Baghdad tears down security barriers
Government starts to remove network of concrete walls set up at height of Iraq's sectarian conflict
Security may still be unpredictable, but officials in the Iraqi capital are planning to tear down Baghdad's network of concrete barriers and razor wire in the coming months as a measure of reconciliation creeps through its neighbourhoods.
The towering grey concrete barriers, known as T-walls, sprang up as sectarian conflict intensified in 2006 and 2007. Streets were closed and checkpoints established. Entire communities were isolated or divided, and familiar landmarks all but disappeared. Residents cowered or fled.
Now, improved security means that teams of cranes and trucks are stealing out under cover of darkness from municipal depots across the capital and removing the barriers, street by street.
A ministry of defence spokesman told the Guardian most of the concrete barriers would be gone by the end of 2009. "They are now the biggest obstacle to breathing new life into our city," said Ali Dawoud, the head of reconstruction and development at Baghdad's city council. He said that since January, 10-15% of the streets that were closed had been reopened and the barrier removal programme was growing month by month, security permitting.
Security concerns still abound. Bombs and mortars are still a regular occurrence in Baghdad; violence has flared in Iraq before a June 30 deadline for US troops to withdraw from urban areas; and yesterday the volatility of the situation was underscored by a car bomb in the Shia heartland of Nasiriya that killed more than 30 people.
But the Baghdad wall removal plan is part of a wider effort to beautify a city scarred by years of conflict. Sabah Sami, a spokesman for the Baghdad municipality, said: "Our role is to rehabilitate the streets and repair the damage made by the concrete walls to streets and pavements and because of their weight to the city's drainage and sewerage system." Each T-wall weighs about five tons. "Once they have gone from an area, we will clean and pave and then paint and plant," Sami said.
The only barriers to stay would be those protecting ministries and other official buildings.
Nobody knows how many of the barriers were deployed in the capital. Some residents likened them to tombstones, others to a thousand Berlin Walls.
But as a result of the beautification campaign, city authorities find themselves in possession of thousands of unwanted reinforced concrete slabs, standard measurement 12ft by 5ft.
On a recent trip to a southern suburb, the Guardian glimpsed a T-wall graveyard, which appeared to stretch for miles.
Suggestions have ranged from deploying them along Iraq's notoriously porous borders to massing them into a large heap as a monument to the madness of war.
"There's really not much you can do with them, other than build more walls," offered an engineer serving with the US military in Iraq.
Original article posted here.
Showing posts with label Iraq in Fragments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq in Fragments. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2009
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Breaking Babylon
Wrecked Iraq
What was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society - economically, socially, and technologically - has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world
Michael Schwartz.
What the Good News from Iraq Really Means
As the Smoke Clears in Iraq: Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple — usually front page – reports on the country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went by without a mention of the war.
The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis disappeared. There are still occasional stories about high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions, and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life.
A typical "return to normal life" piece appeared October 11th in the New York Times under the headline, "Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety." Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her students by assuring them that "security has returned to Baghdad, city of peace."
Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam Dagher hedged the "return to normal" theme. Here was his first paragraph in full:
"On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama looked uneasy standing in formation under an already stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates listened to a teacher's pep talk — probably a necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn playground."
This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school, amplified in the body of Dagher's article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated) decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign reporters to move around enough to report on the real conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided US readers with a far fuller picture of the devastation George Bush's war wrought.
In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land. The major newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their staffs there and — with a relative trickle of exceptions like Dagher's fine report — what's left is often little more than a collection of pronouncements from the US military, or Iraqi and American political leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American public's image of the situation there.
In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of a kind that can always be easily explained in a short report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on artillery and air power during the worst days of fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure. Political and economic changes imposed by the American occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very tools they would now need to launch a major reconstruction effort in their own country.
As a consequence, what was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society — economically, socially, and technologically — has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world. Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches, which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used until US forces withdraw from the country, provides a glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out of the abyss into which the US invasion pushed it.
Consider only a small sampling of the devastation.
The Economy: Fundamental to the American occupation was the desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein's Baathist state apparatus and the economic system it commanded. A key aspect of this was the closing down of the vast majority of state-owned economic enterprises (with the exception of those involved in oil extraction and electrical generation).
In all, 192 establishments, adding up to 35% of the Iraqi economy, were shuttered in the summer and fall of 2003. These included basic manufacturing processes like leather tanning and tractor assembly that supplied other sectors, transportation firms that dominated national commerce, and maintenance enterprises that housed virtually all the technicians and engineers qualified to service the electrical, water, oil, and other infrastructural systems in the country.
Justified as the way to bring a modern free-enterprise system to backward Iraq, this draconian program was put in place by the President's proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III. The result? An immediate depression that only deepened in the years to follow.
One measure of this policy's impact can be found in the demise of the leather goods industry, a key pre-invasion sector of Iraq's non-petroleum economy. When a government-owned tanning operation, which all by itself employed 30,000 workers and supplied leather to an entire industry, was shuttered in late 2003, it deprived shoe-makers and other leather goods establishments of their key resource. Within a year, employment in the industry had dropped from 200,000 workers to a mere 20,000.
By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment. Meanwhile, the country's agriculture, a key component of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling of government establishments and services. The lush farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers suffered badly. The once-thriving date palm industry was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations of pests when the occupation eliminated a government-run insecticide spraying program. Even oil refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum activities were shuttered.
This economic devastation fueled the insurgency by generating desperation, anger, and willing recruits. The explosion of resistance, in turn, tended to obscure — at least for western news services — the desperate circumstances under which ordinary Iraqis labored.
As violence has subsided in Baghdad and elsewhere, demands for relief have come to the fore. These are not easily answered by a still largely non-functional central government in Baghdad whose administrative and economic apparatus was long ago dismantled, and many of whose key technical personnel had fled into exile. Meanwhile, in early 2006, the American occupation declared that further reconstruction work would be the responsibility of Iraqis. It is not clear into what channels the growing discontent over an economy that remains largely in the tank and a government that still cannot deliver ordinary services will flow.
Electricity: A critical factor in Iraq's collapse has been its decaying electrical grid. In areas where the insurgency raged, facilities involved in producing and transmitting electricity were targeted, both by the insurgents and US forces, each trying to deprive the other of needed resources. In addition, Bremer eliminated the government-owned maintenance and engineering enterprises that had been holding the electrical system together ever since the U.N. sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War deprived Iraq of material needed to repair and upgrade its facilities. Maintenance and replacement contracts were given instead to multinational companies with little knowledge of the existing system and — due to cost-plus contracting — every incentive to replace facilities with their own proprietary technology. In the meantime, many Iraqi technicians left the country.
The successor Iraqi governments, deprived of the capacity to manage the system's reconstruction, continued the US occupation policy of contracting with foreign companies. Even in areas of the country relatively unaffected by the fighting, those companies did the lucrative thing, replacing entire sections of the electric grid, often with inappropriate but exquisitely expensive equipment and technology.
A combination of factors — including pressure from the insurgency, the soaring costs of security, and an almost unparalleled record of endemic waste and corruption — led to costs well beyond those originally offered for the already overpriced projects. Many were then abandoned before completion as funding ran out. Completed projects were often shabbily done and just as often proved incompatible with existing facilities, introducing new inefficiencies.
In one altogether-too-typical case, Bechtel installed 26 natural gas turbines in areas where no natural gas was available. The turbines were then converted to oil, which reduced their capacity by 50% and led to a rapid sludge build-up in the equipment requiring expensive maintenance no Iraqi technicians had been trained to perform. In location after location, the turbines became inoperative.
Even before the invasion, the decrepit electrical system could not meet national demand. No province had uninterrupted service and certain areas had far less than 12 hours of service per day. The vast investments by the occupation and its successor regimes have increased electrical capacity since the invasion of 2003, but these gains have not come close to keeping up with skyrocketing demand created by the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, private security personnel, and occupation officials, as well as by the introduction of all manner of electronic devices and products in the post-invasion period. Recent U.N. reports indicate that, in the last year, electrical capacity has slipped to less than half of demand. With priority going to military and government operations, many Baghdad neighborhoods experience less than two hours of publicly provided electricity a day, forcing citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive and polluting gasoline generators.
In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that they had experienced inadequate electricity in the previous month. During the heat of summer and the cold of winter, these shortages create real health emergencies.
In 2004, the U.N. estimated that $20 billion in reconstruction funds would be needed for a fully operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from $40 billion to $80 billion.
Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow through the country from the northwest to the southeast, have since time immemorial irrigated the rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the fish that are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided water for animal and human consumption. American-style warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and air power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in upstream Sunni cities like Tal Afar, Falluja, and Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One result was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage systems. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, for instance, where much fighting has taken place and American air power was called in regularly, there is now a lake of sewage clearly visible on satellite photographs.
The ultimate destination of significant parts of the filth from devastated sewage systems was the two rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing through the streets and into those rivers has left them thoroughly contaminated. Their water can no longer be safely drunk by humans or animals, the remaining fish cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.
Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has proven woefully insufficient to handle this massive flow of contamination, while inadequate electric supplies insure that the country's few functional purification plants are less than effective.
In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely reconstructed, but repairs cannot even begin without a viable electrical system, a reinvigorated engineering and construction sector, and a government capable of marshalling these resources. None of these prerequisites currently exist.
Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the initial invasion, the US military often commandeered schools as forward bases, attracted by their well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and many rooms for offices and barracks. Two incidents in which American gunfire from an occupied elementary school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni city of Falluja may have been the literal sparks that started the insurgency. Many schools would subsequently be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles fought in or near them.
Under the US occupation's de-Baathification policy, thousands of teachers who belonged to the Baath Party were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of students teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government enterprises deprived the schools of supplies — including books and teaching materials — as well as urgently needed maintenance.
The American solution, as with the electric grid, was to hire multinational firms to repair the schools and rehabilitate school systems. The result was an orgy of corruption accompanied by very little practical aid. Local school officials complained that facilities with no windows, heating, or toilet facilities were repainted and declared fit for use.
The dwindling central government presence made schools inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with administrators, teachers, and especially college professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for ideological reasons. This, in turn, stimulated a mass exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from the country, removing precious human capital essential for future reconstruction.
Finally, in Baghdad, the US military began installing ten-foot tall cement walls around scores of communities and neighborhoods to wall off participants in the sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were often separated from their schools, reducing attendance at the few intact facilities to those students who happened to live within the imprisoning walls.
This fall, as some of these walls were dismantled, residents discovered that many of the schools were virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie neighborhood which "is falling apart, and overwhelmed by the children of almost 4,000 Shiite refugee families who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof is caving in, classroom floors and hallways are stripped bare, and in the playground a pile of burnt trash was smoldering."
The Dysfunctional Society: Much has been made in the US presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil surplus the Iraqi government built up in these last years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is currently being held in American financial institutions, with various American politicians threatening to confiscate it if it is not constructively spent. Yet even this bounty reflects the devastation of the war.
