posted 12-21-2003 07:25 PM            

THE ROVING EYE
THE RAT TRAP
Part 1: How Saddam may still nail Bush
By Pepe Escobar

BAKU - The Christmas blockbuster from the Pentagon studios was a dream. This was the new Roman Empire at its peak - better than Ridleys Scott's Gladiator: a real, captive barbarian emperor, paraded on the Circus Maximus of world television. The barbarian was not a valiant warrior - but a bum. He was not hiding in a nuclear-proof bunker armed to his teeth - he was caught like "a rat" in a "spider hole". He was nothing but a pathetic ghost taking a medical for the world to see. What the bluish pictures did not show, though, is that former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset Saddam Hussein is a reader of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. An Arabic copy of Crime and Punishment was found in a shack near the "spider hole" where he was captured.

Saddam surely now know very well what he needs to do. He won't be consumed with remorse like Dostoevsky's character Raskolnikov, who committed murder. For the moment Saddam may be "taking the Fifth" - in the words of an American interrogator, referring the the fifth amendment of the US constitution under which a person has the right to remain silent until charged in court. But Saddam will wait until he gets some rest, a very good lawyer, and then he will start talking.

The capture of Saddam was the best Christmas gift that President George W Bush could expect from his foreign policy adviser - God. Or was it? AlJazeera television has quoted Egyptian writer Sayyid Nassar saying that "by shaving his beard, a symbol of virility in Iraq and in the Arab world, the Americans committed an act that symbolizes humiliation in our region". Revenge could be imminent - and it will pour in avalanches, not from Saddam of course, but from wounded Iraqi and Arab pride.

Holes big enough to accommodate armies of spiders remain in the carefully-choreographed Pentagon screenplay. Suppose Saddam - well versed in the treachery levels in the Arab world and well aware that a close family friend had denounced his sons Uday and Qusay - had indeed chosen to hide in a hole in the ground only a few hours before his capture. It's still remarkable how the "rat" managed to elude capture when thousands of American soldiers were combing every inch of the Sunni triangle for months. And if he really had US$750,000 with him in $100 bills, it wouldn't take a lot of human intelligence to just follow the money.

It's also remarkable that someone who foiled all sorts of assassination plots chose to be holed up in a farm near his hometown - the most obvious place where he could be found - and without any protection. Only two of his cousins from the al-Douria tribe were with him at the time of the arrest. Unlike the Pentagon version, sources tell Asia Times Online that they were simply peasants, not Saddam's bodyguards. Where were the protecting hordes of paramilitary Fedayeen of Saddam, and the still-loyal Mukhabarat intelligence agents?

Not only one of his daughters, but local villagers, are absolutely convinced that he was drugged before the capture, a vital element in the Pentagon choreography to show to the world - especially the Arab world - the picture of a disoriented bum. Saddam was carrying his pistol. So no one will ever know whether he had any intention of using it - against his attackers or against himself. The "documentation" found with Saddam is also very suspicious, as it might conveniently contain a list of names of people leading the Iraqi resistance in the Sunni triangle.

But all of this is speculation. The reality is that Saddam is in US custody, so what now? From Saddam's point of view, he has a better chance to tell his side of the story - including the real circumstances of his capture - now that his legacy as a courageous Saladinesque warrior facing up to America is in ruins. Living the rest of his life as a nightmarish remake of The Fugitive was definitely not an option. He may not have chosen it, but he may not regret public humiliation in an American commercial instead of doing a James Cagney in White Heat under a hail of bullets.

Only three months ago, this correspondent met scores of people in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle whom were absolutely convinced that former CIA friend Saddam and Washington were still involved in some sort of secret deal. Now European, Asian and Arab diplomats and businessmen are commenting off the record that there's every possibility that the CIA, or even Bush himself, may have struck a deal with his number two embodiment of evil - number one being the still elusive Osama bin Laden. They are all suspicious of the impeccable timing: and if a deal was not in the cards, then the CIA knew exactly where Saddam was for days or weeks, and were just waiting for the moment of maximum impact. Saddam was captured exactly when Halliburton was under extreme pressure for effectively swindling American taxpayers. Bush himself said on the record that if there was any proof of wrongdoing - and there is conclusive proof of overcharging - the company would face consequences. It didn't: the story - too dangerous, too close to vice president and former Halliburton boss Dick Cheney - simply disappeared from the news.

