January 10, 2006
The
sign has been put out front: "Iraq is open for business."
We read about things
done and said by the Iraqi president, or the Ministry of this or the
Ministry of that, and it's easy to get the impression that Iraq is in the
process of becoming a sovereign state, albeit not particularly secular and
employing torture, but still, a functioning, independent state. Then we
read about the IMF and the rest of the international financial mafia --
with the US playing its usual
sine qua non
role -- making large loans to the country and forgiving debts, with the
customary strings attached, in the current instance ending government
subsidies for fuel and other petroleum products. And so the government
starts to reduce the subsidies for these products which affect almost
every important aspect of life, and the prices quickly quintuple, sparking
wide discontent and protests. [1] Who in this sovereign
nation wanted to add more suffering to the already beaten-down Iraqi
people? But the international financial mafia are concerned only with
making countries meet certain criteria sworn to be holy in Economics 101,
like a balanced budget, privatization, and deregulation and thus making
themselves more appealing to international investors.
In case the presence
of 130,000 American soldiers, a growing number of sprawling US military
bases, and all the designed-in-Washington restrictive Coalition
Provisional Authority laws still in force aren't enough to keep the Iraqi
government in line, this will do it. Iraq will have to agree to allow
their economy to be run by the IMF for the next decade. The same IMF that
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former
chief economist at the World Bank, describes as having "brought disaster
to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing
economies in its wake." [2]
On top of this comes
the disclosure of the American occupation's massive giveaway of the
sovereign nation's most valuable commodity, oil. One should read the new
report, "Crude
Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq's Oil Wealth" by the British NO,
Platform. Among its findings:
This report reveals
how an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to
be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public
debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority
of Iraq’s oilfields -- accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil
reserves -- for development by multinational oil companies.
The estimated cost
to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194 billion,
compared with leaving oil development in public hands.
The contracts would
guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates of return of 42
to 162 percent. The kinds of contracts that will provide these returns are
known as production sharing agreements. PSAs have been heavily promoted
by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior figures
in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. However, PSAs last for 25-40 years, are usually
secret and prevent governments from later altering the terms of the
contract. [3]
"Crude Designs"
author and lead researcher, Greg Muttitt, says, "The form of contracts
being promoted is the most expensive and undemocratic option available.
Iraq's oil should be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not foreign oil
companies." [4]
Noam Chomsky
recently remarked, "We're supposed to believe that the US would've invaded
Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were
pickles and lettuce. This is what we're supposed to believe."
[5]
Reconstruction,
Thy Name is Not the United States
The Bush
administration has announced that it does not intend to seek any new funds
for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in
February. When the last of the reconstruction budget is spent, US
officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the
fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is
tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring
reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million
people. [6]
It should be noted
that these services, including sanitation systems, were largely destroyed
by US bombing -- most of it rather deliberately -- beginning in the first
Gulf War: 40 days and nights the bombing went on, demolishing everything
that goes into the making of a modern society; followed by 12 years of
merciless economic sanctions, accompanied by 12 years of often daily
bombing supposedly to protect the so-called no-fly zones; finally the
bombing, invasion and widespread devastation beginning in March 2003 and
continuing even as you read this.
"The U.S. never
intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army
Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a
recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This
was just supposed to be a jump-start." [7]
It's a remarkable
pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing
entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the
infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And
afterward doing shockingly little or literally nothing to repair the
damage.
On January 27, 1973,
in Paris, the United States signed the "Agreement on Ending the War and
Restoring Peace in Vietnam". Among the principles to which the United
States agreed was that stated in Article 21: "In pursuance of its
traditional [sic] policy, the United States will contribute to healing the
wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam [North Vietnam] and throughout Indochina."
Five days later, President Nixon sent a
message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam in which he stipulated the
following:
1) The Government of the United States of
America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without
any political conditions.
2) Preliminary
United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the
United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the
range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years.
Nothing of the
promised reconstruction aid was ever paid. Or ever will be.
During the same
period, Laos and Cambodia were wasted by US bombing as relentlessly as was
Vietnam. After the Indochina wars were over, these nations, too,
qualified to become beneficiaries of America's "traditional policy" of
zero reconstruction.
