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2 THE ROVING
EYE Surging toward the holy oil
grail By Pepe Escobar
"I see the imminent death of 20,000
men, That, for a fantasy and trick of
fame, Go to their graves like beds ... O,
from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or
be nothing worth." Hamlet,
Act IV; according to White House spin part of
reading-adverse President George W Bush's book
list during the summer of 2006.
And so,
after a tsunami surge of spin, US President George W
Bush
is heading toward escalation, summoning his 21,500
men, supported by barely 11% of Americans.
Escalation in Iraq is the name of the president's
game, and that also applies to Somalia - the new
Afghanistan.
In far from accidental
timing, the good old "war on terror" is back from
the grave (nobody really related to the "long war"
newspeak). After all, the galleries had to be
reminded that there's a Pentagon-concocted "arc of
instability" running from the Horn of Africa to
the Middle East and then to the Caucasus, Central
Asia and the Himalayas. The "war on terror" has
expanded to the business of killing Africans, now
afforded membership of the ever-expanding "axis of
evil".
Bush, in front of a stack of books
he never reads, blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni
Arab resistance and "Shi'ites supported by Iran"
for his failures; committed five more brigades to
Baghdad and 4,000 extra troops to guerrilla and
al-Qaeda-controlled al-Anbar province. As if these
shock troops will be enough to pursue the "fight
against terror". Bush's plan ultimately breaks
down to a slightly bulkier US militia in Iraq
capable of killing more Arabs.
Taking
the bull by the Horn With some aplomb, the
White House/Pentagon axis has managed to turn
Somalia into the new Afghanistan, in more ways
than one and just in time for Bush's announcement
of his escalation-tainted "new way forward". The
Pentagon maintained it had "credible" intelligence
before it decided to strike alleged
al-Qaeda-infested villages in southern Somalia.
This is highly suspect.
The intelligence
was provided by unsavory, corrupt Ethiopian
dictator Meles Zenawi - who came up with the
clever plot of concocting a fictitious jihad
conducted by "neo-Taliban" in Somalia and selling
it handsomely to the US Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon. He's now posing as
a prime US ally in the "war on terror", just as
Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov did in the autumn of
2001.
Zenawi's US-trained Ethiopian
troops, the ones who invaded Somalia, are infested
with CIA operatives and Special Forces - all of
them flown in from the strategic US-controlled
(since September 11, 2003) Camp Le Monier in
Djibouti.
Arab media are having a field
day reporting that Somali President Abdullahi
Yusuf, a reconverted warlord "elected" by fellow
warlords (all armed by the US) and then
legitimized by the United Nations, told African
journalists in Mogadishu that the US had the right
to bomb "anywhere in the world". According to the
Kenyan newspaper The Daily Nation, this new US
campaign of targeted assassinations has in fact
killed scores of civilians.
But with the
help of Ethiopia's dictatorship - whose soldiers
it trained - Washington is being rewarded with one
more client regime, and a crucial foothold in the
Horn of Africa, right on the Gulf of Aden and the
Arabian Sea, very close to the Red Sea and
literally next door to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Or is it that simple? Somalia, 75%
pastoral with six major clans and hundreds of
sub-clans, is now in civil-war mode. Millions of
Somalis live in neighboring Kenya, and support the
deposed, moderate Islamic Union Courts. Kenya will
be convulsed. Blowback will be inevitable - and
bloody. "Long war" marketers and profiteers could
not but rejoice.
The bull in the carpet
shop As the Somali Osama bin Laden
slouches toward Kenya to be born, there is only
one new Saddam Hussein strong enough to "save" the
US in Iraq. His name is Abu Deraa. But there is a
slight problem: he is a Shi'ite warlord, and head
of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army.
The Iraqi
media have been wildly speculating that Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki could be the victim of a
US-engineered white coup, the likely replacement
candidates being two certified Washington puppets,
current Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi from the
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq
(SCIRI), an enthusiast of a proposed new Iraqi oil
law, and former interim prime minister, former
Ba'athist and "butcher of Fallujah", Iyad Allawi.
But just when Washington and the Green
Zone in Baghdad were abuzz with talk of regime
change, Bush told Republican senators this week
that his escalation and "new way forward" policies
were basically designed by none other than Maliki,
widely condemned for his support of Shi'ite death
squads. It is astonishing that Maliki might
actually have managed to convince Bush that he
will frontally take on the militias of his ally
Muqtada.
High on the White House
wishful-thinking list is that Muqtada be isolated
in the Iraqi Parliament as the US-trained Iraqi
army, on Maliki's orders and helped by the
Pentagon, crushes the Mehdi Army. Shi'ites killing
Shi'ites? Now that's an extremely tall order. Yet
this would lead, runs the scenario, to the
mollifying of the
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