[D66] Obama authorises a new air war in Iraq

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/08/iraq-a08.html

Obama authorises a new air war in Iraq
By Peter Symonds
8 August 2014

In a statement signalling resumed US military operations in Iraq,
President Obama announced yesterday evening in Washington that he had
authorised American air strikes against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
(ISIS) militia in northern Iraq.

The immediate pretext for the renewed military intervention is the
plight of thousands of members of the Yazidi minority who have fled ISIS
military advances and are reportedly trapped in mountainous areas of the
Sinjar region in north-western Iraq. The Pentagon announced that the US
military planes have already made air drops of food and water in the area.

In comments steeped in hypocrisy, Obama declared that the US could not
“turn a blind eye” when the Iraqi religious minorities were threatened
with a massacre. For the past month, the Obama administration has fully
supported the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians and levelling
of large areas of the Gaza Strip.

Once again, US imperialism is playing the humanitarian card to justify
its predatory aims. Obama’s phony professions of concern about the fate
of Iraq’s Yazidi, Christian and other minorities are no more than a
convenient excuse to put into action military plans drawn up over the
past two months to combat ISIS militia.

The US has intervened in response to new ISIS offensives to the east and
west of the northern city of Mosul, which its Islamist forces captured
in June. Over the past week, ISIS and its Sunni militia allies have
seized a major strategic dam and a series of towns that have brought
them within striking distance of the Kurdish Autonomous Region and the
regional capital of Erbil.

The collapse of resistance by the Kurdish peshmerga militias produced a
degree of panic in Washington, as well as in Erbil and Baghdad.
Washington has long relied on the Kurdish region as a base of operations
inside Iraq. Following the fall of Mosul, Obama ordered hundreds more US
special forces and other military personnel into Iraq and established
joint operation centres in Baghdad and Erbil. Obama invoked the
protection of US diplomatic and military personnel in Erbil as a second
justification for authorising air strikes.

Despite denials from the Pentagon, Kurdish and Iraqi officials reported
that US air strikes have already begun in northern Iraq. Kurdish
military spokesman Holgard Hekmat told Agence France Presse that US war
planes hit two targets in northern Iraq. “F-16s first entered Iraqi
airspace reconnaissance mission and are now targeting Daash (ISIS) in
Gwer and the Sinjar region.” He claimed that US war planes struck a key
bridge connecting Mosul to Gwer, which lies just 30 kilometres from the
main checkpoint into the Kurdish region.

A New York Times article reported officials on Kurdish television as
saying that US war planes hit ISIS targets in the towns of Gwer and
Mahmour. It also cited a top Iraqi official, close to Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki, who said the US consulted the Iraqi government late
last night about launching air strikes, received the go-ahead and began
bombing. In its denial, the Pentagon suggested that Turkish or Iraqi
warplanes could have carried out the attacks.

In his statement, Obama indicated that the US was seeking support from
its allies. France has already joined the propaganda campaign about the
plight of the Yazidis and pushed for an emergency session of the UN
Security Council, which condemned ISIS and called for international
support for the Iraqi government. In a statement issued after speaking
to Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, French President Francois Hollande
declared that the persecution of religious minorities was “a very
serious crime” and “confirmed France’s availability to bring support to
the forces engaged in this combat.”

The propaganda campaign over Iraq’s minorities recalls the hue and cry
in the international media in 2011 over the alleged threat to the
population of Benghazi. This served as the pretext for imposing a no-fly
zone over Libya as part of the regime-change operation to oust Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi. Now the tattered banner of humanitarianism is again
being raised in Iraq to justify military operations to shore up vital
imperialist interests in the Kurdish Autonomous Region and Iraq more
broadly.

ISIS itself is a product of the criminal operations of US imperialism in
the Middle East over the past two decades. Faced with mounting
resistance to its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, Washington
deliberately inflamed sectarian Shiite-Sunni divisions. This played
directly into the hands of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which transformed into
ISIS. Its militia have been part of the US backed regime-change
operation in neighbouring Syria, aimed at ousting President Bashir
al-Assad, which is being funded and armed by US allies, Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf States.

While condemning the depredations of ISIS inside Iraq, the US remains
silent about ISIS’s operations within Syria against the Assad regime.
The Islamic extremists, who seek to establish a caliphate over the whole
region, draw no such distinction. Their military offensives toward the
Kurdish regions of Iraq coincide with an attempt that began last month
to seize the largely Kurdish city of Ain al-Arab in Syria.

The Obama administration has, until now, held off providing military
support to the Iraqi government against ISIS in a bid to force Maliki to
abandon plans for a third term as prime minister. The US and allies such
as Saudi Arabia regard Maliki as too closely aligned with Iran and have
blamed him for alienating the country’s Sunni population. Obama’s
authorisation of air strikes coincides not only with the ISIS threat to
the Kurdish north, but with the deadline for anointing a replacement
prime minister.

In launching a new air war in Iraq, Obama is acutely conscious of
widespread anti-war sentiment in the US and internationally, generated
in no small part by the brutal, US-led occupation of Iraq between 2003
and 2011. “I will not allow the United States to be dragged into
fighting another war in Iraq,” he declared last night. However, the
determination of US imperialism to maintain a dominant position in Iraq
and the Middle East has a logic of its own—having despatched hundreds of
US military advisers to Iraq and now unleashed US air power, the US is
already enmeshed in an escalating conflict that not only involves Iraq
and Syria but could draw in other regional powers.