THE ROVING EYE Evil Iran,
the new al-Qaeda By Pepe
Escobar
DUBLIN - "Iraq and its costs", the
op-ed published this Monday by the Wall Street
Journal and authored by Senators Joe Lieberman
(Independent, Connecticut) and Lindsey Graham
(Republican, South Carolina)[1] is nothing short
of alarming. Even more alarming than
counterinsurgency ace General David Petraeus' show
to the US Senate.
Coming from the two top
surrogates to Republican presidential candidate
Senator John McCain, the Lieberman-Graham piece -
a preemptive strike proclaiming the success of the
"surge" - should be taken as the very essence of
McCain's foreign policy, a presidential candidate
that still can't tell the difference between a
Sunni and a Shi'ite. As it happens, it is also a
formidable piece of
fiction. The overall martial
theme remains unmistakable: we need war, war, war.
Mr
Surge goes to Washington
Lieberman-Graham hail Petraeus as
"having led one of the most remarkably successful
military operations in American history" while
deriding "antiwar critics" as essentially a bunch
of losers. What they don't say is that the "surge"
is in fact not over - it has been reconverted into
a "pause", according to Petraeus himself, before
things start surging again. Lies. Lies. Pause.
More lies.
Lieberman-Graham rebrand the
"surge" as a "noble cause" - insisting on the drop
of American casualties ("down by 70%"). But they
don't tell how. They insist on magical surge
"liberation" of former al-Qaeda strongholds - but
they don't say that "empowered Iraqi Muslims" -
actually Sunni Arab guerrillas - decided, wisely,
to rake in US cash ($300 a month in a 70%
unemployment economy) instead of fighting three
enemies at once (al-Qaeda, the Baghdad government
and the Americans themselves).
They also
don't mention that any "success" of the "surge" is
also directly conditioned by Muqtada al-Sadr's
truce, imposed last autumn; and by decreased
ethnic cleansing in Baghdad (which had in fact
been turned from a Sunni-majority to a
Shi'ite-majority city even before the "surge"
began).
Lieberman-Graham talk of "Muslims
taking up arms against Osama bin Laden". Al-Qaeda
in the Land of the Two Rivers - although extremely
violent - is a negligible militia among the
jaw-dropping 28 militias in Iraq, no more than
3,000 fighters compared, for instance, to around
100,000 Kurdish Peshmergas.
Lieberman-Graham hail the
deer-caught-in-headlights [Nuri al-]Maliki
government in Baghdad, "encouraged" ("under heavy
pressure", rather) by US ambassador Ryan Crocker,
to pass US-designated benchmarks. Even Sunnis
rejected the new de-Ba'athification law. Not many
are "encouraged" to vote in the next elections
(Lieberman-Graham are certain they will, "by the
millions"); their collective feeling is that the
government remains a Shi'ite-Kurdish private
affair.
Not surprisingly, there's not even
a passing mention by Lieberman-Graham of the holy
of holies: oil. In fact, the only benchmark that
Washington really cares about is the new Iraqi oil
law - which no serious Iraqi nationalist member of
parliament would dare to approve. On the other
hand, Lieberman-Graham exult that "the Iraqi
economy is growing at a brisk 7%". Good for dodgy
car smugglers from the Gulf, not for a 70%
unemployment economy.
Lieberman-Graham
laud Maliki's "political will" to "take on the
Shi'ite militias and criminal gangs, which he
recently condemned as "worse than al-Qaeda". Here
pops up for the first time the dizzying amalgam
now relentlessly established by the Bush
administration and McCain himself of Wahhabi,
al-Qaeda and Shi'ite Iran - the Islamic Republic
branded guilty, with no evidence, of supporting
these militias and gangs.
Lieberman-Graham
seem to believe the Iraqi security forces have
"shown significant improvement". Whatever rhetoric
they employ cannot modify the end result of the
battle of Basra, where these "Iraqi security
forces" deserted en masse and were routinely
humiliated by the Mahdi Army and/or rogue Mahdi
Army units. Not to mention the supreme
humiliation: the ceasefire was broken by the
commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), in Qom, the
religious capital of Iran, and behind Maliki's
back. The IRGC, branded by Washington as
terrorists, were actually the peacemakers.
