Pepe Escobar writes Anti-Israeli columns (although not exclusively) on Asia Times. He has a right, it is part of my belief in Tolerance. If I wish people to read about my position, whether they respect me or not, he must have the freedom to write on his position, whether I respect it or not. I certainly respect his ability to write – he is good. Whether he is also an Anti-Semite is, of course debatable. I choose not to enter that debate. Often I find his columns quite distasteful. I decided his last one needed a response. I rarely respond to writers like Pepe since I do not believe their positions are subject to change; those who accept his views also. However sometimes, like the Anti-Semite who wrote wishing that the Islamists do to me what Hitler failed, need a response for my sake, not theirs.
Learning from Jonathan Swift in my ‘Yeshiva’ I adopt his style. Pepe
article was about how the Americans and the Israelis were planning for
the Kurds to gain independence in order to gain their oil.
On March 1, Asia Times published by response to Pepe.
“Dear Pepe [Escobar (The Shi'ites' Faustian pact, Feb 11)]: It is well
known that the Kurds are seeking independence. Everyone from the
dictatorial Syrians to the clerical-dominated Iranians to the Turks who
despite their democracy used their military power to do genocide
against the Armenians will destroy Kurdish independence. The Kurds,
like the Israelis in regard to Jerusalem would claim Kirkuk, with its
oil, 40% of Iraq's reserves, as their capital. Turkmens may
legitimately live there, Arabs not, having been imported by Saddam
[Hussein] when he expelled the Kurds. The Arabs need to be ethnically
cleansed like we volunteered in Gaza. While the American administration
strongly opposes Kurdish independence, all of us conspiratorial
theorists (and we Jews are the best) know that is a Big Lie. Israel
strategized the war with the Americans for the purpose of the oil. It
intends it to be their own. Having given up Gaza we are entitled to
something in exchange. When would Jews give up something for nothing?
We all have [knowledge] of Shylock, and if not see Robert DeNiro in his
new production [The Merchant of Venice] - he is magnificent in the
starring role, a fix for next year's Jewish Oscars. His next starring
role, I am told by my associates in the Elders, is to play Osama [bin
Laden]. Unfortunately the production is on hold until the real Osama is
caught, thus the $25 million reward. Pepe, I do not know why you
considered the oil issue simply a "Faustian Pact". It is much more, a
plot by us, the Elders of Zion?”
Rabbi Moshe Reiss (Mar 1, '05)
Feb 11, 2005
THE ROVING EYE
The Shi'ites' Faustian pact
By Pepe Escobar
In Najaf, the holy Shi'ite city, the grand ayatollahs are busy
advancing a religious agenda: Ali al-Sistani, Mohammad Ishaq al-Fayad,
Bashir al-Najafi and Mohammad Said Hakim compose the al-marja' iyyah
(source of infallible authority on all religious matters). They are
unanimous: the Shi'ite religious parties, the big winners in the
elections, must implement Sharia (Islamic) law - and in fact this is
one of the parties' top priorities. This does not mean that
Sistani wants - or needs - to control an Iraqi theocracy: it means that
the Shi'ite religious parties themselves - led by secular people - will
give birth to an Iraqi Islamic republic.
Sistani's representatives have been stressing in the past few days that
what matters for the grand ayatollah is equal rights for all. According
to his senior aide, Mohammad al-Haboubi, the top priority in the
writing of the future Iraqi constitution is "the preservation of the
rights of all citizens, majority or minority, so they are all equal in
the eyes of the law".
Most Shi'ite scholars insist the Americans must stay away from the
writing of the new constitution. Whether the Americans like it or not,
Sharia law will prevail over civil law. What's left is a matter of
degree: how deep will Sharia in Iraq rule over everything - apart from
stating that women may not shake hands with men, music is allowed only
"if it is not for enjoyment" and daughters inherit less than sons?
Sistani will have the last word as far as who will be the new Iraqi
prime minister, not to mention the turbulent process of drafting the
permanent constitution. He will refuse to allow the Kurds a veto power
over the constitution - something they already have thanks to an
administrative law passed by the Americans. Baghdad sources confirm
that a key reason for Sistani to "bless" the Shi'ite-dominated United
Iraqi Alliance (UIA) was that he was assured a primordial role in
drafting the constitution. Moreover, Sistani himself is infinitely more
popular and respected than the two main Shi'ite parties, the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Da'wa Party. For
the majority of Sunnis and even for some secular Shi'ites, they are
Iranian agents: during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the SCIRI was on
Iran's side, ie against Saddam. Without Sistani's "blessing", these
parties would never have been voted for en masse on January 30.
What about all that oil?
Abdel Mahdi, currently the finance minister and a member of the SCIRI, remains a strong contender for prime minister, alongside Ibrahim al-Jafaari of Da'wa.
