Tell me that this doesn't sound like something out of a history of Nazi tactics in World War II:
The rules [of engagement]t explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances...Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights....Of course, it's not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.
Didier, who has since been promoted to captain, said that "if that individual makes contact with you and then breaks contact of their own accord and disarms themselves while they are breaking contact, they are still an engageable target because they are not wounded, nor did they surrender." He explained, "They are only breaking contact so that they can engage coalition forces at a later time." In court, Sgt. Anthony Murphy, one of the snipers who was responsible for a questionable kill, testified that he interpreted this order about breaking contact so they can engage at a later time as: "Engage fleeing local nationals without weapons."
In other words, if an innocent, unarmed Iraqi runs away to seek safety from a suicide bombing, a missile attack or a gunfight -- which any human being would instinctively do -- then he is fair game to be killed by an American sniper.
The excerpt above comes from a story in Salon.com, "Killing by the Numbers," about an "elite" U.S. sniper squad that murdered a captured, unarmed civilian in cold blood. A more detailed excerpt follows below, but I'd like to deal briefly with one ancillary aspect first.
The story expands to talk more generally about the sniper program in Iraq, and is careful -- overly careful -- to emphasize that the snipers responsible for so many "questionable kills" are operating in very stressful conditions: sleep-deprived, sweltering in deadly heat, surrounded by potential "hostiles," at constant risk of attack. All true, of course, but it prompts this simple question: What the hell are they doing there in the first place? Why are they squatting and sweltering in "hides" in a foreign land, looking to kill people who never attacked the United States?
Yes, it is entirely understandable that a soldier subjected to nerve-wracking, physically tormenting conditions might fail to act with reason, patience, judgment and prudence. But is this supposed to be some kind of excuse for crimes committed within the context of a larger crime: a war of aggression, the military invasion and occupation of a foreign country without any provocation? Surely many of the Nazi atrocities were committed by men under unbearable mental and physical strain as well. So what? Were they absolved of their crimes? And more importantly -- were their leaders absolved for instigating the larger crime that engendered these atrocities?
For as the story also shows, the "questionable kills" by American snipers derive largely from the murderous "rules of engagement" they are given by their superiors -- and by the anxiety of their officers to produce big "kill numbers" to appease the bloodlust -- and PR needs -- of the thugs in the White House and their "counterinsurgency genius," David Petraeus.
But let's return to the story of how a sniper squad murdered Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, an Iraqi vegetable farmer, almost one year ago, after he stumbled upon their "hide" on the banks of the Euphrates.
I. George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make a new Fallujah in Sadr City, home to two million Shiites in Baghdad. Thousands of people are already fleeing the area before the full-scale slaughter and destruction begin. As in Fallujah, the multitudes who cannot escape will be trapped in a "free fire zone", subjected to ruthless bombardment and ground assault. Thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of innocent civilians stand in the shadow of imminent death.
The assault is part of the run-up to the coming attack on Iran -- an attempt to secure the rear of that new front by destroying Iraq's Shiite nationalist forces. It is also part of an on-going effort to eliminate the strongest rival to the Shiite extremists that Bush has installed in office in Iraq, before the conquered land's fall elections.
The preliminary assault on Sadr City has already begun, of course. As the BBC notes, in the last seven weeks around 1,000 people -- most of them civilians -- have already been killed by the Bush-Petraeus "surge" into the area. Petraeus is frantically building high-walled ghettos in Sadr City, slicing neighborhoods in half, sundering families, destroying communities and livelihoods. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is circulating leaflets in Sadr City districts, warning the people to leave -- or else.
This, you understand, is liberation. This is freedom. This is the glorious "surge" to victory. As Tacitus noted:
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.
That translation of the quote was taken from a remarkable article by David Bromwich in the New York Review of Books, a shattering analysis of the nation's hideous and horrifying moral decay in the Terror War. The title says it all: Euphemism and American Violence. You should read the whole thing, but the conclusion is most apt to our immediate subject here:
"History begins today" was a saying in the Bush White House on September 12, 2001—repeated with menace by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the director of Pakistani intelligence Mahmoud Ahmad—a statement that on its face exhibits a totalitarian presumption. Yet nothing so much as language supplies our memory of things that came before today; and, to an astounding degree, the Bush and Cheney administration has succeeded in persuading the most powerful and (at one time) the best-informed country in the world that history began on September 12, 2001. The effect has been to tranquilize our self-doubts and externalize all the evils we dare to think of. In this sense, the changes of usage and the corruptions of sense that have followed the global war on terrorism are inseparable from the destructive acts of that war.
In the name of tranquilized American people, a new evil is about to externalized upon the bodies of the women and children, the old and sick, the innocent and vulnerable in Sadr City. As the BBC reports:
The authorities in Baghdad say they are preparing for an exodus of thousands of people from eastern parts of the city. Fighting between government and US troops on one side, and Shia militia on the other, has intensified recently. Two football stadiums are on stand-by to receive residents from two neighbourhoods in the Sadr City area...
In the last seven weeks around 1,000 people have died, and more than 2,500 others have been injured, most of them civilians. The fighting so far in Sadr City has been fierce - street to street, and house to house.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki is showing a determination to disarm the country's Shia militia groups - particularly the Mehdi Army - that he has never displayed before. However, Iraqi army operations, backed by US ground and air support, have so far failed to overwhelm the Shia militiamen, who are still responding with roadside bombs, sniper fire, mortars and rockets.
