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THE ROVING
EYE
Twelve more years
By Pepe Escobar
If
only those "axis of evil" fellas were a little
more ... cooperative.
In Iraq, the Sunni
Arab resistance insists on being on a roll, thus
disturbing the Pentagon's plans of quietly
building its 14 military bases. In Iran, the new
game has not even started, but Tehran and
Washington are already at each other's throats.
Only one day after his victory, Iranian
president-elect Mahmud Ahmadinejad said at his
first press conference in Tehran, "Iran is on a
path of progress and elevation, and does not
really need the United States on this path." A few
hours later, US Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld was snarling on Fox News, "I don't know
much about this fellow ... But he is no friend of
democracy."
Double standards rule. Imagine
the fury in the US if, for instance, an Iranian
government official in 2000 said, "I don't know
much about this cowboy Bush. But he stole the
American elections."
Karl Marx may be
rolling (with laughter) in his Highgate, north
London grave. Talking about classic class
struggle: in Iran, a left-wing, working-class hero
(Ahmadinejad) has beaten a super-bourgeois,
millionaire mullah (Rafsanjani). In Iraq, the
local, deposed, militarized Sunni Arab bourgeoisie
is fighting a national liberation movement against
an imperialist occupation. According to one of the
current running jokes in the vast Iranian
blogosphere, Ahmadinejad is already doomed because
Bush will never be able to pronounce his name. On
a more serious note, as much as for Iranian
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
election result is a "humiliation" to America. Yet
a much harsher humiliation is being inflicted by a
few thousand Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq,
bogging down the self-described mightiest army in
the history of the world.
No wonder
Rumsfeld is in a foul mood.
Wait for
2017
Fresh from being invited last week by
Senator Ted Kennedy to graciously step down,
Rumsfeld is back on his usual attack-dog mode -
but now with a downbeat twist. In May, Vice
President Dick Cheney said the "insurgency was in
its last throes". Now - without even appealing to
semantic contortionism of the "unknown unknowns"
kind - Rumsfeld in fact has clarified to American
and world public opinion that the "throes" will go
on until 2017. He said, "We're not going to win
against the insurgency. The Iraqi people are going
to win against the insurgency. That insurgency
could go on for any number of years. Insurgencies
tend to go on five, six, seven, eight, 10, 12
years."
So Rumsfeld is in fact admitting
what many people already knew: the Lebanonization
of Iraq. With the added element of
Vietnamization/Iraqification: when Rumsfeld said
"the Iraqi people are going to win against the
insurgency", he actually meant former Mukhabarat
pals of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi
at the Interior Ministry, plus the militia inferno
at the core of the ministry (the so-called
"Rumsfeld's boys"), ganging up to fight the
resistance. Sunni Arab intelligence plus Shi'ite
and Kurd militias fighting Sunni Arabs. In other
words: civil war. Iraqification as the way to
civil war was more than evident when Rumsfeld
said, "We're going to create an environment that
the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can
win against that insurgency."
Rumsfeld
also said that the Pentagon is "talking with
insurgent leaders": "Well, the first thing I would
say about the meetings is they go on all the
time." What this actually means is that the Sunni
Arab "Rumsfeld's boys" exchange information with
the Sunni Arab guerrillas and play a double game,
looking for the best deal. It's not dissimilar to
the mujahideen in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001
bagging cases full of dollars from the Americans
with one hand and passing sensitive information to
the Taliban with the other. The resistance has
infiltrated each and every government and official
body in Iraq, Interior Ministry included. If the
Pentagon throws around a lot of money-stuffed
cases, it might reach some degree of success.
Rumsfeld took pains to remind and alert
American public opinion that the Pentagon does not
talk to terrorists, so there's no conversation
with cipher Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - maybe for the
simple reason that the Pentagon doesn't have a
clue where he is (or, cynics would add, because
Zarqawi is dead). It gets curiouser. Only hours
after Rumsfeld did the Sunday talk show round in
the US, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers and
Ansar al-Sunnah denied that they were talking with
anybody. Al-Qaeda said these were "lies", they
would never talk to "crusaders, Jews and the
enemies of Allah". "Axis of evil" observers will
be fascinated by the symmetry: the Pentagon does
not talk to terrorists in Iraq as much as it does
not talk to the new, weapons of mass
destruction-pursuer president of Iran, and
vice-versa.
General John Abizaid, the US
Centcom commander, was more precise than Rumsfeld
when he said that the Pentagon was "looking for
the right people in the Sunni community to talk
to". "Right people" can only mean people such as
the Association of Muslim Scholars. Anyway, all
the Sunni Arab "right people", even if they were
willing to talk, would press on the Americans
their number one condition: the end of the
occupation itself.
This blockbuster is
a dud
Whoever is talking to whichever
evildoers, it all boils down to a massive,
desperate public-relations campaign in Washington.
The Bush administration must imperatively convince
American public opinion that it will "win " in
Iraq as a nagging Titanic feeling starts to fill
the air. When confronted with a non
sequitur, the White House and the Pentagon
have always been able to change the script of the
Iraqi movie. No weapons of mass destruction? No
problem: let's go with "democracy and freedom to
the Arab world". Terrorism? Let's fight it with
"free elections". Oops, we didn't want these
Iran-friendly Shi'ites in power. No problem, let's
support them and use them to build an Iraqi army
to fight the Sunnis on our behalf.
Now
growing numbers of Americans seem to have had
enough of all the plot twists - and would rather
switch to a Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise vehicle where
the bad guys always lose and the good guy always
gets the girl. People around the world are always
bemused by the fact that American society is a
strictly winner-takes-all universe. Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld may end up being branded as losers - the
ultimate insult (or "unknown unknowns", in
Rumsfeld doublespeak). Rumsfeld has finally
admitted that the Iraq war is unwinnable. No
amount of Washington spin can have it packaged and
sold to the American people - again.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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