Middle East

Nov 29, 2006

Page 2 of 2
THE ROVING EYE
Bury my heart in the Green Zone
By Pepe Escobar

The Maliki government is, for all purposes, already dead. Maliki, the No 2 of the Islamist Da'wa Party, controls only 25 representatives in the 275-member parliament. He depends on the SCIRI - which has the majority - and the Sadrists. So obviously Maliki cannot order any kind of crackdown either on the Badr or the Mehdi Army factions. According to the Islamic Party - which has the majority of parliamentarians under the Sunni Concord Front - the police and the army are totally infiltrated by Shi'ite militias. The Sadrists for their part denounce the US "return of the Ba'athists" strategy - and defend the Mehdi Army as patriots who protect Shi'ites from the takfiris (Sunni radicals).

The Maliki government won't go down quietly, though, if judged by its current diplomatic frenzy. The US for its part will accomplish absolutely nothing by trying to take down Muqtada and the Mehdi Army, or even the Badr Organization. If the Pentagon somehow decided to go on an all-out offensive, it would be very easy for SCIRI/Badr - or for Mehdi Army commandos - completely to cut off the US supply route from Kuwait to Baghdad.

What the Shi'ite Islamic parties in power and Tehran agree on is a crucial point: the Sunni Arab resistance must be vanquished. But Muqtada's position is more nuanced: as a true Iraqi nationalist, he does not rule out agreements with Sunni Arabs with the supreme objective of kicking the occupiers out. Meanwhile, the US military will keep being caught in a deadly trap - between the sprawling, underground Sunni Arab resistance and the Shi'ite militias' non-stop rampage.

The fall of the Green Zone
Everyone is guilty in the ongoing Iraq tragedy. The US-trained new Iraqi army is infiltrated by militias, by death squads and even by al-Qaeda in Iraq. The SCIRI, Da'wa and the Kurds are only worried about their own interests, not the interests of Iraq as a nation. And the US - always hiding under the dubious mantra of "Iraqi democracy" - totally evades its responsibility in provoking the appalling chaos in the first place.

Militia hell will remain impervious to any summit. Shi'ite clerical leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani may call for restraint. But Sistani does not control the Shi'ite proletarian masses anymore, Muqtada does. The Americans - attacked at least 180 times a day, every day - will keep "controlling" only one piece of real estate in the whole of Mesopotamia (although an extremely valuable one): the Green Zone.

The ISG may recommend more summits and more covert contacts with the Sunni Arab resistance. Ahmadinejad, Talabani and Assad may even meet again. But Baghdad sources close to the resistance in the Sunni belt have told Asia Times Online of another coup in the making - and that goes way beyond the removal of the Maliki government.

Secular former Ba'athists and Saddam's fighters congregated in the Army of Mohammed - the paramilitary wing of the Awda Party - are already in control of the Syrian border (and not Salafi-jihadis of the al-Qaeda kind).

The next big step for the Sunni Arab resistance - according to sheikhs of the powerful Shammar Sunni tribe - would be to take out the Badr Organization, holed up in the Ministry of the Interior, and the two most murderous factions of the Mehdi Army. That would mean an Iraqi nationalist purge of the hated "Iranians". And that implies an all-out attack on the Green Zone.

The return of the Ba'athists and the fall of the Green Zone: now that's a prime-time double bill to knock 'em dead.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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