THE ROVING EYE: IRAQ FIVE YEARS
ON Shocked, awed and left to
rot By Pepe Escobar
Future non-biased historians may well
regard March 19, 2003, as a crucial mark in the
annals of Western imperial arrogance. Five years
later, the pre-emptive war celebratory fireworks
have turned to dust. For months now Iraq has been
an invisible American war. It's seldom on TV. It
does not "sell". Thus, it does not exist. US Vice
President Dick Cheney, one of its key architects,
has just been to a whirlwind Baghdad tour. He said
he sensed "phenomenal changes" since his last
whirlwind tour 10 months ago. He praised security
progress as "dramatic".
The "dramatic"
progress was celebrated in style by a Sunni Arab
female suicide bomber who managed to detonate her
payload under her black abaya near the
ultra-protected Imam Hussein
shrine
in holy Karbala, killing at least 42 Shi'ites and
wounding 73.
Cheney did not see the real
Baghdad, drowning in sewage, desperate for water
and plunged in the dark - lacking 3,000 megawatts
of electricity (it may take as many as 10 years
before the city gets power 24 hours a day; so much
for "reconstruction"). As no US official was
suicidal enough to take Cheney, for instance, to a
real life suicide bomber-targeted vegetable market
in Sadr City - or to Imam Hussein's shrine in
Karbala for that matter - these "phenomenal
changes" warrant examination.
Cheney seems
not to be very fond of the humongous Pentagon
study based on more than 600,000 Iraqi documents
which proved that there was no link whatsoever
between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In a
curiously sedate propaganda effort, the report
will not be posted online and will not be e-mailed
by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia;
any reporter who wants it will have to ask it to
be sent via CD in the mail. That's quite a
"phenomenal change" with regard to the George W
Bush administration's hyped 2002 build up towards
war.
British agency Oxford Research
Business has recently updated its estimate of
"additional deaths" caused by the war to 1.3
million Iraqis - not including the top killing
fields, the provinces of al-Anbar (Sunni) and
Karbala (Shi'ite). At least 4 million Iraqis have
been internally displaced or become refugees,
mostly in overburdened Syria and Jordan, now
desperately running out of money and resources. As
for any Sunni or Shi'ite proud of his historical
memory, the US occupation has been regarded as
more devastating than the Mongol invasion of the
13th century. Talk about a historical "phenomenal
change".
Baghdad - following the strategy
of counterinsurgency ace General David Petraeus -
has been reduced to a rotten, amorphous, bloody
and dangerous stockpile of blast-wall ghettos
controlled by local warlords and militias. This
"strategy" is being financed by US taxpayers to
the tune of billions of dollars a month.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes, in their book
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of
the Iraq Conflict, estimate that by 2017, the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost between
$1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion. Republican
presidential contender John McCain wants this to
last indefinitely as millions of Americans finally
realize this avalanche of funds could instead
provide them with better public schools, better
health insurance and better projects to repair
crumbling US infrastructure.
Petraeus'
"surge" is gone - replaced by a "pause", defined
by the general to the Army Times as "sensible" and
"prudent". Recently resigned Admiral William
Fallon, the CENTCOM commander, was dead set
against Petraeus' "pause". He wanted to start
drawing down troops - immediately. The Bush
administration evicted him.
Up to the US
presidential election, for political reasons, many
would be led to believe nothing moves on the US
front. At least nothing visible. Because in
Kuwait, the Pentagon is busy building, in virtual
secret, a mammoth permanent command structure to
project "full spectrum dominance" not only in Iraq
but all over the arc from the Middle East to
Southwest Asia. Lieutenant General James J
Lovelace minced no words to the Middle East
edition of Stars and Stripes. It will be a
"permanent presence" - of course compounded with
all those extra permanent bases in Qatar, Bahrain
the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Be it under
pro-withdrawal Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton,
or pro-"surge" McCain, the "war" in and on Iraq
will go on - supported from Kuwait and the Gulf
petro-monarchies.
It's alright Ma, I'm only
dyin' Baghdad is not only the 21st
century heart of darkness. It is Fear Central - a
desert sand nightmare frozen in fear, a direct
consequence of the soggy mix of Petraeus' "surge"
profiting from the uneasy Shi'ite Mahdi Army truce
and the proliferation of the 80,000-strong
anti-al-Qaeda movement dominated by Sunnis, Sahwa
(Awakening).
As middle class Shi'ite
professionals tell Asia Times Online, rape and
pillage and widespread killing is down (65 Iraqis
killed daily in August 2007, 26 killed daily in
February 2008) because most neighborhoods have
been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is only "safer"
- as the current official mantra in Washington
goes - if compared to horrific post-February 2006
after the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in
Samarra, during the battle of Baghdad, when as
many as 3,000 people were being killed every
single month.
