THE
ROVING EYE Slouching toward
D-day By Pepe Escobar
The war clock is ticking for the United
States, both in Iraq and with Iran. The
US-maneuvered United Nations deadline for Iran to
stop its uranium-enrichment program is now less
than two weeks away. On February 21, the UN's
nuclear watchdog will report on whether Iran has
heeded the Security Council's demand to stop
enriching uranium - to date it has not.
It
might be tempting to see detente in the air.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was assured
by US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice that the
White House will not attack Iran. Early this week
in Tehran, the leader of the Supreme Council for
the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim, said in a joint press conference with
the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security
Council, Ali Larijani, that Iraq fully supports
direct talks between the US and Iran.
In
reality, the mood in Tehran is increasingly grim.
Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary
Guards, positively scared state-TV viewers - a
rarity in media-controlled Iran - when he said the
US will try to strike Iran and he's willing to
"become a martyr". It's as if Tehran has finally
drawn the implications of a two-pronged hardcore
militarization of the eastern Mediterranean
region. On the one hand there is the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization allied with Israel
against Syria, on the other the Persian Gulf,
where the US is lining up against Iran.
The mood in Iraq may be even grimmer as
the will of the US, through the government of
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, is imposed over
Baghdad. In official spin, the Iraqi police and
the army, under a joint Sunni-Shi'ite command,
have begun the much-anticipated double bill of
attacking Sunnis and Sadr City, the vast Shi'ite
enclave in Baghdad that staunchly backs cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army.
The
trouble is, the police are heavily infiltrated by
the Mehdi Army and the national army is basically
staffed by the SCIRI's Badr Organization.
"The implementation of the prime
minister's plan has already begun and will be
fully implemented at a later date," US military
spokesman Major-General William Caldwell said on
Wednesday.
Additionally, the Maliki
government cynically toes the Bush administration
line, accusing Syria of allowing Sunni jihadis to
cross the border and perpetrate at least half of
the current carnage.
Al-Zaman daily in its
Iraqi edition informed that all non-Baghdadi
combatants in these same Iraqi police and army -
ie the Kurds, as well as southern Shi'ites - will
be showered with cash to make sure they do their
job. In essence, the stage in Iraq is being set
for the first widespread battle of the "Shi'ite
crescent" against the "axis of fear" (Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab
Emirates).
Mistah Kurtz he not
dead The Pentagon's new batch of "warrior
intellectuals" and counterinsurgency aces dripping
with PhDs have begun their Baghdad strike - but so
has the Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance),
which, according to the Islammemo website, is now
polishing its own counter-plan against
"Safavid-American aggression". "Safavids" is a
common Sunni reference to the Persian dynasty that
converted Iraq to Shi'ism in the 16th century.
The resistance plan is a mirror image of the
Pentagon's. It also divides the capital into
military sectors under a central command.
Shoulder-fired missiles will be downing more CH-46
Sea Knight helicopters in (still Sunni) western
Baghdad - as happened on Wednesday.
Joint
army checkpoints are now in place under dozens of
flyovers, protected by tanks and barbed wire - not
to mention those provoking extra traffic jams in
Baghdad's scarred boulevards. Nobody can drive
from central Baghdad to Sadr City without passing
through a massive checkpoint swarming with army
and police commandos. Sadr City is under police
commandos. Most bridges over the Tigris River are
blocked.
The US risks a worse fate than
Captain Benjamin Willard in Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now. Its Colonel Walter Kurtz is
the heart of darkness itself, the haunting face of
wasteland Baghdad. There's no way these
counterinsurgency aces will win against classic
guerrilla tactics with popular support -
especially on two fronts (the muqawama and
the Sadrists). Iraqis will never accept foreign
occupation or "redeployment". They know this war
was never about "democracy". So whatever the US
does - with or without airborne hell - it is
already a failure.
Which brings us back to
the whole point in this folly: Iran.
Since
2004, inspectors from the UN's International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been able to "go
anywhere and see anything" in Iran - according to
the agency's own assessment. This includes the
latest visit this past Saturday to the
uranium-conversion plant in Isfahan. Visitors this
time included members of the Non-Aligned Movement,
the Group of 77 developing nations, the Arab
League and, for the first time, journalists. In
sum, that was a real sample of what otherwise
passes for the "international community". The
visitors were in synch: an attack on Iranian
nuclear installations would be catastrophic.
But even coyotes in the Mojave Desert now
know that Admiral William J Fallon, the new head
of CentCom, a specialist in planning air/sea
warfare, may be itching to set fire to the Strait
of Hormuz. They also know that US President George
W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney hold
constitutional power to order a preemptive nuclear
strike against Iran.
It may be dawning on
the nationalist theocracy leadership in Tehran how
perilous Iran's position really is. Tehran has to
be extra-careful not to fall into Washington's
trap of scrapping the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty altogether - or, in exasperation, throwing
out IAEA inspectors. Tehran knows it must counter
at every stance the trap of "Iranian networks"
inside Iraq. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
now alleges, without proof, that 70% of the
improvised explosive devices killing US troops are
Iran-connected. And Tehran has also to
counterpunch the massive Israeli propaganda of "a
second Holocaust".
Every major player also
knows that the chain of pretexts is already
established: the shaky Maliki government fails to
meet the United States' security "benchmarks" (as
it certainly will); Iran is set up for the fall;
Washington engineers a provocation in the Persian
Gulf; the path is cleared for a Congress-approved
"defensive" US strike. Democrats in Congress are
doing little to prevent the escalation, when they
could at least organize themselves to torpedo the
"use of force" authorization for Iraq and pass a
law preventing the Bush administration from
attacking Iran. Russia, China and the European
(dis)Union also remain paralyzed.
In Iraq,
Muqtada is in a win-win situation (and so is the
SCIRI's Badr Organization: its death squads may
take a nap during the US surge to wake up stronger
than ever in a few months).
Sadrism cannot
be wiped out by any escalation: as a nationalist
movement, it will always thrive. The Mehdi Army
has more fighters in Baghdad than the US - with or
without the surge of 21,500 troops. In the event
the Sadrists are heavily bombed by the US in the
Battle of Sadr City, Muqtada has the luxury of
ordering a counterpunch as soon as he's secure of
being supported by enough Sunni tribal sheikhs (he
has been courting them for months).
And as
US casualties skyrocket, Bush will inevitably
blame Tehran. We're back, ominously, once again,
to the heart of darkness: the path cleared for a
US "defensive" strike against Iran.
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