The Roving Eye-The fall guy in Iraq (ASIA TIMES)

THE ROVING EYE
The fall guy in Iraq
By Pepe Escobar

The Bush administration has perfected the art of fall-guy selection. The more convoluted the plot, the more credible the fall guy must be. As Lewis "Scooter" Libby was the fall guy in Washington, Premier Nuri al-Maliki will be the fall guy in Baghdad.

The Baghdad conference on Saturday was a derivative talk-fest setting up three committees to prepare the way for another meeting at the foreign-minister level next month in Istanbul. The subtext, though never explicit, is more glaring: it is the absolute US impotence to guarantee security or stability in Iraq, and the desperate search for a way out, now pitting the "axis of fear" (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates) against the "axis of evil" (Iran and Syria).

The spiraling equation in Iraq is stark. The more that a lone Sunni Arab mujahid with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher can take down a US$25 million Apache helicopter, the more Pentagon counterinsurgency tactics will include "surgical strikes" with minimal "collateral damage" on occupied civilians.


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This fits in a much bigger picture - the apocalyptic devastation of a whole country directly or indirectly engineered by the Bush administration. No fewer than 4 million Iraqis have been killed directly or indirectly, or been forced into exile.

The more the surge expands, the more Iraq dissolves into a horrific degree zero of culture - as in the bombing of al-Mutanabbi, Baghdad's great book street named after a poet of the Abassid era. And this happened after the massacre of students at Mustansiriya University, older than the Sorbonne. Even books in Iraq "are being assassinated", a librarian told pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, comparing the tragedy to the destruction of the library of Baghdad by the Mongol hordes of Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson, in the 13th century. In the words of Hodja Ali, the owner of the ultra-atmospheric Chahbandar cafe - where writers, poets and journalists used to gather - the street was the embodiment of "conscience opposed to violence".

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Maliki, the fall guy, is already irrelevant. Any analysis of US imperial designs since the CIA-engineered coup against prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran more than half a century ago reveals the same pattern. If you want divide-and-rule and total domination, who's your man? A clever, charismatic nationalist or a ruthless CIA asset?

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IC13Ak05.html

It is one of their primary functions, always has been, but the stooges never seem to learn.