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THE ROVING
EYE
Iraq showdown: Winners and
losers
By Pepe Escobar
BRUSSELS and GENEVA - At the height of the war
on Iraq, the paradox in al-Qaeda's strategy became
apparent: in fighting American imperialism, al-Qaeda in
the end just managed to reinforce it. The fighting
machine set in motion by September 11 ultimately drove
home the awesome omnipotence of Washington and the world
now has to accept the US's total domination of the
Middle East. The United Nations has been marginalized,
and European voices don't mean much either.
This
was the state of things until the Riyadh and Casablanca
suicide bombings - al-Qaeda, or its offspring, are not
finished, and at the same time the invasion of Iraq is
not revealing itself to be the first "domino" of peace
in the Middle East, as Washington's hawks had assumed.
Even in Iraq, there is not even a faint shade of
an American dream. The occupying power's program for
post-war stabilization is at best ineffectual, and it's
becoming seemingly impossible for America to convince
Iraqis that their dizzying array of problems are the
heritage of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Insecurity
rules. Only two police stations work in Baghdad. It took
the Americans more than a month to start cracking down
on the weapons market flourishing in the streets: a fake
but very reliable Kalashnikov made in Romania can be
bought for less than US$20.
Many parents refuse
to let their children back to school, although they
opened on May 3: most have been victims of robberies
after the fall of the regime. All the ministries -
except the Oil Ministry, of course, protected by the
Americans - and administrative services have been
destroyed. Hospitals are operating at the limit. There
are endless queues to buy gas - in a country that holds
the second largest oil reserves in the world. Gasoline
in the black market is 10 times more expensive than in
regular gas stations as Iraq's current oil production is
10 times lower than before the war. The crippling UN
sanctions are still in place. And before it has a
functional sovereign government, Iraq's oil exports
cannot resume.
Most of Baghdad has no more than
two hours of electricity a day: the grid was hit by
American bombing, and decent service still has not been
restored. Temperatures are now reaching 35 degrees.
Trash has not been collected for more than five weeks.
Working phone lines are limited to a few neighborhoods.
Water is polluted. And for no apparent reason, the Iraqi
dinar has dropped to 1,500 to the dollar (it used to be
around 2,500, and almost 3,000 when the regime fell).
And in the dollar-based black market, prices have also
sky-rocketed.
Some people
are hitting back. Taking advantage of the Belgian law of
"universal competence", 17 Iraqis and the widow of the
Jordanian al-Jazeera correspondent killed in Baghdad on
April 8 by an American missile (Silenced in the name of freedom
,
April 10), filed a lawsuit last Wednesday in Brussels
accusing General Tommy Franks of war crimes.
Lieutenant-General Brian McCoy of the 4th regiment, 3rd
Marine battalion - the man who "liberated" Paradise
Square in front of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and
ordered the decapitation of Saddam's statue live on
world TV - is also charged: according to witnesses, he
designated ambulances as legitimate targets suspected of
hiding armed combatants. The US State Department
considers the Belgian charges "grotesque".
Iraqis, now with access to a free press, like
the newspaper al-Iraq al-Jadid (The New Iraq) and
mobilizing themselves around the explosion of at least
70 political parties, are learning a little about their
occupiers: How that stellar proponent of Tomahawk
diplomacy, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
described Iraq as a country with no history of
democracy. So, in Rumsfeldspeak, this means the
"reconstruction" and consequent occupation of Iraq could
take years, and not the "year or two" that Washington
had been floating.
European diplomats in
Geneva and Brussels are very much aware of the triumph of
the Rumsfeld doctrine over that of Secretary of State
Colin Powell. But they wonder whether the US can really be
a winner in the new equation. China certainly already
is. Washington's hope for a peaceful solution of the
North Korea crisis in fact relies entirely on
effective Chinese pressure. While Europe is on the brink
of recession, Japan is already in recession and the
US economy is sluggish to say the least. All
optimistic economic expectations, therefore, fall on China.
