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2 THE ROVING
EYE Sheikh Osama and the iPod general
By Pepe Escobar
"And among the most important items
contained in [President George W] Bush's speeches
since the events of the 11th [September 11, 2001]
is that the Americans have no option but to
continue the war. This tone is in fact an echoing
of the words of neo-conservatives like [Vice
President Dick] Cheney, [former defense secretary
Donald] Rumsfeld and [former chairman of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board] Richard Perle,
the latter having said previously that the
Americans have no choice in front of
them other than to
continue the war or face a holocaust. -
Osama bin Laden video, September 7.
PARIS - World public opinion has just been
treated to the face-off of the year - as if
orchestrated, with impeccable timing, in a John
Woo movie.
On the Washington side is
General David Petraeus, 54, the top US commander
in Iraq, the Teflon general or, critics would
argue, the iPod general, as he only plays the
iTunes playlist selected by his owner, the White
House.
On the Hindu Kush
mountainside, possibly between Chitral in Pakistan
and Kunar province in Afghanistan, arguably in a
cave with broadband and video-production
facilities, is Sheikh Osama bin Laden, 50,
al-Qaeda leader and (still) the most wanted man in
the world. (The
United States' bounty on his head doubled to US$50
million in July.)
It's six years after
September 11 and, once again, Canadian educator,
philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan was
right: the medium is the message. This war is
being decided on the screen. The
half-trillion-dollar question is inescapable:
Who's to be trusted, the general spinning a
successful "surge" for President George W Bush's
troops in Iraq, or the sheikh posing as statesman
and strategist? Who's not lying, the Pentagon or
al-Qaeda?
Six years ago, it was not
supposed to be this way. Al-Qaeda was turning
Boeings into missiles and delivering to the US the
"new Pearl Harbor" for which neo-cons so much
yearned. Saddam Hussein, counting his dollars from
the United Nations oil-for-food program, was
building palaces and living in the lap of luxury
in Baghdad. He regarded Islamist fanatics as the
plague.
Then the plot got convoluted. The
neo-cons pulled an Alfred Hitchcock and, just like
the vanished Janet Leigh character in
Psycho, introduced vanished weapons of mass
destruction in Mesopotamia. Shock-and-awe was
ruthlessly counter-acted with good old guerrilla
warfare. Saddam was hanged after being judged by a
kangaroo court. And bin Laden pulled a comeback
a la John Travolta in Pulp Fiction:
looking younger, sporting a dyed-black beard (a
stick-on?), white robe and cap and cool beige
cloak, he's now back in a starring role in garb
tailored for global audiences. Meanwhile,
incidentally, the US lost the war in Iraq.
I'm ready for my close-up, Mr Bush
Both the sheikh and the general have been
aiming to seduce multiple layers of
constituencies, but above all US public opinion.
Any number of troubling questions may be posed
regarding the "message from Sheikh Osama bin Laden
to the American people", acquired by Reuters "from
a Web trawler in Europe" last Friday, but only,
suspiciously, after the US government and the
neo-con-drenched, Washington-based
terrorism-monitoring SITE (Search for
International Terrorist Entities) Institute had
already bagged it.
Anyway, the iconic
jihadi might have boasted that a record 60% of
Americans, according to the latest USA
Today/Gallup poll, agrees with him: they now
believe the Iraq invasion was a mistake, the war
will be lost, and the US should send the troops
home according to a timetable, and "stick to that
timetable regardless of what is going on in Iraq".
Under these circumstances, who cares if
Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security
adviser, believes the sheikh is "virtually
impotent"? When he seizes the moral high ground
and analyzes - in intimate detail - the failure of
the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, he has his
finger much closer to the pulse of the American
street than either Republicans or Democrats, not
to mention the Pentagon.
Enter bin Laden
not only as film star but visionary film director.
Had he been the screenwriter of all the plot
twists since the fateful September 11, the sheikh
would have written exactly the same parts played
by key Bush administration characters.
As
for Petraeus, he was the central character in a
book about the invasion of Iraq. He played
himself: commander of the famed 101st Airborne
Division. He's a classic intellectual warrior (a
PhD in the lessons of the Vietnam War from
Princeton; the author of the current Pentagon
counterinsurgency manual). He might have been
Martin Sheen's Lieutenant Willard tracking Marlon
Brando's Colonel Kurtz in Francis Coppola's
Apocalypse Now. He mixes war and politics
with consummate ease and, like the sheikh, simply
cannot resist self-promotion in front of the media
glare. His Dutch ancestry betrays the ruthlessness
behind his cool projected persona.
In an
ideally sane scenario, he would have been in
charge of a task force tracking the sheikh and
engaged in dismantling al-Qaeda as part of
carefully designed global police work. Right now,
for instance, he would have to be focused on the
Chitral-Kunar corridor in the Hindu Kush, the most
probable location of that mythical bin Laden cave.
Better yet, he would be focused on finding
al-Qaeda's information-technology manager, the guy
who makes the global distribution of all those
videos possible.
Instead, the iPod
general, after "shock and awe", was sent to
supervise the occupation of Mosul and to train
Iraqi forces. No spinning may disguise the stark
reality; "pacified" Mosul today happens to be a
major stronghold of Sunni Arab guerrillas, and
only six battalions of Iraqi security forces
behave with real independence.
As
expected, after a tsunami of leaks and
speculation, the messianic (for hardline
Republicans) general's spin of a "successful"
"surge" in Congress was not raw, blunt or
realistic. He droned on about "ethno-sectarian"
violence and was long on "achieving objectives
over time" and "success" in al-Anbar province - as
if wily, armed-to-the-teeth Sunni tribals would
not turn against the Americans sooner rather than
later.
For instance, according to two
different assessments - by the Associated Press
and by Iraq Body Count - Iraqi civilian
deaths
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
the world. (The
United States' bounty on his head doubled to US$50
million in July.) 
