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April
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April 22,
2003
Shi'a Will to Power
Downfall of
Bush and the Neocons?
by KURT NIMMO
Ironically, the Bushites will eventually regret
getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In short order, Iraq will turn
from a Ba'athist dictatorship into a Muslim theocracy. It's happening
now, even with the US occupation. On Saturday tens of thousands
of Shi'ite Muslims trekked on foot to the holy city of Karbala
to mark the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the
grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. It was the first time in more
than 30 years Shi'ites have been able to hold the traditional
march, which was banned by Saddam Hussein.
Increasingly, the Shi'ites of Iraq say
they will rise up against the Americans if they don't quit the
occupation and leave. Thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets
in the last few days to protest and demand the US get out. "We
reject this foreign occupation, which is a new imperialism,"
Sheikh Kaazem al-Abahadi al-Nasari said at the mausoleum of Imam
Hussein. "We don't need the Americans. They're here to control
our oil." Anti-American speeches were delivered by Shi'a
imams at hundreds of mosques throughout Baghdad and elsewhere
in Iraq. At the al-Hikma mosque in Sadr City, formerly Saddam
City, more than 50,000 people jammed the mosque and surrounding
streets. "This form of government would be worse than that
of Saddam Hussein," declared Sheikh Mohammed Fartusi.
According to AFP, Reuters, AP, al-Jazeera,
al-Arayiba and Abu Dhabi, more than 200,000 Iraqis demonstrated
following Friday prayers. Not only Shi'as and Sunnis marched,
but also members of professional associations, small merchants,
former Ba'ath Party members and students, some of them from the
left wing Iraqi National Liberation Front. Much of this activity
went unreported in the US.
Meanwhile, foreign ministers in Iran,
Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Bahrain
released a joint statement calling for US and British forces
to establish security in Iraq and then leave the country as soon
as possible. The ministers also called on the United Nations
to take a central role in a post-war Iraq.
This isn't what the Bushites and the
neocons have in mind.
As former CIA director James Woolsey
characterizes it, the US is engaged in "World War IV,"
which will "last considerably longer than either World Wars
I or II." The enemies in this war, according to Woolsey,
are the rulers of Iran, the "fascist" rulers of Iraq
and Syria and groups such as al-Qaeda. "We want you nervous.
We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in 100 years,
this country and its allies are on the march and that we are
on the side of those whom you -- the Mubaraks, the Saudi royal
family -- most fear. We're on the side of your people."
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions,
of Iraqis don't see it that way. Countless numbers of Shi'a Muslims,
like Imam Hussein before them, are ready to become martyrs in
the name of Islam. All it will take is the appropriate fatwa
issued by a respected imam.
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of
Commentary magazine, believes this tidal wave of Muslim activism
can be snuffed out if the American people find "the stomach
to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties."
But are the American people ready for World War IV? "Many
Americans reluctantly supported the attack on Iraq because they
truly believed that it would make America safer and Iraqis freer,"
write Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish. "Precious few have
willingly signed up for a new, catastrophic and completely unnecessary
global confrontation with Islam."
Regardless of what the American people
want, the Bushites are pushing hard to confront Islam on all
fronts. Last month PNAC (the Project for the New American Century)
released a letter signed by 23 prominent neocons. "Any early
fixation on exit strategies and departure deadlines will undercut
American credibility and greatly diminish the prospects for success,"
the letter stated. "Everyone -- those who have joined the
coalition, those who have stood aside, those who opposed military
action, and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors
-- must understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of
Iraq and will provide the necessary resources and will remain
for as long as it takes."
In other words, if PNAC and the neocons
have their way -- and they have up until now -- the US will not
leave Iraq anytime soon. In fact, they are preparing to march
and bomb their way across the entire map of the Middle East and
Central Asia, or wherever irksome Muslims amass.
"There is little question about
the source of PNAC's influence," writes Jim Lobe. "When
it was founded in 1997 by two prominent neoconservatives, William
Kristol and Robert Kagan, its charter, which called for a U.S.
strategy of global pre-eminence based on military power, was
signed by men who would become the most influential hawks in
the Bush administration, including Cheney, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under
Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security
John Bolton, and Cheney's influential national security adviser,
I. Lewis Libby."
For the neocons, Iraq is but one battle
in a war Bush said will last for a generation or more. World
War IV, according to the neocons, began with the invasion of
Afghanistan. "When all is said and done, the conflict in
Afghanistan will be to the war on terrorism what the North Africa
campaign was to World War II: an essential beginning on the path
to victory," write William Kristol and Robert Kagan. "But
compared with what looms over the horizon -- a wide-ranging war
in locales from Central Asia to the Middle East and, unfortunately,
back again to the United States -- Afghanistan will prove but
an opening battle.... But this war will not end in Afghanistan.
It is going to spread and engulf a number of countries in conflicts
of varying intensity. It could well require the use of American
military power in multiple places simultaneously. It is going
to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped
to avoid."
