Washington's imperial vision is seen in its plan for bases in Iraq. Christopher Columbus in Iraq
Why was the Bush administration so unperturbed by the wanton destruction of Iraqi history?
"The American Moment"
Quotes of the day in honor of "the American moment" in the Middle East:
"'Washington,' said an Arab envoy, 'needs to wipe that pre-emptive smirk off its face, in a hurry.'"
-- From R.W. Apple, Jr.'s latest dispatch in The New York Times
Yes, the future is truly a mystery and predicting it a ridiculously dicey activity, as I've learned from my own ventures where no one can really go. But we do know now that the looting of the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad was as predictable -- for experts -- as any future event might be. One other matter was utterly predictable. I even predicted it myself in the pre-war period -- and it only took a postwar week to get there. For an added benefit, you don't have to search out the news in the Asia Times or the Sydney Morning Herald or Alternet or Al-Jazeera or www.warincontext.org (though you can find it there). It's on the front page of The New York Times -- Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt's piece on the Pentagon's plans for "a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq."
"American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north."
Ho-hum, what's new? The article might as well have been written by the New Left Review. Our imperial string of bases, a vast arc of military control, now stretches from the Rumania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia to China's doorstep, taking in the most crucial oil lands of our globe. As the Times' reporters write, it's "a swath of Western influence not seen for generations."
We are, in a pungent phrase employed by Shanker and Schmitt, "modulating our footprint" -- Godzilla calling -- in Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole. If you combine that piece with what might be considered a companion story by Esther Schrader in the Los Angeles Times, it's possible to see that the planning that did not go into an occupation of Baghdad has gone into a military reconfiguration of the region.
"Last week's quiet removal of 30 of the 80 fighter jets and almost half the 4,500 personnel from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey... is just the beginning, officials said. Within months, the Pentagon plans to close down most of its operations at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, leaving only a skeleton crew, and to move most of its aircraft and troops out of Qatar and Oman. The plans, which are preliminary and subject to review, are a response to pressure from Arab governments incensed by the U.S. military buildup in the region over the last 12 years, the financial burden of maintaining vast numbers of troops overseas and the strain it has caused for families and military readiness.
...
The decision to shrink what the Pentagon calls its footprint in the Middle East does not, for now, affect the more than 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq...."
This is, in part, our long-delayed response to Osama bin Laden's demands (and will certainly be seen that way in the region). Now, that we have Iraq, the pivotal spot in the neocon plan to grasp and remake the region, we'll lower our profile in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar -- or so the initial planning goes. As the "new Rome," however, we -- and I'm really referring to the Pentagon here since that seems to be where the real planning takes place, the planning that matters, the planning that adds up to much of American foreign policy "on the ground" these days -- are something like the famed guest who came to dinner. Once we have a base in place, whatever the immediate explanation, we just never quite leave the feast.
With that in mind and given that some striking assumptions about success are buried in our planning for a long-term military presence in Iraq, let me add below two thoughtful, strong warnings from men who know something about history. Paul Kennedy, the creator of the term "imperial overstretch," whose book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is already something of a classic, examines this "American moment in the Middle East" from the grim perspective of recent imperial history in the region in The Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section. It's an essay that should (but won't) give pause even to the most gung ho neocon. As Kennedy says, "To be sure, history never repeats itself exactly, but it often deals hard blows to those who ignore it entirely."
Finally, on the Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion page, Jon Weiner, a contributing editor at The Nation, considers "regime change" in Iraq within the context of three previous American moments of "regime change," in Guatemala, Vietnam, and Iran 00 all of which were initially remarkably easy and from two of which the "unintended consequences" were devastating for us and extend to this moment. (For Guatemala, the consequences of "regime change" American-style were horrific indeed, but its experience is also a reminder that not all imperial deeds, however despicable, "blow back" to the "homeland.") Both pieces should remind us as well in the rush of the moment that the verdict of history, such as it is, can take decades to arrive.
Christopher Columbus in Iraq
History? Who needs it?
We all do, of course, more than we imagine. And certainly the American right spoke out loudly and bitterly during the late unlamented era of our "culture wars" over the "loss," as they saw it, of our own history. Just check out our present VP's angry wife and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, on the subject. But that's our history of course, not theirs.
It's not that the destruction of "their" history was unexpected. As much as anything in the future can be known, the looting of Iraq's patrimony with this war's end was, it turns out, known to the experts (and warnings issued to this administration on the subject). Consider, for example, a piece in a discussion forum of the European Journal of International Law, posted by their art correspondent on April 7. It begins:
"Fears that Iraq's heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf War have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration. It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance in preserving the country's invaluable archaeological collections. The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws as 'retentionist' and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US."
There was occupation planning, of course. Given all those months of leaked reports to the press on the future occupation of Iraq and the endless administration reading lists of histories of World War II (that's where they like to think they are anyway) and the postwar occupations of Japan and Germany, there had to be. And the taking and guarding of the oil part of Iraq's patrimony seems to have been reasonably well thought out. The rest of the occupation was evidently supposed to take care of itself. All those months of "planning" and more or less the full infrastructure of Baghdad (right down to supplies of vaccines for children in a country that was in a health crisis before the war began) has either been stolen away or thoroughly trashed.
But history does have its uses. And its loss -- or the loss of the objects that embody everything we've been through as a sentient, self-conscious, history-writing, tale-telling species -- is bound to be a kind of wound. So let me offer a little Saturday history lesson of my own, three different historical commentaries on, and perspectives on our last weeks of war and conquest, on the kind of American "innocence" that no longer has the right to pass for innocence anywhere on this earth.
