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THE ROVING
EYE
Blood on the sky-blue
flag
By Pepe Escobar
HANOI -
The red line has been crossed in Iraq. Now it is another
kind of war: total war, carefully programmed, following
a precise, overall strategy set by a clandestine Iraqi
joint chiefs of staff.
The bombing of the United
Nations headquarters, a bloody attack on the "soldiers
of peace" who work under the sky-blue flag, is the
culmination of a coherent sequence: sabotage of water
pipelines, sabotage of oil pipelines, and now sabotage
of humanitarian aid. Water, oil and the UN are the
targets in a perverse scorched-earth policy designed to
prevent any possibility of normalization in Iraq. In the
minds of the attackers, as the American occupying force
has organized and installed a durable chaos, now it's
the time to tell the Americans: you don't, and you
can't, control anything.
More than an attack on
the representatives of the international community as a
whole, the bombing was a stark warning to any nation
that might even contemplate sending peacekeepers to
Iraq, and thus internationalize the American occupation.
And compounding the perverse logic, the UN was all but
used as a means to an end: once again, to hurt the
American occupation force.
The cold, clinical,
almost simultaneous headlines, in their eerie
resemblance, tell the whole story. "Truck blast at UN's
Iraq HQ kills 20". "Suicide blast kills 18 on Jerusalem
bus". There's no denying that the majority of the
Arab world will read this as Iraq-Palestine, the same
struggle: to get Israel out of occupied Palestine, to
get America out of occupied Iraq, to get the West out of
occupied Muslim land.
But who might possibly
profit from such a slaughter of the lambs? The attack on
the UN may have been organized by any among myriad Sunni
Iraqi resistance groups; by former army and Ba'ath Party
officials; by Afghan-Arabs directly connected or not
with Ansar al-Islam; by foreign al-Qaeda fighters
recently infiltrated into Iraq; or even by a
combination of all of the above. It may have answered
Saddam Hussein's recent audiotape incitements (if indeed
it was him) toward a jihad against the American
invaders. Or it may have completely bypassed the old
Iraqi order and be a quintessential product of global
jihad.
During the
1990s, the UN was associated in the minds
of the Saddam regime with a ruthless embargo and sanctions
- but not necessarily by ordinary Iraqis, many of
whom managed to survive thanks to the UN oil for food
program. Snubbed and bypassed by the Bush administration's war adventure,
the UN in post-Saddam Iraq was fulfilling
basically a humanitarian mission. This included a
concerted effort to demonstrate to long-suffering Iraqis that
the UN was independent - and not part of
the occupation force. But in this framework the mission of
the UN special representative to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de
Mello, was in itself much broader and ambitious. Although
without any formal power, the 55-year-old Brazilian
diplomat who is arguably the UN's number one
troubleshooter - he was also UN under secretary general
and a UN high commissioner for human rights - was acting
as a de facto privileged go-between, squeezed by the
American proconsular regime under L Paul Bremer on one
side and Iraqi political and religious leaders on the
other. As the only player trusted by both sides, he was
trying to bridge the gap between the unbridgeable - the
American-imposed agenda for normalization and the Iraqi
desire of "democracy now".
Vieira de Mello was
the ultimate pacifier in the extremely complex Iraqi
puzzle, and that's why his death under the rubble at the
UN HQ is so tragic, not only for the UN, but for the
whole Iraqi nation. The perfect global civil servant,
Vieira de Mello had experience in Rwanda, Bangladesh,
Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, among other
places. His success in helping democratize the former
Portuguese colony and Indonesian province was so great
that locals made him an honorary Timorese.
He was
widely favored to become Kofi Annan's successor as UN
secretary general. When Annan appointed him as special
representative to Iraq, Vieira de Mello's reaction was
typical, "My whole life has been a minefield."
According to Ghassam Salame, a Lebanese former
minister and one of his top advisers in Iraq, Vieira de
Mello survived the blast for more than two hours with an
iron bar over both his legs preventing any movement,
until he succumbed to his wounds. Salame says that they
even spoke by cellphone several times. Now one thing is
clear: there will be no more interlocutors between
American proconsul Bremer, touted as a counter-terrorism
expert, and increasingly angry Sunni and Shi'ite clerics
and political leaders.
It may be instructive to
examine those who probably did not bomb the UN offices
in the Canal Hotel.
The Pentagon script, as
enunciated by anybody from Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld to the average GI, is that the Americans are
facing no more than local, sporadic "remnants of the
Ba'athist regime". But this is just not true. As Asia
Times Online has demonstrated (Why the lessons of Vietnam
do matter , Aug 20)
there's a "popular war", in the Vietnamese sense,
going on in Iraq.
