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THE ROVING EYE A divided Iraq just doesn't add up By Pepe Escobar
his mind, saying that a model for Iraq would be the United Arab Emirates, which
is a loose association of relatively autonomous sheikdoms. But anyway, that
"wouldn't fit" Iraq.
The Gulf Cooperation Council, which groups six Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms, is
against it. The toothless Arab League is against it - accusing the US of
destroying Iraq and offering it to al-Qaeda. Yemen is also against it. US ally
Saudi Arabia has been mute.
Meanwhile, in Tehran, Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, former
leader of the IRGC and recently promoted to special advisor on military affairs
to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Iraq is bound to be broken up
into a federal government anyway, and the US will keep military bases in the
country for years.
Does it ring a Bell?
US senators seem to be sufficiently ignorant of the Middle East not to see that
partition would set the region on fire. Turkey - a US ally - would be terrified
by too much autonomy for Iraqi Kurds (who would be encouraged to help their
Kurdish brothers inside Turkey). Saudi Arabia would be alarmed at Iraqi
Shi'ites controlling their own, resource-rich, mini-state and enjoying very
close relations with Iran.
The Iraqi daily Az-Zaman was close to the mark, noting that for the US, Iraq is
and will remain a "vassal state". A weak, dismembered Iraq makes sense only in
a scenario of the US exercising control, directly or indirectly, meddling in
"sovereign" decisions, keeping its "invisible" military bases and profiting
from Blackwater USA and assorted mercenaries' services till kingdom come.
Iraq as we know it is a product of Western colonialism. It was invented as a
country by Gertrude Bell, T E Lawrence and Harry St John Philby, and
established as a Hashemite kingdom in 1921. Very few people know that shortly
before she invented her country, Bell met Sayyid Hasan al-Sadr, the
great-grandfather of Muqtada al-Sadr and the key religious leader at the time.
That's when she finally got the whole picture. She knew this new kingdom would
inevitably turn out be a Shi'ite-led theocracy. But that's not what British
imperialism wanted. They wanted to control Iraq's oil fields in the north. So
Bell came up with the perfect scheme: rule by a Sunni minority, the Shi'ites
excluded from power and the Kurds denied their own state. She also knew this
fabricated Iraq would never be a democracy.
Whatever imperialist machinations, the fact is that Iraq, over these almost 90
years, has been constituted into a nation - at least for Sunnis and Shi'ites.
National pride is an essential trait of the Iraqi character. Partition could be
the US scenario towards the Korea model. This means military bases on the
ground for decades. It also means - unlike Korea - endless war, because the
Sunni Arab resistance (as well as Muqtada's Mahdi Army) will never give up.
Partition could also lead to a Vietnam model. A unified Iraqi resistance
eventually wins (it already has almost total popular appeal), topples the
government in Baghdad and the US is forced to perform a humiliating remix of
the helicopters abandoning Saigon in 1975.
The kingdom, then state, created by Bell is no more. Saddam Hussein was
basically perpetuating what had been invented in the 1920s. When Bush's troops
invaded in 2003, they destroyed not only the regime but the whole state. Bell
was indeed a visionary. Liberal democracy in Iraq is virtually impossible. The
Shi'ite-led theocracy that British imperialism tried to prevent in the 1920s is
back with a vengeance.
But for the moment, all the horrors built into the Bush administration's
disaster in Iraq have been able to engender above all a truly horrific process:
ongoing, slow-motion ethnic cleansing. Kurdistan will be populated almost
exclusively by Kurds. Sunnistan will be poor and resentful, with no oil, and
sprinkled with US military bases. Baghdad will be an overwhelmingly Shi'ite
city (it used to be majority-Sunni). And Shi'iteistan will be a wealthy beacon
of the Shi'ite revival all over the majority Sunni Middle East. This will all
be accomplished by overlapping ethnic cleansing.
Now let's see whether any senators are able to at least begin to comprehend the
weight of all these implications.
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