I say this to the evil Bush - leave my
country. We do not need you and your army of
darkness. We don't need your planes and tanks.
We don't need your policy and your
interference. We don't want your democracy and
fake freedom. Get out of our land. -
Muqtada al-Sadr, Iraqi Shi'ite
leader
The George W Bush-sponsored Iraqi
"surge" is now one year old. The US$11
billion-a-month (and counting) Iraqi/Afghan joint
quagmire keeps adding to the US government's
staggering over $9 trillion debt (it was "only"
$5.6 trillion when Bush took power in
early 2001).
On the
ground in Iraq, the state of the union - Bush's
legacy - translates into a completely shattered
nation with up to 70% unemployment, a 70%
inflation rate, less than six hours of electricity
a day and virtually no reconstruction, although
White House-connected multinationals have bagged
more than $50 billion in competition-free
contracts so far. The gleaming reconstruction
success stories of course are the Vatican-sized US
Embassy in Baghdad - the largest in the world -
and the scores of US military bases.
Facts
on the ground also attest the "surge" achieved no
"political reconciliation" whatsoever in Iraq -
regardless of a relentless US corporate media
propaganda drive, fed by the Pentagon, to proclaim
it a success. The new law to reverse
de-Ba'athification - approved by a half-empty
Parliament and immediately condemned by Sunni and
secular parties as well as former Ba'athists
themselves - will only exacerbate sectarian
hatred.
What the "surge" has facilitated
instead is the total balkanization of Baghdad – as
well as the whole of Iraq. There are now at least
5 million Iraqis among refugees and the internally
displaced - apart from competing statistics
numbering what certainly amounts to hundreds of
thousands of dead civilians. So of course there is
less violence; there's hardly any people left to
be ethnically cleansed.
Everywhere in Iraq
there are myriad signs of balkanization - not only
in blast wall/partitioned Baghdad. In the Shi'ite
south, the big prize is Basra, disputed by at
least three militias. The Sadrists - the voice of
the streets - are against regional autonomy; the
Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC)- which
controls security - wants Basra as the key node of
a southern Shi'iteistan; and the Fadhila party -
which control the governorate - wants an
autonomous Basra.
In the north, the big
prize is oil-rich Kirkuk province, disputed by
Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen; the referendum on
Kirkuk has been postponed indefinitely, as
everyone knows it will unleash a bloodbath. In
al-Anbar province, Sunni Arab tribes bide their
time collaborating with the US and controlling the
exits to Syria and Jordan while preparing for the
inevitable settling of scores with Shi'ites in
Baghdad.
Obama and Hillary vs Iraqis
Meanwhile, in the Democratic party
presidential race, Hillary Clinton, who voted for
the war on Iraq, viciously battles Kennedy
clan-supported Barack Obama, who opposed the war,
followed at a distance by John "can a white man be
president" Edwards, who apologized for his initial
support for the war. Obama, Edwards and Clinton
basically agree, with some nuance, the "surge" was
a fluke.
They have all pledged to end the
war if elected. But Edwards is the only
pre-candidate who has explicitly called for an
immediate US troop withdrawal - up to 50,000, with
nearly all of the remaining out within a maximum
of 10 months. Edwards insisted Iraqi troops would
be trained "outside of Iraq" and no troops would
be left to "guard US bases".
For their
part, both Clinton and Obama believe substantial
numbers of troops must remain in Iraq to "protect
US bases" and "to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq". This
essentially means the occupation grinding on. Both
never said exactly how many troops would be
needed: they could be as many as 75,000. Both have
steadfastly refused to end the "mission" before
2013.
It's hard to envision an "occupation
out" Obama when among his chief advisers one finds
former president Jimmy Carter's national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski - the "grand
chessboard" ideologue who always preached American
domination of Eurasia - and former Middle East
negotiator Dennis Ross, who always fought for
Israel's dominance of the "mini-chessboard", the
Middle East.
So far Obama has not given
any signs he would try to counter the logic of
global US military hegemony conditioned by control
of oil; that's why the US is in Iraq and Africa,
that's the reason for so much hostility towards
Venezuela, Iran and Russia. As for Clinton - with
the constant references to "vital national
security interests" - there's no evidence this
twin-headed presidency would differ from Bush in
wanting to install a puppet, pliable, perennial,
anti-Iranian, peppered-with-US-military-bases
regime in Iraq.
But more than US
presidential candidates stumbling on how to
position themselves about Iraq, what really
matters is what Iraqis themselves think. According
to Asia Times Online sources in Baghdad, apart
from the three provinces in Iraqi Kurdistan, more
than 75% of Sunnis and Shi'ites alike are certain
Washington wants to set up permanent military
bases; this roughly equals the bulk of the
population in favor of continued attacks against
US troops.
Furthermore, Sunni Arabs as a
whole as well as the Sadrists are united in
infinite suspicion of the key Bush-mandated
"benchmark": the eventual approval by the Iraqi
Parliament of a new oil law which would in fact
de-nationalize the Iraqi oil industry and open it
to Big Oil. Iraqi public opinion as a whole is
also suspicious of what the Bush administration
wants to extract from the cornered, battered Nuri
al-Maliki government: full immunity from Iraqi law
not only for US troops but for US civilian
contractors as well. The empire seems to be
oblivious to history: that was exactly one of
ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's most popular reasons
to dethrone the Shah of Iran in 1979.
