January 02, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The
scene in the Green Zone in Baghdad easily
evokes memories of Tehran forty years ago. A
U.S. embassy in the Persian Gulf region is
under siege by an angry mob. The protestors,
predominantly young, break through the outer
walls of the compound as U.S. diplomats take
refuge in a safe room. President Trump
implicitly extends the parallel by reacting
in the narrowly anti-Iran terms that have
defined his policies in this part of the
world. “Iran is orchestrating an attack on
the U.S. Embassy in Iraq,” Trump tweeted
from Mar-a-Lago. “To those many millions of
people in Iraq who want freedom and who
don’t want to be dominated and controlled by
Iran, this is your time!”
But a closer look at what has been happening in Iraq
suggests that genuine anger had much more to do with
events than any orchestration did. The protestors who
smashed their way into the embassy compound did so in
defiance of appeals from leaders armed with
loudspeakers. And the popular anger displayed at the
embassy was also quite visible elsewhere in Iraq. If
there is a parallel with Tehran in 1979, it is to be
found primarily in a U.S. failure to anticipate and
understand the nature of the anti-U.S. anger so much in
evidence.
The newest outburst in Baghdad is in response to U.S.
airstrikes Sunday on facilities in Iraq of the Kataib
Hezbollah militia, which killed at least 25 and wounded
at least 55 more. The airstrikes were billed as
retaliation for a rocket fired two days earlier at an
Iraqi naval base that killed an American civilian
contractor and wounded “several” other Iraqi and U.S.
personnel. Iraqis noticed the obvious disproportionality
between the U.S. airstrikes and what they were
retaliating for, and this disproportionality was part of
what underlay the angry popular response. Another part
was the fact that a foreign power was taking it on
itself to conduct a military attack inside Iraq against
Iraqi citizens.
