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THE ROVING
EYE
The first, not the last
throes
By Pepe Escobar
"The insurgency in Iraq is in its last
throes."
- Vice President Dick
Cheney, in May
Even
the Central Intelligence Agency now admits that
Iraq is the new Afghanistan - breeding a new,
lethal generation of jihadis. Iraq has also been
the new Vietnam since the day the resistance was
born, April 18, 2003, in front of the Abu Hanifa
mosque in 
Baghdad. Iraq as the new Vietnam replays - in a
new setting - the movie of a superpower being
subdued by a guerrilla war. Remember former Iraqi
deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's famous words
before the invasion: "Let the desert be our
jungles."
A mini-Tet offensive happened in
Baghdad on Monday. In a city allegedly under the
control of American and American-trained Iraqi
forces, more than 100 guerrillas mounted a
devastating attack on Baya'a, the biggest police
station in Baghdad - employing successive waves of
mortars, explosions, rocket-launcher attacks, hand
grenades, sophisticated diversionary tactics and
the sinister icing on the lethal cake, car
bombings. Hi al-Elam, the neighborhood around the
police station, was turned into a smoldering
disaster zone. The guerrillas retreated after two
hours, having lost dozens of men. But just like
the Tet offensive, the message was clear: the
writing, scrawled in graffiti, was literally on
the walls of Hi al-Elam - "We'll be back."
Three days after this mini-battle in
Baghdad, the Pentagon top brass had to face the
fact that the writing on the wall is now becoming
increasingly visible not only to tens of millions
of Americans (60%, according to the latest polls)
but to the cowed, Bush administration-intimidated
Congress as well. Nevertheless, during eight hours
of back-to-back testimony to House and Senate
committees in Washington, the Pentagon still
refused to abandon the rhetoric of "steady
progress" and "victory is certain".
General John Abizaid, the Centcom chief,
had to admit "more foreign fighters [are] coming
into Iraq than there were six months ago" - not
exactly Cheney's "last throes" scenario. Senator
Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, told
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to "get off your
high horse" and stop answering questions "with a
sneer". Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat from
Massachusetts, went one step further and suggested
it was time for Rumsfeld to go.
Rumsfeld
told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "If the
coalition were to leave before the Iraqi security
forces are able to assume responsibility, we would
one day again have to confront another Iraqi
regime, perhaps even more dangerous than the
last." The occupation's logic - we can't leave
because they would not know how to take care of
themselves - happens to be the same espoused on
the record by Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim
Jaafari, in Washington for official talks at the
White House. Sunni Arabs in Iraq - as well as the
Sadrists - will take note, adding even more fuel
to the fire.
Help, the voters will kill
us
The somewhat rash exchanges in
Washington have to be put in the context of the
2006 mid-term elections in the US. The Iraq
quagmire is leading senators and congressmen -
especially Republican - to a degree of panic.
They're starting to realize that President George
W Bush's war is taking them down. Democrats for
their part - including those who supported the war
in the first place - are scenting blood.
Crucially, no senators or congressmen suggested
that the Pentagon should send more troops to Iraq
- an extremely unpopular move. But at the same
time, nobody suggested troops should be withdrawn
immediately - which means they still, albeit
grudgingly, subscribe to the Pentagon's strategy.
The disorientation was more than evident
in the behavior of Senator Lindsey Graham, a
Republican from South Carolina and staunch war
supporter. Graham said he was concerned by
declining support for the war - which means bad
news in the next elections - but he also said,
ominously, "We have bought into a model that is
extremely difficult, but the only answer, because
you can't kill enough of these people" - implying
that it is such a pity the Pentagon cannot produce
a thousand Fallujahs.
For his part, Carl
Levin, Democrat from Michigan and the senior
Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
came up with the wacky suggestion that "the United
States needs to tell the Iraqis and the world that
if that deadline [for approving a new
constitution] is not met, we will review our
position with all options open, including but not
limited to, setting a timetable for withdrawal".
Levin shifts the blame for all the mess from the
occupation to Iraq's politicians. He should beware
of what he wants: Iraqis may enthusiastically
welcome his proposition, as throwing the occupiers
out is their No 1 priority.
And it's
one, two, three, what are we fighting for
The Pentagon strategy is not working, and it
won't work for two main reasons. The
neo-conservative American project for Iraq was
based on ethnic, confessional sectarianism for a
start. The current pre-civil-war atmosphere is
just a consequence of privileging Kurds out of
proportion and marginalizing Sunni Arabs - not to
mention the blowback (from Washington's point of
view) of a weak Shi'ite-dominated,
Islamic-leaning, Iran-friendly government having
to fight not only the Sunni Arab guerrillas, but a
Sunni-Sadrist political opposition. Moreover, the
development of the so-called Iraqi defense forces
may take at least five years. The current militia
inferno - tolerated or even encouraged by the
Americans - is bound to derail the country for at
least a generation.
Just like in Vietnam,
the Americans have no meaningful intelligence on
the resistance. It's a massive, American
strategic, cultural and linguistic failure. That's
why American "counterinsurgency" in Iraq these
days is reduced to supporting militias nested in
the Interior Ministry - "Rumsfeld's boys", as they
are known - as well as operations conducted by El
Salvador-style death squads. There's no way this
will win Sunni Arab hearts and minds. For most
Sunni Arabs, from the simply alienated to the
terrified, most of them impoverished to
sub-Saharan conditions, the American presence - in
the form of awesome firepower - only means death
and destruction.
The hearings this
Thursday in Washington may have been just the tip
of the iceberg. The real facts on the ground are,
in Iraq, a horrific quagmire; and in the US, the
unstoppable rising of anti-war sentiment. This is
not a "last throes" scenario - rather the first
throes of a national American rejection of the
Iraqi imperial adventure. Just like in Vietnam.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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