The government has distributed leaflets in two key districts of Sadr City, warning people to leave.The speculation is that government forces are preparing for a big push into eastern Baghdad to end the current fighting once and for all. Shortages of water and medical supplies have already made life inside Sadr City extremely difficult.
And this is just the beginning.
II. The story of Fallujah's destruction at Bush's order in mid-November 2004 -- a burnt offering to celebrate his renewal of power -- gives us an intimation of what is about to happen in Sadr City. This is what I wrote, in the Moscow Times, about that assault while it was still going on:
Ring of Fire: The Fallujah Inferno "The inferno…is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." -- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate – the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic – transforming human blood into gold.
"There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens."
This was a voice from the depths of the inferno: Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters, trapped in the iron encirclement along with tens of thousands of civilians. It was a rare breath of truth. The reality of a major city being ground into rubble was meant to be obscured by the Infoglomerate's wall of noise: murder trials, state visits, Cabinet shuffles, celebrity weddings – and, above all, the reports of "embedded" journalists shaping the "narrative" into its proper form: a magnificent feat of arms carried out with surgical precision against an enemy openly identified by American commanders as "Satan," the Associated Press reports.
One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors – and their patients, including women and children – were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as "propaganda centers," the Pentagon's "information warfare" specialists told the NY Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time – except for NBC's brief, heavily-edited, quickly-buried clip of the usual lone "bad apple" shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner – the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
So while Americans saw stories of rugged "Marlboro Men" winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
What they saw instead were two loudly devout Christians, Bush and Tony Blair, clasping hands and proclaiming that Artica Salim had been torn to shreds in order to fight terrorism – specifically, the terrorism of Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The city's alleged refusal to turn over Zarqawi was the ostensible reason for the attack; yet halfway through the assault, with dead civilian bodies already stinking in the streets, Coalition commanders finally admitted the truth: Zarqawi wasn't in Fallujah – and hadn't been there for weeks, perhaps months.
But then, Zarqawi leads a peculiarly charmed life. Three times before the war, U.S. forces were set to kill him and destroy his organization. It wasn't that difficult; after all, he was operating in Kurdish-held Iraqi territory, where the U.S. military had free rein. Yet each time, Bush called off the strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needed Zarqawi for his pre-war propaganda, so he could point to an "al Qaeda ally in Iraq" – even though Zarqawi was on Bush's Iraqi turf, not Saddam's. And Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him – a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources.
Bush and Zarqawi are mirror-image enemies: foreign terrorists breaking into Iraq to spread indiscriminate death and ruin in pursuit of their brutal visions. Everywhere they go, everything they touch, everyone they draw to their cause becomes inferno.
Arthur Silber has the second part of his powerful "Choosing Sides" series up now: Killing Truth and Hope -- The Fatal Illusion of Opposition. There is little I can add to the insight and eloquence of the piece -- just go read the whole thing, and follow up on the links provided there as well.
But I would like to highlight two particular aspects of the post. First is Silber's succinct description of the "corporate-authoritarian political system" that confronts us at every turn with its soul-crushing, death-dealing power:
This system encompasses every area of our national life....The military-industrial complex -- or what is now often more accurately described as the military-industrial-congressional complex -- is the most significant component of these interrelationships, but there are many other parts. They encompass all major industries, and almost every minor one, as well as many of our educational and cultural institutions....
This system as it exists today consists of innumerable interrelated, constantly moving parts. Countless agencies, commissions and bureaucrats act in concert and on their own to expand their power, and that of government generally. The system has a life of its own; it is its own reason for being. It sustains itself, and it seeks more and more territory for its dominance. The exercise of power and the acquisition of still more power are not directed at the improvement of the lives of "ordinary" Americans, whoever they may be; ordinary Americans are of no interest or concern to the ruling elites, except insofar as their labor and often their lives are necessary for the maintenance of the lives of immense comfort and privilege enjoyed by the powerful. Power is not the means to some other end, although that claim is a crucial element of the extraordinarily successful propaganda so willingly swallowed by the public. Power -- its exercise and maintenance, and the acquisition of still more power -- is the end.
Again, see the original for the several illuminating links provided.
Silber also deals extensively with two important articles by Pam Martens recently published at Counterpunch. (Here and here.) As Silber notes, Martens is a personal admirer of Barack Obama, and believes him to be a more or less sincere tool of forces beyond his control. Yet this does not prevent her from doing what legions of "progressives" -- especially in the blogosphere -- seem congenitally unable to do: look at the reality of the Obama campaign in the face. And Marten's reality-based analysis of the campaign's real nature is absolutely devastating. She shows the true backers of Obama's candidacy:
A Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government....Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.
She also exposes the rank hypocrisy of Obama's claim to be free from the influence of the Big Money lobbyists who wield such overwhelming, sinister sway in Washington. This claim is, to put it bluntly, an egregious lie. As Martens demonstrates, Obama's Wall Street backers are also some of the worst, most corrupt lobbyists -- such as Greenberg Traurig, former home of that master criminal of the Bush Regime, Jack Abramoff.
Senator Obama's premise and credibility of not taking money from federal lobbyists hangs on a carefully crafted distinction: he is taking money, lots of it, from owners and employees of firms registered as federal lobbyists but not the actual individual lobbyists. But is that dealing honestly with the American people?
The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That's not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience.
Martens goes on to report that "the Obama campaign has spent over $52 million on media, strategy consultants, image building, marketing research and telemarketing." As Silber says, you should read Martens' articles in their entirety to get the full impact of her facts and analysis.
