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The Twin Towers and the Tower of
Babel
Part 1: Sleeping with the
enemy
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS - Two
years after September 11, 2001, the Washington
neo-conservative dream of a rainbow of democracy shining
from Israel to Afghanistan and traversing Iraq has
vanished into thin air. From Kabul to Baghdad, the
vision is being wiped out by the truth of hard facts. 1)
The American army does not have the resources to play by
itself the role of global sheriff. 2) America is not
prepared for or interested in nation-building. 3)
Military "victories", like Afghanistan and Iraq, mean
nothing when they are not complemented by moral and
political legitimacy. The lack of legitimacy creates a
political void, immediately exploited by radical Islam.
Tribal Afghanistan is a Taliban-infested
ungovernable chaos trespassed by an anti-American jihad.
Iraq is an ungovernable chaos bordering on civil war and
trespassed by an anti-American jihad. The
Israeli-Palestinian roadmap has been ripped apart.
Al-Qaeda, a mutant virus, continues to strike from east
Africa to the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Osama bin
Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri remain on the
loose in the Pakistan-Afghan tribal areas. Taliban
leader Mullah Omar leads the Afghan jihad from his
hideout in the mountains north of Kandahar. And Saddam
Hussein, after losing yet another war, has exploded a
time bomb in the face of the Pentagon by financing a
great deal of the Iraqi resistance - a magnet now
attracting people from all over the Arab world.
Al-Qaeda is "celebrating" September 11 in its
own sinister way, via a new audiotape broadcast on
al-Arabiyya satellite television on September 3. A
spokesman who identified himself as Abu Abd al-Rahman
al-Najdi announced, "There will be new attacks inside
and outside [the US] which would make America forget the
attacks of September 11." But the spokesman denied that
al-Qaeda was involved in the car bombing that killed
Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and another 125 people
in front of Imam Ali's Shrine in Najaf in Iraq last
month.
According to the al-Qaeda version, the US
and Israel orchestrated the bombing because they feared
the ayatollah's connections with Iran, and also to
provoke trouble between Sunnis and Shi'ites and turn the
Shi'ites against Wahhabi-dominated al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda's
objective, according to the spokesman, remains "to fight
the Americans and kill them everywhere on earth and
drive them out of Palestine, the Arabian peninsula and
Iraq". Of course, the tape has not failed to remind
everyone that bin Laden and Mullah Omar are alive and in
jihad mode in Afghanistan.
The latest
developments have proved once again that American
conservatives' pocket futurology is dead and buried.
There has been no "end of history". There has been no
"death of ideology". Instead of these pre-Galilean
platitudes to which all would have been forced to
submit, now it's Medievalism all over again - with
clashing sectarian apocalyptic visions (born-again
Christian fundamentalists against radical Islamists),
Inquisition tribunals (Guantanamo) and the horrors of
war (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine).
It's
Medievalism - but mixed with the epitome of modernity.
As John Gray, a professor of European Thought at the
London School of Economics argues in his latest book
(Al-Qaeda and what it means to be modern, London,
Faber & Faber), al-Qaeda is a by-product of
globalization: "Its most distinctive feature -
projecting a privatized form of organized violence
worldwide - was impossible in the past." Gray goes to
great lengths to stress that on September 11, al-Qaeda
"destroyed the West's ruling myth". And he sharply
demonstrates how "like communism and Nazism, radical
Islam is modern. Though it claims to be anti-Western, it
is shaped as much by Western ideology as by Islamic
traditions. Like Marxists and neo-liberals, radical
Islamists see history as a prelude to a new world. All
are convinced they can remake the human condition. If
there is a uniquely modern myth, this is it."
Just as the US re-invented and financed jihad in
the early 1980s to combat the "evil" Soviet empire in
Afghanistan - and so contributed to the emergence of
this modern myth - by invading Iraq the US has opened up
a new Pandora's box, facilitating the alliance of
Wahhabi, Afghan-Arab jihadis with secular, Ba'athist
operatives: "the deadliest of combinations" according to
European intelligence experts. The White House and the
Pentagon won't admit that Iraq is not tribal Afghanistan
- and that the rule of anarchy everywhere around Kabul
cannot prevail in a country that George W Bush wants to
portray as the window of his democracy export program to
the Middle East. If the Iraqi adventure fails, it's the
end of the American pretense of fashioning the new world
order, and it's the death knell for the unilateralist
neo-conservatives who have held the world hostage since
September 11.
As Asia Times Online has argued
(Why the lessons of Vietnam do
matter - Aug 20), Iraq is already a Vietnam
in the sense that the most powerful army in the world is
again facing a popular war of national liberation - with
no exit strategy. It's a popular war in the sense that
the resistance is multi-faceted, composed by dozens of
groups - left, center, religious, non-religious,
Shi'ite, Sunni, Kurd. It's a simultaneously nationalist,
Ba'athist and Islamist resistance. And like in
Palestine, the resistance exists as a direct consequence
of the occupation - and not, as Israeli and American
spin would have it, because of "Islamic terrorists". To
top it all, the absolute key question in Iraq is not the
fact that the Sunni triangle (Baghdad-Ramadi-Tikrit) is
engaged in a guerrilla war. If the Shi'ites also go for
it in the next few weeks, then one will be witnessing
the end of the neo-conservatives' fantasy.
