A Los Angeles gang member's analysis of
Saddam-Iraq
By Edward Cranswick
Al-Jazeerah, May 5, 2004
When I was in Amman, Jordan, in March 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq, a
young Palestinian, Mohammad, who had been a member of a street gang when he
lived in Los Angeles as a teenager, told me his analysis of the impending
situation in Iraq. First of all, he repeated a sentiment I had heard from others
in the Mideast, that Saddam was a tough guy and Iraq was a tough country -- the
only people to stand up to the US in the Arab world -- and that was why the US
wanted to get rid of Saddam and take control Iraq. Mohammad said that basically
the US liked Saddam, he was their kind of guy, except that he wouldn't do what
he was told to do, and it was going to be very hard for the US to find someone
to replace him.
I had been in Baghdad the week before and had come to Jordan to set up a website
for the Human Shields <http://cranswick.net/humanshieldiraq20030313>. I had
spent a week sitting in a Amman hotel trying to set up the website in the face
of a variety of technical obstacles -- some of which I now believe were caused
by deliberate interference with my Internet access -- and I received much expert
assistance from two employees of the hotel, Mohammad and Khaled <http://cranswick.net/humanshieldiraq20030313/Acknowledgements.htm>
.
Like half of the population of Jordan, Khaled is a Palestinian whose family had
been displaced from their home by the Israelis in one of the many conflicts
since 1948. He was a desk clerk, good looking in a perfectly fitting suit with
pale skin and a well-proportioned body about 5% smaller than mine. His vivacious
presence reminded me of one of my close friends from my university years in New
York, Moony, a big Jew from the Bronx, who is about 5% larger than I. So Moony
and Khaled are like two brothers in the flesh and simultaneously symbols of two
archetypal brothers from some Old Testament argument about who was to inherit
the family land, Palestine.
The Palestinians displaced during the 1948 war were resettled in Arab countries
throughout the Mideast, but in their adopted countries they frequently inhabit a
legalistic immigration Purgatory. For example, Osama, one of the Human Shields
from Australia told me that although he had grown up in Baghdad, "Palestinian"
was stamped in his Iraqi passport. By contrast, he said that after only a few
years of residence in Australia, he had become a full-fledged Australian
citizen. The rationale for distinguishing those of Palestinian origin from the
rest of the Arab population in Mideastern countries was to support the
Palestinian "right of return" to their original homelands. Thus, two different
sets of people assert the exclusive right to return to the same land, i.e., many
residents of Arab countries throughout the Mideast, some of whom are in
important positions in their respective nations, watch as the farms and homes
and businesses formerly inhabited by their Palestinian parents and grandparents
are occupied by recent Russians immigrants who claim to be Jews. And as of 14
April 2004 when George Bush declared his support of Ariel Sharon's plan to
formally annex Jewish settlements in the occupied territory of the West Bank,
the Palestinian "right of return" has become even more problematic.
The Arabs are a people who share a language, religion and culture -- a culture
that was in the forefront of Western civilization a thousand years ago when it
stretched from the Mideast west across North Africa to the Atlantic Ocean and
east by sea trading routes as far as Indonesia. Since then, this culture has
been transformed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire and fragmented into a variety of
independent nations by European imperialism, particularly by the British and
French in the Mideast after the First World War, most recently by the primarily
European colonization of Palestine, i.e., the creation and enlargement of
Israel. Their participation in the current Iraqi fiasco represents the fourth
time the British have invaded Iraq in the last century. British subterfuge in
carving up the Mideast into separate nations so angered the Arabs that, in the
period between the First and Second World Wars, Arab countries such as Saudi
Arabia welcomed only American -- and expressly forbid the British -- companies
to exploit their oil.
Two cosmic truths: Allah, in his wisdom, put more than three quarters of the
world's oil reserves in Moslem countries; Henry Ford, in his wisdom, put more
than three quarters of the world's consumption of oil in non-Moslem countries.
And a disproportionately large amount of this oil is consumed in Los Angeles,
more than 1% of the world's total consumption.
