China Blames U.S. for Battle Between Pro- and Anti-Nationalist Shiite Factions in Iraq

China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday heaped blame on the United States for an ugly battle in Baghdad, Iraq, between Shiite Muslim nationalists and Shiites loyal to Iran.

The Chinese Communist propagandists hooted that such factional strife was an inevitable result of saddling Iraq with “democracy” instead of authoritarian rule.

The Global Times dismissed what actually happened — a riot breaking out after Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr quit politics forever, for the sixth or seventh time, in frustration because Iraq’s feuding factions could not put together a government that met with his approval — as merely the “surface” explanation for the unrest.

“The U.S. is the hidden hand that explains why the political struggle of this country comes to where it is today,” the Global Times muttered.

The Chinese Communist Paper essentially argued that only despotism can suppress religious resentments, tribal hatreds, and political opportunism in the Middle East to hold a stable government together.

This grim assessment is not without its adherents in the West, to be sure. The realist take on the much-ballyhooed “Arab Spring” of 2011 is that it swept some deeply corrupt, barely functional autocracies aside, only to replace them with non-functional Islamist fanatics, brutal civil wars, and terrorist reavers like the Islamic State.

It is increasingly difficult to find analysts who still believe the Arab Spring’s chaos might have plowed the soil from which stable, enlightened, representative governments might grow. Egypt and Tunisia are back in the hands of strongman dictatorships; Libya has been through countless civil wars since eccentric dictator Muammar Qaddafi was deposed and might be teetering on the edge of another.

The Global Times had no patience to take a hard look at the Arab Spring fallout, or contemplate any reason for Middle Eastern political dysfunction beyond “America bad.” Instead, it bizarrely lumped Ukraine with Iraq as another example of “the hardship the U.S. brings wherever the U.S. sticks its hands to,” presumably because the Chinese think the collapse of the Soviet Union was a U.S.-caused blunder and Ukraine would be better off under despotic rule from Moscow.

The Global Times remembered it was supposed to be ranting about Iraq and the Middle East just in time for its final paragraph:

Unfortunately, no power is holding the US accountable for all the chaos it created, be it in Iraq, or in other parts of the Middle East. In terms of security risks that Washington has brought to the region, all it knows is targeted military strikes, without ever considering local economic and social development. Granted, there is no Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri, but al-Qaeda still exist, hidden security dangers are thus far from being eliminated. All those lead to one conclusion – the failure of US-led global governance.

Unmentioned by the Global Times was Iran, a major source of the “chaos” in every region of the Middle East it does not already control, very much including Iraq. Much of the strife in Baghdad flows from resistance to Iran’s influence over the Shiite population. Muqtada al-Sadr is an old ally of Iran (and a bitter foe of the U.S.) who decided he does not like playing second fiddle to the ayatollah in Tehran.

It is possible to argue that nation-building after 9/11 had dismaying results in Iraq, and was utterly disastrous in Afghanistan, without accepting the premise that a great swathe of the human race is doomed to live under brutal tyranny like China’s forever. 

It was naive to think the groundwork for democracy would be easily laid, or that votes could be given first, and all the social resources that make representative government possible would follow. Moqtada al-Sadr is a mercurial cleric and aspiring despot who seeks to override democracy with street muscle and temper tantrums. He is not an example of democracy’s inevitable failure.