Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE The state of the
(dis)union By Pepe Escobar
Americans; Allawi's private goons,
who are training "in the former Muthanna military
airport"; the Kurdish peshmerga, who are
coming to patrol Baghdad alongside the Americans;
and the US surge.
Muqtada does
not need to say that the Pentagon escalation could
force up to 3 million poor Shi'ites (including
more than a million kids under 14), who barely
survive in the
monster slum that is
Sadr City, to become Sadrists - making the "surge" one of the
most stupidest follies in the history of the
Middle East. But he secretly fears that hundreds
of thousands may perish under US bombs in the
Battle of Sadr City.
Muqtada denied he was
part of the Shi'ite lynch mob present at the
hanging of Saddam Hussein: "The objective was to
depict Muqtada as the real enemy of the Sunnis.
And they succeeded." But who are "they"? The
Maliki government? The Americans? Muqtada has been
trying a rapprochement with moderate Sunnis for
almost two years now. But his conditions are
clear: Sunnis must reject Ba'athists and al-Qaeda.
He believes this still might happen. Reality, for
the moment, suggests otherwise.
(Dis)united we fight What
both Zawahiri and Muqtada are saying torpedoes the
heavily spun Bush-system propaganda according to
which Iranian "networks" inside Iraq are allied with
the Iraqi resistance to kill Americans. The last
thing on Earth Iranian Shi'ites would do is smuggle
weapons to Ba'athists, Saddam allies and/or
al-Qaeda. The surefire way for the leadership
in Tehran to raise hell in Iraq against the
United States would be to help the Supreme Council
for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq's (SCIRI's)
Badr Organization, or the Mehdi Army for that
matter, to launch its own anti-US guerrilla war.
That is obviously not happening - at least while
Iran has not been the victim of a US/Israeli
attack.
The
winner in the short term in Iraq
will be the clever chess player who has managed
to ingratiate himself as Bush's man - apart
from the momentarily shadowy Allawi: SCIRI's Abdulaziz
al-Hakim, whose Badr Organization, holed up
in the Ministry of the Interior, actually deploys
anti-Sunni death squads.
Why is he Bush's
man? Simple: he supports the soon-to-be-voted-on
Iraqi oil law, the Holy Grail for Anglo-American
Big Oil. Muqtada, on the other hand, is fiercely
against it. From the Bush/Cheney system's
perspective, two crucial "sins" - Muqtada's
courtship of moderate Sunnis to get their act
together against the occupation, and his
admiration of Hezbollah's strategy - pale before
the ultimate sin: Muqtada wants Iraqi oil for
Iraqis.
The US plan B anyway is on. If
Maliki does not deliver and defang the Mehdi Army
- as he certainly won't - a US-engineered white
coup will be inevitable, and there are only two
possibilities: "Saddam without a mustache" Allawi,
or a Hakim-blessed candidate.
Hakim
is already cleverly manipulating
the US escalation to strike
against his two real mortal enemies - the
muqawama (resistance) and the Mehdi Army -
at the same time. No wonder Sunni tribal leaders
started accusing the US of ethnic cleansing in
Baghdad. So there's no way for
Iraqification-cum-surge to appeal to Sunnis. The
muqawama knows it - and it is
already making plans to lie low at times, hide
its constant flow of weapons bought with funding
from private, wealthy Saudi and Persian Gulf
individuals, or retreat from Baghdad and melt away
in the desert province of al-Anbar.
Bush's
surge is perfect if the template is divide and
rule. The Battle of Sadr City will divide the
Shi'ites into a pro-US "elite" (SCIRI and Da'wa)
and a guerrilla force of the damned (the
Sadrists). It will divide the Shi'ites from the
Kurds (peshmergas from Kurdistan killing Shi'ites
in Baghdad). It will keep Shi'ites and Sunnis
bitterly divided (the other battle front in the
surge is against the Sunni Arab resistance). Hakim
may consider himself the winner. But Zawahiri,
of course, will also love it, confident that
his emirate in al-Anbar - led by Abu Hamza al-Muhajir
- will ride the storm. Like the White House/Pentagon,
al-Qaeda after all insists on also
fighting a two-pronged war, in al-Qaeda's case
against the Americans and the Shi'ites.
With Baghdad to be divided into nine
military districts, each with its dedicated Iraqi
army/police and its embedded US battalion, the
muqawama is also more than relishing the
prospect of laying siege to the sitting-duck Fort
Apaches that will spring up in each of these
districts. What happened in Karbala last Sunday
will be quite common in Fort Apache land: attacks
by guerrilla commandos disguised as American
soldiers, driving in a convoy of GMCs. And
Black Hawk Down will be endlessly replayed
- just like last Saturday, when a helicopter was shot
down by a clumsy Russian SA-7 shoulder-fired
missile.
Most of all, the dire prospect is
of a devastating air war over Baghdad - followed
by wholesale slaughter of Sunnis and Shi'ites
alike as counterinsurgency fails (there are no
hearts and minds to be won; everyone wants US
troops out). But as US bombs and missiles now
define who is a "terrorist" and who is not - see
the recent bombing of Somali nomadic herdsmen sold
as dangerous al-Qaeda operatives -
Iraqification-cum-surge will be a disaster mostly
for every Baghdadi caught in the crossfire.
The Pentagon cannot at the same time
launch the Battle of Sadr City, fight the
muqawama spread out and in control all over
western Baghdad, and fight al-Qaeda in al-Anbar
province. Or maybe it could: if bombs and missiles
from above are The Great Decider on who's a
terrorist, why not take out everybody down there
on the ground? Forty years after Che Guevara's
"one, two, a thousand Vietnams", meet "one, two, a
thousand Fallujahs".
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