Whatever his ghastly criminal record, already debated to exhaustion, Saddam understands power extremely well: that's how he managed to keep it for three decades. He had plenty of time to prepare his exit - before the "fall" of Baghdad - and he certainly had plenty of time to prepare his re-entry in case he was caught. He may well have piles of compromising documents to use in his defense in what will certainly be the trial of the centuries - current and previous.

World leaders are now falling over themselves calling for a fair trail, in Iraq, under international standards. The Iraqi occupation is absolutely illegal, so Washington will not even consider trying Saddam in the Hague, like Slobodan Milosevic.

Unlike George W Bush - whose Texas state allowed executions when he was governor - United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan was quick to say that the UN never sets up a court which carries the death penalty. Amnesty International insists that Saddam should "not be subjected to torture or ill-treatment" and must "receive a fair trial". An Iraqi version of the post-World War 2 Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals will be totally illegitimate and a political disaster for the Americans. So the consensus is moving towards a public trial, in an Iraqi court, conducted by Iraqis, with some international judges, and meeting international standards. The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) is also in favor of this latter option. But there's a huge problem: a tribunal in Iraq, like everything else at the moment, will have no legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqis and the Arab world because it will be subservient to the occupying power. One can already see the daily guerrilla attacks outside the courtroom. The trial will only make sense if there is a real representative Iraqi government in place, which will not happen until June next year at the earliest.

Saddam's j'accuse
Saddam then will finally have an international platform. Everybody knows in advance the heinous crimes of which he will be accused. But at least then he could finally expose the hypocrisy and double standards of the West as a whole, and specifically America.

With the help of a battery of legal eagles, he can prove that there were never any weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and he can prove there's no evidence to support Bush's claims, last March, that he had "trained and financed al-Qaeda".

He can expand on how, in February, slightly before the onset of "shock and awe", his negotiators were delivering everything to Washington on a plate: free access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look for WMD anywhere in Iraq; full support for the American-penned road map in the Middle East; and the right for American companies to exploit Iraq's oil. The neo-conservative "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle, who had been calling for an invasion of Iraq for years, was one of the contacts of Saddam's negotiators. The defense will certainly call Perle to testify.

On March 17, Bush said that "should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war". Bush lied - and it would be very easy for Saddam to prove that he did everything to find a diplomatic alternative, while Washington did everything to prevent it. He can prove that Bush and his European allies - Britain's Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and President Jose Aznar of Spain - lied to a world public opinion which was overwhelmingly against the war.

He can talk of endless collusions with Washington, right up to the day he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Still today, nobody has told the real story preceding the invasion of Kuwait. He will say how at the time Washington led him to the conclusion that an invasion was "acceptable". The defense will certainly call April Glaspie, the American ambassador in Baghdad and the last American official to see Saddam eye-to-eye five days before the invasion. She was "retired" by the State Department and has been conveniently silent ever since.

Using equipment bought from National Security Council chief Brent Scowcroft's company, Kuwait was involved in slant-drilling in Iraq in 1989, and was pumping out something like US$14 billion in oil from underneath Iraqi territory. The territory from which Kuwait was drilling had indeed been Iraqi territory. Saddam will say that Glaspie told him the US was neutral in the dispute. Saddam will also say that in 1989, while the CIA was advising Kuwait to put pressure on Iraq, a CIA-affiliated think tank was advising him to put pressure on Kuwait. And at the same time, Bush senior's administration was issuing a secret directive that resulted in billions of dollars of arm sales to Saddam.

He can talk about how, why and by whom the Shi'ite intifada was betrayed after the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. He will give American names. He will detail the American deal under which the US was to have helped the Shi'ites. He will prove that those exhumed bodies incriminate the Anglo-American alliance as much as himself.

