Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not to avoid taxes, which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but firstly to conceal what they have stolen and later to launder it legally. Some of this can be done by buying property in places such as Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company such as Mossack Fonseca.

  The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of financial interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing or are racked by conflict and war.

  Tuesday, 3 May 2016

  SHAKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF IRAQ’S GOVERNMENT

  Iraqis bursting into the Green Zone in Baghdad over the weekend were able to see for the first time the palatial homes and offices of the corrupt and dysfunctional Iraqi leadership that has misgoverned the country for the last 13 years.

  As the security forces stood aside, protesters toppled a section of the 15-foot-high blast walls and poured through the gap into this well-fortified and exclusive enclave on the banks of the Tigris and in the centre of the Iraqi capital. After taking over the parliament building, the crowd chanted the name of the Shia populist nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, to whose movement many of the protesters belong, and denounced the failures of the present government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

  The Green Zone, with its fountains and well-watered lawns, has long been a hated symbol of the isolation of the rulers of Iraq who never experience the harsh living conditions and shortages endured by ordinary Iraqis. By breaching its walls, the demonstrators who splashed in the fountains and took pictures of themselves on the lawns showed that the Iraqi elite is more vulnerable than in the past to expressions of popular anger.

  Mr Sadr's stated aims are reform rather than revolution: he does not want Mr Abadi to resign, but he does want him to appoint a cabinet of technocrats and to end the quota system by which the sectarian or ethnically based parties appoint loyalists regardless of their abilities. This is opposed by existing parties, which operate extensive client and patronage systems. At least 8,000 of Iraq's bureaucrats - some put the figure as high as 25,000 - are political appointees who are notorious for their corruption and incompetence.

  Mr Sadr's purpose may be to strengthen the Iraqi state and make it more effective and honest. But the very ease with which the Sadrists and their supporters penetrated the Green Zone and took over parliament without resistance from the security forces makes the state look even more weak and ineffectual.

  Though the Sadrists say that many of the protesters do not belong to their movement, they appeared to have the eruption into the Green Zone very much under control from the beginning.

  Sadrist stewards prevented equipment in parliament being smashed and say they cleaned up the parliamentary chamber on leaving. The well-disciplined exodus of protesters from the zone on Sunday without any looting shows the degree to which the action was organised by the Sadrist movement.

  "The people are saying that if the government does not appoint a government they will be back [to take over the Green Zone again]," a Sadrist leader, who did not want his name published, told The Independent. He believed that the other political parties had been hoping that the protests would get out of hand and lead to the ransacking and looting of the Green Zone which would have provided an excuse for the Iraqi security forces to use force against the demonstrators. "The parties hoped for chaos so the army would clear away the protesters," he said. He did not think that the other Shia movements were in a position to use their militias against protests that have mass support.

  There is deep anger among most Iraqis of all classes against a ruling elite that is seen as having stolen much of Iraq's oil revenues since 2003. The sense of crisis was exacerbated by the disintegration of the large and expensively equipped Iraqi army in 2014 when it was attacked by much smaller Isis forces. But the alarm today is less to do with Isis, which has been losing ground, and more to do with the fall in the price of oil, which means the government is fast running out of money. The state is by far the biggest employer in Iraq, paying some seven million people out of a population of 33 million as employees or pensioners. This costs $4 billion (£2.73 billion) a month but oil revenues have been running closer to $2 billion.

  The Sadrist leader said that Mr Sadr was aware of the difficulty of reforming the corrupt Iraqi administration. He said that "we can't change hundreds of director generals and thousands of officials, but we have to start somewhere." He added that independent ministers could push for changes in important financial institutions like the Central Bank, where those in charge were often only acting officials connected to the ruling Dawa Party, though they should have been approved by parliament under the Iraqi constitution.

  Mr Sadr, who comes from a clerical family famous for its opposition to Saddam Hussein, has a devoted following among the Shia poor. He led his Mehdi Army militia against the US occupation in 2004, fighting two battles against US troops in the Shia holy city of Najaf, but he later dissolved the Mehdi Army amid accusations that it was centrally involved in the murder of Sunni during the sectarian killings of 2006-7 when tens of thousands were killed.