The financing of America's deficit is based on Asia
buying American Treasury bonds. And this "Asia"
increasingly means China, not Japan. In five years, China, Hong
Kong and Taiwan will control roughly 50 percent of
America's debt(the Bank of China already holds 30 percent).
In spite of the severe acute respiratory
syndrome scare, China is holding its ground. At the UN,
Beijing maintains its strategy of active support of the
developing world, while it hid behind France and Russia
during the harsh Iraqi debates. In North Asia, it
maximizes its contribution to solve the crisis with
North Korea, while in South Asia it continues to support
Pakistan militarily, as it always has.
"New
Europe" - a hollow concept - might be considered a
winner. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and
the Baltic states will profit from the the transfer of
strategic American bases from Germany to Eastern Europe.
Post-communists from Warsaw to Vilnius, from Budapest to
Bucharest are pleased. But in Brussels, this Eastern
European block about to enter the EU is widely
considered by diplomats as a dangerous Fifth Column.
Their life won't be a bed of roses in an EU de facto
dominated by the Paris-Berlin alliance. On the other
hand, NATO as we know it has all but expired, but at the
same time America has just inherited the whole Warsaw
Pact, plus the United Kingdom: a sweet deal indeed.
It might be tempting to consider the Arab League
a winner. But not from the point of view of the Arab
intelligentsia - now plunged in a sea of sadness,
humiliation and pain. Abdul Rahman Munif, one of the
greatest contemporary Arab novelists, a former exile in
Baghdad, deprived for 40 years of his Saudi passport
because he is politically incorrect, sums up the mood.
"The objective of the war and occupation of Iraq was not
only to depose a regime, but to exercise revenge over a
country, its history and its civilization, and to reduce
its role to nothing."
From Damascus to Amman,
from Cairo to Beirut, Arab intellectuals deplore not
only the almost 4,000 civilian victims, the treason of
the escaping Iraqi leadership, the obvious absence of
weapons of mass destruction, but above all the
destruction of the libraries and museums: the places of
Mesopotamian memory.
Syrian editorial writer Ali
al-Atassi is horrified by much of the West's lack of
cultural and historical knowledge, insisting on a flow
of images that "correspond to cliches and myths,
presenting the Iraqis as hungry and thirsty Bedouins or
like gangs of looters", neglecting the reality of Iraq
as a "middle-class country, of technocrats, of an
intelligentsia that we never see". And the whole
debacle, adds Wajih Kawthrani, a Lebanese professor of
history, is the Arabs' fault. "Our elites, political
parties, power and regimes have not managed to built a
modern state after independence."
Nader
Ferghani, the Egyptian who coordinated the famous United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) report over the
immense problems in human development in the Arab world,
shares the same opinion: "There are those who committed
the crime, the Americans, but there are also the
'accessories', and these are the Arab regimes. The
powerlessness of the Arab regional system was revealed
in all its splendor. Now it's inevitable to finish with
the Arab League, to the benefit of a League of the Arab
Peoples and civil society organizations."
But
still the Arab League as it is seems to have found a new
lease of life. Before the war on Iraq, many analysts
believed the new geopolitical core in the Middle East
would be Tel Aviv-Ankara-Baghdad. But at least for the
moment the new core is actually Cairo-Riyadh. Egypt and
Saudi Arabia have tried everything to find a political
solution to the Iraqi tragedy: They tried to convince
Saddam to go while there was still time, and may have
been instrumental in convincing him to abandon his
strategy of a siege of Baghdad. Mohsen Khalil, the Iraqi
ambassador to the Arab League in Cairo, was a central
character in this diplomatic frenzy.
The
Cairo-Riyadh alliance also provided crucial support to
Bashir Assad of Syria - in exchange for a number of
assurances. Cairo tried to accommodate numerous concerns
of Sudan, Libya and Yemen. And both Cairo and Riyadh
were also crucial in convincing Yasser Arafat to agree
to Abu Mazen's government in Palestine. It may be too
early to talk about the emergence of a new Arab
diplomacy. But a start has been made. It's not
pro-American and it's not anti-American - which means it
will not be easily interpreted by the more
fundamentalist black-or-white hawks in Washington.
