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THE ROVING EYE
The plot
thickens
By Pepe Escobar
HANOI - Ahmad
Chalabi, the Pentagon erstwhile protege, leader of the
Iraqi National Congress (INC), member of the
American-appointed Iraqi interim government in Iraq and
a convicted criminal in Jordan, went on record in
Baghdad saying that he had received intelligence on
Thursday, August 14, that "a large-scale act would take
place ... against a soft target, such as Iraqi political
parties or other parties, including the UN". He even
learned that the attack would be a truck bombing - by
means of a suicide bomber or a remote-controlled
detonator. Chalabi also made clear that according to
this intelligence, "neither the Coalition Provisional
Authority nor coalition troops" would be attacked.
Chalabi is usually not recognized as a reliable
source. But if this startling piece of information is
true, it means two things: 1) The Americans in Iraq knew
about an attack, and did nothing to try to prevent it.
2) The UN itself didn't know anything about it,
according to Fred Eckhard, spokesman for secretary
general Kofi Annan: "To my knowledge, that information
was not relayed to the United Nations."
The
frightening possibility that Chalabi knew it, the
Americans knew it, the UN didn't and the Americans did
nothing to improve security at the UN headquarters will
only benefit one player: the Pentagon, according to
which Iraq is now the central battle in the "war against
terrorism". And right on cue, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and US Central Command chief General John
Abizaid, in a joint briefing, declared Iraq now to be a
sort of terrorist Woodstock.
Whatever goes
terribly wrong in Iraq is not enough to force the
Pentagon to change its script. It still refuses to
acknowledge the indigenous broad-based Iraqi resistance
against the occupation, which, as Asia Times Online has
reported, spreads out from Sunni mosques and is guided
by patriotism. The Pentagon keeps repeating what it
wants to hear - and it all comes from none other than
Chalabi, according to whom there was an important
meeting between the notorious "remnants of Saddam's
regime" and "international terrorists" before the UN
bombing.
The Pentagon may have a point when one
considers that a substantial part of Iraqi public
opinion is convinced that true patriotic Iraqis could
not have perpetrated the attack. Some Islamic factions
of the Iraqi resistance - like the Iraqi National
Islamic Resistance Movement - have in fact condemned the
UN bombing as a "criminal act", although up to now other
factions, like the White Flags, the Muslim Youth and the
Army of Mohammed, have not said anything. But it's
crucial to note that the Iraqi National Islamic
Resistance Movement has denied the involvement of all
Iraqi resistance factions, not only in the UN bombing
but in the attacks against the Jordanian embassy and the
oil pipelines: it says these attacks discredit the true
Iraqi resistance.
Even if the Iraqi resistance
was not responsible for these attacks, this does not
mean that there is no heavy indigenous opposition to the
occupation - as the Pentagon script demands. It's much
easier to blame everything on al-Qaeda, the Ansar
al-Islam or a fuzzy terrorist Woodstock with players
coming from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Afghanistan.
Ansar al-Islam - led by Mullah Krekar, at the
moment exiled in Norway - may have been a very
convenient tool manipulated by the Pentagon. For three
years, the organization was based in the village of
Bijara, in northeasten Iraq, almost an enclave in
Iranian territory. Last March, its hideout was bombed
into oblivion by the Americans. The Pentagon version at
the time was that Ansar was virtually extinct. But now
Ansar's leadership has mysteriously managed to resurface
- and in heavily-patrolled Baghdad, of all places.
According to Kurdish sources, a key element of the
leadership is Abu Wayl, a former colonel in Saddam's
security services reconverted into operational chief of
Ansar's "Arab battalion".
The Americans have
already blamed Ansar al-Islam for the attack on the
Jordanian embassy. Jordan, for its part, blames Abu
Mussad al-Zarkaoui, a Jordanian national, as one of
Ansar's top operatives. Of myriad groups operating in
Kurdistan, there have been no Ansar-related arrests so
far. On the other hand, the Americans have arrested Ali
Bapir, the leader of Jamiya Islamiya, and Mullah Ali
Abdul Aziz, the charismatic leader of the Islamic
Movement of Kurdistan - the main Kurdish Islamic force,
which even has two ministers in the local government
dominated by Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK, also a member of the interim
government).
Nobody knows where Mullah Abdul
Aziz is being held. The Americans are accusing both
Jamiya Islamiya and the Kurdistan Islamic Movement of
having links with Ansar. The complicating factor is that
all these groups come from the same source: the Islamic
Movement of Kurdistan, created in 1988 and fragmented in
three factions in 1990. Ansar al-Islam decided to launch
a jihad against the kaffirs (infidels) of the
PUK. The other two remained legal. But they also
consider themselves jihadi groups: the difference is
they don't think a jihad against the PUK - as well as a
jihad against the Americans - is justified at this
stage.
A crucial fact is that both Islamist
groups enjoy huge popular support in Kurdistan: many
Kurds are in fact fed up with Jalal Talabani's
barely-disguised dictatorship. But as the Americans have
branded these groups as "terrorists", the only one to
benefit is Talabani, an American ally. And why are these
Kurds fed up? We come back to the same point: because in
a real democratic set up in Iraq, it is Islamist parties
that inevitably touch popular sentiment, with their
central message that Muslims cannot accept to be pawns
of a foreign and non-Muslim occupation force.
The Pentagon line of "remnants of Saddam's
regime", now composed with "international terrorists",
is supposed to explain the actions of all those
anti-American "evil doers" on the loose in Iraq. It's
much more complex than that. During the Saddam era all
sort of crypto-Wahhabi groups were more or less
tolerated - as long as they did not meddle in politics.
Obviously, these groups were all of them anti-Saddam.
Post-Saddam Iraq finally offered them the perfect cause:
resistance against foreign occupation. This has
absolutely nothing to do with al-Qaeda or Ansar
al-Islam. Al-Qaeda - which was never tolerated inside
Iraq - or the enclaved Ansar al-Islam could never have
organized such a disciplined resistance in two or three
months.
As the Iraqi resistance is so
multi-faceted, there's every possibility that the UN
bombing was perpetrated by elements of this Wahhabi
network, already in existence in the Saddam era. And as
unfortunate as it may seem, the UN for them is a pretty
legitimate target. Human rights groups have extensively
documented how UN Resolutions 661 and 687 may have been
responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi
children in the 1990s, due to entirely preventable
diseases. For many strands of the Iraqi resistance, the
UN is just a tool of the occupying power.
On top
of it, the Baghdad office of the World Bank was also in
the UN building . Many Iraqi patriots in fact welcomed
the fact that the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) "suspended" their activities in Iraq
after the bombing. Educated Iraqis are very much aware
of the dreaded IMF-imposed "structural adjustments" and
the ghastly record of the World Bank in terms of
alleviating poverty in the developing world. The
rationale of the Iraqi resistance is that there are no
holds barred to prevent an occupation designed to steal
Iraq's fabulous oil resources and also plunder its
already devastated economy.
So not only soldiers
are legitimate targets. Corporate employees of Kellogg
Brown and Co (a subsidiary of Halliburton) or any other
corporation likely to make a killing out of Iraq's
resources are legitimate targets. UN employees are
legitimate targets. The IMF and the World Bank are
legitimate targets. The Pentagon's response is
predictable. It will send more troops. Not regular
troops, but most of its 29,000 specialists in repression
of urban guerrilla and terrorist groups with military
training. They may kill thousands more Iraqis, but they
won't kill a national liberation movement, operated by
people who lived for years in a militarized society
awash with weapons. And the message of this national
liberation movement to those who concocted and want to
profit from the invasion of their country is stark:
welcome to hell.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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