The real conspiracy

The real conspiracy
In a turbulent Middle East, Arab conspiracy scenarios continue to
abound. History proves they are not always flights of fancy, writes
Ayman El-Amir

Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/831/op5.htm

Westerners have often scoffed at Arabs as conspiracy theory addicts.
Throughout the 20th century, everything Arab nationalists suspected as
a scheme by colonial powers against their interests and aspirations
was dismissed as a figment of Arab imagination -- another tale from
The Thousand and One Nights. Yet after decades of secrecy,
declassified documents of confidential meetings, agreements,
diplomatic correspondence and reports, from the early years of the
last century to the mid-1990s, reveal that the stretch of Arab
imagination is much narrower than the scope of the conspiracy. Indeed,
it may be safe to assume that conspiracy is at work in the internecine
mini-wars raging in Iraq, in intermittent Palestinian Fatah-Hamas
clashes, in the precipitous confrontation between the Lebanese
opposition parties and the Siniora government, along with threats
against Syria and militant non-Arab Iran. This conspiracy is designed
by the perpetrator-beneficiary, Israel.

Iraq is the scene of the bloodiest civil war the region has known in
one hundred years. True, there are a few players with different
agendas. But it is by no means the Sunni- Shia sectarian war that is
being played to Arab and Western audiences. The Arab-Muslim world has
sometimes been the battlefield of political rivalries and conflicts,
but not religious wars. Arab history bears no witness to anything
remotely close to the 150-year religious wars in Europe, between the
16th and the 18th century. Catholics and Protestants then shed each
other's blood profusely as a result of the division among Christian
churches and following the relatively peaceful period of the
Reformation.

Muslims did fight a fratricidal war in the 7th century as part of the
political rivalry between Beni Umaiya, led by the ruler of Syria
Muawiya Ibn Abi Sofian, and Beni Hashem, represented by the selected
Khalif of the Muslims, Ali Ibn Abi Taleb. For all its ferocity, the
one-week war ended with arbitration. The spectre of that war and its
aftermath haunted Muslims for the following 14 centuries during which
they shunned religious conflict. Even though the revered Khalif Ali
was assassinated in Kufa in January 661, it is the martyrdom of his
son Husain, the grandson of the Prophet, in an unequal battle at
Karbala in 680 that is remembered as a heinous crime that troubled
Muslims for centuries. The Shias commemorate it with different forms
of remorse on the holy day of Ashura every year, while the Sunnis mark
Ashura by fasting. Whatever reasons could be cited for the violence in
Iraq today, nothing could explain the death of an estimated 1,000
Iraqis during one week of bombings from 28 January to 4 February. A
sinister design is at play.

In the spirit of grand conspiracy, Israeli-leaning US strategists
plotted the Bush administration's invasion and destruction of Iraq,
which is now divided up in the interest of Israel. As part of the
plan, Israeli agents infiltrated Iraqi Kurds in the north, agitating
their ambitions for an independent Kurdistan -- a gathering of the
Kurds of northern Iraq, Turkey and Iran. They helped train and arm an
estimated 70,000 Kurdish peshmerga, a paramilitary force, as a way of
consecrating the division of Iraq and destabilising neighbouring Iran.
Elsewhere, in Lebanon, Israeli failure to destroy Hizbullah forces in
the month-long war of July-August 2006 left it with only one
alternative -- to try to divide Lebanon and incite civil war to wipe
out Hizbullah, which is perceived as an extension of Iranian influence
in Lebanon.

Working hand-in-glove with the Bush administration, Israel is
promoting the idea that Shia Iran is a mortal danger to Sunni-oriented
Gulf and other Arab states. Iran is being set up as a Shia scarecrow
for its Sunni- dominated neighbours because its nuclear programme
threatens to undercut the regional supremacy of a belligerent Israel.