On December 22, Mahdi - with US Under Secretary of State Alan Larson by
his side - told the National Press Club in Washington in so many words,
and to the delight of corporate US oil majors, that a new oil law would
privatize Iraq's oil industry. The new law would allow investment in
both downstream and "maybe even upstream" operations, meaning
foreigners could become de facto owners of Iraqi oilfields. No wonder
Mahdi has been touted by US corporate media as the next best candidate
for prime minister after "the Americans' man", former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset and current Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Apart from an item by Inter Press Service at the time, Antonia Juhasz,
a Foreign Policy in Focus scholar currently writing a book about the
economic invasion of Iraq, has been the only one to sound alarm bells:
Is it possible that Washington has made a deal - oil for power - with
the SCIRI?
This is the fine print that President George W Bush's freedom rhetoric
does not cover. Iraq may have a new "elected" National Assembly and a
new Iraqi constitution may be written in the next few months. But the
fact is that during 2005 the US remains in total control. Follow the
money: US$24 billion funded by American taxpayers toward the
reconstruction, plus all the rules that have been passed by the US that
control Iraq's economy, plus the military occupation.
Both the billions of dollars and the maze of rules are controlled by
auditors sitting in every Iraqi ministry for five years, all of them
appointed (and controlled) by the Americans. The only thing that the
Bush administration does not control in Iraq is unlimited,
no-holds-barred access to oil - which anyone familiar with Vice
President Dick Cheney's world view knows to be the key reason for the
invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The whole point of an indefinite, muscular US military presence in Iraq
(14 military bases, more than 100,000 troops, the massive embassy in
Baghdad, the CIA-trained "Salvador option" death squads) would be to
protect US corporate interests in the oil industry. But the possibility
of a law privatizing Iraq's oil coming to pass under a UIA-dominated
government is less than zero - for two main reasons. In terms of Iraqi
nationalism, this would spell political suicide to either the SCIRI or
the Da'wa Party: most Shi'ites who voted in the elections, following
Sistani's dictum, thought they were voting for the US to leave, for
good. And in geopolitical terms, all the Shi'ite religious parties have
close connections with Iran, which, encircled by the US from the east
(Afghanistan) and west (Iraq), would find innumerable creative ways to
turn the Americans' lives into a living hell.
One of the key - if not the key - challenges for the new Iraqi
government will be a US demand to negotiate a SOFA (Status of Forces
Agreement), the agreement that stipulates the legal status of US
garrisons. A cursory look at a world map will teach Iraqis to be
extremely careful not to fall into a trap. There are insistent rumors
in Baghdad that a SOFA will not be negotiated in 2005: the
responsibility will fall to the permanent government that will be
elected next December. This is one more indication of the irrelevance
of the new elected government. The Pentagon anyway has already
determined it will keep 120,000 troops in Iraq into at least 2007, even
if a withdrawal is demanded tomorrow.
Predictably, the Shi'ites don't want the US military to leave - at
least for now. Ibrahim al-Jafaari, the Da'wa Party leader and strong
contender for one of the three top posts, has repeatedly said this
would lead to a bloodbath. But both Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the SCIRI's No
1, and interim President Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni, agree: the US
military must begin a substantial withdrawal by the end of 2005.
Shi'ite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr is just waiting to pounce. It's
increasingly possible that the Sadrists who contested the elections may
capture something like 7% of the seats in the new assembly. They've
already said they will demand an immediate timetable for total US
withdrawal. Muqtada wants the Americans out and he wants them out now.
That's also exactly what disgruntled, religious Sunnis want. This
spells a possible alliance between the Shi'ite urban proletariat and
middle-class religious Sunnis - one more nail in the coffin of the myth
propagated by the Bush administration that the resistance against the
occupation is dominated by "terrorists". Significantly, Abdul Salam
al-Kubaisi, the leader of the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim
Scholars (AMS), has said he is in close contact with the Sadrists.
An extraordinary new development in Baghdad is that now the AMS is
floating a clear proposal: we accept the new elected government as
legitimate, as long as it sets a definitive timetable for US
withdrawal. Although this is what the overwhelming majority of Iraqis
want, nobody - no Shi'ite party, no Kurdish party, not even Sistani
himself - is contemplating it at this stage. Baghdad sources tell Asia
Times Online that the AMS would even issue a fatwa (religious edict)
calling for the end of the resistance if the new government sets a date
for US withdrawal in writing - with the United Nations as a watchdog.
If true, that would certainly be the only way to lead the Baghdad
sniper to retire his rifle.
What you want is not what you get
UIA spokesmen are saying that the Shi'ite alliance will capture half of the seats in the 275-member parliament, or a little less than 140 seats. They would need 182 to govern by themselves, without a coalition. The Kurds believe they will get about 65 seats: this only happened because the Sunni vote ranged from weak to non-existent. (Election results were due on Thursday, but were delayed over the re-examination of some ballot boxes.)
The consensus in rumor-filled Baghdad is that really bad news would
mean the Shi'ites capturing 140 seats, the Kurds from 75 to 85 seats,
and Allawi's list the rest. Sunnis in Baghdad are very gloomy: it looks
like the bad-news scenario - a Shi'ite/Kurd landslide - is about to
happen, with Kurds bragging they may have captured as many as 75 seats.