De-Baathification and subsequent chaos rendered the Iraqi government incapable of effectively administering projects that lay outside the fortified, American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad. A vast flight of the educated class to Syria, Jordan, and other countries also deprived it of the managers and technicians needed to undertake serious reconstruction on a large scale.
As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted for facility construction and reconstruction last year were even spent. Some government ministries spent less than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the large oil surpluses have become magnets for massive governmental corruption, further infuriating frustrated citizens who, after five years, still often lack the most basic services. Transparency International's 2008 "corruption perceptions index" listed Iraq as tied for 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.
The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land, housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their homes; many millions of others have been scarred by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of common criminality. Education and medical systems have essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous societies on earth.
As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and technical devastation became ever more entwined, reinforcing one another. The country's degraded sewage and water systems, for example, have spawned two consecutive years of widespread cholera. It seems likely that this year, the disease will only subside when the cold weather makes further contagion impossible, but this "solution" also guarantees its reoccurrence each year until water purification systems are rebuilt.
In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's once vaunted medical system, since two-thirds of the country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are often in a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain scarce, and equipment, if available at all, is outdated. The rebuilding of the water and medical systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the electrical system is restored to reasonable shape. Repair of the electrical grid awaits a reliable oil and gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and this cannot be constructed without the expertise of technicians who have left the country, or newly trained specialists that the educational system is now incapable of producing. And so it goes.
On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why American military leaders regularly insist that the country's current relative quiescence is, at best, "fragile." They believe only the most minimal reductions in US forces in Iraq (still hovering at close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.
Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities, military officials working close to the ground know that the country's state of disrepair, and an inability to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this could explode in further sectarian violence or yet another violent effort to expel the US forces from the country.
Michael Schwartz's new book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, 2008), has just been released. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His work on Iraq has appeared in numerous outlets, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. A video of him discussing "wrecked Iraq" can be seen by clicking here. His email address is ms42@optonline.net.
Original article posted here.
What was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society - economically, socially, and technologically - has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world
Michael Schwartz.
What the Good News from Iraq Really Means
As the Smoke Clears in Iraq: Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple — usually front page – reports on the country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went by without a mention of the war.
The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis disappeared. There are still occasional stories about high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions, and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life.
A typical "return to normal life" piece appeared October 11th in the New York Times under the headline, "Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety." Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her students by assuring them that "security has returned to Baghdad, city of peace."
Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam Dagher hedged the "return to normal" theme. Here was his first paragraph in full:
"On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama looked uneasy standing in formation under an already stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates listened to a teacher's pep talk — probably a necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn playground."
This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school, amplified in the body of Dagher's article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated) decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign reporters to move around enough to report on the real conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided US readers with a far fuller picture of the devastation George Bush's war wrought.
In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land. The major newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their staffs there and — with a relative trickle of exceptions like Dagher's fine report — what's left is often little more than a collection of pronouncements from the US military, or Iraqi and American political leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American public's image of the situation there.
In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of a kind that can always be easily explained in a short report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on artillery and air power during the worst days of fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure. Political and economic changes imposed by the American occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very tools they would now need to launch a major reconstruction effort in their own country.
As a consequence, what was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society — economically, socially, and technologically — has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world. Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches, which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used until US forces withdraw from the country, provides a glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out of the abyss into which the US invasion pushed it.
Consider only a small sampling of the devastation.
The Economy: Fundamental to the American occupation was the desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein's Baathist state apparatus and the economic system it commanded. A key aspect of this was the closing down of the vast majority of state-owned economic enterprises (with the exception of those involved in oil extraction and electrical generation).
In all, 192 establishments, adding up to 35% of the Iraqi economy, were shuttered in the summer and fall of 2003. These included basic manufacturing processes like leather tanning and tractor assembly that supplied other sectors, transportation firms that dominated national commerce, and maintenance enterprises that housed virtually all the technicians and engineers qualified to service the electrical, water, oil, and other infrastructural systems in the country.
Justified as the way to bring a modern free-enterprise system to backward Iraq, this draconian program was put in place by the President's proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III. The result? An immediate depression that only deepened in the years to follow.
One measure of this policy's impact can be found in the demise of the leather goods industry, a key pre-invasion sector of Iraq's non-petroleum economy. When a government-owned tanning operation, which all by itself employed 30,000 workers and supplied leather to an entire industry, was shuttered in late 2003, it deprived shoe-makers and other leather goods establishments of their key resource. Within a year, employment in the industry had dropped from 200,000 workers to a mere 20,000.
By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment. Meanwhile, the country's agriculture, a key component of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling of government establishments and services. The lush farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers suffered badly. The once-thriving date palm industry was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations of pests when the occupation eliminated a government-run insecticide spraying program. Even oil refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum activities were shuttered.
This economic devastation fueled the insurgency by generating desperation, anger, and willing recruits. The explosion of resistance, in turn, tended to obscure — at least for western news services — the desperate circumstances under which ordinary Iraqis labored.
As violence has subsided in Baghdad and elsewhere, demands for relief have come to the fore. These are not easily answered by a still largely non-functional central government in Baghdad whose administrative and economic apparatus was long ago dismantled, and many of whose key technical personnel had fled into exile. Meanwhile, in early 2006, the American occupation declared that further reconstruction work would be the responsibility of Iraqis. It is not clear into what channels the growing discontent over an economy that remains largely in the tank and a government that still cannot deliver ordinary services will flow.
Electricity: A critical factor in Iraq's collapse has been its decaying electrical grid. In areas where the insurgency raged, facilities involved in producing and transmitting electricity were targeted, both by the insurgents and US forces, each trying to deprive the other of needed resources. In addition, Bremer eliminated the government-owned maintenance and engineering enterprises that had been holding the electrical system together ever since the U.N. sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War deprived Iraq of material needed to repair and upgrade its facilities. Maintenance and replacement contracts were given instead to multinational companies with little knowledge of the existing system and — due to cost-plus contracting — every incentive to replace facilities with their own proprietary technology. In the meantime, many Iraqi technicians left the country.
The successor Iraqi governments, deprived of the capacity to manage the system's reconstruction, continued the US occupation policy of contracting with foreign companies. Even in areas of the country relatively unaffected by the fighting, those companies did the lucrative thing, replacing entire sections of the electric grid, often with inappropriate but exquisitely expensive equipment and technology.
A combination of factors — including pressure from the insurgency, the soaring costs of security, and an almost unparalleled record of endemic waste and corruption — led to costs well beyond those originally offered for the already overpriced projects. Many were then abandoned before completion as funding ran out. Completed projects were often shabbily done and just as often proved incompatible with existing facilities, introducing new inefficiencies.
In one altogether-too-typical case, Bechtel installed 26 natural gas turbines in areas where no natural gas was available. The turbines were then converted to oil, which reduced their capacity by 50% and led to a rapid sludge build-up in the equipment requiring expensive maintenance no Iraqi technicians had been trained to perform. In location after location, the turbines became inoperative.
Even before the invasion, the decrepit electrical system could not meet national demand. No province had uninterrupted service and certain areas had far less than 12 hours of service per day. The vast investments by the occupation and its successor regimes have increased electrical capacity since the invasion of 2003, but these gains have not come close to keeping up with skyrocketing demand created by the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, private security personnel, and occupation officials, as well as by the introduction of all manner of electronic devices and products in the post-invasion period. Recent U.N. reports indicate that, in the last year, electrical capacity has slipped to less than half of demand. With priority going to military and government operations, many Baghdad neighborhoods experience less than two hours of publicly provided electricity a day, forcing citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive and polluting gasoline generators.
In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that they had experienced inadequate electricity in the previous month. During the heat of summer and the cold of winter, these shortages create real health emergencies.
In 2004, the U.N. estimated that $20 billion in reconstruction funds would be needed for a fully operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from $40 billion to $80 billion.
Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow through the country from the northwest to the southeast, have since time immemorial irrigated the rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the fish that are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided water for animal and human consumption. American-style warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and air power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in upstream Sunni cities like Tal Afar, Falluja, and Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One result was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage systems. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, for instance, where much fighting has taken place and American air power was called in regularly, there is now a lake of sewage clearly visible on satellite photographs.
The ultimate destination of significant parts of the filth from devastated sewage systems was the two rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing through the streets and into those rivers has left them thoroughly contaminated. Their water can no longer be safely drunk by humans or animals, the remaining fish cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.
Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has proven woefully insufficient to handle this massive flow of contamination, while inadequate electric supplies insure that the country's few functional purification plants are less than effective.
In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely reconstructed, but repairs cannot even begin without a viable electrical system, a reinvigorated engineering and construction sector, and a government capable of marshalling these resources. None of these prerequisites currently exist.
Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the initial invasion, the US military often commandeered schools as forward bases, attracted by their well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and many rooms for offices and barracks. Two incidents in which American gunfire from an occupied elementary school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni city of Falluja may have been the literal sparks that started the insurgency. Many schools would subsequently be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles fought in or near them.
Under the US occupation's de-Baathification policy, thousands of teachers who belonged to the Baath Party were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of students teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government enterprises deprived the schools of supplies — including books and teaching materials — as well as urgently needed maintenance.
The American solution, as with the electric grid, was to hire multinational firms to repair the schools and rehabilitate school systems. The result was an orgy of corruption accompanied by very little practical aid. Local school officials complained that facilities with no windows, heating, or toilet facilities were repainted and declared fit for use.
The dwindling central government presence made schools inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with administrators, teachers, and especially college professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for ideological reasons. This, in turn, stimulated a mass exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from the country, removing precious human capital essential for future reconstruction.
Finally, in Baghdad, the US military began installing ten-foot tall cement walls around scores of communities and neighborhoods to wall off participants in the sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were often separated from their schools, reducing attendance at the few intact facilities to those students who happened to live within the imprisoning walls.
This fall, as some of these walls were dismantled, residents discovered that many of the schools were virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie neighborhood which "is falling apart, and overwhelmed by the children of almost 4,000 Shiite refugee families who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof is caving in, classroom floors and hallways are stripped bare, and in the playground a pile of burnt trash was smoldering."
The Dysfunctional Society: Much has been made in the US presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil surplus the Iraqi government built up in these last years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is currently being held in American financial institutions, with various American politicians threatening to confiscate it if it is not constructively spent. Yet even this bounty reflects the devastation of the war.
De-Baathification and subsequent chaos rendered the Iraqi government incapable of effectively administering projects that lay outside the fortified, American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad. A vast flight of the educated class to Syria, Jordan, and other countries also deprived it of the managers and technicians needed to undertake serious reconstruction on a large scale.
As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted for facility construction and reconstruction last year were even spent. Some government ministries spent less than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the large oil surpluses have become magnets for massive governmental corruption, further infuriating frustrated citizens who, after five years, still often lack the most basic services. Transparency International's 2008 "corruption perceptions index" listed Iraq as tied for 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.
The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land, housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their homes; many millions of others have been scarred by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of common criminality. Education and medical systems have essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous societies on earth.