Let me start with a thoughtful private email I received from Karen Greene, who was kind enough to give me permission to reproduce it:
"I am the librarian for Ancient & Medieval History and Religion at Columbia University. If you let that sink in for a moment, I'm sure you'll understand the trauma that I -- and my colleagues here -- have suffered in the wake of the news of the destruction of the Antiquities Museum and, especially, the National Library in Baghdad. I agree with you, while human life has been lost in inexcusable numbers, there is something, somehow, more deeply tragic about the loss of material that has survived for centuries, or millennia. Lives long past are renewed when future generations may hold their creations. I will never forget standing in the Rare Book vault at Durham Cathedral, holding a 9th-century Cassiodorus commentary in my hands, seeing the pin pricks in the parchment where the scribe had marked off the rulings for his script. That scribe lived again for me.
A good librarian friend of mine and I have talked at length about the Bush administration's neglect of these tragedies, of their preferred focus on the commercial rather than the cultural preservation of Iraq, and we have come to the sad conclusion that the best chronicler of the American response to the cultural suicide in Baghdad would have been Rudyard Kipling. Surely he would have some choice observations to make on the imperial response to colonial culture -- after all, why should we care about it? It's just the remains of a bunch of wogs, right?
I think what makes this administration even more callous to the tragedy in Baghdad is its Christian fundamentalist bent -- you and I may see the broken artifacts as the destruction of the history of civilization, but men like Bush & Ashcroft and their ilk probably don't recognize these items as reflecting their civilization."
I believe she's quite right. We underestimate the influence of Christian fundamentalist thinking, connected to that most historically flammable of areas, the Biblical Middle East. As those of you who have been reading these dispatches know, I think this administration actively took on the role of the vengeful, angry God of the Old Testament in order to lay low "idolatrous" creations of Saddam Hussein. In this way, the Bush men don't mind seeing that alien world laid low and humiliated. In their dreams, I suspect, some of the neocons, at least, imagine themselves recreating (like so many gods) a new world in Iraq, which they can name and claim.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute. {publish-page-break}
Bechtel's Big Payday
San Francisco's massive -- and massively-connected -- Bechtel, Inc. captures the brass ring in Iraq. Is anybody surprised? Cutting Losses?
A growing cross-section of embittered Iraqis is calling for the US to quit their country. Some in Washington seem to agree.
Bechtel's Big Payday
"You look at this process, which is secret, limited or closed bidding, and you have to ask yourself: 'Why are these companies being picked? How's this process taking place, and is this the best use of scarce taxpayer money at a time when seniors can't afford medicine, kids are having trouble getting access to a quality education and local communities are just getting pounded? The administration has been keeping the taxpayers in the dark with respect to how this money is being used, and that information ought to be shared."
--Representative Ron Wyden, D-Oregon.
No one knows exactly what a new Iraqi government will look like, or exactly how long rebuilding the country is going to take. But one thing is certain: It's going to be expensive. Experts estimate that the reconstruction will take somewhere between $25 billion and $100 billion, and the project is sometimes being touted as the biggest reconstruction project since World War II. A big chunk of that money is going to come from American taxpayers, and a big chunk of that money is also going to go straight to the San Francisco-based giant Bechtel, Inc.
Bechtel, Inc. posted $11.6 billion in revenue last year. The Bush administration has awarded it a contract that will pay the company $34.6 million at the outset, and as much as $680 million over 18 months, and those amounts may be only the beginning. In a closed bidding process that involved only a handful of powerful and well-connected companies, Bechtel was the big winner. It is as "well-connected as Washington insiders come," reports The Associated Press:
"Bechtel not only has close ties with elder Republican statesmen, its executives also enjoy direct links to the Bush administration, which has critics crying cronyism. Many worry that Bechtel's inside-the-Beltway cachet was as important to its successful bid as any technical advantage over competitors."
Those ties consist, to begin with, of two current Bechtel employees:
"A senior vice president, Jack Sheehan, sits on the Defense Policy Board formed to advise Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who himself once lobbied for a Bechtel project. Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general, manages Bechtel's petroleum and chemical operations. And President Bush appointed Bechtel's chairman, Riley Bechtel, in February to the Export Council, which advises the president on international trade matters."
European corporations in particular are grumpy that they were not included in the bidding process and that American companies, including Bechtel, are getting all the goodies. The Independent in London reports that:
"Outside the US, meanwhile, there have been numerous complaints that the victor is taking all the spoils without regard to calls for United Nations or other international involvement in rebuilding Iraq. British firms were particularly aggrieved when a $4.8m contract to rebuild the port at Umm Qasr went to Stevedoring Services, a US company, even though the soldiers who did the fighting there were British."
Of course, as Michael Kinsley points out in The Washington Post, it's both illegal and foolish to keep all the pork for ourselves:
"It seems like just the other day that Donald Rumsfeld was lecturing Saddam Hussein about the importance of obeying international law. The World Trade Organization rules forbid governments to discriminate against the companies of fellow members when they are looking to spend some money. This is not one of those high-minded international laws that we agreed to just because we're so noble and can't really be expected to obey, my dear fellow, we being the world's only superpower and all that. This particular law is superpower-friendly. Our country is the one with more of the big global companies that are most likely to benefit from open markets for government business. We also have a smaller government share of GDP than any of our major trading partners. That means we have more to gain from access to other nations' government business than they have to gain from access to ours. And therefore we have more to lose if other nations retaliate by cutting off our access to their government contracts, which they are understandably threatening to do."
Unidentified administration officials quoted by The New York Times defended their choice, saying that "it was important to give contracts to American corporations, as a way to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the United States is a liberator bringing economic prosperity and democratic institutions to their nation."
But Bechtel is not exactly a universally-recognized symbol of prosperity and democracy. In fact, the company is raising eyebrows both abroad and at home. Democrats in the US are attacking Bush's process of choosing companies to rebuild Iraq. Ranking Democrats on the Government Reform and the Energy and Commerce committees, Representative Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and John Dingell, D-Michigan, are leading the charge. As a result, the General Accounting Office has agreed to start an overall review of "Iraq-related matters," including the ways in which construction contracts were awarded.
