| |
THE ROVING
EYE
Iraq first, then Southwest
Asia
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS -
An Islamic scholar born in Egypt tells Asia Times Online
that as soon as US Secretary of State Colin Powell, a
living portrait of moderation, pronounced the deadly
magic words "material breach", the Arab world had to
swallow its bitter impotence and admit that war against
Iraq was practically inevitable.
The whole world
knows Saddam Hussein is indefensible: he tortures and
kills opponents, has used chemical weapons against Iran
and Iraqi Kurds, has produced biological weapons and
tried to obtain nuclear weapons - even before the Gulf
War, when the US and the UK generously supplied him with
armaments, radioactive material and advanced military
technology. But what concerns the Arab world is less the
fate of Saddam than the exponential suffering of the
Iraqi civilian population in case of war.
Destroy Saddam
The American strategy
has been extremely efficient: it relies on the fact the
US cannot be criticized because it is following the UN.
This is one more splendid paradox coming from an
administration that has boycotted the most consensual UN
decisions - those regarding the International Court of
Justice, global warming, children's rights and the
banning of nuclear tests.
Cato in Imperial Rome
used to conclude all his speeches with the catch phrase
"Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed).
Practically harmless in fact, Rome's old enemy was
blocking the construction of the empire and was also an
unwanted competitor in the export of oil and grain. Then
one day the Carthaginians violated their "exclusion
zone" to pursue a bunch of robbers. This was the pretext
Rome was waiting for, and it smashed Carthage into
oblivion. Carthage had to die for the Roman Empire to
live.
Just like Cato, George W Bush doesn't
mince words as far as his new world order is concerned.
Critics of the war all agree that Bush may not know much
about the world outside Texas, but he knows something
about oil: his family has been in this business for two
generations. He also knows the war will mobilize more
than 100,000 troops, will cost between US$100 billion
and $200 billion, depending on the scenario, and
afterwards will require maintaining 50,000 troops in
Iraq, at a cost of $18 billion a year, perhaps for
decades.
In exchange, the Bush administration
may control the production and pricing system of oil in
the world markets. Iraq, which was producing no more
than 1.6 million barrels a day until a few months ago,
and now is barely producing 500,000, could produce 3
million, 5 million or even 10 million barrels a day.
George W Bush has a vision of a world where the highest
values in his moral scale - open markets and cheap gas -
are explicitly guaranteed by the US Marines.
Nobody ever stresses that the Security Council
resolutions adopted after the Gulf War are the most
punitive collection of measures imposed on a country in
peacetime since the Versailles Treaty. The economies of
Germany and Japan were rebuilt after World War II, and
both countries soon came back to the concert of nations.
Iraq, on the other hand, has been devastated. All these
years, Security Council members have been approving
sanctions against Iraq so inhumane that two highly
respected UN officials, Denis Hallyday and Hans von
Sponeck, in charge of humanitarian aid to Iraq, resigned
because they did not want to be accomplices to a policy
described by both of them as "genocidal".
Richard Falk, professor of international law at
Princeton University, is one of the few to draw the
relevant conclusions: "The West is ready to impose a
punitive peace on Third World countries, especially
Muslim countries. It is even capable of giving an
appearance of legitimacy to these hate measures by their
vote at the UN."
Few outside the US are being
fooled - as Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin
America know, Washington hawks have scant respect for
the UN. It is widely recognized that the US, as a
permanent member of the UN Security Council, would never
say a single word about the state of Israel's illegal
colonization and slow-burning ethnic cleansing policies
in Palestine - practices widely condemned by UN member
states.
Frustrated UN diplomats have been
reaffirming off the record that Resolution 1441, the way
it was voted on November 8, is a blank check for war and
nothing but a convenient instrument of American policy.
No matter what it does, Iraq is condemned in advance.
The process has nothing to do with Iraq's
disarmament and everything to do with "regime change" -
which specialists in international law like Falk define
as a direct interference in a country's sovereignty and
its people's right to self-determination.
Washington is actively sponsoring post-Saddam
Iraq. During the recent, highly-publicized Iraqi
opposition meeting in London, says the respected Al
Hayat newspaper, the American delegate Zalmay Khalilzad
- the man who according to Afghans stole the Loya Jirga
from King Zahir Shah - actually threatened the 300
participants. He said "Washington could name a military
governor after the fall of Saddam Hussein if the
conference finished without an agreement".
