SPEAKING
FREELY All going according to
plan? By Sadi Baig
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"All but
the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that
Bush administration officials have no clue about what to
do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now." -
Washington Post, May 10
Variants of thoughts
expressed in the sentence above are beginning to
saturate the US and British media. However, the words
are astounding not in their content, but their source -
the indomitable neo-conservative, Robert Kagan.
So has Kagan, one of the authors of the infamous
Project for the New American Century, had a change of
heart? Does he now view an invasion and occupation he
and his fellow neo-cons so passionately and assiduously
worked for, as untenable? Could these be the statements
of someone trying to reclaim some intellectual integrity
in order to sail through a crisis to see another day? Or
is this a beginning of a bait-and-switch of an order
hitherto unseen in US policy?
In order to
explain this and the dizzying array of bewildering
statements, from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's
admission of worse acts and proofs thereof, to outbursts
by the likes of George Will and senior Republican
leadership, one needs to take a closer look. One must
forget for a moment the 2004 presidential election fever
that carries a simplistic assumption of a change in US
policy by a northeastern democrat desperately trying to
play down his anti-war credentials from the past to
appear more war-like. Forget also for a moment, the
prisoner torture scandal that seems to have rocked the
White House and its ancillary power centers. Yes, the
pictures have caused great embarrassment for the US
internationally and may eventually be a precursor to a
US withdrawal, and even President George W Bush's
defeat, but from the Iraqi viewpoint, the photos are
nowhere near to the inflammation caused by the siege and
bombardment of civilians in Fallujah, in clear violation
of the Geneva Convention. By issuing profuse apologies
and conducting thorough inquiries, the US will in the
long run bolster its credentials, in contrast to the
governments of the region.
Now let us take stock
of where Iraq stands today, and what constitutes a
favorable outcome from the US strategic viewpoint,
regardless of how bad the situation currently appears.
The war has changed Iraq in many ways for some
time to come, if not forever. While conveying to their
masses how they were destroying a totalitarian and
repressive regime, the United States and the United
Kingdom actually destroyed the strongly federated state
of Iraq. The systematic looting and destruction of the
state structure including the ministries of health,
education, agriculture, the museums depicting Iraq's
unparalleled cultural and historical heritage, all under
the silent watch of the US military, meant that the
future occupiers had no interest in a unified Iraq - in
line with the history of British and French colonialism
to leave more states behind than before colonization.
Related with the previous argument is the
incessant talk of a civil war in Iraq. Iraq has had no
history of such strife, but US and British military and
political leadership started talking about it from the
very early stages of the conflict. It was repeated so
thoroughly, that besides the compliant mainstream media,
even respected US publications such as Salon.com and the
British Independent bought the theme, hook, line and
sinker. As Aldous Huxley would have noted, it is a case
of the "irrational" propaganda crossing over into
"rational" propaganda through creative use of
repetition. Some conservative leaders are already
talking about a three-state solution. The US and
subsequently the United Nations plan is designed to
engineer a divide by having a president and two vice
presidents, each representing the three divisions of
Kurd, Shi'ite and Sunni. A US equivalent of it will be
to have a white president with two vice presidents, one
African-American, and the other a Latino. The
UN-sponsored solution will not be very different than
the weakly federated states of the Balkans that are held
together by UN and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
forces.
The strands that emerge from either a
three-state outcome, or an institutionalized
secessionism, have very favorable outcomes from the US
standpoint. It will serve to keep Saudi Arabia's
oil-rich eastern provinces a cause of concern due to
their Shi'ite majorities. Restive Kurds in the north
will provide an ethnic beachhead that can be tapped when
needed, and keep Turkey's regional ambitions in check.
