Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Saurian Tail wrote:No need to worry about all those deaths. It was all worth it. The investment in Iraq is about to pay off ... it was "absolutely, absolutely justified" to quote the US Ambassador. The quote highlighted in red below is perhaps the most direct I have seen.US envoy says Iraq critical to global energy needs
By Anwar Faruqi | AFP – Sat, Jul 2, 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/us-envoy-says-ira ... 52638.html
The US ambassador in Baghdad said on Saturday that the State Department has asked for a $6.2 billion budget for Iraq in 2012, underscoring that its oil and gas reserves were critical for the world's future energy needs.
"This country is on a glide path to increase its oil exports," James Jeffrey told reporters at the sprawling US embassy in Baghdad, the world's largest.
The embassy plans to double in size next year to 16,000 personnel, when it takes over many military tasks after US troops pull out of Iraq at the end of this year, including military sales and training of Iraqi security forces.
Nearly 50,000 American troops still remain, down from a high of 170,000 after the 2003 US-led invasion.
"Right now they are at about 2.2 million barrels (of oil) per day. They could go as high as four to six million within four or five years," he said, noting that energy-related facilities remained vulnerable to insurgent attacks.
"There's no other source of millions of new barrels in the pipeline anywhere in the world," Jeffrey said. "The implications on the price per barrel are dramatic."
Saudi Arabia, the only producer inside the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries with an extra production capacity of about 1 million barrels per day (bpd), is able to control global prices, Jeffrey noted.
He said that Iraq was also critical to Europe's future gas needs.
"The only source of enough gas for Europe to become somewhat more diversified in energy sources -- or gas sources -- is Iraq," he said. "Azeri gas is not sufficient, Turkmen gas is many years off."
Iraq sits on one of the world's largest oil reserves -- 143 billion barrels by Baghdad's own estimates. It also has the world's 11th largest gas reserves, but decades of sanctions and wars have prevented effective production.
Current gas production -- all of it associated gas from oil wells -- is 42.5 million cubic metres per day, but half is burned off in flares from oil wells, according to Baghdad-based analyst Ruba Husari.
"Given the criticality of Iraq, given the investment we've made in it... the effort that we need to make and the amount of money required to make it is absolutely -- absolutely -- justified," Jeffrey said.
He added that his top concern for Iraq's future stability was insurgent Shiite groups that were beholden to neighbouring Iran.
"Not getting some of these militias under control can undercut rule of law and governance in those areas where they are allowed to roll around free," Jeffrey said.
He said two of the groups, Ketaeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahel al-Haq, "are nothing more than thuggish clones" of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
Last week Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told AFP that the two groups, plus the Promised Day Brigade, were responsible for attacks against US forces, which last month suffered their worst casualties in three years with 14 soldiers killed, most in rocket attacks.
Buchanan accused Iran of supplying more lethal weapons to those groups.
Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi dismissed as "ridiculous lies" US claims that Tehran smuggled weapons to Iraq and Afghanistan, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Saturday.
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/co ... ntion.html
An Urgent Call for Humanitarian Intervention
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 08 July 2011 11:40
Worrying news this week from the Middle East, as Jason Ditz reports:
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today blasted calls for Sunnis to consider a secessionist movement in the nation’s west, insisting that any effort to form an autonomous region or to secede outright would lead to bloodshed. “If it happens, people will fight each other and blood will reach to the knee,” insisted Maliki.
Wait a minute! [/url]
Is this a national leader using extreme rhetoric to threaten condign punishment against those who rebel against his government? Isn’t that what Moamar Gadafy was accused of doing? Wasn’t this indeed the whole casus belli of West’s war on Libya?
Then we must immediately intervene militarily to save the innocent civilians of western Iraq from this threatened bloodbath! We’d better send troops into Iraq right away to stop this raging heinous monster!
For as every heart-sworn humanitarian interventionist knows, the presence of death-dealing Western military power is the best guarantee of a peaceful, stable, happy regime -- especially in those benighted countries where the grubby little darkies can't be trusted to sort out their own affairs.
