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Jan 12, 2007
THE ROVING EYE
Surging toward the holy oil grail
By Pepe Escobar
"I see the imminent death of 20,000 men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds ...
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth."
Hamlet, Act IV; according to White House spin part of
reading-adverse President George W Bush's book list during the summer of
2006.
And so, after a tsunami surge of spin, US President
George W
Bush is heading toward escalation, summoning his 21,500
men, supported by barely 11% of Americans. Escalation in Iraq is the name
of the president's game, and that also applies to Somalia - the new
Afghanistan.
In far from accidental timing, the good old "war on
terror" is back from the grave (nobody really related to the "long war"
newspeak). After all, the galleries had to be reminded that there's a
Pentagon-concocted "arc of instability" running from the Horn of Africa to
the Middle East and then to the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Himalayas.
The "war on terror" has expanded to the business of killing Africans, now
afforded membership of the ever-expanding "axis of evil".
Bush, in front of a stack of books he never reads,
blamed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni Arab resistance and "Shi'ites supported
by Iran" for his failures; committed five more brigades to Baghdad and
4,000 extra troops to guerrilla and al-Qaeda-controlled al-Anbar province.
As if these shock troops will be enough to pursue the "fight against
terror". Bush's plan ultimately breaks down to a slightly bulkier US
militia in Iraq capable of killing more Arabs.
Taking the bull by the Horn
With some aplomb, the White House/Pentagon axis has
managed to turn Somalia into the new Afghanistan, in more ways than one
and just in time for Bush's announcement of his escalation-tainted "new
way forward". The Pentagon maintained it had "credible" intelligence
before it decided to strike alleged al-Qaeda-infested villages in southern
Somalia. This is highly suspect.
The intelligence was provided by unsavory, corrupt
Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi - who came up with the clever plot of
concocting a fictitious jihad conducted by "neo-Taliban" in Somalia and
selling it handsomely to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the
Pentagon. He's now posing as a prime US ally in the "war on terror", just
as Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov did in the autumn of 2001.
Zenawi's US-trained Ethiopian troops, the ones who
invaded Somalia, are infested with CIA operatives and Special Forces - all
of them flown in from the strategic US-controlled (since September 11,
2003) Camp Le Monier in Djibouti.
Arab media are having a field day reporting that Somali
President Abdullahi Yusuf, a reconverted warlord "elected" by fellow
warlords (all armed by the US) and then legitimized by the United Nations,
told African journalists in Mogadishu that the US had the right to bomb
"anywhere in the world". According to the Kenyan newspaper The Daily
Nation, this new US campaign of targeted assassinations has in fact killed
scores of civilians.
But with the help of Ethiopia's dictatorship - whose
soldiers it trained - Washington is being rewarded with one more client
regime, and a crucial foothold in the Horn of Africa, right on the Gulf of
Aden and the Arabian Sea, very close to the Red Sea and literally next
door to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Or is it that simple? Somalia, 75% pastoral with six
major clans and hundreds of sub-clans, is now in civil-war mode. Millions
of Somalis live in neighboring Kenya, and support the deposed, moderate
Islamic Union Courts. Kenya will be convulsed. Blowback will be
inevitable - and bloody. "Long war" marketers and profiteers could not but
rejoice.
The bull in the carpet shop
As the Somali Osama bin Laden slouches toward Kenya to
be born, there is only one new Saddam Hussein strong enough to "save" the
US in Iraq. His name is Abu Deraa. But there is a slight problem: he is a
Shi'ite warlord, and head of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army.
The Iraqi media have been wildly speculating that Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki could be the victim of a US-engineered white coup,
the likely replacement candidates being two certified Washington puppets,
current Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi from the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an enthusiast of a proposed new Iraqi
oil law, and former interim prime minister, former Ba'athist and "butcher
of Fallujah", Iyad Allawi.
But just when Washington and the Green Zone in Baghdad
were abuzz with talk of regime change, Bush told Republican senators this
week that his escalation and "new way forward" policies were basically
designed by none other than Maliki, widely condemned for his support of
Shi'ite death squads. It is astonishing that Maliki might actually have
managed to convince Bush that he will frontally take on the militias of
his ally Muqtada.
High on the White House wishful-thinking list is that
Muqtada be isolated in the Iraqi Parliament as the US-trained Iraqi army,
on Maliki's orders and helped by the Pentagon, crushes the Mehdi Army.
Shi'ites killing Shi'ites? Now that's an extremely tall order. Yet this
would lead, runs the scenario, to the mollifying of the
Sunni Arab resistance. Sunnis would increase their voice in
the government - supposing they were convinced there would be no more
militia-conducted ethnic cleansing. The scenario completely "forgets" the
SCIRI's Badr Organization, whose militias, much more organized and well
trained than the Mehdi Army, are operating right from inside the Interior
Ministry.
Nothing of the White House's laundry list, of course, is going
to happen. What could happen, though, is indiscriminate US-conducted
civilian killings, thus generating another martyr, Muqtada, even more
powerful for legions of Shi'ites than Saddam has become for Sunni
Ba'athists.
