A Rerun
(TPJ 201)
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – July 30, 2008
As I noted last week, 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.
With it I began what will be an occasional re-visit to columns that I have
written on the War, over time. Here I am presenting the second part of
what has become a two-parter from that very first column of mine on the
subject, way back then. For that column I did adopt a literary maneuver,
putting some of the 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 contains writing of mine, most of it dating back about
a year before I started writing for TPJ. And now, on to the second part
that writing.
I concluded last week’s Part I with that thought that we
knew that the Iraq war planning at the Pentagon has been going on for at least
eight years and that, for example, Marines had been 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 knew 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 now 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. (Yes, we do it now for sure, but
those who could see what actually was going on knew it then too.)
Based on the assumption that Kissinger and Perle did for
some unknown reason (arrogance, hubris, whatever) let the cat out of the bag
(see Part I of this column, last week), and that the US goal for Iraqi oil is
not only to control its distribution but also to actually own the stuff,
privately, what kind of government does the US want in Iraq? A national,
democratically elected one? One that could, for example, possibly be moderately left-wing? (There were left-wing
elements in the original Ba'ath Party, murdered by Hussein the same way that
Hitler murdered the left-wing elements in the Nazi Party in June, 1934.)
A government that could, heaven forefend, include Iraqi communist
deputies? One that could sometime in the future say,
"You know this oil really does belong to the Iraqi people and we are going
to administer it for their benefit?" Hardly!
And so, would the US then want a national government at
all? Hardly. Iraq is gradually splitting up before our very
eyes. Under the cooperative Brits, a Shiite regime is being established
in the South (although there is already internecine warfare going on among them
for control of it, [Diep Hiro in the London Independent, April 11,
2003]). A Kurdish State is being established in the North, with the US
"allies," the Turks, be damned. (The US was probably just as
happy that the Turks didn't allow it to use Turkish territory for basing ground
troops, nor allow the use of its air base at Incilrik for launching air
strikes. Now the US owes Turkey nothing, in re the Kurds.) A
Kurdish government, landlocked as it is, will be quite easy for the US to
control and will be happy to give up ownership of the oil for a royalty. And
after all, who are they going to send against the US
armed forces, peshmurgah fighters? And now, with control of those two big
airbases in Western Iraq, the US will soon have no need for Incilrik.
As for Baghdad and the looting. If the US had stepped in right away, the
cries would have gone up about "imperialist/infidel military
government," etc. Now the US has been asked
in by some local Iraqi leaders, at least. And in the meantime,
virtually all national records have been destroyed,
among other things. What that means is that the possibility of forming a
new national Iraqi government becomes even more remote and less of a potential
headache for the US. And so the trifurcation of Iraq is becoming a
reality (remember the British colonial policy of divide and conquer?) As
for the promises made by George HW Bush to the Saudis and the Turks that he
would not do this at the time of the Gulf War (the reason he did not go on to
Baghdad in 1991), in return for the use then of Saudi and Turk territory for
staging areas, the old double-cross seems to be in the Bush genes. After
all, George I told Saddam, through the American ambassador April Glaspie, just
before he invaded Kuwait, that it would not stand in his way (See Chap. 8,
"The Gulf War," in Jonas, S., The New Americanism, Port
Jefferson, NY: Thomas Jefferson Press, 1992).
Now, how does this all fit with what Powell et al did
at the UN? Given that the long-term US goal is private ownership of Iraqi
oil, did the US have any interest in having a UN role in any armed enforcement
of its resolutions? No way. UN sanction with a truly broad coalition
would have included at the very least French troops (promised by Chirac should
Blix have eventually declared the inspection process at an impasse) and
possibly Russian ones as well. That would have meant that those two
countries would have had a leg to stand on in their demands that their own
previous oil contracts with the previous Iraqi government under Hussein be
enforced. (A side issue to the trifurcation of Iraq and with at best only
a weak "Federal" central authority, but no true national Iraqi government,
means no legal successor to the Hussein government, and thus no one of whom the
French and Russians could ask for enforcement of their contracts.)
And so, I have come to the conclusion that the Powell effort
was a charade, intended to fail, and in the bargain get the French and the UN
to look bad to an American public somewhat skeptical about going to war without
UN sanction. I think that the invasion date had less to do with the
weather than with a fear that if the inspection process kept going, and the
Iraqis kept saying with (to date at least) truth on their side that they had no
WMD, but with American demands getting ever-more insistent, the French and
Russians would have caved and joined the invasion, the very last thing the US
actually wanted, in fact.
Furthermore, making the UN look bad to the US public, by
setting the "shirking of duty" trap for it, makes it much easier for
those forces in the Administration [e.g., John Bolton, later Georgite
“Ambassador” to the UN] that want the US to leave the UN, to sell that to the
American public and the Congress. I think that the US intentionally made
UN Resolution 1441 [the first, somewhat vague, resolution on Iraq] open to
interpretation, rather than the other way round. If Blair were in the
plot from the beginning, then he would be the perfect guy to ask for a second
resolution, with both the US and the UK holding their breaths just in case it
might pass. Of course, Bush had already announced that he was going to
invade anyway, regardless of what the UN did. And of course, the Bush
"diplomacy" (redefined by the Georgites to mean talking with the
parties on your side, in contradistinction to the usual definition, talking
with those parties with whom you have a dispute) was done in such a way as to
almost assure that the second resolution wouldn't pass or if it did that
the French and/or Russians would veto it.
Perle et al, have been working on this plan since the
mid-90s (Perle, R., "Saddam Unbound," in Kagan and Kristol, eds., Present Dangers, San Francisco, CA: Encounter
Books, 2000). As have the military planners (under the Clinton
Administration, it should be noted). The Special Forces were on the
ground for months. British and US activity in the "no-fly
zones" (not UN sanctioned) had been stepped up while the UN inspection
process and debates were ongoing. The military plan was meticulous. It
boggles the mind to think that there were no plans for, for example, the
possible outbreak of civil unrest. The plan was, in fact, to let it
happen, so as to make it that much easier for a) Gen. Jay Garner to come in
with a military government and b) to proceed with desired trifurcation of Iraq.
All of the above text was actually written by me in 2003 and
then edited for the 2004 column. At that latter time I did note that the
trifurcation of Iraq is not happening, and the public position of the US is
that the Iraqi oil industry is not to be taken over by foreign powers. It
did look at that time as if there would be a national government for Iraq, at least
on paper. So maybe I wasn’t all right, although I do think that I was
right about Powell, the UN, and making sure that they wouldn’t join in
the intervention. But the history of the US invasion and occupation of
Iraq is far from over, I noted then. And Perle and Kissinger certainly
had not publicly gone back on their statements about Iraqi oil. So maybe,
down the road, [I said at the time] I will be proved to be right after all.
As the old New York Yankees broadcaster, Mel Allen, loved to
say: “How About That?”