Then came the
American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. There goes our
neighborhood. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled
Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up
to the US Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for the damage caused by
Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the
American invasion and bombing). They got just nothing, the same amount the
people of Grenada received.
In 1998, Washington,
in its grand wisdom, fired more than a dozen cruise missiles into a
building in Sudan which it claimed was producing chemical and biological
weapons. The completely pulverized building was actually a major
pharmaceutical plant, vital to the Sudanese people. The United States
effectively admitted its mistake by releasing the assets of the plant's
owner it had frozen. Surely now it was compensation time. It appears that
nothing has ever been paid to the owner, who filed suit, or to those
injured in the bombing. [8]
The following year
we had the case of Yugoslavia; 78 days of round-the-clock bombing,
transforming an advanced state into virtually a pre-industrial one; the
reconstruction needs were breathtaking. It's been 6 1/2 years since
Yugoslavian bridges fell into the Danube, the country's factories and
homes leveled, its roads made unusable, transportation torn apart. Yet the
country has not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect
and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States.
The day after the
above announcement about the US ending its reconstruction efforts in Iraq,
it was reported that the United States is phasing out its commitment to
reconstruction in Afghanistan as well. [9] This after
several years of the usual launching of bombs and missiles on towns and
villages, resulting in the usual wreckage and ruin.
Oh Those Quaint
Tribal Customs
On December 7, the All Things Considered feature of National Public
Radio had a report about the "honor" killing of a young woman in Iraq who
had been kidnapped. She had to be killed by her family because of the
mere possibility of her having been raped by her captors; the family had
to protect its honor; a much loved and admired daughter she was, but
still, her cousin shot her dead. It had nothing to do with Islam, the
story said, it was a "tribal custom."
This report was
followed immediately by Col. Gary Anderson, US Marines retired, arguing
that the United States has to stay the course in Iraq. He's concerned that
bin Laden et al. will think the United States is "a quitter." He says that
leaving now would "dishonor" the Iraqis and he's apparently prepared to
continue killing any number of the very same Iraqi people to preserve
their honor. Anthropologists report that this seems to be some kind of
"tribal custom" in Anderson's country.
Presumably it
doesn't bother the good colonel that a large majority of the informed
people of the world think the United States is a murderous imperialist
power -- he's probably proud of that -- but a "quitter"? Over his dead
body. Or someone's dead body.
Yankee Karma
The questions
concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go
on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: How
to/should we block the flow into the country? Granting amnesty, a
guest-worker program, whether the immigrants help the economy, immigrants
collecting welfare, policing employers who hire immigrants ... on and on,
round and round it goes, for decades. Once in a while someone opposed to
immigration will question whether the United States has any moral
obligation to take in these Latino immigrants. Here's one answer to that
question: Yes, the United States has a moral obligation because so many of
the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by
American interventions. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew
progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting
poverty. In El Salvador, the US played a major role in suppressing a
movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent
played such a role in Honduras.
The end result of
these policies has been an army of desperate people heading north in
search of a better life, in the process of which they have added to
Mexico's poverty burden, inducing many Mexicans to join the trek to
Yanquiland.
Although Washington
has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US
has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico's
police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own
people's aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of
the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington's North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has brought a flood of cheap,
subsidized US corn into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the
land and into the immigration stream north.
Hmmm, perhaps we
really are in danger of a biological attack ... but not from al Qaeda.
A week after the
massive anti-war demonstration in Washington on September 24, it was
revealed that deadly bacteria had been detected at several sites in the
city, including by the Lincoln Memorial, situated very close to the
demonstration. Biohazard monitors installed at various sites gave
positive readings on the 24th and 25th for the bacterium
Francisella
tularensis,
which causes the infectious disease tularemia, a pneumonia-like ailment
that can be acquired by inhaling airborne bacteria and can be fatal. This
biological agent is on the "A list" of the Department of Homeland
Security's biohazards, along with anthrax, plague and smallpox.