Maliki Vows Bloodshed if Sunnis Try to Secede
Parliament Speaker Nujaifi Suggested Secession Over Unfair Treatment
by Jason Ditz, July 07, 2011
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki today blasted calls for Sunnis to consider a secessionist movement in the nation’s west, insisting that any effort to form an autonomous region or to secede outright would lead to bloodshed.
“If it happens, people will fight each other and blood will reach to the knee,” insisted Maliki, whose Shi’ite “State of Law” Party is currently ruling in a coalition with support from the Shi’ite Iraqi National Alliance bloc.
Tensions between the two religious factions have been on the rise for years, and the 2010 election, which saw the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya bloc winning a plurality but winding up mostly irrelevant in ruling the nation has many Sunnis convinced they have no real say in their government.
Indeed, top Iraqiya figure Osama al-Nujaifi, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, recently warned that secession was vital as a check on national power, and could be exercised if the Sunni minority did not receive more equitable treatment. Nujaifi’s brother, Atheel, is the governor of the Nineveh Province, and has come under fire for the sectarian nature of his faction’s government.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html
Friday, Aug 12, 2011 11:56 ET
Iraq foots the bill for its own destruction
While Glenn Greenwald is away this week, Murtaza Hussain, who blogs at Revolution by the Book, will be filing periodic guest posts.
By Murtaza Hussain
When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.
Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s "free Iraq." In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to "liberate" the Iraqi people.
In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop of massive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.
Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to "pay back" the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.
The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of "liberation" speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.
Murtaza Hussain blogs at Revolution by the Book and is on Twitter at @MazMHussain.
27 March 2006
REFERENCE: AL G/SO 214 (33-23) USA 6/2006
Excellency,
I have the honour to address you in my capacity as Special
Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary
executions pursuant to Commission on Human Rights resolution
2004/37.
I would like to draw the attention of your Government to
information I have received regarding a raid conducted by
the Multinational Forces (MNF) on 15 March 2006 in the house
of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee, a farmer living in the outskirts
of Al-Iss Haqi District in Balad (Salah-El-Din Governorate).
I have received various reports indicating that at least 10
persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife
Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three
children Hawra'a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5
months old), Faiz's mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74),
Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces Asma'a Yousif
Ma'arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf (aged
3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi
(aged 23) were killed during the raid.
According to the information received, American troops
approached Mr. Faiz's home in the early hours of 15 March
¶2006. It would appear that when the MNF approached the
house, shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued
for some 25 minutes. The MNF troops entered the house,
handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the
initial MNF intervention, a US air raid ensued that
destroyed the house.
cont http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/04/06GE ... ml#par2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/30/ ... -war/print
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.
Weekend Edition December 30-32, 2011
Leaving Iraq, Remembering Vietnam
The Lies of War
by JACK RANDOM
“You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.
“The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy –- it’s a lesson about our national character. Because of you, we are ending these wars in a way that will make America stronger and the world more secure.”
– President Barack Obama, Address to Troops at Fort Bragg, December 14, 2011
The lies of war are forgotten as easily and readily as the wrappings of Christmas or the resolutions of a new year. Like a child still in diapers, the lessons of war must be learned again and again until finally they are taken to heart.
The lies of the war in Iraq are so easily buried that six out of seven Republican candidates for president of the United States have publicly pledged to go to war in Iran based on the identical unsubstantiated claims that led us to war in Iraq. The lessons of that ill-fated war, the largest strategic blunder since Vietnam, are so readily put behind us that even before that colossal disaster officially ended, six of seven Republican candidates pledged his and her allegiance to the same neoconservative brain trust that guided us into the snake pit. And the White House is not far behind.
Those of us who remember the war in Vietnam and the years we committed to ending it will find the bipartisan rationalizations of the Iraq War all too familiar and profoundly disturbing.
The lie that drove the Vietnam War was the Domino Theory: If we lose one nation to the red menace of communism, then we will lose them all. On that basis, three generations of western powers (Britain, France and America) chose a little country on the doorstep of China as their playground of war.
It required over three million lives to prove that a child’s game was not a legitimate basis for a foreign policy. It only made sense because it fit on a bumper sticker and because our leaders were dominated by military minds in search of power, glory and the spoils of empire.
