THE GREAT ESCAPE--UPDATED 5/17/06

Unorthodox and independent views, always!

Sixth draft

“You don’t run me; they don’t run me.” What movie?

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Update: ISRAEL AND KUWAIT: AN ALLIANCE?

The intelligence services of Israel and some Arab countries (Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other gulf countries) have been playing an increasingly pivotal role in the American Iraq policy, in good part due to the desperation of the American policy makers. Jordan seems to be doing the larger share. But Kuwait's intelligence service is weighing in significantly.

(Intelligence services in the Arab world play a hugely substantial role in these countries' politics. Why? The governments of these countries are usually engaged in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim policies which don't have the approval of those countries' people. It happens here, too, doesn't it?)

On or about May 15, Masoud Barazani, the President of Iraqi Kurdistan, after meeting the Emir of Kuwait, declared from Kuwait that Kurdistan would be willing to have an Israeli consulate.

Visits to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other oil-and-cash-rich countries are usually money related. In other words, the intelligence services of these countries feed the leaders who visit them. That Mr. Barazani would call from Kuwait for the opening of an Israeli consulate in Kurdistan is indication that the Kuwaiti government is putting out a trial balloon as it considers an Israeli consulate in Kuwait city.

I could be wrong.

But recipients of Kuwait's largesse should be reluctant to make announcements from that country which they had not cleared with that country's government.

We'll monitor that trial balloon. Overall, though, this would be a huge success for Israel's Arab (minus the Palestinians)opening should the above interpretation prove correct.

One possibility trumps the interpretation outlined above: That the United States is using Barazani's declaration from Kuwait to set up the Islamic Republic of Iran. An old trick, really. (Remember April Glaspie?) In other words, the American overseers of Kuwait's intelligence service are hoping for a terror reaction from the Islamic Republic to the possibility of Kuwait welcoming an Israeli consulate. The goal of the overseers would be to persuade all Gulf states--including Saudi Arabia--of the need for the closest possible coordination with the U.S. to check Iranian power. An Iranian-sponsored terror act against Kuwait would go a long way into scaring the Gulf countries into the arms of the United States.

SaudiPolitics will watch as events unfurl and will keep its readers informed.

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IRAQ: THE STATE OF OUR WRETCHED PRESENCE.

We’re suffocating in Iraq.

Our jobs-and-contracts-creating Pentagon and our Abu-Ghraib-experts-in-torture intelligence services are running out of ideas. For all practical purposes, desperate, they have lost the upper hand with their regional assets. The fear of total and abject failure has thrown them into the arms of Israeli, Kuwaiti, Jordanian, Saudi, and Egyptian intelligence. These stalwarts of defeat (the Israelis bled in south Lebanon thanks to IED’s that were primitive compared to those currently being used in Iraq) are now running the Iraq show. These same stalwarts are now drafting the strategy for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services. How does SaudiPolitics know that? Antennae, my dear, antennae. SaudiPolitics doesn’t need “intelligence.” It’s not into job-creation and pandering to Israeli, Jordanian, Saudi, and Egyptian Uncle Toms. Consider that the best predictions on Vietnam came from independent state university professors, not from such cesspools of right wing mediocrity (an oxymoron?) as the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Sadism (SAIS) .

(Georgetown wants to be mediocre, too. It wants to hire Douglas Feith. His father, I hear, has lots of dineros. As if Georgetown is lacking in mediocrity. After all, it has George Tenet. Oh boy: Feith and Tenet on the same campus!)


Where do we stand in the Land of the Two Rivers? The short answer: We have no place left to stand. We’re drowning. What follows is the longer version.

I will outline the forces at work, so to speak, and hope to show you the Pentagon’s grand scheme for a great escape...to the north.


1. THE U.S. PUPPET SHIA FACTIONS: DOUBLE AGENTS NO MORE.

These are the former Iranian agents, bought off fully and totally by the United States. They are SCIRI and Dawa, and their politico-spiritual guide, the Ayatollah Sistani. Among the ranks of these are all sorts of corporate and Pentagon sycophants, those who the imperial grab project (the Iraq project) had envisaged would run Iraq and open it to American corporations, in full.

