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The Twin Towers and the Tower of
Babel
Part 2 : The roadmap of human
folly
By Pepe Escobar
Part 1: Sleeping with the
enemy
PARIS - "I wonder
whether there can be a future for the UN in Iraq," asks
an European diplomat. Some Iraqis recognize that the
United Nations' humanitarian aid, in the shape of the
oil for food program, may have saved lives during the
embargo. But many hate the UN exactly because of the
embargo: for them, the UN just enforces what Washington
decides. The undisputable fact is that the UN supervised
the harsh sanctions that, according to the United
Nations Children's Fund, were directly responsible for
the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and an
explosion in the mortality rate. Denis Halliday and Hans
von Sponeck, two senior, respected UN officials,
resigned in disgust against the way in which the oil for
food worked (or not) - for them, the UN had betrayed the
people of Iraq.
Meanwhile, the US and Britain -
with the UN's tacit approval - have bombed Iraq since
1992, as well as launching thousands of missiles, to the
point that in 1999 American officials were saying that
they had run out of targets. Educated Iraqis keep these
painful memories very much alive. And to add more insult
to injury, the UN Security Council has recently ratified
- in retrospect - the American invasion and occupation,
in a clear, direct breach of the UN Charter. It is now
impossible to overstate the anger in many parts of Iraq
towards the UN.
After years of Byzantine UN
weapons inspections, Washington's dirty little secret
was finally revealed: intelligence and scientific
inspectors proved almost beyond reasonable doubt that
Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction.
This raised the question of which of the Bush
neo-conservatives came up with the false evidence to
support the war, which Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon
number 2, cynically claimed on the record was to "secure
a consensus for the war policy". European intelligence
confirms that a group of "unofficial" political advisers
appointed and controlled by Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and
Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Special Planning (OSP)
were the source of the false claims.
Wolfowitz
and Feith, the Pentagon number 3, were responsible for
setting up the OSP. Its director was Abraham Shulsky.
The OSP included other neo-cons with no professional
qualification whatsoever in intelligence and military
affairs. It came as no surprise that Shulsky is a
protege of the "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle - who
resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board before
the war (a job he got via Wolfowitz). The OSP also
included Elliot Abrams (who supported the Guatemalan
genocide of the 1980s), a senior director for Middle
East affairs for the National Security Council. These
neo-cons intimately connected with the Zionist lobby,
even issued reports on Iraq totally contradicting those
from the Israeli Mossad, which did not believe that Iraq
represented any threat, either to the US or to Israel.
The OSP is just one more arm of the neo-cons -
especially Wolfowitz and Feith - in a central strategy
of supporting Ariel Sharon's hardcore policy against the
Palestinians. Sharon was never interested in the success
of the Middle East roadmap to peace - which would imply
painful concessions from Israel towards the
Palestinians. It's no surprise that Perle, Feith and
Wolfowitz are now targeting Iran, Syria, Lebanon and
Saudi Arabia with a vengeance - with the same barrage of
fake "intelligence reports" accusing Arab countries of
funding, protecting and promoting terrorism, and now
sending terrorists to Iraq. All the fake intelligence is
provided by OSP operatives and their elaborate networks.
European intelligence reads the death of the
roadmap in the Middle East as a coup deliberately
orchestrated by the Israeli military, with Ariel Sharon
and his Defense Minister Shaoul Mofaz as commanders (and
following Wolfowitz's advice). That's the same view of
Israeli writer and peace activist Uri Avnery, "The
military was upset when it saw the new hope that took
hold of the Israeli public, the bullish mood of the
stock exchange, the rise in value of the shekel, the
return of the masses to the entertainment centers, the
signs of optimism on both sides. In effect, it was a
spontaneous popular vote against the military policy."
Sharon's strategy was first to isolate and
discredit Palestinian prime minister Abu Mazen; then not
even trying to fulfill roadmap commitments (remove
settlements, stop the construction of the "Wall of
Shame" separating Israel and Palestine, withdraw the
army from the whole West Bank). Finally, with the end of
the hudna (truce), Sharon has given Israeli army
tanks and helicopters the chance to wreak havoc in
Palestine all over again.
