WHEN Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller, a pair of Americans who describe themselves as “two of the only politically conservative scientists aroundâ€, were naming some of the 65 newly discovered species of mould-eating beetles, they decided it was a good opportunity to honour some of their heroes. As a result, three of the insects now bear the exalted names Agathidium bushi, Agathidium cheneyi and Agathidium rumsfeldi.
Did the scientists stop to think whether the US president, vice-president and defence secretary might be less than flattered by their nomenclatural association with creatures of questionable value that are liable to be trampled and susceptible to insecticide? The White House, as far as I can ascertain, has offered no comment. And should Wheeler and Miller be accused of hurling an ill-disguised insult at the men they profess to admire for “having the courage of their convictionsâ€, they could always respond that at least the beetles in question weren’t of the dung-eating variety.
One can’t help wondering, though, why they stopped with this exemplary threesome. Surely it would have done no harm to carry on in the same vein, gifting other species of Agathidia with equally memorable names such as wolfiei, condii and blairi?
The relevant BBC report contains no clues to why this should be the case. It does point out, though, that whereas the bushi can be found in North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, the cheneyi and rumsfeldi hail from Mexico. Doesn’t that make them undesirable aliens or illegal immigrants?
I am less than convinced, however, about the veracity of this part of the report. Surely, the bushi occurs mostly in Texas and the District of Columbia, while the cheneyi is harder to track down, because it tends to burrow underground at the first sign of danger. As for the rumsfeldi, well, it’s all over the place, isn’t it?
Over the past couple of years, a favourite clip of documentary-makers has been the one in which the US defence secretary pinpoints the location of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. In a scene reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Donald Rumsfeld announces: We know exactly where the WMD are – they are in Tikrit, and to the north and south and east and west…
That priceless performance alone should have sufficed for him to be shunted off to some sort of sinecure at the end of George W. Bush’s first term. But no, possibly on Dick Cheney’s insistence, he ain’t going nowhere. He popped up in Baghdad recently on his ninth visit (not counting the occasion, two decades ago, when he dropped by in his capacity as Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to butter up Saddam), before cutting a swath through the “stansâ€.
The Iraq trip was evidently in honour of the latest instance of regime change. This advanced phase of the puppet show is predictably being projected as the great exemplar the region has been waiting for. But did Rumsfeld pause even momentarily during his sojourn in Baghdad to ponder why, from the Nile to the Gulf of Oman, Arabs can’t be heard yelling: “O Uncle Sam, why hast thou forsaken us? You can’t reserve all your blessings for our Iraqi brothers and sisters! We, too, yearn for the great civilizing influence of your daisy-cutters and napalm, of Halliburton and Abu Ghraib. Our hereditary satraps are are wallowing in sleaze, so could we have some brand new, elected ones, please? We can’t wait a moment longer – come and kill, kill, kill us for democracy, private enterprise and peace!â€
It doesn’t help, of course, that Bush himself has pointed out, albeit perhaps unwittingly, what’s wrong with Iraqi democracy. When commanding Syria earlier this year to remove all this troops from Lebanese soil, the Great Liberator opined that truly democratic elections were unthinkable in a Lebanon under occupation. It isn’t hard to imagine why many Lebanese would find the presence of a 15,000-strong Syrian contingent unpalatable. But those troops are now gone. there are ten times as many American military personnel in Iraq. Are we expected to imagine that occupation did not adversely affect the January 30 electoral exercise?
Interestingly enough, the emerging political pattern in Iraq is remarkably reminiscent of the constraints in Lebanon whereby the president must always be a Christian, the prime minister a Sunni and the parliamentary speaker a Shia. Iraq now has a Kurdish president (Jalal Talabani), a Shia prime minister (Ibrahim Al Jaafari) and a Sunni speaker (Hajem Al Hassani), plus a Shia and a Sunni each serving as vice-presidents.
