The Americans are in Iraq on a mission of destruction: Scholar

“The Americans are in Iraq on a mission of destruction,” according to Kevin Barrett, an American scholar and political commentator.

News ID: 449538

Date: 11 March 2020 - 09:48

RNA - The Pentagon on Sunday announced that two US troops have been killed by “enemy forces” while accompanying Iraqi security forces in Iraq.

US Central Command said in a statement on Monday that the service members were killed during a mission against Daesh terrorists in a mountainous area of north-central Iraq.

The statement did not publicly identify them with the permission of their families, in accordance with US Department of Defense policy.

“Well, the Pentagon just announced that two more American soldiers have been killed by what they called enemy forces in Iraq. The term enemy forces could refer, of course, to all sorts of things because the United States is in Iraq as an occupier and an aggressor. And under international law, every Iraqi has the right if not the duty to use force to expel the occupying power. So pretty much everybody in Iraq would be considered an enemy of the occupation,” said Barrett, an author, journalist and radio host with a Ph.D.  in Islamic and Arabic Studies.

“In this case, it sounds like the Daesh forces are probably responsible for killing these two Americans. But it's also possible that the US will try to blame somebody else, just as they blamed al-Ḥashd ash-Shaʿbī (Popular Mobilization Forces) the militia that's part of the official Iraqi Armed Forces, but which is blamed by the Americans for being too friendly with Iran was falsely blamed for killing an American contractor, which was one of the many excuses that were proffered for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani,” Barrett told Press TV on Monday.

“The Americans are in Iraq on a mission of destruction. We were told that Iraqis would welcome American forces as liberators with candy and flowers. And this was all part of the propaganda war back in 2003, when Bush Jr., invaded Iraq at the instigation of the Israel loyalists neoconservatives, who had orchestrated the September 11 2001 – the new Pearl Harbor event -- precisely to destroy the regional countries that Israel saw as a threat, beginning with Iraq and going on to Syria, Lebanon and others and finally finishing with the seventh of the seven countries in five years that General Clark said was the real reason for 9/11 and that is the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the Americans bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan as they placed military bases around Iran and wrecked the region on behalf of the Israeli expansionists,” he added.

“And now, more and more Americans have accepted that these wars were a terrible mistake. Americans want out. President Trump is said to want to leave and pull out of these countries. But of course, his neoconservative advisers have a totally different agenda,” he noted.

“And so we're seeing these, these incidents as the US first says it's going to pull out of Iraq and then reverses itself and says it is not. Iraqi parliament has passed a resolution demanding American withdrawal. And in particular, Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric who heads the biggest block in Parliament has ramped up his rhetoric, and has called for a complete expulsion of American troops in the most humiliating possible circumstances, and called for criminalizing any Iraqi government contact with Americans, calling for shutting down the massive US occupation embassy in the green zone,” he said.

“The Iraqi people are obviously ready to finish off the expulsion of the Americans. And in an election year, Trump will be in a bad position to try to do anything about it. So as this heats up and as different groups whether Daesh or whether the honest Iraqi patriots get into these conflicts with American occupation forces, at some point the pressure is going to mount and the US is going to have to pull out. The only question is what circumstances that will happen under,” he noted.

The United States, backed by the United Kingdom, invaded Iraq in 2003 claiming that the former regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons, however, were ever found.

The invaders withdrew from Iraq, after nearly nine years of a military campaign that cost tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.

Leading a new coalition of its allies, the United States returned to Iraq in 2014, when Daesh unleashed a campaign of destruction in the Arab country. Widespread reports, however, said the Washington-led operations largely spared the terrorists and led, instead, to civilian deaths and inflicted damage on the Iraqi infrastructure.

Iraq’s army troops, backed by Hashd al-Sha’abi forces, managed to liberate all Daesh-held areas thanks to military advisory assistance from neighboring Iran.

Baghdad declared the end of the anti-Daesh campaign back in 2017.

On January 5, Iraqi lawmakers unanimously approved a bill, demanding the withdrawal of all foreign military forces led by the United States from the country, following the US assassination of top Iranian commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis at Baghdad international airport on January 3 in Iraq.

Later on, Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said the parliamentary resolution to end the presence of foreign troops in the country had not gone far enough, calling on local and foreign resistance groups to unite.

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