- MOSCOW -- Nuri Said was the
puppet prime minister of Iraq during the 1950s, when the British pulled
all the strings in Baghdad. When he was toppled by revolutionary Iraqi
officers in 1958, Said's mangled corpse was dragged through the streets.
His end more or less confirmed what he used to say: "You can always
rent an Arab, but you can never buy him." The Bush administration
is filled with men with short memories who won't have heard of Nuri Pasha,
and aren't in the frame of mind to listen to his advice.
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- Asia Times Online told this story in September of 2002
(Russia rooting for a quick hit on Saddam), and 18 months later it deserves
to be repeated, especially after Said's gruesome fate recently befell four
American security men at the hands of an Iraqi mob in the town of Fallujah.
Since their intensely televised death and dismemberment, the American occupation
forces have faced surging rebellions by the two major communities of Iraq,
the Sunnis and the Shi'ites. Their attacks have also targeted foreign civilians,
pseudo-civilians, and soldiers of fortune in Iraq, forcing widespread evacuations.
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- For the first time, the US military leadership in Washington,
fearing the political consequences of adding fresh, inexperienced US forces
to Iraq, has cancelled the one-year rotation agreement it had with its
troops, extending their service in the war zone for another three months.
Rotation was a scheme devised by the White House to limit the extent to
which unpopular and unwinnable wars might provoke mutiny in the ranks,
and votes against the president at home. The one-year rotation failed to
staunch the crack-up of the US Army in Vietnam, but neither presidents
Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon dared to cancel the rotation promise.
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- The political calculation by President George W Bush
is that, even if the disgruntled families of the 20,000 troops affected
immediately - one in every seven in Iraq - vote against him later this
year in the presidential elections, that will still add up to fewer votes
against him than if he adds 20,000 new troops who begin to suffer casualties.
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- The military calculation is that it will not be possible
to preserve the US position in Iraq by paying local Iraqis to replace departing
US forces. They must stay to fight; or they must retreat. The recent fighting
has demonstrated for all to see that Said's warning has returned to haunt
those who ignored it. The Iraqis whom Washington has rented will never
risk Said's fate. And so, win or lose against Democratic Party candidate
John Kerry, Bush has started down the slope that once defeated Johnson
and Nixon, and put a brief stop to Washington's imperial ambitions.
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- That's a slope which Russian policy has no interest in
either precipitating or accelerating - so long as it has the same outcome
for US expansionism.
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- At the time of Nuri Said's downfall, and again during
the Vietnam War, the American leadership attributed its troubles to the
cleverness of the Soviet Union, mostly because it was the Cold War, and
Washington had no other way of explaining, let alone accepting, outbreaks
of nationalism, localism and the like.
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- President Vladimir Putin, his Defense Minister Sergei
Ivanov and new Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov understand how easy it would
be for Bush and his circle to revive similar charges, and put the blame
for their own mistakes and battlefield losses on the Kremlin. They understand,
too, how different the war in Iraq is from the war in Vietnam. They realize
that the American people have even less commitment to the imperial fight
this time than they had before. The Russian policymakers understand that
it is Israel, and its men in Washington, who are mostly calling the shots
for the president. The Russian assessment, and American public opinion,
are therefore likely to converge, as the Arabs begin to exact the same
toll on Americans in Iraq, as the Palestinians have been doing to the Israelis
in that occupied territory.
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- Israel is trying to shoot its way out of a casualty ratio
of one of their own to three Palestinians. For the time being, the US is
trying to cope with a ratio of one to 50. Israel's effective capture of
the White House has taken a half-century to pull off, and for those, like
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle,
who now command the heights of US power, this is a do-or-die campaign.
Only it will be patriotic Americans who will be doing the dying. And they
are not as malleable as their president.
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- Russian policy is therefore founded on letting the battlefield
serve as a reminder of Nuri Said's warning. Officially, Moscow would like
to effect a substitution of US troops for a combination of Iraqi sovereignty
and United Nations support. But sovereignty cannot be rigged by Wolfowitz
and Perle, nor paid for by the US Congress and Halliburton Corporation.
Nor can Bush's puppets in England, Australia, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and
Japan pretend to UN legitimacy. The Iraqi resistance is making sure that
point is already clear (ask Spain). Sooner or later, the allied occupation
forces will have to be replaced. But creating a new Iraqi political consensus
will take much longer than Bush has realized.
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- Until that happens, Russian policy is to try to neutralize
the damage that the Israeli faction in Washington can do, and try to advance
a strategic relationship with the Americans who may be able to wrest power
over Bush from the grip of the Israelis. Two remarks by Ivanov on his recent
visit to Washington indicate this direction. The Kremlin, said Ivanov,
"considered joint Russian-US efforts within the framework of the counterterrorism
coalition to be much more important than our differences about the war
in Iraq ... " The US alliance, he added, regarding the Balkan conflict
in Kosovo, but a general principle nonetheless, "must finally understand
that one cannot flirt with political extremists".
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- For Russia, it is crucial to prevent the deteriorating
US position in Iraq from becoming the policy of perpetual war and territorial
aggrandizement, which has characterized the Israeli policy for decades.
To this end, having such a person as Bush in the White House may be preferable,
if the extremists around Bush can be defeated by the simple facts on the
battlefield.
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- Ivanov and other Russian officials have acknowledged
recently that if the Americans were to decide to abandon their redoubts
in Iraq, as they did in Vietnam, the communal instability inside the country
would pose severe risks of spreading. And that isn't in the Russian interest,
so long as Islamic fundamentalism already threatens across several Russian
frontiers, and inside the Russian Caucasus. Ivanov made clear also that,
beyond the Chechen conflict, Russia is especially concerned to protect
the movement of its exports, especially energy, to market through waterways
and pipelines that are vulnerable to attack.
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- Ivanov told his Washington audience that he expects that
the most likely conflicts between the Great Powers that may "flare
up in the foreseeable future will certainly be related to the economic
domain, to the needs to secure by the individual, national states of their
national interests, especially in the sphere of economy". Teaching
Washington to accept that Russian economic interests are not antithetical
to American ones may take time. But as long as the US keeps making costly
mistakes in Iraq, time is on Russia's side. And so is the price of crude
oil.
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- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FD21Ag02.html
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