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2 THE ROVING
EYE The second coming of
Saladin By Pepe Escobar
The best lack all conviction While the
worst are full of passionate intensity. - W B
Yeats, The Second Coming
DAMASCUS -
The discreet green-and-white tomb of the greatest
warrior of Islam, Saladin - by the splendid
Ummayad Mosque in
the
former seat of the caliphate - may be the ideal
place to meditate on if, where and when Islam may
be shaken again by the advent of a new Saladin,
nine centuries after the illustrious deeds of the
great Muslim general.
Saddam Hussein, not
least because he was also from Tikrit (although
Saladin was a Kurd), fashioned himself as the
genuine article - fighting (twice) the infidel
Christian armies of the US. He is now no more than
a martyr for a minority. Osama bin Laden carefully
fashioned his iconography as a cross between
Saladin, Che Guevara and the Prophet Mohammed. But
as in the immortal line in Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now, "his methods are unsound";
despite the marketing success in the expansion of
the al-Qaeda brand, bin Laden will never be able
to capture the collective conscious of the
ummah.
The new Saladin might be the
son of a Palestinian refugee victim of the Nakhba
("catastrophe") 59 years ago. He might be a
computer wizard too sophisticated to be tempted by
al-Qaeda's Salafi-jihadism. He might be an angry
young man straight out of the "sanctions
generation" in Iraq - deprived of everything while
he was growing up, courtesy of the "international
community".
He won't be a tourism
developer in Dubai, self-styled "city of
captivating contrasts" (between the Western/Arab
business elites and the South Asian slaves,
maybe?). He won't be the pampered son of the Sunni
business aristocracy in Damascus showing off his
Porsche Cayenne. He won't be a billionaire
international playboy posing as politician a
la Saad Hariri in Beirut. He won't be a
gas-dealing executive in gas nirvana Qatar.
Divide and rejoice Conditions
are more than ripe for the advent of a new Saladin
- after the Nakhba, the 1967 lightning Israeli
victory against the Arabs, the failures of
pan-Arabism, the occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq, the Israeli attack on Lebanon, the limited
appeal of Salafi-jihadism, the non-stop stifling
of nationalist movements by Western-backed brutal
dictatorships/client monarchies.
When the
future Saladin looks at the troubled and dejected
Middle East, the first thing he sees is US Vice
President Dick Cheney shopping for yet another war
- skipping the "axis of evil" (Iran, unofficial
member Syria) and ordering support from the "axis
of fear" (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, the
Emirates) in his relentless demonizing of Iran.
After inflating sectarianism in Iraq, this time
the imperial "divide and rule" weapon of choice is
Arabs vs Persians.
The administration of
US President George W Bush may have taken a leaf
from former colonial power France - which invented
Greater Lebanon as a confessional state, thus
prone to perennial turbulence - to apply it in
Iraq. But plunging Iraq into civil war to control
better it is not enough (and there's still the
matter of securing the oilfields).
Forcing
a practically de facto partition of Iraq into
three warring crypto-states - a Kurdistan, a
southern "Shi'iteistan" and a small central,
oil-deprived Sunnistan - mired in a sea of blood
in the heart of the Middle East is not enough. For
Cheney, the industrial-military complex and
assorted Ziocon (Zionist/neo-conservative)
warriors, the big prize is the subjugation of
Iran. Because Iran, apart from its natural wealth,
is the only power capable - at least potentially -
of challenging regional US hegemony.
Yet
the trademark Cheney threats - with the standard
high-tech aircraft-carrier background - are not
cutting much ice. Al-Jazeera has been rhetorically
bombarded by everybody and his neighbor - from
retired Egyptian generals to Emirati political
analysts - stressing that the Middle East will not
support another US war. Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, in a swift move, has just been to the
United Arab Emirates - the first visit by any
Iranian leader since the Emirates became
independent in 1971, and all the more crucial
because of a still-running dispute over a bunch of
Persian Gulf islands.
The House of Saud -
for which the only thing that matters is its own
survival - desperately wants a solution as soon as
possible for the Palestinian tragedy, before they
may be buried six feet under by the terrible
sandstorms blowing from Mesopotamia (think of
hordes of battle-hardened Salafi-jihadis coming
home after fighting the US in Iraq).
King
Abdullah is not bent on antagonizing Iran. On the
contrary: the most important guest at the recent
Riyadh conference was Iranian Foreign Minister
Manoucher Mottaki. Saudis and Iranians want to
prevent US-provoked sectarianism in Iraq from
spreading regionally. And King Abdullah wants a
better deal for Sunni Arab Iraqis (hence his
identification of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki as an Iranian puppet).
While
Cheney wants to pit Saudi Arabia against Iran, a
discreet, behind-the-scenes Saudi-Iranian pact of
no aggression may be all but inevitable, diplomats
tell Asia Times Online. Saudi Foreign Minister
Prince Saud al-Faisal said as much on the record:
"Stop any attempt aimed at spreading sectarian
strife in the region."
Iran of course can
be very persuasive, holding some tasty cards up
its sleeve - such as hard-earned intelligence
directly implicating the Saudis in training the
Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance) in Iraq on
explosive form penetrators (EFPs), which the
Pentagon foolishly insists come from Iran.
Everyone in Iraq knows it is operatives from "axis
of fear" allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt - and also
Pakistan - who have provided the Sunni Arab
guerrillas in Iraq with technology and training on
improvised explosive devices and EFPs.
Thus we have another Bush administration
foreign-policy special: Cheney coddling
guerrilla-arming Sunni Arabs - who are
facilitating the killing of American soldiers in
Iraq - to support an attack on Shi'ite Persians
(allied with the Iraqi Shi'ites supported by the
Americans ...).
Anyway, Iraqi Shi'ites are
more than winning the US surge game. The surging
US soldiers are fighting various strands of the
Sunni Arab resistance and al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the officially ensconced Badr
Organization and its shady death-squad spinoffs
are free to apply a lot of deadly pressure on the
Sunni Arab civilian population. The Mehdi Army, on
Muqtada al-Sadr's orders, is just lying low - not
taking the bait of fighting the Americans. Nothing
will change the reality of this surge picture in
the next few months.
About that
clash A possible Saudi-Iranian entente
would be a classic case of local powers taking the
destiny of the region in their own hands. In a
parallel register, in southern Beirut - prime
Hezbollah territory - there are plenty of banners
in front of buildings destroyed by Israel last
summer. They read: "The Zionist enemy destroys,
the Islamic Republic of Iran builds."
Unity in the Muslim world is not a
chimera: crypto-scientific Western babble of the
"Arabs are extinct" variety is plain silly,
as
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