Page 1 of 2 THE ROVING
EYE The fall guy in
Iraq By Pepe Escobar
The Bush administration has perfected the
art of fall-guy selection. The more convoluted the
plot, the more credible the fall guy must be. As
Lewis "Scooter" Libby was the fall guy in
Washington, Premier Nuri al-Maliki will be the
fall guy in Baghdad.
The Baghdad
conference on Saturday was a derivative talk-fest
setting up three committees to prepare the way for
another meeting at the foreign-minister level next
month in Istanbul. The subtext, though never
explicit, is more glaring: it is the absolute
US
impotence to guarantee security or stability in
Iraq, and the desperate search for a way out, now
pitting the "axis of fear" (Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates)
against the "axis of evil" (Iran and Syria).
The spiraling equation in Iraq is stark.
The more that a lone Sunni Arab mujahid with a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher can take down a
US$25 million Apache helicopter, the more Pentagon
counterinsurgency tactics will include "surgical
strikes" with minimal "collateral damage" on
occupied civilians.
The more President
George W Bush displays brute force in the non-stop
surge, and the more Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army
lies low, even in a monster slum like Sadr City
(whose "street" name is Madinat al-Thawra, "City
of the Revolution"), and the more Sunni guerrillas
wreak havoc over unprotected Shi'ites (114 dead
and more than 150 wounded pilgrims to Karbala last
Tuesday; 31 pilgrims coming back from Karbala on
Sunday - the day after the Baghdad conference).
The everyday safety of scores of Shi'ites
used to be guaranteed by the Mehdi Army. The Jaish
al-Mehdi's main tasks are socio-economic, with a
heavy focus on education and charity, but they
also involve security, most of all in impoverished
Baghdad. The Mehdi Army was already splintered
into at least three factions. But now, as a
consequence of the surge, neighborhood
associations as well as commanders not totally
faithful to Muqtada have decided not to lie low
anymore - and in effect to reorganize Shi'ite
civilian defense.
If a US Army base,
rather a Fort Apache, is set up in the "City of
the Revolution" - as is taken for granted in
Baghdad - it won't fall in the short term. But it
will fall eventually - when the Mehdi Army totally
unmelts from the civilian population. For the
moment, the US Cavalry is bombing their houses (in
Karbala) or raiding them (in Najaf) just to find
nothing.
Munthir al-Kewther, born in
Najaf, holding a PhD in Islamic philosophy from
Kufa University and currently dean of a Dutch
journalism faculty, has been adamant in denouncing
a systematic US assassination spree targeting key
Mehdi Army and Sadrist leaders. The best example,
according to Dr Kewther, "was the assassination
last December of Sahib al-Ameri in front of his
wife and children in his house in Najaf. Al-Ameri
was the secretary general of the Shahidollah
Institute, a charitable organization that helps
poor and displaced people. He had no connections
whatsoever to the Mehdi Army" (see The Sadr movement 'will
eventually triumph', Asia Times Online,
March 7).
This fits in a much bigger
picture - the apocalyptic devastation of a whole
country directly or indirectly engineered by the
Bush administration. No fewer than 4 million
Iraqis have been killed directly or indirectly, or
been forced into exile.
The more the surge
expands, the more Iraq dissolves into a horrific
degree zero of culture - as in the bombing of
al-Mutanabbi, Baghdad's great book street named
after a poet of the Abassid era. And this happened
after the massacre of students at Mustansiriya
University, older than the Sorbonne. Even books in
Iraq "are being assassinated", a librarian told
pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, comparing the tragedy to
the destruction of the library of Baghdad by the
Mongol hordes of Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson,
in the 13th century. In the words of Hodja Ali,
the owner of the ultra-atmospheric Chahbandar cafe
- where writers, poets and journalists used to
gather - the street was the embodiment of
"conscience opposed to violence".
But
conscience could never have eschewed the violence
in-built from the start of the occupation. The
"assassination of books" is
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