He will keep talking all the way back to 1989, to the famous meeting on December 20, 1983 in Baghdad with his friend Donald Rumsfeld, now Pentagon chief. The fuzzy photo of Rumsfeld eagerly shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, observed by foreign minister Tarik Aziz - which simply vanished from corporate media - will be one of the stars of the trial. Rumsfeld was sent by then president Ronald Reagan to mend relations between the US and Iraq only one month after Reagan had adopted a secret directive - still partly classified - to help Saddam fight the Islamic revolution in Iran. Saddam will detail how this close cooperation led to Washington selling loads of military equipment and also chemical precursors, insecticides, aluminum tubes, missile components and anthrax to him. Of course he will be condemned for using the lot to gas Iranian soldiers and then civilian Kurds in Halabja, northern Iraq, in 1988. But he will also prove that the selling of these chemical weapons was organized by Rumsfeld.

He will prove that American - and European - companies exported biological viruses for at least four years to various Iraqi government agencies and other companies, with licenses from the US Commerce Department, and thus helped him to build up his crude weapons of mass destruction program - totally dissolved after the first Gulf War.

He will prove that Washington was perfectly aware at the time that he was using chemical weapons. He will remind anyone how, after the Halabja massacre, the Pentagon engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, spinning that the massacre was caused by Iran. He will prove how Dick Cheney, as Pentagon chief from March 1989 onwards, continued to cooperate very closely with him. He will prove how the military aid - secretly organized by Rumsfeld - also enabled him to invade Kuwait in 1990. He will remind anyone again of how, between 1991 and 1998, UN weapons inspectors conclusively established that the US - as well as British, German and French firms - had sold missile parts and chemical and bacteriological material to him.

He will recall the Iran-Iraq war in great detail, and how, during the war, the CIA always sent him a team to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance planes. The defense will call CIA officials who signed documents sharing US satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran - so Washington could be sure of a permanent military stalemate.

Incriminating evidence against all levers of power in Washington will be immeasurable. There will be a non-stop roll-call of civilian deaths and non-stop supply of arms. It will go all the way back to 1959, when a young Saddam was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad which botched the assassination of then Iraqi prime minister General Abdul-Karim Qasim.

Saddam on his way to the courtroom does not mean democracy has arrived in Iraq. Let's make it absolutely clear. The last thing that the White House, the euphemistic Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the ICG (dubbed "the imported government" by Iraqis) want is real democracy in Iraq. Shi'ite and Sunni alike are in the streets shouting "free elections now!" - leading to the formation of a constituent assembly. The occupiers and their local collaborators know very well that an elected constituent assembly would naturally demand what the overwhelming majority of Iraqis want: the immediate end to the occupation, total Iraqi control of Iraqi oil and first choice for Iraqi companies in the rebuilding process.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shi'ite religious authority, also wants direct elections. In an unprecedented move for someone as "beyond politics" as Sistani, he accused the CPA of being non-democratic. Sistani is totally supported by Shi'ite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of the rare members of the IGC not suspected by ordinary Iraqis of being a crook. Al-Hakim's official position is that a provisional national assembly should be elected by the Iraqi people, and this assembly should choose the government. The credibility of the IGC is less than zero. Iraqis, Shi'ite and Sunni alike, are convinced there is absolutely no difference between Saddam's former thugs and the current, power-hungry majority of IGC members.

posted 12-21-2003 07:26 PM            

THE RAT TRAP
Part 2: Why the resistance will increase
By Pepe Escobar

BAKU - Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset Saddam Hussein is - already was - totally beside the point. Only in the past few months have we learned the extent to which the Saddam system sub-contracted a great deal of decision-making to different Iraqi elite - from tribal sheikhs to businessmen and Sunni and Wahhabi religious leaders. They may originally have been cajoled by Saddam with carrots and sticks to be incorporated into the Ba'athist regime. But now they are totally free to command their own agendas.

To top it all, they really have a common agenda for the first time in their lives: a war against American occupation. The resistance will persist because Saddam was never its political, religious, spiritual or moral guide. The mukawama - resistance against foreign occupation - is now a full-blown nationalist, religious movement. The most popular political party on the sprawling campus of Baghdad University is not the widely-despised Ahmad Chalabi's neo-conservative-backed Iraqi National Congress. It is the Iraq Islamist Party.