The Bushites may talk of "liberation"
and "democracy" in the Arab Middle East, but their
real intention is more purposeful and ambitious. It has nothing
to do with democracy and everything to do with confronting and
enervating Islam.
On November 20, 2002, Eliot Cohen wrote
in the Wall Street Journal: "The enemy in this war is not
'terrorism'... but militant Islam... Afghanistan constitutes
just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one
campaign." Kristol and Kagan again, from their book The
War Over Iraq: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does
not end there... We stand at the cusp of a new historical era...
This is a decisive moment... It is so clearly about more than
Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East
and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United
States intends to play in the twenty-first century."
Bush may make threatening gestures in
the general direction of Syria, but the preferred target is Iran,
the font of Shi'a Islam. "As a Shia power," notes Robert
Dreyfuss of the American Prospect, "Iran has vast influence
among the Shi'a majority in Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain, with the
large Shi'a population in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province
and among the warlords of western Afghanistan. And Iran's ties
to the violent Hezbollah guerrillas, whose anti-American zeal
can only be inflamed by the occupation of Iraq, will give the
Bush administration all the reason it needs to expand the war
on terrorism to Tehran."
Before they can move on to Iran, however,
the Bushites need to deal with the Shi'a Muslims in Iraq. It
was initially assumed the Shi'as, long oppressed by Saddam Hussein,
would welcome the Anglo-American "coalition" forces
and garland them with flowers. Naturally, this didn't happen,
and for good reason -- the Shi'ites of southern Iraq were betrayed
by Dubya's father after he called on them to revolt against Saddam
Hussein and then abandoned them in the wake of the Gulf War.
Not only have Iraqi Shi'ites -- who comprise nearly two-thirds
of the country -- refused to welcome the US as liberators, they
consider them invaders and infidel Crusaders determined to eviscerate
Islam and steal Iraq's oil. Considering the loose talk and malicious
saber-rattling of the Bush neocons -- and the fact they intend
to install malleable puppets to lord over the people of Iraq
-- these assumptions are hardly unwarranted. One such rubber
stamped puppet, the exile Abdul Majid al-Khoei, was hacked to
death at the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf on April 17.
Meanwhile, the feverish neocons continue
to entertain their fantasies of conquest and domination. "Despite
liberal, socialist, nationalist, and Islamist political factions,
a clear majority [of Iraqis] appear to favor a secular democracy,"
write Hussain Hindawi and John R. Thomson in the National Review.
"Of greater concern is the division between a virulent minority
calling for jihad in the event 'infidel U.S. and British invaders'
show any inclination to prolonged occupation and groups like
the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq led by Baker al-Hakim, who have allied themselves with Washington."
It's safe to say many Iraqis realize al-Hakim shares a cozy relationship
with "Iraqi opposition" groups organized by the CIA.
No doubt most wouldn't lose any sleep if al-Hakim went the way
of Abdul Majid al-Khoei.
Bush and the neocons will never allow
free elections or participatory democracy in Iraq -- the result
would almost certainly be fundamentalist religious parties harmonized
against the US master plan for Islam and the Middle East. In
order to see their mission through, the Bushite neocons will
attempt to occupy Iraq indefinitely. This will be impossible.
"Drawing upon British experiences
in Malaysia and Rhodesia, the force ratio of army forces to guerilla
forces needed for merely containing guerilla resistance, let
alone defeating a guerilla force, is about 20 to 1," explains
Henry C K Liu. "US estimates of the size of Iraq's guerilla
force stands at 100,000 for the time being. This means the US
would need a force of 2 million to contain the situation even
if it already controls the country."
In the months ahead, as Bush gears up
for his re-election, guerilla resistance to US occupation of
Iraq will redouble. "How [Saddam Hussein] was removed,"
writes Geov Parrish, "sows the seeds of a much longer and
by definition unwinnable war -- one which goes a long way toward
fulfilling the bin Laden fantasy of a pan-national Islamic guerilla
war against America." Soon the question will be -- as more
and more young Americans die in a futile effort to put down the
pan-national Islamic guerilla war Parrish describes -- does the
American public have the "stomach" (as Norman Podhoretz
deems it) for the escalating cost of the neocon war against Islam
and the Arab people? Bush and the neocons may smirk and declare
the Vietnam Syndrome dead, but the arrival of ever increasing
flag-draped coffins eventually turns the tide against war, especially
if that war rests on a foundation of lies and carelessly crafted
and shifting fabrications.
"Roughly comparable wars of the
last 50 years have not helped presidents, and in some cases have
really hurt them," historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University
told the St. Petersburg Times. "There are so many ways a
war can go badly." If thousands of enraged Iraqis filling
the streets of Baghdad, Basra, Karbala, Najaf and other Iraqi
cities last week are any indication, Bush's invasion is already
going bad. In fact, by the time the presidential election rolls
around next year, it may go so bad as to deny him a second term.
If Bush is indeed thrown out of the White House, the malevolent
neocons will be obliged to go with him.
If that happens, it will surely be reason
to celebrate.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
We highly recommend regular visits to
Nimmo's website, Another
Day in the Empire
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Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult
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