|
|
|
|
THE ROVING
EYE
The shadow Iraqi government
By Pepe Escobar
The
ideal White House/Pentagon script for Iraq calls
for a pro-American government, total control of at
least 12% of the world's known oil reserves and 14
military bases to make it happen. Reality has been
churning up other ideas.
Whenever there is
a so-called "transfer of power" in Mesopotamia,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, like clockwork,
steps on a plane to Baghdad. On his latest trip
designed to issue orders for the new, supposedly
sovereign Iraqi government, Rumsfeld, in a
splendid Freudian slip, let it be known on the
record the US "does not have an exit strategy" in
Iraq: only a "victory strategy". This is code for
"we're not going anywhere".
Reality had
intervened two days before Rumsfeld arrived, when
about 300,000 Shi'ite nationalists occupied the
same Firdaws Square of "liberation day", April 9,
2003, but this time with no Saddam-toppling
photo-op intent. Their messages were clear: out
with the occupation; and Bush equals Saddam
Hussein.
By organizing this huge, Shi'ite
mass protest - the largest popular demonstration
in Iraq since 1958 - young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr
was not just occupying a political vaccum: he was
daring the new prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari of
the Da'wa Party - who appeals to the same Shi'ite
constituency - to reveal his true colors.
Muqtada and his thousands were saying: you
cannot pose as "sovereign" and sanction the
occupation at the same time. The new Iraqi
president, reconstructed Kurdish warlord Jalal
Talabani, also revealed his true colors: he said
he wanted the American military to stay. Talabani
has a history of shady deals with everyone and his
neighbor - Israel, the Shah of Iran, Turkey,
Britain, the US - and his tug-of-war with rival
warlord Masoud Barzani has led to the deaths of
tens of thousands of Kurds.
To add fuel to
the fire, Talabani now is also in favor of using
Kurdish peshmerga and assorted Shi'ite
militias to fight the Sunni Arab resistance - a
certified recipe for civil war: this could begin
the day the peshmerga are sent to guard
Kirkuk's oil fields.
The Sadrists - now
constituted as a very organized, openly
anti-sectarian and anti-occupation movement - have
learned a political thing or two after the 2004
face-to-face between Muqtada and the Pentagon.
They have 23 seats in the new National Assembly.
In the elections in Basra - the Shi'ite-dominated
southern city - they got only 12 of 41 city
council seats. The Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) won 20. But the
Sadrists managed to form a coalition and are now
actually in control in Basra. The Sadrists' Mehdi
Army is even more powerful than the SCIRI's Badr
Brigades. Without Mehdi Army interventions, the
Badr Brigades would have taken over every
government institution in the south. The Badr
Brigades' thuggish approach has led many Shi'ites
to give at least the benefit of the doubt to the
Mehdi Army. The whole Shi'ite south around Basra -
provincial councils, the police, the
administrative bureaucracy - is controlled by
Shi'ite militias.
Muqtada the religious
outsider and the Sadrists are cleverly placing
Jaafari and his supporters - the powerful Najaf
Shi'ite clergy - in an intolerable position. In
this epic battle between Muqtada and Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Sadrists all-out
campaign for the end of the occupation is touching
a raw nerve: popular opinion is exasperated with
the haggling and corruption in Baghdad; with the
snail's pace of the political process; and most of
all with the abominable conditions of everyday
life.
Don't touch our thugs
According to Washington's script, progressive
invisibility of the occupying force means
increasing repression exercised by Iraqi forces.
This means the return - in full force - of
Saddam's Mukhabarat agents, now posing as agents
of the new Iraqi security and intelligence
services. Seemingly, that is the way the
disenfranchised Muqtada-regimented masses see it:
Bush equals Saddam because the same people who
repressed us are back. Not to mention that
everyone painfully remembers how George Bush
senior did nothing to prevent Saddam from smashing
the Shi'ite uprising at the end of the first Gulf
War in 1991. The masses correctly interpreted the
meaning of Rumsfeld's "message" to the Shi'ite
al-Jafaari: don't touch the defense and interior
ministries, ie, don't touch our old Mukhabarat
allies and counterinsurgency experts.
