How U.S. Foreign Aid to Iraq Funds Terrorism Against Americans

By Daniel Greenfield July 09, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2020 and 2021, the United States spent over $600 million on foreign aid in Iraq. That’s down from a high of over $2 billion in 2018 and $4.4 billion in 2016. But it still means that we have blown through over $10 billion on Iraq since 2016. That’s long since we officially withdrew.

Meanwhile, where was Iraq’s money going? Iraq’s latest budget dedicates $2.8 billion to Shiite PMU terror militias including Kataeb Hezbollah: an Iran-backed terror group that has been responsible for the deaths of numerous American soldiers.

At the height of the Iraq War, Kataeb Hezbollah was using Iranian IEDs to kill American soldiers. Kataeb Hezbollah is listed as a foreign terrorist organization which makes it a crime for Americans to fund it. But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from providing massive amounts of foreign aid to Iraq.

While some U.S. conflicts with Jihadists in the region are old news, Kataeb Hezbollah fired rockets at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2019, and has bombed U.S. bases in recent years. Kataeb Hezbollah killed two American soldiers in 2020: Army Spc. Juan Miguel Mendez Covarrubias and Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts.

Politicians and the media have mostly ignored the fact that Americans are continuing to be killed in Iraq, that the Iraqi government is funding their killers, and that we’re funding Iraq.

While Iraq funds Iran’s terror militias, the United States funds the UN Development Programme to “stabilize” Iraq and has invested over $100 million into “conflict, peace and security” funding.

The United States has spent over $1 billion financing the nation’s military while Iraq spends billions financing the Iranian PMU terror militias which are expected to approach a quarter of million Jihadis. The rise of ISIS provided the Shiite regime running Iraq with the perfect excuse for discarding the ISF military built by the U.S. and turning over security to Shiite terror groups.

The foreign policy establishment claims that we need to fund the Iraqi military as a counterbalance to Iran’s PMU militias, but that just allowed Iraq’s government to shift even more defense funding to the Shiite terror groups. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani and his government were backed by the PMU’s and are turning them into an even bigger army.

That’s not surprising since al-Sudani is a second generation member of a Shiite Islamist movement loyal to Iran’s Islamic Revolution. The Shiite Coordination Framework, which is behind the Sudani government, is filled with Shiite Islamists groups with their own militias. For example, the Badr alliance, created by Iran, controls both sizable chunks of Iraq’s military and police forces, as well as one of the larger militias, and has a sizable presence in Iraq’s parliament.

Iraqi democracy consists of Shiite blocs, some Islamists, some fronted by former leaders like Maliki, fighting each other for power and competing for Iran’s favor. Iran has helped them set up militias that, in imitation of Iran’s IRGC and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, also control large portions of the economy, running their own businesses, scoring construction contracts and oil deals.

The foreign policy establishment has refused to acknowledge that Iraq has long since become an Islamic terror state under the political control of Iran and that the only reason it isn’t more of a threat is the constant infighting between the Shiite majority which often turns violent. If Iraq’s Shiite Islamists were ever united under a single leader, like Muqtada Al-Sadr, a perennial player, it will become as much of a threat to the region and the world as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Instead, we keep sinking more money into Iraq in the hope of a better outcome.

Iraq, until recently, was on the list of the top 5 recipients of U.S. foreign aid. And the Baghdad regime continues to come up with new ways to extract money from U.S. taxpayers.

Last month, Prime Minister Al-Sudani claimed that the Islamic terror state was going green and pleaded for foreign aid to save the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which according to media accounts, was blamed on “climate change”. In fact, the Tigris river is a filthy mess because Sadr City’s Islamists pour tons of filth into it. Five million cubic meters of waste are dumped daily into both rivers from sewage to corpses. That isn’t the work of climate change, but of Iraqis.

The United States provided military aid to the Baghdad regime and its military in order to defeat ISIS. But what we were actually doing was intervening in a Shiite-Sunni civil war while disregarding the fact that the side we were backing was just as much our enemy as ISIS.

While military aid has fallen under the Biden administration after the decline of ISIS, much as in Afghanistan, even humanitarian aid easily finds its way into the hands of Islamic terrorists.

Iran’s PMU militias control large swathes of territory, including farmland, own construction companies and demand payoffs from nonprofits who operate in the areas claimed by them. Humanitarian aid, no matter how seemingly benevolent, to people in terrorist areas, funds terror.

