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THE ROVING
EYE
Exit strategy: Civil
war
By Pepe Escobar
"In reality, the electoral process was
designed to legitimize the occupation, rather than
ridding the country of the occupation ... Anyone
who sees himself capable of bringing about
political reform should go ahead and try, but my
belief is that the occupiers won't allow
him."
- Shi'ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr
As Shi'ites and Kurds
fought for three months to come up with an Iraqi
cabinet, it is emerging from Baghdad that soon a
broad front will emerge on the political scene
composed of politicians, religious leaders, clan
and tribal sheikhs - basically Sunni but with
Shi'ite participation - with a single-minded
agenda: the end of the US-led occupation.
This front will include, among others,
what we have termed the Sinn Fein component of the
resistance, the powerful Sunni Association of
Muslim Scholars (AMS) and the Sadrists. It will
refuse any kind of dialogue with new Prime
Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and his government unless
there's a definite timetable for the complete
withdrawal of the occupation forces. Even the top
Marine in Iraq, Major General Stephen Johnson, has
admitted, "There will be no progress as long as
the insurgents are not implicated in a political
process."
But the proliferation of what
many moderate Sunnis and Shi'ites suspect as being
Pentagon-organized black ops is putting the
emergence of this front in jeopardy. This is
obvious when we see Harith al-Dhari - the AMS
leader - blaming the Badr Brigades (the armed wing
of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution -
SCIRI - in Iraq, a major partner in the
government) for the killing of Sunni Arab clerics.
Breaking up Iraq
Several Iranian websites have widely reported a plan to
break up Iraq into three Shi'ite southern
mini-states, two Kurdish mini-states and one Sunni
mini-state - with Baghdad as the seat of a federal
government. Each mini-state would be in charge of
law and order and the economy within its own
borders, with Baghdad in charge of foreign policy
and military coordination. The plan was allegedly
conceived by David Philip, a former White House
adviser working for the American Foreign Policy
Council (AFPC). The AFPC is financed by the Lynde
and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has also
funded both the ultra-hawkish Project for a New
American Century and American Enterprise
Institute.
The plan would be "sold" under
the admission that the recently elected,
Shi'ite-dominated Jaafari government is incapable
of controlling Iraq and bringing the Sunni Arab
guerrillas to the negotiating table. More
significantly, the plan is an exact replica of an
extreme right-wing Israeli plan to balkanize Iraq
- an essential part of the balkanization of the
whole Middle East. Curiously, Henry Kissinger was
selling the same idea even before the 2003
invasion of Iraq.
Once again this is
classic divide and rule: the objective is the
perpetuation of Arab disunity. Call it
Iraqification; what it actually means is sectarian
fever translated into civil war. Operation
Lightning - the highly publicized
counter-insurgency tour de force with its 40,000
mostly Shi'ite troops rounding up Sunni Arabs -
can be read as the first salvo of the civil war.
Vice President Dick Cheney all but admitted the
whole plan on CNN, confidently predicting that
"the fighting will end before the Bush
administration leaves office".
But the
destiny awaiting this counter-insurgency may be
best evaluated by comparing it to Gillo
Pontecorvo's 1966 classic, The Battle of
Algiers - one of the most influential
political films ever, and supposedly a "must see"
at the Pentagon. The French in Algeria in the
early 1960s did indeed break the back of the
guerrillas - but in the end lost the Algerian war.
Talking about Vietnamization - the precursor to
Iraqification - the Vietcong's Tet offensive in
1968 was lethal, but the counter-insurgency -
Operation Phoenix - was even more lethal. In the
end, though, the US also lost the war.
There's no Operation Phoenix going on in
Iraq. The US has little "humint" (human
intelligence), so it is incapable of penetrating
the complex resistance tribal net - and not only
because of its cultural and linguistic
shortcomings. Even a west Baghdad neighborhood
such as Adhamiyah is essentially an independent
guerrilla republic. The daily, dreadful
car-bombing litany will persist: whatever
intelligence it comes across, the Pentagon does
not share it with the Iraqi police, and the Iraqi
police for its part is not exactly the best.