Outside Iraq - not only in the Arab world but
also in Europe, Asia and Latin America - there's a
pervasive cynical perception according to which the
Islamist scarecrow is an enemy made by US intelligence:
invisible and virtual, thus eternal. And very convenient
as well, compared to the old Soviet "evil empire".
Franco-Palestinian writer and former peace negotiator
Ilan Halevi, in his book Face a la Guerre - Lettre
from Ramallah (Paris, Actes Sud) argues that one
must distinguish Islamism in general from "the
international network created by the American secret
services more than two decades ago, essentially with
anti-Soviet purposes, and which we are now told it has
staged a mutiny". The real tragedy is that hidden by the
Islamist scarecrow, one finds as hostages no less than
the hundreds of millions of people living in the Arab
and Muslim world.
Two years after September 11
- and after the neo-conservatives have squandered all
the capital of sympathy that poured towards America from
all corners of the globe - cynicism towards the
American "official" version of events is also pervasive. From
Rio to Rome and from Sydney to Saigon, many started
viewing "Islamic terror" as too convenient a scarecrow,
so pliable to the image Washington neo-conservatives
want to project. This led to the widespread suspicion
that the boys at spy headquarters in Langley have let it
live and prosper during the 1990s to better illustrate
the necessity of a new never-ending war. It's important
to remember that in the beginning of the Bush
administration the top candidate for enemy number 1 in a
new Cold War was China - until the Islamic terrorism
scarecrow came, literally, out of the sky.
Another impregnable perception is widely shared
all over the world: the American adventure in Iraq was
not about weapons of mass destruction (which simply have
refused to show up); but, as British analyst Tariq Ali,
author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms puts it,
"capturing an oil-producing country with a regime that
was very hostile to Israel, which was giving money to
the Palestinians". It was also a display of "theatrical
militarism", a concept coined by French historian
Emmanuel Todd and already analyzed by Asia Times Online
(Theatrical militarism - Dec 4,
2002).
In the eyes of most of the Iraqi
population, as well as most of the Arab and Muslim
world, the Bush adventure has not "liberated" Iraq, but
replaced a cruel dictatorship - which successive US
governments encouraged and supported until it went out
of line - with a neocolonial regime headed by a
proconsul with absolute powers.
European
intelligence experts have noted how Bush's recent
messages have been in fact designed to address the
"liberated" Iraqi people, with the same tone "you are
either with us or against us". This means "accept our
occupation on our terms, or else". But as the Iraqi
resistance stiffens - and the secular "remnants of
Saddam's regime" and radical Islam have finally found a
common goal - Washington has been forced to concede that
it must change its tactics. The alliance of what Iraqis
are calling "the Saddam network" with radical Islam is
betting on a "Lebanonization" of Iraq.
The Bush
administration for its part is now saying that it will
leave the country - or considerably reduce its military
deployment - after the first democratic elections,
promised by proconsul L Paul Bremer for Spring 2004. The
deadly message seems to have hit home: the latest
attacks have smashed any channel of communication that
might benefit American plans and simultaneously
demonstrated the powerlessness of the occupying force.
But as far as the American-appointed governing council
is concerned, for the moment the verdict is still open.
It may be the first step towards really representative
government - although all major decisions are ultimately
taken by Bremer. Or it may represent the beginning of
communal fragmentation - opening the doors for a civil
war.
Whatever the spin, George W Bush's decision
of asking the United Nations to issue a mandate for a
multinational stabilizing force in Iraq is viewed in the
corridors of the European Union as concrete proof that
the arrogance and incompetence of the neo-conservatives
led them to a quagmire. Diplomats warn that Bush, as he
appeals for help, will try simultaneously to dictate his
conditions to the UN. So "old Europe" - France and
Germany, plus Russia - is caught in a dilemma: how to
help this American adventure that has been condemned
from the beginning? An EU diplomat sums it all up, "We
cannot allow Iraq to sink into horror and abjection just
because we want to punish George W Bush. But at the same
time we cannot just bow our heads and march into this
mess the Americans themselves created, and now want to
get rid of."
The EU, meeting in Riva del Garda,
Italy, this past weekend, remains deeply divided. Great
Britain and Spain support Washington's proposal to the
UN, France, Germany and the Scandinavians are against
it. As Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister puts it,
"You cannot have a situation where the US remains in
control over what happens in Iraq and at the same time
others have to move in and take care of security and
reconstruction."
UN blue helmets - which in fact
are little else than mercenaries - may eventually be
offered the honor of trying to clean up the mess. So in
the corridors of the European Union inevitably there's
great sadness about what is ultimately the UN's
irrelevancy and lack of independence: "The fact is the
UN simply cannot do anything against the will of the US.
The maximum the UN can aspire to is to clean up the
empire's mess," says another diplomat. Most Iraqis -
who, let's not forget, are among the most well-educated
people in the Arab world after the Palestinians - share
exactly the same view.