It’s a hard lesson that we have failed to learn in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

Like most failed Islamic terror states in the region, Iraq is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. In an effort to crack down on money from Iraq going to Iran, the Treasury Department restricted Iraqi banks from sending dollars to unknown parties. Since much of the Iraqi economy consists of moving dollars to Iran, this has become a real problem.

Despite the existence of the Iraqi dinar, much of the country uses the dollar. And the United States provides pallets of dollars to Iraq that then go on to Iran. Earlier this year, an Iraqi banker warned that if the rules weren’t suspended, “Within one year, most banks will declare bankruptcy”. That says more about what Iraqi banks really do than about our rules.

And yet no amount of economic problems keep the regime in Baghdad from spending billions on its terror militias. That’s a choice and it should not be subsidized by American taxpayers.

Especially when it costs American lives. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

U.S. 'spent blood and treasure' to free one country, now look who's profiting

'The agenda here is to control the world'

  By Peter LaBarbera March 22, 2023  

First Lt. Allison Wohnoutka, an AC-130J Ghostrider weapon systems officer with the 4th Special Operations Squadron, places a wreath on a grave during a memorial ceremony for the 30th anniversary of Spirit 03 at Barrancas National Cemetery, Pensacola Naval Air Station, Florida, Jan. 31, 2021. Spirit 03, an AC-130H Spectre gunship with 14 crewmembers, was shot down by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile while conducting a combat mission during Operation Desert Storm. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Miranda Mahoney)

Twenty years after the U.S. liberated Iraq from the grip of a dictator, Saddam Hussein, another despotism, Communist China, is profiting off its postwar rebuilding effort through lucrative, exploitative projects that are part of China's plan to dominate the world.

Beijing's "Belt and Road Initiative" — described by critics as a "debt trap" — exchanges Chinese investments in massive foreign development projects for raw materials such as oil needed to fuel the Chinese economy and grow its international power.

On Monday, China's state-run Global Times "boasted that Chinese companies are taking a leading role in the reconstruction of Iraq, making money and spreading Beijing’s influence in a country the United States spent blood and treasure to liberate from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein two decades ago," reported the Foreign Desk by journalist Lisa Daftari...........To Read More......

Righteous Anger vs. Politics as Usual

January 25, 2020  By Shoshana Bryen

There is anger and then there is righteous anger. Peter Finch yelling out the window, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

From Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, where parts of a whole are coming undone, to Hong Kong to Puerto Rico to France and Venezuela, people are mad as hell.

Consider Lebanon. Independent in 1943, but occupied by Syria from 1975-2005, and brought into Iran’s orbit through the creation of Hezb’allah in the early 1980s, the same constellation of politicians have held power since the end of the civil war in 1990. Americans appear to worry most about the security implications of Hezb’allah, a U.S.-designated terror organization with its own army and a drug/weapons/money racket in South America, pulling strings in Beirut. And worry, too, about the U.S. armed and trained Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), working alongside and sometimes in cooperation with Hezb’allah. Hassan Nasrallah calls the LAF “a partner.”

But how did Lebanon come to this point and why are people angry now?..........To Read More....

The Compromising Background of Jamal Khashoggi’s Work

By Jim Geraghty

Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi speaks at an event hosted by Middle East Monitor in London, England, September 29, 2018. (Middle East Monitor via Reuters ) Making the click-through worthwhile: how customs and border-patrol agents can make the argument for a security fence, three easily overlooked comments from President Trump’s visit in Iraq, and some surprising revelations about Jamal Khashoggi that complicate the initial narrative about his work. Finally, Trump Will Make His Fencing Argument at the Border.............Three Observations about Trump in Iraq...........

Once the Senate works through a deal to reopen the government, it has a huge pile of work to get to: confirmation hearings for at least five cabinet officials; about 30 judges awaiting a confirmation vote; 45 nominees to be ambassadors; and about 150 other nominees for positions throughout the executive branch, including director of the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Marshals Service, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and inspector generals for the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, HUD, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and White House director of National Drug Control Policy.

Oh, and the debt ceiling is reinstated March 2, meaning that they need to raise it sometime in the months after that..........To Read More...

Iraqi Lawmakers Are Upset Over President Trump's Impromptu Visit With U.S. Troops

Beth Baumann Dec 26, 2018

Political leaders and lawmakers in Iraq are upset with President Donald Trump over his impromptu visit with U.S. troops on Wednesday. They say that his visit is a "violation of Iraq’s sovereignty" and Trump's meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi was canceled because the two couldn't agree on a location, Reuters reported. Trump wanted to meet at the Ain al-Asad military base but Abdul Mahdi refused.

