John McCain has consistently echoed the Bush administration talking points regarding our “commitments” to continue fighting the Iraq War. First there is the idea that “If we don’t fight them over there we’ll have to fight them here”. Then there is “If we cut and run we’ll show the world that we don’t honor our commitments”. And then there is simply “We need to maintain a strategic influence in that part of the world”. Perhaps the main difference between McCain’s position on the war, compared to George Bush’s is that McCain has specified various lengths of times that he expects US forces to remain in Iraq – such as
a hundred, a thousand, or a million years. Since McCain is almost certain to be the Republican nominee for president this year it is well worth asking several questions regarding these talking points – such as who is the “them” we’re protecting ourselves against by fighting this war, what are the commitments we’ve honored in Iraq and that McCain expects to continue honoring, and what are the costs and benefits of maintaining “influence” in the area.
Who is the “them” we are protecting ourselves against?The
Iraq Study Group Report of late 2006 contains in some respects one of the most thorough descriptions of the dynamics of the Iraq War available. The report acknowledges four sources of violence in Iraq, including the Sunni insurgency, al Qaeda, Shiite militias, and organized criminality. The most important of the four groups as a source of violence against Americans is noted by the report’s statement that “most attacks on Americans still come from the Sunni Arab insurgency”. Next in importance is the Shiite militias, about which the report states: “The Mahdi Army, led by Moqtada al-Sadr, may number as many as 60,000 fighters. It has directly challenged U.S. and Iraqi government forces, and…” Third in importance is al Qaeda, about which the report estimates there to be about 1,300 foreign fighters.
So whom are we protecting ourselves against through our presence in Iraq? We’ve already gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, against whose nonexistent weapons of mass destruction provided the excuse for our initial invasion. Is the purpose of our continued presence in Iraq to protect ourselves against the 1,300 foreign fighters, who would never have had a reason to be in Iraq if not for our invasion? Far from deterring al Qaeda, as a result of the
false pretenses upon which we invaded Iraq, our disregard for the international laws of war regarding
treatment of prisoners, and the death and destruction we have wrought upon Iraq, the
international reputation of the United States has plummeted to record lows, especially among Muslims. And consequently, the war has served as a
recruiting tool for anti-American terrorists, resulting in great harm to our efforts to combat international terror.
Thus it is clear that our war is primarily fought against the Iraqi insurgents, who greatly resent our invasion and occupation of their country and our killing of their civilian population, as well as many other things that have resulted from our invasion and occupation of their country. But why should they resent that when, as George Bush says, we are there to
spread democracy and to bring them freedom?
An overview of US violence towards IraqA starting point for understanding the reasons why the Iraqi insurgents, whom we call “terrorists”, resent our efforts to spread democracy and bring them freedom, is the violence that we have brought to their country. The bottom line is
over a million dead (mostly civilians) and more than
four million refugees, out of a population of just over 25 million. What are some of the dynamics of the US military presence in Iraq that have allowed this to happen?
A
report by a coalition of non-governmental groups called the Global Policy Forum sheds a lot of light on some of the reasons for the tragedies that so many Iraqis have suffered under the U.S. occupation. The report explains that U.S. forces:
have held a large number of Iraqi citizens in 'security detention' without charge or trial, in direct violation of international law. No Iraqi is safe from arbitrary arrest and the number of prisoners has risen greatly since 2003 (when the US-led war began)…
U.S. military commanders have established permissive rules of engagement, allowing troops to use deadly force against virtually any perceived threat. As a consequence, the US and its allies regularly kill Iraqi civilians at checkpoints and during military operations, on the basis of the merest suspicion…abusing and torturing large numbers of Iraqi prisoners… torture increasingly takes place in Iraqi prisons, apparently with US awareness and complicity…In addition to combat deaths, coalition forces have killed many Iraqi civilians.
The United States has established broad legal immunity in Iraq for its forces, for private security personnel, for foreign military and civilian contractors, and even for the oil companies doing business in Iraq…
US bombing of Iraq as an example of the philosophy of American military presence in Iraq A
recent article in
The Nation by Tom Engelhardt provides a more vivid example of how US military action in Iraq has produced so many civilian casualties. It notes a
New York Times article whose main emphasis is the death of a single American soldier, with which that article begins. Buried in the 22nd paragraph is this, presumably less important fact than the single American death:
To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.s.
To give some context to the importance of 100,000 pounds of bombs, Engelhardt points out that this is approximately the same tonnage of bombs that was
dropped on Guernica, Spain, by the Nazis during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. At the time, that assault was considered
“unparalleled in military history”… This had been an attack on a civilian population, a terror bombing (by definition)… The self-evident barbarism of the event – the first massively publicized bombing of civilians – caused international horror…
Returning to the Iraq War, Engelhardt continutes:
How could there not be civilian casualties and property damage? After all, the official explanation for this small scale version of “shock and awe” was to “take out known threats before our ground troops move in”… Given such a scenario, civilians will always suffer. And this, increasingly, is the American way of war in Iraq…
Air power has been surging in Iraq. There were 5 times as many air strikes in Iraq in 2007 as in 2006; and 2008 has started off with a literal bang from those 100,000 pounds of explosives.