A part of the $320 billion cost of the war and occupation has gone and continues to go to them, to fatten their faces and the faces of their U.S. corporate allies. The bastards! So clever.

Effectiveness? They’re useless. Why? It’ll kill my entire week to tell you why. Suffice it to say that Empire castrates people in the Islamic world when it pays them off. If an Arab or an Islamic leader cannot talk about occupied Palestinian and Arab lands, this leader loses her ability to appeal to her people and to her army. By getting on the payroll of the United States, the sponsor of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands, these leaders in exchange promise to ignore the subject altogether. When they ignore the subject, they are unable to draw their people and their army behind them. Consequently, they become useless “assets.” The Islamists infiltrate their armies, some times at relatively senior levels, I suspect, since the issue of occupation of Arab and Palestinian lands angers Arabs and Muslims across classes.


Not to mention that these “leaders” have been reared in Iran. Consider how the Iranians issued an invitation to Nouri al-Maliki so soon after he became Prime Minister-designate. .The message to him will be clear: You’d better not turn Iraq into an American base against Iran. You do that, and it’s your ass. Can’t blame the Iranians. After all, political Empire wanted to do exactly that: Turn Iraq into an American base against Iran.

Al-Maliki will have to obey. Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, SCIRI’s former head, did not. Hence his transition to that greatest of all empires.


2. MUQTADHA: THE NEW ARAB NATIONALIST. BRINGING A NEW GENERATION INTO THE ANTI-COLONIAL AND ANTI-IMPERIAL STRUGGLE TO RE-UNITE IRAQ AS AN ISLAMIC ARAB STATE.

Sweeping the Shiites off their feet, charming them to no end, is the Sadrist movement. I know: Our torture-on-demand Abu-Ghraib intelligence services would like to finish Muqtadha off. Antennae. They think this is Central America. Beware: This is a new breed of Shia-led Arab nationalism, with an Islamic bent. It’s not the person. It’s the movement, stupid! Stop your moronic so-called “counter-insurgency, ” and do politics. You know what I mean. De-link. If you can’t de-link, get the f....out! For in Iraq, unlike in your Central American backyard, you’re not the only ones who can set up death squads and enslave the natives. This is not El Salvador.


(Help: can someone bring back Clinton and Gore. Please. Please. These men were smart, I swear to you. They knew how to de-link. Bill charmed the hell out of all involved and came so darn close to succeeding. For once, the Democrats had a superb foreign policy.)

Muqtadha stands for a united and strong Iraq, not the consociational patchwork devised by the geniuses at the right wing consulting firms associated with the Pentagon. Iraq is being reborn. As Feyrouz said about Lebanon in the middle of its civil war, “I answered them [that] our country is being born, anew.” The Sadrist movement is Iraq reborn. Get out of the way. If you don’t, the Iraqis will bleed you to no end. Establish non-Jordanian links to Muqtadha; help evolve a progressive policy to re-unite Iraq as one country with a socialist Arab Islamic ideology. Tell the Kurds they have to go along. Tell me I’m dumb.

Jordan, an American-Israeli base to Iran and Syria, has tried to stop Muqtadha from drawing closer to the Sunnis. It succeeded, but only briefly. When the Akariyyah mosque was blown up, Muqtadha controlled his men, though not fully. But not Badr, the American proxy. A cell phone found on one of Badr’s deceased men showed the gruesome execution of the Saudi-owned (what medium isn’t?) al-Arabiyyah’s Baghdad reporter, Atwar Bahjat, in Samarra, in the aftermath of the Askariyyah bombing. A bit of evidence that Badr was heavily involved in the wholesale murder of Arab Sunnis.