As Sharon is very
close with George W Bush - and also managed to convince
him that virtually all Palestinians are terrorists - his
plan, says Avnery, just explored "the simplistic world
of Bush with its good guys and bad guys. The bad guys
are the terrorists. Therefore, it was advisable to kill
Hamas and Islamic jihad militants. That would not upset
Bush. In the eyes of the president, to kill terrorists
is a good thing. And as a result, the Palestinians would
be compelled to break the hudna." That's exactly
what happened. Avnery's summary is totally shared by
European intelligence analysts: Sharon killed the
roadmap because he was against it from the beginning.
Bush saw it only as a photo opportunity and former
premier Abu Mazen did not get from Israel and the US
anything he could show to the Palestinians, who treated
him as a "traitor" and a "puppet" of the US and Israel.
So it's back to all-out bloody confrontation.
European diplomats are keen to point out that if
there is a choice in the Middle East, it is not a choice
between secular dictatorship and secular democracy - but
between secular dictatorship and Islamic democracy. The
difference between what people living in the Middle East
want and what the Bush administration says they want is
abysmal. A solution will come only when America - and
regional autocratic regimes - allow those people to
decide by themselves. Obviously, this will only happen
when Middle Eastern oil runs out.
Washington
neo-cons fear that if left to their own devices, Iraqis
would probably choose a Shi'ite-led, perhaps moderate,
Islamic republic.This would be intolerable for the
neo-cons and the oil lobby's "masters of the universe".
Washington is already finding out why Saddam Hussein was
such a ghastly dictator. Iraq is a mirage in the desert,
a colonial, artificial creation put together by the
British from three former Ottoman provinces. As Sunnis,
Shi'ites and Kurds have very little in common, this
surrealist construction could only be sustained by brute
force. That's exactly how Saddam behaved.
Slightly before his assassination in front of
the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf on August 29, Grand
Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the moderate spiritual
chief of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI) warned that "some groups wanted to
create conflict among Shi'ites, and others want to
create conflict among Arabs". The majority of Shi'ites
(62 percent of Iraq's population) want a democratic
transition: by the logic of the ballot box, they should
get most of the power. But they are already in conflict.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - the top Shi'ite religious
authority - refuses to get bogged down in politics, and
still adopts a "wait and see" attitude towards the
Americans. The downtrodden and dispossessed prefer to
listen to the young firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr, who is
calling for a jihad against the invaders.
The
turning point, as far as the Shi'ites are concerned, may
have been expressed by the funeral oration of Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim, brother of slain Grand Ayatollah al-Hakim, in
front of a crowd of half a million grieving Shi'ites in
Najaf. He said that "the occupation force is primarily
responsible for the pure blood that was spilt in holy
Najaf ... this force is primarily responsible for all
this blood and the blood that is shed all over Iraq
every day. Iraq must not remain occupied and the
occupation must leave so that we can build Iraq as God
wants us to do." This means that unlike the situation
from April to August, the Shi'ites' "window of
opportunity" for the Americans to do any good, has
expired.
What makes it even more complicated is
that everywhere in Iraq, religion, tribe and ethnicity
are intertwined. Inside the same tribe one may find
Shi'ite and Sunnis, "remnants" and victims of Saddam's
regime. This goes a long way to explain why acts of
revenge against those same "remnants" have been so
scarce.
Washington may now be confronted with a
nation of warring factions. It faces the same problem
Saddam faced. And it may even apply Saddam's methods.
It's important to remember that the neo-cons' initial
plan was just to replace the two most senior officials
in each of Saddam's ministries, and leave the rest of
the infrastructure of government intact. The alternative
is what we are seeing right now: Iraq falling apart. So
it comes as no surprise that the Pentagon is now
recruiting Mukhabarat agents. Iraqis have repeatedly
told this correspondent that without the Ba'ath Party,
the country is ungovernable. Saddam, whose psychological
warfare tactics are much more sophisticated than those
of the Americans, knew it all along.
UN special
representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the
bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last month,
correctly assessed that the issue in Iraq is
sovereignty, not security. For him, the attack on Uday
and Qusay Hussein (Saddam's sons) was "overkill" - it
would have been better to put them on trial. He
initially described US proconsul in Iraq L Paul Bremer
as a "true neo-con who does not care about getting
international legitimacy" - but later he thought Bremer
was starting to see the big picture. He knew that
whether Saddam was captured or not, that would make no
difference in the number of attacks against Americans -
be they by former security agents, Islamists or even
people seeking revenge for the killing of innocents by
trigger-happy GIs. The problem was the occupation
itself: Vieira de Mello tirelessly warned that "security
can only get worse. Iraqis' impatience and exasperation
with such a massive foreign force is likely to increase
and is psychologically understandable."
