May 13, 2016
The Islamic Republic has made a major effort in recent years to convince the Arab world that the United States is the power behind the Islamic State—and it appears to have had considerable success marketing that conspiracy theory to Shiites in Iraq, if not elsewhere in the Arab world.
The conspiracy theory is part of Iran’s long-term effort to convince the world’s Muslims that the US government is untrustworthy and Muslims should put their faith in the Islamic Republic. The first part is pushing on an open door. The second part had considerable success until the 2009 post-election protests in Tehran convinced many Muslims that Iran was just another petty dictatorship and not a true democracy. With the disorders of the last five years in the Arab world and the harsh Sunni-Shia split, Iran’s aspirations to lead the Islamic world have been dashed.
But Iran still plugs away on the theme that the Islamic State wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the massive support it gets from the United States—a theme the Iran Times has noted several times in its weekly “Eye on Rhetoric” column.
Newspapers and TV stations in both Iran and Iraq harp on the myth that the US created the jihadi group to sow chaos in the region in order to seize Iraqi oil. Ignored is the fact that the organization was originally Al-Qaeda in Iraq and was created with the avowed goal of killing American occupation forces in Iraq. Also ignored is the fact the United States had the perfect opportunity to steal all of Iraq’s oil in 2003 after it dismantled the government of Iraq, the Baath Party of Iraq, the armed forces of Iraq and totally controlled all the organs of state, including the Iraqi treasury.
The US State Department has conducted a survey in Iraq that, while not up to international standards for scientific surveys, found that 40 percent of Iraqis believe US policy is to “destabilize Iraq and control its natural resources,” and a third believe America “supports terrorism in general and (IS) specifically.”
There has been no survey that the Iran Times has been able to find as to how many Iranians believe similarly.
Skepticism about US motives is deeply rooted in Iraq, where many still blame the chaos after the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein on American malice rather than ineptitude.
Within Iran, media pushing the conspiracy theories routinely attribute their “facts” to Iraqi media or legislators. But those media and legislators are linked to Iran. Among the most vocal proponents of the conspiracy theory is al-Ahad TV — a 24-hour satellite channel funded by Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which is an Iranian-funded militia.
The US “aims at weakening Iraq and the Arab world as well as the Shiites,” al-Ahad’s spokesman, Atheer at-Tariq, has said. “They spare no effort to destabilize Iraq and neighboring countries in order to continue selling weapons and strengthening their presence in the region through establishing more military bases,” he said, never mind that there are fewer US bases in the region than a decade ago as every US base in Iraq has been closed and most of those in Afghanistan have been shuttered.
While supervising the channel’s war reporting last year, Tariq claimed to have witnessed incidents when US forces helped IS. As Iraqi security forces prepared to enter the city of Tikrit in April, he said two US helicopters evacuated senior militants. A few months later, during an operation to retake the Baiji oil refinery, crates of US weapons, ammunition and food were dropped over militant-held territory, he said.
US officials say most of these stories are made up out of whole cloth, but they do acknowledge one air drop of supplies that missed Iraqi troops and landed inside IS lines.
Tariq asked, “Is it logical to believe that America, the source of technology and science, could fire a rocket or drop aid materials in a mistaken way?”
One of the fascinating things about the conspiracy theory is that it relies on the common belief in the Arab world that the Americans are technologically perfect, something that an American would laugh at as insane.
Videos uploaded to social media purport to tell a similar story. Just a few weeks ago, one video that was re-shown on Iranian state TV displayed US military MREs (“meals, ready-to-eat,” which are American field rations), as well as uniforms and weapons said to have been found in an area held by IS. Another shows the interrogation of a captured IS militant. “Check out his boots, they are from the US Army,” a fighter says. Another fighter points to a pile of rocket-propelled grenades he says were made in the US and shipped to IS.
But when IS forces swept across northern and western Iraq in the summer of 2014, they captured armored vehicles, heavy weapons and other US equipment that had been provided to Iraqi security forces at a cost of billions of dollars. In fact, one oddity of the propaganda campaign is that it largely ignores all the American HUMVEEs driven by IS. The Iraqi Army abandoned 2,000 Humvees when it fled from IS in 2014. The Islamic State probably has more HUMVEEs than any military force in the world apart from the US Army.
The Associated Press last week reported that the US Embassy in Baghdad has invested considerable time and resources trying to refute the conspiracy tales.
There are Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and regular press conferences. US officials frequently appear as guests on Iraqi TV networks. “There are a lot of players out here on this information and media battle space,” said US Army Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for the US-led coalition in Iraq.
“The Iranians have something to say every day, the Russians have something to say every day, ISIL has something to say every single day, so we need to make sure that this coalition and this Iraqi government is also saying something every day,” he said, using an alternative acronym for IS. “This coalition is here to fight ISIL,” he said, “not provide them MREs.”
Within Iran, however, these US responses to the stories about Americans arming and feeding IS go unreported.
But the US responses in Iraq do not seem to be helping Washington much. In December 2014, 38 percent of Iraqis had a favorable view of the US, but by August 2015 that had been halved to just 18 percent, according to the State Department’s unscientific survey.
A group of Iraqi men smoking cigarettes and sipping tea outside a Baghdad shop selling books and newspapers told the AP their skepticism extends beyond US officials. They say Iraqis are well aware that most media outlets are run by political parties furthering their own agendas.
“Iraqi media aren’t professional; it’s all just ideology,” Abu Muhammed said, asking that his full name not be used for fear of reprisals.
But he said the accusations of US support for IS are hard to ignore because of America’s confusing tangle of regional alliances. “The US is always fighting groups on one side that they also support on the other side,” he said. He pointed to Syria, where the US supports Syrian Kurdish fighters who are considered terrorists by NATO ally Turkey (though not by the US).
Others simply can’t understand how the world’s most powerful military hasn’t been able to defeat the extremists, ignoring President Obama’s demand that the Arabs do most of the work themselves and not rely on Americans to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
“They took out Saddam in two weeks, but they can’t finish IS in two years?” asked Falih, another Iraqi who asked that his last name not be used out of security concerns. “It just doesn’t make sense.”