The basic fact remains that Bush's escalation is designed to
smash Muqtada's Mehdi Army. That can only mean, in practice, a
mini-genocide of vast masses of unruly, extremely dispossessed Shi'ites:
the coming battle of Sadr City, which the Pentagon has been itching to
launch since the spring of 2004. The Pentagon is actually declaring war on
no fewer than 2.2 million (poor) people. A sinister symmetry still
applies: the Pentagon will attack dispossessed Shi'ite masses - just as
the Israeli Defense Forces attacked dispossessed Shi'ite masses in
southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
There's more. Bush's escalation, according to his own speech,
will ensure there will actually be two major battles on two different
fronts: the battle of Sadr City, against Shi'ites, and the Great Battle of
Baghdad, as the Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance) has been dubbing it. A
tangential taste of this second front was provided this week by the
day-long fight in Haifa Street between coalition and Iraqi forces against
militants.
Muhammad al-Askari, the military adviser to Maliki, justified
the bombing of Haifa Street as crucial to the killing of "50 terrorists".
Anyone familiar with the Sunni Arab resistance knows they would never be
dumb enough to concentrate 50 top fighters in a single Baghdad street in
full view of US firepower. The battle of Haifa Street actually fits into
Maliki's preferred developing pattern: systematic ethnic cleansing of
Sunni areas by the heavily militia-infiltrated, and US-trained, Iraqi
army.
Bush's escalation is also certain to incinerate the stars of
counterinsurgency ace Lieutenant-General David Petraeus, currently spun as
the new military messiah who will "save" Iraq for the US. After all, he is
the co-author of the new US Army counterinsurgency field manual. But
according to Petraeus' own doctrine, the Pentagon would need at least
120,000 combat troops to have a shot at winning the counterinsurgency game
in Baghdad. The US currently has no more than 70,000 combat troops in the
whole of Iraq. It controls not even a hectare of al-Anbar province - which
is practically on the way to becoming an Islamic emirate. The US controls
the Green Zone - and that's it. So in essence Bush's 21,500 extra men are
doomed to total irrelevance - not to mention raising their odds of
returning home in a body bag, courtesy of the upcoming resistance surge.
Grabbing those oil fields by the horn
Washington's successive divide-and-rule tactics - facilitating
a possible genocide of Sunnis, contemplating a mass slaughter of Shi'ites,
betting on a regional Sunni/Shi'ite war - never for a second lose sight of
the riches of Iraqi. For Big Business, an Iraq eaten alive by
Balkanization is the ideal environment for the triumph of Anglo-American
petrocracy.
A new Iraqi oil law will most likely be voted on in Parliament
in the next few weeks, before the arrival of Bush's 21,500 men, and it
should be in effect in March. The law is Anglo-American Big Oil's holy
grail: the draft has been carefully scrutinized by Washington, Big Oil and
the International Monetary Fund, but not by Iraqi politicians. The
profit-sharing agreements enshrined by the law are immensely profitable
for Big Oil. And crucially, the law prevents any Iraqi government from
nationalizing the oil industry - as the majority of Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member states did. In essence, it's a
game of "if you nationalize, we invade you - again". So the law fulfills
the early-2003 neo-con boast of "we are the new OPEC".
Iraq's petrodollars will turn to mush - or rather, as with
Saudi Arabia, be recycled back to US banks. Security company Blackwater
will make a killing "protecting" Iraqi pipelines. Bechtel and Halliburton
will get myriad fat contracts to rebuild everything the US has bombarded
since 1991.
But what's the use of an oil law in a 100-cadavers-a-day
hellhole? Enter the escalation as a way of providing "stability".
Whichever way the coming surge goes - ethnic cleansing of Sunnis, the
battle of Sadr City - what matters is not the piling up of Arab Muslim (or
American) bodies, but how much less cumbersome is the path toward the holy
oil grail. Big Business will make a deal with anyone that facilitates the
passing of the oil law, be it Maliki's Da'wa Party, the SCIRI, or - in a
wildest-dream version - the Sadrists or al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ite, want
the US out, and as soon as possible. A rape of Iraq's oil wealth enshrined
by a Parliament-approved oil law would certainly lead to national unrest.
For the moment it's fair to assume the US is taking no chances in its
backroom deals, as the SCIRI's support for the new law, via Vice President
Adil Abdul Mahdi, is practically assured. Da'wa must be in the process of
being bribed to death.
But Muqtada is another story. He is close to some Sunni
factions. They are getting closer. And crucially, they agree on being
Iraqi nationalists who want the Americans out. There's a very strong
possibility of the Sadrists joining the muqawama in the event the oil law
is approved. Thus the preemptive, two-pronged Bush escalation on the war
front - against both Muqtada and nationalist Sunnis.
The ever-expanding killing fields
Stenographers of the "clash of civilizations" may rejoice. But
what really matters is what 1.5 billion people of the Muslim ummah are
seeing. They see, on a given day, apart from made-in-USA bombs over
Palestine, the US bombarding Arab Muslims in Iraq, Central Asian Muslims
in Afghanistan, black Muslims in Somalia. Soon, perhaps, Persian Muslims
will be included. Blowback is assured.
Referring to the hearings on Capitol Hill last month on the
Lancet study compiling 655,000 civilian deaths provoked by the war on
Iraq, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole wrote in his blog that
the US government "has committed cliocide" - after the Greek muse Clio,
who watched over the course of human history. Cliocide will of course
continue.
In Iraq, there are only two stark, inevitable options for the
White House: cliocide, as in mass slaughter (of Sunnis and Shi'ites
alike); or defeat (which is all but assured). Bush has chosen the first
option. The upcoming battle of Sadr City will signal the descent of Iraq
into absolute, abysmal, irreversible chaos. Bush, in imperial-Rome mode,
can then call the desolation victory, and retire. Provided, of course, the
oil law is in the bag.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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