As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and technical devastation became ever more entwined, reinforcing one another. The country's degraded sewage and water systems, for example, have spawned two consecutive years of widespread cholera. It seems likely that this year, the disease will only subside when the cold weather makes further contagion impossible, but this "solution" also guarantees its reoccurrence each year until water purification systems are rebuilt.
In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's once vaunted medical system, since two-thirds of the country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are often in a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain scarce, and equipment, if available at all, is outdated. The rebuilding of the water and medical systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the electrical system is restored to reasonable shape. Repair of the electrical grid awaits a reliable oil and gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and this cannot be constructed without the expertise of technicians who have left the country, or newly trained specialists that the educational system is now incapable of producing. And so it goes.
On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why American military leaders regularly insist that the country's current relative quiescence is, at best, "fragile." They believe only the most minimal reductions in US forces in Iraq (still hovering at close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.
Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities, military officials working close to the ground know that the country's state of disrepair, and an inability to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this could explode in further sectarian violence or yet another violent effort to expel the US forces from the country.
Michael Schwartz's new book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, 2008), has just been released. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His work on Iraq has appeared in numerous outlets, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. A video of him discussing "wrecked Iraq" can be seen by clicking here. His email address is ms42@optonline.net.
Original article posted here.
Even the puppet stops dancing
Iraq's prime minister won't sign U.S. troop deal, official says
By ROY GUTMANFearing political division in the parliament and the country at large, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki won't sign the just-completed agreement on the status of U.S. troops in Iraq, a leading lawmaker said on Friday.
Shelving the new accord would constitute a major setback both for the Bush administration, which has been seeking to establish a legal basis for the extended presence of the 151,000 U.S. troops in this country, and for Iraq, which gained notable concessions in the draft accord reached one week ago.
"No, he will not" submit the agreement to the parliament, Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, the deputy head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, told McClatchy Newspapers. "For this matter, we need national consensus."
Instead, al-Sagheer said, Iraq's political leaders are thinking about seeking an extension of the United Nations mandate for the presence of U.S. troops that expires on Dec. 31. Russia, a member of the U.N. Security Council, had given Iraq a direct assurance that it wouldn't veto an extension, he said, adding that it was likely to last between six months and a year.
Ali al-Adeeb, the chief of staff of al-Maliki's Dawa party, said Wednesday that the Iraqi parliament "cannot approve this pact in its current form."
Top U.S. military officials have warned of serious consequences should the agreement not be signed. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this week that Iraq's forces "will not be ready to provide for their security" after the current U.N. mandate runs out. "And in that regard there is great potential for losses of significant consequence," Mullen said.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told USA Today: "Without (a security agreement), we would potentially have to cease all operations."
Iraqis, however, are adamant that the accord must be open to further amendments if they are to approve it.
"The problem is that when we were given the latest draft, we were told the American negotiators will accept no amendments to it, and the Iraqi government has more requirements," said al-Sagheer, an Islamic cleric who later led the Friday prayers broadcast on national television.
He said al-Maliki had come to the Political Council for National Security, a top decision-making body, and said the new accord was the best he could obtain, but it did not include everything Iraq wanted.
If al-Maliki signed the accord and turned it over to the parliament, "I'm sure that the agreement will not be approved for 10 years," Sagheer said.
The cleric said the draft accord was "good, in general," but its timing was bad. If an Iraqi negotiator accepted the agreement, "he will be taken as an agent for the Americans," and if he were to reject it, "he will be taken for an agent for Iran."
A second factor is that the accord comes just before the U.S. elections, and an Iraqi negotiator had to ask whether it was best to negotiate with the lame-duck Bush administration or its successor. Still more important, al-Sagheer said, was the approaching provincial elections in Iraq, which could be held early next year.
"Iraqi politicians don't want to give their competitors the chance to use this agreement to destroy them," he said.
The accord contains a number of American concessions, calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal onto their bases by June 2009 and a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011 - both dates subject to extension but only if the Iraqi government requests it.
The accord also would allow Iraq to prosecute U.S. troops except when they're on bases or on military operations, strips private military contractors of U.S. legal protection and reclaims control over Baghdad's "Green" zone, the location of U.S. missions and many of the government headquarters.
Al-Sagheer said the setting of a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal was a "historic" accomplishment.
He also acknowledged that an extension of the current U.N. mandate might not reflect the gains made in the status of forces draft.
"For everything there is a price," he said. "And although (the accord) has many advantages, it also has many disadvantages, as it does for the coalition forces."
The problem for Iraqis, he said, was "the feeling with some of the parties that America has no intention of withdrawing within the timetable." Iraqis, he said, had so many negative experiences while a British mandate under the League of Nations from 1920 to 1932 that they fear a written agreement. "We have the feeling that if the Iraqi government accepts the demands, it will give a legal right to be occupied, so we don't have any kind of sovereignty."
Other politicians say that if Washington agrees to extend the negotiations, the talks will never end.
"This is all a game to win time. When the current issues are settled, they will just find new ones. ... They are delaying to appease Iran," said Mithal al-Alusi, a secular Sunni legislator who is critical of the current Shiite-led government.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Massive Iraqi resistance
ANOTHER MILLION IRAQI DEMONSTRATORS: GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY
Baghdad witnessed another demonstration with more than one million Iraqi, Arabs and Kurds and others, Muslims and Christians and others, Sunnis and Shiites and others demonstrated together against the occupation and the long term agreement, asking for a complete withdrawal the leaves no permanent bases, no troops, and no mercenaries.
Its really sad to watch how the mainstream U.S. media and politicians ignore Iraq's massive non violent resistance, whether it was the annual one million Iraqis demonstration, or whether it was the other forms of non-violent resistants like voting for the current anti-occupation parliament, signing petitions, writing poems and books, or even talking against the current occupation.
Ignoring the Iraqi non-violent resistance will definitely push more Iraqis to choose armed resistance as the way to get their country back. The bottom line is that people want their country back; if they manage to get it back through signing petitions and demonstrating, they'll be more than happy. If they can't they'll use force.
Choosing which type of resistance to adopt from the huge continuum (that starts from writing a word and ends by holding a gun) is a two way dialog: if the U.S. government reacted more to Iraqis demonstrating, i'm sure than more one million Iraqis will demonstrate.
Its really sad to watch how the mainstream U.S. media and politicians ignore Iraq's massive non violent resistance, whether it was the annual one million Iraqis demonstration, or whether it was the other forms of non-violent resistants like voting for the current anti-occupation parliament, signing petitions, writing poems and books, or even talking against the current occupation.
Ignoring the Iraqi non-violent resistance will definitely push more Iraqis to choose armed resistance as the way to get their country back. The bottom line is that people want their country back; if they manage to get it back through signing petitions and demonstrating, they'll be more than happy. If they can't they'll use force.
Choosing which type of resistance to adopt from the huge continuum (that starts from writing a word and ends by holding a gun) is a two way dialog: if the U.S. government reacted more to Iraqis demonstrating, i'm sure than more one million Iraqis will demonstrate.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
So much for Bushmonkey broken ideology. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out!
Bush set to go with a whimper
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With only three months left in office, United States President George W Bush appears increasingly determined to calm the international waters he so vigorously churned up, especially during his first term.
In just the last several days, he has effectively rehabilitated a charter member of the "axis of evil" - North Korea - by agreeing to take it off the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for Pyongyang's agreement to resume its dismantling of a key nuclear facility and cooperate with US and international inspectors.
As for the other surviving member of the axis, Iran, leaks from the State Department and elsewhere over the last several days suggest that Bush will announce Washington's intention to open a US Interest Section in Tehran shortly after the November 4 presidential elections, effectively re-establishing diplomatic relations that were broken off 29 years ago.
Although both moves were foreseen already last summer, neo-conservatives and other hawks in and outside the administration who have steadfastly opposed any detente with either country are furious.
"It is ... the final crash and burn of a once-inspiring global effort to confront and reverse nuclear proliferation, thereby protecting America and its friends," wrote former UN ambassador John Bolton in Monday's Wall Street Journal about the North Korea deal.
"Having bent the knee to North Korea, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears primed to do the same with Iran, despite that regime's egregious and extensive involvement in terrorism and the acceleration of its nuclear program," continued Bolton, who is often thought to express the off-the-record views of Vice President Dick Cheney.
He predicted that Washington will actually open its Interest Section "within days" after the election despite the fact that Tehran has not yet given its approval. "Hard as it is to believe, there may be worse yet to come," Bolton concluded.
Worse for the hawks, the two moves also tend to undercut the foundering election campaign of Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, in precisely those very few remaining areas - national security and the "war on terror" - in which, according to public opinion polls, he is generally perceived as stronger and more experienced than his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama.
McCain, who has joked about bombing Iran on the campaign trail, until recently opposed any direct diplomatic engagement with Tehran unless it complied with UN Security Council demands that it freeze its uranium-enrichment program. And he reacted to the latest agreement with Pyongyang by effectively withholding his support.
"I expect the administration to explain exactly how this new verification agreement advances American interests and those of its allies," he said after the State Department announced that it would take Pyongyang off the terrorism list. Obama, on the other hand, called the deal a "modest step forward".
Indeed, on a range of key foreign policy issues - including the priority to be given to Israel-Palestinian peace talks, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia after its intervention in Georgia, and even Taiwan, to which McCain supports several big-ticket arms systems currently opposed by both the administration and Obama - Bush now appears closer to the Democratic candidate than to his fellow Republican.
Many of McCain's closest advisers include neo-conservatives and nationalist hawks whose views were decisive in shaping what became known as the "Bush Doctrine" and inspiring the fateful US invasion of Iraq during the president's first term.
In that respect, Bush's latest moves reflect the culmination of a "realist restoration" during his second term, one that has witnessed a gradual decline in the hawks' influence and a return to a more traditional reliance by Washington on diplomacy and multilateralism, particularly in coordination with key Western allies, as the preferred option for solving international problems.
That restoration has been led by Rice and senior career diplomats in the State Department, the intelligence community, and, since late 2006, by Pentagon chief Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff whose conviction that the US armed forces are badly overstretched and cannot afford to fight yet another war, be it on the Korean peninsula, the Middle East, or, for that matter, in the Caucasus, has clearly had an impact in the Oval Office.
The current financial crisis has no doubt enhanced the White House's appreciation for the degree to which the United States is dependent on foreign powers - not all of them necessarily friendly - and their cooperation, thus strengthening the realists' position as the administration plays out its term.
Their efforts - and now Bush's, too - are directed primarily at trying to undo the damage to Washington's global position inflicted by the hawks not only during their period of dominance from 9/11 to the end of the first term, but also as a result of their furious rear-guard actions during the second term against realist efforts to engage North Korea and Iran.
While North Korea's nuclear-weapons program was effectively frozen by a series of accords between Pyongyang and the Bill Clinton administration between 1994 and 2001, Bush's refusal to continue where Clinton left off - as he had been advised by his realist secretary of state at the time, retired General Colin Powell - led to Pyongyang's withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and eventually to its detonation of a nuclear device in Oct 2006.
