After trillions of dollars squandered and hundreds of thousands of lives lost during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, a coalition of the Communist Party and an anti-American Islamist group famous for terrorism and ruthless death squads recently won the largest number of votes in Iraqi parliamentary elections. Seriously. Now, the alliance is partnering with another Islamic militia openly backed by the regime in Iran. Communists in the United States and beyond could barely contain their glee.
The controversial partnership, dubbed the “Forward Alliance,” or “Sairoun” in Arabic, brings together communist totalitarians and Shiite Muslim totalitarians under one big, totalitarian tent. One of the partners is the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). Another is an Islamist faction led by powerful Shi’ite cleric and “former” warlord Muqtada al-Sadr. Other, minor partners include the “Youth Movement for Change Party,” the Party of Progress and Reform, the Iraqi Republican Group, and the State of Justice Party.
After winning the most seats in the mid-May elections, Sairoun has now joined forces with another Shi’ite party, Fatah, led by Iran-funded Badr Brigades militia commander Hadi al-Amiri. But considering Sadr’s history, which includes operating death squads and using terrorism, the alliance between the two Shi’ite factions and the communists is hardly a surprise. Fatah came in second place in the election. U.S. government-backed former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his State of Law bloc were decimated at the polls.
In the election, Sairoun, which included Sadr’s forces and the communists, won 54 seats out of 329. That gives them control of 16.4 percent of the votes in Iraq’s national legislature. But with no party or coalition winning an outright majority, frantic negotiations are underway among the parties and groupings to try to form a coalition government before Parliament’s term expires this weekend. Even with Fatah and Sairoun combined, the coalition would fall well short of an outright majority.
The election itself is also shrouded in suspicions amid allegations of fraud, record-low turnout, and widespread “irregularities” that include a ballot-box warehouse catching fire. Accusations of foreign meddling — particularly from the Russian-backed regime in Tehran — are also spreading. Significantly less than half of the public voted, the lowest number since elections began after “regime change.” Calls for a recount are growing.
Internationally and in Iraq, though, communists celebrated the outcome as a great win for their movement. In the Communist Party USA mouthpiece People’s World, for example, the headlines claimed the communist success was a “step toward rebuilding popular power.” That article boasted of the fact that key labor union federations were allied with, or even controlled by, communist forces. And open communists expect to control at least one government ministry once the dust settles, if not more. It remains unclear how many secret communists are in the alliance.
In public statements, Iraqi communist leaders claimed they were just normal Iraqis. “We, the Communist party, have a long history of honesty — we were not agents for foreign occupations,” said Suhad al-Khateeb, a teacher and one of the communists who secured a seat in Parliament in this year’s election. “We want social justice, citizenship, and are against sectarianism. This is also what Iraqis want.”
Communists typically pretend to support issues of public concern as a means to an end — gaining power ahead of enslaving and murdering their countrymen. The same process has occurred everywhere where communists have taken power. First, they pretend to fight for “the people” and claim to share their concerns, whatever those may be. Then, once in power, they ruthlessly oppress the people using torture, mass murder, terror, secret police, gulags, re-education, espionage, and more.
This electoral success is not the first time communists have enjoyed power under political institutions created by the U.S. government. In 2003, after the invasion, the U.S. government created the “Iraqi Governing Council” (IGC) to help lord over the occupied nation. And one of the Council’s members was Hamid Majid Mousa, a member of the ICP.
Despite their gloating, it appears that, as in countries around the world, the communist “victory” was achieved by riding on the coattails of others with a similarly repugnant ideology — but with some actual popular support. The South African Communist Party’s hijacking of the African National Congress (ANC) is one obvious parallel. And in the United States, the Communist Party USA’s leader publicly boasts of advancing the communist agenda using the Democrat Party as a “vehicle.”
In the case of Iraq’s communists, the larger vehicle is Sadr and his Sadrist movement. In fact, admitted communists only got two seats out of the 54 earned by the Sairoun alliance. But their influence on the alliance is significant, and appears to have begun with mass protests that communist operatives worked to hijack, foment, and direct. “The success of Sairoun, as a big trans-sectarian bloc of a national and civil character, is a first step in the struggle to break the existing monopoly of political power,” U.K.-based Iraqi Communist Party “International Representative” Salam Ali was quoted as saying in a communist Iranian newspaper.