Both wings of the parliament agreed on one thing: they didn't like how President Trump visited Iraq.
The leader of the Islah parliamentary bloc, Sabah al Saadi, called for an emergency parliamentary meeting “to discuss this blatant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and to stop these aggressive actions by Trump who should know his limits: The U.S. occupation of Iraq is over.”

The Bina bloc, which is led by Iran-backed militia leader Hadi al-Amiri, had similar sentiments about Trump's visit............To Read More.....

My Take - This is just one more example of how there's no way to fix the Middle East. Nation building will not work in Islamic nations. The nation building we undertook after WWII with Germany and Japan was clearly a one on thing. In most of the world, especially the Middle East, there's no way to bring actual democracy to these people because as soon as they get the right to vote they vote in the very same kind of people that were forced out militarily. It's been that way forever and as long as Islam exists, it will continue to be that way forever.

No matter what the Neo-cons think these people aren't just waiting to bust out and be just like Americans. American republican democracy is unique in all of world history, and the social paradigms that mold the actions of the world's peoples aren't in any way harmonious to the foundational social paradigms of Americans. We really do need to get that!

The only solution is to keep them over there, keep them isolated, keep them poor and keep them unarmed as much as possible. Eventually they'll destroy themselves. In days gone by one strong nation could conquer the rest, as was done by the Ottoman Turks. But that's not possible now with modern communications, transportation and weaponry. The Muslim world is sharply divided beyond repair. Each sect thinks it represents Allah as "True Islam", making all the rest heretics. Sharia law demands they kill heretics.

There's no love lost between Muslims and other Muslims.  These are medieval tribal societies with modern trappings.   All the violence that's been going on between them, and all other peoples of the world, is testimony to the fact that Islam exists to bring hatred, intolerance, murder, rape, theft and tyranny to the world in the name of Allah. And that must continue until the whole world submits to Allah.

The problem is they don't agree what that means. If you decide to convert, but you pick the wrong sect to follow, then you're not following “True Islam”, and therefore you’ve not submitted to Allah. That means you need to be killed as a heretic, and the instability and violence would continue. We really do need to get that because it’s history and that history is incontestable.

Iraq Invites Its Own Demise

By Jacob L. Shapiro Oct 9, 2017

As the political organization of the Middle East continues to deteriorate, some countries are starting to form new relationships with old enemies. Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid an official visit to Iran, a regional competitor that has backed different militant groups in the Syrian war. In a joint press conference after the meeting, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that Turkey, Iran and Iraq will work together to ensure that the region’s political borders do not change. The following day, Iraq’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Iraq had officially requested that both Turkey and Iran close border crossings and halt all commercial transactions with Iraq’s Kurdish region after Kurds there voted in favor of independence in a referendum last month. The disarray in Iraq has gotten so bad that Baghdad is looking to Turkey and Iran for help controlling its Kurdish population.

Strange Bedfellows

The notion that these three countries would find common cause on any subject is counterintuitive. Turkey and Iraq have been at each other’s throats in recent years, and as recently as December 2015, they were involved in a protracted diplomatic spat over Turkish deployment of troops and armor in Iraq without the permission of the government. The Turkish troops were there ostensibly to help train Kurdish peshmerga to fight the Islamic State. Turkey also routinely bombs militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – Turkey’s own Kurdish rebel movement – in northern Iraq without permission from Iraqi authorities. In effect, Turkey is announcing its intention to help defend the territorial integrity of a country whose integrity it regularly violates......To read more the post Iraq Invites Its Own Demise appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.

My Take - As the article points out later Iraq was one of the strongest countries in the Middle East but is so weak now they hope Iran and Turkey can fix their internal problems.  Foolish!  These people all hate one another.  However, the question not asked and not answered is this:  Why are they so weak now? 

In the Middle East the answer is now and will always be the same answer: In any Middle East country - a strong tyrannical dictator is what makes them strong.  That's their societal paradigm now, it was their societal paradigm yesterday and it has always been their societal paradigm and as long as Islam - in whatever form they may subscribe - exists as the dominant philosophical force in these countries.

Islam is like socialism, and have much in common.  Both have forever failed those who subscribe to it - or have it imposed on them by force - and yet untold millions still cling to them, espouse them and demand all others embrace them. 

Is it any wonder I think they're both insane!