[10]
My first thought
upon reading about this was: Those bastards, they'd love to punish people
who protest against the war. There's nothing I would put past them.
My second thought
was: Oh stop being so paranoid. The news report cited federal health
officials saying that the tularemia bacterium can occur naturally in soil
and small animals.
My third thought
came more than a month later, when I happened to be reading about a US
Army program of the 1960s which carried out numerous exercises involving
aircraft spraying of American warships with thousands of servicemen
aboard. A wide variety of chemical and biological warfare agents were used
to learn the vulnerabilities of these ships and personnel to such attacks
and to develop procedures to respond to them. Amongst the CBW agents used
were
Pasteurella tularensis
(another name for
Francisella
tularensis),
which, said the Department of Defense later, causes tularemia, can produce
very serious symptoms, and has a mortality rate of about six percent.
[11]
These tests in
effect used members of the armed forces as guinea pigs, without their
informed consent and without proper medical follow-up. This was a scenario
enacted on numerous occasions during the Cold War, and subsequently as
well, involving literally millions of service members, with frequent
harmful effects, including at least several deaths, military and civilian.
It's a good bet that on some future date we'll learn that similar tests
are still going on as part of the war on terrorism. I conclude from all
this that if our glorious leaders are not particularly concerned about the
health and welfare of their own soldiers, the wretched warriors they
enlist to fight the empire’s wars, how can we be surprised if they don't
care about the health and welfare of those of us standing in opposition to
the empire?
Civil liberties
holds an important place in the heart of the Bush administration's
rhetoric.
"This is a limited
program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America and, I
repeat, limited," said President Bush about the National Security Agency's
domestic spying on Americans without a court order. [12]
Let's give the devil
his due. It's easy to put down the domestic spying program, but the fact
is that the president is right, it is indeed limited. It's limited to
those who are being spied upon. No one -- I repeat, no one -- who is not
being spied upon is being spied upon.
On the other hand,
there have been legal scholars, such as former Supreme Court Justice Lewis
Brandeis, who have felt strongly that all wiretapping by the government
should be considered an unconstitutional search under the Fourth
Amendment, which, we should remember, states: "The right of the people to
be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants
shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation,
and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or
things to be seized."
Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But,
as someone has pointed out, he was talking about citizens watching the
government, not the reverse.
William Blum
is the author
of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2,
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower,
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire,
and
West-Bloc
Dissident: A Cold War Memoir.
Visit his website:
www.killinghope.org.
He
can be reached at:
bblum6@aol.com.
Other Articles by William
Blum
*
The Climax of
Civilization
* Bringing
Orwell's Nightmare to Fruition
* Empire is
Harmful to Your Health
* More Things
You Need to Know Before the World Ends
* Some Things
You Need to Know Before the World Ends
* "Revolution",
Imperial Arrogance, and Questions for God
* What Do the
Imperial Mafia Really Want?
* Imperial
Wonderland
* Empire of
Frivolity
* Some
Thoughts On That Election Thing
* The Faces of
Fear
* Coke or
Pepsi in 2004?
* If John Kerry
is the Answer, What is the Question?
NOTES
[1]
Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2005, p.1; Agence France Presse,
December 23, 2005
[2] Johann Hari, "Why Are We Inflicting This Discredited Market
Fundamentalism on Iraq?" The Independent (UK), December 22, 2004;
yes, 2004, this has been a work carefully in progress for some time.
[3]
www.crudedesigns.org/
[4] Interview
with Institute for Public Accuracy (Washington, DC), November 22, 2005
[5] Interview by Andy Clark, Amsterdam Forum, December 18, 2005, audio and
text at:
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11330.htm
[6] Washington Post, January 2, 2006, p.1
[7] Ibid
[8] William Blum, "Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American
Empire," p.134-8
[9] Washington Post, January 3, 2006, p.1
[10] Washington Post, October 2, 2005, p.C13
[11] Part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), Department of
Defense "Fact Sheets" released in 2001-2, "Shady
Grove" test; See also Associated
Press, October 9, 2002, The New York Times May 24, 2002, p.1
[12] Associated Press, January 2, 2006