A recent peaceful mass demonstration in the south-central city of Hilla brought down the local "collaborator" governor. People were shouting: "Free elections now!" Sources in Baghdad tell Asia Times Online that avalanches of people are just waiting for June 2004 to see what kind of government the Americans will allow, and if they are not satisfied, then they will join the resistance. But there are also many people - Sunni and Shi'ite - who fear that some Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) members may turn violent, afraid of losing power. Rival Kurdish chieftains Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani - both on the IGC - keep their strong peshmerga private armies. Chalabi has his own CIA-trained army, complete with American weapons. According to new Iraqi policemen who defected to Amman, Jordan, the bulk of the new Iraqi police is also inclined to join the resistance.

The increasingly sophisticated attacks in the Sunni triangle are being coordinated by the Committee of the Faith. They are Sunni, and most of all, they are Wahhabi - and they had the freedom to proselytize and act even under Saddam. As the relentless mukawama will expose day by day the fallacy of the Anglo-American mantra - according to which the attacks are perpetrated by "remnants of Saddam's regime" - expect from Washington another change in the screenplay: the blame will shift to "foreign" al-Qaeda or "Syrian-backed terrorists".

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is making things even worse. According to Iraqi-Canadian journalist Firas al-Atraqchi, the CPA wants Kurdish peshmergas patrolling the explosive Sunni triangle and Mosul - which is predominantly Arab: "Sunni religious leaders have expressed outrage over the proposed deal and have warned, in no ambiguous terms, that the Sunni areas will not tolerate being patrolled or policed by Kurdish (or Shi'ite) militia. They warn that a civil war would be inevitable."

The non-aligned mujahideen
Meanwhile, in Europe, anti-terrorist specialists warn that the four bombings in Istanbul last month were also messages to the European Union - because some countries, like Britain, Italy and Spain, are collaborating with the Americans in Iraq, and also because they have dismantled jihadi cells in Europe. Experts at the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC) in Brussels are extremely worried of a fallout from Iraq and an imminent attack on one of the European Union countries.

European investigations are centered on Sheikh Abderrazak, an Algerian who was based in Milan and who is now under arrest in Hamburg, and who was a member of al-Tawhid, an organization directed by Abu Mussab al-Zarkawi, a Jordanian and an al-Qaeda planner who was identified before the Iraq war by US Secretary of State Colin Powell as the "missing link" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Nobody in Europe at the time - apart from Britain's Tony Blair, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Aznar of Spain - was convinced of the link. Now, however, European investigators tell Asia Times Online that things have changed and Zarkawi "is indeed part of the Iraqi resistance. The Americans invaded Iraq as part of their 'war on terror', and ended up bringing terror to Iraq."

Zarkawi - loaded with German contacts - is suspected of recruiting "more than a thousand jihadis to Iraq": they are Arab-Afghans, jihad veterans, with European passports. August Hanning, president of the German security service (BND), told German television that most of these jihadis, and some extra volunteers, have already left to Iraq from Great Britain, Bosnia and Germany, infiltrating via Syria and Saudi Arabia. Hanning is convinced that Iraq is about to become "the crystallization point for extremist Islamists the world over".

Experts in Brussels have even a "top ten" list of countries most likely to be victims of a next wave of terror attacks: they are, from top to bottom, the US, Britain, Israel, Australia, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland. The experts are all assuming the working hypothesis that al-Qaeda cells which are not directly related to bin Laden anymore are using an "al-Qaeda trademark" to mobilize jihadis and increase the repercussion of their particular attacks.

The ESISC has thus detected the last word in the "war on terror": the emergence of the "non-aligned mujahideen". These people are skilled, totally isolated and practically undetectable. Alain Chouet, in a study from the French Institute of International Relations, stresses that since December 2001, only five attacks can be attributed with full certainty to al-Qaeda. Chouet stresses that al-Qaeda has definitely mutated into "a multitude of small entrepreneurs or local sub-contractors, with tortuous and indirect strategies".

Breakdown: The Iraqi resistance
The invasion of Iraq was widely perceived as an attack on the Arab world. That's why the resistance is turning pan-Arab. Once again: this is a nationalist and religious resistance movement.

