[NYTr] The Baghdad Gulag
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Asia Times Online via Info Clearing House - Apr 13, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17527.htm
The Baghdad Gulag
By Pepe Escobar
DAMASCUS - There are three overlapping wars in Iraq: the Sunni Arab
guerrilla struggle against the US; strands of Sunni Arab guerrillas against
assorted Shi'ite militias/death squads; and al-Qaeda in Iraq against the
puppet, US-backed Iraqi government in the Green Zone. Make it four wars: the
Sunni Arab guerrilla war against the government inside the Green Zone.
Better yet, make it five wars: the Sadrists, from Sadr City to Kufa and
Najaf, against the Americans.
All strands of these five overlapping wars will never allow the United
States - or Anglo-American Big Oil - to control Iraq's oil wealth. Even
if the new oil law is ratified by Parliament before June, implementation
will be a certified nightmare, and security for billions of dollars of
necessary investment non-existent.
Strands of these five overlapping wars also will never accept the
long-term imposition of vast US military bases under a Status of Forces
Agreement negotiated with dodgy politicians who spend more time in London
than in Baghdad.
Setting a precise date for a total US withdrawal - the crystal-clear
demand insistently formulated by Muqtada al-Sadr - would be the only way
for the Bush administration to salvage a modicum of not totally
humiliating defeat. Instead, the world had better be ready for the
imminent arrival of the Baghdad gulag.
Can I leave my condo, please?
US corporate media/think-tanks may think they fool strands of US public
opinion (or themselves), but they don't fool Iraqis on the (dangerous)
ground. No realist in his right mind could possibly ignore the
14-kilometer-long throngs compacted all along the Kufa-Najaf road this
past Monday, on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.
There were hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million Iraqi
nationalists, waving Iraqi flags - with no room for a religious divide -
responding to Muqtada's call for "Occupation out!" The Shi'ite
million-man march proved once again Sadrists rule the Shi'ite street -
and are the most powerful political force among Iraqi Shi'ites.
Yet for the administration of US President George W Bush, Muqtada al-Sadr
- like every nationalist with immense popular appeal - is nothing but an
evildoer who must be squashed by all counterinsurgency means necessary.
Imperial and neo-colonial systems are incapable of thinking laterally.
The French failed to do so in Algeria. The Americans failed in Vietnam.
The Israelis failed in Palestine. The Americans will fail to do so again
in Iraq. Call it counterinsurgency run amok. Thirty of Baghdad's 89
districts will become gated communities from hell - cellophane-wrapped
compounds where only Iraqis with a new, theoretically safe ID will be
allowed in and out of this "secure environment", in Pentagon newspeak.
Yes, it will be Orwellian. Better yet, it will be a post-mod, Arab condo
version of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, where the eye of the system is
ubiquitous.
In the last chapter of my book Globalistan - titled "Condofornia vs
Slumistan" - I argue that the future now revolves around the tension
between gated communities and unruly slums, "secure environments" and
black waves of anger. Wherever both meet - from Baghdad to Sao Paulo - we
may see endless replays of Black Hawk Down.
The Baghdad gulag is a Pentagon-enforced Condofornia imposed over an Arab
Slumistan. Let no one be fooled: it's being conducted as a technical
experiment, with live Iraqis as guinea pigs, and is bound to be
replicated in other areas of the Pentagon-created "arc of instability"
from the Andes to the Horn of Africa to Arabia to Central Asia.
Let no one be fooled (again): guerrillas will IED the system from their
underground cells, and many a Black Hawk will go down. But as everyone
watches the destined-to-failure experiment, really serious matters - such
as three new, crucial US mechanized brigades deploying east of Baghdad on
the way to be strategically positioned at the Iraqi-Iranian border - will
be taking place under the cover of night.
Pass the explosive coffee, please
The Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance) has already celebrated the arrival
of the Baghdad gulag - by attacking the heart of the system itself, the
Green Zone. The bomb that exploded on Thursday in the cafeteria of the
Baghdad Convention Center - which houses the Iraqi Parliament, inside the
Green Zone - was yet another crystal-clear message: we can strike you as
we please, and where we please.
It has been an open secret in Baghdad for months now that strands of the
muqawama boast they can sweep over the Green Zone and decimate the
innocuous government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki whenever they
choose to.
Then what must have been al-Qaeda in Iraq complemented the new Green Zone
bombing with a kamikaze suicide truck bombing of Al-Surafiya Bridge, one
of the oldest of the 10 bridges over the Tigris. This bridge used to
separate still predominantly Sunni Adhamiya from still mixed Bab
al-Muazzam, with which it is literally at war. The logic here would be to
protect Adhamiya from Shi'ite militia-conducted ethnic cleansing.
The Green Zone bomb at the Parliament cafeteria is metaphorical in more
ways than one. This is already a bombed-out Parliament. Sadrists, holding
32 seats, are threatening a boycott. Unlike throngs of SCIRI (Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), Da'wa Party and Kurdish
parlamentarians who prefer to watch Chelsea soccer matches in London
drinking vintage scotch, Sadrists actually go to work every day in the
Green Zone. If the Sadrists and the Islamic Virtue Party representatives
actually decided to boycott it, along with the hardcore Sunni members of
the Iraqi Accord Front, this Parliament would be no more.
Crucially, this would mean no passing of the Holy of Holies, the new
Iraqi oil law. It's also an open secret in Baghdad - as well as among
Iraqi refugees in Damascus - that the Bush administration's now famous
"June deadline" to the Maliki government is only about oil. If the oil
law is not approved by then, "all options are on the table", and that
means a white coup with the reinstallation of former Central Intelligence
Agency asset, former interim prime minister, former "butcher of Fallujah"
Iyad Allawi, whose main task would be ... to get the oil law approved.
A Sunni Arab refugee businessman in "Little Fallujah" in Damascus, now
running a kebab joint and counting every Syrian pound, summed it all up:
"The bomb could have killed them all, these politicians. We are not
sorry. They are just adding more misery to the Iraqi people. Nothing will
change if the Americans don't leave." He is Sunni. And he agrees with
Muqtada al-Sadr.
So much for sectarian civil war. For the 1.2 million-plus Iraqi refugees
in Syria, Sunnis in Little Fallujah or Shi'ites around Sayyida Zaynab,
the verdict is unanimous: with a population descended to Fourth World
status, infant mortality doubling, 60% unemployment, a refugee crisis and
the ground zero of civil society, there's only one answer: Americans out.
Muqtada knows it. Instead, soon on every screen, ready for the summer
blockbuster season, we will have the latest Pentagon production: The
Baghdad Gulag.
[Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at
pepe...@yahoo.com.]
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd
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