The Quartet 'Party' In Iraq
By Hazem Saghieh
Al-Hayat
16 October, 2003
Is it possible to say that George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Moqtada Al Sadr are affiliated to one 'party' whose objective is, regardless of the rhetoric, to fragment Iraq?
Yes.
How?
We put aside what we previously know about each of them. We settle for the current moment:
- George W. Bush: he wants Turkey to send 10,000 soldiers into Iraq, while what is required is the peaceful preparation for the withdrawal of the American and British troops, and preparing the Iraqis to replace them. Turkey's entry, which is rejected by the vast Iraqi majority, succumbs a part of Iraq to a power other than that which controls the other parts. It wets the appetite of the other bordering countries to get into Iraq, or to increase their interference in it (see the history of the Turkish/Sunni-Iranian/Shiite competition there). It turns the Kurdish region, which is currently the strongest link in post Saddam Iraq's chain, to one of its weakest links.
- Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden: the latest terrorist operation, the Baghdad Hotel, is another pretext for those who want to associate the Iraqi issue with that of terrorism, those who derive the one from the other, turning the Iraqi nation into an 'backyard' for conflicts. It is feared that the Arab welcoming of this 'resistance' would contribute to deem easy a change that comes on the Iraqis in the first place: on their national bond as well as expanding the circles of external interferences and interventions.
- Moqtada Al Sadr: while the only available political guarantee for Iraq is the 'transitional governing council,' with all its weakness and limited and vague powers, this young man aspiring for glory pushes towards fragmenting the Iraqi authority, or what is available of it. He promises of another army one day, and another government the second day. But he is permanently obsessed, consciously or not, with another war.
The fragmentation that is currently aggravating in Iraq drinks from many waters. But the most important stream that supplies it is the concurrence of two popular cultures in the land of the Euphrates and the Tigris: one that elevates the war on terror to the level of sanctity, and the other elevates the resistance to that same level. The holy and
unique allows itself everything for the simple fact that it is holy and unique. If the mentality of the sacred and unique would not be confronted, and the absolutism would not be extracted from both the war and the resistance, in the United States and in the Arab world, the four men will proceed in turning the Iraqi people into a target of their disastrous projects, and Iraq into a laboratory of the devils hidden within them.