Analysis
The Zarqawi affair, part 5 of 15
By B. J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Sep 18, 2006, 02:30

�To his great credit [George Bush] - and to the outraged howls of self-described 'internationalists', he has repeatedly acted to reassert our national sovereignty and to restore our ability to act unilaterally. . . ." --In praise of US unilateralism, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs [Italics added]

What were the tactical moves undertaken by the United States and Israel to weaken the Shiites but not to defeat them entirely, since they need them to maneuver through the persistent failure of the occupation regime despite all ruses that included election under the directives of Israeli planners?

Remember, the moment the Americans occupied Iraq, they began trumpeting the idea of war among Arab Muslims, but they never spoke or hinted at any war between Arab and Kurds, meaning the American-Israeli decision to sever the Kurdish provinces from Iraq was a fact. Therefore, the only strategic target of American Zionism at that time was to provoke a war only among Iraqi Arabs. Conclusively, Bush�s war in Iraq is not against Islam but against the Arabs as 1) adversaries of Israel, and 2) as depositories of oil wealth; although hating Islam as a fashion and fighting so-called Islamic terrorism is still the official rationale for the frontal attack against the Arab nations.

It follows that, to keep Arab Shiite Muslims under tight control, U.S. planners came up with a triple prong solution. First, to sedate the Shiite masses, the U.S. revived bizarre Shiite�s religious rituals such as self-flagellation, chest pounding, and self-wounding that President Saddam Hussein abolished in 1975. Second, make Iraqi Arabs fight among themselves. Third, turn the Kurds into a subsidiary occupation force of Arab Iraq by transferring the military hardware of the former Iraqi state to America�s agents: the Kurdish militia of Barazani and Talabani.

Overall, with that strategy U.S.-Israeli planners hoped to achieve many objectives at the same time. First, create a Sunni-Shiite confessional war. Second, weaken the anti-occupation resistance. Third, create an appropriate climate to partition Iraq along confessional lines among the Arabs, and ethnical lines between Arabs and Kurds.

I included the Israelis as co-planners, because what happens in Iraq is a replica of what happens in Palestine, where Israel is leading the way by provoking fratricidal wars among the Palestinians by making Hamas and the PLO fight each other. Are the Arabs so stupid to fall for this trite plot? It is not a matter of stupidity; rather, it is the way of the new Arabs: surrender to colonialism for safety and personal gains from collaboration.

To implement it, the U.S. and Israel depended on two methods: 1) inflame the hate of the Shiite clergy toward the Baath Party and President Saddam Hussein (a Sunni), and then extend that hate to the rest of the Sunni population, and 2) inflate the Shiite (a relative religious confessional majority) ego and lust to rule Iraq. Rule Iraq? That is what political illiterates such as the American agents, al-Hakim, al-Jaffari, Allawi, and Maliki think, all while even the sightless can see that Iraq is effectively a colonized country.

Could this strategy succeed?

This is a debatable issue. It is true that U.S. policy for promoting a military confrontation between Iraqi Arabs has been a �success,� but this type of success has limited value as far as it concerns the strategy for colonization. In other words, a confessional war between Sunnis and Shiites has no positive effects on U.S. fortunes to secure Iraq. On the contrary, should a generalized war erupt between the Iraqis, U.S. forces will be captive to both sides, and, as a result, that would be a black day for the occupation: it would end sooner than later.

Hoping to avoid that deadly scenario, the U.S. selected a course of action based on changing momentary alliances with pro-occupation Iraqi forces (Sunnis and Shiites), while sparing the Kurds since a deal has been cut with them to turn a promised independent Kurdish state into a hub for American military bases and Israeli special forces.

