Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia?

Today Juan Cole reports from a newspaper in Iraq that since Mohammed al-Allawi has become the new prime minister in Iraq, there has been a meeting in Baghdad between the Russian ambassador and the Iraqi milirary Chief of Staff, and the Iraqi president, Saleh, will be visiting Moscow shortly. A variety of issues and possible areas of cooperation apparently are being discussed, but the biggie apparently is that there is serious discussion of Russia replacing the US in providing air support for the Iraqi military for its ongoing campaign against the remnants of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.

It looks like the new PM is very much a part of the move in the Iraqi parliament to get US troops out of Iraq, something that those in Washington have been pretending is not for real.  Juan Cole reports that key in this discussion is that when Trump killed Iranian general Soleimani at the Baghdad airport, he also killed Iraqi general al-Mohandis, a point I have posted on here before, and one that almost nobody talks about in the US (In the Dem debate just over ABC’s David Muir tried to get the Dem candidates to say they would have killed Soleimani).  But what has got lots of Iraqis upset about this is that it was a blatant violation of iraqi soverignty.  Cole reports on Putin sending out a message promising to respect Iraqi sovereignty.

This may not come to pass, but for sure the only thing that Trump had to say about all this was to brag about killing Soleimani, no menton of the 67 American soldiers suffering brain injury due to the Iranian missilee attack in respoinse to this, and also the 170 people who died in an airplane accidentally shot down by the Iranians due to their being on high alert as a result of Trump’s attack, much less a word about leaders and people in Iraq being upset over his also killing one of their generals in violation of their sovereignty.

Barkley Rosser