THE ROVING
EYE The new Saddam, without a
moustache By Pepe Escobar
Talk about outsourcing.
The first two acts of former
Central Intelligence Agency asset
turned Prime Minister Iyad Allawi
were to call a US air strike on an alleged safe house
in Fallujah, and to sign a martial-law order to be imposed
on an Arab "sovereign" state by a Western, Christian
army. Saddam Hussein also imposed martial law on Iraq.
Last year, the talk in Baghdad was that the Americans
wanted an "American Saddam". Now they have one. No
wonder "sovereign" Iraq looks like your average Arab
dictatorship - again: it could be Egypt, it could be
Syria.
Weary, secular Iraqis are now contrasting
the two unsavory propositions with which they have been
presented. On one side, there's the virtually
independent enclave of Fallujah, half an hour away from
Baghdad and under control of hardline Taliban-like
mujahideen militias. On the other side, "democratic"
Iraq with its inbuilt Patriot Act - where everyone is
potentially subjected to martial law, curfews, a ban on
demonstrations, phone-tapping, the opening of mail, the
freezing of bank accounts and the appointment of the
military to rule parts of the country. Iraq's Patriot
Act was appropriately announced to the Iraqi population
by Bakhtyar Amin, the new minister of justice and human
rights.
Some Iraqis may welcome their Patriot
Act because it supposedly tackles the security nightmare
bequeathed by the Americans. People in Baghdad still
remember Saddam Hussein's ultra-harsh security state: it
was ugly, but there was plenty of security. But Baghdad
sources tell Asia Times Online that many people are
wondering whether the Patriot Act will be enough to save
Allawi's Iraq. Much of the Sunni triangle - including
the major cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarra and
Baqubah - is now controlled by the resistance. These
cities are nothing less than autonomous republics.
The pseudo-state General Richard
Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has
said that at least 145,000 US troops may stay in Iraq
for as many as five years. Muqtada al-Sadr, the
firebrand Shi'ite leader, says the resistance has to
increase because the occupation is not over yet. Allawi
is caught in the middle.
The British tried to rule Iraq by proxy
in the 1920s, via their embassy. The scheme failed. Adam Hochschild,
a professor at the University of California, Berkeley
and also the author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story
of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, has
compared the new Iraq with the Bantustans of South
Africa during apartheid, a scheme that also failed.
Washington may want a "pseudo-state", says Hochschild,
"a willing home for the permanent military bases the
Pentagon is building in the country; an oil reservoir
safely under US influence; and a strategic ally against
militant Islam, all with the facade, at least, of
democracy. On the other hand, with its vast oil wealth
and restive population, at some point Iraq could take a
very different path, and embody the religious fervor of
its Shi'ite majority, demand that US forces leave, try
to cancel reconstruction contracts with US firms, and
reverse the privatization of state assets now under
way."
The main contractor The heavy
silhouette of Allawi, the heir of a Shi'ite merchant
family from Nassiriyah, configures him as an Arab
version of Tony Soprano - without the charm.
According to Dr Haifa al-Azzaoui, a former exile
who now writes for the Arab media, Allawi's Baghdad
diploma in neurology is "a fake, and provided by the
Ba'ath Party before they sent him to London to spy on
Iraqi students". A former hardcore Ba'athist in the
1960s - socialist and Arab nationalist - an exile for 32
years, the head of a political party with absolutely no
popular base, and an honorable client of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), Britain's MI6 military
intelligence and Saudi intelligence, it was Allawi who
almost sent British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the
unemployment line when he sold the notion that Saddam
had weapons of mass destruction "operational in 45
minutes".
According to Professor Saadoun
al-Douleimi, now director of the Iraqi Center of
Research and Strategic Studies, Allawi was "an important
member of the Ba'ath. He knew many things and he passed
this information to MI6. That's why Mukhabarat [state
security] agents tried to kill him" in 1978 in London.
Allawi was seriously wounded and was evacuated by MI6 to
be treated in a clinic in France.