But perhaps the most important outcome would be
the Shi'ite-Sunni divisiveness that will test the
integrity of intrastate cohesion and inter-state
relationships across the Muslim world - even more so
than it did during the period of the Iran-Iraq war in
the 1980s. With the emergence of non-state actors
trained in guerilla warfare, important Muslim nations
such as nuclear-armed Pakistan, and oil-rich Iran and
Saudi Arabia, will experience great stress on their
internal cohesion and relations with their neighbors,
leading to geostrategic outcomes that can be easily
manipulated to enhance US power. Evidence that a
conflict is being nursed between the Shi'ites and Sunnis
of Iraq can be found in the handling of the siege of
Fallujah versus that of Najaf and other Shi'ite cities
in the south. Treating one with brute force, while
showing nuanced concern for the other, will eventually
sow suspicion that can be explosive in a tinder-box like
Iraq.
Iraq today does not have a military, nor
is anybody talking about a strong Iraqi military.
Western proposals amount to nothing more than a highly
armed police force. The argument will always be Iraq's
(not Saddam Hussein's, conveniently) hostility to its
neighbors. Of course, the real beneficiary will be the
state of Israel, that never again has to worry about an
Iraq challenging it in conventional military power.
Despite the current tactical lull, the strategy
calls for (and will be seen to be implemented), ensuring
further pressure on Israel's Arab neighbors and
degrading their military capabilities through sanctions
and even targeted military strikes under different
pretenses. Due to the thorough destruction wrought on
Iraq by the two Iraq wars and the crippling UN
sanctions, any future Iraqi government that tries to
build even a semi-strong military for legitimate defense
purposes will be instantly blamed for ignoring its
people and having regional ambitions.
The
radicalization of Arab politics has received a
tremendous boost from the Iraq war. Faced with
monarchies and monarchic "presidents" and the presence
of foreign troops, Arab politics will follow the dismal
fate of Palestinian politics. This was done masterfully
by Israel by first promoting extremist organizations
such as Hamas, and after they had enveloped the
support-base of the secular Palestinian leadership, push
them in a cycle of violence where Israel was always seen
to be responding to indefensible acts of terror. The
Palestinian intifada is now on a ventilator, with
Palestinians for the first time since the creation of
Israel utterly isolated and politically defenseless,
susceptible to the much awaited purge from their
territories by the Israelis and the neo-con/evangelist
combine of the US government.
The most important
outcome, however, relates to oil. It is not so much
about the price of oil but access to it. The price of
oil is bound to increase due to a lack of any
significant new finds, with surging demand. It's a
simple principle of economics. As Lee Raymond of
ExxonMobil pointed out in an interview with Charlie
Rose, any talk of an alternative energy source discounts
the scale of the energy industry that lies at the heart
of the modern world economy. The oil industry sells one
billion gallons every three days. There is no
alternative source that can match it for a long time to
come. Iraq floats on a "sea of oil".
The Iraqi
oil industry was nationalized in 1970. Since then it has
weathered the Iran-Iraq war, and even to some extent the
first Gulf war of 1991. But the present state of Iraq's
oil infrastructure precludes any significant ramping of
output without major rebuilding and modernization. No
future Iraqi government can afford such an endeavor on
its own and is bound to call for private help in
exchange for exploration rights. The rising oil prices
will make it a strategic need for energy consuming
nations like China to have Iraqi production come online
as soon as possible. This will lead to political
accommodations that favor US strategic objectives and
would enrich and empower Western and mainly US global
energy giants. No future government in Iraq will be able
to free itself from the influence of such corporations
that maintain the lifeline of the country's economy. The
negative effects on the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries are also clear.
The friends
of Israel within the US government and the Israeli
establishment have been clamoring for a
"cauldronization" of the Middle East, and with it the
wider Muslim world. Iraq is now quickly becoming a black
hole that has the potential to suck in Egypt and Turkey
on its western extremity, to the second-largest Muslim
nation of Pakistan on its east. As long as the oil keeps
pumping with a few stable pockets, such as the Gulf
statelets of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, the
interests of the Western economies and Japan will be
protected and Israeli strategists will sleep easier in
the comfort of an ever-diminishing threat from the
country's Arab and Muslim adversaries. The US-Israeli
strategic objectives in Iraq have been achieved, and to
stay or not to stay is more a matter of style than
substance.
(Copyright 2004, Sadi Baig)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click hereif you
are interested in contributing.