In his piece, Silber kindly quotes from a post I wrote, in which I noted that the very small differences between the two major parties could have significant effects, because "even minute mitigations in the operation of vast power structures can translate into real benefits for many ordinary people, simply due to the scale on which such structures operate." But Silber goes on to note, quite rightly:
If you choose to support one party over the other because of those "minute mitigations" that "can translate into real benefits for many ordinary people," that's fine -- but intellectual honesty ought to compel you to recognize the great danger you're courting.
He has much more to say on this theme -- again, go read the whole thing -- but it is a point worth stressing again. As I noted in this earlier post ("Disabuse Your Illusion"):
Whether these mitigations of injustice and suffering in certain instances outweigh the cost of participating in – and thereby to some extent legitimizing and perpetuating – a system that inevitably produces injustice and suffering on a massive scale is a question that each person must decide for themselves, in their own individual conscience.
And this question is certainly pertinent in the case of Barack Obama. For by the choices he has made in picking advisers to help him shape his policies, he has given every indication that while his presidency might represent a better management and presentation of the current system, it will in no way overturn or even seriously challenge it on any essential point. In other words – and bearing in mind the type of not-insubstantial mitigations noted above – he will keep doing what Bush has been doing, only more competently, less radically, with a greater care for the long-term viability of the power structure. And what is that structure that Obama seeks to refine and extend? It is an imperial system based on militarism and the exaltation of elitist profit and privilege above all other concerns.
It's your choice. But as Silber says -- "at least be honest about the nature of your choice." Have the courage to do what Martens and Silber are doing, and look reality in the face.
Do you want to know what the entire American political establishment -- Democrat and Republican, conservative and "progressive" -- really stands for? Do you want to know what they all support, whole-heartedly, without the slightest objection or demur? Do you want to see their true vision for the world, behind all the pious rhetoric and poisonous lies? Then look no further; here it is, in the raw:
A leading human rights group on Tuesday accused Ethiopian troops in Somalia of killing civilians and committing atrocities, including slitting people's throats, gouging out eyes and gang-raping women. (AP)
"The people of Somalia are being killed, raped, tortured; looting is widespread and entire neighbourhoods are being destroyed," said Michelle Kagari, Africa Programme Deputy Director at Amnesty International, speaking from Nairobi.
Witnesses described to Amnesty International an increasing incidence of Ethiopian troops killing by what is locally termed "slaughtering" or "killing like goats" -- referring to killing by slitting the throat. The victims of these killings are often left lying in pools of blood in the streets until armed fighters, including snipers, move out of the area and relatives can collect their bodies.
In one case, a 15-year-old girl found her father with his throat cut upon returning home from school, after Ethiopian security forces swept through her neighbourhood.
Other cases in the report include:
Haboon, a 56-year-old woman from Mogadishu, who said her neighbour's 17-year-old daughter was raped by Ethiopian troops. When her 13 and 14-year-old sons tried to defend their sister, the soldiers beat them and took their eyes out with a bayonet. The mother fled. It is not known what happened to the boys. This girl is in a coma as a result of the injuries she sustained during the attack.
Guled, aged 32, who said that he saw his neighbours "slaughtered". He said he saw many men whose throats were slit and whose bodies were left in the street. Some had their testicles cut off. He also saw women being raped. In one incident, his newly-wed neighbour whose husband was not home was raped by over twenty Ethiopian soldiers. (Garowe Online)
Ceebla'a, aged 63, from Wardhiigley, said she fled Mogadishu on 15 November 2007 with her young children after some shooting in the area. One day she saw three men leaving their shops being picked up by Ethiopian soldiers for investigation. The next morning she saw the bodies of the three men on the street. One was strangled with electrical wire. The second had his throat cut. The third had been chained ankle to wrist, and his testicles had been smashed. (Amnesty report)
These Ethiopian troops were armed, trained and funded by the Bush Administration, then sent into Somalia as a proxy army for yet another Terror War "regime change" operation in late 2006. American military forces have been directly involved in the operation, on the side of the invaders, throughout the conflict, from the very beginning to this day -- as evidenced by the U.S. missile attack last week that killed at least two dozen civilians in the course of an "extrajudicial" assassination of a Somali insurgent leader.
There has been no objection to any of this from any major figure in American politics. Barack Obama doesn't object to it. Hillary Clinton doesn't object to it. Nancy Pelosi doesn't object to it. It goes without saying that John McCain and the Republicans don't object to these latest war crimes by their blood-drenched leader. The entire Washington power structure has lined up to support this hideous project: military aggression, murder, destruction and rampant atrocity. Somalia -- already one of the world's most fragile and ravaged nations -- is being battered into utter destruction before our eyes....and in our names.
"The human rights and humanitarian situation in Somalia is growing worse by the day. This report represents the voices of ordinary Somalis, and their plea to the international community to take action to end the attacks against them, including those committed by internationally-supported [Transitional Federal Government] and Ethiopian forces."
Security in many parts of Mogadishu is non-existent, and the entire population of Mogadishu bears the scars of having witnessed or experienced egregious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.
"There is no safety for civilians, wherever they run. Those fleeing violence in Mogadishu are attacked on the road and those lucky enough to reach a camp or settlement face further violence and dire conditions."
