It was another one of those discouraging weeks in Iraq — you know the type. Bombs going off. People dying in large numbers. Very… well… discouraging. But far be it from our leaders to become discouraged with the project itself. And no, I don’t mean this project they call “Middle East democracy”, because that’s just some policy hack yammering. I mean the real Iraq project involving permanent U.S. bases in country and an Iraqi government compliant with (or at least sensitive to) our wishes. Something tells me that project will withstand a good many setbacks of the type that involve loss of life and limb, so long as those lives and limbs belong only to the relatively poor and poorly connected. It was with this goal in mind that our leaders insisted on starting this disastrous war back in March 2003, and if they’ve shown an element of regret over that decision during the last four years, I’ve missed it.

Actually, the “project” was dealt a minor blow in the past couple of weeks with the drafting of legislation regulating the Iraqi oil industry. I say minor because the legislation does actually appear to allow foreign (i.e. U.S.-based) companies to invest in the Iraqi oil industry without significant limits and to repatriate most if not all of the profits from those investments. However, outright privatization of the industry has been left out of this draft. According to Christian Parenti in last week’s Nation, the law has not provided for productions sharing agreements — contracts that allow massive profit-taking and asset management advantages on the part of the petroleum multinationals. (Previous iterations of the law had been a bit kinder to Bush’s friends in the industry.) I’m certain they haven’t exhausted all of their options on this point, and the law does allow them a strong foothold in some of the richest oil fields on earth. But what isn’t really being reported on is the role these efforts play in fueling the insurgency.

Imagine just for a moment that the Iraqis are not simple, ignorant people who have been waiting since the bronze age for us to come and grant them “freedom”. Imagine that people in the insurgency and folks like Moqtada al Sadr have a somewhat subtle understanding of their own national self-interest. Imagine, too, that they have been paying attention to U.S. policy in the region over the past half century… perhaps paying it greater attention than we ourselves have done. How can we expect that they would show any enthusiasm over our apparent intention to settle in for a good long stay? How can we think that they would willingly submit themselves to a government dominated by people who were living in exile prior to the arrival of U.S. forces in 2003? Do we really think that they will sit still while our armed forces (government-run and private) are in occupation of their country and our commercial sector lobbies for greater influence?

If so, we suffer from a morbid kind of optimism, tacking somewhere between Pollyanna and Pangloss. Kind of late in the game for these sorts of illusions, isn’t it?

luv u,

jp

In their efforts to paper over a catastrophe, the Bush administration (and Iraq war supporters in general) are beginning to look like Saddam’s old press spokesman, “Comical” Ali, who steadfastly denied the advance of U.S. troops to Baghdad in 2003 when his audience could easily see American tanks in the street behind him. There’s a P.R. hero for you. Bush really needs that guy! All he’s got is his lame cousin Tony Snow, his even lamer “uncle” Dick Cheney, and the ever faithful bride of Frankenstein, Laura, who opined to Larry King recently that things are going not too badly in Iraq except for that one bombing that discourages everyone. I think she may have meant to use another word that begins with “dis”, like “dismembers”. In any case, all this minimizing does have some effect. Some recent polling shows that large numbers of Americans have no even semi-realistic notion of how many Iraqis have been killed since we unilaterally decided to “liberate” their country (by destroying it). People seem to think about 10,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003 — that’s only 1/3 of the ludicrously low-ball estimate Bush himself offered some months back.

