US trying to prevent a centralized Iraq: Lawyer

The United States’ main objective in Iraq is to prevent the country from functioning as a centralized nation, says Arno Develay, an international human rights lawyer from Paris.

“The story in itself is smoke and mirrors from the US military leadership insofar as trying to blame the ‘conspiracy theory’ mindset of the region, when we all know that the main objective is to prevent Iraq from functioning as a centralized state,” he told Press TV on Saturday.

Develay made the comments when asked about recent remarks by a top US general in Iraq that Washington’s information campaign in the Middle East is so inadequate that many Iraqis think American forces are clandestinely supplying the ISIL terrorists.

This may make US forces vulnerable to retaliatory attacks from their nominal allies in the campaign against the ISIL, Army Brig. Gen. Kurt Crytzer said on Thursday.

“Our adversaries are constantly one step ahead of us in the IO realm,” said Crytzer, who has been in charge of US special operations forces in Iraq for the past six months.

The US general also said, “We need to find solutions that allow us to more effectively contest for the ideological battle space.”

He also said it takes the US too long to counter anti-American “narratives” in the Middle East, thus ceding the information battlefield to its enemies.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Develay said the US is under pressure from certain Arab countries which “are not seeing from a very favorable eye the nuclear deal that was signed earlier in April and so they (the US officials) are under pressure to provide those allies reassurances that Iran will not dominate the region.”

He said the US foreign policy “is completely inconsistent and the fact is we don’t really know what the US foreign policy is all about except to favor chaos.”

A congressional bill has urged the Obama administration to recognize separate Kurdish and Sunni states and provide them with military assistance to battle ISIL.

Observers say that while the US and its allies claim they are fighting against terrorist groups like ISIL, they in fact helped create and train those organizations to affect their policies in the Middle East region.

AT/HRJ