Unstoppable, Lieberman-Graham go on to say
that al-Qaeda "still retains a significant
foothold in the northern city of Mosul" where
"Iraqi and coalition forces are involved in a
campaign to destroy it". The true story, reported
by Asia Times Online (The other Iraqi civil
war, April 3) is
rather that Americans are helping Kurds in their
slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in
Mosul and the surrounding region.
Blame,
blame Iran The full demonization of
Iran - and the heart of Bush and McCain's foreign
policy - is on show when Lieberman-Graham accuse
Iran, with no evidence whatsoever, of continuing
"to wage a vicious and escalating proxy war
against the Iraqi government and the US military".
The Iranians have American blood on their hands"
and are responsible, through ghostly, undetermined
"extremist agents", for "the deaths of hundreds of
our men and women in uniform".
There's no
evidence these American-christened "special
groups" even exist - or are just a
counterinsurgency fabrication. It doesn't matter.
The whole project - Bush's and McCain's - is
spelled out quite frankly: "Our fight in Iraq
cannot be separated from our larger struggle to
prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated
Middle East." This is code for regime change - a
newer, "softer" surge of the old neo-con maxim
"Real men go to Tehran".
The amalgam is
duly reinforced when Lieberman-Graham stress
"continuing threats from Iran and al-Qaeda" -
underscoring once again that McCain's gaffe of two
weeks ago (Iran is training al-Qaeda) was not a
gaffe at all. Lieberman - who recently went out of
his way to elevate McCain to JFK status - even
manages to blame "antiwar politicians" for turning
"John F Kennedy's inaugural address on its head,
urging Americans to refuse to pay any price, or
bear any burden, to assure the survival of
liberty." Then it's amalgam redux - the specter of
a fictional world "in which al-Qaeda and Iran can
claim that they have defeated us in Iraq and are
ascendant".
As for the bread-and-butter
daily horror in Iraq, nothing will change. No
significant "troop withdrawals in the months
ahead", and no "political timeline". But then
Lieberman-Graham soar to unparalleled brotherhood
heights when they write that "thanks to the surge,
Iraq today is looking increasingly like Osama bin
Laden's worst nightmare: an Arab country, in the
heart of the Middle East, in which hundreds of
thousands of Muslims - both Sunni and Shi'ite -
are rising up and fighting, shoulder to shoulder
with American soldiers, against al-Qaeda and its
hateful ideology".
Bin Laden is patient -
he knows the occupation itself will continue to be
a magnet to thousands of aspiring jihadis. Sunni
Arab guerrillas have learned to be patient; they'd
rather breathe now, paid by US cash, and then
relaunch their offensive, at the right time, to
recapture Baghdad. As for those "hundreds of
thousands of Muslims" - in fact millions - their
main battle cry is not al-Qaeda, but rather
"Occupation out", as in the Million Man March
called by Muqtada al-Sadr for this Wednesday in
Baghdad and then canceled.
Why the abrupt
cancelation? Because the immense Sadr City slum,
as well as other Sadrist bases, have been totally
encircled by Maliki's and Petraeus' "surge"
troops. In a press conference at Firdous Square -
where exactly five years ago today the marines
staged the toppling of the statue of Saddam
Hussein, with the help of a few Baghdad locals -
Sadrist spokesman Salah al-Obaidi said Muqtada
would not risk the safety of his millions of
supporters.
Asia Times Online sources
confirm Iraqi "security" - in fact Badr
Organization commandos - have been detaining every
single young Shi'ite male from 15 to 35 and
preventing them from entering the city center.
This is also what the "surge" is about - massive
popular repression, although no one will hear it
from Lieberman-Graham.
The war on Iraq
ended five years ago today. No: the war on Iraq
actually started five years ago today. For those
who still live under the spell of a Bush "we
create our own reality" administration, the
Lieberman-Graham piece is soothing. For McCain
supporters, it's confirmation of the road map
ahead - The Hundred Year War plus "bomb, bomb,
Iran". As for the majority of the American public,
which has had enough of an endless war that has
torn the country apart, it's nothing but an insult
to their collective intelligence.
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