Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  2. Since the U.S.-led “transformation” of the Iraqi economy, the bad news has only increased. An Iraqi office established originally by the U.S. occupation authority has looked into 814 cases of potential corruption relating to reconstruction funds paid to Iraqi agencies and officials by the U.S., producing 399 investigations (as of May 2005) and 44 arrest warrants for Iraqi government employees. The problems identified include “sweetheart deals on leases, exorbitant contracts for things like garbage hauling, and payments for construction that was never done.” The author of a recent report puts questions raised by the investigation's findings in rather understated terms, saying that the information will “fuel the most pessimistic concerns over where the money has gone.” See James Glanz, “Iraq Officials Detail Extensive Corruption,” International Herald Tribune, June 25, 2005, online. [Interested readers should also see the report by the minority staff of the House Committee on Government Reform on the cash delivered to Iraq, and then lost track of: “Rebuilding Iraq: U.S. Mismanagement of Funds,” June, 2005 (http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20050621114229–22109.pdf).—Ed.]

  CHAPTER

  11

  postscript

  The More Things Change …

  ………

  Prof. William O'Rourke

  GIVEN THE REALITIES of the war in Iraq – shock and awe, death and destruction, a continuing guerrilla insurgency – it is easy to overlook what in Hollywood is called “the back story,” what our government also brought to Iraq when it invaded: we're not just bringing “democracy” to Iraq, we are bringing, without objection, unchecked freemarket ideology.

  When Paul Bremer, fresh from Kissinger Associates, first arrived in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority made a lot of changes other than just disbanding what was left of the Iraqi army. He annulled all of Saddam Hussein's rules and regulations overseeing the Iraq economy, except one: he kept Saddam's laws banning labor unions.

  Tariffs protecting Iraqi industries were cut to a minimum. Foreign ownership of land and most businesses was allowed. Iraq had had a largely self-sustaining economy, but when Bremer's reforms were enacted, all that changed.

  Iraq's cement industry found itself being undersold by Jordanian firms after the tariffs were cut, and when cement plants shut down – similar to the permanent death steel mills suffer when closed – they turn into concrete. Iraq is now a cement importer – not a sign of economic efficiency. As one military observer put it, the State Department sent in young economists – many in their first job out of graduate school – to create the freemarket economy Bremer and the White House wanted.

  When Bremer left in June 2004 he didn't leave behind a new economy, just a destroyed one.

  The free-market economy experiment has made Iraq a nation of importers and high unemployment – nearly 50 percent – and the U.S. underwrites endless unemployment insurance. Much of business is still conducted in a cash-and-carry manner. Hundred-dollar bills have been a symbol of the Iraq war since its very beginning, when caches of them were found squirreled away in various locations. The American military pays compensation in cash for whatever human collateral damage occurs, if relatives of the damage complain.

  The new Iraqi government in formation is having trouble deciding how to divide the spoils of the war, though, at this point, the spoils are largely spoiled. Counter to all claims to the contrary, the one industry that remains as it was before the war – in fact, has even improved – is the oil industry, and, although Bremer wanted it privatized, oil was exempted temporarily, though it remains under the protection and control of the U.S. military. In any case, outside investors aren't too eager to risk their capital and employees in such an unsafe environment. Iraq's National Assembly halted its work in March 2005 when it couldn't decide who would be named oil minister.

  What the Bush administration is doing domestically – trying to privatize Social Security, continuing tax favors for corporations, changing bankruptcy laws to favor business over individuals, applying free-market ideology wherever possible – has been done with impunity in Iraq.

  Wars might be hell, but they have their up side for business. Bechtel and Halliburton might be impeded in the way they do business here in the States, but in Iraq, anything goes. One of the first edicts Bremer signed gave immunity from Iraqi laws to U.S. contractors and other Western firms doing business in Iraq.

  Americans are concerned with the suffering of their soldier children, dead and injured and in peril. It is hard to get exercised over spending tax money for other purposes, beyond that of the tardily produced body and Hummer armor – all the equipment and infrastructure large armies require. The last thing on most minds is the fact that the Bush administration has attempted, however ineptly, to remake Iraq in its chosen image: a triumphal business-friendly, free-market paradise, a future Banana Republic, where those in-the-know profit and those on the ground try to figure out what happened to their lives.

  It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties and the sacrifice that's being made. It also kills me when I hear someone say that, well, each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, they're insignificant statistically. Never should we let any political leaders utter those words. This is the greatest treasure the United States has, our enlisted men and women. And when we put them into harm's way, it had better count for something. It can't be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out.

  They should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting – our generals will take care ofthat – but for the aftermath and winning that war. Where are we, the American people, if we accept this, if we accept this level of sacrifice without that level of planning? Almost everyone in this room, of my contemporaries – our feelings and our sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam; where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. We swore never again would we do that. WE SWORE NEVER AGAIN WOULD WE ALLOW IT TO HAPPEN. And I ask you, is it happening again?

