Duh! Is this news? No!
onelocalnews.com
Iranian forces helped plan of the most sophisticated militant assaults of the Iraq war — a January raid in which gunmen posed as an American security team and launched an attack that killed five U.S. soldiers, an American general said Monday.
The claims were an escalation in U.S. accusations that Iran is fueling Iraq‘s violence, which the government in Tehran has denied. It was also the first time the U.S. military has said Hezbollah has a direct role — which, if true, would bring a dangerous new player into Iraq‘s conflict.
Bergner said a senior Lebanese Hezbollah operative, Ali Mussa Dakdouk, was captured March 20 in southern Iraq. Dakdouk, a 24-year veteran of Hezbollah, was sent to Lebanon "as a surrogate for the Iranian Quds Force" to finance and arm militant cells to carry out attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, he said.
The general also said that Dakdouk was a liaison between the Iranians and a breakaway Shiite group led by Qais al-Khazaali, a former spokesman for cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Bergner said al-Kazaali‘s group carried out the January attack against a provincial government building in Karbala and that the Iranians assisted in preparations. Al-Khazaali and his brother Ali al-Khazaali were captured with Dakdouk.
Meanwhile Robert Dreyfuss reports on Washington Post and Newsweek articles that details the working relationship the US has with Iran around Iraq. SICI/Dawa control is waning in the south where Sadr has been consolidating control.
Some scattered items in the news today shed yet more light on the oft-overlooked U.S.-Iranian alliance in Iraq. Yes, that would be the same U.S-Iran alliance that many Sunnis in Iraq, including Baathists and resistance leaders, keep talking about.
In an interview with Newsweek, Mohsen Rezai, the grand old man of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, says that Maliki's regime in Iraq "is of strategic importance to us. ... We want this government to stay in power. Rival Sunni countries oppose Maliki. We haven't."
The Post, meanwhile, writes about Amar Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the son of. He's taking over SCIRI, now SICI. (In the article, Robin Wright talks about the conference put together by Hakim, Iraq for All Iraqis, at which I spoke. No, she doesn't mention me.) But in addressing SICI's remaining power in Iraq, the Post notes that SICI's power in the south of Iraq is ever less and less. It quotes an Arab diplomat in Iraq thusly:The only person who has grass-roots support is Sadr. Hakim has Bush receiving him at the White House and the ayatollahs seeing him in Iran. But Hakim's influence in southern Iraq began to ebb at the end of 2006.
So there you have it. Hakim has the support of the White House and the ayatollahs. And the Iranians are calling the survival of the Dawa-SICI regime in Baghdad "of strategic importance."
That's the context in which to view the newly reaffirmed alliance between Dawa and SICI. The New York Times actually had the gall to suggest that this alliance, proclaimed this week, could salvage Iraq, citing unnamed diplomats in Baghdad thus: "If Kurds were included and a true bloc of moderates could be formed, it could break some of the parliamentary paralysis."
How stupid. The fact is that no bloc of American-supporting moderates can rule Iraq, since they'd be opposed by the only forces with any real popular support: Sadr's Shia and the pro-resistance Sunnis.
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