When he was 15, Mohammad moved to LA to live with his sister who was a resident
there. He went to high school and was a member of a street gang where he learned
the facts of life and the American way. He managed to survive and graduate from
that primary education program and was studying computer science -- hence, the
expert advice he gave me about my Internet problems -- at a local community
college when the World Trade Center towers took a fall. If 9/11 had not
happened, Mohammad -- bright guy that he is, a handsome well-tanned Hi-Tek Dude,
an Omar Sharif of the digital desert -- would probably by now be burning gas
from Iraq (petrol) while driving an expensive imported sports car or monstrous
Humvee around the squirrel cage of LA freeways as he commuted to his high-paying
IT job. Instead, being a Muslim of the most suspicious sort, a young & swarthy
Palestinean suspect -- he was the first to go, to be booted out of California's
Promised Land. And so Fate had him working for a pittance at a menial job in a
hotel in Amman, waiting to help me with Bill Gates's nightmare and tell me
realities of the cosmic tribal hierachy.
Not only the oil, but also the drugs flow from the Third World to the First
World -- the CIA makes sure that happens. You can't reward your friends in
banana republic dictatorships if they can't sell their drugs for big bucks in
LA. The US invaded Viet Nam and soon the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia was
supplying much of the world's heroin; then the US invaded Afghanistan and now it
supplies most of the world's opium poppies. The world's cocaine comes from South
America, and the previous George Bush president, Dubya's father, before he was
president, was head of the CIA back in the 1970's. George then arranged for his
good buddy, Noriega, of Panama to manage and profit from a large part of the
drug flow from South America to the US -- and George paid him a $100,000 for
doing such a good job. Noriega was pretty cool, he was the strong man in charge
of Panama, but one day he woke up and decided he was so cool that he didn't have
to listen to George anymore. But now George was the President, and he sent the
US Marines into Panama to bust Noriega's ass, arrest him for doing his job --
drug trafficking -- and in the process a few thousand innocent bystanders got
wasted ...
Bin Laden started working with the CIA back in the 1980's along with the many
mujahidin the CIA had recruited from all over the Moslem world to come fight the
Soviets in Afghanistan. But Bin Laden is not stupid; he is exceptionally sharp,
e.g., he studied language at Oxford when he was 14 in 1971, and learned fast
about the true nature of the CIA and US imperialism. He did not allow himself to
be set up as a sitting duck like Noriega or Saddam Hussein -- he wasn't planning
to die on a Christian cross for America's sins. Nor did he allow himself to be
liquidated by the CIA -- the fate of hundreds of his former mujahidin
comrades-in-arms who were massacred in the Mazar-i-Sharif prison by US allies as
instructed by the CIA during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 because the
mujahidin remembered too much about their CIA friends from the old days of
fighting the Russians.
Khaled was a young romantic who had a girlfriend in Baghdad, but he had never
traveled outside of the Mideast. We traded emails a few times after I left
Jordan, and a week and a half after the attack on Iraq started, I received this
email from him:
--------------------------------------------------------
I have not heard from Khaled since.
By contrast, because of his experience in the gangs & LA & or whatever,
Mohammad, is a realist. He told me the US will try to find a replacement for
Saddam who satisfies the contradictory criteria: the candidate must be ruthless
enough to do whatever it takes to suppress the Iraqi resistance and create a
stable environment conducive to oil exploitation but at the same time must be
willing to take orders from the US. The US will try one replacement after
another -- one like Chalabi who is incompetent, the next won't know how to
protect himself and will get wasted, etc. This is the South Viet Nam syndrome
that led to the parade of US-created puppet presidents -- searching for Mr.
Right -- that ended when the North Vietnamese entered Saigon. The desired
personality who is bloodthirstily competent tends to megalomania and is prone to
waking up one morning and telling the US to go to Hell.
However, at the rate things are now going with the new re-Ba'athification
program in Iraq, I suspect that one day soon, Bush, like some latter-day Billy
Graham, will fly to Baghdad and have a special prayer meeting with Saddam
Hussein who will be born again and come to accept Bush as his Saviour, the new
Messiah of Christian Capitalism. And once he is back in the saddle again, it
won't be long before the born-again Saddam is burning members of the Shia
resistance at the stake using petrol supplied by Exxon, and Iraqi oil will be
flowing out into the world again and the profits will be flowing into the bank
accounts of big US oil companies -- MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
or maybe that's just Bush's wet dream ...