The suspicious point to Bechtel's long-standing ties with the same conservatives who were so eager to wage this war in the first place. George Shultz, former secretary of state under Ronald Reagan and a longtime conservative and friend of the military industrial complex, is the former president and now board member and senior counselor of Bechtel. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert notes, Shultz has been pushing for a war in Iraq for a long time:
"Under the headline 'Act Now; The Danger Is Immediate,' Shultz, in an op-ed article in The Washington Post last September, wrote: 'A strong foundation exists for immediate military action against Hussein and for a multilateral effort to rebuild Iraq after he is gone.' Gee, I wonder which company he thought might lead that effort."
And Shultz is only part of Bechtel's cozy history of contacs with Reagan Republicans and contracts in the Middle East. A study released by the Institute for Policy Studies documents that Bechtel, Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein go way back: "Key figures associated with the Bush Administration, in particular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, pressed Saddam Hussein during the mid '80s to approve the Aqaba pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan," the IPS reports -- a pipeline that Bechtel would have built. The report "reveals that the diplomatic pressure from Rumsfeld and the Reagan administration happened during and despite Hussein's use of chemical weapons. Behind the scenes, these officials worked for two years attempting to secure the billion dollar pipeline scheme for the Bechtel corporation."
So Bechtel has a history of using its Washington clout to vie for windfall profits from the Middle East. What's more, the company's track record is far from stellar. Scratch the surface, and a whole host of scandals involving large scale, public works projects swims into view.
In November of 2001, the San Francisco Bay Guardian ran an extensive investigation into cost overruns of Bechtel's management of the city's public water system. In April of 2002, The New Yorker ran a long piece about Bechtel's disastrous effort to privatize the water utility in Bolivia. In that South American country, water prices spiraled so drastically out of control that the people rose up and basically booted Bechtel by popular uprising. And in Boston, Bechtel is the lead company in one of the nation's largest and costliest highway reconstruction projects, otherwise known as The Big Dig. A year-long investigation by The Boston Globe revealed a pattern of costly mistakes and cover-ups, and "determined that at least $1.1 billion in construction cost overruns, or two-thirds of the cost growth to date, are tied to Bechtel mistakes."
The Globe also accuses Bechtel of failing to own up to or repair its mistakes, relying instead on its cozy relationship with state legislators to get it off the hook. In one case where carcinogenic asbestos dust was found at a Bechtel site, The Globe reports: "Bechtel emerged with its reputation intact and paid just $131,000. But taxpayers paid more than $3million to clean up the asbestos mess. The asbestos case is but one example of how Bechtel has not only engineered the Big Dig, but has built a fortress around company profits with the help of its state overseers, often at the public's expense." Discuss this article.
Cutting Losses?
For months, neoconservative hawks have argued that the invasion of Iraq would allow the US to bring democracy to Iraq. They have insisted that a democratic Iraq would serve as a stabilizing inspiration for the rest of the Middle East. But, then again, those same hawks predicted that "liberated" Iraqis would welcome -- or at least accept -- the presence of an interim government led by US officials. Instead, a growing cross-section of angry Iraqis is calling for the American soldiers and civilians to quit their country.
Surprisingly, some Washington hawks are calling for the same thing.
The man picked by the Pentagon to lead that interim administration -- retired General Jay Garner -- is in Baghdad at last. But Garner and his lieutenants are facing a series of crises never included in the war party pundits' rosy predictions. Those crises run from ongoing violence in Mosul to ugly conflicts between rival Iraqi opposition leaders to the rising power of fundamentalist clerics calling for the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq.
For Garner's military bosses, the chaos in Mosul must be the greatest immediate problem. But the dangerous dynamics underlying that conflict are what should trouble Garner the most. As Philip Robertson writes on Salon, Mosul is "going through a violent political mutation."
"Various factions are combining and coming into being in the chaos of the old regime's demise, assembling out of its bitter proteins. Some former Baathists and Iraqi military men are beginning to organize underground opposition to the American occupation, collecting at mosques around the city. There are Iraqi provocateurs and on the other side American soldiers who have accidentally wounded civilians. In the middle are Iraqis who are trying to re-create a civil society. They are failing."
Robertson's analysis could well be applied to the entire country. Rival Iraqi factions are fighting for control in virtually every corner of the country, and none want to share that power with the American occupiers. The first flash point might come in Baghdad, where Mohammed Mohsen al-Zubaidi has claimed control of the city, proclaiming himself the interim "Mayor" of Iraq's capital. As Hooman Peimani reports in Asia Times, it remains unclear exactly who chose al- Zubaidi, or why.
"Being an Iraqi dissident living in exile in Iran, he was selected on his return to Iraq, according to the Iranian news agency, IRNA. Quoting al-Jazeera TV network, IRNA reported that 'the interim government of Baghdad will be commissioned with the task of restoring security and stability in the Iraqi capital, as well as seeing into the mending of the water and electricity facilities of the city'. According to the report, al-Zubaidi will hold his position until free elections can be held at an unspecified time. Reportedly, his selection was the result of 'heavy consultations with prominent personalities residing in Baghdad'. ...
The political views of al-Zubaidi are not known. His living in Iran does not necessarily mean he is committed to promoting the Iranian government's ideology and interests. Iran's geographical location as a neighboring state on hostile terms with the Saddam regime turned that country into a safe haven for a wide range of Iraqi dissidents, secular and religious, Shi'ite and Sunni, Arab and Kurd alike. A well-known example is the case of two major Kurdish groups in control of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan have representative offices in Iran and enjoy the Iranian government's support, although they subscribe to secular political views and have friendly ties with the United States, a state hostile toward Iran.
However, given al-Zubaidi's residence in Iran, one could presume that he should have a non-hostile and possibly positive view toward his former host. Added to the growing popularity of the SAIRI in Iraq, his selection demonstrates that, despite the US hope, the creation and the survival of a desired puppet regime in Iraq will not necessarily be a sure bet under the current 'democratic' circumstances."
