Dismantling Iraqi Life
Commentary: On the corrosive effects of the Bush administration's reconstruction efforts.
May 18, 2006
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Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
After five months of confusion, bickering, dickering, dithering, and strong-arm tactics from Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to Iraq and various high American officials arriving on the fly, Prime Minister-designate Nouri al-Maliki has reportedly chosen his cabinet and a government will evidently be established in Baghdad's Green Zone. At the moment, its reach seems unlikely to extend much beyond the American-protected berms and fortifications of that citadel-mini-state. In the meantime, what governmental authority still existed in Iraq seems to be rapidly on the wane -- and not just in largely Sunni areas of the country either. (In parts of Sunni al-Anbar province, however, according to Mathieu Guidère and Peter Harling of Le Monde Diplomatique, control seems to be passing into other "governing" hands: "A formal procedure is in place for lorry drivers to pay an insurance fee [to insurgent groups] that allows them to cross the governorate, as long as they are not supplying the enemy.")
In the city of Basra, in the Shiite south, the reliable British journalist Patrick Cockburn reports that, according to an Iraqi defense ministry official, an average of one assassination an hour is taking place, and local police "no longer dare go to the site of a murder because they fear being attacked." Indeed, when a tribal leader was recently killed by men in police uniforms, a local police station was promptly sacked and 11 policemen killed. Reprisal murders of every sort seem to be sweeping the country as a complex, low-level civil war only grows more intense. In fact, Middle Eastern scholar Juan Cole now regularly begins his daily blog at his Informed Comment website with lines like: "The Iraqi Civil War took the lives of another 42 persons on Tuesday.")
None of this seems to have slowed the Sunni insurgency. It is, if anything, better organized than a year ago and, as a result, American military deaths for the first half of May now stand at 45, the highest figure in many months, though those deaths are happening in twos and threes, largely due to roadside bombs, and rarely make the front pages of American newspapers anymore. At the same time, the use of air power and artillery against Iraqi cities, towns, and villages by the U.S. military remains commonplace (though, again, barely noted in the American press). Here are typical passages buried in Iraq round-up stories: This in relation to the town of Yusufiyah: "The ground troops called for more air support, and jets and helicopters pounded the enemy positions, killing approximately 20 more suspected insurgents… a powerful airstrike by U.S.-led forces caused many families in the area to flee. The strike killed several civilians… and leveled houses. ‘We spent a long, scary night with our families and children,' Qaraghouli said." Or this little phrase in relation to fighting in the city of Ramadi: "...U.S. troops engaged in intense, close-quarters combat with a large force of insurgents, killing several with gunfire and artillery strikes, according to residents of the area."
Here's a typical U.S. Air Force description of a day's action in Iraq: "Air Force F-15 Eagles, F-16 Fighting Falcons and Navy F/A-18 Hornets provided close-air support to coalition troops in contact with anti-Iraqi forces near Al Hawijah, Al Iskandariyah, Al Mahmudiyah, Baghdad and Hawijah." (Full reports on daily air action can be found by clicking here.)
The result of all this, as Michael Schwartz points out, is a constant level of destruction that has, cumulatively, proved devastating in Iraq's cities and towns. In the piece that follows he considers the nature of the ongoing destruction and the way U.S. occupation authorities laid the foundations for it through the programmatic deconstruction of the country. The results are increasingly apparent for anyone who cares to look, most recently in a UN-backed government survey of malnutrition among Iraq's children, which has soared to "alarming levels." (Nearly one in ten children "aged between six months and five years, suffered acute malnourishment," according to the report, far beyond levels of malnutrition in the worst moments of Saddam's rule.)
At his blog, AP Reporter Robert Reid catches something of what daily life is like in electricity-starved Baghdad, even for a Western reporter, with a description of how to shower when the water briefly and miraculously starts flowing. "It's pitch dark, but at my age, I know where the body parts are anyway… Now comes the tricky part: shaving in the dark. Only a real optimist would even bother to take an electric razor to Baghdad. I fumble in the dark, my hands finding the shaving cream on the counter and the razor, hidden on the corner where it fell in my earlier search for the soap…" And so on -- in the capital of deconstructed, ever-devolving Iraq.