Vieira
de Mello wrote a plan - which UN Secretary general Kofi
Annan took to the Security Council on June 17 -
according to which the UN could develop a total strategy
to support the political transition, the humanitarian
assistance and the economic development of Iraq. Iraqis
in the interim government welcomed the plan. But this is
exactly what Wahhabi Islamists and the "Saddam network"
did not want: a surefire way to legitimize the American
occupation. That may be the main reason why Vieira de
Mello was the target of the UN bombing operation on
August 19. Plans like these were floating since early
February, when a panel of experts produced a preliminary
report on postwar reconstruction, according to Stephane
Dujarric, a spokesman in the office of Kofi Annan. The
report was edited by a Pakistani UN official, Rafeeuddin
Ahmed, and the postwar project was being overseen by
Louise Frechette, the number 2 at the UN.
It's
also important to remember that at the time - February
to March - the Bush administration didn't want to be
perceived as a colonial power, and was ready to give
power back to Iraqis as soon as the country recovered an
acceptable degree of stability. But already at the time
the model was Afghanistan - where the UN has just a
support role, focused on nation-building and
humanitarian operations, with no administration
involved. It was also at the time that Great Britain was
telling France and Germany that they would "reap a
whirlwind" if they refused to sign up to a new
Anglo-American UN resolution authorizing a war. History
may still dictate that Tony Blair and George W Bush will
"reap a whirlwind" for engaging in such a war.
The Afghan model is a total failure. Warlords
keep helping the Americans to go after the Taliban - to
the tune of suitcases full of dollars. Obviously the
warlords have no interest to finish off this
extraordinary source of income. By using the warlords -
and getting a lot of disinformation for its dollars -
the Pentagon further sabotages the already flimsy
authority of Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul. The
Taliban, for their part, pose as the only credible
alternative to warlords and gangs which terrorize
residents, extort money, deal heavily in opium and
heroin and run ultra-profitable smuggling routes. With
strong tribal support in the Pashtun belt, and protected
by some of the higher ranks of the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence, the Taliban are back with a
vengeance. Allied with infamous Afghan Pashtun stalwart
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the anti-American jihad, they are
determined to keep the country mired in perpetual chaos.
Trying to fight its paralysis - both over
Afghanistan and Iraq - the UN keeps doing what it does
best: talking. Before the next General Assembly, on
September 22, around 20 heads of state and government -
including Jacques Chirac (France), Jose Maria Aznar
(Spain), Pervez Musharraf (Pakistan) and Hamid Karzai
(Afghanistan) will discuss in a conference how to "fight
terrorism for humanity's sake". To help the leaders
determine "the various roots of terrorism", the
organizers of the conference had assembled, last June,
in Oslo, a panel of 30 international experts. Among
their most important findings: there's a direct link
between poverty and terrorism, but terrorists do not
necessarily come from disinherited classes. Their
education is usually above average, and they usually
come from countries with no freedom of expression.
For some experts, the correlation between
poverty and terrorism is even weaker than between
terrorism and absence of a rule of law. Terrorism finds
a favorable terrain in societies under rapid mutation,
like the Arab world, where thanks to oil the tribal
structure has given place to high-tech in less than a
generation. Contrary to American spin, experts sustain
that rogue state support is not a precondition of
terrorism. Terrorist groups prefer to maintain relations
with many states at the same time.
Terrorists
are not mad or mentally afflicted: they follow their own
rationality, but they are not irrational. On suicide
bombers, the experts have found no evidence of the
psychopathology of suicidal individuals. Religion
generally is not a determinant factor. And there's no
correlation with a particular desire for vengeance.
Experts also recommend not to think of terrorism in
terms of "they bomb us because they are Muslim
fundamentalists". And they stress that war crimes - of
which terrorism is a manifestation - cannot be studied
without taking into account the causes of each
particular war.
Professor Gilles Kepel, a
leading European expert on radical Islam, has been
stressing for some time that the long march of Islamism
in Egypt and Algeria, which sought to conquer political
power by mass mobilization, has failed, as well as the
short march of extreme violence privileging the historic
confrontation between an aggressed, humiliated Islam and
Jews and Christians. Kepel, at the time of his classic
Jihad (Gallimard, 2000), thought that radical
Islam was "a fatal trap" for the Islamist movement.