Tribal chiefs organize it,
Baghdad and Mosul businessmen finance it, the average
neighborhood mom and dad protect it. It is a complex
guerrilla resistance movement, controlled by a shadowy
joint chiefs of staff, fueled by patriotism - as it was
in Vietnam - and Iraqi nationalism: the difference is
that instead of the Communist Party, the vanguard is
with sheikhs in mosques. The discipline does not come
from the teachings of Vladimir Lenin: it comes from
Allah. And the banned Ba'ath Party and its remnants are
just minor players in this equation: Iraqi patriots
simply don't trust them.
The Iraqi resistance
was born in front of the Sunni Abu Hanifa mosque in
Baghdad's Aadamiyah district on April 18, during the
first, historic anti-American demonstration of
post-Saddam Iraq (and the first democratic protest in
Iraq for decades). Asia Times Online has established
that the Iraqi resistance works in classic guerrilla
mode through small, mobile, well-armed cells, with
hardly more than 30 members each. The cells generally
conduct an operation with teams of four or five
mujahideen: two operate a RPG rocket launcher and two or
three others give them cover. Most of the time they
don't know each other's identities.
Some cells
make their names known - like the Army of Mohammed or
the Army of Right. Virtually everybody has a tribal
background. There's no electronic communication among
them: only through couriers. As virtually any Iraqi male
under Saddam's rule was militarized, they have hands-on
experience, now expanded by know-how in bomb-making and
remote-control detonation obtained from manuals
abandoned by the demobilized Iraqi army. Iraq is flooded
with weapons of the non-mass-destruction-kind: millions
of AK-47s, RPGs and mortars are hidden everywhere or
buried in graveyards. A hand grenade costs US$2 in the
black market. A Romanian AK-47 goes for $20 while an RPG
costs not more than $100. You can call them jihadis, you
can call them mujahideen - but the main fact is that
their leadership is now unified and national.
There
is indeed an influx of mujahideen from Palestine, Syria
and Saudi Arabia, but these fighters are not in control
of the resistance. Immediately after the UN
Baghdad bombing, American neo-conservative hawks
started pointing fingers at the usual suspects, accusing Syria,
Iran and Saudi Arabia of sending "international
terrorists" to Iraq.
The Palestinian, Syrian and
Saudi mujahideen - no Iranians - who are now fighting in
Iraq are doing so out of a sense of pan-Arab patriotism,
and also responding to calls by Islamic clerics for
jihad against a foreign invader. They are not being
protected by any Middle Eastern government. On the other
hand, scores of wealthy private Arab individuals are
contributing with money, mujahideen, weapons and even
intelligence.
The rationale of the Iraqi
resistance is clear, and follows the anti-American
graffiti found on countless walls around Baghdad.
There's no nostalgia at all for Saddam, but he is
considered to be a lesser evil than the Americans, who
are regarded as not treating Iraqis with even an inch of
respect. Americans are simply incapable of understanding
how deep is the average Iraqi's anger and resentment.
With the Americans bunkered in a "circle the wagons"
mentality, there's simply no possibility of winning any
hearts and minds. So, contrary to Washington's argument,
the liberation struggle has nothing to do with bringing
Saddam's regime back, but with having Iraq ruled by
Islam and not by a foreign invader.
Perhaps a clue to
the UN Baghdad bombing can be found in a communique by
the Abu Hafs al-Misri Brigades, posted last Friday on
the Arabic online Global Islamic Media - which has
already published many al-Qaeda statements - but
unconfirmed by any other source. The communique claims
responsibility for the recent power blackouts in eastern
North America, and lists a dozen "benefits of this
strike" which, according to them, cost "only US$7,000".
The fifth benefit is described as "a message delivered
to the United Nations against Islam, whose headquarters
is in New York". The communique becomes even more
interesting when cross-referenced with an audiotape
broadcast by Abu Dhabi-based al-Arabiyah on Sunday and
again on Monday, in which an Afghan-based, so-called
al-Qaeda spokesman, Abdul Rahman al-Nadji, says that bin
Laden and former Taliban supremo Mullah Omar are alive
and urging all Muslims to fight a jihad against the
Americans in Iraq.
Al-Nadji - who has never been
identified before as an al-Qaeda spokesman -
congratulates "our brothers in Iraq for their valiant
struggle against the occupation, which we support and
urge them to continue." If the tape is authentic, this
would confirm that al-Qaeda is indeed supporting the
Iraqi resistance, but not controlling it.
If the
al-Misri Brigades communique is authentic, this would
mean that al-Qaeda might have been involved in
delivering a "message" to the UN in Iraq. Wherever lies
the responsibility for what happened in Baghdad -
indigenous Iraqi guerrillas, global jihad, or an
alliance of both - the fact is that the US way out of
the quagmire via the UN now lies under the rubble.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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