Indeed, Ali’s rhetoric has remarkable parallels with the language of South African communists, who used different issues but followed a similar program in the seizing of power there. “The [Iraqi Communist Party] will continue to work with the Sadrist movement and other members of the Sairoun Alliance on the basis of its program which has adopted and clarified the demands of the popular protest movement,” Ali said. “It also converges with our party’s national democratic program.” South African communists used and continue to describe their ongoing enslavement of that nation as the “national democratic revolution.”
Exploitation and manipulation of Muslims by the international communist conspiracy is nothing new, either. “In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S.,” explained General Ion Mihai Pacepa, chief of the Communist Romanian regime’s intelligence services and arguably one of the most important defectors to the West. “As KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions.” According to assassinated Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, even al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB, formerly KGB) in the late 1990s.
Even without that, both key Sairoun partners would raise alarm among any freedom-loving, civilized people. For some perspective, Sadr’s own words reveal a great deal. “Saddam was the little serpent, but America is the big serpent,” he said in an interview on 60 Minutes, a feeling that is perhaps understandable after the horrors inflicted on his people by the globalists running U.S. government foreign policy. Later that year, Sadr authorized looting in an “Islamic” so-called “fatwa,” provided the thieves shared the loot with his minions. Perhaps that is why he gets along so well with the Communist Party. More recently, Sadr vowed that a regime led by his alliance would be run by “independent technocrats.”
The history of Sadr’s militias is even more troubling — especially Sadr’s infamous death squads and Iranian-backed terrorism. Sadr’s so-called “Mahdi Army,” as his mass-murdering thugs were known, became infamous for murdering and terrorizing minority Sunni Muslims all across Iraq. Arbitrary killings, torture, bombings, kidnappings, and more perpetrated by Sadr’s men were common and widespread — even in hospitals and mosques. U.S. troops were a frequent target.
Sadr’s forces were so barbarous and violent that, aside from their shunning of suicide bombings, more than a few analysts compared them to Sunni terror groups such as al-Qaeda. And without a majority allowing them to govern, the Communists and Sadr have joined forces with the Badr militias, fellow Iran-funded Shia forces also infamous for violence, terror, killings, and other atrocities.
Speaking of the apparent contradiction between Islamists famous for running “religious” death squads and communists infamous for death squads that publicly espouse contempt for religion, Iraqi Communist Party General Secretary Raid Jahid Fahmi said the Sairoun alliance had a “strong natural basis” at its core. “The social base is quite close — the social base of the left and the social base of the Sadrist movement,” he was quoted as saying in People’s World.
And after the decision of Sadr’s movement to join forces with the Iran-backed Badr movement, the Communist Party issued a statement saying the alliance between the two Shiite factions would help “prevent the country from serious threats.” Both apparently distinct movements share roots in a series of protests that began in 2010.
Critics blasted the U.S. government’s role in the mess. “The recent electoral victories by the Iraqi Communist Party underscore the insanity of our foreign policy, going back to the end of World War II, when General George C. Marshall and American aid facilitated the communist takeover of mainland China,” said Research Project Manager Christian Gomez with The John Birch Society, a leading anti-communist organization and an affiliate of this magazine. “Again, we see the fruits of our foreign policy and unconstitutional foreign interventionism giving rise to communism. One can only wonder what the state of communism would be like around the world today without the foreign policies of the State Department.”
Indeed, as usual, U.S. interventionism has produced yet another disaster in yet another country — and an estimated one million Iraqis, including half-a-million children who died from U.S. sanctions as admitted by top U.S. officials, paid the ultimate price. Ironically, the U.S. government played a key role in bringing mass-murdering dictator Saddam Hussein to power, too. It also armed him with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), on purpose, as declassified CIA documents show, even as he was gassing Kurds in his own country. The invasion and occupation that began in 2003 under the guise of “WMDs,” meanwhile, resulted in the practical annihilation of ancient Christian communities in Iraq going back some 2,000 years. Similar fruit has been observed across the region and beyond.
It is time for the U.S. government to heed the advice offered by America’s Founding Fathers and stay out of the affairs of other nations.
Image: ericsphotography via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook. He can be reached at [email protected].
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