THE
ROVING EYE Iraq, the new
Israel Comment by Pepe Escobar
Why do we fear words? Some words
are secret bells, the echoes of their tone
announce the start of a magic and abundant
time steeped in feeling and life. So why
should we fear words? - Nazik al-Mala'ikah,
female Iraqi poet, who died on June 20 in
Cairo
of Parkinson's disease, aged 85
Lame-duck
US President George W Bush, last week in a speech
at the US Naval War College, made it official:
Israel is the model for Iraq, although Iraq is
rather more like Palestine.
Anyone
familiar with the Arab world knows Israel is
viewed all across the Middle East as a
Western-configured colonial power, illegally
gobbling up Palestinian land and treating its own
Arab residents as third-rate citizens. Bush's
Israeli Iraq - rather Americastan in Iraq, as it
is known in many quarters in Baghdad - amounts to
nothing less than a public relations nightmare in
terms of the US "message" for the wider Middle
East.
The endless Palestinian tragedy -
the cancer at the root of every problem in the
Middle East - now has officially spread to
Mesopotamia. The disease is man-made. Not that the
White House is losing any sleep over it. Bush may
even have had a Nero-like impulse to add fuel to
the burning of Rome, ie Baghdad: after all, the
Zio-con objective is to encourage civil war in
Iraq on a divide-and-rule basis.
Iraq's
Palestinians are the minority Sunni Arabs -
moderates included, and certainly, at least in the
thinking of Bush and his vice president, Dick
Cheney, Shi'ite followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. That
leaves little else than the Kurds as "Israelis";
mountainous Iraqi Kurdistan, anyway, has been
infested with Israeli intelligence services for
years.
Not only Bush dreams of an Israeli
Iraq; evildoers identify the dream for what it is.
Any self-respecting jihadist website in the Arab
world and any self-respecting Salafi-jihadist
cleric characterizes the occupation as an
anti-Sunni, US-Shi'ite coalition. Thus Sunni Arabs
are indeed widely viewed in the Arab world as
Palestinians.
Gimme my
benchmark Meanwhile real life - or survival
in the heart of darkness - remains bleak. Most
areas in Baghdad are "red" or "dark pink" -
meaning the odds of one seeing the sun rising day
after day range from 10% to a maximum of 30%. The
National Association of British Arabs, in a report
by Dr Ismail Jalili to the House of Lords
Commission on Iraq, has detailed only part of the
horrendous, systematic decimation of Iraq's
intelligentsia: 830 documented assassinations
since 2003, including 380 academics and doctors,
210 lawyers and judges, and 243 journalists.
Washington's Holy Grail - or Benchmark
Supreme - remains the Oil Law. Only 24 of 37 Iraqi
cabinet ministers have approved the
made-in-Washington draft of the law - which should
have been presented for discussion in Parliament
this Wednesday. The Kurds have already leaked that
they are against it - the terms, not the law in
itself. The Sadrists, virtually all Sunni parties
and the overwhelming majority of Iraq's population
- if they had access to the text - are against
handing over the nation's wealth to Anglo-American
Big Oil.
For security reasons - the
Israeli-as-Iraq government cannot secure even a
side street in Baghdad, not to mention provincial
highways - Muqtada al-Sadr canceled his new
Million Man March, which would have taken place
this Thursday in Sunni-majority Samarra. He was
forced to issue a communique discrediting rumors -
black ops? - relayed by Sunni sheikhs according to
which the Mahdi Army would conduct ethnic
cleansing in Samarra and turn it into a 100%
Shi'ite city.
Disregarding the occasional
shriek by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as ambient
noise, the US military continues to invade Sadr
City practically on a daily, pre-dawn basis in
search of Iranian "terrorists", bombing houses and
killing poor Shi'ite Iraqi civilians instead. This
is the face of Bush's "surge" that doesn't feature
in the Western press - but it does on Arab
satellite channels.
Iraqis have every
reason to fear words, as in the poem by Nazik
al-Mala'ikah. Many remember the apocalyptic
expressions "axis of evil" or "weapons of mass
destruction". They've now been told - by the
Mission Accomplisher-in-Chief - their country is
the new Israel. An exiled history professor in
Damascus may have come up with the only possible
way out of the heart of darkness: "Maybe we should
abandon Islam, convert to Judaism, and start doing
business with Texas."
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