by Oliver Stone
The carefully orchestrated images of U.S. power and Iraqi jubilation to which Rumsfeld alluded quickly gave way to images of Iraqis looting ancient treasures from Baghdad museums. It turned out that even the jubilation wasn’t so jubilant or so spontaneous. The famous scene of Iraqis toppling the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square was actually staged by a U.S. Army psychological warfare team who recruited the Iraqis and brought the statue down for them.139
With Iraq in the win column, potential targets for future regime change included Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the PLO, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. Perle had earlier gloated, “We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: ‘You’re next.’ ”140 In The War over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan wrote, “we stand at the cusp of a new historical era.” They considered it “a decisive moment” that was “so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the twenty-first century.” “The mission begins in Baghdad,” they acknowledged, “but it does not end there.”141
No wonder Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told an Arab League summit meeting on March 1, “We are all targeted. . . . We are all in danger.”142 North Korea drew a similar lesson but proposed a different solution. Kim Jong Il said that Iraq’s big mistake was not having nuclear weapons. If it had had such weapons, he argued, the United States would never have invaded. North Korea’s official party newspaper, Rodong Shinmun, insisted that North Korea would neither submit to inspectors nor disarm. North Korea, it decided, “would have already met the same miserable fate as Iraq’s had it compromised . . . and accepted the demand raised by the imperialists and its [sic] followers for nuclear inspection and disarmament. . . . No one should expect [North Korea] to make any slightest concession or compromise.”143
Besides possessing nuclear weapons, North Koreans had one other “advantage” over the Iraqis: they weren’t sitting on top of the world’s second largest known oil reserves. Iraqis had no illusions about the United States’ motives. The more U.S. leaders spoke about freedom, the more Iraqis heard the word “oil.” More than three-quarters of Iraqis told pollsters that the U.S. invasion was motivated by a desire to control Iraqi oil. In a November 2002 radio interview, Rumsfeld categorically denied this: “Nonsense. It just isn’t. There are certain things like that, myths, that are floating around. . . . It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.”144
Alan Greenspan, the long-serving chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, thought such denials absurd. “I am saddened,” he wrote, “that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”145
U.S. tanks roll through Baghdad in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. With the perceived mission so quickly “accomplished” in Iraq, neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration began to look elsewhere for dragons to slay.
Experts estimated that Saudi Arabia, with 259 billion barrels of proven reserves, and Iraq, with 112 billion barrels, sat atop approximately one-third of the world’s total supply of oil. Some thought that Iraq might actually have over 400 billion barrels of reserves.146
PNAC cofounder Robert Kagan believed that securing that oil would likely require a long-term military presence. “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time,” he said. “When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”147 Michael Klare, who has written extensively on the subject, took a broader view than Kagan. “Controlling Iraq is about oil as power,” he observed, “rather than oil as fuel. Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It’s having our hand on the spigot.”148
Those who wanted to dismantle Iraq’s state-run companies and turn the oil over to the international oil companies ran into a buzz saw of defiance, replete with sabotage by insurgents, resistance by unionized oil workers, and opposition by the Iraqi parliament. Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, did receive a $1.2 billion contract in 2004 to reconstruct Iraq’s southern oil facilities, but the Iraqis retained operational responsibility. The United States continued to pressure the Iraqi government to pass the long-stalled petrochemical bill.