Would it make a difference if people were more broadly aware of, say, Les Roberts’ Johns Hopkins study that estimates the death toll at as high as 650,000? I mean, imagine it were explained to the American people that the type of statistical model used in this study is the same that is routinely applied to war zones all around the world. What would we do with that knowledge? Would we force our leaders to end the war now? Or do we really only care about American lives? Hard to say. I like to think that many of us would be appalled to know that Bush had brought us back into Rwanda territory (we’ve certainly been there before). I don’t know if that would be enough to bring a stop to all this. What worries me is the degree to which people tolerate this war. This sort of permissiveness merely encourages bad behavior on the part of our leaders. Let one president get away with mass murder, and you can bet the next one will try the same thing. There are precedents.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ll have to wait for the next president. This one and his team are ready to strike a blow against Iran and, more broadly, what they view as Shi’ite extremism on the rise throughout the region. They appear to think that they can attack the center of regional Shi’ism without pissing off the millions of co-religionists who live in neighboring Iraq. (Check out Sy Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker.) And sure, I know the administration has said they will sit around a table with representatives of Iran, but that’s likely just so that they can say they went the extra diplomatic mile before bombing Tehran. It’s hard to imagine any foreign policy team that includes creatures like Elliott Abrams would offer the hand of friendship to a regime in whose vilification they’ve invested so much of their political capital. As Hersh and others have reported, the Bush administration is wittingly or unwittingly setting the stage not just for war with Iran, but for a regional conflict between Shi’as and Sunnis. Think they wouldn’t dare push their luck? Think harder.

As long as we don’t hold people accountable for this disaster, they will cause new disasters. And we will be left with the bill.

We seem to be headed, once again, down that treacherous path that leads to unprovoked war. Would such a course be possible were it not for the willing participation of the major national news media? Indeed, some of the mighty organs of the American press that felt compelled to apologize when the Iraq war rationales they so enthusiastically peddled fell apart are now engaging in the very same sort of behavior that brought on the mea culpas. Like the many politicians who supported this seemingly endless war at the outset, the press is only sorry that Bush/Cheney’s Iraq adventure wasn’t a swift success. The thing they’re decidedly not sorry for is the fact that they helped send thousands to their deaths needlessly. For this, they couldn’t care less. And you can bet politicians, pundits, and Pulitzer-prizewinning scribblers will raise a collective cheer for war with Iran if they see short-term benefit in it.

Still, this time around, the dossier against our potential enemy is pretty weak stuff, even for the New York Times. I mean, background-only briefings on weapons they can only provide photos of? Give me a break. Even the bogus claims about Iraqi WMDs held up for a week or two. This shit didn’t even last a day. Andrew Cockburn had an excellent article about how these “sophisticated” weapons can be built in a machine shop with about $20 – 30 worth of materials, according to Cockburn’s source at the Pentagon. Iraq is flush with the kind of high-explosives that might be used in these improvised devices, versions of which have been employed by the French resistance in WWII, by the IRA, and by Hezbollah during Israel’s 19-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Even NPR pointed out that the claim about Iran supplying these weapons was nothing new and had, in fact, been floated by the administration since early last year.

So… why does this shit make the front page of the Times? Because the prevailing model in mainstream journalism is to take the word of government spokespersons and “senior administration officials” at face value. Often it seems that reporters rely upon these highly placed sources even when it conflicts with the evidence of their own senses. In Iraq, they rely upon official information for just about everything that occurs beyond the boundaries of the Green Zone. So Judy Miller may be gone, but the Miller brigade marches on — next stop, Teheran! And if Cheney is to be believed (as he most assuredly will be in the corporate newsrooms), it will be another cakewalk. Hell, look what a difference the British have made in Basra, eh?

Then again, don’t look. Just take Cheney’s word for it — you’ll find it on the front page.

I guess I’m just supposed to get annoyed at the president — Rove and the boys just love getting a rise out of people like me. Though I hate to encourage them, it is irritating as hell to watch or hear Dubya at one of his press conferences. I mean, there’s something about an obvious idiot talking down to you that is just innately insulting. Then, of course, there’s the scummy substance of what he has to say… like suggesting that he’s only “protecting the troops” when he openly attempts to provoke Iran, thereby pissing off about half of the Shi’a Muslims in Iraq (in other words, 30% of the population). In a country where a majority already supports armed attacks against U.S. troops, how is this a good idea? Then there’s Bush’s speculation about how history will judge us if we “fail” in Iraq — let that happen and future generations will ask, “Where were they?” (Huh?) That’s the boy in the bubble talking… and he’s talking out his ass. We’re the people of the future with respect to his decision to start this disastrous war four years ago. What the hell are we saying right now?