The great postwar lie of Vietnam was that we lost the war because we were never fully committed. The politicians in Washington held our generals back. Between 1965 and 1968 we dropped over a million tons of missiles, bombs and rockets on North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but we were never fully committed. We sprayed 12 million gallons of the deadly chemical defoliant Agent Orange over wide swaths of Southeast Asia but we were not fully committed. At the height of the war in 1968 we deployed over half a million soldiers, including the first conscripts since the Korean War, but we were not fully committed.
Short of nuclear bombs, we were as committed to that unjustifiable war as any nation could have been yet the lies of war survive. The lies of war take on mythological characteristics and believing them becomes a ritual of patriotism.
Little wonder we commit the same strategic mistakes, the same errors in judgment, the same acts of criminal inhumanity, the same ultimately desperate and self-destroying measures over and over again.
In the wake of Vietnam, America’s leaders were confined to small-scale interventions until George Herbert Walker Bush, former Director of the CIA, conspired to wage war in Iraq. Though the Gulf War was short-lived, its military success inspired President Bush to announce: “The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”
Forever was not a long time as his eldest son was to initiate two wars that brought the specter of Vietnam back into focus. One was the ongoing ten-year war in Afghanistan and the other was a return to his father’s war in Iraq.
Few will recall the lies of the father but the lies of the son are too fresh to be so soon forgotten. They include not only the infamous weapons of mass destruction but also the later claim that virtually all the world believed the lie. For the record, we lost our appeal before the United Nations Security Council to justify military action on the basis of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The International Atomic Energy Agency thoroughly debunked our claims and the measure was withdrawn when it became clear that the Council would vote overwhelmingly against our cause for war.
Members of the Bush administration falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was a party to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. They falsely claimed that Iraq harbored and worked with Al Qaeda operatives. These claims were so clearly and demonstrably false that even President Bush was forced ultimately to disavow them.
The lies of war had served their purpose. Once the first bombs lit up the Baghdad skyline, supporting the war became a matter of patriotism.
The next lie was that our actions had nothing to do with Iraqi oil and everything to do with establishing democracy in the Arab world. That lie was exposed when our first action was to protect the oil fields. Well before an Iraqi government could be established we contracted Iraqi oil to the highest corporate bidders. Mission accomplished.
The lies of war are really not that difficult to detect. It only requires an open mind, an appetite for facts, and a willingness to think.
The lies of the Iraq War will survive unless those of us who witnessed them, from the soldiers who sacrificed to the citizens who supported and opposed them, unless each of us vows to accept the truth and pass that horrid account forward to future generations.
We can be grateful that a president elected largely on the promise of ending the Iraq War has officially done so, though we remain mindful that thousands of American-hired mercenaries remain behind to guard the largest diplomatic embassy on earth.
We understand at our stage of development that a president cannot apologize for the harm done in the name of our nation.
We understand the wisdom of separating the war from the warrior.
We know the president cannot inform our soldiers that they were fighting the wrong war for the wrong reasons.
But when the president announces that we have created an opportunity for the Iraqis to thrive and prosper as a democratic nation, he is not only being disingenuous; he is perpetuating the lies of war. When the president declares that our fight in Iraq was for Iraqi freedom and international justice, he is paving the way for another unjust war in America’s future. He is attempting to bury the specter of Vietnam.
Leaving Afghanistan for another day, we should all agree that the Iraq War was wrong from its inception. It was never about democracy. It was never about justice. It was always about oil and strategic advantage.
Wrong is wrong.
Jack Random is the author of Jazzman Chronicles (Crow Dog Press) and Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press.)
JackRiddler wrote:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/30/ ... -war/print
“You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11.
“The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy –- it’s a lesson about our national character. Because of you, we are ending these wars in a way that will make America stronger and the world more secure.”
– President Barack Obama, Address to Troops at Fort Bragg, December 14, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/16/ ... ents/print
August 16, 2012
They Don't Want to be Us
Imperial Reconstruction and Its Discontents
by PETER VAN BUREN
Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44 billion American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad. Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food.
I flew home that same day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those horses were scrabbling to get by. To this day I’m left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its owninfrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”?
