THE
ROVING EYE We build walls, not
nations By Pepe Escobar
DAMASCUS - No British soccer players,
Czech supermodels or Chinese infotainment moguls
have been lining up to get a piece of the new
exclusive gated territory in the global market -
courtesy of Pentagon real-estate developers and
lavishly promoted as The Great Wall of Adhamiyah.
But then, who wants to live behind a
5-kilometer-long, 3.7-meter-high concrete wall,
being erected in haste by the 407th Brigade
support battalion of the
famed 82nd Airborne Division, currently based in
sprawling Camp Taji, north of Baghdad.
It's being built, Dubai-style, by
semi-slave labor - underpaid Iraqi crews, although
the engineers and the cranes are all-American. And
when it's ready, by the end of April, what's
inside - the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah -
will look exactly its same sorry self: no
cappuccino al fresco Starbucks style, no Versace
outlets, no fit blondes on in-line skates.
No wonder Pentagon "engineers" -
imperiously impervious to irony - have been
mumbling about how the local population will react
to their new development.
Prime Minister
Nuri al-Maliki has already expressed his concern,
calling on Sunday for construction to be halted.
The US military did not say whether it would
comply.
Call it the first instalment of The Baghdad gulag (Asia
Times Online, April 14), apartheid in Mesopotamia,
or Balkanization with Arabic subtitles.
"Suicide bombers" and/or "death squads" -
whose life, according to the Pentagon, will be
"more difficult" with the arrival of the gated
community, have already celebrated by lobbying a
few Katyusha rockets inside the walled-off area.
Similarities with the wall of shame being built by
Israel in the Palestinian West Bank are also to
the point: no concrete wall peppered with
checkpoints will be able to block the main fact
that every hour in Iraq, day in, day out, there
are at least seven or eight bloody bombings or
attacks, 75% of them against the US occupation,
17% of them against the so-called Iraqi security
forces.
The US cannot cut off the head of
the (resistance) snake in Iraq - simply because
there is no head: a Buddhist monk would say the
snake now is one with the river itself, and it
flows non-stop. Walls are irrelevant - either to
the resistance or to the militias or death squads.
The surge promoted by US President George
W Bush is no more - its metaphorical wall already
smashed by almost 100 car and truck bombings since
February, perpetrated either by strands of the
Sunni Arab resistance, some more nationalistic,
some more Islamic, or by al-Qaeda in the Land of
the Two Rivers.
If walls were such a
brilliant idea - as Pentagon "engineers" don't
seem to remember one in Berlin - then why don't
neo-cons of the French presidential candidate
Nicolas Sarkozy variety propose walling inner
Paris from the suburban Islamic throngs that
invade it every weekend? Oops, maybe because
recent Europol research on Islamic terrorism in
the European Union detected only one Islamic
terror attack in the EU in 2006 among 498
incidents.
I want my nation back
Nine leading Sunni Arab resistance groups,
including the Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920
Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Front for the
Iraqi Resistance - all with no "foreign"
connections, meaning basically al-Qaeda - have
recently united all their know-how against very
clear enemies: the US occupiers, the inefficient,
corrupt Maliki government and al-Qaeda.
According to all recent polls, 80% of
Iraqis are against the occupation: this includes
virtually all the Sunnis - including those in the
Adhamiyah gated area - and more than 70% of
Shi'ites. Sixty percent of all Iraqis think the US
controls everything in Iraq - no wonder, when
gated areas are erected without consulting the
local population, or when the key security agency
- the dreaded Iraqi National Intelligence Service
- is basically a phenomenally expensive Central
Intelligence Agency asset (US$3 billion already
consumed in less than three years).
Instead of building gated areas, the
leading Sunni Arab resistance groups want to talk
real business. They have laid out their conditions
for - among other things - not bombing any future
Pentagon real-estate projects
They want
direct negotiations with General David Petraeus,
the Pentagon supremo in Iraq, and the US Embassy
in the (walled, but breachable) Green Zone. They
want Washington to drop the Maliki government
(that's more or less on the way). And they want
two things they know they will never get:
financial compensation for all the horrors
inflicted on Iraq since the 2003 invasion (maybe
they should request a meeting with Iraq
liberator-in-chief Paul Wolfowitz at the World
Bank); and the smashing of all L Paul Bremer's
neo-liberal laws, especially making sure that
Iraq's oil wealth will not be sold out to
Anglo-American Big Oil.
The Bush
administration will obviously say no to most, if
not all, of these conditions. What's left couldn't
be anything other than building exclusive gated
areas.
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