(Strangely, Jordan is now indirectly allied to those who murder Arab Sunnis wholesale, while Iran is drawing closer to some of the Sunni resistance groups who are murdering Shias wholesale.)

The Sadrist movement is allied to Iran and Syria, and has become an extension of Lebanon’s Hizballah. The leaders of these movements can talk about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and Arab land. Accordingly, they dazzle Arabs and Muslims the world over. They have not been castrated by a piece of the $320 billion.

In the next battle between U.S. troops and the Sadrist Mahdi Army, expect some of the Sunnis to join in, to buttress a Shia-Sunni front in Iraq. In addition, expect a split in the Salafi camp (the Zarqawi camp) as these fellows are not all ready to accept a full alliance with the Shias. But they will stand aside to their detriment. They will lose fighters to those Arab Sunni resistance groups that join in with Mahdi. This will be especially true if the battle is meant to keep Kurdistan from seceding by becoming an American base.

As a corollary, expect Jordanian intelligence and its Iraqi Baathist allies to attempt to blow up the budding Sunni-Shia alliance.

The Sadrists’ alliance with Iran could be seen (possibly) in the recent downing of a British helicopter in Basra on or about May 7. There are some indications that the Sadrists had used a more sophisticated weapon than was usually available. Ominously for the British, the popular backlash that followed the downing seemed to indicate that the Sadrist movement has the allegiance of the Arab Shia street. It competitors, SCIRI/Badr and Dawa are on the U.S. payroll; accordingly they’ve become insignificant.

Iran had repeatedly accused Britain of sponsoring terror acts in Khozistan (al-Ahwaz) to help the secessionist movement there. Time to show the Brits their place. They seem to have forgotten that southern Iraq is not Yorkshire but a semi-tropical swamp where arrogant Anglos can easily sink. The Iraqis are not the Saudi royals who shed their manhood as soon as they are blackmailed Can’t blackmail those who’ve got nothing to lose.

The only way to counter Iran's influence within Iraq is to re-awaken the old Arab nationalism so as to split Iran's Shia agents. But Arab nationalism is all but dead, having been historically the victim of the American-Israeli alliance. The United States offered the coup de grace when it invaded Iraq. Arab government proxies of the United States will never be able to replace a nationalist movement. In contrast, the Sadrist movement, if able to accomodate a version of Sunni-inspired Arab nationalism, will be the biggest winner of all the factions and movements within Iraq. Kurdish secessionism may just be the ticket for such Shia-Sunni fusion.



3. THE MORE-OR-LESS STILL UNITED ARAB SUNNI FRONT

The Arab Sunni Islamists have taken over the Arab Sunni street. That should’ve been expected as a by-product of the invasion. Algeria had provided a preview. IEDs and suicide bombings, too, should've been expected, since Hizballah had used them to great effect in south Lebanon. One really wonders whether anyone at the Pentagon reads up. What do these people do? Pay up Rand and other moronic right wing outfits to produce mediocre studies? Or are they so enamored with numbers that they can’t read anything that has no graphs in it?


One only needed to consider the Algerian experience to conclude that the Islamists in Iraq would take over once Saddam Hussein and the Arab Baath had been eliminated. But hey, the American Christian-Jewish right wanted to kill Arabs and Muslims, come what may. This Israel-centric right had for years nursed a bunch of ugly “3Arab” academicians with narcissistic personality disorder who are incapable of empathy, though they have a passion for television appearances where their dwarf-like short stature is not revealed. These, so happy to feel power, told them that it can be done. Besides, the Israel-centric right has wanted the U.S. in the Middle East, to ease up the perceived pressure on Israel.

(Watch the Saudis pay up, as their ambassador’s best friend, the President, will not be able to control the Christian right he unleashed. The Jewish right will sway these to demand reforms in the Kingdom as a step towards more severe intervention.)

The Arab Sunni resistance highlighted the mediocrity of the Israel-centric right wing. Presently, The military operations of the Arab Sunni indicate that they’re still intent on disallowing the American puppet government from ever establishing itself. A recent bombing in Karbala (@May 7) likely was a message that the security shield of the puppet Shia state was porous, and that attacks against Sunnis would be paid for.