The inept Nuri al-Maliki
government in Baghdad knows little of what's
really going on - as it drags on in imperial
seclusion behind the Green Zone, defended by
valiant mercenaries from Georgia, Peru and Uganda.
If Maliki and his entourage decide to go for an
armored convoy stroll in formerly bustling
al-Mansur neighborhood, for instance, the area has
to be extensively searched as if this was a US
presidential visit.
No matter what
Washington decides or spins, it won't alter two
major facts on the ground. Of all the major
overlapping wars in Iraq, the Sunni Arab
resistance has for all practical purposes
stalemated the US occupation to the edge of
defeat. And on a sectarian level, the Shi'ites
have defeated the Sunnis as a whole - as they now
control, allied with the Kurds, the government,
Parliament, the army (13 divisions, half of them
militias aligned with Iran) and the police.
The anti-al-Qaeda Sahwa, which the
Americans dubbed "Concerned Local Citizens" and
then "Sons of Iraq", are the same old Sunni Arab
guerrillas, many of them former Saddam army
officers who former defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld described as "remnants of the old regime"
who were killing Americans before they decided to
rake some cash ($300 a month, an excellent salary
in 70% unemployment Iraq) and do their own version
of a "pause".
After all, they could not
fight the US Army, al-Qaeda and the Iraqi
government at the same time and believe they would
win it. They are, of course, anti-majority Shi'ite
Iraqi government (although the American public
relations machine would never let this cat out of
the bag). They're still one more militia in a
cornucopia of militias - the US Army itself being
nothing more than a heavily armed militia.
In a sense, the old imperial divide and
rule tactic has worked - as Sunnis and Shi'ites
are more deadly polarized against each other than
against the occupiers. But at the same time they
all unite on the key issue: occupation out. The
answer as to why no Iraqi militia organizes a
Tet-style anti-American onslaught is political
positioning.
Everyone's got militias - the
Kurdish Peshmerga, the Mahdi Army, the Badr
Organization, the Sahwa. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi
Army's objective is to conquer political power in
the next legislative elections. The Kurdish
Peshmerga worry about defending Kirkuk after a
referendum that could see it incorporated into the
Kurdish north. Badr does not want to lose the
government power it already enjoys; Hadi al-Amri,
the dreaded leader of Badr, says he will respect
the truce with the Mahdi Army. And Sahwa is just
waiting to pounce against the Shi'ites. In this
lethal cobweb, the Americans are just marginal,
puzzled onlookers.
Stuck inside of
Baghdad This country is no more. This
is an ex-country. It has gone to meet its maker
(the Sumerians, presumably). The "surge" is a
public relations-created illusion - as ghostly as
those abandoned, burned out Iraqi tanks littering
Baghdad's empty, dirty boulevards in April 2003;
after all there was no war to speak of, the Iraqi
army having preferred to flee.
The Turkish
army, for its part, has just proved its point;
Ankara can invade Iraqi Kurdistan any time it sees
fit - as if it was Gaza. And this is nothing
compared to what may happen after the endlessly
postponed Kirkuk referendum, when Iraqi Kurds will
finally have full control over their oil wealth
and rekindle their independentist dreams. If East
Timor and Kosovo can do it, why not us?
Muqtada has - literally - vanished, after
lamenting an Iraq "characterized by social
turmoil". He disappeared just like the 12th Imam,
Imam Mahdi - and that's a really huge thing for
pious Iraqi Shi'ites, not to mention a masterful
political ploy. Muqtada has transferred to the US
Marines the task of carrying a pogrom of the Mahdi
Army. He's aiming at the polls - he wants the
Sadrists to take over the Shi'ite provincial
governments in the south in the next election.
Sooner or later "anti-American" occult Muqtada
will be the lord of what remains of Iraq - and
there's nothing Washington can do about it.
As an internal US issue, neither Clinton
nor Obama has provided any concrete evidence they
want to totally scrap the US "mission" in Iraq -
or at least roll back the worldwide empire of
military bases still heavily supported by Cheney
and an array of corporate/industrial-military
interests.
As a global issue, millions of
Iraqis lost their homes, their jobs, their
families, their dreams and in countless cases
their own lives because of a pre-emptive war (or
"successful endeavor") built on lies. Shocked,
awed and utterly destroyed, their ancestral land
beheaded like a stray dog, Iraqis deserve at least
the world's respect in their hour of darkness.
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