MR BUSH HAS ONE PRIORITY FOR 2004: GET AMERICA OUT OF IRAQ. FAST.

By Robert Fisk

Ever since Daniel Pipes - he of the failed
American neo-cons - piped up last summer with his plan
to install a "democratic-minded autocrat" (sic) in Iraq,
I have been eyeing the Washington crystal ball for
further signs of what the designers of this wretched war
have in store for the Iraqis whom they "liberated" for
"democracy" last year. And bingo, not long before
Christmas, another of those chilling proposals for "New
Iraq" popped up from the same right-wing cabal. Any
predictions for Iraq this year may thus have to be based
on the thoughts of Leslie Gelb, a former chairman of the
United States Council on Foreign Relations, whose
wretched plans for "liberated" Iraq call for something
close to ethnic cleansing.

In no less an organ than The New York Times - the same
paper which carried a plea last year that Americans
should accept that US troops will commit "atrocities" in
Iraq - appeared Mr Gelb’s "Three State Solution", an
astonishing combination of simplicity and ruthlessness.
It goes like this. America should create three mini-
states in Iraq - Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the
centre and Shias in the south - the frontiers of these
three entities drawn along ethnic, sectarian lines. The
"general idea," says Mr Gelb, "is to strengthen the
Kurds and Shias and weaken the Sunnis." Thus US forces
can extricate themselves from the quagmire of the "Sunni
triangle" while the "troublesome and domineering" Sunnis
themselves - with no control over Iraq’s northern or
southern oil fields - will be in a more moderate frame
of mind.

True, the chopping up of Iraq might be "a messy and
dangerous enterprise" - tens of thousands of Iraqis,
after all, would be thrown out of their homes and pushed
across new frontiers - but Washington should, if
necessary, impose partition by force. This is the
essence of the Gelb plan.

Bosnia comes to mind. Or Kosovo. But if it gets us out
of Iraq, who’s going to complain when we - the famous
"coalition of the willing" - push those recalcitrant,
ungrateful Iraqis into the same kind of "divide and
rule" colonial world for which the Americans always used
to excoriate the British.

It’s important not to regard all this as the meandering
of Washington think-tanks. Pipes and Gelb and their
friends helped to build the foundations of this war, and
their ideas are intended to further weaken Iraq as a
nation - and thus the Arab world as a whole - while
maintaining American military power. Already, the
sectarian nature of "New Iraq" has been established by
Washington’s proconsul in Baghad, Paul Bremer.

His "Governing Council" is made up of Shias, Sunnis and
Kurds in direct proportion to their share of the
population. The Shias, who form 60 per cent of the
country, expect to take effective power in the Iraqi
national elections this year - this, after all, is the
only reason why the Shia clergy have not urged their
people to join the anti-American insurgency - and the
Americans and British understand this all too well. Like
so many of those Arab nations created by the French and
British amid the wreckage of the Ottoman empire after
the First World War, Iraq is to be governed along
sectarian lines.

So the coming months are not difficult to comprehend. As
the insurgency continues - and as President Bush’s re-
election drama grows nearer - the US administration will
be ever more anxious to do two things: to insist that
America will "stay the course" - and to get out as
quickly as possible. There will be ever more policemen
hired, ever more militias, ever more ex-members of
Saddam’s old secret service, to act as sandbags between
Iraqi guerillas and the Americans. Already - with Iraqi
cops taking the most casualties - this is coming about.
The Iraqi world is now breaking up into rebels and
collaborators, with a vast heap of innocent Iraqi bodies
– of children playing beside roadside bombs, children
cut down by American gunfire during house raids or
protests, busloads of passengers caught in guerilla
ambushes, diners blown apart in restaurants - turning up
each morning at the Baghdad morgue.

Mr Bush, of course, will be looking forward to the Show
Trial of the Year to help his election prospects. What,
after all, could be more calculated to justify the whole
miserable occupation of Iraq than the concrete evidence
of Saddam’s atrocities? Already, however, this highlight
is beginning to look distinctly worrying for the Bush
administration, because any fair trial of the old
dictator must take into account the massive evidence,
much of it still secret in Washington, of the United
States’ involvement in creating - and supporting -
Saddam’s regime for the cruellest years of his rule. The
shark-like lawyers already vying to defend Saddam are
well aware that it was Washington which enabled Saddam
to obtain the chemicals for his revolting use of gas
against both Kurds and Iranian soldiers.

Gwynne Dyer, the courageous journalist who did more than
anyone to publicise Saddam’s use of gas against the
Kurds - at a time when the CIA was putting out the lie
that the Halabja dead were killed by Iranian gas bombs -
believes Saddam will never get a public trial because if
he did, "all this would come out in gory detail." So
maybe we won’t see Saddam in the dock this year after
all.

As for that other, cancerous war - between the Israelis
and the Palestinians - we can be sure than America’s
cowardly bias towards Israel at the expense of occupied
Palestinians will only be exacerbated by November’s US
presidential election. Between Arafat’s corrupt rule and
the suicide executioners of Hamas, and the expansionist
and brutal Ariel Sharon, there will be no peace. Already
– how often that word "already" now crops up in any
Middle East analysis - Washington has given its blessing
to the shocking "new" message delivered by Sharon last
month.

This was the speech in which the Israeli Prime Minister
appeared to support President Bush’s "road-map" - which
calls, among other things, for an end to Jewish
settlement building - by stating that he was faithful to
the agreement "based on President Bush’s speech of June
2002".

Countless newspaper editorials went along with this
piece of chicanery - without checking the date. For Bush
outlined his "road-map" in a speech in 2003, not 2002.
The 2002 presidential speech to which Sharon was
referring stated only that Palestinians must forgo
terrorism "before the peace process can begin". Which
suits Sharon fine. Hence this week’s revelation that
during his three-year premiership, the population of
illegal Jewish settlements - built for Jews and Jews
only on occupied Arab land - has increased by 16 per
cent.

So there you have it. More Israeli settlement building
on Arab land and, I’ve no doubt, more Palestinian
suicide bombings. More desperate attempts by the
Americans to escape from Iraq and more talk of turning
"New Iraq" into ethnic statelets. More Arab humiliation.
More anger. More "war on terror". Flak jackets on for
2004.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=477381