As for its relation with the Iraqi Arabs, the U.S., like a seesaw, kept maneuvering its already halted colonialist march along several directions. These are 1) isolate and destroy anti-occupation Shiite currents that want an end to the occupation, 2) use pro-occupation Sunni personalities as spokespersons for all Sunnis whose majority is against the occupation, 3) and cajoling the Iraqi resistance to come to terms with its appointed Iraqi �government.� Another maneuver that I left for last is keeping the legitimate president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein alive in order to use him as 1) a bargaining chip with the Iraqi resistance, and 2) as intimidation against his personal enemies who came to nominal power riding on American tanks.

Interestingly, while some may think this could be a workable tactic to achieve U.S. geopolitical objectives, it is, actually, the most eloquent indication of the Splendid Failure of the U.S. Occupation of Iraq, as well as, of the strategic failure of hyper-imperialism worldwide. What could be more eloquent than realizing that after three and a half years of brutal occupation, after the billions it spent, the soldiers it lost, the U.S. is still incapable of subduing a tenacious uprising with no regional or international support?

Regarding the partition of Iraq (Israel�s strategic objectives), there is a superficial difference between the U.S. and Israel on how to proceed further. Whereas U.S. imperialism maybe inclined to keep Iraq unified -- at least nominally-- to rule it more efficiently and to show that it did not invade it to partition it, Israel wants to see it partitioned for another calculation that I shall discuss shortly.

How does the U.S. objective relate to the Zarqawi hoax?

As I stated earlier, consequent to the unresolved crime against humanity of 9/11, the administration had deliberately transformed that crime into a universal symbol of Arab and Islamic �terrorism.� Once the symbol became a cry for vengeance, the neocon court became the judge, the prosecution, and the jury on the coming wars against the Arab states. In short, George Bush created an inductive formula that says, �A crime by a specific group of people is due to those societies that share ethnicity or religion with that group.�

This goes beyond deception and extremist criminal intent. If this formula were true, then we should be capable of applying it uniformly, universally, presently, and retroactively. That is, crimes committed by Europeans and Americans against Asians, Africans, Polynesians, and the Original Peoples of the Western Hemisphere in over five centuries of colonial conquests and imperialism should be judged not as decisions made by their ruling elites, but because of 1) national qualities such as being English, Dutch, French, etc., and 2) religion; in this case, Christianity.

Needless to say, for Bush�s formula to work, the administration did not only target the Arabs as political states, but also as a synthesis of history, i.e., as the societal amalgamation that history produced out of diverse ethnic, religious, cultural, and social classes. For instance, U.S. wars on Iraq in 1991 and the war-invasion of 2003 did not target and kill a single group, but all groups indiscriminately, that is, regardless of their ethnical or cultural origins. The United States targeted Iraq and its citizens because the Iraqi polity as a whole stood as a barrier in the way of reviving colonialism.

A forceful conclusion, therefore, is in order: the collective indictment of the Arabs because of 9/11 cannot but have one explicit motive: their colonial conquest. Still the invasion of Iraq as a response to 9/11 does not make sense under the following light. If the Arabs are collectively responsible for 9/11, then the United States should have attacked all Arab countries simultaneously. Why did I conclude that the explicit motive of U.S. wars (in Iraq, at least) is the colonialist conquest of the Arabs?

A historical parallel exists. In the conquest of North America, for example, British, French, Spanish, and American colonists and conquistadors exterminated most of the Original Peoples with a one-word slogan: savages. Substitute the Original Peoples with Iraqis, and replace the word, �savages,� with the word �terrorists� and . . . the formula is ready . . .

A question: because �terrorism� (as conceived by the United States) did not exist in Iraq before the invasion, then how could the U.S. (after the invasion) fight something that did not exist?

To resolve this problem, it seems that Bush and neocons followed Voltaire�s conceptual model for the creation of the inexistent. Voltaire had once suggested that �If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.� After the hoax of Iraq�s WMD unraveled, inventing terrorism in Iraq to �fight� it had become a pressing necessity. That would justify Bush�s �war on terror� while the true motive is something else.

To summarize, U.S. planners needed two things: 1) invent �terrorism,� and 2) invent a villain to personify it.

Thus, the Zarqawi hoax came to life. . . .