Allawi
created al-Wifaq
(Iraq National Accord) as a political party in February
1991 to position himself for the post-Saddam era
- without knowing that Saddam would be spared by the legions
of George Bush the elder. Thirteen years later, Allawi
turned into a strong "American Saddam" contender when
the first choice, Pentagon favorite Ahmad Chalabi,
turned out to be less than trustworthy. Chalabi and
Allawi are cousins by marriage. Both are secular
Shi'ites. Allawi was born in 1944, Chalabi in 1945. But
while Chalabi maneuvered the Americans to commit
de-Ba'athization in 2003, Allawi did the opposite in
2004, recruiting back his old comrades-in-arms.
"With Allawi, it's like the CIA is marrying
Iraq," says a Baghdad intellectual. European diplomats
in Brussels prefer to note his old-school but very sound
strategy to climb to power: first infiltrating the
debris of the Iraqi secret services and then putting
them back into place while allying himself with former
Ba'ath Sunni generals so he can reconstitute the army in
his image. In Baghdad, Allawi is called "Saddam without
a moustache". Exactly what Washington wants.
But the point is what Iraqis want. They want two
things from Allawi: restoration of order and security,
and getting rid of the US occupation as soon as
possible. Allawi and his party, though, have absolutely no
popular base. He has to do what the Americans - via
US Ambassador John Negroponte at the US Embassy -
tell him to do. Bringing back the Mukhabarat and
Saddam's spies is a tremendously unpopular move - as
well as a virtual death warrant to democracy.
Allawi now controls the
unelected interim government's budget of roughly US$20 billion
a year. Half of this is oil income, which will
inevitably fall, drastically, because of non-stop sabotage by the resistance.
Foreign aid is not exactly flowing in. Allawi's system
does not have the infrastructure to collect taxes. And
Allawi needs at least $30 billion to make his government
work. Conclusion: this government will be impotent.
Negroponte - in his fortress-embassy - will control the
$18.4 billion in US Agency for International Development
funds at the "Program Management Office". Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld keeps controlling the
military. Sovereignty? That's more like a Mesopotamian
tragedy: to prove his credibility, Allawi could not
possibly rely on the occupation army his countrymen want
him to throw out.
The trumpeted
"reconstruction" is seen by most Iraqis as an extension of
the occupation: one more foreign invasion, this one
by US multinationals. That's why the
"reconstruction" is a key target of the resistance. US contractors
are protected by thousands of mercenaries. Twenty-five
percent of reconstruction contracts go to security: this
is money not being spent on hospitals, schools, roads
and US-bombed telephone exchanges. So what the
average Iraqi sees is a surrealist situation of
contractors spending fortunes to arm and insure
themselves against the Iraqis they were supposed to help
in the first place.
The Fallujah effect
The security nightmare in Iraq won't be
contained. The Fallujah effect can generate a reaction
that could spill over into Jordan - via the towns of
Zarqa, Irbid and Maan - and into the West Bank and Gaza
in Palestine.
Jordan's King Abdullah is not
exactly popular in a country that is almost 60% Palestinian
(the natives are Arab Bedouins) and an ally of
the United States and Israel to boot. Irbid in Jordan is a
Palestinian-majority town. Maan in Jordan is an
important Salafi crossroads. The political opposition in
Jordan is basically constituted by Salafis and the
Muslim Brotherhood: this in essence is the ideology
predominant in Fallujah.
That's the reason
King Abdullah has offered Jordanian troops to Allawi's
Iraq: so he can have a shot at preventing radical Islam
from expanding west from Fallujah toward Jordan.
Washington tried 19th-century-style
colonialism in Iraq. It failed. Now it's trying a remix of
1970s Latin America - with proxy hardcore security
forces subjected to the US. It will fail - as it did in
Latin America. The United States may be militarily strong in Iraq,
but politically it is a midget - as Fallujah
demonstrates. Only one desired effect by the White House is
already on: the war - at least in this summer silly season -
is slowly disappearing from US television. The resistance -
and not only in Fallujah - will certainly bring it back.
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