The Good War(s)
With the success of the post-World War II Marshall Plan in Europe and the economic miracle in Japan, rebuilding other countries gained a certain imperial patina. Both took relatively little money and time. The reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost only $32 billion and $17 billion, respectively (in 2010 dollars), in large part because both had been highly educated, industrialized powerhouses before their wartime destruction.
In 2003, still tumescent with post-9/11 rage and dreams of global glory, anything seemed possible to the men and women of the Bush administration, who would cite the German and Japanese examples of just what the U.S. could do as they entered Iraq. Following what seemed like a swift military defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the plan had gotten big and gone long. It was nothing less than this: remake the entire Middle East in the American image.
The country’s mighty military was to sweep through Iraq, then Syria — Marines I knew told me personally that they were issued maps of Syria in March 2003 — then Iran, quickly set up military bases and garrisons (“enduring camps”), create Washington-friendly governments, pour in American technology and culture, bring in the crony corporations under the rubric of “reconstruction,” privatize everything, stand up new proxy militaries under the rubric of regime change, and forever transform the region.
Once upon a time, the defeated Japanese and Germans had become allies and, better yet, consumers. Now, almost six decades later, no one in the Bush administration had a doubt the same would happen in Iraq — and the Middle East would follow suit at minimal cost, creating the greatest leap forward for aPax Americana since the Spanish-American War. Added bonus: a “sea of oil.”
By 2010, when I wrote We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, the possibility that some level of success might be close by still occupied some official minds. American boots remained on the ground in Mesopotamia and looked likely to stay on for years in at least a few of the massive permanent bases we had built there. A sort-of elected government was more or less in place, and in the press interviews I did in response to my book I was regularly required to defend its thesis that reconstruction in Iraq had failed almost totally, and that the same process was going down in Afghanistan as well. It was sometimes a tough sell. After all, how could we truly fail, being plucky Americans, historically equipped like no one else with plenty of bootstraps and know-how and gumption.
Failure Every Which Way
Now, it’s definitive. Reconstruction in Iraq has failed. Dismally. The U.S. couldn’t even restore the country’s electric system or give a majority of its people potable water. The accounts of that failure still pour out. Choose your favorites; here are just two recent ones of mine: a report that a $200 millionyear-long State Department police training program had shown no results (none, nada), in part because the Iraqis had been completely uninterested in it; and a long official list of major reconstruction projects uncompleted, with billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, all carefully catalogued by the now-defunctSpecial Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction.
Failure, in fact, was the name of the game when it came to the American mission. Just tote up the score: the Iraqi government is moving ever closer to Iran; the U.S. occupation, which built 505 bases in the country with the thought that U.S. troops might remain garrisoned there for generations, ended without a single base in U.S. hands (none, nada); no gushers of cheap oil leapt USA-wards nor did profits from the above leap into the coffers of American oil companies; and there was a net loss of U.S. prestige and influence across the region. And that would just be the beginning of the list from hell.
Even former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s accomplice in the invasion of Iraq and the woman after whom Chevron Oil oncenamed a double-hulled oil tanker, now admits that “we didn’t understand how broken Iraq was as a society and we tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out. And we really should have rebuilt Iraq outside Baghdad in. We should have worked with the tribes. We should have worked with the provinces. We should have had smaller projects than the large ones that we had.”
Strange that when I do media interviews now, only two years later, nobody even thinks to ask “Did we succeed in Iraq?” or “Will reconstruction pay off?” The question du jour has finally shifted to: “Why did we fail?”
Corruption and Vanity Projects
Why exactly did we fail to reconstruct Iraq, and why are we failing in Afghanistan? (Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, is the Afghan version of We Meant Well in detailing the catastrophic outcomes of reconstruction in that never-ending war.) No doubt more books, and not a few theses, will be written, noting the massive corruption, the overkill of pouring billions of dollars into poor, occupied countries, the disorganization behind the effort, the pointlessly self-serving vanity projects — Internet classes in towns without electricity — and the abysmal quality of the greedy contractors, on-the-make corporations, and lame bureaucrats sent in to do the job. Serious lessons will be extracted, inevitable comparisons will be made to post-World War II Germany and Japan and think tanks will sprout like mushrooms on rotted wood to try to map out how to do it better next time.