At this point, it seems that one of the U.S.'s undeclared objectives from the invention of the Zarqawi hoax was the destruction of Iraqi Shiites as people, and of Shiism as an important school of Islamic thought, because of the realization that the Shiites, being a relative religious majority, could challenge the occupation in ways never predicted by U.S. planners. Therefore, to implement its control of Iraq, the U.S. needed to control the Shiites first. That explains the constant bombing of al-Sadr�s followers by the U.S. Army and by pro-occupation Shiite groups, a fact that validates my stated suppositions regarding the position of the Shiites in the American planning.

The Israeli Objective

As a state, Israel is a flagrant historical anomaly. It did not exist by dent of local historical forces, but by the will, as I explained earlier, of Britain and other imperialist powers including the Soviet Union of Stalin. Israel, therefore, is an invented entity made by the confluence of foreign invaders from diverse nationalities with no historical continuity with the land they invaded. Aside from being a product of British colonialism, Israel is also the product of ethnic and religious cleansing at the expense of the Palestinian people of all religious denominations.

It is not surprising, therefore, that despite its 58-year existence and a vast nuclear arsenal, Israel still lacks the most essential articles of normalcy: legitimacy and legality.

Israeli clinical psychologist and Haifa university teacher Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi [1] concisely, but convolutedly, expressed the status of the Zionist state with the following words:

The aim of Israel�s foreign policy since its founding has been to achieve legitimacy as a �normal� state despite its abnormal history, through diplomatic contacts and recognitions, and to deprive the Palestinians of similar legitimacy. [1]

Honestly, we do not require psychoanalysis to read into the thought of Beit-Hallahmi, who, despite his interesting analysis of the militarist makeup of the Zionist state, used obvious ploys and selective wording to present the case for Israel without criticizing its essence. This should not be surprising; Beit-Hallahmi is a Zionist, and as such, presenting a set of debatable facts always requires circumlocution to avoid the crux of the problem. The following is a succinct critical dissection of Beit-Hallahmi�s statement:

One: Beit-Hallahmi acknowledged that Israel is an illegitimate entity.

Two: he also acknowledged that Israel is not a normal state.

Three: Beit-Hallahmi applied an intended ideological mystification and historical obscurantism, as when he wrote, �Despite its abnormal history.� This is for two fundamental reasons: 1) he mentioned the word �history� without qualifying it in terms of epochal terms since Israel is only a recent Zionist creation. 2) When Beit-Hallahmi used the term �abnormal,� he actually meant it in a good way, since the word abnormal is not very different from the word �normal� except in the final attribute where the suffix, �ab� comes to indicate extraordinariness, as in the usage: �a person with abnormal strength.�

Four: afterwards, Beit-Hallahmi stated that Israel was seeking legitimacy �through diplomatic contacts and recognitions.� But Beit-Hallahmi did not say a multitude of essential things. First, he excluded 1) Israel�s militarist ideology, 2) its colonialist ideology, 3) the Zionist manifesto, 4) relations with the West that created and armed Israel, and 5) Israel�s wars and aggressions to expand the boundaries of its state. Second, he glossed over the fact that, no matter how many states not afflicted by the scourge of Zionism recognize Israel, that recognition would never erase its inborn illegitimacy vis-�-vis those whom Zionism dispossessed.

A question, how was it possible that an eight-year old state with no resources, no legitimate structures, and above all, surrounded by hostile forces, could grow up so rapidly to become a partner with Britain and France in their war against Egypt in 1956? (This happened after President Jamal Abdul-Nassir nationalized the Suez Canal.)

To expand on this argument, the successive growth of Israel to be a military power is neither congenital nor a product of its social genius. Israel is entirely a western creation. The West gave it money, developed its nuclear weapons, gave it free weapons and technology, financed its society, paid its debts, and financed its deficits. Most importantly, it conferred to it �moral qualities� that transcend the moralities of all other nations combined. Is that because of infatuation with Israel as an idea, or, are there other reasons?

NOTES