Bush finally yielded to Rice's appeal to engage Pyongyang directly, a mission undertaken by her Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs, Christopher Hill. By then, however, Washington's hand had been so badly weakened that Hill was forced to settle for a de-nuclearization accord that inevitably fell short of Bush's one-time promise of a virtually full-proof verification regime that would permit inspectors to go virtually anywhere at any time to suspected, as well as known, nuclear sites.
To the bitter protests of the hawks, last weekend's announcement that North Korea had been removed from the terrorism list in exchange for its agreement to a more limited inspection regime confirmed that Bush had once more retreated from his maximalist demands. "This isn't diplomacy, it's lunacy," one unnamed former administration official told The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who is also known to be close to Cheney.
Realists - including members of the 2006 Iraq Study Group headed by former secretary of state James Baker - have long urged Bush to drop preconditions for direct negotiations with Tehran. In June, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Michael Mullen called for a "broad dialogue" with Iran.
Less than one month later, Bush sent a senior State Department official to participate for the first time in talks between the other permanent UN Security Council members, Germany, and Iran, amid reports that Iran had successfully tested advanced centrifuges that would permit it to accelerate its uranium-enrichment program. He also tentatively agreed to Rice's idea of opening an Interest Section at that time, but the announcement was reportedly put off when Cheney and others opposed to the move argued that it could harm McCain's election chances.
The well-connected Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported Sunday, however, that the announcement will be made after the election in mid-November, a report echoed by Bolton the following day.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Iraq finding its own way. The crony puppet evolves.
When success is failure in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz
As the George W Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling a National Security Council meeting: "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond."
A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum offered an even more exuberant version of the same vision to the New York Times Magazine: "An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."
From the moment on May 1, 2003, when the president declared "major combat operations ... ended" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, such exuberant administration statements have repeatedly been deflated by events on the ground. Left unsaid through all the twists and turns in Iraq has been this: Whatever their disappointments, administration officials never actually gave up on their grandiose ambitions. Through thick and thin, Washington has sought to install a regime "aligned with US interests" - a government ready to cooperate in establishing the United States as the predominant power in the Middle East.
Recently, with significantly lower levels of violence in Iraq extending into a second year, Washington insiders have begun crediting themselves with - finally - a winning strategy (a claim neatly punctured by Juan Cole, among other Middle East experts). In this context, actual Bush policy aims have, once again, emerged more clearly, but so has the administration's striking and continual failure to implement them - thanks to the Iraqis.
In the past few weeks, the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has made it all too clear that, in the long run, it has little inclination to remain "aligned with US interests" in the region. In fact, we may be witnessing a classic "tipping point", a moment when Washington's efforts to dominate the Middle East are definitively deep-sixed.
The client state that the Bush administration has spent so many years and hundreds of billions of dollars creating, nurturing, and defending has shown increasing disloyalty and lack of gratitude, as well as an ever stronger urge to go its own way. Under the pressure of Iraqi politics, Maliki has moved strongly in the direction of a nationalist position on two key issues: the continuing American occupation and the future of Iraqi oil. In the process, he has sought to distance his government from the Bush administration and to establish congenial relationships, if not an outright alliance, with Washington's international adversaries, including the Bush administration's mortal enemy, Iran.
Withdrawal becomes an official issue
Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of this new independence is the Iraqi government's resistance to a Washington proposal for a SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement), which will allow for a permanent and uninhibited US military presence in Iraq.
With the impending expiration of the UN resolutions that gave the US military legal cover to keep a presence in Iraq, the SOFA negotiations are crucial. They began with a proposal that expressed the full extent of Washington's ambitions to utilize Iraq as the base for making the US "more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans". The proposal, which was first leaked to the press in June 2008, was essentially a major land grab, and included provisions like the following that would not have seemed out of place in a 19th century colonial treaty:
An indefinite number of US troops would remain in Iraq indefinitely, stationed on up to 58 bases in locations determined by the United States.
These troops would be allowed to mount attacks on any target inside Iraq without the permission of, or even notification to, Iraqi authorities.
US military and civilian authorities would be free to use Iraqi territory to mount attacks against any of Iraq's neighbors without permission from the Iraqi government.
The US would control Iraqi airspace up to 30,000 feet, freeing the US Air Force to strike as it wishes inside Iraq and creating the basis for the use of, or passage through, Iraq's air space for planes bent on attacking other countries.
The US military and its private contractors would be immune from Iraqi law, even for actions unrelated to their military duties.
Iraq's Defense, Interior and National Security ministries (and all of Iraq's arms purchases) would be under US supervision for 10 years.
When leaked - clearly by Iraqis involved in the negotiations - this proposal generated opposition across the political spectrum from parliament to the streets. It was even denounced by the usually silent Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shi'ite Ayatollah. Soon, Maliki made clear his own rejection of the proposal, setting in motion a chaotic negotiating process in which the Iraqis seem to have argued vehemently for a more modest, briefer US presence, as well as a definite deadline for full withdrawal - a proposal that was an anathema to the Bush administration.
By early August, when the details of a new proposal endorsed by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began to leak out, it was clear that US negotiators had given way, granting significant concessions to the Iraqi side. According to Iraqi insiders, the new draft agreement called for US troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraqi cities, where most of the fighting usually takes place, by the summer of 2009. All US troops - not just the "combat" troops usually mentioned when Democrats talk about withdrawal timelines in Iraq - would have to be gone by the end of 2011.
If the leaked draft were implemented, the US would leave behind those 58 bases, including the five massive "enduring" bases into which the Bush administration has poured billions of dollars. Moreover, the unhindered scope of action Washington had originally demanded for its forces would be dramatically limited: The US would not have the right to attack other countries from Iraqi soil, its ability to conduct operations within Iraq would be circumscribed, and immunity from prosecution would be restricted to US military personnel (and then only when they were participating in approved military actions).
Symptomatic of the loosening US grip on its Iraqi client government were the reactions of the two sides to the leaked provisions of the new version of the agreement. Rice declared it "acceptable" and explained uneasily that the timeline proposed was not the sort of fixed withdrawal date that the Bush administration had long, adamantly, rejected, but an "aspirational ... time horizon" that would depend on "conditions" in Iraq.
Maliki, in all likelihood responding to the fervor of public protests to Rice's comments, immediately declared the agreement unacceptable unless the deadline for withdrawal was time-based and unconditional. In a well publicized speech to a gathering of tribal sheiks, he said that any agreement must be based on the principle that "no foreign soldier remains in Iraq after a specific deadline, not an open time frame". In further clarifying his remarks, a key aide told the Associated Press that "the last American soldiers must leave Iraq by the end of 2011, regardless of conditions at the time".
The latest reports suggest that a further round of secret negotiations had restored some US demands, including full immunity for American soldiers (but not mercenary fighters), and application of the withdrawal deadline to combat troops only. Such concessions by Maliki, however, appeared certain to trigger another round of protests, and resistance in the streets and in the Iraqi parliament.
Whatever their outcome, the still-unfinished negotiations point to something quite new in the relationship between the two governments. Until recently, the Iraqi leadership faithfully sought to enact whatever policies the Bush administration favored (though its capacity to implement them was always in question). With the proposed SOFA, this posture disappeared, replaced by a clear antagonism to Washington's desires. With its formidable weapons (including 146,000 soldiers on the ground), Washington is bound to win at least some of these confrontations, but what we may be seeing is the end of the dream of a regime "closely aligned" with US policies.
The re-emergence of oil nationalism
Nothing better highlights this transformation than oil policy. From the beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration sought to quadruple Iraqi oil production by delivering control of the industry to the major international oil companies. Once given free rein to act at their own discretion, Washington policymakers believed that the oil majors would invest vast sums in modernizing existing fields, activate undeveloped reserves using the most advanced technology available, and discover major new fields utilizing state-of-the-art exploration and extraction methods.
Up until 2007, the Iraqi government was an active ally in this enterprise, even though the vast majority of Iraqis - including the powerful oil workers union, the religious leadership, and a majority of parliament - vehemently opposed these plans, demanding instead that control of the industry remain in government hands. In 2004, the US-appointed Iraqi government enthusiastically endorsed an International Monetary Fund agreement that mandated the development of major Iraqi oil reserves by international oil companies.
When those companies found the legal basis for such investment too fragile to risk vast sums of capital, the Iraqi government - surrounded by American advisors - immediately began work on an oil law which would presumably provide a more secure foundation for the investment. In the meantime, informal advice was accepted from the oil majors, whose technicians were placed in charge of various engineering operations within the country.
In 2007, when the oil law was finally delivered to the Iraqi parliament, it met with unremitting opposition, and the always strong oil unions immediately began a ferocious resistance campaign that stalled the law.
None of these developments altered the Bush administration's determination to push the law through. They did not, however, anticipate that the Maliki administration itself would become a further source of opposition. As Charles Ries told journalists on leaving his position as US economic ambassador to Iraq in August 2008 after a year of failure: "When I got here ... I was quite optimistic it was only a month or two [before the petroleum bill would be passed, but the] more I understood what the real issues were ... it was clear this was going to be a major political challenge."
While Ries was on the job, even the leadership of the Ministry of Oil, until then a pro-American bastion, went into opposition. One symptom of this was its failure to complete five no-bid contracts (which did not even include either investment or extraction rights) with oil consortia led by the usual suspects - Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total and Chevron - designed to increase Iraqi production by 500,000 barrels per day. Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahrastani told the Wall Street Journal that a key reason for the faltering negotiations was the desire of the oil companies for "preferential treatment for future oil-exploration deals". This comment, like the faltering negotiations, hinted at the abandonment of the Bush administration's long-desired version of an Iraqi oil policy.
The new attitude was underscored when the Oil Ministry revived a Saddam Hussein-era agreement with the China National Petroleum Corporation, which was now granted a US$3 billion contract to develop the Ahdab oil field. Given the growing US-China rivalry over the control of foreign oil sources, the symbolism of this act could not have been clearer - especially since the earlier contract had been unceremoniously canceled by the United States at the beginning of the occupation in 2003. No less important, this was a "service contract" whose terms did not follow US guidelines calling for the reduction or elimination of Iraqi government control of the oil industry.
Soon after announcing this new agreement, Oil Minister Shahrastani offered what might be seen as a declaration of oil policy independence. "[Global] oil supplies," he declared, "meet and may slightly exceed current world demand". The world, that is, had plenty of oil, and so there was, he insisted, no global need to rush pell-mell into oil development agreements that might not, in the long run, be of use to Iraq.
This represented an attack on the fundamental premise of US oil policy - that, as Vice President Dick Cheney told an oil industry gathering back in 1999: "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
Significantly, in 2001 - and before 9/11 - the Cheney Energy Task Force, working with the National Security Council, would make this commitment the centerpiece of administration for Middle Eastern policy, defining the world situation as one in which the supply of oil must be drastically increased to meet the demand for an "additional 50 million barrels a day".