For
the London-based Palestinian paper Al Quds Al Arabi -
one of the only pan-Arab papers to escape Saudi control
- the meeting was organized by the US to fulfill its own
interests: "They got what they wanted: a political cover
for their military objectives." For Al Quds Al Arabi,
the main beneficiaries are "the pro-Iranian Shi'ites and
the Kurds. This assures the 'Shi'ite-Kurd coalition' a
big influence over the nomination of members of the
provisional [Iraqi] government, scheduled for January
15." Arab diplomats fear that by playing up ethnic and
religious components, the US will be forcing post-Saddam
Iraq to lose its Arab character.
According to a
recent Gallup poll, 91 percent of Americans think the
Iraqi weapons declaration is a lie, but 66 percent think
the administration should not go to war before the lies
are proved by the UN inspectors. This is one of the
reasons the US administration may take its time until
January 27, but another reason is that the Pentagon
military machine won't be ready until late January or
early February.
The best Arab observers have no
doubt that Saddam Hussein will do everything in his
power to make the Americans pay a tremendous price for
the invasion. American military planners know the urban
guerrilla scenario is very much on the cards: a Fortress
Baghdad heavily protected by Saddam's elite Special
Republican Guard plus the two regiments of the
Republican Guard, in a 21st century remake of the Siege
of Stalingrad.
There's a possibility Saddam may
set fire to Iraq's oil fields - as he did in 1991 in
Kuwait. He may also be betting on collateral damage
reaching an unbearable level for Western public opinion,
way beyond the estimated 3,000-plus civilian victims of
American bombing during the New Afghan War. If Saddam
Hussein, the ultimate survivor, resorts to employing his
crude chemical or biological weapons, the White House's
assurances that it would go nuclear will not be much of
a consolation.
The bigger
picture
American foreign policy is now dominated
by three vectors: the post-Cold War policy to prevent
the resurgence of any rival power comparable to the
USSR; the global war against terrorism, encompassing
states that support terrorism, and states that have
decided to acquire weapons of mass destruction; and the
echoes and reverberations of the war against the Taliban
in Afghanistan.
These three vectors converge at
an intersection of the Chinese, Indian, Slavic and Arab
worlds - what American strategists (but not yet tourist
guidebooks) define as Southwest Asia.
As if any
confirmation were needed, General Tommy Franks - who
managed the war against the Taliban and will manage the
war against Iraq - has stressed time and time again that
American forces will stay in Afghanistan for a long
time. There are roughly 8,000 American troops in
Afghanistan at the moment. They remain practically all
the time in cantonment mode, because they have no access
to valuable information to guide them on the trail of
Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.
To make matters
worse, in the Pashtun belt, the Americans are faced with
a jihad against foreign invaders launched last August, a
jihad with a strong rear-guard base in Pakistani
territory. As Asia Times Online has reported from the
spot, Pashtuns on both sides of the volatile and porous
Pakistan-Afghanistan border are unanimously enraged by
the US. Afghanistan remains totally insecure. Warlords
rule the provinces. Hamid Karzai's government is
dominated by Uzbeks, Tajiks and, on a smaller scale,
Hazaras. It is so fragile that Karzai, according to
local jokes, cannot rule even over his own chair. And
once again, predictably, Afghanistan has disappeared
from the media radar.
The "smoking out" of
Taliban and al-Qaeda and the capture of their chiefs and
commanders has been a failure. The New Afghan War became
a Pakistani war. President General Pervez Musharraf's
decision to totally align himself with the US was not
much help to Washington. The best illustration is what
happened in the Pakistani elections on October 10: the
President's party - the Muslim League Quaid-e-Azam - won
in some places, but the religious parties united in the
Muttahidda Majlis-e-Aman (MMA) won a massive victory in
the ultra-sensitive Pashtun-dominated regions, the North
West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan.
The vice-president of the MMA, Qazi Hussain
Ahmed, has said he wants to eliminate US air bases in
Pakistan and wants the country out of the coalition to
fight terrorism. The regions controlled by the MMA are
bound to be subjected to Sharia (Islamic law), with no
interference of Western culture. Militants in most of
the groups composing the MMA - especially the young -
are in fact basically the same people that fought under
a Taliban or an al-Qaeda banner last year and are still
engaging in anti-US jihad on both sides of the border.