For the near term a reluctant acknowledgment of our failing economy may keep the U.S. out of major reconstruction efforts abroad. Robert Gates, who succeeded Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, told a group of West Point cadets that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” Still, the desire to remake other countries — could Syria be next? — hovers in the background of American foreign policy, just waiting for the chance to rise again.
The standard theme of counterinsurgency theory (COIN in the trade) is “terrorists take advantage of hunger and poverty.” Foreigners building stuff is, of course, the answer, if only we could get it right. Such is part of the justification for the onrushing militarization of Africa, which carries with it a reconstruction component (even if on a desperately reduced scale, thanks to the tightening finances of the moment). There are few historical examples of COIN ever really working and many in which failed, but the idea is too attractive and its support industry too well established for it to simply go away.
Why Reconstruction at All?
Then there’s that other why question: Why, in our zeal to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, we never considered spending a fraction as much to rebuild Detroit, New Orleans, or Cleveland (projects that, unlike Afghanistan and Iraq in their heyday, have never enjoyed widespread support)?
I use the term “reconstruction” for convenience, but it is important to understand what the U.S. means by it. Once corruption and pure greed are strained out (most projects in Iraq and Afghanistan were simply vehicles forcontractors to suck money out of the government) and the vanity projects crossed off (building things and naming them after the sitting ambassador was a popular suck-up technique), what’s left is our desire for them to be like us.
While, dollar-for-dollar, corruption and contractor greed account for almost all the money wasted, the idea that, deep down, we want the people we conquer to become mini-versions of us accounts for the rest of the drive and motivation. We want them to consume things as a lifestyle, shit in nice sewer systems, and send everyone to schools where, thanks to the new textbooks we’ve sponsored, they’ll learn more about… us. This explains why we funded pastry-making classes to try to turn Iraqi women into small business owners, why an obsession with holding mediagenic elections in Iraq smothered nascent grassroots democracy (remember all those images of purple fingers?), why displacing family farms by introducing large-scale agribusiness seemed so important, and so forth.
By becoming versions of us, the people we conquer would, in our eyes, redeem themselves from being our enemies. Like a perverse view of rape, reconstruction, if it ever worked, would almost make it appear that they wanted to be violated by the American military so as to benefit from being rebuilt in the American fashion. From Washington’s point of view, there’s really no question here, no why at all. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to be us? And that, in turn, justifies everything. Think of it as an up-to-date take on that classic line from Vietnam, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
Americans have always worn their imperialism uncomfortably, even when pursuing it robustly. The British were happy to carve out little green enclaves of home, and to tame — brutally, if necessary — the people they conquered. The United States is different, maybe because of the lip service politicians need to pay to our founding ideals of democracy and free choice.
We’re not content merely to tame people; we want to change them, too, and make them want it as well. Fundamentalist Muslims will send their girls to school, a society dominated by religion will embrace consumerism, and age-old tribal leaders will give way to (U.S.-friendly, media-savvy) politicians, even while we grow our archipelago of military bases and our corporations make out like bandits. It’s our way of reconciling Freedom and Empire, the American Way. Only problem: it doesn’t work. Not for a second. Not at all. Nothing.Nada.
From this point of view, of course, not spending “reconstruction” money at home makes perfect sense. Detroit, et al., already are us. Free choice is in play, as citizens of those cities “choose” not to get an education and choose to allow their infrastructure to fade. From an imperial point of view it makes perfectly good sense. Erecting a coed schoolhouse in Kandahar or a new sewer systemin Fallujah offers so many more possibilities to enhance empire. The home front is old news, with growth limited only to reviving a status quo at huge cost.
Once it becomes clear that reconstruction is for us, not them, its purpose to enrich our contractors, fuel our bureaucrats’ vanity, and most importantly, justify our imperial actions, why it fails becomes a no-brainer. It has to fail (not that we really care). They don’t want to be us. They have been them for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They may welcome medicines that will save their children’s lives, but hate the culture that the U.S. slipstreams in like an inoculation with them.