Anyway, the three absolutely key men to watch in the
next stages are Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: the
extremely reasonable and sound Saudi Foreign Minister
Saud Faisal; and the chief of the Egyptian secret
services, General Omar Sulayman.
The Iranian
people may be considered winners - opposed as they are
to the Iranian hardcore mullahs. But even this victory
of democratic supporters in Iran is not enough to
legitimize a vicious Western campaign where Iran is
accused of exporting its expiring Islamic Revolution to
Iraq. The Shi'ites are the overwhelming majority in
Iraq. They have never exercised political power. They
consider themselves, above all, Iraqis and Arabs: this
is more important than their Shi'ite confessionalism. A
taste of things to come may be a political party like
the Islamic Movement of Iraq, created in March by a
writer, Hamid al-Moktar. He says the party's goal is "to
establish a modern and open democracy, with no
extremism, and inside the precepts of Islam, because it
is Islam which invented democracy". The party is fully
approved by al-Hawza, the extremely powerful Iraqi
assembly of Shi'ite clerics based in Najaf.
Turkey, with its government of moderate
Islamists (also pro-Saudi) may have been left in an
uncomfortable position. America will not relinquish its
relationship with the Turkish army - the eastern flank
of NATO. But Turkey could be punished by the
International Monetary Fund because its parliamentarians
refused to support the American war. The list of victims
of American revenge does not stop with Turkey. There's
the South Korean government, which Washington will do
everything to marginalize in a political solution for
the North Korean crisis; Canadian Prime Minister Jean
Chretien; Mexican President Vicente Fox; and the Chilean
government, which will be forced to renounce its free
trade deal with the US and strike a deal instead with
Mercosur - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay,
which will boost Latin American unity.
There's a
consensus in diplomatic circles in Brussels and Geneva
that the key of the new diplomatic order lies in Europe,
and between two crucial players, France and the UK. The
UK might follow a line being developed since 1945 which
essentially means a "privileged" alliance with the US
and a relationship with Europe based exclusively in
terms of a consumer market. But Prime Minister Tony
Blair's supreme ambition - and the one he thinks could
really place him in the history books - is to position
London at the heart of Europe, beside France and
Germany. For that, he must start by adopting the euro.
The problem is that his base in England is exactly the
same one that bitterly criticized him for this stance on
Iraq.
Diplomats lament that what happened in
France was obviously not understood in the US. The still
ongoing France-bashing campaign is just plain silly. The
unanimous French "no to war" - a popular sentiment well
identified and capitalized by the Jacques Chirac
government - was interpreted in Washington as treason.
In fact it was the expression, among other things, of a
European feeling of geostrategic impotence. But inside
Europe, one of the most welcome effects of the Iraqi
standoff was the emergence of a renewed Franco-German
entente. And only the disinformed may sustain that this
is not the real engine of Europe. Any diplomat in
Brussels knows that Germany needs a strong partner in
France to forge a grand European political coalition -
and vice-versa.
France, Germany and Belgium are
deeply committed to organize a common European army -
and the consensus in Brussels and Geneva is that no
matter the spin and pressure from Washington, it will
happen. Even in Italy and Spain the increasingly
unpopular Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar are
both down if not yet out. The future of Europe will
basically be decided by the inescapable Paris-Berlin
alliance.
Which leaves London and Paris not too
much time to sort out their common future. Without
crucial help from Paris, Blair cannot steer the UK to
become fully European. Without Blair, Chirac will remain
exposed to all sorts of petty revenge by American hawks.
If they get their act together, Europe will be the true
winner. The acid test, and many others, like George W
Bush setting his feet on "enemy" French soil, will
happen during the G8 meeting in Evian, France, in the
beginning of June.
(?003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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