Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE Surging toward the holy oil
grail By Pepe Escobar
Sunni Arab resistance. Sunnis would
increase their voice in the government - supposing
they were convinced there would be no more
militia-conducted ethnic cleansing. The scenario
completely "forgets" the SCIRI's Badr
Organization, whose militias, much more organized
and well trained than the Mehdi Army, are
operating right from inside the Interior Ministry.
Nothing of the White House's laundry list,
of course, is going to
happen. What could happen,
though, is indiscriminate US-conducted civilian
killings, thus generating another martyr, Muqtada,
even more powerful for legions of Shi'ites than
Saddam has become for Sunni Ba'athists.
The basic fact remains that Bush's
escalation is designed to smash Muqtada's Mehdi
Army. That can only mean, in practice, a
mini-genocide of vast masses of unruly, extremely
dispossessed Shi'ites: the coming battle of Sadr
City, which the Pentagon has been itching to
launch since the spring of 2004. The Pentagon is
actually declaring war on no fewer than 2.2
million (poor) people. A sinister symmetry still
applies: the Pentagon will attack dispossessed
Shi'ite masses - just as the Israeli Defense
Forces attacked dispossessed Shi'ite masses in
southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
There's more. Bush's escalation, according
to his own speech, will ensure there will actually
be two major battles on two different fronts: the
battle of Sadr City, against Shi'ites, and the
Great Battle of Baghdad, as the Sunni Arab
muqawama (resistance) has been dubbing it.
A tangential taste of this second front was
provided this week by the day-long fight in Haifa
Street between coalition and Iraqi forces against
militants.
Muhammad al-Askari, the
military adviser to Maliki, justified the bombing
of Haifa Street as crucial to the killing of "50
terrorists". Anyone familiar with the Sunni Arab
resistance knows they would never be dumb enough
to concentrate 50 top fighters in a single Baghdad
street in full view of US firepower. The battle of
Haifa Street actually fits into Maliki's preferred
developing pattern: systematic ethnic cleansing of
Sunni areas by the heavily militia-infiltrated,
and US-trained, Iraqi army.
Bush's
escalation is also certain to incinerate the stars
of counterinsurgency ace Lieutenant-General David
Petraeus, currently spun as the new military
messiah who will "save" Iraq for the US. After
all, he is the co-author of the new US Army
counterinsurgency field manual. But according to
Petraeus' own doctrine, the Pentagon would need at
least 120,000 combat troops to have a shot at
winning the counterinsurgency game in Baghdad. The
US currently has no more than 70,000 combat troops
in the whole of Iraq. It controls not even a
hectare of al-Anbar province - which is
practically on the way to becoming an Islamic
emirate. The US controls the Green Zone - and
that's it. So in essence Bush's 21,500 extra men
are doomed to total irrelevance - not to mention
raising their odds of returning home in a body
bag, courtesy of the upcoming resistance surge.
Grabbing those oil fields by the horn
Washington's successive divide-and-rule
tactics - facilitating a possible genocide of
Sunnis, contemplating a mass slaughter of
Shi'ites, betting on a regional Sunni/Shi'ite war
- never for a second lose sight of the riches of
Iraqi. For Big Business, an Iraq eaten alive by
Balkanization is the ideal environment for the
triumph of Anglo-American petrocracy.
A
new Iraqi oil law will most likely be voted on in
Parliament in the next few weeks, before the
arrival of Bush's 21,500 men, and it should be in
effect in March. The law is Anglo-American Big
Oil's holy grail: the draft has been carefully
scrutinized by Washington, Big Oil and the
International Monetary Fund, but not by Iraqi
politicians. The profit-sharing agreements
enshrined by the law are immensely profitable for
Big Oil. And crucially, the law prevents any Iraqi
government from nationalizing the oil industry -
as the majority of Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) member states did. In
essence, it's a game of "if you nationalize, we
invade you - again". So the law fulfills the
early-2003 neo-con boast of "we are the new OPEC".
Iraq's petrodollars will turn to mush - or
rather, as with Saudi Arabia, be recycled back to
US banks. Security company Blackwater will make a
killing "protecting" Iraqi pipelines. Bechtel and
Halliburton will get myriad fat contracts to
rebuild everything the US has bombarded since
1991.
But what's the use of an oil law in
a 100-cadavers-a-day hellhole? Enter the
escalation as a way of providing "stability".
Whichever way the coming surge goes - ethnic
cleansing of Sunnis, the battle of Sadr City -
what matters is not the piling up of Arab Muslim
(or American) bodies, but how much less cumbersome
is the path toward the holy oil grail. Big
Business will make a deal with anyone that
facilitates the passing of the oil law, be it
Maliki's Da'wa Party, the SCIRI, or - in a
wildest-dream version - the Sadrists or al-Qaeda
in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of
Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ite, want the US out, and as
soon as possible. A rape of Iraq's oil wealth
enshrined by a Parliament-approved oil law would
certainly lead to national unrest. For the moment
it's fair to assume the US is taking no chances in
its backroom deals, as the SCIRI's support for the
new law, via Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi, is
practically assured. Da'wa must be in the process
of being bribed to death.
But Muqtada is
another story. He is close to some Sunni factions.
They are getting closer. And crucially, they agree
on being Iraqi nationalists who want the Americans
out. There's a very strong possibility of the
Sadrists joining the muqawama in the event
the oil law is approved. Thus the preemptive,
two-pronged Bush escalation on the war front -
against both Muqtada and nationalist Sunnis.
The ever-expanding killing fields
Stenographers of the "clash of
civilizations" may rejoice. But what really
matters is what 1.5 billion people of the Muslim
ummah are seeing. They see, on a given day,
apart from made-in-USA bombs over Palestine, the
US bombarding Arab Muslims in Iraq, Central Asian
Muslims in Afghanistan, black Muslims in Somalia.
Soon, perhaps, Persian Muslims will be included.
Blowback is assured.
Referring to the
hearings on Capitol Hill last month on the Lancet
study compiling 655,000 civilian deaths provoked
by the war on Iraq, University of Michigan
Professor Juan Cole wrote in his blog that the US
government "has committed cliocide" - after the
Greek muse Clio, who watched over the course of
human history. Cliocide will of course continue.
In Iraq, there are only two stark,
inevitable options for the White House: cliocide,
as in mass slaughter (of Sunnis and Shi'ites
alike); or defeat (which is all but assured). Bush
has chosen the first option. The upcoming battle
of Sadr City will signal the descent of Iraq into
absolute, abysmal, irreversible chaos. Bush, in
imperial-Rome mode, can then call the desolation
victory, and retire. Provided, of course, the oil
law is in the bag.
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