Oil-producing countries of the Middle East never embraced Cheney's analysis and consistently resisted US efforts to encourage, induce or coerce dramatic increases in oil production. Instead, they viewed the "shortage" of oil as a natural result of market forces, beneficial to their own economies.
With the success of the US invasion, the Iraqi government threatened to become a maverick among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), endorsing US supported plans that, theoretically, would have quadrupled Iraqi production within 10 years. So Shahrastani's comments were a signal that Iraq was rejoining OPEC's ranks and potentially opening a new era in post-invasion Iraqi politics in which the government he represented would no longer be a reliable ally of the United States.
Nail in the coffin of American defeat?
Implicit in these actions is a new attitude toward, and assessment of, the US presence in Iraq. Maliki and his cohorts appear to have adopted the viewpoint of journalist Nir Rosen that "the Americans are just one more militia," just the most powerful of the rogue forces that they have to manage and eventually eliminate.
As the Iraqi government accumulates an expanding lake of petrodollars and finds ways to shake themselves loose from the clutches of US banks and US government administrators, its leaders will have the resources to pursue policies that reflect their own goals. The decline in violence, taken in the US as a sign of American "success," has actually accelerated this process. It has made the Maliki regime feel ever less dependent for its survival on the American presence, while strengthening internal and regional forces resistant or antagonistic to Washington's Middle East ambitions.
The respected Iraqi newspaper Azzaman pointed to one of these forces in a recent editorial, "Iran has emerged as the country's top trading partner. Its firms are present in the Kurdish north and southern Iraq carrying out projects worth billions of dollars. Iranian goods are the most conspicuous merchandise in Iraqi shops. Iraq, though occupied and administered by America, has grown to be so dependent on Iran that some analysts see it as a satellite state of Tehran."
To support this contention, Azzaman asserted: "The Ministry of Oil and other key portfolios such the Ministry of Interior and Finance are in the hands of pro-Iran Shi'ite factions." Citing Oil Ministry sources, it suggested that recent changes in oil policy actually reflected Iranian pressure to "exclude US oil majors from contracts to develop the country's massive oil fields".
Azzaman may be overemphasizing Iranian influence, since there are myriad internal Iraqi influences that continue to press against Washington's desire for a client regime. Parliament, the Sunni and Shi'ite religious leaderships, powerful unions, and the Sunni and Shi'ite insurgencies have all registered broad opposition to continued US presence and influence.
As all this occurs, US leverage over the Iraqi government, though still formidable, is in decline. The Bush administration - or its soon-to-be elected successor - may face a difficult dilemma: whether to accept some version of the withdrawal demands of the Iraqi government, or re-escalate the war in yet one more attempt to create a government that is "aligned with US interests".
The recent declaration by the Pentagon that only the most modest of troop reductions is militarily feasible in the foreseeable future may be a symptom of this dilemma. Without a full complement of US troops, after all, it will be increasingly difficult to convince the Maliki regime to re-embrace policies favored by Washington.
The question remains: can anything reverse the centripetal forces pulling Iraq from Washington's orbit? Will the president's "surge" strategy prove to have been the nail in the coffin of its hopes for US dominance in the Middle East?
If this turns out to be the case, then watch out domestically. The inevitable controversy over "who lost Iraq" - an echo of those earlier controversies over "who lost China" and "who lost Vietnam" - is bound to be on the way.
Michael Schwartz's new book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, 2008), will be released later this month. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His e-mail address is ms42@optonline.net.
Original article posted here.
By Michael Schwartz
As the George W Bush administration was entering office in 2000, Donald Rumsfeld exuberantly expressed grandiose ambitions for Middle East domination, telling a National Security Council meeting: "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond."
A few weeks later, Bush speechwriter David Frum offered an even more exuberant version of the same vision to the New York Times Magazine: "An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."
From the moment on May 1, 2003, when the president declared "major combat operations ... ended" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, such exuberant administration statements have repeatedly been deflated by events on the ground. Left unsaid through all the twists and turns in Iraq has been this: Whatever their disappointments, administration officials never actually gave up on their grandiose ambitions. Through thick and thin, Washington has sought to install a regime "aligned with US interests" - a government ready to cooperate in establishing the United States as the predominant power in the Middle East.
Recently, with significantly lower levels of violence in Iraq extending into a second year, Washington insiders have begun crediting themselves with - finally - a winning strategy (a claim neatly punctured by Juan Cole, among other Middle East experts). In this context, actual Bush policy aims have, once again, emerged more clearly, but so has the administration's striking and continual failure to implement them - thanks to the Iraqis.
In the past few weeks, the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has made it all too clear that, in the long run, it has little inclination to remain "aligned with US interests" in the region. In fact, we may be witnessing a classic "tipping point", a moment when Washington's efforts to dominate the Middle East are definitively deep-sixed.
The client state that the Bush administration has spent so many years and hundreds of billions of dollars creating, nurturing, and defending has shown increasing disloyalty and lack of gratitude, as well as an ever stronger urge to go its own way. Under the pressure of Iraqi politics, Maliki has moved strongly in the direction of a nationalist position on two key issues: the continuing American occupation and the future of Iraqi oil. In the process, he has sought to distance his government from the Bush administration and to establish congenial relationships, if not an outright alliance, with Washington's international adversaries, including the Bush administration's mortal enemy, Iran.
Withdrawal becomes an official issue
Perhaps the most dramatic symbol of this new independence is the Iraqi government's resistance to a Washington proposal for a SOFA (Status Of Forces Agreement), which will allow for a permanent and uninhibited US military presence in Iraq.
With the impending expiration of the UN resolutions that gave the US military legal cover to keep a presence in Iraq, the SOFA negotiations are crucial. They began with a proposal that expressed the full extent of Washington's ambitions to utilize Iraq as the base for making the US "more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans". The proposal, which was first leaked to the press in June 2008, was essentially a major land grab, and included provisions like the following that would not have seemed out of place in a 19th century colonial treaty:
An indefinite number of US troops would remain in Iraq indefinitely, stationed on up to 58 bases in locations determined by the United States.
These troops would be allowed to mount attacks on any target inside Iraq without the permission of, or even notification to, Iraqi authorities.
US military and civilian authorities would be free to use Iraqi territory to mount attacks against any of Iraq's neighbors without permission from the Iraqi government.
The US would control Iraqi airspace up to 30,000 feet, freeing the US Air Force to strike as it wishes inside Iraq and creating the basis for the use of, or passage through, Iraq's air space for planes bent on attacking other countries.
The US military and its private contractors would be immune from Iraqi law, even for actions unrelated to their military duties.
Iraq's Defense, Interior and National Security ministries (and all of Iraq's arms purchases) would be under US supervision for 10 years.
When leaked - clearly by Iraqis involved in the negotiations - this proposal generated opposition across the political spectrum from parliament to the streets. It was even denounced by the usually silent Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shi'ite Ayatollah. Soon, Maliki made clear his own rejection of the proposal, setting in motion a chaotic negotiating process in which the Iraqis seem to have argued vehemently for a more modest, briefer US presence, as well as a definite deadline for full withdrawal - a proposal that was an anathema to the Bush administration.
By early August, when the details of a new proposal endorsed by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began to leak out, it was clear that US negotiators had given way, granting significant concessions to the Iraqi side. According to Iraqi insiders, the new draft agreement called for US troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraqi cities, where most of the fighting usually takes place, by the summer of 2009. All US troops - not just the "combat" troops usually mentioned when Democrats talk about withdrawal timelines in Iraq - would have to be gone by the end of 2011.
If the leaked draft were implemented, the US would leave behind those 58 bases, including the five massive "enduring" bases into which the Bush administration has poured billions of dollars. Moreover, the unhindered scope of action Washington had originally demanded for its forces would be dramatically limited: The US would not have the right to attack other countries from Iraqi soil, its ability to conduct operations within Iraq would be circumscribed, and immunity from prosecution would be restricted to US military personnel (and then only when they were participating in approved military actions).
Symptomatic of the loosening US grip on its Iraqi client government were the reactions of the two sides to the leaked provisions of the new version of the agreement. Rice declared it "acceptable" and explained uneasily that the timeline proposed was not the sort of fixed withdrawal date that the Bush administration had long, adamantly, rejected, but an "aspirational ... time horizon" that would depend on "conditions" in Iraq.
Maliki, in all likelihood responding to the fervor of public protests to Rice's comments, immediately declared the agreement unacceptable unless the deadline for withdrawal was time-based and unconditional. In a well publicized speech to a gathering of tribal sheiks, he said that any agreement must be based on the principle that "no foreign soldier remains in Iraq after a specific deadline, not an open time frame". In further clarifying his remarks, a key aide told the Associated Press that "the last American soldiers must leave Iraq by the end of 2011, regardless of conditions at the time".
The latest reports suggest that a further round of secret negotiations had restored some US demands, including full immunity for American soldiers (but not mercenary fighters), and application of the withdrawal deadline to combat troops only. Such concessions by Maliki, however, appeared certain to trigger another round of protests, and resistance in the streets and in the Iraqi parliament.
Whatever their outcome, the still-unfinished negotiations point to something quite new in the relationship between the two governments. Until recently, the Iraqi leadership faithfully sought to enact whatever policies the Bush administration favored (though its capacity to implement them was always in question). With the proposed SOFA, this posture disappeared, replaced by a clear antagonism to Washington's desires. With its formidable weapons (including 146,000 soldiers on the ground), Washington is bound to win at least some of these confrontations, but what we may be seeing is the end of the dream of a regime "closely aligned" with US policies.
The re-emergence of oil nationalism
Nothing better highlights this transformation than oil policy. From the beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration sought to quadruple Iraqi oil production by delivering control of the industry to the major international oil companies. Once given free rein to act at their own discretion, Washington policymakers believed that the oil majors would invest vast sums in modernizing existing fields, activate undeveloped reserves using the most advanced technology available, and discover major new fields utilizing state-of-the-art exploration and extraction methods.
Up until 2007, the Iraqi government was an active ally in this enterprise, even though the vast majority of Iraqis - including the powerful oil workers union, the religious leadership, and a majority of parliament - vehemently opposed these plans, demanding instead that control of the industry remain in government hands. In 2004, the US-appointed Iraqi government enthusiastically endorsed an International Monetary Fund agreement that mandated the development of major Iraqi oil reserves by international oil companies.
When those companies found the legal basis for such investment too fragile to risk vast sums of capital, the Iraqi government - surrounded by American advisors - immediately began work on an oil law which would presumably provide a more secure foundation for the investment. In the meantime, informal advice was accepted from the oil majors, whose technicians were placed in charge of various engineering operations within the country.
In 2007, when the oil law was finally delivered to the Iraqi parliament, it met with unremitting opposition, and the always strong oil unions immediately began a ferocious resistance campaign that stalled the law.