The US also does not have sufficient
troops - so it has to resort to doomed
Iraqification, using Shi'ites and Kurds to fight
Sunnis. And to top it all, the US is blocked in
the political sphere, because the real
intelligence victory would mean convincing Sunni
Arabs of the legitimacy of the political process:
it's not going to happen, with only two Sunni
Arabs in the 55-member committee in charge of
drafting the new Iraqi constitution, and with
Shi'ite death squads killing Sunni Arabs.
Militia inferno
In Iraq's
current militia inferno, some are more respectable
than others. The 100,000-strong Kurdish
pershmerga are not forced to disarm because
they are American allies. The Sadrists' Mehdi Army
on the other hand is regarded as a bunch of thugs
because it responds to the maverick Muqtada
al-Sadr - whom the Pentagon still considers an
enemy. Iraq's Interior Ministry is infested by at
least six separate militias - half of them
responding to former prime minister Iyad Allawi's
pals. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, is
busy praising the pershmerga. Abdul-Salam
al-Qubeisi, an AMS spokesman, doesn't skip a beat,
saying that Talabani is following "US policies to
prolong the struggle in Iraq and turn it into an
Iraq-Iraq conflict". In other words: he unmasks
Iraqification.
The Badr Brigades - renamed
Badr Organization - for its part is accused by the
AMS of giving intelligence to the notorious Wolf
Brigade, still another militia (or,
euphemistically, "elite commando unit") operating
in the Interior Ministry but under a top SCIRI
official.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI
leader and eminence grise behind Jaafari, went on
record vociferously defending the Badr. In a
priceless linguistic stretch mixing Bushism with
Arab nationalism, Hakim said that "forces of evil"
are trying to "sully the reputation of nationalist
movements like Badr so that they can achieve goals
that do not serve the interests of the Iraqi
people".
One wonders whether Pentagon
black ops are also part of these "forces of evil".
In October 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
invented a secret army - one of his pet projects.
According to the Pentagon's Defense Science Board,
the goal of Rumsfeld's army - the 100-member,
US$100 million-a-year Proactive, Preemptive
Operations Group (P2OG) - would carry out secret
operations designed to "stimulate reactions" among
"terrorist groups", thus exposing them to
"counter-attack" by the P2OG. The stock in trade
of Rumsfeld's army is assassinations, sabotage,
deception, the whole arsenal of black ops. Iraq is
the perfect lab for it. "Iraqification" means in
fact "Salvadorization". No wonder old faces are
back in the game. James Steele, leader of a
Special Forces team in El Salvador in the early
1980s, is in Iraq. Steve Casteel, a former top
official involved in the "drug wars" in Bolivia,
Peru and Colombia, is also in Iraq. He is a senior
adviser in - where else - the Interior Ministry,
to which friendly militias are subordinated.
Guerrillas forever
For all
their complex, interlocking strands, it is the
Sunni Arab guerrillas who are now operating almost
like a united front. Their full thrust is against
what is denounced as a puppet government
controlled by the US and its "foreign allies" -
exiles, pro-Iranian Shi'ites and splittist Kurds.
Guerrilla leaders admit the reality of superior
American firepower, which should be fought with
"the ideals of pure Islam" - courage, piety,
abnegation, spirit of sacrifice. "Victory" is the
struggle itself.
This essentially means,
for most groups, the absence of any alternative
political project - no possibility of guerrillas
as a whole adhering to a Sunni-Shi'ite united
political front. The military strategy of the
guerrillas is to prevent any possibility of
normalization: or, to put it another way, to force
the Sunni Arab population to accept their methods.
It may be impossible for the resistance to become
an Iraqi nationalist movement; but it may rely on
5 million Sunni Arabs as a very strong base for a
prolonged, successful guerrilla war. They
certainly have the means to destabilize the
country for decades, if they're up for it.
From an ideological point of view, the
guerrilla leaders must have analyzed the degree of
dependence of Jaafari's government, and concluded
that the Americans will not go away. And even if
the Americans did decide to leave, this would be a
major problem because it would shatter the unity
of so many guerrilla groups with different
agendas, but with a common goal of ousting the
occupiers.