Now, Garner is heading for a showdown with al- Zubaidi -- or, Garner's municipal deputy in Baghdad is. As Andrew Buncombe of The Independent writes, Barbara Bodine, the US coordinator for central Iraq, arrived in the capital with Garner on Sunday and immediately announced the interim administration would not recognize al- Zubaidi's authority.
The expected struggle for control of Baghdad is unlikely to be the last, and not just because Iraqi dissidents are jockeying for position. In fact, Jonathan Steele argues in The Guardian, some rival Iraqi factions seem to be putting their differences aside to unite against the US occupation.
"The gratitude for removing Saddam Hussein on which Washington mistakenly expected to bank for years is almost exhausted. Those who warned the Bush administration against this war have been proved right. Only in the Kurdish areas of the north is there any satisfaction. ...
In the vacuum of power the mosques are emerging as the main source of resistance. The good news is that far from confronting each other, Sunni and Shia clerics and worshippers are uniting behind a common agenda. Many are fundamentalists but Iraq's progressive secular forces say this is not the primary issue at this stage. 'What we're faced with today is not a choice between secularism and religion. We're facing an invasion and foreign rule. We have to work together to end it,' says Dr Wamid Omar Nadmi, a leading political scientist at Baghdad university."
With Iraqi opposition growing, along with the danger of clashes between Iraqis and occupying troops, Steele argues the UN must be given charge of the reconstruction effort. The UN, he asserts, has "a moral obligation to take over."
Of course, Steele's argument is unlikely to find favor in either the White House or the Pentagon. The administration's neoconservative hawks remain committed to freezing the UN out of the reconstruction process. But a handful of officials in both buildings are apparently eager to see the US cut its occupation short. The Washington Post reports that "senior officials" in the White House and the Pentagon are "questioning the Bush administration's most ambitious, long-term plans for Iraq's reconstruction."
"'I don't think it has to be expensive, and I don't think it has to be lengthy,' a senior administration official said of the postwar plan. 'Americans do everything fairly quickly.' Concerns about the costs and duration of rebuilding Iraq are being raised by senior civilian planners at the Pentagon, as well as senior aides to President Bush. The president's budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., maintained in a recent report that Iraq 'will not require sustained aid.'
Even officials at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid, the umbrella group headed by retired Gen. Jay Garner that will lead the postwar effort, said they expect to measure their time in Iraq in 'months, not years,' though Garner suggested in an interview Saturday that the United States would persevere until democracy is established."
So, how might the unnamed administration officials seek to justify an early departure? Republican Sen. Richard Lugar worries that the answer might be early elections, insisting that any such plan would be disastrous. In a sign that the 'get out fast' crowd have yet to convince even the GOP leadership, Lugar told Meet the Press on Sunday that it may take five years before truly democratic elections are held in Iraq. Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
Another Fig Leaf?
The Bush administration may have use for the UN after all -- if only to salvage a scrap of legitimacy. Beijing Boondoggle?
The crisis in North Korea seems to cry out for a diplomatic solution. But is that what Washington and Pyongyang want?
Another Fig Leaf?
For months, Bush administration hawks and their think-tank cronies have declared the UN a defunct, irrelevant institution. They belittled and blamed the UN arms inspectors working in Iraq. They argued against seeking international support for their longed-for invasion, and exulted when it became clear that the White House would launch the attack with only the diplomatic fig-leaf provided by a "coalition of the willing." They vilified the antiwar politicos in France and Germany, and smeared the antiwar movement in the US. Finally, they have made it clear they see no meaningful role for the UN -- or non-American companies -- in the complex and costly reconstruction of Iraq. That unilateralist fervor held sway in Washington throughout the buildup to war, despite questions about the legal and moral standing of a war waged without international support. It held sway throughout the first, deadly weeks of the war, despite questions about the wisdom of launching an attack without the backing of key regional allies. It held sway throughout the post-war planning, despite accusations that the administration's approach amounted to nothing more than a massive payoff for the White House's corporate friends.
But the neocon ideologues now have a problem.
Washington launched its war under the banner of disarming Iraq, but the US has failed to find any meaningful evidence of chemical or biological weapons. And now the UN Security Council -- the same body the White House decided it could do without -- is set to consider insisting that the UN inspectors return to Iraq to search for the weapons the White House cited in justifying the attack.
The man who led the inspectors before the war, Hans Blix, addressed the Security Council yesterday. That meeting was closed. But Blix gave the BBC a good sense of how he feels about Washington's approach. In an interview, Blix said American officials undermined his efforts, discrediting the work of the inspectors to further their case for war.
"'The US was very eager to sway the votes in the Security Council, and they felt that stories about these things would be useful to have, and they let it out,' he said. 'And thereby they tried to hurt us a bit and say that we had suppressed this. It was not the case, and it was a bit unfair, and hurt us. [We] felt a little displeased about it.'"
Ever the diplomat. Still, as The Baltimore Sun reports, the US has "no intention of giving the United Nations a major role" in the search for banned Iraqi weapons. But, facing widespread suspicion in the Arab world that US teams will plant evidence to justify the attack, some in Washington and London now see using the UN inspectors as "one way to show that any discovery is legitimate."
"'There's going to have to be some kind of U.N. role in that process,' an administration official said yesterday. 'There are allegations that [evidence] will be planted. It would be a good thing to find a compromise.'"
In other words, the White House might budge in exchange for another diplomatic fig-leaf, this time to cover the yawning chasm in its justifications for the war.
The editors at the Salt Lake Tribune clearly hope that Washington sees the value of such diplomatic cover, arguing that it is "hard to figure why US officials are reluctant to invite UN inspectors back into Iraq."
"For openers, the U.N. inspectors have experience. They know the sites they examined before the war and what they found or did not find there. Second, if the United States discovers evidence of banned weapons, many people in other nations will assume that the Americans framed the Iraqis, that they planted the goods. If, by contrast, the UN inspectors confirm the American finds or make the discoveries themselves, that would lend credibility to the process.
...