None of these developments altered the Bush administration's determination to push the law through. They did not, however, anticipate that the Maliki administration itself would become a further source of opposition. As Charles Ries told journalists on leaving his position as US economic ambassador to Iraq in August 2008 after a year of failure: "When I got here ... I was quite optimistic it was only a month or two [before the petroleum bill would be passed, but the] more I understood what the real issues were ... it was clear this was going to be a major political challenge."
While Ries was on the job, even the leadership of the Ministry of Oil, until then a pro-American bastion, went into opposition. One symptom of this was its failure to complete five no-bid contracts (which did not even include either investment or extraction rights) with oil consortia led by the usual suspects - Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total and Chevron - designed to increase Iraqi production by 500,000 barrels per day. Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahrastani told the Wall Street Journal that a key reason for the faltering negotiations was the desire of the oil companies for "preferential treatment for future oil-exploration deals". This comment, like the faltering negotiations, hinted at the abandonment of the Bush administration's long-desired version of an Iraqi oil policy.
The new attitude was underscored when the Oil Ministry revived a Saddam Hussein-era agreement with the China National Petroleum Corporation, which was now granted a US$3 billion contract to develop the Ahdab oil field. Given the growing US-China rivalry over the control of foreign oil sources, the symbolism of this act could not have been clearer - especially since the earlier contract had been unceremoniously canceled by the United States at the beginning of the occupation in 2003. No less important, this was a "service contract" whose terms did not follow US guidelines calling for the reduction or elimination of Iraqi government control of the oil industry.
Soon after announcing this new agreement, Oil Minister Shahrastani offered what might be seen as a declaration of oil policy independence. "[Global] oil supplies," he declared, "meet and may slightly exceed current world demand". The world, that is, had plenty of oil, and so there was, he insisted, no global need to rush pell-mell into oil development agreements that might not, in the long run, be of use to Iraq.
This represented an attack on the fundamental premise of US oil policy - that, as Vice President Dick Cheney told an oil industry gathering back in 1999: "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional 50 million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
Significantly, in 2001 - and before 9/11 - the Cheney Energy Task Force, working with the National Security Council, would make this commitment the centerpiece of administration for Middle Eastern policy, defining the world situation as one in which the supply of oil must be drastically increased to meet the demand for an "additional 50 million barrels a day".
Oil-producing countries of the Middle East never embraced Cheney's analysis and consistently resisted US efforts to encourage, induce or coerce dramatic increases in oil production. Instead, they viewed the "shortage" of oil as a natural result of market forces, beneficial to their own economies.
With the success of the US invasion, the Iraqi government threatened to become a maverick among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), endorsing US supported plans that, theoretically, would have quadrupled Iraqi production within 10 years. So Shahrastani's comments were a signal that Iraq was rejoining OPEC's ranks and potentially opening a new era in post-invasion Iraqi politics in which the government he represented would no longer be a reliable ally of the United States.
Nail in the coffin of American defeat?
Implicit in these actions is a new attitude toward, and assessment of, the US presence in Iraq. Maliki and his cohorts appear to have adopted the viewpoint of journalist Nir Rosen that "the Americans are just one more militia," just the most powerful of the rogue forces that they have to manage and eventually eliminate.
As the Iraqi government accumulates an expanding lake of petrodollars and finds ways to shake themselves loose from the clutches of US banks and US government administrators, its leaders will have the resources to pursue policies that reflect their own goals. The decline in violence, taken in the US as a sign of American "success," has actually accelerated this process. It has made the Maliki regime feel ever less dependent for its survival on the American presence, while strengthening internal and regional forces resistant or antagonistic to Washington's Middle East ambitions.
The respected Iraqi newspaper Azzaman pointed to one of these forces in a recent editorial, "Iran has emerged as the country's top trading partner. Its firms are present in the Kurdish north and southern Iraq carrying out projects worth billions of dollars. Iranian goods are the most conspicuous merchandise in Iraqi shops. Iraq, though occupied and administered by America, has grown to be so dependent on Iran that some analysts see it as a satellite state of Tehran."
To support this contention, Azzaman asserted: "The Ministry of Oil and other key portfolios such the Ministry of Interior and Finance are in the hands of pro-Iran Shi'ite factions." Citing Oil Ministry sources, it suggested that recent changes in oil policy actually reflected Iranian pressure to "exclude US oil majors from contracts to develop the country's massive oil fields".
Azzaman may be overemphasizing Iranian influence, since there are myriad internal Iraqi influences that continue to press against Washington's desire for a client regime. Parliament, the Sunni and Shi'ite religious leaderships, powerful unions, and the Sunni and Shi'ite insurgencies have all registered broad opposition to continued US presence and influence.
As all this occurs, US leverage over the Iraqi government, though still formidable, is in decline. The Bush administration - or its soon-to-be elected successor - may face a difficult dilemma: whether to accept some version of the withdrawal demands of the Iraqi government, or re-escalate the war in yet one more attempt to create a government that is "aligned with US interests".
The recent declaration by the Pentagon that only the most modest of troop reductions is militarily feasible in the foreseeable future may be a symptom of this dilemma. Without a full complement of US troops, after all, it will be increasingly difficult to convince the Maliki regime to re-embrace policies favored by Washington.
The question remains: can anything reverse the centripetal forces pulling Iraq from Washington's orbit? Will the president's "surge" strategy prove to have been the nail in the coffin of its hopes for US dominance in the Middle East?
If this turns out to be the case, then watch out domestically. The inevitable controversy over "who lost Iraq" - an echo of those earlier controversies over "who lost China" and "who lost Vietnam" - is bound to be on the way.
Michael Schwartz's new book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, 2008), will be released later this month. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His e-mail address is ms42@optonline.net.
Original article posted here.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Evolution of a not-so-grand Inquisitor
Revelations of an Abu Ghraib Interrogator |
| by Aaron Glantz |
| Few people have thought as much about the morality of the US occupation of Iraq than Joshua Casteel, a former US Army interrogator who served at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the detainee abuse scandal there. Once a cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point and raised in an evangelical Christian home, Casteel became a conscientious objector while he was stationed at the prison. It wasn't the kind of abuse shown in the famous graphic images that made him feel morally compelled to leave the military – Casteel says that kind of behavior had ceased by the time he showed up in June 2004 – but the experience of gleaning information speaking to the detainees in their own language. Those experiences, and the spiritual awakening Casteel experienced inside the walls of the prison, are contained in "Letters from Abu Ghraib", a compendium of e-mail messages he sent home from the prison, which was published last month by Iowa's Essay Press. The e-mails, compiled in a lean 118-page volume, are less concerned with the details of prison operations than their moral implications. By what right, the former interrogator asks, does one derive the authority to question prisoners as part of a military occupation? It's an important question to ask and timely too given the steady growth in the number of Iraqi prisoners in US custody over the course of its occupation of Iraq. Pentagon statistics show the US military now holds over 24,000 "security detainees" in Iraq – more than double the number incarcerated by Coalition at the time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal four and a half years ago. US forces are holding nearly all of these persons indefinitely, without an arrest warrant, without charge, and with no right to any type of open legal proceedings. It's perhaps a mark of the failure of the United States' political and religious establishments that it falls to a US Army Specialist like Joshua Casteel to wrestle with the moral difficulties of these massive imprisonments. "Letters from Abu Ghraib" shows how the ethical failures of their leaders affect soldiers on the ground. When he first arrives at Abu Ghraib's interrogation center, Casteel tells his family he really loves his work. "I see my job much more as a Father Confessor than an interrogator," he writes, "As a Confessor you cannot coerce a person to reveal that which they wish to hide. A Confessor's aim is to help the one confessing to be sincere, to arrive at the kind of contrition that actually desires self-disclosure – and to that end, empathy and understanding go a long way." But Casteel, who prays daily and considers "keeping the liturgy with others and taking the Eucharist – Communion" to be "the most important part of the week," begins to feel uncomfortable after just a few weeks on the ground. "The weight of the job sometimes is more painfully present to me than at other times," he writes a month into the deployment. He is uncomfortable "exploiting" prisoners for their "intelligence" value rather then interacting with them as fully equal human beings. Making matters worse is that many of the detainees he interrogated turned out to be completely innocent. "I was constantly being asked, 'Why am I being held here? I want answers!'" Casteel told IPS. "But that was my job. We were supposed to be finding answers to our questions, but we kept being put into situations that were incredibly puzzling because talking to people was like trying to get blood from a turnip. They were the ones that had a greater justification for the need to have answers." Faced with such a dilemma, Casteel turns to an army chaplain for help. "We talked, I vexed and I summoned whatever strength we could conclude upon to go back to my interrogation...He prayed me back into combat," Casteel writes. "I was no longer afraid to demand authority, to play upon certain weaknesses of my detainee, and to question in a most heated fashion – because ultimately, I thought, it would lead me to a more accurate assessment of the veracity of his statements.' "I transgressed no lines of 'proper conduct,' but I certainly, and without hesitation, used a man's anxieties, weaknesses and fears, and my particular place of power and dominance to assess him according to his word...And I even left with what I thought was a clearer picture of the man I was assessing – perhaps to his benefit. So, why did I feel like a complete failure?" The answer to his question comes in October 2004, five months into his tour at Abu Ghraib. "I had an interrogation with a 22-year-old Saudi Arabian who was very straightforward that he had come to Iraq to conduct jihad," Casteel said. "We started having a conversation about religion and ethics and he told me that I was a very strange man who was a Christian but didn't follow the teachings of Jesus to love my enemy and pray for the persecuted...I told him that I thought he was right and that there was a massive contradiction involved with me doing my job and being a Christian." "I wanted to have a conversation with him about ethics and the cycle of vengeance and how idiotic it was that his people said it was okay for him to come and kill me and my people told me it was okay to kill him," he said in an interview. "Why is it that we can't find a different path together?" Since that type of conversation was not possible as a US Army interrogator, Joshua Casteel filed an application for discharge as a conscientious objector. Much to his surprise, his command endorsed it, and offered to speed his transition out of the Army. He now hopes to serve as a bridge between conservative Christians and the antiwar left. He hopes "Letters from Abu Ghraib" will "give conservative Christians an unfiltered picture of one Christian's wrestling with violence and also help the secular world get a backstage pass to the way a conservative Christian operates." Since his discharge, Casteel converted to Catholicism, attracted by the Church's tradition of "social teaching," and has worked with other like-minded Catholics to push the Church play a more active role in bringing the war to an end. He's excited his book has been assigned to students at a number of Catholic high schools in the Midwest and the former interrogator has been invited to speak at religious schools from New Jersey to Colorado. "Catholics are 30 percent of the military. They're equally 30 percent of Congress," he said. "The Vatican had a strong rebuke of the Iraq war but the Iraq war could not have happened were it not for Catholics. Christ has turned up in the people of Iraq's bodies and it's Iraq that's getting crucified and it's largely Christian America that's allowed to be prosperous in the midst of it." |
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Forgetting the Iraq carnage
Saturday: 25 Iraqis Killed, 60 Wounded
A number of bomb attacks occurred in Iraq today, the most significant one in Tal Afar. Overall, at least 25 Iraqis were killed and 60 more were wounded. No Coalition deaths were reported. Also, the U.N. representative in Iraq met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and stressed the need for provincial elections to take place soon.