Not
featured in the elaborate Pentagon plans to
regiment Mukhabarat agents is that these same
Sunni, Saddam-era operatives may not be exactly
inclined to fight the Sunni resistance. To
complicate the equation, 70% of the US-trained
Iraqi security forces are former Ba'athists. The
top commando, with 10,000 operatives, is almost
100% composed of former Saddam army officers. If
Jaafari's government purges them, it's the end of
the American dream of having Iraqis doing the
dirty jobs.
All the explosive issues -
federalism, who gets Kirkuk, the fate of the oil
industry - which translated into nine weeks of
turbulence before a president, two vice presidents
and a prime minister were appointed - are now back
into the negotiations over a new constitution.
People in Baghdad knows it's unrealistic to expect
a draft of the new constitution in the course of
the next four months, according to the
American-imposed calendar.
Ominous signs
abound. Sunni tribal sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer, one of
the two vice presidents, is furious that the
Shi'ites and Kurds have decided to give only four
ministries to Sunni Arabs, instead of the original
six. Even moderate Sunnis now accuse Shi'ites and
Kurds of marginalizing what we have termed the
Sinn Fein stance of the Sunni Arab resistance.
Moreover, the story playing in the global
media for days, according to which the Wahhabi
hardcore faction of the Sunni resistance had
kidnapped up to 150 Shi'ites in Madaen, south of
Baghdad, is an elaborate hoax - and this after
former Central Intelligence Agency asset and
outgoing prime minister Iyad Allawi quickly
described the alleged hostage situation as "a
dirty atrocity". The story was apparently planted
by the SCIRI. Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi of the
powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars,
said: "This was an excuse to produce a small-scale
Fallujah." Iraqis tend to agree that intimations
of civil war only benefit one player: the
occupying power.
Allawi - the Americans'
man, as he is known in Baghdad - also has his
reasons to be furious. He badly wanted the
Interior Ministry, so he could organize the
Mukhabarat-led espionage and overall repression in
conjunction with the Green Zone. The Shi'ites of
SCIRI came up with a resolute "no". The next
interior minister may well be Hadi al-Amiri, the
leader of the Badr Brigades. To say that Amiri is
a bete noire of choice in Rumsfeld's vast
collection would be an understatement.
It
is well known that the Badr Brigades - the
paramilitary wing of SCIRI, recently renamed Badr
Organization - were trained in exile by Iran's
Revolutionary Guards. That makes them extremely
suspicious to all Sunni Arabs. So just like in
Afghanistan, private militias (peshmergas,
Badr Brigades) in Iraq are fusing into the
government's army and police, competing with small
militias of former Ba'athist friends of Allawi
armed with Pakistani weapons and following the
American agenda. Adding to this lethal cocktail,
the hardcore Wahhabis, Abu Musab Zarqawi-style,
who get their kicks killing Shi'ites, the overall
picture spells chaos. Once again, in the eyes of a
majority of Iraqis, this benefits only one player:
the occupying power.
Highway to
hell
The occupation is worse than an
economic tsunami: it managed to plunge Iraq - once
a beacon of development in the Arab world - into
Sub-Saharan poverty. There's less electricity each
day than in 2003 or even 2004. Without
electricity, the whole country is paralyzed:
nothing - communications, industry, the healthcare
system, the educational system - works properly.
All water plants "reconstructed" by Bechtel and co
are breaking down. With weekly, sometimes daily
attacks on pipelines, oil production is pitiful,
still inferior to Saddam-era, pre-war levels.
Sixty percent of the total population survives on
food stamps.