The UIA may be Shi'ite-dominated, but it contains more than 20 groups,
movements and political parties - Christians, Turkomans, even Sunnis
and Kurds, including the Badr Organization (the former Badr Brigades,
trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards), the Hezbollah Movement in
Iraq and the Islamic Union for Iraqi Turkomans.
The only Iraqi government that would have a minimum of stability would
be a UIA/Kurdish alliance. It's very unlikely to happen, and even if it
did it would send even moderate Sunni Arabs into open guerrilla mode.
The Shi'ite religious parties in the UIA want Sharia law. The White
House is relying on the Kurds to veto Sharia law. The relatively
secular Kurds are obsessed with loose federalism and a fully fledged,
autonomous Kurdistan province. They want nothing less than the
presidency for Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani.
The current foreign minister, the affable Kurd Hoshyar Zebari, says
that the only way to placate the Sunnis would be to offer them one of
the key three posts - president, prime minister or Speaker of the
National Assembly. It may not be enough. Sunni Arabs know the Kurds
supported the war and occupation of Iraq and have been a de facto US
protectorate for more than a decade. Sunni Arabs also know that the
only indigenous allies the Americans have at the moment are the Kurdish
tribes: the Kurdish 36th Command Battalion, for instance, helped the
marines to attack Sunni Arab Fallujah. Many Sunnis, even moderate,
consider the Kurds traitors.
What the Kurdish tribal chiefs really want is the ultimate prize: they
want independence (it could even be some kind of US-Israeli
protectorate) and they want Kirkuk's oil. All of this, for them, is
non-negotiable. Supposing Turkey - a key North Atlantic Treaty
Organization ally dreaming of being accepted by the European Union -
buries the Kurdish dream, and the Americans cannot deliver, it's fair
to assume that even the Kurds will abandon the Americans.
Meanwhile, in a Najaf still under piles of rubble there's widespread
fear that in the end the same former CIA asset Allawi will continue to
be prime minister. Allawi has been controlling Iraqi security for more
than six months now. His new Iraqi National Guard is a remix of
Saddam's security - and not by any coincidence infested with Saddam's
men: after all, Allawi is also a former Ba'athist.
As the Bush administration needs a ruthless Iraqi police state to fight
not only the resistance but all kinds of emerging protests against the
appalling living conditions throughout the country, Allawi is indeed
"the Americans' man", as he is known in Baghdad. His tough-guy profile
will be his main argument to convince the UIA he should remain as
premier. But Baghdad sources tell Asia Times Online that this is all
cosmetic anyway: only the terminally naive may believe that the
Washington-Green Zone axis is not controlling the selection of the top
three posts.
No surrender
The Bush administration script is well known: Iraq was "liberated" from "tyranny" and the "insurgents" are fighting democracy - of which the elections were the first manifestation. These are the facts: Iraq was conquered, not liberated; the new government will not have any say in economic and oil issues; and the resistance fights the occupying power, not democracy.
Sistani sold the elections to the pious Shi'ite masses as the first
step toward the end of the occupation. In the next few months his
promise will be subjected to a groundbreaking reality test. Shi'ites at
the polls unmistakably said that they were voting to expel the
Americans, not to legitimize them.
If the Kurds get too much power, if the Shi'ite list disintegrates, if
the US keeps building its sprawling military bases - which means they
will be in Iraq for the long run, supported by puppet governments - the
Sunni resistance will definitely become a national, Sunni-Shi'ite
resistance. As for "terrorism", according to Baghdad sources, an
overwhelming number of moderate, secular Sunnis and Shi'ites are
convinced that "arch terrorist" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is being exploited
in a CIA black-ops designed to exacerbate ethnic tensions.
Many Israeli and American intellectuals and officials are already busy
preparing global public opinion, calling for an independent Kurdistan.
One of the top-flight propagandists is ambassador Peter Galbraith, one
of the negotiators of the Dayton accords and currently a professor at
the National War College. Independence is what the Kurdish leadership
wants. Kurds hate the idea of Iraq: the Iraqi flag is practically
forbidden in some remote mountainous areas. Kurds refuse to hand the
control of their borders to Arab troops from Baghdad. Former US
secretary of state Henry Kissinger is enthusiastically calling for a
Kurdistan, a Sunni center and a Shi'ite south. Why not three weak
countries instead of one strong, united Iraq? It's divide and conquer
all over again.
The key reason for the war was control of Iraqi oil, supported by the
installation of strategic US military bases. The key question now is
which Iraqis will embrace the agenda of the Bush administration.
Secular, moderate Sunni observers in Baghdad simply cannot believe the
Shi'ite leadership will maintain public support for the rest of the
year without telling the Americans to leave.
Moreover, the majority of Iraqis - those who voted and especially those
who didn't - are not willing to surrender their oil, their economy and
their land to corporate America. The popular resistance, on a national
level, tends only to increase. Shi'ites - from Sistani to the SCIRI -
better not enter into a Faustian pact.
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