It is worth noting that, of the hundreds of books that have been written about the Nazi atrocities of the 1930s and early 40s, many note how the Nazis and their supporters came to think of those atrocities as an ordinary accompaniment of war. Hence the much used phrase “
the banality of evil”. But neither our country nor our Allies in World War II bought the argument that terror against civilian populations counted as an ordinary accompaniment of war. Hence the
Nuremberg Trials, where several Nazis were tried as war criminals for such acts. Compare that situation to our current war in Iraq, as Engelhardt explains:
Unfortunately, the air war is not visible to most Americans, mainly because mainstream US reporters… simply refuse to look up… The predictably devastating results of pilots bombarding a major Iraqi city, if reported at all, will be treated as the normal “collateral damage” of war as we know it. In our world, what was once the barbarism of air war, its genuine horror, has been transformed into humdrum ordinariness, as unremarkable, and as American as apple pie.
Engelhardt ends his article by hoping that maybe someday we will recognize what “the ‘liberation’ of Iraq has meant to Iraqis.”
“Shock and Awe” as a prelude to economic imperialismNaomi Klein, in “
The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, speaks of how the United States and international institutions largely dominated by the United States (like the IMF and World Bank) have used various “shocks” to facilitate the imposing of right wing economic doctrine on numerous nations since 1973. The doctrine was initially put forth by Milton Friedman, and it is often referred to as the “Chicago School” economic theory. That economic theory involves radical privatization and so-called “free market” solutions that have done great harm to populations wherever it has been implemented. Since it is so painful to the vast majority of a country’s inhabitants, various methods have had to be developed to keep the populations in line. Sometimes that involves martial law and widespread kidnappings, executions, disappearances and torture, as under Pinochet in Chile. But many other methods have been developed as well, and often financial pressures or threats are enough to do the job. Taken as a whole, Klein terms these methods “shock therapy” – actions that are brutal enough to make a person or a population docile enough to go along with what they’re told to do. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is an extreme example of “shock therapy. Klein explains:
The Iraq invasion marked the ferocious return to the early techniques of the free-market crusade – the use of ultimate shock to forcibly wipe out and erase all obstacles to the construction of model corporatist states free from all interference…
For the strategists of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the answer to the question of “where to stick the needles” appears to have been: everywhere. During the 1991 Gulf War, roughly three hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired over the course of five weeks. In 2003, more than 380 were launched in a single day…
Shock and Awe was doing its job. In open defiance of the laws of war barring collective punishment, Shock and Awe is a military doctrine that prides itself on not merely targeting the enemy’s military forces but,… the “society writ large”…
The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive… was pure torment… An entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful, endless night…
I’ve previously discussed Antonia Juhasz’s book, “
The Bush Agenda”, which describes how the Iraq War and the accompanying economic policies initiated by L. Paul Bremer III, Bush’s administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), benefited so many U.S. corporations. Juhasz describes how: Bremer’s “
Trade Liberalization Policy” provided many benefits to U.S. corporations, devastating Iraq’s businesses and industries in the process; his
Foreign Investment Order provided the legal framework for the invasion of U.S. corporations into Iraq; billions of dollars worth of
no-bid contracts were provided by the U.S. government for reconstruction and security purposes, while more billions of dollars went
completely unaccounted for;
production Sharing Agreements were put in place to ensure access of U.S. oil companies to Iraq’s oil, causing their
profits to skyrocket; and much more.
Naomi Klein touches on these same basic issues, while going into more detail with regard to how these measures related to Milton Freidman’s Chicago School economic theories and the concept of “shock therapy”, and how they affected the Iraqi people:
There was a vision, one neatly encapsulated at
a conference held by the U.S. State Department in Baghdad in the early months of the occupation… One of the main speakers was Marek Belka, Poland’s former right-wing finance minister… Belka pounded the Iraqis with the message that they had to seize this moment of chaos to be “forceful” in pushing through policies that “would throw many people out of work.”… Iraq was in the middle of a humanitarian emergency. Unemployment was at 67%, malnutrition was rampant and the only thing holding off mass starvation was the fact that Iraqi households still received government-subsidized food and other essentials… Belka told the Iraqis that these market-distorting giveaways had to be scrapped immediately…
The views of such luminaries as Marek Belka were indeed put into practice by the U.S. occupation authorities:
Bremer spent his first four months in Iraq almost exclusively focused on economic transformation, passing a series of laws that together make up a classic Chicago School shock therapy program…. In Iraq, there was not a single governmental function that was considered so ‘core” that it could not be handed to a contractor, preferably one who provided the Republican Party with financial contributions…
There was no concern whatsoever on the part of the U.S. occupation authorities as to what their policies might do to the Iraqi people. All that was important was getting their “free market” up and running:
While private Iraqi firms closed in droves, unable to compete with imports streaming across the open borders, Bremer’s staff had few comforting words to offer.