At least six people were killed and 54 others were wounded when a suicide car bomb exploded in Tal Afar. The attack took place at the same outdoor market that suffered a significant attack last month. The suicide bomber took advantage of a traffic accident to harm as many onlookers as possible.
In Baghdad, a car bomb killed the head of an Awakening Council in Saidiya. Another four deaths were reported in yesterday's attack on Ahmed Chalabi's convoy. Two people were injured during shelling in Doura. Two dumped bodies were found. Security forces reported that 24 people were detained, one hostage was freed, and seven bombs were defused in the last day.
A bomb in Buhriz killed two people and wounded three others.
One civilian was killed and another was wounded during a bombing in Baquba.
In Mosul, a policeman working for the governor was killed when a bomb attached to a car was detonated. A dumped body was found. Another bombing left no casualties.
Gunmen attacked a checkpoing in Garma. Two policemen were killed, while two others were abducted.
Yesterday, gunmen killed a man in Iskandariya.
A body was found near Mussayab.
In Kuweir, two dumped bodies were found.
South of Nasariya in Sooq al-Shiokh, a bomb near a mosque was successfuly defused.
U.S. forces detained 12 suspects across Iraq.
A cache of TNT was found near Hawija.
A meeting concerning Khanaqin was called off due to lack of a quorum. A Fadhila party leader criticized the prime minister's decisions so far.
Thirteen suspects were arrested in Basra.
In Diyala, thirty detainees were released.
Iraqi forces raided the home of a local councilman in Saidiya.
A special groups leader was detained in Hilla.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Iraqis more familiar with Joe Biden than Americans . . .
VP choice Biden unpopular in Iraq for autonomy plan
Peter Graff and Khalid al-Ansary
BAGHDAD, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.
Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.
"We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."
Delaware senator Biden unveiled his plan to divide Iraq into a federation of autonomous Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish zones at a time when sectarian killing in Iraq was out of control and getting worse.
"The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralising it, giving each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- room to run its own affairs," he proposed in a May 2006 piece he co-wrote in the New York Times.
"The Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions would each be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security. The central government would control border defence, foreign affairs and oil revenues," Biden said.
LESS RELEVANT
At the time, many Iraqi politicians hinted at a need for communities to be divided. Since then, however, violence has ebbed and nearly all mainstream politicians speak out against such ideas.
"The original 'Biden plan' seems less relevant in Iraq today than at any point," said Reidar Visser, a Norwegian academic and editor of the Iraq-focused website historiae.org. "The trend in parliament is clearly in a more national direction, with political parties coming together across sectarian divides.
"In other words, there is a very strong Iraqi mobilisation against precisely the core elements of the Biden plan, and it would be extremely unwise of the Democratic Party to make Biden's ideas the centrepiece of their Iraq strategy," he added.
Today, even Kurds who already have their own autonomous enclave in northern Iraq say they oppose the "Biden plan".
"We don't support establishing federal regions on a sectarian basis. For example our region is not ethnic, it contains Kurds and non-Kurds. The regions should be established on a geographic basis," said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman.
Ezzet al-Shabender, a member of parliament from the secularist Iraqi List of former prime minister Ayad Allawi, actually credited the broad-based disgust triggered by Biden's proposal for helping Iraqi politicians bury their differences.
"His project was the reason behind the unity of many political blocs that once differed in viewpoints," he said, comparing it to the Balfour Declaration, a 1917 British note that backed the creation of Israel and is regarded across the Arab world as the ultimate colonial injustice.
"Such a person, if he would assume the vice-presidency post, would not serve to improve Iraq-USA relations."
Original article posted here.
Peter Graff and Khalid al-Ansary
BAGHDAD, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.
Across racial and religious boundaries, Iraqi politicians on Saturday bemoaned Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's choice of running mate, known in Iraq as the author of a 2006 plan to divide the country into ethnic and sectarian enclaves.
"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters.
"We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."
Delaware senator Biden unveiled his plan to divide Iraq into a federation of autonomous Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish zones at a time when sectarian killing in Iraq was out of control and getting worse.
"The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralising it, giving each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- room to run its own affairs," he proposed in a May 2006 piece he co-wrote in the New York Times.
"The Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions would each be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security. The central government would control border defence, foreign affairs and oil revenues," Biden said.
LESS RELEVANT
At the time, many Iraqi politicians hinted at a need for communities to be divided. Since then, however, violence has ebbed and nearly all mainstream politicians speak out against such ideas.
"The original 'Biden plan' seems less relevant in Iraq today than at any point," said Reidar Visser, a Norwegian academic and editor of the Iraq-focused website historiae.org. "The trend in parliament is clearly in a more national direction, with political parties coming together across sectarian divides.
"In other words, there is a very strong Iraqi mobilisation against precisely the core elements of the Biden plan, and it would be extremely unwise of the Democratic Party to make Biden's ideas the centrepiece of their Iraq strategy," he added.
Today, even Kurds who already have their own autonomous enclave in northern Iraq say they oppose the "Biden plan".
"We don't support establishing federal regions on a sectarian basis. For example our region is not ethnic, it contains Kurds and non-Kurds. The regions should be established on a geographic basis," said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman.
Ezzet al-Shabender, a member of parliament from the secularist Iraqi List of former prime minister Ayad Allawi, actually credited the broad-based disgust triggered by Biden's proposal for helping Iraqi politicians bury their differences.
"His project was the reason behind the unity of many political blocs that once differed in viewpoints," he said, comparing it to the Balfour Declaration, a 1917 British note that backed the creation of Israel and is regarded across the Arab world as the ultimate colonial injustice.
"Such a person, if he would assume the vice-presidency post, would not serve to improve Iraq-USA relations."
Original article posted here.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Asian Times suggest the Moron loses
Bush outfoxed in the Iraqi sands
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's demand for a timetable for complete United States military withdrawal from Iraq, confirmed on Tuesday by his National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, has signaled the almost certain defeat of the George W Bush administration's aim of establishing a long-term military presence in the country.
The official Iraqi demand for US withdrawal confirms what was becoming increasingly clear in recent months - that the Iraqi administration has decided to shed its military dependence on the United States.
The two strongly pro-Iranian Shi'ite factions supporting the government in Baghdad, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and Maliki's own Da'wa party, were under strong pressure from both Iran and their own Shi'ite population and from Shi'ite clerics, including the pre-eminent Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to demand US withdrawal.
The statement by Rubaie came immediately after he had met with Sistani, thus confirming earlier reports that Sistani was opposed to any continuing US military presence.
The Bush administration has had doubts in the past about the loyalties of those two Shi'ite groups and of the SIIC's Badr Corps paramilitary organization, and it maneuvered in 2005 and early 2006 to try to weaken their grip on the Interior Ministry and the police.
By 2007, however, the Bush administration hoped that it had forged a new level of cooperation with Maliki aimed at weakening their common enemy, Muqtada al-Sadr's anti-occupation Mahdi Army. SIIC leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was invited to the White House in December 2006 and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November 2007.
The degree of cooperation with the Maliki regime against the Sadrists was so close that the Bush administration even accepted for a brief period in late 2007 Maliki's argument that Iran was restraining the Mahdi Army by pressing Muqtada to issue his August 2007 ceasefire order.
In November, Bush and Maliki agreed on a set of principles as the basis for negotiating agreements on the stationing of US forces and bilateral cooperation, including a US guarantee of Iraq's security and territorial integrity. In February 2008, US and Iraqi military planners were already preparing for a US-British-Iraqi military operation later in the summer to squeeze the Sadrists out of the southern city of Basra.
But after the US draft agreement of March 7 was given to the Iraqi government, the attitude of the Maliki government toward the US military presence began to shift dramatically, just as Iran was playing a more overt role in brokering ceasefire agreements between the two warring Shi'ite factions.
The first indication was Maliki's refusal to go along with the Basra plan and his sudden decision to take over Basra immediately without US troops. General David Petraeus, who this week was confirmed by the US Senate as as Washington's most senior commander in the Middle East, later said a company of US Army troops was attached to some units as advisers "just really because we were having a problem figuring where was the front line".
That Maliki decision was followed by an Iranian political mediation of the intra-Shi'ite fighting in Basra, at the request of a delegation from the two pro-government parties. The result was that Muqtada's forces gave up control of the city, even though they were far from having been defeated.
US military officials were privately disgruntled at that development, which effectively canceled the plan for a much bigger operation against the Sadrists during the summer. Weeks later, a US "defense official" would tell the New York Times, "We may have wasted an opportunity in Basra to kill those that needed to be killed."
In another sign of the shifting Iraqi position away from Washington, in early May, Maliki refused to cooperate with a scheme of Vice President Dick Cheney and Petraeus to embarrass Iran by having the Iraqi government publicly accuse it of arming anti-government Shi'ites in the South. The prime minister angered US officials by naming a committee to investigate the US charges.
Even worse for the Bush administration, a delegation of Shi'ite officials to Tehran that was supposed to confront Iran over the arms issue instead returned with a new Iranian strategy for dealing with Muqtada, according to Alissa J Rubin of the New York Times: reach a negotiated settlement with him.
The Maliki government began to apply the new Iranian strategy immediately. On May 10, Maliki and Muqtada reached an accord on Sadr City, the Shi'ite slum in Baghdad, where pitched battles were being fought between US troops and the Sadrists.
The new accord prevented a major US escalation of violence against the Mahdi Army stronghold and ended heavy US bombing there. Seven US battalions had been poised to assault Sadr City with tanks and armored cars in a battle expected to last several weeks.
Under the new pact, Muqtada allowed Iraqi troops to patrol in his stronghold, in return for the government's agreement not to arrest any Sadrist troops unless they were found with "medium and heavy weaponry".
The new determination to keep US forces out of the intra-Shi'ite conflict was accompanied by a new tough line in the negotiations with the Bush administration on Status of Forces Agreements. In a May 21 briefing for US Senate staff, Bush administration officials said Iraq was now demanding "significant changes to the form of the agreements". These agreements are due to replace the United Nations resolutions authorizing the US presence in Iraq which expires at the end of this year.
The Maliki government was rejecting the US demand for access to bases with no time limit as well as for complete freedom to use them without consultation with the Iraqi government, as well as its demand for immunity for its troops and contractors. The Iraqis were asserting that these demands violated Iraqi sovereignty. By early June, Iraqi officials were openly questioning for the first time whether Iraq needed a US military presence at all.
The unexpected Iraqi resistance to the US demands reflected the underlying influence of Iran on the Maliki government as well as Muqtada's recognition that he could achieve his goal of liberating Iraq from US occupation through political-diplomatic means rather than through military pressures.
Iran put very strong pressure on Iraq to reject the agreement, as soon as it saw the initial US draft. It could cite the fact that the draft would allow the US to use Iraqi bases to attack Iran, which was known to be a red line in Iran-Iraq relations.