The American-backed invasion, and the depradations of the American-backed TFG, which was helped into power by Somali warlords in the pay of the CIA, have, inevitably, radicalized opposition forces, some of whom respond with similar brutality. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent "regime change" aggression only exacerbates the extremism it purports to combat. And, as in the other Terror War operations, the chaos wrought by the war in Somalia breaks down all vestiges of society and human communion, leaving people prey to freebooting criminal gangs and the ravages of desperation.
In the face of all this deliberately fomented horror -- and its embrace by the entire American political establishment -- it is difficult to regard the U.S. presidential race as anything other than a sickening obscenity, played out on a stage drenched in viscera. "Oh my god, did you hear what Harold Ickes said about Barack?!" "Mercy me, did you hear what those latte-swilling Obamaniks said about Hillary's gas tax plan?!" This is juvenile navel-gazing taken to sinister extremes. I honestly cannot fathom such people, who pretend to care about politics and policy -- yet ignore the unspeakable ruin and suffering that are the reality of our politics, the accepted, bipartisan results of our policies.
Until we have a politics that considers the fate of Haboon and her children to be just as important, just as meaningful, just as real as our own, there will be no end to this cycle of atrocity and terror, no end to ruin and revenge, no real change, no matter who is elected.
(More details from the Amnesty report can be found after the jump.)
Judith Miller might have been the poster child for the corporate media's collaboration with the Bush Administration's war of aggression against Iraq -- but her New York Times colleague and co-writer, Michael Gordon, was every bit as culpable and complicit, happily playing stovepipe to the bloodthirsty bullshit gurgling up from the White House and Pentagon cesspits.
Miller is gone from the mainstream heights, but Gordon soldiers on at the Times -- literally. Although he is probably not paid directly by the Bush Regime to peddle their propaganda, he serves precisely the same function as the military brass that the Administration embedded as "independent analysts" on the network news shows -- a nefarious practice most recently exposed in great detail by...the New York Times.
But the Times, like most of our great institutions, piously follows the scriptural injunction, and lets not the right hand know what its left hand is doing. And so while it exposes television's willing collusion with White House warmongering, the paper continues its own collaboration with fomenting aggression -- this time, the conflict with Iran.
Gordon's latest is a classic of this sinister genre. He dutifully stovepipes claims by the usual unnamed "American officials" who tell him that Iranian agents have revealed that Hezbollah is training anti-American Iraqi Shiites inside Iran. This information, we are told, comes from "interrogations" of four Shiite militia members who were captured by American forces last year.
In other words, four Shiites who have been subjected to George W. Bush's beloved (and personally approved) "harsh interrogation techniques" for an entire year have -- surprise, surprise! -- told American officials exactly what they want to hear: that Iran is training Iraqi insurgents to kill Americans. Or to speak plainly and with no addition: four men have been tortured into confessions that serve the Bush Faction's militarist agenda.
But let us be absurd, and entertain for a moment the notion that Gordon's story is true; or rather, that the information tortured out of Iraqis held in indefinite detention and subjected to "strenuous interrogation" for a year is actually true, that Iran is actually using Hezbollah as a proxy to train Iraqi Shiites. The only sensible reply to such an assertion is: So what?
Why shouldn't Iran do exactly what the United States is doing in Iraq: training friendly militias to advance its own "national interests"? (Albeit in a far less extensive, less lethal way -- and in a troubled nation that sits on its border, and which recently invaded Iran?) In the perverted moral universe of the nation-state, Iran would only be following the lead of world's most exemplary nation. What's more, consider the wider, truer context of the story: it takes place at a time when Bush has ordered the escalation of the ongoing U.S. covert campaign inside Iran itself, in which Washington is paying and arming terrorist groups to murder Iranians and wreak violent destruction -- while also authorizing U.S. covert agents to assassinate Iranian officials. Given this reality, why shouldn't Tehran -- or any nation thus targeted for terrorism and assassinations -- take measures to respond?
But of course, Gordon's story is almost certainly false -- especially in its raw, context-less, unnuanced and uncritical regurgitation of Pentagon spin. And in any case, as actual experts such as Juan Cole and Nir Rosen have noted over and over, Iran's closest allies in Iraq are the same extremist factions that Bush himself now maintains in power in Baghdad, at an immense cost of American blood and treasure (not to mention the cost of a million Iraqi lives). Here's Rosen:
The truth is, most allegations about Iran's role in Iraq and the region are unfounded or dishonest. Iran was responsible for ending the recent fighting in Basra and calming the situation after Iraqi parliamentarians who backed Prime Minister Maliki approached it. The Iranians, never close to Muqtada or his family, were so annoyed with Muqtada and his presence that they reportedly ordered him out of Iran where he had been living in virtual house arrest anyway since arriving six months earlier. Iranian officials and the state media clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as "illegal armed groups" in the recent conflict in Basra, which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer.
The Supreme Council is of course also the main proxy for the US in Iraq and somehow in the Senate testimony it was forgotten that its large Badr militia was established in Iran and is actually the only Iraqi opposition group to have fought on the Iranian side against Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. Moreover, the Badr militia was a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is so demonized today, and Badr dominates the ministry of interior, if not most of Iraq at the higher echelons. But none of this openly available information made its way to the Post's editorial writers or the dominant discourse in the US.