Too many fish in the sea It's
impossible to overestimate the widespread anger in
Baghdad, among Sunnis and Shi'ites alike, for what
has essentially been the balkanization of the city
as negotiated by US commanders with a rash of
militias; the occupiers after all are only one
more militia among many, although better equipped.
Now there are insistent rumors - again - in
Baghdad that the occupation, allied with the
government-sanctioned Badr Organization - is
preparing an anti-Sadrist blitzkrieg in oil-rich
Basra.
The daily horror in Iraq has all
but been erased from US corporate media narrative.
But in Baghdad, now virtually a Shi'ite city like
Shiraz, Salafi-jihadi suicide bombers continue to
attack Shi'ite markets or funerals - especially in
mixed neighborhoods, even those only across the
Tigris from the Green Zone. Sectarian militias -
although theoretical allies of the occupation,
paid in US dollars in cash - continue to pursue
their own ethnic cleansing agenda. And the "surge"
continues to privilege air strikes which
inevitably produce scores of civilian "collateral
damage".
The Sunni Arab resistance
continues to be the "fish" offered protection by
the "sea" of the civilian population. All during
the "surge", the Sunni Arab guerrillas always kept
moving - from west Baghdad to Diyala, Salahuddin,
Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces and even to the
northern part of Babil province. After the
collapse of fuel imports from Turkey used to drive
the Iraqi power grid, Baghdad and other Iraqi
major cities are most of the time mired in
darkness. Fuel shortages are the norm. In
addition, the Sunni Arab resistance makes sure
sabotage of electricity towers and stations
remains endemic.
Contrary to Iraqi
government propaganda, only very few among the at
least 1 million Iraqis exiled in Syria since the
beginning of the "surge" - mostly white-collar
middle class - have come back. They are Sunni and
Shi'ite alike. People - mostly Sunni - are still
fleeing the country. The Shi'ite urban middle
class fears there will inevitably be a push by the
Sunni Arab resistance - supported and financed by
the ultra-wealthy Sunni Gulf monarchies - to
"recapture" Baghdad. This includes of course the
hundreds of thousands of Baghdad Sunnis forced to
abandon their city because of the "surge".
As for the Sadrists, they are convinced
the 80,000-strong Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils"
- al-Sahwah, in Arabic - gathered in Anbar
province are de facto militias biding their time
and practicing for the big push. It's fair to
assume thousands still keep tight connections with
the Salafi-jihadis (including most of all al-Qaeda
in the Land of the Two Rivers) they are now
supposedly fighting.
Considering the
sectarian record of the US-backed Maliki
government - which, as well as the Sadrists,
considers the Awakening Councils as US-financed
Sunni militias - there's no chance they will be
incorporated into the Iraqi army or police.
One of the Awakening Council leaders, Abu
Marouf, a Saddam Hussein "security officer" before
the 2003 invasion and then a commander of the
influential Sunni Arab guerrilla group the 1920
Revolutionary Brigades, all but admitted to The
Independent's Patrick Cockburn the consequences
will be dire if they are not seen to be part of
the so-called "reconciliation" process. All this
amounts to a certainty: a new battle of Baghdad is
all but inevitable, and could happen in 2008.
Occupied of the world, unite As
the occupation/quagmire slouches towards its fifth
year, it's obvious the US cannot possibly "win"
the Iraqi war - either on a military or political
level - as Republican presidential pre-candidate
John McCain insists. Sources in Baghdad tell Asia
Times Online if not in 2008, by 2009 the
post-"surge" Sunni Arab resistance is set to
unleash a new national, anti-sectarian,
anti-religion-linked-to-politics offensive bound
to seal what an overwhelming majority of Iraqis
consider the "ideological and cultural" US defeat.
Already now a crucial Sunni-Shi'ite
nationalist 12-party coalition is emerging -
oblivious to US designs and divorced from the
US-backed parties in power (the Shi'ite SIIC and
Da'wa and the two main Kurdish parties - the
Kurdish Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the
Kurdistan Democratic Party ). They have already
established a consensus in three key themes: no
privatization of the Iraqi oil industry, either
via the new oil law or via dodgy deals signed by
the Kurds; no breakup of Iraq via a Kurdish state
(which implies no Kurdish takeover of Kirkuk); and
an end to the civil war. The 12-party
coalition includes almost all Sunni parties, the
Sadrists, the Fadhila party, a dissidence of
Da'awa and the independents in the Iraqi
Parliament. And they want as many factions as
possible of the Sunni Arab resistance on board -
including the crucial tribal leaders of Awakening.
The ultimate success of this coalition in
great measure should be attributed to negotiations
led by Muqtada al-Sadr. The Sadrists are betting
on parliamentary elections in 2009, when they
sense they may reach a non-sectarian,
nationalist-based majority to form a government.
This would definitely bury Iraq's Defense Minister
Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim's recent estimate that
a "significant" number of US troops would have to
remain in Iraq at least for another 10 years,
until 2018.
Even barring a possible Dr
Strangelove-like attack on Iran, Bush is set to
leave to Obama or Clinton, apart from a nearly $10
trillion black hole, a lost war in Afghanistan,
total chaos in Pakistan, an open wound in Gaza, a
virtual civil war in Lebanon and the heart of
darkness of Iraq.
Both Obama - still
unwilling to defend progressive ideas on
progressive grounds - and drowning-in-platitudes
Clinton owe it to US and world public opinion to
start detailing, in "the fierce urgency of now",
how they realistically plan to confront such a
state of (dis)union.
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