Wednesday

Escobar: Civil War and Balkanization in Iraq

February 01, 2005

Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times is a prescient observer of the Iraqi invasion and the situation in the Middle East, and that is why I put credence in his assertion that the Shi’ite majority of Iraq, who have obviously won the “election” even before all the “votes” have been tallied, will cut the Americans some slack in regard to the occupation and work with them against the Sunni resistance. “The Shi’ites may be on the brink of power after 14 centuries,” writes Escobar. “Their premier electoral promise—later reneged—was to negotiate a total American withdrawal. If now their strategy is a ‘wait and see’ —let’s train Iraqi forces to fight the Sunni resistance and then we negotiate the American withdrawal—they may be in for a rude shock and awe.”

If the Shi’ites do as Escobar suggests, it will likely step up the tempo of the Sunni resistance and ultimately result in civil war between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites. As I have said now for months, this is precisely what the Strausscons want to happen in Iraq. “As the Sunni resistance will inevitably become bloodier, balkanization is the preferred Washington strategy feared in the Sunni triangle,” writes Escobar. “Sunnis mention the Central Intelligence Agency for promoting suspicious bombings; Shi’ite militias used in the leveling of Fallujah; peshmerga (paramilitaries) used to fight Arabs in Mosul; and the possibility of the Badr Brigades being called back. In a civil war, the Americans would divide Iraq in three parts—the juicy ones attributed to US corporations, the rotten ones controlled by warlords.”

Since the resistance is almost completely a Sunni affair, credence should be put in the suspicion that the CIA—now Rumsfeld’s Strategic Support Branch (SSB)—is behind bombings and other terrorist acts carried out against innocent civilians, as I have speculated. In fact, this is perfectly logical since there is simply no way the U.S. can put an end to the resistance through traditional military means. SSB “counterinsurgency” operations are designed not only to alienate the Iraqi people from the resistance, a plan that seems to be making little if any headway, but to set the stage for civil war as well.

As Escobar notes, the Sunni resistance is essentially calling the shots.

If the Sunni resistance is really 200,000-strong, as Iraq’s chief spook has announced, it is the resistance that will have the last word. In a perverse twist of “reaping what you sow", American abuses in Iraq have reaped so such anger that nobody wants them to leave—even moderate Sunnis, because everyone fears total chaos. The Americans created the conditions for the emergence of a hardcore resistance. They created the conditions for the emergence of suicide bombers. And they created the conditions for staying: after all, now they need to engage in counterinsurgency. As the Iraqi Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni party puts it, even the resistance does not want the Americans to leave. What moderate Sunnis want to see is a detailed plan on the table, with fixed dates.

Of course, with the Strausscons driving the occupation, this “detailed plan on the table, with fixed dates” will never appear and chaos will rule, as planned, and Iraq will be balkanized, as demanded by the Likudites in Israel. In fact, with the exception of Jordan, this is the plan for most of the Arab and Muslim Middle East—ethnic strife, civil war, balkanization, stomping out Arab nationalism, and the United States and Israel cutting deals with the resultant fiefdoms run by feudal warlords and dictators. As for those who resist, the prospect is never-ending war and incalculable misery for millions of people.

As a final note, in response to the adulatory nonsense pumped out by the corporate media in regard to Iraq’s stage-managed “election,” read these comments made by Alexander of the Guerilla News Network. He includes an article about the U.S. stage-managed elections in Vietnam, written by Peter Grose of the New York Times on September 3, 1967, a near mirror reflection of the current corporate media response to the Iraqi election. It is instrumental to keep in mind that several months after the state-managed South Vietnam election, so heralded in the United States, on January 30-31, 1968, the National Liberation Front kicked off the Tet Offensive, essentially signaling the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. “US media reports of the battles shocked both the American public and its politicians,” notes Wikipedia. “Apparently the depth of the US reaction surprised even the North Vietnamese leadership. … Support for the Vietnam War began to steadily erode from that point on, until the release of the Pentagon Papers largely confirmed the deliberate practice of ‘covering-up’ various facts about the progress of the war. After the Tet Offensive, the main issue of public debate would be ‘how to securely withdraw’ from the war without losing a ‘hearts and minds’ Cold War battle against then-enemy Soviet Union and its system of communism.”

On occasion, history does repeat itself.

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