U.S. victory celebrations proved premature. Defeating Iraq’s demoralized army was simple. Imposing order proved impossible. Arrogant war planners ignored warnings from civilians and military alike that governing an occupied Iraq would not be the cakewalk they anticipated. In January 2003, the National Intelligence Council produced two lengthy assessments of what to expect following the invasion based on the views of the sixteen different intelligence agencies. Titled “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” and “Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq,”149 they warned that a U.S.-provoked war would increase Iran’s influence in the region, open the door to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq, awaken dormant and potentially violent sectarian rivalries, spark a resurgence of political Islam, and facilitate fund-raising by terrorist groups “as a result of Muslim outrage over U.S. actions.” Establishing democracy would be “a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge” because Iraq had “no concept of loyal opposition and no history of alternation of power.”150
Similar conclusions had been drawn after a series of April 1999 war games known as Desert Crossing that were designed to assess the aftermath of a U.S. invasion.151 General Zinni, who led the effort, became adamantly opposed to going to war. He lambasted hawks who belittled the importance of public opinion in the Muslim world: “I’m not sure which planet they live on, because it isn’t the one that I travel.”152 Michael Scheuer, the first head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, concurred, noting that “the CIA repeatedly warned Tenet of the inevitable disaster an Iraq war would cause—spreading bin Ladenism, spurring a bloody Sunni-Shiite war and lethally destabilizing the region.”153
This information apparently never entered into the calculations of the president when planning for war. Shortly before the invasion began, Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom later became postwar Iraq’s first representative to the United States. As they elaborated on concerns about a post-Saddam Sunni-Shiite split, they realized that the president had no idea what they were talking about and explained to him that Iraqis were divided into two potentially hostile sects. Bush evidently did not understand that he might be handing a suddenly Shiite-dominated Iraq to Iran on a silver platter.154
Al-Qaeda leaders thanked Allah for the colossal blunders, both tactical and strategic, of the United States’ neocon strategists. In September 2003, on the second anniversary of 9/11, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri exulted, “We thank God for appeasing us with the dilemmas in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Americans are facing a delicate situation in both countries. If they withdraw they will lose everything and if they stay, they will continue to bleed to death.”155 The following year, bin Laden drew on the same “bleeding” metaphor to explain his strategy, taking credit for having “bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.” He was, he claimed, “continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” noting that the half-million dollars Al-Qaeda spent on the 9/11 terrorist acts had resulted in a U.S. “economic deficit” of over a trillion dollars.156
Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made a series of calamitous decisions. Overriding the State Department, the Pentagon flew neocon favorite Ahmed Chalabi and hundreds of his supporters back to Baghdad shortly after Saddam’s fall. U.S. Lieutenant General Jay Garner, to his credit, refused to allow Chalabi to play the role Rumsfeld and Cheney envisioned.157 The Americans would later learn how suspect Chalabi’s loyalties really were. Evidence surfaced of his ties to Iranian leaders and to the Iranian-linked Shiite militant League of the Righteous, which was implicated in the kidna
pping and murder of foreigners, including the 2007 execution-style slaying of five U.S. marines. The U.S. government severed its ties with Chalabi in May 2008. Three months later, it arrested one of his top aides on suspicion that he had served as a liaison to the League.158
From President Bush on down, administration officials were simply delusional. In April 2003, Nightline’s Ted Koppel was incredulous when Andrew Natsios, the administrator of the Agency for International Development, told him that the total cost to U.S. taxpayers would be $1.7 billion.159 Wolfowitz insisted that Iraqi oil revenues would be sufficient to finance the postwar reconstruction. As he had observed, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil.”160 By the time Bush left office, the United States had spent some $700 billion on the war, not including interest payments on borrowed money and long-term care for veterans, many of whom suffered crippling physical and psychological injuries.
Conditions in Iraq went from bad to worse when L. Paul Bremer replaced Garner in early May. Bremer swiftly dissolved the Iraqi army and police force and ordered former Baath Party members fired from government posts. Looting swept Baghdad as undermanned coalition forces could not maintain order. While national treasures disappeared from Iraq’s museums, U.S. troops and tanks protected only the Oil Ministry building. The country rapidly descended into chaos as electricity failed, water supplies dried up, sewage ran in the streets, and the sick and wounded overwhelmed hospitals. While Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), operating out of the heavily fortified Green Zone, issued upbeat reports, the insurgency, fueled by armed and disgruntled former Iraqi soldiers, whom Rumsfeld contemptuously dismissed as “dead-enders,” grew and war costs skyrocketed.161 The Pentagon requested an additional $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.
By November 2003, coalition forces were suffering thirty-five attacks per day. Angry insurgents flooded in from throughout the Islamic world intent upon ousting the infidels. Bin Laden and Zawahiri urged fellow Muslims to “bury [the Americans] in the Iraqi graveyard.” In September, between one thousand and three thousand were thought to have arrived, with thousands more on the way. One highly placed U.S. official noted, “Iraq is now Jihad Stadium. It is the place for fundamentalists to go now, it is their Super Bowl, where you go to stick it to the West . . . there are an infinite number of potential new players.”162
Bremer set about reorganizing the Iraqi economy, which essentially meant privatizing the national oil company and two hundred other state-owned companies. Planning for this had begun before the invasion, when the U.S. Agency for International Development drew up its “Vision for Post-Conflict Iraq.” Contracts for $900 million had been awarded to five infrastructure engineering firms, including Kellogg, Brown & Root and Bechtel. The Treasury Department had been busy circulating a program for “broad-based Mass Privatization” among financial consultants.