Today, he thinks that "the Islamist movement has never
been so divided. On one side, there are the advocates of
better relations with nationalist and democratic forces,
and on the other side the proponents of jihad. But
between American evangelical fundamentalism, which
progresses in the Christian sphere, and Islamic
fundamentalism, two visions also clash, founded on
schematic discourse, savage exegesis and perverted
sacred scriptures. And if the religious dimension of
this war of course is not yet so visible, or the most
decisive, tomorrow it could bring unpredictable
consequences."
Palestine is inextricably linked
with Iraq - as Palestinians and Iraqis know so well. The
US - like Israel - is finally beginning to discover that
occupation is a bloody and, ultimately, unsustainable
business, not least because the heavy American armed
response to bombing and snipers has totally alienated
the people, especially Shi'ites, who were initially
grateful for being liberated from Saddam. From
conversations with many diplomats and high officials,
it's possible to determine a perception in Brussels that
neo-con arrogance is leading indeed to an alternative
Middle East, with the change starting in Iraq: "But the
alternative project went mad: it is leading to fiery
hatred between Arabs and Muslims on one side, and the US
and the West on another," says a diplomat. Radical
Islamists conceive Iraq as a gigantic volcano whose lava
will bury any American presence in the region - and
destabilize many other Arab regimes close to Washington
in its path.
As far as the Arab world is
concerned, the US is running the risk of transforming
Saddam from cruel, hated tyrant into the romantic,
mythological hero of Arab and Muslim resistance, the
Salah al-Din of Saddam's youthful dreams. Saddam counts
on being seen as the man who did to the US what the
Afghan mujahideen did to the former Soviet Union: lure
the superpower so deep into an absolutely unwinnable war
that both the American economy and popular support
collapse. Saddam - a consummate survivor - should not be
underestimated: he dreams that he may still have the key
to seduce not only Iraqis, but the whole Muslim umma.
The US, by a series of blunders, has already
managed to engineer the fantastic chimera it has
repeatedly claimed to be chasing: the alliance of
Saddam's well-armed secular brutality and al-Qaeda's
global insurrection. Some well-traveled European
diplomats agree that more than Saddam, it is the
fighting spirit of the Iraqi people which is
progressively inspiring a revolt throughout the Muslim
world, against the Americans, the British and, of
course, Israel.
The stage is now set for a
merciless confrontation between the American occupation
force - with its unrivalled firepower - and the myriad
forms of resistance, with the Iraqi population as
hostage. European intelligence is paying serious
attention to conspiracy theories roaming the Arab and
Islamic world - according to which the neo-cons have
deliberately provoked this escalation of violence,
especially after the Najaf bombing that killed al-Hakim.
From Egyptian newspapers to Iranian clerics, a chorus of
voices is accusing US intelligence and Mossad of
applying the well-worn imperial tactic of "divide and
rule", creating conflict among Shi'ites and between
Sunnis and Shi'ites. This development is so serious that
it even led to Saddam releasing another audiotape
denying any involvement in the bombing. Saddam would
have nothing to gain from pitting Sunnis against
Shi'ites: he is betting on a unified movement of
national resistance, with the Sunni triangle
(Baghdad-Tikrit-Ramadi) linked to the Shi'ite south.
Two years after September 11, the neo-cons' mix
of geopolitical calculation and messianic fervor has
dragged the world into a bloody mess from which we might
not emerge for years to come. John Gray of the London
School of Economics points out that "Americans see their
country as embodying universal values. Other countries
see the American way of life as one among many; they do
not believe it ever will - or should - be universal ...
They resist the division of the world into 'good' and
'evil' regimes ... in any realistic scenario, the US
will have to learn to live with states that have no wish
to share its values. After all, they include nearly all
the states in the world. Strategically allied in the
Cold War and - already less convincingly - during the
post-Cold War period, Europe and America are reverting
to being the alien civilizations they were before the
First World War. In Asia, the claim that the US embodies
the only sustainable model of human development is
viewed with incredulity, if not contempt."
The
current "war on terror" may last longer than the Cold
War. This implies a bleak future for all of us. Gray's
prediction is as good as any, "Once al-Qaeda has
disappeared, other types of terror - very likely not
animated by radical Islam, possibly not overtly
religious - will surely follow. The advance of knowledge
does not portend any age of reason. It merely adds
another twist to human folly."
Part 1: Sleeping with the
enemy
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