It would be shame if U.S. officials do not want to deal with Blix now because they are sore that he has not supportive of American claims before the war that Iraq was hiding the disputed weapons. That kind of small-minded thinking should not be guiding American policy."
Small-minded thinking? In this White House? Robert Scheer doesn't make that accusation -- at least, not in so many words. Instead, Scheer suggests that Bush is probably being guided by the growing pressure to "find or plant those alleged weapons of mass destruction fast or stand exposed as a bullying fraud." In his regular Los Angeles Times column, Scheer dissects the administration's feverish and increasingly empty-looking arms claims.
"Of course, our vaunted intelligence forces knew well from our overhead flights and the reports of U.N. inspectors freely surveying the country that Iraq had been reduced by two decades of wars, sanctions and arms inspections to a paper tiger, but that didn't keep the current administration from depicting Baghdad as a seat of evil so powerful it might soon block the very sun from shining. And while Emperor Bush piled on the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, his bespectacled vizier for defense presented a mad-hatter laundry list of Iraq's alleged weapons collection, as long and specific as it was phony and circumstantial.
...
Having taken over the country, we now know with a great deal of certainty that if chemical or biological weapons were extant there, they were not deployed within the Iraqi military in a manner that threatened the U.S. or anyone else.
Likewise, Bush's fear-mongering about Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program has proven baseless. There was no reason to hurriedly yank the UN inspectors out of Iraq."
Still, the most damning evidence of Washington's intentions, Scheer asserts, is the administration's insistence that UN inspectors remain out of Iraq. David Corn agrees. The Nation columnist reminds us that Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld led the criticism of the UN inspectors and their chief, Hans Blix, claiming that Washington had clear proof of Iraq's weapons caches and implying that the international teams were doing all they could to avoid finding the arms. Now, of course, Rummy is soft-pedaling the work being done by US WMD teams, chipping away at expectations that they will find anything in Iraq unless led to it ("The inspectors didn't find anything, and I doubt that we will.")
"Imagine if Rumsfeld had said that before the war: We're invading another country to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, but I doubt we'll find them unless people there tell us where they are. ...
It's worth remembering that the Bush administration, in its go-to-war push, did not say that Hussein -- who was not cooperating fully with inspections -- might possess biological and chemical weapons and a program to develop nuclear weapons. They maintained there was no question he had awful weapons and a nuclear program. 'If there are no weapons of mass destruction, I'll be mad as hell,' David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector told The Los Angeles Times. 'I certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If there is no [WMD program], I will feel taken, because they asserted these things with such assurance.'"
Jed Babbin's already mad as hell. The neocon and National Review nabob cannot stand the fact that Blix is back in the game. In a classic piece of character assassination (something the neocons have become very adept at, when it comes to Blix), Babbin sputters that the former chief weapons inspector "can never be trusted to find anything, or ever report the truth." Predictably, Babbin sees great anti-American conspiracies behind Blix's appearance before the Security Council. But Babbin has a cure -- a painfully familiar cure.
"The timing of this is not at all suspicious. France, Russia and Germany are blocking action to lift the sanctions on Iraqi oil exports in order to get their piece of the pie. It is time to give them another ultimatum, and let Iraqi oil reach the market with or without U.N. action to lift sanctions. The Security Council is not a serious place. We should treat it accordingly. If the U.N. doesn't act quickly to lift the sanctions on Iraq, we should indicate -- in the strongest terms -- that we no longer take it seriously. In our role as a permanent Security Council member, we should veto everything -- yes, everything -- it proposes until the Iraq sanctions are lifted. Permanent gridlock in the Security Council would be far preferable to what goes on there now."
In other words, damn the fig-leaves and let the world see us in all our glory. Except most of the world sees nothing at all glorious about the self-absorbed arrogance on display in Washington. And without some sort of UN cover, the Bush administration has very little ground on which to argue that its war was anything more than an imperialistic grab for control of Iraq. Discuss this article.
Beijing Boondoggle?
Today, diplomats from North Korea, the United States and China will meet for the first round of talks about North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Beijing will most likely serve as a kind of mediator or facilitator, while Washington pressures Pyongang to give up its nuclear program. At stake in this crisis are not only the safety of North Korea's immediate neighbors but also the stability of the region as a whole. Experts fear that the North Korean crisis could set off an arms race in all of Asia.
The talks are an important positive development, if only because they represent a diplomatic effort to deal with a frightening nuclear situation. But it's unclear how much the talks will actually be able to accomplish, given both Bush and Kim Jong Il's erratic behavior in recent weeks. By now, Kim Jong-il has both stated and then backed away from a statement that North Korea would begin reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods -- a step Bush had warned would bring dire consequences. But the Bush administration has wavered, too. Bush had been reassuring Kim Jong-il that his job was safe, but then on Monday the papers reported on a leaked memo from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld which suggested that Beijing and Washington team up to pressure Pyongang into regime change:
"Mr. Rumsfeld's team, administration officials said, was urging diplomatic pressure for changing the government, not a military solution. But the classified memo, drafted by officials who are deeply opposed to opening talks that could eventually end up benefiting North Korea economically, shows how the handling of the crisis has become the newest subject of internal struggle over how to pursue Mr. Bush's determination to stop the spread of nuclear arms and other unconventional weapons. Officials on all sides of the arguments say that, with the fall of president Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the internal battles that once surrounded the policy on Iraq are re-emerging over North Korea are re- emerging over North Korea."
Those battles are shaping up along familiar lines -- Rumsfeld vs. Powell. As The Independent reports, the Pentagon/State Department split apparent before the attack on Iraq was clearly never closed. And, boosted by the military successes in Iraq, Rumsfeld and his civilian Pentagon hawks are once again pushing a more confrontational approach than Powell and the diplomats at State.
For China, the talks are something of a diplomatic coup, reports the Christian Science Monitor, "For the first time in memory, experts say, Beijing is taking an active and bold step to address a serious conflict in this part of the world, bridging what seemed a dangerous impasse between the US and North Korea over how to handle the latter's nuclear ambitions." But the process may still be long.
