Remember the Iraqi Awakening, those Sunnis who switched sides from the insurgency to reduce violence in their neighborhoods based on America promises to take care of them after order was restored? The Shiite government is now engaging in a bloody campaign against them hoping to destroy them as a force in the country. Following the arrest of one such leader in Baghdad, his group rioted for two days.
The Diyala Awakening chief threatened to go on strike if the Baghdad leader is not released, doubtless hoping that this threat will cause the Americans to intervene and uphold their promises, if only to protect their security gains. Now he has his answer - an Awakening patrol has just been bombed by the US, in yet another classic betrayal of local allies in the best imperial tradition.
Anybody who has taken a passing interest in the actual situation in Iraq can tell you that, despite the complacent perception of success of our operations in that country, which is now being cultivated among the US public, none of the underlying problems and tensions plaguing the country have been resolved, and some, such as the Kurdish question, are actually more acute today than they were last year. Attacks on US forces are down, and that is really all we care about, isn’t it? And the gullible natives who put their trust and hope in us are quickly learning the same.
A major lingering concern has been the fate of the Awakening forces, those Sunnis who switches sides from the insurgency to support the government in suppressing violence in their areas. The US armed and paid them, and gave them countless assurances that we would continue taking care of them and would not abandon them into the hands of the Shiite government which has been hostile to them from the beginning. However, those promises were then, and this is now. We are getting the hell out, and they get to stay and reap the rewards of their trust in imperial promises. The US has handed over their care to the Iraqi government last October, with the promise that they would continue to be paid and would eventually be absorbed into official Iraqi forces or given jobs. This promise was entirely implausible even when made, but the Sunni militiamen had no choice, since by then they had become the insurgent’s number one enemies for their betrayal, and could not oppose the Iraqi army on their own.
The Shiite government of Nouri al Maliki, which is universally viewed by the Sunnis as an Iranian proxy, in turn views them as terrorists with blood on their hands, who are simply biding their time until they strike again, and has been planning to eliminate them as a force from the beginning. Several statements from the Shiite government suffice to show the government's view of the Awakening militiamen:
Jalal al Din al Saghir, a member of Iraq's parliament and the Shia bloc stated that, "The State can not accept the men of the Awakening; their days are coming to an end." While, Brigadier Nasser al Haiti, the commander of Al Muthanna brigade in the Iraqi army, goes further in describing the Awakening Council's members as a, "cancer", and that they must be "uprooted."
The state cannot accept the Awakening," said Sheik Jalaladeen al-Sagheer, a leading Shiite member of Parliament. "When the government attacked the Mahdi Army, it sent the message to all the militias including the Awakening that their days are numbered."
In accordance with such views, the government has not been paying the militiamen, nor have any significant numbers of them been enrolled in the army or police, as was supposed to happen. In fact, their is now in place an official freeze in hiring for the security forces. Instead, the Maliki government has engaged in a systematic campaign of threats, arrests and assassinations against the Awakening leadership, seeking to isolate and suppress these groups piecemeal, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town, while keeping the rest in line through threats and platitudes, until their turn comes.
The Awakening has now realized that they have been betrayed by the US and their own government, which the US had installed on the pretense that this deeply sectarian body, dominated by Shiite groups who had previously engaged in the outright ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, would somehow represent all Iraqis. Like so many locals before them, they put their trust in the pretty words and the earnest handshakes of imperial officers promising them the sky and the moon for collaborating, only to be cast aside, crushed and hunted down once their usefulness had expired. Now that General Petreaus, who was primarily responsible for the encouragement of Sunnis to put their trust in the US and their government, is now at CENTCOM, planning a similar operation in Afghanistan and hoping that the Afghans aren't getting the news out of Iraq, and are similarly unaware of the dark English connotations of his name.
"Some people from the government encouraged us to fight against Al Qaeda, but it seems that now that Al Qaeda is finished they don’t want us anymore," said Abu Marouf, who, according to American officials, was a powerful guerrilla leader in the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade west of Baghdad. "So how can you say I am not betrayed?"
After he said he discovered his name on lists of 650 names that an Iraqi Army brigade was using to arrest Awakening members west of Baghdad, Abu Marouf fled south of Falluja. His men, he said, "sacrificed and fought against Al Qaeda, and now the government wants to catch them and arrest them."
Amazingly and heartbreakingly, some of the Awakening leaders have not awoken and continue in their delusion (hopefully just in front of the Americans), they are simply baffled by how the Americans could have made such a "miscalculation" in leaving them in the hands of the hostile Maliki government:
Maliki tells the Americans what he thinks they want to hear," an Awakening leader tells The Nation. "I tell the Americans all the time that it is a trick, but they don't understand. The Americans are so naïve. They assume good will on the part of Maliki. We don't understand. The Americans know that Maliki is working closely with the Iranians, so why do they believe him? Why do they listen to him?"
It remains to be seen if the Awakening, which was not able to gain political control of al Anbar, where they are strongest, or any other province in recent and extremely corrupt provincial elections, has enough strength to resist the assault from their own government under which they now find themselves, or if al Qaeda and other insurgents in Iraq still have the means to put the disaffection of the Awakening members to good use in reigniting the war. there is no dobut that Al Qaeda, which, contrary to popular belief, has not been fully defeated in Iraq and continues to control its third largest city, Mosul, will look to attract the disaffected Awakening members back to the insurgency. Perhaps, like so many natives before them, the Sons of Iraq will have no choice but to submit and accept whatever ugly fate awaits them at the hands of the colonial regime now that they have become useless to it.
Perhaps in some sense this is poetic justice for these men's own betrayal of their former comrades in the resistance in the name of temporary security and expediency, that they themselves are now betrayed and have no way back, having fatally undermined the resistance by their previous departure. Certainly it is hard to blame these men for trying to secure their neighborhoods and expel the butchers of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Islamic State of Iraq, however naïve their hope in the American promises may have been. Rather it is truly a tragedy, as these people find themselves attacked on all sides by brutal predatory forces seeking their destruction in order to gain control of their country.
It is also possible that the Maliki government has bitten off more than it can chew, and the Sunni resistance is about to once again burst into flames, negating the hard won security gains of last year. Certainly now that the Americans have made it clear that they will back Maliki's betrayal of the Awakening with force, and will treat any Awakening members who do not acquiesce to their own destruction as "terrorists" to be eradicated, Maliki's plan appears to be on solid ground, and it is possible that he will succeed in smashing this movement without any need to make concessions or payments to them or to integrate them into Iraq’s armed forces. He has previously successfully pulled this trick on the Mahdi Army, which was actually his staunch political ally prior to that betrayal.
The US public, used to the systematic and continuous betrayal of allies by its government (the state, after all, stands on the land of countless Indian tribes similarly betrayed), will likely view this crisis, if they give it any thought at all, only in terms of whether it constitutes a threat to the ephemeral victory and stability which the US has supposedly achieved in Iraq. This will remain to be seen. The top US officers in Iraq are certainly viewing this development as problematic from that standpoint, and of course not from any moral consideration which these hardened servants of empire are incapable of even considering. One thing is certain, we can all be proud of another well played imperialist campaign, and can look into the faces of Iraq's widows and say - gotcha! Afghans, you are next, with Pakistanis warming up in the on deck circle. The Cherokee said hi. Isn’t it beautiful when an imperial plan comes together?