Addressing a gathering of Iraqi businessmen, one of Bremer’s deputies confirmed that many of their businesses would indeed fail in the face of foreign competition, but that was the beauty of the free market…
While George Bush speaks of trying to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq, it is the utmost foolishness and arrogance to speak of things like that without even attempting to see the situation from the Iraqis’ point of view. Klein notes that “Iraqis did not see the corporate reconstruction as “a gift”; most saw it as a modernized form of pillage…” – as indeed it was. Opening the country to unregulated foreign corporation while excluding the Iraqis from the reconstruction process for no good reason other than to reward Bush cronies with no-bid contracts resulted in the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs at a time when the unemployment rate was already going through the roof. Klein explains how this all looked from the Iraqis’ point of view:
When tens of thousands of foreign workers poured across Iraq’s borders to take up jobs with foreign contractors, it was seen as an extension of the invasion. If within six months of the invasion, Iraqis had found themselves drinking clean water, their homes illuminated, their infirm treated in sanitary hospitals, their streets patrolled by competent police, many citizens would probably have overcome their anger at being excluded from the reconstruction process. But none of this happened… Freed of all regulations, largely protected from criminal prosecution and on contracts that guaranteed their costs would be covered, plus a profit, many foreign corporations did something entirely predictable: they scammed wildly… engaged in elaborate subcontracting schemes… The mismanagement continued for three and a half years until all the major U.S. reconstruction contractors pulled out of Iraq, their billions spent, the bulk of the work still undone… As of December 2006, when all the main reconstruction contracts were ending, the Inspector General’s Office was investigating 87 cases of possible
fraud relating to U.S. contractors in Iraq. Corruption during the occupation was not the result of poor management but of a policy decision: if Iraq was to be the next frontier for Wild West capitalism, it needed to be liberated from laws.
Consequently, a very large vacuum needed to be filled. Klein explains:
When the occupation proved unable to provide the most basic services, including security, the mosques and local militias filled the vacuum. The young Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr proved particularly adept at exposing the failures of Bremer’s privatized reconstruction by running his own shadow reconstruction, earning himself a devoted following… dispatched electricians to fix power and phone lines… ran blood drives. He also took the young men who saw no jobs and no hope in Bremer’s Iraq… and armed them…
The result was the Mahdi Army, now one of the most brutal forces in Iraqi’s sectarian battles…
The hypocrisy that the Bush administration (and many others) has shown with respect to its invasion and occupation of Iraq is astonishing. It refers to those Iraqis who take up arms against our imperial invasion of their country as “terrorists”. The designation of “terrorist” to patriots trying to defend their country is so ridiculous that refuting it by use of historical analogies would be superfluous.
Likewise, our forcing of so-called “free-market” principles down their throats and calling it freedom and democracy shows a degree of hypocrisy that could not exist if we had a decent national news media.
Speaking to an audience of Iraqi businessmen, Bremer’s CPA:
explained that “protected businesses never, never become competitive.” He appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, Blackwater and all the other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense.
Naomi Klein, speaking of the U.S. insistence that its contractors in Iraq be immune from the rule of law, sums up the economic aspects of U.S. occupation:
The U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage – there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign (mostly U.S.) corporations, completely outside the law.
A word about the relative position of the presidential candidates on George Bush’s Iraq WarMuch has been written about Hillary Clinton’s vote for the Iraq War resolution and about the lack of leadership and commitment from both Obama and Clinton towards ending the Iraq War. Some have even gone so far as to say that because of this they will not vote for one or both candidates in the General Election. But in our disappointment, some of us tend to forget or discount the huge disparity between their position and that of John McCain.
Both Clinton and Obama
have committed to ending the war and withdrawing our troops as soon as possible. Yes, it is troubling to me that Hillary Clinton has never apologized for her vote for the Iraq War Resolution. And yes, it is troubling to me and others that, unlike what John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich promised when they were still in the presidential race, both Clinton and Obama plan to leave a residual combat force in Iraq to “combat terrorism”. That leads some of us to question their full commitment to ending the war.
But still, their position is miles apart from John McCain’s position that our troops should remain in Iraq for a hundred to a million years. If McCain gets the Republican nomination for president, the Iraq War is likely to and
should be a major campaign issue. McCain should be pushed to thoroughly explain why our imperialist interest in Iraq justifies the killing of a large portion of their civilian population and what right we have to occupy their country indefinitely against the will and at great harm to the Iraqi people.
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