  In an interview with The Independent in the Shia holy city of Najaf in 2013, Mr Sadr forecast that "the near future of Iraq is dark", saying that the unity and independence of the country was endangered by Sunni-Shia hostility. He warned against the marginalisation of the Sunni and said that the danger was that because of sectarianism "the Iraqi people will disintegrate and it will be easy for external powers to control the country". He remains adamantly opposed to intervention from the US, UK, Iran, Turkey or Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, asserting that they always make the crisis in Iraq worse. The protesters who stormed the Green Zone at the weekend shouted both anti-American and anti-Iranian slogans.

  Mr Sadr comes across as politically astute and cautious about what he says and does, quite contrary to his image in the West a few years ago when he was portrayed as "a firebrand cleric".

  He said that the problem in Iraq is that the Iraqis generally have been traumatised by the last half a century, during which there has been "a constant cycle of violence: Saddam, occupation, war after war, first Gulf war, then second Gulf war, then the occupation war, then the resistance - this would lead to a change in the psychology of Iraqis."

  AFTERWORD

  Tuesday, 5 July 2016

  CHILCOT INQUIRY SUMS IT UP

  By an accident of history, the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq War is appearing at a critical moment in British history. The war was the first great test this century of the ability of the British powers-that-be to govern intelligently and successfully and one that they demonstrably failed. The crisis provoked by the vote to leave the European Union is the next crisis of similar gravity faced by these same powers and, once again, they appear unable to cope.

  Britain's politicians and senior officials have traditionally had the reputation of making fewer mistakes than their rivals, but their inability to grapple with these crises is a sign that this period may be drawing to an end. The Chilcot report will presumably provide evidence about why Britain made so many mistakes before and during the Iraq war, but is unlikely to explain why it went on making them in Libya and Syria.

  Britain's rulers periodically admit that they got many things wrong in Iraq, but they tend to be unspecific about what these were or what practical lessons can be learned from British military involvement there between 2003 and 2009. This ignorance is wilful, stemming from a consc
ious or unconscious sense that, if Britain admits to real weaknesses and failures, it will be seen as a less valuable ally by the US and others whom Britain is trying to convince of its continuing political and military strength.

  One way of looking at the Iraq conflict is to see it as a disastrous attempt by Britain to make war on the cheap in conditions which were far more risky than those launching it imagined. To prevent fragile support for the war eroding further, bad news was concealed or glossed over to the point that propaganda took over from reality

  It was comical but chilling in the early years of the war to see Tony Blair and other British ministers, sometimes protected by helmets and body armour, travelling by helicopter from Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone because it was too dangerous for them to drive along the short stretch of road between the two. Despite the necessity for these security measures in the heart of the Iraqi capital, they would then blithely state that the insurgents were on the run and a majority of Iraqi provinces at peace, a claim they wisely made no attempt to validate by a personal visit and in the knowledge that journalists could not disprove without grave risk of being murdered.

  Within a year of the invasion, the US and Britain controlled only beleaguered islands of territory which were under constant attack. The British Army, its forces far too small for the task they had been given, failed to control Basra in southern Iraq and by the end was humiliatingly confined to a camp on its outskirts. Many of the British soldiers there were transferred to an equally messy, unwinnable and ill-understood conflict in Helmand province in Afghanistan in 2006 with predictably grim and bloody consequences.

  These failures should have given pause to anybody in authority in Britain plunging into foreign ventures which destabilised established states with no idea of what would replace them.

  Nevertheless, in 2011 David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy did not hesitate to lead the charge in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in a war which turned Libya into a battleground for rival warlords and opened the door for a flood of desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy.

  In Syria, British policy was for long predicated on the expectation that Bashar al-Assad was about to fall, though it should have been self-evident that this was not going to happen since he held most of the populated areas of the country and was backed by Russia and Iran. In 2012, just as Isis was establishing Al Nusra as its Syrian branch, senior British diplomats were saying in private that they believed that fears of the Syrian conflict spreading were much exaggerated.