As Tariq Ali stresses, "For
the US, the main thing in Iraq is to push through the
privatization of Iraq's oil, to achieve the
liberalization of the Iraqi economy and to get the big
US corporations in there. They are not too concerned as
to how the country will be run. We are witnessing
imperialism in the epoch of neo-liberal economics and
the 'Washington consensus'. Why rebuild hospitals and
recreate the state health service in Iraq when you are
dismantling it in your own countries?"
It's all
there in Executive Order 13315, signed by Bush on August
28 and conceived to "expand the scope of the national
emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22".
By "blocking property of the former Iraqi regime, its
senior officials and their family members, and taking
certain other actions", the Executive Order in fact
places Iraq's state assets under total control of the US
Treasury. It is by all means the institutionalization of
the looting of Iraq, under the banner of "Iraqi
reconstruction". Without any Iraqi being consulted, the
Executive Order implies that what benefits the Iraqi
people benefits the US. With this Executive Order duly
signed, the Bush administration shouldn't have any
problems if it is forced to hand over a little control
of Iraq to the UN.
If somebody should take the
fall for most of the current, ghastly chaos in Iraq, one
has to look no further than American proconsul L Paul
Bremer. On May 23, as Bush issued his first Executive
Order seizing control of Iraq's assets, Bremer for his
part signed a decree which simply dismantled the huge
Iraqi army - with more than 400,000 officers and
soldiers. Furious with this decision, a great deal of
them subsequently fell or are falling right in the lap
of the Iraqi resistance movement. The decision was of
course made in Washington, possibly by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld himself. The official spin was that it
should signal the end of the former government. Instead,
it bolstered the resistance. European intelligence
analysts comment that this may have been perversely what
the Pentagon had in mind: to force the elusive nexus
between the "remnants of Saddam's regime" and Islamists
related to al-Qaeda.
As Asia Times Online has
described (The plot thickens - Aug
23) , the Iraqi resistance works as myriad cells
operated by former soldiers of Saddam's army, each of
them responding to a higher official with good military
training. All obey to a Central Command, a sort of
clandestine joint chiefs of staff. Crossing Iraqi
information with European intelligence information, it's
possible to determine that the bulk of this "invisible"
army is composed by at least three different groups -
all of them autonomous in military as well in financial
terms:
The Iraqi mujahideen. Composed of
non-members of the Ba'ath Party, plus jihadis who have
combat experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya and who
come from different Muslim countries. Practically
everybody has guerrilla training. This group may have up
to 7,000 fighters.
Al-Ansar (the Partisans). These are
the famous "remnants of the Ba'ath Party" the Pentagon
is so fond of talking about . All the leaders have been
personally chosen by Saddam. They are spread out all
over Iraq. No manuscript messages, no radio, no
satphone: the cells communicate only through oral
messages.
Al-Muhajirun (the Emigrants) . These
are a few members of the Iraqi elite, plus Ba'ath Party
officials, especially military strategists. They are the
hard core of the new Iraqi regime Saddam dreams of - if
and when the Americans leave.
Ali Hasan
al-Majid, the notorious Chemical Ali, recently arrested,
was in theory the general director of the Saddam
resistance, or what the Iraqis themselves are calling
the "Saddam network". Former vice president Taha Yassin
Ramadan, captured in Mosul on August 19, was the head of
al-Ansar. But Izzat Ibrahim, the former
commander-in-chief of the Iraqi armed forcers, and
leader of the mujahideen, is still on the loose. Ibrahim
was the main enforcer of the Islamization of Iraqi
society for these past 10 years. He is the absolute key
connection between the regime and prominent Islamists in
the wider Arab world. If he is arrested, this would be
the closest that the Pentagon will get to finding a link
between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda.
At least
100,000 former members of the Iraqi security services,
especially the Mukhabarat, all of them unemployed, are
roaming the Sunni triangle. Mohammed Khtair al-Dulami,
head of the branch specialized on explosives, poisoning
and other special operations, has not been arrested yet.
Former Mukhabarat agents are acting as go-betweens for
resistance fighters interested in buying loads of
weapons from all sorts of dealers operating in the black
market.
In a startling development, Washington
was forced to swallow its own propaganda and start
recruiting hundreds of real "remnants of Saddam's
regime" - the feared Mukhabarat - to try to at least to
identify the more than 40 different groups that compose
the resistance. Members of the American-appointed
interim governing council could not be but furious. This
is not only a sensational case of sleeping with the
enemy, but it also painfully highlights how the
Americans simply have no access to ground intelligence.
The Mukhabarat was one of the four branches -
the best organized and the most feared - of Saddam's
security services. It was specialized in foreign
relations. The Pentagon is particularly interested in
working with agents familiar with Syria and Iran - also
as an additional way to continue to demonize both
countries. The Mukhabarat was officially dissolved by
Bremer in early summer, as well as the ministries of
information and defense. They are back - paid in
dollars, and chasing Iraqis again. When Iraqis knew
about it, is was one more nail in the coffin of the
discredited American democratic "vision".
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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