I wrote the following this morning after reading the first two items on the
NYT website but before I read a great deal more from various other sources
-- all of which have Bush (and Gates, the Defense Secretary) saying things
which don;lt really mesh what I've written below. Nevertheless, I still
think that something along the lines of what I suggest below will start
taking place and Bush will plead "force majeure". The American public have
already had quite enough of Iraq and will be quite happy then to forget all
about the place almost whatever happens by way of blood baths over the next
two or three months. Bush and the White House will have no opportunity to
prepare the way for any sort of Republican presidential campaign in 2008
unless this whole issue is removed entirely from political debate.
The only dissonance with what I write below is that, if all this takes
place, then there must also be a secret agreement between Bush and
Moqtada-Sadr that although almost all American troops might leave Iraq very
swiftly, American oil corporations will be given a fair chance of sharing
in the future development of the northern oilfields -- that is, to join
French, Italian, Russian and Chinese oil corporations who already had
negotiated contracts with Saddam Hussein (but, of course, frozen since the
invasion). On the face of it, negotiations between Bush and Sadr seem
remote -- but far stranger things happen in realpolitik.
KH
----------
"American fortunes in Iraq are ever more dependent on feuding Iraqis who
seem, at times, almost heedless to American appeals." New York Times (29
November 2006)
Apart from the Freudian slip -- the word "fortunes"! -- events are becoming
curioser and curioser in Iraq. Apparently on the basis of one face-to-face
meeting only, Stephen J Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser,
has expressed serious doubts about the ability of Iraqi Prime Minister
Maliki to hold the Shias and Sunnis together.
And then Hadley's "classified" memo to Bush was immediately leaked! And now
we learn that Bush is meeting Maliki today in Jordan. Is this because
Baghdad is now too insecure for the meeting to be held there, or is it to
get Maliki out of the way while a putsche takes place? The latter would not
surprise me. I would bet on it. If so, then we can expect a bloodbath later
today or tomorrow as the Mahdi Army occupies itself with rounding up
terrorist Sunnis in Baghdad. It may be the case that the better the devil
you know than any one of the leaders of the new terrorist Shia militias
that are now emerging in Baghdad. Moqtada al-Sadr may not be the Bush's
favourite cup of tea but he seems to be the only person who can possibly
bang heads together in Iraq as Saddam Hussein used to and give
opportunities again to the professional, business and technocratic classes
who are now sitting it out in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon and whom Iraq badly
needs to entice back again before it has any chance of recovery.
Besides the curiosity of the security barrier being built between Saudi
Arabia and Iraq, and the telephone call between Bush and Chinese President
Hu that I mentioned yesterday there are two more curiosities I forgot to
mention. These were the visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to Beijing
two weeks ago and the more recent flying visit of Vice-president Cheney to
Saudi Arabia last week-end. In the latter case, was he visiting Riyadh
because he was being sidelined by the new Bush-Paulson-Hadley axis in the
White House and wanted some visibility for the sake of his amour propre? Or
perhaps just fishing? Or is he party to the larger plot I hinted at
yesterday. It is said that Cheney visited Saudi Arabia in order to persuade
them (that is, the Wahhabi-dominated portion of the royal family) to dampen
their support for the Sunnis in Baghdad. No chance of that, of course.
It looks to me as though there's a double putsche in the offing -- firstly,
a change of leadership on Iraq, secondly a complete change of policy in the
White House (that is, the overthrowing of who has been the real president
of America, Cheney). And they both revolve around the same pivot -- the
pivot that's been the main cause of trouble throughout the Middle East --
Saudi Arabia.
The change of policy in the White House will be a double one. Firstly, that
they no longer try to maintain that it wants to bring American-type
elections to Iraq. That will be for another century. Another dictator is
necessary. Secondly, they are going to let the Chinese handle Saudi Arabia
(as, reading between the lines, they have obviously been doing recently as
peacemakers between America and Iran). As with Iran, China has huge
contracts with Saudi Arabia. Fifteen years ago, American oil corporations
refused desperate Wahhabi requests to invest heavily in non-oil
opportunities for the millions of Saudi Arabian young men without jobs.
They refused on the grounds that this wasn't their expertise. But that's
why they obtained no more oil and gas concessions from then onwards.
The American government should have stepped in then and offered some sort
of Marshall Plan to Saudi Arabian -- developmental and training aid rather
than finance. They didn't, and that's when the whole Middle East mess
started in earnest -- the opportunity for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda,
9/11, massive Saudi Arabian aid to extremist groups throughout the Middle
East and the hundreds of madrassahs in Pakistan.
Well, we'll see. I may very well be wrong but if I'm right then we should
expect events to start moving swiftly today and, indeed, bearing time zones
in mind, may be happening as I write. And this will have been the real
result of what the Iraq Study Group have arrived during their deliberations
of the past year, not the policy statement that it will announced in
January for the birds.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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