  The following year David Cameron favoured Britain undertaking airstrikes against Syrian government forces, though this would have either been ineffective or, if President Bashar al-Assad had fallen, would have led to him being replaced by extreme Islamists since they dominated the armed opposition.

  The change in policy was fortunately turned down by the House of Commons which had taken on board the dangers involved in such ventures. But the government still seemed to be plugged into a fantasy picture of the Syrian war when last December it began airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria, though once again the forces involved were so limited as to make it little more than a symbolic gesture. In order to avoid having to choose between Assad and IS, Mr Cameron claimed that we are acting in support of 70,000 moderate Syrian fighters prepared to take on both Syrian government forces and Islamic fundamentalists, but whose location cannot be disclosed and whose very existence is in doubt.

  The Iraq war was militarily small compared to others fought by Britain over the last century.

  British forces lost just 179 dead in action in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 compared to 455 fatalities in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015, both figures being entirely dwarfed by the horrendous figure of 40,000 dead for British and Indian soldiers killed fighting in what later became Iraq between 1914 and 1918.

  But the political impact of the Iraq war in Britain and the US was serious, long-lasting and far outweighed its significance as an armed conflict. It permanently blasted the reputation of Tony Blair, though he won one more general election in 2006, and Barack Obama's vote in the Senate against the war was a decisive advantage for him in competing with Hillary Clinton in the race to be Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

  In all wars propagandists get free range, but a distinctive feature of the Iraq war saw the blatancy and mendacity of official attempts to manipulate American and British public opinion which were probably worse than anything seen in either country since the First World War.

  The US and Britain justified going to war in Iraq in 2003 by claiming that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world because he possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It swiftly emerged that this was untrue and evidence for the charge had been fabricated or taken at face value when all the indications were that it was false. A further justification for the war was regime change on the grounds that Saddam was an evil dictator and mass murderer and his overthrow could only benefit the Iraqi people.

  Bad Saddam certainly was and it is impossible to know the course of events if there had been no invasion, but his fall was followed by 13 years of horrific war in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and millions more permanently expelled from their homes. Early last Sunday morning a vehicle packed with explosives blew up in the Karada district of Baghdad, killing 165 people, many of them of them children, as they walked in the street at the end of the day's Ramadan fast. The atrocity was claimed by IS, whose murderous targeting of civilians is comparable with the Nazis in the Second World War, and whose rise owes everything to the sectarian civil war in Iraq which followed the invasion and occupation.

  Chilcot may not produce explosive revelations about how the war was conceived or the degree of culpability of Tony Blair and those around him. Most of what happened is fairly clear or could be guessed at the time. Those who doubt this should read Robin Cook's resignation speech in the House of Commons in March 2003 explaining his opposition to the war which was about to begin, in which he says that "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target".

  He points out the contradiction between an invasion strategy that was based on the assumption that Saddam was militarily weak and incapable of putting up much resistance, but at the same time a government policy justifying its pre-emptive action against Iraq by claiming that it was potent threat to the world.

  In the aftermath of the invasion there have been many conspiracy theories about how and why it began, but the main contours of what happened have been long established and are damning enough in themselves. The most interesting part of the Chilcot report will not be to discover how the British and American governments deceived others, but how and why they deceived themselves and with such disastrous consequences.

  PHOTO CAPTIONS AND COPYRIGHTS

  USS Abraham Lincoln, site of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on 1 May 2003 (Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.com)

  The Iraq War (kentoh/Shutterstock.com)

  President George W. Bush, June 18, 2008 (Joseph August/Shutterstock.com)

  Under attack by militants (BPTU/Shutterstock.com)

  Baghdad, Iraq (Erce/Shutterstock.com)

  War on Terrorism (Prazis/Shutterstock.com)

  American flag and soldier’s dog tags (NSC Photography/Shutterstock.com)

  At the grave of a child, Kirkuk, Iraq (serkan senturk/Shutterstock.com)

  ISIS targets in Kobani, Syria, 22 October 2014 (Orlok/Shutterstock.com)

  ISIS on-line (Gong To/Shutterstock.com)

  Terror in Iraq (alexskopje/Shutterstock.com)

  US and UK flags (Aleksandar Mijatovic/Shutterstock.com)

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