That the Arab Sunnis are still going after the new American puppet state can also be seen in the recent suicide bombing (@May 7) against police/army recruits in Arab Sunni Tikrit. Finally, the Arab Sunnis are still active against U.S. troops, which indicates that the “opening” towards them months ago has failed. Jordan can do so much for the United States. I suspect that Jordan’s contacts are mostly old Baathists and tribal leaders, from the old school, the modernists who would’ve been America’s natural allies. These old Baathists now have little say on the street. The American invasion had allowed for a true generational and ideological revolution. The Islamists have nearly fully taken over.


4. THE KURDS: EMPIRE’S LAST (FALTERING) HOPE

At night, while in deep sleep, the very mediocre right wing mandarins who are fighting wars with other people’s children, dream up a solid base in Iraqi Kurdistan from where Empire can unleash its campaign to change the government of Iran.

Until Empire is ready for the Iran campaign, fortress Kurdistan would have to do. It’ll be the refuge after the great escape from the rest of Iraq.

Empire is prepping that principality to play the historic role of the American base in the region. A piece of the $320 billion had gone (and continues to go) to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK–Talabani) and to the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP-Barazani). Antennae! Empire wants them united to prep the grounds for U.S. bases. So, on or about May 7, the two parties so democratically announced via the Kurdish parliament that they have merged. Yes, they did. Never mind that they had bled each other to death in the mid-1990s. If the Parliament said they had merged, then they had merged. Why argue? The U.S. ambassador to Iraq attended the ceremony to give the merger Empire’s blessing and make yet more payments, in person.

But Mr. Talabani, whose section of Kurdistan sits closest to Iran, is worried. On or about May 9, he announced that Iran was a good neighbor.

Iran of course is aware of Empire’s plans. Hence the dispatch of two Mahdi Army companies to Kirkuk. Hence possibly the suicide bombing in Tel Afar meant to dispel the notion that an Empire-sponsored successful paradigm exists for security in a multi-sectarian and multi-ethnic city. In other words, the Tel Afar bombing likely was a message to the Kurds.

Tagging along the Mahdi Army into the north was the Badr Brigade. I suspect Badr here is acting as an American proxy to balance Mahdi as an Iranian proxy. An intra-Shia civil war? It would spread like wild fire into the rest of Iraq. Should this possibility rise to the level of the real, expect Iran to neutralize Badr by neutralizing its leadership. You know what I mean. (Badr, unlike the Sadrists, is not a movement. It’s a bunch of goons for hire, America’s closest thing to yet more death squads. Not that the Mahdi Army doesn't have goons. It does.) Hence the invite to the new Prime Minister to Tehran so he can hear Iran’s concerns with his own ears. Do not turn Iraq (and Badr and Dawa’s men) into a dagger directed at Iran.


To further counter the American Kurdistan-as-an-American-base plan, Iran has been drawing close to Turkey, and using a fight against the PKK as the means. Iran and Turkey do meet regularly about border security. Iran would like to draw even closer to Turkey. And so does the U.S. The latter is holding the promise of F-16s as a lure. But Turkey has an Islamic government and a Kurdish problem that should only exacerbate if a Kurdistan-as-an-American-base is ever established.

In short, the plan for Kurdistan-as-an-American-base is rife with its own explosive tension. Turkey would need to worry about a renewal of its civil war, about Iran, about Russia, and about a popular backlash in the Arab and Islamic world, possibly in the form of a commercial boycott of its products.


Too, the United States clearly has no place in Iraq. Accepting advice from (biased) regional intelligence services will only result in the unnecessary loss of yet more American life.

Time to focus on politics, on de-linking. Anyone dares?

Who am I kidding?

If nothing else, withdrawing to Qatar, Kuwait, and other small gulf countries may be necessary and should stop the uncessary loss of American life.