You have to give Bush credit for his Christmas spirit. Giving Iran Iraq for
christmas was very generous. I'm surprised that Iran working on developing
nuclear weapons and claiming the holocaust was a myth didn't stop him from
giving this gift.

     Iraq - the ultimate quagmire
     By Pepe Escobar
     Monday Dec. 26, 2005: Iraq is a giant, messy albatross hanging from
President George W Bush's neck. The faith-based American president believes
"we are winning the war in Iraq". The reality-based global public opinion -
not to mention 59% of Americans, and counting - know this is not true.
     Bush felt that "God put me here" so he could conduct a "war on
terror". Somebody up there must have a tremendous sense of

     humor - once again manifested in the way He allotted winners and
losers in Iraq's December 15 parliamentary elections.

     United we stand

     The Shi'ite religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) were
the big winners - from 70% to 95% of the vote in the impoverished southern
provinces; 59% in Baghdad; and nationally, well over 40% of the total
(they've won in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces plus the capital). It's a
relatively unexpected success considering the dreadful record of Ibrahim
Jaafari's Shi'ite-dominated government.

     All those intimately allied with the US invasion and occupation were
big losers. The Iraqi National List of US intelligence asset and former
prime minister Iyad Allawi, also known as "Saddam without a moustache", the
man who endorsed the Pentagon bombing of the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf and
Sunni Arab Fallujah - got a pitiful 14%.

     Convicted fraudster and former Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi received
less than 1% in Baghdad. The neo-conservatives of the American Enterprise
Institute were predicting 5% for Chalabi (their overwhelming favorite) and
20% for Allawi; that's proof enough they have no clue about what's going on
in Iraq.

     Bush's new Iraq is pro-Iran. It will not recognize Israel. And it
wants the Americans out; one of the first measures of an emerging, powerful
parliamentary alliance between roughly 38 Sadrists of Shi'ite nationalist
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and roughly 50 Sunni Arabs will be to call for an
immediate end of the occupation.

     The details to be ironed out hinge on whether the UIA majority aligns
itself with the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, or with both in a government of
"national unity" - as it is being called by the current vice president Abdel
Mahdi (a free marketer) as well as current president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.

     "National unity" is improbable; the Shi'ites simply won't forgo their
majority. The Kurds for their part know it will be a foolish move to try to
break their strategic alliance with the UIA. Sunni Arab votes were split
between the neo-Ba'athist National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak and the
Islamist, Sunni National Accord Front of Adnan Dulaimi. But what matters is
that they are both part of the Sunni Arab resistance. Their common line is
that their presence in parliament develops a new political front - what we
have called the Sinn Fein component of the Sunni Arab resistance.

     It never happened

     The big problem is that once again in Iraq Shi'ites voted for
Shi'ites, Sunnis for Sunnis (they won in four provinces, Anbar, Salahuddin,
Nineveh and Diyala, but got only 20% in Baghdad) and Kurds for Kurds (they
also won in four provinces, including Kirkuk). Liberal democrats who were
dreaming of a democratic, federal, anti-sectarian Iraq have been totally
sidelined. Arguably no politician in Iraq is thinking about the future of
the country as a whole. No national projects are being discussed.

     The constitutional vote in October had already institutionalized the
sectarian division - 80% of the Sunni Arabs in the four main Sunni provinces
voted against what they saw as an American-designed charter. Washington
believed the vote would undermine the resistance. The exact opposite
happened. The December elections now paint a vivid picture of a country
fractured on sectarian lines. But this is what the Americans wanted in the
first place.

     Elections or no elections, Iraq enters 2006 mired in the same, usual,
gruesome rituals. The Pentagon believes it can subdue the Sunni Arab
resistance by bombing them to death while the resistance keeps bombing,
suicide bombing and assassinating en masse.

     So the endless, gory stream will continue, not even making headlines -
explosions at police stations, assassinations of "Baghdad officials",
executions of collaborators, mortars over the Green Zone, scores of innocent
civilian victims of car bombings, Marines killed in the Sunni triangle,
Shi'ite death squads, Turkmen fighting Kurd for Kirkuk ...

