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THE ROVING EYE
Iraq, the
new Afghanistan
By Pepe Escobar
The script was Brussels does Baghdad this
Wednesday at an international conference of
foreign ministers - co-sponsored by the US and the
European Union - high on rhetoric and low on
practical decisions, designed to support nation
(re)building in Iraq as a "pluralist democracy".
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Iraqis should
"take heart from this strong message of support".
Unscripted response in the streets of
Baghdad: four car bombs, 32 dead, more than 50
wounded.
Behind all the diplomatic gloss,
observers in Brussels say that nobody was really
paying attention to the usual routine by US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accusing Syria
of destabilizing Iraq (Syria has 7,000 troops
patrolling the border) or insisting that Iraq was
"on its way to democracy".
What really
counts is where the money is coming from - the
crucial issue at a donor conference in Amman,
Jordan, next month. For starters, one wonders
whether any "donor" will dare ask the Americans
what happened to US$8.8 billion of Iraqi money
that "disappeared" under former proconsul L Paul
Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. For
their part, wealthy Iraqi neighbors such as Sunni
Arab Saudi Arabia will only pledge substantial
financial help if Sunnis are represented en masse
in the political process.
It's virtually
impossible for US President George W Bush's Iraq
to be "on its way to democracy" when real
unemployment reaches a staggering 50% (a scarier
prospect for most people than car bombs or
snipers), 25% of children under five years old are
malnourished, 78% of the households in the country
(and 92% in Baghdad) have electricity only a few
hours a day, only 37% of urban households (and a
mere 4% in the countryside) have sewage-disposal
systems, only 61% have access to drinking water,
5% of households have been destroyed by bombing or
search-and-destroy missions, only one in 10
households in rural areas can be reached by a
paved road, and more youngsters than in any
previous generation are illiterate. This is the
appalling legacy of the occupation - and the US
and UN-imposed regime of sanctions in the 1990s.
Now, to complete the picture, the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) has just "discovered" in
a classified report leaked to the New York Times
that Iraq - rather, Bush's Iraq - is breeding the
new, lethal generation of jihadis, just like
former president Ronald Reagan's "freedom
fighters" were bred in the 1980s in Afghanistan
during the anti-Soviet jihad. Anyone familiar with
the invasion and occupation of Iraq knew this for
a fact as far back as two years ago - at a time
when Pentagon supremo Donald Rumsfeld was, on the
record, very happy with the idea of Iraq as the
new jihad Mecca. The CIA report cannot but
conclude that the new jihadis - who are now taking
their higher education in urban warfare in the
Sunni triangle - will be even deadlier than the
famous Arab-Afghans. There was blowback in
Afghanistan - after the US financed a jihad. There
is now blowback in Iraq - after the US invented a
jihad out of the blue.
The lies that
lead to the killers
The Downing Street
memo - or memos - whose authenticity both
Washington and London didn't even try to deny,
have once again proved that "intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the [Bush
administration's] policy", in the immortal words
of Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British M16.
The memos once again proved that Bush knew Saddam
Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction as well
as no connection whatsoever with the attacks of
September 11, 2001. The memos also prove, more
lethally, that the British government viewed the
invasion of Iraq as a war crime.
Whatever
the spin, a majority of Americans are now finally
starting to wake up to the fact that the White
House, the Pentagon, the State Department and
corporate media simply lied about the whole Iraqi
imperial adventure. George W Bush's response, on a
June 18 radio address: we invaded Iraq because we
were attacked - once again the non-existent
connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Bush also
said the war on Iraq would be won, despite
"cold-blooded killers" trying to derail the US.
The "cold-blooded killers", as the CIA's
Porter Goss would tell his friend Bush in an
improbable, frank exchange, now exist because
Bush's Iraq made them happen. And that's just part
of the problem. American "intelligence officials"
in Baghdad now are also "discovering" that Iraq's
new security services, or the new Mukhabarat,
largely responding to former interim prime
minister Iyad Allawi ("Saddam without a
moustache", in Baghdad parlance), are totally
infiltrated by the resistance. These "intelligence
officials" must have spent the past two years
sipping martinis by the pool inside the Green
Zone.
Iraq is the new Afghanistan in more
ways than breeding a new generation of jihadis.
The US has alienated Sunni Arabs in Iraq, just as
it has alienated the Pashtun in Afghanistan. Sunni
Arabs control the heart of Iraq's industrial
economy, just as the Pashtun control the heart of
Afghanistan's rural economy - based on
opium-trading. The Pashtun will fight to the death
against the remake of Afghanistan as a docile
pupil of International Monetary Fund/World Bank
dictates, just as Sunni Arabs - and many Shi'ites
as well - will fight to the death the remake of
Iraq as a US-controlled neo-liberal paradise.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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