It’s hard to say if Dubya is aware of it or not (there may be no institutional reason why he should be), but there is one narrow sense in which what he says is true. Future “deciders” — those who will inherit the dilapidated machinery of empire that Bush is now driving into the ground — might well deplore the failure of his Iraq project. It has, after all, been a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy planning to exert strong influence over the energy-rich Middle East, going back to at least World War II. So long as the region’s oil remains one of the world’s greatest strategic assets, our commissars will want to exercise control over it if only to maintain the option of denying those resources to our principal economic competitors. Defeat in Iraq — i.e. the U.S. abandoning its plans for a permanent presence and a congenial client state there — would mean a significant loss of influence in that part of the world. High stakes indeed for the imperial mandarin class.

Assuming for a moment that Bush knows this to be true, why would he risk this invasion and how could he have been so blind to the obvious dangers? Well… I think of it as somewhat like the plot of The Producers. I mean, you got Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom just so damn certain that “Springtime for Hitler” was going to be an immediate flop, they essentially bet the store on it. Bush and company had that kind of confidence in the success of their Iraq adventure. Remember, they were coming off of the invasion of Afghanistan (real easy to beat, because it had been blown up numerous times already), and they had the same visions of an easy victory chief executives have dreamed of since Desert Storm… even back to the Six-Day War. A few encouraging words from a drunk named “curve ball” and it’s Fuck, we can’t lose! So now what? Blow up the theater? Starting to look like it.

I know some watery liberals are almost afraid that the “surge” will succeed. They might remind themselves what success looks like. It looks like Fallujah. It looks like Guatemala. It looks like Afghanistan. That kind of success is truly something to fear.

On a week when most of the mass media have been obsessing over love-crazed astronauts and tabloid corpses, it’s almost easy to forget that there are a couple of bloody neo-colonial wars going on, and that one of them is on the verge of a significant escalation in violence. Oh, well, we’re supposed to say… what’s on the other channels? The less we focus on this growing catastrophe, the better off our leaders will be. They’ve already made certain we won’t be called upon to fight if we don’t want to, and that all of the costs will be deferred until long after they leave office to their opulent retirement consultancies (Uncle Carlucci! Keep that chair warm for me!) A little high fructose news-food puts icing on the multi-layer cake of denial they’ve baked up for us — devil’s food, for sure. And yet, at the same time, the Iraq war story keeps growing larger and larger, its lethal tentacles stretching into every corner of American life, destined to touch each one of us, whether we like it or not.

With respect to that, there were some non-tabloid stories in the news this week as well. One was the Pentagon inspector general’s report on the Office of Special Plans — that raw intelligence stovepiping shop run by snot-nosed neocon Doug Feith (now on to bigger and better things, thank you very much). Seems even the Pentagon may be getting around (four years too late) to recognizing that putting ideologically-driven morons in charge of policy is maybe not such a great idea. That won’t stop us from doing it again, mind you. Our new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whose job it once was to exaggerate Soviet military capabilities, is making much of some fragmentary evidence that Iranian munitions may be making their way into Iraq. Well, there’s a surprise. I have to think that if a provenance were found for each item of explosives in that sorry country, someone other than Iran would top the list. Jesus Christmas — isn’t it just too fucking obvious that this administration (and really any administration) will bend the facts to their own purposes whenever they see fit?

It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which the principal boosters of this war will engage in rhetorical gymnastics in order to prove themselves right in some small measure. Chuck Krauthammer is exemplary of the war planners’ three-strike process to the hell we live in today. Strike one: scare talk about a grave and gathering threat — Saddam’s dreaded nuclear weapons that Krauthammer and others insisted we must “pre-empt”. Strike two: triumphalist blather just following the fall of Baghdad about the glorious “three week war”. Strike three: shifting the blame to the Iraqis and domestic opponents of the war, whom Krauthammer attempts to portray as possessed of a kind of paternalistic, colonial attitude that in effect discriminates against Iraqis by suggesting that America is the author of the current catastrophe, not the Iraqis themselves (who, according to Krauthammer, “chose” civil war). That’s the trajectory of both the administration and the congressional leaders who bought into the 2003 invasion, and if we’re not careful, that is the kind of thinking that will define the debate in the coming election.

This is the time to resist — not just this attempt to blame Iraqis, but also the associated effort to attack Iran. They’ve had their three strikes. It’s our turn to drive this debate.

luv u,

jp