Rival branches of the former
Ba'ath Party now have the upper hand in the
resistance - although they don't control it
wholesale. Despite all the internal wrangling -
from fervent pro-Syrians in the red corner to
those in favor of political accommodation in the
blue corner - they are united by the same
objectives. They have a lot of money, stashed
before the fall of Saddam Hussein; they have
legions of former Republican Guard and Mukhabarat
(intelligence) officers (the guerrillas have at
least 40,000 active members, plus a supporting
cast of 80,000); they have loads of weapons (at
least 250,000 tons remaining); they can enjoy a
non-stop flow of financing, especially from Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf; and they can count on crucial
tactical support by a few hundred Arab jihadis.
Who gets the oil?
Sunni Arabs
and Kurds are virtually on the brink of civil war
in northern Iraq: the daily situation in both
Kirkuk and Mosul is explosive - ambushes,
assassinations, car bombings - but scarce
information filters south to Baghdad and to the
outside world. Kirkuk is nominally under Kurd
control. But what the Kurds want most of all is to
control Northern Oil - part of the Iraqi National
Oil Co, in charge of the oilfields west of Kirkuk.
Sunni Arabs say "over our dead bodies". No wonder
the key local battlefield is the oil pipeline
crossing Kirkuk province: it was blown up again
this Wednesday.
Mosul, a big city of
almost 1.8 million people on the banks of the
Tigris, is still controlled by Sunni Arabs (70% of
the population) and remains the epicenter of Arab
nationalism and a major guerrilla base. Kurds
there maintain the lowest of profiles. Both the
guerrillas and the police come from the very
powerful Sunni Shammar tribe. The Pentagon favors
the Kurds - helplessly, one might say: they are
the only US allies. US intelligence in Mosul
depends on Kurdish intelligence: one more recipe
for civil war. As if this was not enough, most
Shi'ites - 60% of Iraq's population - now firmly
believe they are facing a Machiavellian plot by
the US, the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs or all of the
above to rob the Shi'ites of political power.
The national liberation front
The major Iraqi resistance groups are not
in favor of targeting innocent Iraqi civilians.
Many groups have political liaisons who try to
tell the world's media what they are fighting for.
Considering that American corporate media
exclusively reproduce the Pentagon line, there's
widespread suspicion - in the Middle East, Western
Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia - of American
media complicity in the occupation, incompetence,
racism, or perhaps all of the above.
The
antidote to the Iraqi militia inferno should be a
united Sunni-Shi'ite political front. Former
electricity minister Ayham al-Samarie told the
Associated Press that at least two guerrilla
groups - the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Army of
Mujahideen - were ready to talk with the Jaafari
government and eventually join the political
process. The conditions though are explicit: a set
date for the American withdrawal.
Against
all odds, a national liberation front is emerging
in Iraq. Washington hawks may see it coming, but
they certainly don't want it. Many groups in this
front have already met in Algiers. The front is
opposed to the American occupation and permanent
Pentagon military bases; opposed to the
privatization and corporate looting of the Iraqi
economy; and opposed to the federation of Iraq, ie
balkanization. Members of the front clearly see
through the plan of fueling sectarianism to
provoke an atmosphere of civil war, thus
legitimizing the American presence. The George W
Bush administration's obsession in selling the
notion that Iraqis - or "anti-Iraqi forces", or
"foreign militants" - are trying to start a civil
war in the eastern flank of the Arab nation is as
ludicrous as the myth it sells of the resistance
as just a lunatic bunch of former Ba'athists and
Wahhabis.
The Bush administration though
is pulling no punches with Iraqification. It's a
Pandora's box: inside one will find the Battle of
Algiers, Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia. All point
to the same destination: civil war. This deadly
litany could easily go on until 2020 when, in a
brave new world of China emerging as the top
economy, Sunni Arabs would finally convince
themselves to perhaps strike a deal with Shi'ites
and Kurds so they can all profit together by
selling billions of barrels of oil to the Chinese
oil majors. If, of course, there is any semblance
of Iraq left at that point.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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