As long as Bush's favored Shiite factions remain in office in Baghdad, Iran will have close and willing allies in charge of Iraq. In fact, the worst possible result for Iran at this juncture would be the collapse of the present Baghdad government and its replacement by a faction or coalition actually devoted to the interests of an independent, sovereign Iraq. In this, Tehran and Washington have the same goal: the continuation of a weak, vulnerable and easily cowed and manipulated government nominally in charge of the broken, ruined nation once known as Iraq. If Hezbollah is actually training any Iraqis in Iran, it is the militias of the parties now in charge of the Bush-backed government.
The Bushists know all this. They know that Iran is actually backing Bush's own allies in Iraq, and, if anything, have helped keep that collection of grifters, grafters and collaborators in office. But it doesn't matter to the Bushists that Iran is serving Washington's short-term interests in Iraq -- any more than it mattered that Saddam Hussein was performing an invaluable service for the West during his tenure in power -- including after the first Gulf War. As Michael Scheuer put it recently:
Saddam Hussein was the single most important ally of the United States against al-Qaeda and its allies, and he was the best kind of ally because he did what America needed done without our having to coax, pay, or coerce him to do so. As long as Saddam was in power, the jihadis were stuck in place in South Asia and they were not coming west to permanent bases because the Iraqi intelligence and military services lethally greeted them on arrival. Saddam surely supported Palestinian terrorists, but so what; they attacked Israel not the United States. For America, Saddam was the cork in the neck of the bottle that kept the Sunni Islamists penned-up. Feith and his neocon sidekicks pull the cork from the bottle and now the jihadis have moved 2,500km west to more seriously threaten the Arab Peninsula, the Levant, Europe and Israel.
I believe that the chieftains of the Terror War were well aware of all this, just as they are obviously aware that Tehran is backing America's own partner in Iraq. But just as this knowledge didn't stop them from removing Saddam -- to the obvious detriment of their professed aims -- neither will it stop them from trying to remove the Iranian regime, despite their mutual alliance with Tehran in backing the Green Zone government. That's because it is not and has never been their goal to see secular, democratic, independent governments in either Iraq or Iran. They do not and have never cared a single instant about the freedom and well-being of the Iraqi or the Iranian people. (Or the American people, for that matter.) They are engaged on a long-range project of perpetual war toward an eventual goal of iron-clad military domination of a strategic portion of the world's energy supplies and distribution, and the establishment of America's "unipolar domination" over geopolitical affairs.
The many wars that are being fought -- and will be fought -- toward that goal are regarded as highly profitable sidelines. Their details don't really matter -- which collaborators can be cobbled together, which temporary alliances can be formed, what kind of governments emerge in the shattered territories, what actually happens to the worthless rabble who happen to live in the targeted lands. As we have noted before, this is why the Bush Administration's Iraq war aims and strategies and tactics have appeared to be constantly changing and blatantly contradictory -- because these details do not matter. As long as the war grinds on -- in whatever form -- the militarists will reap gigantic war profits (with the concomitant skewing of the political playing field at home; that kind of swag buys a lot of politicians, a lot of think tanks, and a lot of corporate media), and will keep the ball rolling toward the ultimate goal.
Michael Gordon has long been one of the most useful non-entities pushing this wheel of fire and death down the road for the masters of the war machine. And with his latest piece of shameless, craven stenography, he has done them sterling service once again.
Serving the System: Disillusion, Deception and the Obama Campaign I believe Obama is the lesser of two evils. He should be voted for on Supreme Court appointments alone. I think McCain will continue the fascism of bush. I don't think Obama is a fascist. The choice sucks but you have to vote for him.
Serving the System: Disillusion, Deception and the Obama Campaign This past Sunday, talking with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, Obama said, with regard to his plan to withdraw troops from Iraq,
"If we cannot get the Iraqis to stand up in seven years, we're not going to get them to stand up in 14 or 28 or 56 years...
Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe Northerner -
Waiting around for the invisible hand of the market place to disable the military-industrial-national security complex is not much of a solution obviously, since the current imperial misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are all being c...
Serving the System: Disillusion, Deception and the Obama Campaign Troy, you misunderstand completely. Nobody's saying use a wet noodle in a swordfight.
We're saying that you are deluded if you think Obama is different. We're saying that Obama is as much a stooge of Empire as is Bush, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld, or M...
Serving the System: Disillusion, Deception and the Obama Campaign I don’t see the problem with fighting fire with fire – hiring expensive pollsters or using the technology at hand to achieve goals. If Obama didn’t use these tools, I’d laugh at him and wonder about his intelligence. I rely on an old Californ...
Fallujah Revisited: Bush, Petraeus Prepare 'Cleansing' of Sadr City The link to the Bromwich article is much appreciated, Chris. That is a fantastic piece of prose and perceptive political analysis.
I never picked up on the claim that Fallujah was laid waste ostensibly because the locals were harboring Zarkawi. I ...
Fallujah Revisited: Bush, Petraeus Prepare 'Cleansing' of Sadr City Ah, Chris, the truth in what you write is what makes it so harrowing, so very depressing. I have for several years been afraid of the inevitable and now fast approaching complete collapse of the U.S. economy, but now will almost welcome it as it’s ...
Willing Executioners: America's Bipartisan Atrocity Deepens in Somalia Abdi and Omar aren't exactly doing the best possible job that CIA money can buy. What gives? Why are they so inept at defending the stooges of the Bush-Cheney Crime Syndicate?
Abdi says Mr Floyd's response "speaks volumes" about some nonsense or o...
Shoot, Kill, Lie, Repeat: America's New Moral Universe Increasingly, I have a difficulties making moral distinctions between such acts as the destruction of Fallujah to avenge the killings of four American "security contractors" and the destruction of Lidice to avenge Heydrich's assassination.
Or whethe...
Claiming the Prize: Bush Surge Aimed at Securing Iraqi Oil
Monday, 08 January 2007
This is my latest piece for Truthout.org, with some updating.
I. The Twin Engines of Bush's War The reason that George W. Bush insists that "victory" is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. No, it's that his definition of "victory" is different from those bruited about in his own rhetoric and in the ever-earnest disquisitions of the chattering classes in print and on-line. For Bush, victory is indeed at hand. It could come at any moment now, could already have been achieved by the time you read this. And the driving force behind his planned "surge" of American troops is the need to preserve those fruits of victory that are now ripening in his hand.
At any time within the next few days, the Iraqi Council of Ministers is expected to approve a new "hydrocarbon law" essentially drawn up by the Bush Administration and its UK lackey, the Independent on Sunday reports. The new bill will "radically redraw the Iraqi oil industry and throw open the doors to the third-largest oil reserves in the world," say the paper, whose reporters have seen a draft of the new law. "It would allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil companies in the country since the industry was nationalized in 1972." If the government's parliamentary majority prevails, the law should take effect in March.
As the paper notes, the law will give Exxon, BP, Shell and other carbon cronies of the White House unprecedented sweetheart deals, allowing them to pump gargantuan profits from Iraq's nominally state-owned oilfields for decades to come. This law has been in the works since the very beginning of the invasion – indeed, since months before the invasion, when the Bush Administration brought in Phillip Carroll, former CEO of both Shell and Fluor, the politically-wired oil servicing firm, to devise "contingency plans" for divvying up Iraq's oil after the attack. Once the deed was done, Carroll was made head of the American "advisory committee" overseeing the oil industry of the conquered land, as Joshua Holland of Alternet.com has chronicled in two remarkable reports on the backroom maneuvering over Iraq's oil: Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil and The U.S. Takeover of Iraqi Oil.
[Update: Bush will make explicit the connection between the "surge" and the oil law when he reveals his "New Way Forward" on Wednesday, the New York Times reports. According to senior Bush minions talking up the plan for what is not a surge but a long-term escalation of urban warfare that the U.S. ground commander in Iraq says will likely last for years, Bush's new "stratergery" includes "benchmarks" that the natives must meet to keep in favor with their colonial master. One of the most prominent of these is the demand that Iraq "finalize a long-delayed measure on the distribution of oil revenue." As we can see by the Independent stories quoted here, that benchmark should be done and dusted within weeks.]
From those earliest days until now, throughout all the twists and turns, the blood and chaos of the occupation, the Bush Administration has kept its eye on this prize. The new law offers the barrelling buccaneers of the West a juicy set of production-sharing agreements (PSAs) that will maintain a fig leaf of Iraqi ownership of the nation's oil industry – while letting Bush's Big Oil buddies rake off up to 75 percent of all oil profits for an indefinite period up front, until they decide that their "infrastructure investments" have been repaid. Even then, the agreements will give the Western oil majors an unheard-of 20 percent of Iraq's oil profits – more than twice the average of standard PSAs, the Independent notes.
Of course, at the moment, the "security situation" – i.e., the living hell of death and suffering that Bush's "war of choice" has wrought in Iraq – prevents the Oil Barons from setting up shop in the looted fields. Hence Bush's overwhelming urge to "surge" despite the fierce opposition to his plans from Congress, the Pentagon and some members of his own party. Bush and his inner circle, including his chief adviser, old oilman Dick Cheney, believe that a bigger dose of blood and iron in Iraq will produce a sufficient level of stability to allow the oil majors to cash in the PSA chips that more than 3,000 American soldiers have purchased for them with their lives.
The American "surge" will be blended into the new draconian effort announced over the weekend by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: an all-out war by the government's Shiite militia-riddled "security forces" on Sunni enclaves in Baghdad, as the Washington Post reports. American troops will "support" the "pacification effort" with what Maliki says calls "house-to-house" sweeps of Sunni areas. There is of course another phrase for this kind of operation: "ethnic cleansing."
The "surged" troops – mostly long-serving, overstrained units dragooned into extended duty – are to be thrown into this maelstrom of urban warfare and ethnic murder, temporarily taking sides with one faction in Iraq's hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. As the conflict goes on – and it will go on and on – the Bush Administration will continue to side with whatever faction promises uphold the "hydrocarbon law" and those profitable PSAs. If "Al Qaeda in Iraq" vowed to open the nation's oil spigots for Exxon, Fluor and Halliburton, they would suddenly find themselves transformed from "terrorists" into "moderates" – as indeed has Maliki and his violent, sectarian Dawa Party, which once killed Americans in terrorist actions but are now hailed as freedom's champions.
So Bush will surge with Maliki and his ethnic cleansing for now. If the effort flames out in a disastrous crash that makes the situation worse – as it almost certainly will – Bush will simply back another horse. What he seeks in Iraq is not freedom or democracy but "stability" – a government of any shape or form that will deliver the goods. As the Independent wryly noted in its Sunday story, Dick Cheney himself revealed the true goal of the war back in 1999, in a speech he gave when he was still CEO of Halliburton. "Where is the oil going to come from" to slake the world's ever-growing thirst, asked Cheney, then answered his own question. "The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."
And therein lies another hidden layer of the war. For Iraq not only has the world's second largest oil reserves; it also has the world's most easily retrievable oil. As the Independent succinctly notes: "The cost-per-barrel of extracting oil in Iraq is among the lowest in the world because the reserves are relatively close to the surface. This contrasts starkly with the expensive and risky lengths to which the oil industry must go to find new reserves elsewhere - witness the super-deep offshore drilling and cost-intensive techniques needed to extract oil form Canada's tar sands."
This is precisely what Cheney was getting at in his 1999 talk to the Institute of Petroleum. In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits – and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neocons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.
(Continued after the jump.)
II. The Win-Win Scenario And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq – they care about what comes out of the ground. The end – profit and dominion – justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.
And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction – and the elite interests they represent – has already won the war in Iraq. I've touched on this theme before elsewhere, but it is a reality of the war that is very often overlooked, and is worth examining again. This ultimate victory was clear as long ago as June 2004, when I first set down the original version of some of the updated observations below.
Put simply, the Bush Family and their allies and cronies represent the confluence of three long-established power factions in the American elite: oil, arms and investments. These groups equate their own interests, their own wealth and privilege, with the interests of the nation – indeed, the world – as a whole. And they pursue these interests with every weapon at their command, including war, torture, deceit and corruption. Democracy means nothing to them – not even in their own country, as we saw in the 2000 election. Laws are just whips to keep the common herd in line; they don't apply to the elite, as Bush's own lawyers and minions have openly asserted in the memos, signing statements, court cases and presidential decrees asserting the "inherent power" of the "unitary executive" to override any law he pleases.
The Iraq war has been immensely profitable for these Bush-linked power factions (and their tributary industries, such as construction); billions of dollars in public money have already poured into their coffers. Halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy to the heights of no-bid, open-ended, guaranteed profit. The Carlyle Group is gorging on war contracts. Individual Bush family members are making out like bandits from war-related investments, while dozens of Bush minions – like Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Joe Allbaugh -- have cashed in their insider chips for blood money.
The aftermath of the war promises equal if not greater riches. Even if the new Iraqi government maintains nominal state control of its oil industry, there are still untold billions to be made in PSAs for drilling, refining, distributing, servicing and securing oilfields and pipelines. Likewise, the new Iraqi military and police forces will require billions more in weapons, equipment and training, bought from the U.S. arms industry – and from the fast-expanding "private security" industry, the politically hard-wired mercenary forces that are the power elite's latest lucrative spin-off. And as with Saudi Arabia, oil money from the new Iraq will pump untold billions into American banks and investment houses.
But that's not all. For even in the worst-case scenario, if the Americans had to pull out tomorrow, abandoning everything – their bases, their contracts, their collaborators – the Bush power factions would still come out ahead. For not only has their already-incalculable wealth been vastly augmented (with any potential losses indemnified by U.S. taxpayers), but their deeply-entrenched sway over American society has also increased by several magnitudes. No matter which party controls the government, the militarization of America is so far gone now it's impossible to imagine any major rollback in the gargantuan U.S. war machine – 725 bases in 132 countries, annual military budgets topping $500 billion, a planned $1 trillion in new weapons systems already moving through the pipeline. Indeed, the Democratic "opposition" has promised to expand the military.
Nor will either party conceivably challenge the dominance of the energy behemoths – or stand against the American public's demand for cheap gas, big vehicles and unlimited consumption of a vast disproportion of the world's oil. As for Wall Street – both parties have long been the eager courtesans of the investment elite, dispatching armies all over the world to protect their financial interests. The power factions whose influence has been so magnified by Bush's war will maintain their supremacy regardless of the electoral outcome.
[By the way, to think that all of this has happened because a small band of extremist ideologues – the neocons – somehow "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy to push their radical dreams of "liberating" the Middle East by force and destroying Israel's enemies is absurd. The Bush power factions were already determined on an aggressive foreign policy; they used the neocons and their bag of tricks – their inflated rhetoric, their conspiratorial zeal, their murky Middle East contacts, their ideology of brute force in the name of "higher" causes – as tools (and PR cover) to help bring about a long-planned war that had nothing to do with democracy or security or any coherent ideology whatsoever beyond the remorseless pursuit of wealth and power, the blind urge to be top dog.]
Bush and his cohorts have won even if the surge fails and Iraq lapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights – because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even though they've lost their Congressional majority and could well lose the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will continue to fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" – who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state – until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And we all know that's not going to happen.
So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq – these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is – and they like it.
I know the media has been totally subverted by corporate interests, but I can't understand why the American people continue to allow themselves to be punked by this evil twerp.
I guess it really is true, that people get the government that they deserve.
The left needs to realize these evil people are neither stupid nor incompetent. No matter how many times and how slowly you explain to them their "mistake" they will inwardly laugh at you beause everything is going to plan. Iraq might be a disaster for the majority of the US but it's a windfall for Bush.
BTW, Cheney and Wolfowitz planned invading Iraq in order to steal its oil back in 1992 when Cheney was secdef and Wolfie was under-secdef for policy. The plan also called for usin Iraq as a base to launch invasions of the surrounding oil-rich countries.
Cheney has pushed long and hard to be able to use torture. Gonzalez and Yoo produced bizarre legal constructs saying that "torture isn't really torture" and the Geneva Conventions are "quaint." Bribery and blackmail were used to convinced various contries not to refer the US to the international court for war crimes. Cheney tried to get Leahy to abandon his bill explicitly making torture illegal (it already was, anyway). When Leahy refused, Cheney begged for an exemption for the CIA. When the bill passed, because it mandated behaviour defined in a US military manual of conduct, the manual was re-issued with five new classified pages (you can bet your fortune what they say). Bush issued a signing statement on the Leahy Bill saying that because he had his fingers crossed behind his back when he signed it then he doesn't have to obey it.