With the Kurds over-represented in parliament and the Sunnis underrepresented, this artificial ethnic “balance†isn’t by any means the most dire of Iraq’s problems. During his visit, Rumsfeld warned the new leadership against purging Baathists and the like from the military and security forces as well as the administrative corps, as that would weaken the state (without admitting, of course, that the occupation authorities did precisely that two years ago).
This condescending advice, coupled with a warning against corruption (and one can be certain that neither Talabani nor Jaafari could have plucked up the courage to whisper “Halliburton†as a retort), was at least partially self-serving. The Americans want Iraqis to bear the brunt of the insurgency and that has been happening to an increasing extent in recent months. But there’s no escaping the fact that the resistance, often reciprocally brutal, is a consequence of the occupation, and the effect will be hard to remove for as long as the cause remains.
Talabani told the BBC this week that were the Kurdish peshmerga and Shia militias to be thrown into the fight, the insurgency could be ended. He appears not to have been asked whether, in his opinion, such a move might lead to a full-fledged civil war.
On a slightly less gung-ho note, Talabani also noted that he would not personally sign Saddam’s death warrant. Even though there is no sign yet of a trial for Talabani’s predecessor, the president says his colleagues, almost to a man, favour a quick execution. Some of them may be, in their own way, as bloodthirsty as Saddam, while others appear to believe his elimination would rob a substantial part of the resistance forces of their raison d’etre. However, a very similar theory, propounded by the Americans through much of 2003, turned out to have been based on deluded conjecture when violent resistance to the occupation actually picked up momentum after the former dictator was captured towards the end of that year.
One wouldn’t seriously argue with the perception that Jaafari and Talabani are a less odious duo than Saddam and Uday. But the real test of their leadership will come only when Iraq truly regains its sovereignty. And liberation isn’t only a Sunni preoccupation, as was borne out by a predominantly Shia protest in Baghdad on the second anniversary of the city’s fall.
The demonstrators dragged down effigies of Bush and Tony Blair alongside those of Saddam – an image that, if broadcast by any of the loyal networks, may have confused some Americans. In fact, they may also be scratching their heads over Saddam’s successor: “Who’s this Talabani fella? Are we now again friends with the Taliban….?â€
Not coincidentally, Rumsfeld’s next stop after Baghdad was the land where the Taliban are still sporadically active, and where he was reduced to muttering sweet nothings in the face of a public plea from Hamid Karzai for a deep and enduring “security relationship to enable Afghanistan to defend itself, to continue to prosper, and to stop the possibility of interferencesâ€.
Who would have guessed that Afghanistan was prospering? But then, perhaps the president’s observation was based exclusively on his experience of Kabul. And if he’s unable to sleep at night for fear that his sponsors will suddenly get up and go, perhaps he should be consulting a psychotherapist rather than outgoing US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
For the time being, at least, the Afghan-American “security relationship†runs deeper than either Karzai or Rumsfeld would be willing to acknowledge, with Afghanistan reportedly serving as the hub of global prison system, whereby “terrorism suspects†are flown in from various parts of the world, and then transferred to countries – Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have been mentioned – where they can be squeezed for information they may or may not have through methods that violate every known international covenant, convention and protocol against torture.
Elements of this system have been in place since late 2001, but it entered a new phase of development after the US Supreme Court ruled last July that detainees at Guantanamo Bay weren’t necessarily off-limits to the American system of justice. The international prison network includes facilities where US interrogators themselves handle some the dirty work. That is evidently the case at a pair of jails in Haripur and Kohat, in northern Pakistan, where the prison population reportedly approaches that of Guantanamo, and former inmates claim to have been subjected to Abu Ghraib-like techniques. Worse tales have emerged from interrogation centres in Jordan and Egypt.
It is likely that only a fraction of the ghost detainees have anything to do with terrorism, given that the system operates on the old McCarthyite principle, whereby names revealed under torture provide more targets for arbitrary arrest or kidnapping.
Perhaps Karzai is right to be worried. This sort of security relationship, which stretches far beyond Afghanistan, cannot indefinitely endure. It is illegal, immoral, and in all likelihood incompatible with genuine democracy – which, one must hope, the client regimes will eventually make way for.
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