How the Bush Administration Deconstructed Iraq
By Michael SchwartzMedia coverage of the Iraq War has generally portrayed the current quagmire as the result of an American failure to achieve a set of otherwise admirable goals: suppressing the insurgency that is intimidating the Iraqi people and sabotaging the economy; stopping the destructive ethno-religious violence that has become a major source of civilian casualties; building an Iraqi army that can establish and sustain law and order; rebuilding electrical and sewage systems and the rest of the country's damaged infrastructure; ramping up oil production to place Iraq on a positive economic trajectory; eliminating the element that has made crime in the streets a prevalent and profitable occupation; and nurturing an elected parliament that can effectively rule. U.S. failure, then, resides in its inability to halt and reverse the destructive forces within Iraqi society.
This rather comfortable portrait of the U.S. as a bumbling, even thoroughly incompetent giant overwhelmed by unexpected forces tearing Iraqi society apart is strikingly inaccurate: Most of the death, destruction, and disorganization in the country has, at least in its origins, been a direct consequence of U.S. efforts to forcibly institute an economic and social revolution, while using overwhelming force to suppress resistance to this project. Certainly, the insurgency, the ethno-religious jihadists, and the criminal gangs have all contributed to the descent of Iraqi cities and towns into chaos, but their roles have been secondary and in many cases reactive. The engine of deconstruction was -- and remains -- the U.S.-led occupation.
Repairing the Oil Pipeline at Al Fatah
Once in a while, we get a glimpse of this unreported reality. On April 25, James Glanz of the New York Times offered a neat window into the ugliness of U.S. culpability. He told the story of an American effort to repair an inoperative oil pipeline in Al Fatah, a village about 130 miles north of Baghdad. The pipeline had been damaged early in the war by an American air attack on a bridge across the Tigris River over which it traveled.
Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003, plans were activated to repair the bridge and reestablish the pipeline. Original estimates indicated that "it would cost some $5 million and take less than five months to string the pipelines across the bridge once it was repaired." Initially, $75.7 million was allocated for the repair job. Work began almost immediately, because the American occupation authorities were anxious to acquire the $5 million a day in oil revenues that a reconnected pipeline promised.
Just as immediately, problems began to arise -- first and foremost from the decision of occupation officials not to repair the bridge. As a result, KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary in charge of the project, was forced to seek a new pipeline route across the Tigris. To handle this unexpected problem, the entire $75 million budget -- originally designated for both bridge and pipeline repair – was reallocated to the pipeline project alone. Nevertheless, when Robert Sanders of the Army Corps of Engineers arrived to inspect the work eight months later in July of 2004, it was already two months past its projected completion date.
What Sanders found that day, according to Glanz, "looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along[side] a giant drill bit in a desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed." A supervisor later told Sanders that they knew this was impossible, but "had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway." The denouement came soon enough: "After the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt."
Sanders issued a scathing report detailing what he called "culpable negligence" on the part of KBR. But his report had only the most modest impact. Though KBR was deprived of its bonus fees for the project by the Army Corps of Engineers, nothing was done to recover the wasted millions, or to force the company to complete the project.
Four important points emerge from this story:
First, the oil pipeline was damaged and the bridge destroyed by U.S. forces. The attack was ordered on April 3, 2003 by General T. Michael Moseley "to stop the enemy from crossing the bridge." This was typical of the infrastructural damage caused by the U.S. in Iraq. During the initial battles of the invasion, and then during sweeps against the Iraqi resistance after the occupation had begun, American forces destroyed or damaged roads, bridges, electrical transmission and oil facilities, sewage lines and water treatment plants, commercial and industrial structures, even mosques and hospitals. While the resistance also targets such structures, particularly oil pipelines and electrical transmission lines, its destructive powers have been relatively modest compared to what American airpower can accomplish with 500 and 2000 pound bombs.
Comments:
an MPA or MBA to repair the place?