These guys really want to be able to use torture. And it's not because they get off on it (although they almost certainly do). Torture is an integral part of their strategy.
For a start, under international law the US, as an occupying power, must remain in Iraq until there is a stable government. The torture inflames the insurgency meaning there is no stable government. So the US must stay exactly where Cheney wants it.
The torture is inflaming the whole Islamic world. It just so happens that a very large proportion of the Islamic world sits upon the bulk of the planet's oil reserves. Nobody would be surprised if Iranian or Nigerian or Syrian hotheads conducted a terrorist operation on US soil, which would be used by Bush to justify an invasion. And if the hotheads refuse to bite at the bait a false-flag operation can and will be arranged.
A suitably large "terrorist" incident would allow Bush to declare martial law and essentially become President-for-life.
Things are working out just perfectly for the Bush Family Evil Empire. No matter how slowly you explain it to them that Iraq is a disaster for the US, for Iraq, and for the world, you'll never convince them they made a "mistake" or to change course.
Impeachment and indictment are the only tools that stand any chance of dealing with the problem.
this is the only explanation that makes sense and is fully consistent with the historic policy of the west and now the u.s in the middle east. the other interesting thing is that it is the only explanation that would actually make sense to, I regret to say, the majority of the american people - which is another reason for the smug confidence of the administration. the american people are addicted to an oil based economy and using our collective muscle to secure it is probably okay, more or less, to them. of course, if you just say that out loud, it makes our invasion and international crime. so there we are. committing an international crime in the name of defending and spreading democracy. the ray of hope is the last election, if the democrats in congress have the courage to take full advantage of the opportunity to bring the truth out into the open. what we need is nothing less than a redefinition of Amerifca - forget about Iraq. Are we a fascist corprocacy? or, are we a law-abiding democracy? the democrats have to put the question to the people and hope they make the right decision. If not, this long nightmare is going to continue.
The author is quite right in citing the confluence of several interest groups (Big Oil, Military/Industrial Complex and Israeli political action) in the outright theft of the sovereign nation of Iraq. However, it is interesting to look at the influence of George W. Bush, himself, and how he set the stage for the Iraq oil industry takeover.
Chris Floyd makes no mention of it, but it is instructive to see exactly what it means when the regime speaks of "securing Iraq's oil." Consider Executive Order 13303 dated May 22, 2003:
For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary May 22, 2003 Executive Order Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq and Certain Other Property in Which Iraq Has An Interest By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), section 5 of the United Nations Participation Act, as amended (22 U.S.C. 287c) (UNPA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that the threat of attachment or other judicial process against the Development Fund for Iraq, Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, obstructs the orderly reconstruction of Iraq, the restoration and maintenance of peace and security in the country, and the development of political, administrative, and economic institutions in Iraq. This situation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat. I hereby order: Section 1. Unless licensed or otherwise authorized pursuant to this order, any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void, with respect to the following: (a) the Development Fund for Iraq, and (b) all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations, or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons...This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, entities, officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. Sec. 6. This order shall be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register. GEORGE W. BUSH THE WHITE HOUSE, May 22, 2003. # # # Return to this article at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030522-15.html Executive Order Protecting the Development Fund for Iraq and Certain Other Property in ... Page 2 of 2 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/print/20030522-15.html 5/23/2003
The bush family and their greedy, grasping cronies demonstrate the need for an international criminal court. They all need to be rounded up and charged with war crimes.
Chris is right. I like the comments also. For 6-years, since awakening to this terror-factory government of the USA (greatly due to Chris Floyd's writings in Moscow Times), I have come to lose all threads of patriotism for my USA terror instigator resource war profiteering country and I have made plans to exit my business, hold silver instead of paper, and generally prepare for a petrocollapse.
I see Chris' writings these days as a Mohamed Ali of Journalism and I am grateful.
My whole synopsis for the last 4 or 5 years has been that all indicators - social, political, economic, geological/physical, and yes, even religious are pointing to the same crash landing for industrial "civilization" (in quotes because we are quite uncivil about keeping control over resources).
chris points out the error of our ways. But we are beyond the threshold now. I would ask that Chris and all of us start preparing for petrocollapse. This system and our population pressure are not sustainable. Something's gotta give.
I agree that the Iraq disaster may be going according to Big Oil's plans, but how can it be sustained along with the US's huge budget deficits? By holding vast amounts of US treasury bonds, is China in effect bankrolling US theft of the same oil that China also wants? At some point will China decide that its national interest is to dump dollars and buy euros despite the economic shock that would ensue?
Diogenes, you assume that the borrowing / lending done between the US and China is enforceable by either party equally at arm's length. What evidence do you have to support the idea that the US would not or could not reneg on its bond obligations to China citing some form of international dispute or disagreement that vitiates any other international financial laws?
Time and again the Bush/Cheney Admin and the interests they represent have proven to us that they consider themselves above and beyond the reach of any law that they find problematic, uncomfortable or distasteful for/to their interests. I am inclined to believe that financial obligations would be treated no differently than the theft of Iraqi government, infrastructure and resources. International law does not condone what we are doing in Iraq. Yet there we are.
George W. Bush and David Petraeus are preparing to make 
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