On May 27, 2003, Bremer announced that Iraq is “open for business again” and began issuing orders. Order no. 37 set a flat tax rate of 15 percent, slashing the tax burden on wealthy individuals and on corporations, which had been paying around 45 percent. Order no. 39 privatized state enterprises and permitted 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi firms. The profits, in their entirety, could be removed from the country. Leases and contracts could last for forty years and then be eligible for renewal. Order no. 40 privatized the banks. Rumsfeld testified that those reforms created “some of the most enlightened—and inviting—tax and investment laws in the free world.” With estimates of reconstruction costs reaching $500 billion, it is no wonder that The Economist called it “a capitalist dream.”163 According to Nobel Prize–winning former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, Iraq was getting “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”164
Caught off guard by the strength of the insurgency, the Pentagon sent U.S. troops into combat without sufficient armor to protect vehicles that were targeted with improvised explosive devices. The sheer incompetence of officials sent by the Bush administration sometimes strained credulity. The Washington Post reported that job seekers were chosen based on right-wing political views and loyalty to the Bush administration, not expertise in development, conflict resolution, or the Middle East. Jim O’Beirne, a Bush political appointee, asked job applicants if they had voted for Bush, if they approved of his war on terror, and even if they supported Roe v. Wade. According to the Post, “A twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance—but had applied for a White House job—was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for homeschooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.” The Post reported that many of those tasked with rebuilding Iraq focused instead on “instituting a flat tax, . . . selling off government assets, . . . ending food rations,”165 while the economy collapsed and unemployment skyrocketed.
In May 2003, law enforcement experts from the Justice Department reported that Iraq needed six thousand foreign advisors to revamp its police forces. The White House sent former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik to be the interim interior minister, along with a dozen advisors. Kerik, who would later be imprisoned after pleading guilty to eight felony counts, lasted three months before departing, leaving Iraq in worse shape than he found it. The Bush appointees proved to be the Keystone Kops of nation building. With a gut-level belief that governments were not capable of providing for their people, they set out to prove their convictions right. By September 2004, conditions had deteriorated so dramatically that Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, announced, “The gates of hell are open in Iraq.”166
Lacking sufficient troops to carry out basic functions, the government hired an army of private security guards and civilian contractors to do much of the work, often at outrageous cost and with little oversight. By 2007, they numbered 160,000. Many Blackwater security guards had served in right-wing militaries in Latin America.167 They and other foreign personnel had been granted immunity from arrest by Iraqi authorities. Other support operations were outsourced to companies like Halliburton, which raked in profits in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. With 40,000 employees in Iraq alone, it earned more than $24 billion by 2008, much of it coming from questionable no-bid contracts. After the invasion, Halliburton jumped from number nineteen to the top spot on the U.S. Army’s list of contractors.168 When Senator Patrick Leahy confronted Cheney on the floor of the Senate about Halliburton’s shameless profiteering, Cheney erupted, “Fuck yourself.”169 Not only were Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR found to have repeatedly overcharged the government, but KBR’s shoddy electrical work on U.S. bases resulted in hundreds of electrical fires and the electrocution of numerous soldiers.170
Conditions deteriorated further on February 22, 2006, when a bomb destroyed the golden dome of the Shiite shrine in Samarra. Enraged Shiites attacked Sunnis and their religious sites throughout the country.171 Suicide bombings and murders of civilians became commonplace. The country teetered on the edge of civil war.
Award-winning journalist Helen Thomas confronted George Bush: “Mr. President, you started this war, a war of your choosing, and you can end it alone, today. . . . Two million Iraqis have fled their country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don’t you understand you brought the al Qaeda into Iraq?” “Actually, I was hoping to solve the Iraqi issue diplomatically,” Bush responded. “That’s why I went to the United Nations and worked with the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences.”172
Bush had earlier said he invaded Iraq after giving Saddam “a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in.” Even the Washington Post had felt compelled to comment: “The president’s assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this sp
ring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective.”173
Bruce Bartlett, who served in both the Reagan and first Bush administrations, described George W. Bush’s psychology to journalist Ron Suskind in 2004:
This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . . This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can’t run the world on faith.
Suskind noted that when people questioned Bush’s policies that appeared to fly in the face of reality, “The president would say that he relied on his ‘gut’ or his ‘instincts’ to guide the ship of state, and then he ‘prayed over it.’ ” One of Bush’s senior advisors accused Suskind of being “in what we call the reality-based community.” He informed him, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. . . . We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”174
Not everyone was so sanguine about denying reality. Seven noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne described the Iraqi situation to the New York Times in August 2007:
