Nearly three-quarters of the attacks that kill or wound American soldiers in Baghdad are carried out by Iranian-backed Shiite groups, the United States military said Wednesday.
Senior officers in the American division that secures the capital said that 73 percent of fatal and other harmful attacks on American troops in the past year were caused by roadside bombs planted by so-called “special groups.”
The American military uses that term to describe groups trained by Iran that fight alongside the Mahdi Army but do not obey the orders of the militia’s figurehead, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, to observe a cease-fire. But Col. Allen Batschelet, the Baghdad division’s chief of staff, conceded that there was overlap between the groups.
“These two groups are so amorphous; they go back and forth between one another,” the colonel said at a briefing in Baghdad.
I bet those nefarious Iranian agents are in the east, west, south and north of Baghdad.
Wait, no they’re not. The string-pulling Persians are sitting in the Green Zone lunching comfortably with the Iraqi Prime Minister, whose Badr-allied security forces they control more than he does. After the Basra crackdown Iran sided decisively with Nouri al-Maliki and against Muqtada al-Sadr. It’s Sadr, the nationalist partisan of Iraq’s internal debate over Iranian influence vs. home rule, who has a wide lead in American casualties. Calling Sadr the Iranian stooge is like denouncing the Democratic party for supporting torture.
The weirdest thing is that a rookie reporter on the mideast beat knows all this, or can figure it out after five minutes of scanning through recent history. So where’s the context? Where is a single reference to the paper’s own reporting, or one independent expert? We’re already waist-deep in one loser of a war because the media got drunk on unsubstantiated warnings from the administration about links between a mideast bugbear and anti-American violence. Is it really too much to ask not to make the same mistake twice?
Yeah I know, SATSQ.