South Koreans, already frustrated and humiliated that they are not being included in talks that so clearly concern them (given that they're one of the few countries in range of any potential North Korean nuclear missiles), are not optimistic, the BBC reports:
"Newspapers in South Korea have little confidence that the talks between Pyongyang, Washington and Beijing will end successfully. There is widespread belief that North Korean and US actions in the run up have destroyed any hope of resolving the nuclear issue during the three-day talks starting on Wednesday."
At this point, even the experts are left guessing. The only certainty is that the situation could prove volatile. Cato Institute fellow and former Reagan advisor Doug Bandow worries that Washington's hawks are operating on ill-suited assumptions reinforced by the war in Iraq.
"Some advocates of military action predict that Pyongyang would not retaliate against a blow to its nuclear facilities. Others propose coupling such a military strike with the use or threat of tactical nuclear weapons against the North's conventional forces. But to attack and assume the North would not respond would be a wild gamble. A military strike might not get all of Pyongyang's nuclear assets, and hitting the reprocessing facility and spent fuel rods could create radioactive fallout over China, Japan, Russia or South Korea.
Moreover, given the official U.S. policy of preemption, designation of the North as a member of the "axis of evil" and the Iraq war, Pyongyang might decide that even a limited military strike was the opening of a war for regime change."
Obviously, when the stakes are nuclear, both sides have an interest in resolving things diplomatically. But Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, suggests that "the question to be answered in the coming weeks is whether they also have the desire." And, like Bandow, Kaplan worries that Washington's ideologues will try to apply their neoconservative vision in disastrous way.
"The shame of this situation is that North Korea is the last country on earth where you would want to set a precedent or test a general proposition. Kim Jong-il is more than a little flaky-he is deliberately deceptive; he and his father have displayed a consistent negotiating style (brilliantly described in Scott Snyder's book Negotiating on the Edge). It is designed to irritate, madden, and continuously test and probe their adversaries. It requires enormous patience, a commodity that the Bush administration not only lacks but has no great eagerness to acquire. In Bush's defense, it is also a commodity that in the current crisis, we cannot really afford. If North Korea hasn't yet reprocessed those fuel rods, it is on the verge of doing so. This stand-off cannot persist for months and months. It is not reassuring that Rumsfeld has attack planes in South Korea, as well as B-1 and B-52 bombers in Guam, awaiting orders to take off if the reprocessing commences and no diplomatic solution appears. By the same token, North Korea has several thousand artillery tubes stationed near the South Korean border, 500 of them a mere five minutes' flight time from downtown Seoul. The stakes of this game, in the short term and the long term, could hardly be more serious."
So, is there any reason to feel good about the Beijing summit? Well, Aidan Foster Carter, writing in the Asia Times, notes that even an empty, pointless summit marred by posturing is preferable to the alternative.
"Disagreement already, and we're not yet at first base. But worry not. Creative ambiguity can be good. Different definitions of the situation matter less, at this point, than the fact that they will meet and talk."
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Another Misread
Washington's war planners just can't seem to get a handle on the Iraqi Shiites. That's very bad news. Return of the Powell-Haters
The neocons are calling for regime change again -- but not just in Syria, Iran, or North Korea.
Another Misread
"I love the stories about people saying 'Isn't it wonderful to be able to express our religion, the Shia religion, on a pilgrimage this weekend.'... It made my day to read that." --President Bush, speaking to Newsweek last week
President Bush may have found the massive Shiite pilgrimage to Kerbala slightly less edifying had he known that it would end on Wednesday with a massive demonstration against U.S. occupation. Protesters carried signs reading "Neither America, nor Saddam. Yes, yes to Islam.
Of course, the protests against an American occupation are themselves the product of Iraqis' newfound freedom. But there is mounting evidence that Bush's unflagging optimism masks a deeper blindness to the reality on the ground in Iraq. While the Shiite majority hardly speaks with one voice, sectarian differences aside, it's increasingly clear they can all agree on one thing: They do not like the American presence. And the pilgrimage itself demonstrates that Shiite leaders have the ability to organize and mobilize their faithful. Some officials have admitted to The Washington Post that the administration has been taken aback by what they're encountering in Iraq:
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.
"'It is a complex equation, and the US government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out,' a State Department official said. 'I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, 'What are we looking for?' The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.' ...
Some U.S. intelligence analysts and Iraq experts said they warned the Bush administration before the war about vanquishing Hussein's government without having anything to replace it. But officials said the concerns were either not heard or fell too low on the priority list of postwar planning.
...
'We're flying blind on this. It's a classic case of politics and intelligence,' said Walter P. 'Pat' Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle Eastern affairs. 'In this case, the policy community have absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much.'"
Of course, misreading the Iraqi Shiites is becoming something of a habit for the Bush administration's neoconservative hawks. The same officials who are expressing surprise now also expressed surprise when the expected Shiite uprising never materialized during the war's early days. The two misreads seem to be linked by a common thread of faulty intelligence. One crucial set of tips that the Pentagon may have chosen to ignore included warnings about Ahmad Chalabi, the American-backed leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi has been in exile for 40 years. As Dilip Hiro explains in The New York Times, he made an unlikely choice as a popular leader, and he may have led the U.S. astray:
"The truth is that the exiles had been in the West so long that they knew little of the reality inside Iraq; the defectors, in search of a haven from the cruel regime, told the eager Americans anything they wanted to hear. Now that these illusions have been shattered, American policy makers might do better to consider the history of the region. ...
Mr. Chalabi, with the Americans' support and perhaps money at his disposal, may gain some backing at the enlarged gathering scheduled for later this week. But contrary to his Pentagon backers, the C.I.A.'s longtime assessment of him remains solid: although he is a Shiite, he lacks any constituency inside Iraq. Nor is he likely to inspire new followers. Had he joined the hundreds of thousands of Shiites who made the pilgrimage to Karbala this week he might have enhanced his standing. But apparently he couldn't be bothered.
