A Revisit Column No. 200
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – July 23,
2008
On March 16, 2004 we ran my column no. 4 on The
Political Junkies.net. It was my first on the subject of the Georgite War
on Iraq. I surely did not expect at the time that I would be writing on the
same subject four-plus years hence, with no end in sight. Last week I wrote about the centrality of the
War on Iraq to the Presidential Campaign. This week I am beginning what
will be an occasional re-visit to columns that I have written on the War, over
time. Here I am presenting the first part of what has become a two-parter
from that very column of mine on the subject, way back then. For that
column I did adopt a literary maneuver, putting some of my words into the mouth
of a “friend” with the initials A.L. With apologies to the late, great
sports writer Ring Lardner, I entitled the column “You Know Me,
Al.” “Al’s thoughts” were actually written by me, in May,
2003. So the column that you see here is all my writing, most of it dating
back about a year before I started writing for TPJ. And now, on to the
subject at hand, going back to the time of the invasion and the run-up to
it.
Widespread
looting in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities. The destruction
of the museum of antiquities in Baghdad including the removal of such items as
a tablet on which was inscribed the Code of Hammurabi. I believe that it was
the first known set of rules of law. (How ironic that its disappearance is the
result of the combined work of two men for whom the rule of law is viewed only
as an impediment to their continued rule, Saddam Hussein and George Bush.) This
destruction will go down in history as of the same order as the burning of the
library at Alexandria, c. 400 CE. [Well perhaps not that apocalyptic; there
were some recoveries since the time of the looting, but I don’t know if the
Tablet was among them.] The US, even six days later, was doing little to
control the situation (although by that time it was doing more than the
absolute nothing it did for the first four days or so). As for the museum
specifically and how it was allowed to fall to the mob, I have heard two
stories, both on NPR. One is that the museum directors, anticipating
trouble, asked the US forces to guard the place, and were refused. The
other variant is that the US forces agreed to do so and then did not.
Among the criticisms of
the US/UK invasion, which resulted in the ongoing incapacity and partial
destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, esp. electricity supply, pure water
supply, sanitary sewage disposal, health services, fire-fighting, garbage
collection, etc., has been "how could the invaders not plan for this
predictable outcome?" [Amazing, isn’t it, that most of the
disruption of basic services to the people of Iraq has still not been
effectively dealt with, except in limited areas, and in some places, like
Falluja, it’s much worse.] Thinking it over at the time, I think that
they did plan for it, that in fact things are going pretty much according to
plan, and that this plan for the humbling of Iraq and its inhabitants is part
of a larger US plan (to which the UK may or may not have been privy) that has
been going extremely well, from its perspective. To
wit.
Let us assume that
the primary reason for the invasion is oil and its control by the US (with a
few drops here and there allowed to the UK). An article by Dr. Nimrod
Raphaeli, Senior Analyst for the Middle East Economics Study Program of the
Middle East Media Research Institute of Washington, DC (www.memri.org,
a generally pro-Israeli think tank) projects how US control of Iraqi oil could
eventually be used, among other things, to destroy OPEC, or at least Saudi
domination of it (No. 131, April 10, 2003). An article by Bill Vann of
the World Socialist Website (www.wsws.org, April 8, 2003) cites an article by Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger in The
National Interest magazine that projects the privatization of Iraqi oil to
the major Western (mainly US) oil companies. (And now, lo and behold in
2008, comes the news of those first contracts, no-bid mind you, for the major
US oil companies, with US “advisors” doing the “negotiating” for the Iraqi
“government.)
I, and many other
observers, had thought that the US simply wanted a friendly government in Iraq,
in control of its oil, but partial to US interests. But now, two of the
major planners of the whole project tell us that they want to go beyond that to
a situation that has not existed since the Saudis nationalized ARAMCO in the
mid-70s: actual US oil company ownership of Middle Eastern oil reserves, not
just control over marketing and distribution. Profits are even higher if
you own the stuff in addition to selling it at the retail end. And you
are subject to the winds of no one else's fortunes.
[When I wrote the column
in March, 2004, using the text above that I had originally written in 2003, I
added the following note: For the past six months or so, published plans for
the “privatization” of the Iraqi economy (read takeover by foreign --- read US
with a few drops for the UK --- capital) have specifically excluded the oil
industry. I asked a knowledgeable friend about this and he said, “Just
watch, in the dark of one of those desert nights, even though they couldn’t
find any WMD, they’ll find a way around that one.”]
We know that the Iraq war
planning at the Pentagon has been going on for at least eight years and that,
for example, Marines have training in urban warfare at a specially constructed
"city" of the Middle Eastern type in the New Mexico desert for as
many (Pentagon generals have said this on the air). We know that the war
was underway, through the use of Special Forces, for months (that is throughout
the whole debate in the UN) before the main invasion. We know that the
Powell speech of Feb. 5 to the Security Council about the "evidence"
of WMD was obviously false, as least to some extent if not in toto.
If the US knew that Saddam
had WMD, and further if it knew where they were to the extent that it could
demand that the UN act immediately: a) why did it not simply provide this
intelligence to Blix and if it were not acted upon immediately then demand that
the inspection process be changed to detection, with direct US participation,
or b) why did it not know during the invasion to go directly to the WMD storage
sites that it supposedly knew about? Why and why not? Because what
the US knew, if it knew anything at all, was that either there were indeed no
WMD at all, or that if there were, they existed in a severely degraded
condition.
So why did Powell
lie? To get the Security Council to approve the "second resolution"
(which would have specifically authorized the invasion of Iraq, under UN
auspices and sponsorship, which the “first resolution” did not)? I think
not. I think that the strategy was exactly the opposite. Before we go on
to a consideration of what the strategy is, whether or not (UK then-Prime
Minister) Tony Blair is privy to it is interesting, but immaterial, except for
British politics of course. Do note, however, that the British forces in
the "coalition" have been sequestered in the South, nowhere near
Baghdad. They are near the southern oil fields, but plenty of US forces
are too, and the Brits were bogged down for quite some time in subduing Basra,
a large city. They are certainly going to have no say in the future
national military governance of Iraq.
_____
To be continued next week with Part II
of this column, dealing in further detail about exactly what really happened at
the UN in February, 2003, just before the US/UK
invasion.