Baghdad is a hellish
labyrinth of concrete walls and barbed wire, where
a BMW is "the kidnappers' car", 4X4s are favored
by candidates for suicide attacks and there's no
safe place to hide. Reuters staff survive
barricaded behind sandbags and concrete walls; the
only one able to venture out to collect images by
motorbike is Abu Ali, a kind of local hero. Gas
lines are endless. The resistance is relentless.
The al-Batawiyyin district has become a Dantesque
hell of criminal gangs, drug trafficking,
prostitution and trafficking of human organs.
Western Iraq is totally out of US control. Mosul
is infiltrated by the Iraqi resistance. Ramadi,
the resistance capital of the Sunni triangle, is
controlled by - who else - the resistance.
Made in the shade
There may be
no funds for rebuilding American-bombed Iraqi
infrastructure, but US$4.5 billion promptly found
its way to Halliburton's subsidiary KBR for the
construction and maintenance of the 14 "enduring
camps" or permanent military bases. The most
notorious of these may be Camp Victory North, a
sprawling complex attached to Baghdad (former
Saddam) International Airport. Camp Victory is a
KBR-built, bungalow-with-air-con American city for
14,000, complete with Burger King and gym. When
finished, it will be twice the size of giant Camp
Bondsteel in Kosovo, the base attached to
surveillance of oil pipelines in the Balkans.
American economist Jeremy Rifkin has
calculated the number of years known world oil
reserves would last at current rates of
consumption and extraction. In the US it would be
only 10 years. By contrast, in Iran it would be 53
years; in Saudi Arabia 55; in the United Arab
Emirates 75; in Kuwait 116; and in Iraq no less
than 526 years. That says it all about controlling
oil reserves in the Middle East.
Nothing
gets done in Iraq without Green Zone approval, ie
the all-powerful American Embassy. The
overwhelming majority of Sunnis as well as many
disgruntled Shi'ites who sympathize with the
Sadrists know the Green Zone would never tolerate
new Iraqi ministers not pliable to the White
House/Pentagon military/corporate agenda for Iraq.
The White House/Pentagon, just in case,
can count on a number of key Trojan Horses.
Antonia Juhasz, who was project director at the
International Forum on Globalization for many
years and is currently writing a book about
corporate greed in Iraq, has been one of the very
few voices who pointed out the key role of the
ultimate Trojan Horse - Abdel Mahdi, one of the
two new Iraqi vice presidents and former finance
minister in the Allawi interim government.
Mahdi was the man who carried out the
shock therapy conceived by former American
proconsul L Paul Bremer to totally deregulate the
Iraqi economy. Last December, in a press
conference in Washington, Mahdi stressed that a
new Iraqi oil law would be "very good" for the
American oil majors (Iraq's oil was fully
nationalized in 1972). Mahdi will keep on pushing
for full privatization of the Iraqi oil industry -
a prospect that makes the bulk of the Iraqi
population recoil in horror. The myriad laws
passed by Bremer remain in effect and can only be
amended by a three-quarters vote in the new
National Assembly. There's ongoing, serious,
widespread speculation in Iraq that the SCIRI may
have made a deal with Washington: we get political
power, you get control of our oil industry.
The only way Jaafari's transitional
government can garner any measure of popular
credibility is to demand a firm deadline for total
American withdrawal. This is what the Shi'ite
masses voted for. Whatever the scale of mass
protests though, Rumsfeld remains unfazed: he
wants Saddam's Mukhabarat back in action and he
wants the 14 military bases.
The White
House/Pentagon/Green Zone axis wants "shock
therapy", deregulation, wide-ranging
privatization, control of Iraqi natural resources,
Iraq reduced to a deregulated capitalist colony
with all or most government properties and
services controlled by American multinationals and
all assets held by the foreign lending
institutions that own the majority shares of the
Iraqi National Bank. People who disagree may hit
the streets and scream. So much for Iraqi
"democracy". Long live the shadow Iraqi
government.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