Compare this luxury-loving, highly Westernized banker (who was convicted by Jordan in absentia of embezzlement and fraud) with Ayatollah Khomeini, the ascetic Iranian Shiite cleric who shunned worldly goods and led a popular revolution that overthrew what was the most powerful regime in the Middle East. It is an illustration of the difference between a 'regime change' achieved by the people and one imposed by a foreign military power."
The specter of another Ayatollah in Iraq is looming large, prompting the Pentagon to warn Iraqis that a theocracy -- even an elected one -- would be "unacceptable." Still, the Shiite clergy are clearly a force to be reckoned with. And, as The Times of London reports, they are a force the war-planners in London and Washington failed miserably to account for:
A fortnight after American and British troops deposed Saddam Hussein's regime, there is a growing consensus that the only credible force to have emerged in the country is the Shia clergy and its followers, many of whom advocate the creation of an Iranian-style Islamic state. 'There is real concern,' a senior British official said. 'The Iraqi Shia are the only group to have made any real impact so far. There was a feeling that the Shia were more secular than those in Iran. Now we are not so sure.'"
Some senior officials are trying to brush any unrest off as democratic growing pains. One anonymous official tells NBC that, "after being repressed by a brutal minority government for 30 years, you have to expect them to be venting a bit." And conservative Bushites are reassuring the world that most Iraqis still want a secular government. But the most skeptical of Bush's critics believe that the popular demand for a Muslim theocracy is only going to build, and that for that reason, the Bush administration has little hope of establishing a democracy in Iraq. Kurt Nimmo, writing in Counterpunch, wonders whether the Shiite surge in Iraq might prove an insoluble problem for the White House ideologues:
"Bush and the neocons will never allow free elections or participatory democracy in Iraq -- the result would almost certainly be fundamentalist religious parties harmonized against the US master plan for Islam and the Middle East. In order to see their mission through, the Bushite neocons will attempt to occupy Iraq indefinitely. This will be impossible."
Slightly more optimistic observers can envision a representative national government that would bring Iraq's Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds into some kind of trilateral cooperation. And given the country's recent history, it might be naive to think that such a transformation would happen quickly. But it might also be naive to think that such a transformation can ever come at the hands of Americans. The UN has been almost completely dismissed by the Bush administration, but it may be the only third party capable of ushering in the democracy that Bush says he wants. As Kamil Mahdi writes writes in The Guardian:
"Iraq is under a foreign military occupation that has shown little respect for international law, and the people of Iraq need institutions that can symbolise their unity and prevent the US from hijacking their national will. Iraqis have suffered decades of war, sanctions and dictatorship - the country now needs the support of friends and the extensive involvement of UN and humanitarian organisations. However, a distinction must be made between such involvement and commercial, political and cultural intervention through the illegal channel of occupation. The occupation forces came with an administration blueprint and detailed policies formulated by the US state department. Under the pretext of a search for banned weapons, foreign troops are continuing the destruction of Iraq's civil administration and attempting to install a new apparatus answerable to them. Former Iraqi exiles have been financed and organised by the US government and are being set up in positions of authority. This is not liberation."
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Return of the Powell-Haters
The neocons are agitating for more regime change. But the target isn't Syria or Iran or even North Korea. It's the State Department.
For the better part of a month, the Bush administration appeared to be one big happy, hawkish camp. No longer. The job in Iraq is far from over, and there are troubling indications that the work ahead could be far riskier than the military mission ever was. But rampant neoconservatives have decided they can't wait to return to an old fight -- one apparently only put on hold for the duration of the shooting war.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich fired the latest salvo of that war Tuesday in a speech at one of the wellsprings of neoconservative ideology, the American Enterprise Institute. As Edwin Chen of the Los Angeles Times reports, Gingrich's address constituted "a blistering attack" on the State Department and, by extension, on Secretary Colin Powell.
"The former speaker, a senior fellow at the institute, said that after 'six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success,' the State Department is 'back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard-won victory' in the region. Gingrich urged the administration to 'take on transforming the State Department as its next urgent mission.' The U.S., he said, 'cannot lead the world with a broken instrument of diplomacy.'"
Gingrich cited several examples of that ideological disrepair, including Powell's upcoming visit to Syria. But it is becoming clear that the neoconservative ire is being primarily fueled by a single issue -- Powell's support for the "road map" for Middle East peace. Ultra-conservative parties in Israel have rejected the plan and its support for an independent Palestinian state, even vowing to take down the Israeli government to forestall the recognition of any such state.
Not that Gingrich's attack is anything particularly new. As Chen notes, other neocons have inveighed against both the State Department and the Middle East road map. But the timing is noteworthy and, as Jim Lobe writes, serves to illustrate "the degree to which relations between the State Department and the Pentagon hawks has moved to open warfare."
"It was a stunning attack from someone so closely identified with Rumsfeld and the neo-conservative hawks around him. 'I've never seen a wholesale attack on America's entire diplomatic establishment like this,' said Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at Georgetown University. 'This is fundamentally about ideology and the efforts of the neo-conservatives to institutionalize their victories over the moderate and liberal internationalists.' ...
'I think it is designed to scare people into thinking that anyone who challenges the right wing is going to suffer for it. He wants to get these people who in his mind pervert presidential policy out on the street,' said Richard Murphy, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs under Ronald Reagan and is currently a Middle East expert with the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations."
Stunning or not, the speech is clearly intended to represent a sort of ideological call to arms for the neoconservatives inside and outside the administration. And the pundits at The National Review, which has emerged as the unblinking house organ for neocon thought, are more than ready to heed that call. Frank Gaffney, in a full ideological swoon, goes so far as to compare Gingrich's speech with Winston Churchill's landmark 1946 "iron curtain" address. And, while Gingrich never actually attacked Powell in person, the National Review pundits aren't about to pull such punches. Ramesh Ponnuru, wondering bitterly how Powell "always manages to come out smelling like a rose," concludes unhappily that the former general will remain at State as long as he wants. But Ponnuru reassures himself and his neocon colleagues by asserting that, "while Powell is getting the applause, it's the administration's hawks who are getting the policies they want."
