THE
ROVING EYE Goodbye Iraq, hello
Afghanistan By Pepe Escobar
Saddam Hussein shouts "Down with Bush" in
the heart of the Green Zone, British soldiers beat
up barefoot Iraqi teenagers and US Vice President
Dick Cheney is out shooting people (not Iraqis; a
fellow American, and a campaign contributor to
boot). Cutting right across this theater of the
absurd, Iraqi politicians have manufactured their
own, choosing a new prime minister who happens not
to be that new.
In a secret ballot among
the 128 parliamentarians who compose it, the
Shi'ite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance
(UIA), chose
Ibrahim Jaafari to be the
Iraqi prime minister until 2009. Jaafari, from the
Da'wa Party, got 64 votes. Incumbent Vice
President Adel Abdul Mehdi, a free-marketer from
the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq (SCIRI) with good ties in Washington, got 63.
This, then, was a fierce battle between
the two main Shi'ite religious parties, more
precisely between the SCIRI and the two branches
of Da'wa. Jaafari only won because the two Da'was
were supported by the kingmaker himself - former
US bete noire Muqtada al-Sadr. Da'wa, after
all, was founded in the late 1950s by Mohammed
Baqr al-Sadr, a cousin of Muqtada's father.
The whole thing is far from over.
According to the new US-designed Iraqi
constitution, parliament must convene in less than
two weeks to choose the new presidential council -
the head of state plus two vice presidents. This
council will formally appoint the new prime
minister, who will have one month to form his
government, to be approved by parliament. It's
practically certain that Jaafari will win.
There is now talk that Jaafari may prefer
to form a government with the fundamentalist Sunni
Iraqi Accord Front, headed by Adnan Dulaimi,
instead of the Kurdistan Alliance and its 53
seats. Relations between Jaafari and the Kurds
have been dreadful. But the UIA doesn't have
enough votes to pull it off - at least not yet.
The UIA has 128 of the 275 seats in parliament. So
it needs an ally to take it over two-thirds so it
can form a government of its choice.
The
Kurds want much more say in key policy decisions,
and by all means want a potentially explosive
referendum in Kirkuk on whether it wants to be
part of the Kurdistan confederacy; for Shi'ites,
this is not a priority. Former prime minister Iyad
Allawi, derisively know as "Saddam without a
mustache", the favorite Washington-London asset,
most certainly will not be part of the new Iraqi
government, even though the Kurds have demanded
that he be included.
Ties with Iran will
be close, as expected; Jaafari lived in Iran for
nine years during the 1980s, at the height of the
Iran-Iraq War. He is an ultraconservative. He does
not drink, smoke, play cards or go the movies, and
he's totally in favor of sharia (Islamic) law
regarding marriage, divorce and heritage rights.
The vote may be interpreted as a defeat
for Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI's leader, but
not that much. The SCIRI and its military wing,
the Badr Organization, almost inevitably will
retain control of the crucial Ministry of
Interior, which for Shi'ites is non-negotiable
with either Sunnis or Kurds. This means in
practice the proliferation of hardcore Badr
commandos - many trained by Iranian Revolutionary
Guards - running death squads against Sunni Arabs.
Alarm bells are ringing that the internal
Shi'ite battle raging since the December 2005
elections indicates that the UIA may inevitably
implode well before 2009. This is the meat of the
matter; a fractious and extremely weak central
government will be in power in Baghdad in the
foreseeable future.
Chaos as a non-exit
strategy What does all this political
bickering mean compared with the unbearable
suffering endured by the bulk of Iraq's
population? It spells nothing but doom.
Disgruntled Sunni Arabs will keep refining their
double-track strategy of playing politics and
military defiance. The Sunni Arab guerrilla - not
to mention al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers
- will keep raising hell (attacks against
Americans and "collaborators" now average 77 per
day; they were 55 one year ago).
"Hell" in
this case involves no fewer than 10 million of
Iraq's 26 million people; 6 million in Baghdad
plus the heavily populated province of Nineveh
(home of Mosul, the country's second-largest
city), and also Salahuddin and Anbar provinces.
Attacks also proliferate in Diyala province and
Babil province just south of Baghdad, not to
mention powder keg Kirkuk in the north, where
Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs are at one another's
throats to control the oilfields.
Baghdad
- which accounts for 25% of the country's
population - has virtually no water or
electricity. The Americans for their part may have
become more "invisible", retreating from main
urban centers, but their air war is even more
devastating. The White House/Pentagon policy is
now a "back to the future" of turning Iraq into
Afghanistan, where warlords, religious or secular,
and tribal sheikhs defend their mini-states armed
to their teeth, and criminal gangs run parallel to
death squads. There isn't a remote possibility of
forging a government of national unity under these
circumstances.
Which suits Washington
fine. The only way for the United States to
prolong its Iraqi adventure is to perpetuate
chaos; Iraq as the new Afghanistan. Few dispute
that the US invaded Iraq for its oil resources,
mostly untapped, and that it's located in the
heart of the world's energy system. Thus, if the
US controls Iraq, it extends its strategic power.
Washington neo-conservatives, from Cheney
to former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
may have dreamed of unlimited strategic power by
controlling Iraq. What they got instead is a loose
Iran/Iraq alliance. And they still could get
something even more nightmarish, as American
academic Noam Chomsky put it, "A loose Shi'ite
alliance controlling most of the world's oil,
independent of Washington and probably turning
toward the East, where China and others are eager
to make relationships with them, and are already
doing it."
The new Jaafari government can
count on less than US$19 billion a year in oil
income - a pitiful sum, due to relentless
guerrilla war and non-stop sabotage operations.
Most of the income will go to the Ministry of the
Interior, some will go to snail's-pace
reconstruction projects, and some will go into
paying debts. Just as during Allawi's government
in 2004, billions can be expected to disappear in
corrupt schemes.
According to a number of
polls, as many as 80% of Iraqis want the US out as
soon as possible. In 2005, during the previous
Jaafari government, more than 120 parliamentarians
(out of 275) were demanding a fixed timetable for
the US to go. The new parliament will inevitably
have to align itself with the majority of the
Iraqi population's wishes.
Incapable of
controlling anything, not even the road from
Baghdad's airport to the Green Zone, and incapable
of reconstructing what it has destroyed,
Washington for its part will keep betting on
chaos, retreating behind the huge concrete
barriers that dot the wasteland of its prized
Muslim possessions, Afghanistan and Iraq.
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