     Playwright Harold Pinter pulled a Beckett at his Nobel lecture. He
offered to be Bush's speechwriter. Then Pinter impersonated classic Bush:
"My God is good. [Osama] bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam
Hussein's God was bad except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are
not barbarians." And this was even before Bush mixed up Saddam with bin
Laden in a "we're winning in Iraq" speech.

     Pinter observed, "The United States supported and in many cases
engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end
of World War II." He gave a lot of examples. But then, with devastating
irony (a concept seemingly absent from the White House/Pentagon axis), he
said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was
happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

     Just like the suffering of Iraqis never happened. Robert Fisk, in his
masterful The Great War for Civilization (Fourth Estate, London) remarks,
"The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost 13 years have largely dropped
from the story of our Middle East adventures ... When the Anglo-American
occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the
collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and
commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the
impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were 'ghosted'
out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was freedom'."

     But Iraqis as a whole have not forgotten the sanctions - imposed by
the US, carried out by the "international community" and responsible for the
death of thousands of children. As much as the Shi'ites have not forgotten
their betrayal by George Bush senior, who called for a Shi'ite uprising in
early 1991 and then left thousands of men, women and children to be
massacred by Saddam's gunships. There's no way these impoverished masses can
trust anything related to American promises of "freedom".

     How Bush is winning

     There's some evidence that the murderous chaos unleashed by Shi'ite
death squads may not be "an accident" but part of a carefully crafted
American strategy, as the Bush administration has constantly added fire to
the ethnic furnace as the best diversion to not address Iraq's tremendous
social tensions.

     An atomized and terrorized society is much easier to manipulate, while
at the same time the non-stop bloodshed is the perfect justification for
"staying the course". The incessant chatter in the US about a partial
"withdrawal" is just chatter.

     Already in June 2003, proconsul L Paul Bremer's coalition hands were
hiring Saddam's Mukhabarat pals for "special ops" against the Sunni Arab
resistance, while "torture central", Abu Ghraib, was again operating in full
force under American management.

     In the Shi'ite south, the Badr Organization - the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq's (SCIRI's) militia - as well as Muqtadar's Mahdi
Army were gaining ground. The Badr was finally formally incorporated into
the Interior Ministry, where Sunni units had also been carving up their own
turf (under the protection of Allawi).

     The former Ba'athist Sunnis - and later the Shi'ites - benefited from
the invaluable knowledge of American "counter-insurgency" experts who
organized death squads in Colombia and El Salvador, as well as retired
American Special Forces soldiers. Commandos operating in the "Salvador
option" manner have been very much in the cards from the beginning,
responding to a sophisticated, state-of-the-art command, control and
communications center even while the majority of the Iraqi population had no
electricity, no fuel and no medicine.

     The pattern was and remains the same; people "disappearing" after they
are accosted by groups of men armed to the teeth, in police commando
uniforms, with high-tech radios and driving Toyota Land Cruisers with police
license plates. Needless to say, the resulting murders are almost never
investigated.

     The objectives, from the point of view of the Bush administration,
also remain the same; keep the Pentagon and its military bases inside an
Iraq mired in sectarian bloodshed and with a weak central government.

     The "follow the money" trail leads to an array of profitable
privatizations, and the upcoming sale of Iraq's fabulous oil reserves to a
few, select foreign investors. Abdel Mahdi of SCIRI, one year ago in
Washington, had already laid down the script. He is a key player to watch.

     No wonder that the real composition of the next Iraqi government will
not be determined by the polls - at least not exclusively. The real
kingmaker is the US ambassador, the White House pet, Afghan Zalmay
Khalilzad.

     The Bush administration will pull no punches to safeguard its "follow
the money" interests, as well as its precious military bases. Vice President
Dick Cheney arrived in Baghdad on December 18, only three days after the
election. He didn't even bother to tell Jaafari that he was in the country.
First Cheney talked to Khalilzad and assorted American generals, and only
then were Jaafari and President Talabani summoned to his presence.