"Powell's reputation reflects both a strength and a weakness. He is where he is today because of his charisma, his sterling personal qualities, and his genius at playing the Washington game. But he has never been associated with any brilliant military move or diplomatic breakthrough. His record as secretary of state continues the pattern of his career: He has been more successful in bolstering his position in Washington than in bolstering America's in the world. ...
A Republican senator sums up the sentiment of his colleagues: 'We all like Colin Powell. That said . . . [some of us] are very skeptical of the support he's given the president. You'd like to have people a little more committed to the president's program than the State Department sometimes seems to be.' But Powell, who polls better than the president, will have his job as long as he wants it. The press continues to laud him as the adult restraining the hotheads around Bush.
His impact on the administration, however, is as negligible as that of his predecessor William Rogers in the Nixon years. This is an unusually plastic moment in American foreign policy. The shape of world politics is being set. So far, the concepts that guide Bush -- the doctrine of pre-emption, its application to Iraq, the new national-security strategy -- have been coming from the Department of Defense and the vice president's office. State has offered resistance and foot-dragging, but no alternative concepts. The intellectual agenda is being set by the hated Wolfowitz. Colin Powell, meanwhile, seems content to serve as the State Department's ambassador to the Bush administration."
Ponnuru, of course, hardly needed convincing. Like many others in the National Review stable, he's been gunning for Powell for months. Maureen Dowd, on the other hand, finds Gingrich's addressing convincing in a very different way. The New York Times columnist, happily returning to form, flays the former speaker as part of a rollicking attack on the neocon's post-war imperialistic swagger.
"The man who once depicted himself as an 'Arouser of Those who Form Civilization' stepped back yesterday into a clash of civilizations between the Pentagon and the State Department. In remarks at the Temple of Triumphalism here (the American Enterprise Institute), Mr. Gingrich denounced Colin Powell's domain as a "broken bureaucracy of red tape and excuses" and demanded it be 'transformed,' like Rummy's. He attacked Mr. Powell for announcing that he would visit (rather than bomb) Damascus and for the prewar failure of diplomacy with Turkey -- conveniently ignoring the fact that it was the Pentagon hawk Paul Wolfowitz who had tried and failed to talk turkey with Turkey."
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Sanctions and Sanctimony
Neocons are calling for an immediate end to sanctions on Iraq. Wait, isn't that a progressive cause? Wrecking the Roadmap
The last barrier to the Middle East "road map" has been lifted. No wonder the hawks are frantic.
Sanctions and Sanctimony
There was a time when "lift the sanctions now" would only have been heard from marchers at a lefty rally, or from activists with groups such as Voices in the Wilderness. These days, its favored by dozens of conservative pundits, including the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer. The sanctions fight has been stolen from under the Left, much like the women's rights issue was during the war in Afghanistan. Warming to the fight against the Taliban, the right suddenly got serious about women's lib, and rallied the world around the cause of bringing down burqas. Supporters of groups like RAWA, who had been toiling away for years advocating more rights Afghani women, with little support from the likes of Laura Bush, were livid. Conservatives who had ignored the plight of Afghani women for years were suddenly their champions, and it smacked of Johnny-come-lately hypocrisy. But nobody wanted to call the right out and risk seeming pro-burqa.
Now, the administration has grabbed another left-wing baton, and they're running with it. Every conservative in America is suddenly and vociferously anti-sanctions, and the left is strangely silent on the topic. Even those who have been fighting against the sanctions for the better part of a decade don't seem to want to address the issue. And with that unnecessary silence, the left running the risk allowing the right to box them into another morally ambiguous corner.
The conservative argument is straightforward, and familiar. It should be -- it is the same argument anti-sanctions progressives have been making for years. Abolishing the sanctions, as Krauthammer puts it, is "the right thing to do. It is the only thing to do."
"The Iraqi economy is devastated, the people destitute, the country desperately awaiting reconstruction. Fortunately, Iraq has oil. Perversely, it cannot sell its oil because it is still technically under the U.N. sanctions imposed in 1990 on Saddam Hussein for his invasion of Kuwait and kept in place when he refused to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction.. All we need to get suffering Iraqis on the road to recovery is to lift the embargo and let them sell their oil."
In this narrative, Russia and France, despite their general rapprochement with the US on this issue, are blackmailers for suggesting anything other than the total and immediate abolition of the sanctions. If the UN offers anything less, Krauthammer declares, the US should walk away -- in the name of the starving Iraqi people and their country's "economic health."
France, of course, also claims to be acting solely out of concern for the Iraqi people. "We should really deal with the situat
Money Watch: 
Occupation Watch: 
Aid Watch: Lift Sanctions, for Iraq's Sake (The Jordan Times); Russia: Sanctions Should Stay in Place (The Moscow Times); Iraq Needs Immediate Help From Neighbors (Gulf News)
Weapons Watch: London May Block Inquiry Into Arms (The Independent); Yes, Washington Help Iraq Get Banned Arms (The Belleville News-Democrat); Blair Faces Ugly Questions Over Weapons (The Guardian)
Oil Watch: Who Owns Iraq's Oil? Nobody Can Agree (The Financial Times); Russia, France, UN Weigh In on Oil (The Christian Science Monitor); Israel's Iraqi Oil Play (The Guardian)
Media Watch: Did the NY Times Just Change the Rules of Journalism? (Slate); Freedom of the Press, Kurdish Style (The Times); Alexander Cockburn: The Decline and Fall of US Journalism (Working for Change); For Bush, No News Is Good News (The American Prospect); Fox News Engineer Charged With Smuggling Looted Goods (Associated Press)