The Iranians could argue that an Iraqi Shi'ite administration could not depend on the United States, which was committed to a strategy of alliance with Sunni regimes in the region against the Shi'ite ones.
Iran was able to exploit a deep vein of Iraqi Shi'ite suspicion that the US might still try to overthrow the Shi'ite government, using former prime minister Iyad Allawi and some figures in the Iraqi army. When the US draft dropped an earlier US commitment to defend Iraq against external aggression and pledged only to "consult" in the event of an external threat, Iran certainly exploited the opening to push Maliki to reject the agreement.
The use of military bases in Iraq to project US power into the region to carry out regime change in Iran and elsewhere had been an essential part of the neo-conservative plan for invading Iraq from the beginning.
The Bush administration raised the objective of a long-term military presence in Iraq based on the "Korea model" last year at the height of the US celebration of the pacification of the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province, which it viewed as sealing its victory in the war.
But the Iraqi demand for withdrawal makes it clear that the Bush administration was not really in control of events in Iraq, and that Shi'ite political opposition and Iranian diplomacy could trump US military power.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
Original article posted here.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
No sectarian divide on this issue
Sistani opposes Iraq-US security deal
Iraq's most senior cleric voices opposition to a proposed security deal with the US, saying such a deal would threaten Iraq's sovereignty.
In a meeting with Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq Al-Rubaie on Tuesday, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani expressed his concerns over the security deal by calling it an excuse that will justify the presence of US forces in Iraq.
Ayatollah Sistani had earlier noted that any long-term pact with the US should observe four key terms: safeguarding Iraqis' interests, national sovereignty, national consensus, and parliament approval.
On Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki suggested a timetable for the departure of US forces from Iraq.
However, Washington played down calls for a firm withdrawal deadline, saying any pullout will be based on the conditions on the ground.
"We're looking at conditions, not calendars here," State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said on Tuesday.
Baghdad and Washington are negotiating a treaty that would allow the American troops to stay in Iraq after their mandate under the UN expires in December 2008.
The controversial security deal has faced fierce opposition from Iraqi religious and political figures who believe the deal would turn the country into a US colony.
Original article posted here.
 Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani |
In a meeting with Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq Al-Rubaie on Tuesday, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani expressed his concerns over the security deal by calling it an excuse that will justify the presence of US forces in Iraq.
Ayatollah Sistani had earlier noted that any long-term pact with the US should observe four key terms: safeguarding Iraqis' interests, national sovereignty, national consensus, and parliament approval.
On Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki suggested a timetable for the departure of US forces from Iraq.
However, Washington played down calls for a firm withdrawal deadline, saying any pullout will be based on the conditions on the ground.
"We're looking at conditions, not calendars here," State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said on Tuesday.
Baghdad and Washington are negotiating a treaty that would allow the American troops to stay in Iraq after their mandate under the UN expires in December 2008.
The controversial security deal has faced fierce opposition from Iraqi religious and political figures who believe the deal would turn the country into a US colony.
Original article posted here.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The cat is out of the bag about what Bush's Democratic Revolutions really mean
| |
| Explosively False Propaganda Bush's Middle East legacy |
| by Muhammad Sahimi |
| No part of the world, not even the United States, has been more deeply affected by George W. Bush's presidency than the Middle East. From the lofty goals of starting a "democratic revolution," making a "new Middle East," and helping the Palestinians to have their own independent state, to the bogus "war on terror," invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and meddling in Lebanon, Bush's Middle East policy has been simply one disaster after another. The reality is that the Middle East is of utmost strategic importance to the U.S. U.S. involvement in that region will not end after Bush leaves office in January 2009. Therefore, as the president's second term is coming to an end, it is important to consider the results of his Middle East policy, with the hope the next president will learn valuable lessons from Bush's many blunders and devise a more constructive Middle East policy. So let us consider his legacy. Iraq If there is one minor positive outcome of Bush's Middle East policy, it has to be the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party from power. But at what price?
As if the price that the Iraqis have paid so far is not enough, the Bush-Cheney administration has demanded the following in secret "negotiations" with Iraq's government :
The last one the U.S. also demanded of Iran in the early 1960s, which sparked the June 5, 1963, uprising in Iran, which eventually led to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As Ayatollah Khomeini said at that time: "Capitulation means if we kill the dogs that the Americans bring to Iran, we will be jailed, but if they kill us, our spouse, or our children, or destroy our homes, they will not be even prosecuted in Iran." Bush's Iraq legacy? A destroyed country, only nominally unified, and probably a quasi-colony of the U.S. for the foreseeable future. Afghanistan After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there was an ocean of good will toward the U.S., and great support for destroying al-Qaeda. What happened? Afghanistan was attacked, even though the U.S. knew that the al-Qaeda leadership had already escaped to the border region with Pakistan, and Donald Rumsfeld reportedly said that "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan." The Taliban were overthrown. But where is Afghanistan now?
Bush's Afghanistan legacy? An economic basket case that needs vast amounts of international aid to barely survive and will not be a viable state for decades, if ever. Pakistan Since 9/11, the U.S. has given Pakistan $11 billion in aid, in addition to forgiving its previous debts. Eighty percent of this aid has gone to the military to supposedly fight al-Qaeda. What has happened?
Bush's Pakistan legacy? An unstable nuclear nation with a large number of radicals in its military intelligence (the ISI) who support the Taliban. Lebanon After the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri on Feb. 14, 2005, and the subsequent Cedar Revolution, Bush pushed for democratic elections in Lebanon. These were held in spring 2005, but the results were not to Bush's liking. Not only did Hezbollah receive a significant fraction of the votes and send 14 representative to the parliament, but its partners in the March 8 coalition also received significant votes, and Hezbollah joined the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora in July 2005. Condoleezza Rice's "directed democracy" project was a failure. But Bush did not stop meddling in Lebanon's affairs. He constantly provoked Siniora against Hezbollah and its allies, notably Michel Aoun, the Maronite ex-general. The result: Complete paralysis of the government. Then came the summer 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah began the war, and was rightfully condemned by the world. But Hezbollah had carried out several such small operations in the past, and each time there was a quick cease-fire. Not this time. With strong support by Bush and Cheney, Israel started a full scale war. Meanwhile, the U.S. prevented the United Nations Security Council from reaching any consensus regarding a cease-fire, buying time for Israel to supposedly crush Hezbollah. Condi Rice promised a "new Middle East," one in which Hezbollah would be defeated and Iran would be attacked. Twelve hundred Lebanese (1,000 of them civilians) and over 150 Israelis (40 of them civilians) were killed, and the infrastructure of Lebanon was greatly damaged by Israel's bombing. Hezbollah, however, won the war. Although a U.S. official told Seymour Hersh that the Israelis viewed Lebanon as "a demo for Iran," the Pentagon had to revise its plans for attacking Iran. After seeing the types of weapons used by Hezbollah, Gen. John Abizaid, then the Centcom commander, said the Iranians "have given us a hint about things to come." Hezbollah remained intact, its popularity in the Arab world greater than ever before. This was the second time it had won a war with Israel. The first time was in 2000 when, after fighting with Israel for 15 years, Hezbollah forced Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon, which it had occupied since 1982. Bush, however, continued his meddling. He provoked Siniora to sack the security chief of Beirut's airport, allegedly a Hezbollah member, and shut down Hezbollah's optical communication network, which had played a crucial role in its victory over Israel. The result: Hezbollah swiftly took over West Beirut and routed forces loyal to Siniora. It demanded restoration of its communication network, giving the security chief his job back and veto power over all the government's decisions. Siniora had taken action against Hezbollah, counting on U. S. aid. The aid never came. Bush blinked. Siniora blinked. The result: Hezbollah got all of its demands and more. Michel Suleiman, a general with whom Hezbollah has good relations, is now the president. Hezbollah is more powerful than ever. Bush's Lebanon legacy? An organization that the U.S. has labeled as terrorist has won impressive strategic victories over both the U.S. and Israel and is in the driving seat. Iran Iran provided significant help to U.S. forces when it attacked Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. It opened its airspace to U.S. aircraft and provided intelligence on the Taliban forces. The opposition forces that it had been supporting for years, the Northern Alliance, were the first to reach Kabul and overthrow the Taliban government. Then, during the UN talks on the future of Afghanistan, after the Taliban's ouster, in Bonn, Germany, in December 2001, Iranian representative Mohammad Javad Zarif met daily with U.S. envoy James Dobbins, who praised Zarif for preventing the conference from collapsing because of last-minute demands by the Northern Alliance [.pdf]. Thus, the National Unity government led by Karzai could not have come to power without Iran's help. How was Iran rewarded? Two months later, President Bush made Iran a charter member of his imaginary "axis of evil." Then, in early May 2003 Iran made a comprehensive proposal to the U.S., offering to negotiate on all important issues, recognizing Israel within its pre-1967 war borders, and cutting off material support to Hamas and Hezbollah. The proposal was never taken seriously. What have been the results of Bush's belligerence toward Iran and his constant demonizing of that nation?
Bush's Iran legacy? A nation on the verge of achieving uranium enrichment and becoming a regional power. Palestine/Israel When Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, the Israelis and the Palestinians were tantalizingly close to a peace agreement. Today, the probability of peace is practically nil. No other U.S. president has supported Israel as blindly and one-sidedly. He is also the first U.S. president who actually recognized Israel's policy of building and annexing settlements in the West Bank, giving Israel a secret letter committing the U.S. to such a policy. With Bush's support, Israel "evacuated" Gaza but created the largest jail on Earth: Gaza's land, sea, and air borders are all controlled by Israel. It attacks Gaza at will, and when it kills innocent women, children, and old men, what does Bush say? "Israel must defend itself." Bush and Rice pushed for democratic elections among Palestinians. The radicals actually wanted such elections too! What happened? The elections were held and certified as democratic by Jimmy Carter, but Hamas won. It received more votes than any other group, including Fatah, and took control of the Palestinian parliament. As usual, Rice was shocked. "Nobody saw it coming," she declared. (No secretary of state has made more trips to Israel and Palestine than Rice without having anything to show for it.) So what happened? Instead of trying to work with Hamas, which has never been a threat to the U.S., Bush began punishing the Palestinians by cutting off all aid and pressuring others to follow the U.S. lead. Hamas responded to this by routing the Fatah forces in Gaza, taking full control there. Bush has paid lip service to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. In his recent speech before the Knesset, Israel's parliament, Bush promised the Palestinians that they would have a state of their own "over the next 60 years." Some promise. Bush's Israel/Palestine legacy? Peace between Israel and the Palestinians is more farfetched than ever. The Middle East In addition to all the above, here is the rest of Bush's legacy in the Middle East:
Bush still refuses to face the realities of the mess that he has created in the Middle East. His overall Middle East legacy is EFP, explosively false propaganda, through which he still tries to sell his fantasies to the public. Yes, Mr. President, contrary to what you said recently, there is such a thing as "objective short-term history," and you have failed its test miserably. |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)