     How Bush lost it

     The uprising of Muqtadar's Mahdi Army in 2004 was the definitive nail
in the coffin of the Bush administration's dream of ruling Iraq. At the time
the Pentagon repeatedly said it wanted to "kill or capture him". It did
neither.

     Muqtada became the man to watch much earlier than his newfound - by
American corporate media - prominent role in post-election Iraq. After the
bombing of Najaf, the Bush administration completely lost the plot. Then,
after the January 2005 elections, the new Jaafari government quickly
embraced Iran, received a pledge of $1 billion in aid, the use of Iranian
port facilities, and help with refining Iraqi oil.

     Sunni Arab regimes like Jordan and Saudi Arabia started to be haunted
by the specter of a "Shi'ite crescent". A neo-conservative Iraq as a base to
launch an attack on Iran disappeared as a mirage in the desert. As the US
has to fight a relentless Sunni Arab guerrilla war, it cannot possibly risk
alienating the Iraqi Shi'ite masses (more than they already are) with an
attack on Iran.

     No wonder military historian Martin van Creveld, a professor at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the only non-American author on the
Pentagon's list of required reading for officers, called for Bush to be
impeached and put on trial "for misleading the American people, and
launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his
legions into Germany and lost them".

     Bush and his faithful ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have
been playing the same scratched CD track: "We're better off now without
Saddam." That is not true. The fall of Saddam led to the rise of al-Qaeda in
the Land of the Two Rivers; and even Allawi admitted that human rights in
Iraq now are no better than under Saddam. Not to mention that there is no
reconstruction, unemployment is at 70%, and a country which in the late
1980s had one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world has been
razed to a sub-Saharan level.

     Whatever the Americans do - with "Iraqification" doomed to failure, as
much as "Vietnamization" - the war in Iraq now is a rampaging beast that
threatens to spill all over the Middle East.

     "Bring 'em on," said Bush, and they did; the result is a new, deadly
generation of global jihadis. Sunni-Shi'ite antagonism will spill over to
oil-rich Sunni Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia) with huge but heavily
marginalized Shi'ite populations. Kurdish separatist dreams have tremendous
implications for Turkey, Syria and Iran, especially if Iraq, through civil
war, finally disintegrates.

     So the most probable scenario for 2006 and beyond is a fragile central
government in Baghdad bombarded by an intractable guerrilla movement - a
chaotic and sectarian hornets' nest breeding one, 10, 100 mini (or maxi)
al-Qaeda leaders able to convulse the Middle East. Maybe this is what the
neo-cons meant by "creative destruction".

     Al-Qaeda has a masterplan for the Middle East, and the next stages -
apart from the Gulf emirates - are to be played in vulnerable Jordan,
Turkey, Egypt and even Israel. As for the air war against the Sunni Arab
resistance, it may buy a few votes at home but will do absolutely nothing to
improve America's dreadful image in the Middle East - especially because
civilian "collateral damage" will be enormous.

     That bearded, vociferous guy

     Saddam's trial - the outcome of which is already determined - will
proceed as a purely sectarian propaganda coup. If this were a real trial,
Saddam would be in The Hague in front of an international panel of respected
judges, experts in human rights law.

     Or the United Nations would have been commissioned to organize a
special tribunal in a neutral country like Switzerland. Saddam's secrets,
though, are so vast - and so extremely embarrassing for the US - that he
cannot possibly leave the Green Zone, where he will certainly be executed.
Saddam's trial will become the sorry mirror image of the sectarian politics
let loose in Iraq at large.

     Bush has opened a Pandora's box with his shock and awe tactics. The
ultimate quagmire will keep mutating and unleashing its deadly new powers
for years on end. And there is nothing anyone - not even the "indispensable
nation" - can do about it. We have all been, and will remain, shocked and
awed.

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