Failure in the strict sense of the word is not necessarily a problem for Washington. Our purpose is served by the appearance of reconstructing. We need to tell ourselves we tried, and those (dark, dirty, uneducated, Muslim, terrorist, heathen) people we just ran over with a tank actually screwed this up. And OK, sure, if a few well-connected contractors profit along the way, more power to them.
Here’s the bottom line: a nation spends its resources on what’s important to it. Failed reconstruction elsewhere turns out to be more important to us than successful reconstruction here at home. Such is the American way of empire.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq, the Middle East, and U.S. diplomacy at his blog, We Meant Well. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Bush Deleted Intel Report Passage Saying Saddam Would Only Attack in Self-Defense
New film on the prosecution of Bush to be released
Of all the many Bush administration deceptions employed to frighten the American people into supporting the invasion of Iraq, perhaps the most important and best-kept secret is the doctoring of the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, the "gold standard" report which combined the considered opinion of 16 US intelligence agencies. In the run-up to the invasion, there were two versions of the report: the classified report which the intelligence agencies gave to Bush, and the one that the Bush administration gave to Congress.
Contrary to the mindless repetition at the time from pundits such as Sean Hannity that Congress was "looking at the same intelligence," it was not.
In the summary section called "Key Judgements" of the classified report which Bush was given, US intelligence said that Saddam Hussein would likely only support terrorist attacks on the US in self-defense, if he felt threatened. The classified National Intelligence Estimate 2002 (NEI 2002) read on page 8:
"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.
Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."
In other words, the classified, full version of the report that Bush had was saying that Saddam knew that if any part or role in a terrorist attack was ever traced back to him, it would be national suicide.
This was contrary to statements by Bush, Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that Saddam presented a direct, immediate threat to the United States, and that he was ready to attack the United States "in as little as 45 minutes." In the version given to the public and to Congress, this opinion was completely deleted from the "Key Judgements" section.
This may all seem ancient history, unless, of course, you are one of thousands of soldiers living with a brain rattle injury, missing limbs, burn disfigurations, or worse, one of 5,000 families living with an empty dinner table seat which will never be filled.
The complete classified version in fact said that a US invasion of Iraq would make it more likely that Saddam would support terrorist attacks, not less likely.
Jonathan S. Landay of Knight-Ridder Newspapers wrote in "Doubts, Dissent Stripped from Public Version of Iraq Assessment":
"Deleted from the public version was a line in the classified report that cast doubt on whether Saddam was prepared to support terrorist attacks on the United States, a danger that Bush and his top aides raised repeatedly in making their case for war."
More than 20 countries currently possess some form of weapon of mass destruction, i.e. chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. The most important assessment is the intent of the regime in possessing them. Famed Los Angeles county prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and who wrote the book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," gave testimony before the Rep. John Conyers' Judiciary Committee in 2008 in which he told of the doctoring of the report.
Bugliosi was listening to the president explain on television what an imminent threat Saddam was. This was soon after, in the course of his research, Bugliosi had asked a congressional staffer to send him a copy of the public, unclassified NEI. What Bugliosi received in the mail was the classified version. As Bugliosi listened to Bush make the case that Saddam was a threat who intended to attack the United States, Bugliosi had in front of him the classified intelligence report which said exactly the opposite. Bugliosi was astounded.
Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" has recently been made into a film, "The Prosecution of an American President," for release this October. With the Italian Supreme Court just having recently upheld the conviction of 23 CIA operatives, including the Milan station chief, for kidnap and torture in the Global War on Terror, the wheels of justice cannot apparently always be stopped by Obama administration pressure.
It is predicted that the Italian government will now request the extradition of former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, who has been sentenced to nine years by the Italian Court, and the other agents. The extradition of American war criminals may now become a treaty issue affecting alliances and the stationing of US troops.
But ultimately, the strongest signals to be watched for will come from the soldiers and the families who unhesitatingly answered a call to defend America, but who had critical facts hidden from them in the course of the national debate preceding the invasion.
National Intelligence Estimate 2002, Classified Version.
National Intelligence Estimate 2002, De-Classified Version.
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