History, however, tells us a different story about Sunni-Shia
relations. When Islam was introduced in Persia after the Arab-Islamic
conquest of the Sasanian dynasty in 636, Persians became Sunni Muslims
and remained so for almost nine centuries. Shiism came to Iran only
when the Safavid dynasty established Shia Islam as the mainstream
state religion in the 16th century. On the other hand, Shia Fatimids
ruled now Sunni Egypt for nearly two centuries, from 969 to 1171. The
Shia-Sunni theory of historical animosity simply does not hold water.
It would seem that an agent provocateur is involved.

The US and Israel are obsessed with the prospect of a rising, militant
Iran with its fast-growing alliances in the region. Iranian interests
in Iraq, the Gulf States, Palestine and Lebanon undermine US-Israeli
hegemony over the region. Before long, the US conquest of Iraq will
become a Vietnam-type bitter experience. US failure to stabilise a
divided Iraq, the increasing sophistication of the resistance, the
unsustainable level of US and Iraqi casualties and hardening
opposition in the US Congress to the war is pushing the Bush
administration's strategy towards the inevitable endgame of troop
withdrawal.

Warrior President Bush has said the US cannot afford defeat in Iraq
and its implications for American interests in the region. So he is
likely to activate Plan B, which provides for the gradual replacement
of US forces by an army of hired mercenaries posing as private
security services. Undercover Israeli agents would set off sabotage
plans to disrupt Iran's nuclear activities and rupture its connections
with Iraqi Shias.

A little-noticed paragraph in President George W Bush's State of the
Union address to Congress last month was revealing. After asking
Congress to authorise the increase of US army and navy corps by 92,000
in the next five years he added: "A second task we can take on
together is to design and establish a volunteer civilian reserve
corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It
would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to use
civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when
America needs them." This is widely regarded as a plan of mercenary
warfare in Iraq and elsewhere given a mantle of respectability. Such
forces are already at work in Iraq, providing "security services" for
US diplomats, visiting important persons, and diplomatic convoys.
Evidence of this came to light one week before President Bush's
address. A US helicopter came down in a hostile Baghdad Sunni
neighbourhood as it attempted to rescue an ambushed US convoy. In the
exchange of gunfire that followed, the helicopter's four "private
security service" staff were captured and shot in the back of the
head, execution style.

Some US analysts are talking about the Bush administration's plan to
outsource the war to mercenary armies, of which there are at least a
dozen in Iraq. Mention is repeatedly made of Blackwater Inc, a North
Carolina-based corporation that trains and retains an estimated 20,000
special security men. It reportedly has a $300 million contract with
the Pentagon to provide diplomatic security in Iraq. Author Jeremy
Scahill, who is soon to publish a book on Blackwater, told a US
Pacifica Radio network programme recently that as many as 48,000 of
the US fighting force in Iraq are private security contractors paid by
the Pentagon. In the realm of conspiracy theory, it is not far-fetched
that after US withdrawal, the war in Iraq would turn into a low-
intensity conflict between insurgents and US-hired soldiers of
fortune, with Israeli operatives providing logistical and technical
support, and US military hardware.

If Iraq is a scorched-earth war zone, the Hamas- Fatah mini-war does
not make sense. Not only are both the victim of Israeli occupation and
atrocities, but they are also supposed to each fight the occupation,
not each other. It is a rare but not unusual phenomenon that national
liberation movements have internal dissension over tactics, but not
strategy, as they evolve. But to have more than 100 Palestinian
freedom fighters killed and 300 wounded in intra-Palestinian conflict
since Hamas was elected to power a year ago smacks of yet another
conspiracy theory. The election and assumption of government by Hamas
faced outright rejection by Israel, the US and the European Union. So,
for the Bush administration to request a total allocation of $86.4
million to train and equip the 8,500 National Security Force as a
private army of President Mahmoud Abbas, in addition to the Fatah-
loyal Badr Brigade stationed in Jordan, could only mean that Abbas is
aligning himself with the US and Israel against the consensus of the
Palestinian people, represented by democratically elected Hamas. And
in his bid to put down militant Hamas, President Abbas is egged on,
not only by the US and Israel, but also by some Arab countries that
perceive Hamas as dangerously contagious to their conservative
regimes.

The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC.
He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in
New York.

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namaste;
bodhi
http://psychedelictourist.blogspot.com

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