Asia Times Online has ascertained that at least 12 independent guerrilla organizations from different tribes are involved in the mukawama, all vaguely in touch with each other. This loose organization may be about to extend its reach nationwide. But the Iraqi guerrilla movement is extraordinarily complex. These in essence are the main actors:

The former army. The majority of the 400,000 Iraqi soldiers demobilized by US proconsul L Paul Bremer were nothing but victims of the Ba'athist regime. Humiliated and frustrated, they inevitably turned to the resistance - and they were not being financed by Saddam Hussein, as Asia Times Online reported from the Sunni triangle. At least 100,000 soldiers from the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard didn't even receive a meager financial compensation from the Americans. Big mistake: they were the best trained, the best equipped, the best motivated, and now they are totally engaged in the resistance. They are nationalists demonstrating in practice how the whole thing is not about Saddam's return to power, but about getting rid of a foreign invader.

The tribes. An extremely complex tribal game is in play in Iraq. Saddam was a master in this business. An example: Ramadi and Fallujah, in the Sunni triangle, home to some of the most vicious anti-American attacks, are controlled by the huge Doulaiymi tribe - which always had a turbulent relationship with Saddam. The reason for the attacks were not $100 bills showered around by Saddam's henchmen, but repeated blunders and massacres of civilians by the 82nd Airborne Division. The Americans themselves fed the infernal cycle of violence with their string of arbitrary arrests and daily humiliations. Tha'ar (revenge) is the absolute norm for these extremely proud Bedouins. Meanwhile, local tribes around Kirkuk are attacking oil pipelines just as a means of finally getting paid for protecting them. The Americans then dissolved the so-called "oil police" and sub-contracted regional security to a South African private firm, which for its part sub-contracted security to - who else - the local tribes.

Remnants of Saddam's regime. They are reduced to nothing more than the fedayeen of Saddam - the private militia established by his late son Uday - the surveillance apparatchik and the tribes in Tikrit. It's fair to expect much accumulated rage to explode in the form of attacks now that Saddam is in captivity. These people are armed to the teeth - with weapons caches dispersed all over the country. It still remains to be discovered how they connect with and how they provide logistical assistance to the professional jihadis that Hanning says are coming from Syria and Saudi Arabia.

The jihadis. An elite among them comprise the instigators and perpetrators of the suicide bombings. There are a few dozen survivors of Ansar al-Islam who crossed to Iranian Kurdistan, fleeing American bombing last March: they don't make much of a difference. Most of all there may be a few thousand jihadis who came before, during and after the war. They are Yemenite, Lebanese, Sudanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Jordanian - the pan-Arab character of the resistance. They are loosely linked with local, small groups of salafis - an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam.

American blunders only inflame the resistance. Samarra was a classic case. The Americans said that the guerrillas were Saddam fedayeen. Asia Times Online has been to Samarra: it's a very religious, conservative city which never bowed to Saddam. Sources say that the bulk of the local resistance was from a group called the Mujahideen of Mohammed. Residents insist that there are no fedayeen in the city and accuse the Americans of being the terrorists, massacring civilians.

A new resistance tactic is to join the Iraqi police - recruited and paid for by the Americans - earn some $50 a month, train with American-provided weapons and gather valuable intelligence on the foreign invader. Meanwhile, the American military are now performing an exact replay of the Israeli military occupying Palestine: they surround large tracts with barbed wire and ultra-intimidating security checks, bulldoze houses and round up all men for lengthy interrogations. Tha'ar will come.

The American tactic of now Iraqifying the war is nothing but a replay of "Vietnamization". Washington's push to make over a complex society in its own image will fail - as it failed in Vietnam. Iraqis, politically very sophisticated despite decades of dictatorship, detect crystal-clear the American plan, imposed at tank point, to privatize the whole country by selling its assets and fabulous natural resources to American - and a few European - corporations. This, most of all, is what is fueling the resistance. They know they cannot let people like Chalabi or Talabani in the IGC decide the future of the nation.

As author and commentator Tariq Ali has forcefully pointed out on the website Counterpunch, this is the "21st-century colonial model: Specialist companies are now encouraged to provide 'security'. They employ the mercenaries, and their profits are ensured by the state that hires them. They are backed up by the real army and, more importantly, by air power, to help defeat the enemy. But none of this will work if the population remains hostile. And large-scale repression only helps to unite the population against the occupiers. The fear in Washington is that the Iraqi resistance might attempt a sensational hit just before the next presidential election. The fear in the Arab east is that [President George W] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney might escalate the conflict to retain the White House in 2004. Both fears may well be justified."