Aircraft Carrier Kabuki

The excuse provided by the Trump administration for the movement of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to the Persian Gulf apparently is based on intelligence that some of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces were preparing to attack U.S. troops (see David Sanger's "Iran Will Stop Complying With Some Parts of Nuclear Deal" and Alissa Rubin's "Iraq’s Militias, Accused of Threatening U.S., Pose a Quandary for Iraq").

Putting aside reports from the Navy that this is a regularly scheduled deployment, what is clear is that if the U.S. did attack Iran it would also have to go to war with Iraq again.

The Popular Mobilization Forces saved Iraq from ISIS. Some are aligned with Iran, some not. But the idea that the U.S. can dictate the terms of their composition is absurd. As Rubin says,

[S]oon after the United States Treasury Department announced in March it was listing one of the Popular Mobilization groups, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, as a foreign terrorist organization, the Iraqi government made clear it disagreed.

Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi did not defend the group by name — al-Nujaba has proved difficult for the Iraqi military to work with at times — but he did support the Popular Mobilization groups.

“The Americans can make the decisions they want, but the Americans see things differently from the way we do, and our attitude toward the Popular Mobilization is well known and clear,” he said in March. “We respect all of the groups of the Popular Mobilization that made sacrifices.” 

The sacrifices he was alluding to were largely made from 2014 through 2016, when the Islamic State swept across northern Iraq with little resistance and was moving fast toward the capital. Urged by a call in June 2014 from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s influential Shiite spiritual leader, for volunteers to defend their nation, young men and old formed a pickup army.

That pickup army truly liberated Iraq, even if U.S. troops are still stationed there. The days when the U.S. can exact compliance via aerial bombardment are over. This bit of aircraft carrier kabuki is going nowhere.