As the US war on terror translates into a
massively powerful war machine, the US has extended the
battlefield way beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now
there are more air and ground forces in Diego Garcia -
located in the heart of the Indian Ocean. There are at
least 200 US "advisors" in Yemen, where, not by an
accident, a precise hit from a drone smashed a vehicle
transporting six alleged al-Qaeda members. There are US
Special Forces in Djibouti, in the ultra-sensitive horn
of Africa - where soon there will be a full American
headquarters. The agenda is only superficially related
to the pursuit of terrorist groups in north Africa. It
is directly related to the replacement of American bases
in Saudi Arabia, as it is almost certain (though not yet
an irreversible decision) that the Saudis will not
authorize their use in the upcoming Iraqi invasion.
What the US is really interested in is Southwest
Asia: Iran and the former Soviet republics of Central
Asia. The Bush administration and the Putin government
are playing a very complex chess game. Putin is
sacrificing positions now to gain a later advantage. The
Americans have already attacked Russian interests on
four sides. The US torpedoed the 1972 ABM treaty which
forbids space missile defense. NATO expanded east to
former Soviet satellites - and now incorporates three
former Soviet republics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
A crucial pipeline carrying a substantial part of the
Caspian oil wealth runs from Baku in Azerbaijan to
Ceyhan in Turkey, south of the Caucasus, thus totally
bypassing Russia. And the US signed with Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan - and is negotiating with Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan - agreements to create American air bases
in these former Soviet republics' territories. These
developments form the basis of a long-term American
military presence in the heart of Southwest Asia.
The Bush administration may start its new war
against Iraq - but the war in fact is against Iran. Iran
is an official member of the Axis of Evil. Washington
has conveniently forgotten that only one year ago,
during the New Afghan War, Iran was actually an ally of
the US as it helped, financed and armed the Hazaras, who
were part of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.
European diplomats suggest the heart of the
matter is how the regime in Tehran is perceived in
Washington. There may exist an understanding of the
Iranian regime as a concert of multiple and clashing
centers of decision. But Washington hawks have only two
preoccupations. They know the regime is under the power
of Velayat-e-Faqih - Islamic jurisprudence.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directs the army,
the security services, the Guardians of the Revolution,
the paramilitary forces, the institutions of the
judiciary, the imams who recite the Friday prayers all
over the country, and also the media. So in the view of
Washington hawks, President Khatami simply cannot reform
the regime.
Strategically, Iran is important
because - as Israeli intelligence has been alerting -
Iran could have a nuclear bomb before 2005. Washington
hawks figure that if the Shah's regime wanted to become
a nuclear power, it need be no different for the Islamic
regime. The ayatollahs indeed fear total encirclement of
Iran. They know that Iraq was trying to become nuclear,
that Israel and Pakistan are nuclear powers, and that
now the US is an unwanted neighbor.
European
diplomats speculate that Iran could have three options:
it could continue trying to acquire fissile material and
missile launchers, while waiting for external threats to
justify the pursuit of a nuclear arsenal. It could
engage in a secret program to build nuclear weapons -
just like Israel did. Or it could explode a nuclear
device - just like India and Pakistan did. There's one
factor common to these three options: they are all
anathema for Washington. For the US, it's out of the
question for Iran to become a very important regional
power, andnor does the US want to become engaged in an
automatic nuclear guarantee to the Gulf monarchies. So
Iran risks sooner or later becoming a victim of the
American doctrine of preemptive action.
The
parallels with Afghanistan are striking. The US
intervention in Afghanistan completely destabilized
Pakistan - and a few dangerous after-effects are already
noticeable. The US intervention in Iraq could completely
destabilize Iran. It's absolutely certain that Iran will
not help mortal enemy Saddam Hussein. But the fact is
the US already has a substantial military presence in
the Gulf, Pakistan, Central Asia and Turkey. Add Iraq,
and Iran will be encircled. The Islamic regime may
inevitably react by forcefully aiding the anti-US
jihadis in Afghanistan as well as the anti-Musharraf
parties in Pakistan. Iran could also try to seduce
Iraq's 60 percent of Shi'ites to prevent the next Iraqi
state from being a totally American concoction (as the
Arab press is convinced it will be). It's fair to
imagine that under these circumstances the war against
terrorism will acquire a totally new dimension.
The logic of war for the moment seems to be
favoring American political, economic and strategic
designs. Moscow's interests seem to be threatened - in
terms of loss of influence - and so seem Beijing's in
the longer run - in terms of access to energy sources.
The potential for trouble is immense - but so is the
potential for a peaceful Southwest Asia ruled by a new
concert of powers: the US, China, Russia and India. This
may not be an Axis of Good, as compared to the current
Axis of Evil, but it could certainly be an Axis of the
World.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies, or to
submit a letter to the editor.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