  —Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (ret.),

  September 4, 2003, at the Marine Corps

  Association and U.S. Naval Institute Forum

  THE PROFESSIONALS SPEAK:

  MILITARY REACTIONS TO

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski has received flack for her candid reporting about what the Pentagon policy shop she worked in looked like as war with Iraq approached. That she was attacked principally by a civilian ideologue who had a minor role to play in preparing for war from his Pentagon office (where he was on loan from, not surprisingly, the American Enterprise Institute) means that her accounts struck a raw nerve. That the attack comes via National Review Online in a May 2004 article full of ad hominem attacks coupled with sanctimonious protests is yet further evidence that she's onto something.

  Her article is an intriguing read in its own right. Let us simply point out that she makes a subtle observation towards the end that we think needs emphasizing. “The military brass,” she writes, could “have prevented this invasion.” As Dr. Lutz observes in a footnote, “civilian control of the military” is something of a loose term. No doubt what it means, and what it is understood to mean, for normal people is that the American people should, through their elected representatives, control the nation's armed forces and establish when and where they will be used. What it tends to become in practice is the subservience of career military professionals to politically appointed hacks who tow a party line and expect their “subordinates” to do the same. This is the picture painted by Kwiatkowski in her description of the workings of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It is this culture and practice that the military brass should have stood up to, especially in light of its drift towards an illegal war, sold to the American people based upon a pack of lies. But “following orders” is evidently an acceptable answer in this case. After all, they're not the Germans.

  CHAPTER


  12

  An Inside Look at Pentagon Policy-Making in the Run-Up to Gulf War II

  ………

  Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, USAF (ret.)

  AT THE PENTAGON these days, often on Friday afternoons, award ceremonies are held for soldiers injured in the Iraq occupation. They limp, hobble and roll, or are pushed up to the front to accept their award and the quiet applause of the Pentagon brass and other staff. These soldiers are mostly in their late teens or early twenties. They have little education, few marketable skills, no financial resources, and appalling and debilitating injuries. Most are on their way to being discharged from the Army or Marines. The overwhelming majority will never again be employed by any agency of the United States government, or by Halliburton or Bechtel for that matter.

  But these thousands of injured servicemen and women may be better off than the roughly eighteen-hundred Americans who have been killed in Iraq so far. We are engaged in a preemptive war of occupation, a fourth generation war launched in March 2003 under cover of the dissembling actions of an American President who never understood war, a vice president who might have but had “other priorities,” a crew of very focused neoconserva-tive ideologues, and a confused, muddling, and irresponsible Congress.

  When Army Captain Russell Burgos returned from the occupation of Iraq, he observed to the Washington Post that, “The 'peace' has been bloodier than the war.” He compares America in Iraq to Israel's 18-year occupation of Lebanon. He notes, “Some of us were using the Lebanon analogy even before we invaded.”1

  One wonders if the “some of us” thinking of Israel's 18 years in Lebanon included the architects of the preemptive invasion of Iraq. Did Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, and the united pseudo-intellectual column at the Project for a New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs consider the Lebanon occupation before promoting their war?

  As Pat Buchanan has so eloquently pointed out, Iraq is indeed “their” war. And for all its costs and blatant immorality, it was a valuable war for neoconservative ideologues, for reasons never shared with the American public. Retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner has said we will occupy Iraq for at least the next 20 or 30 years, in part because we need a powerful military presence in the Middle East. Americans might compare the “liberation” of Iraq to the case in the Philippines almost a century ago. There, too, was a preemptive war based on false stories manipulated by Washington-based warmongers, categorized as liberation, and resulting in a bloody and hated American occupation that lasted well over 30 years. Even General Garner used the Philippine case to explain Iraq “positively” to Government Executive magazine in February 2004.1

  I worked in the Under Secretariat for Defense Policy, the Near East and South Asia (NESA) desk under the International Security Affairs Directorate, from May 2002 to February 2003, during the most heated part of the political preparation and justification for war. Our director was Bill Luti, a retired Navy Captain, armed with a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School and the sponsorship of Dick Cheney. He nominally supervised Abram Shulsky, who served as director of the NESA sister, Office of Special Plans (OSP), a group of 20 or so mostly political appointees convened in the summer of 2003. OSP was apparently chartered to ensure proper development and promulgation of talking points explaining to the unwashed how the upcoming invasion of Iraq was liberation for humanity and democracy, and not a territorial and economic expansion of American – and by extension, Israeli – influence in the region. Shulsky's real “boss,” however, appeared to be less the apparatchik Luti and more accurately Paul Wolfowitz, then our deputy secretary of defense; his boss Donald Rumsfeld; and the under secretary for policy, the notoriously pro-Likud and former legal consultant for Turkey and Israel, Douglas Feith. It was a happy family – for those related to the neoconservatives. Every military and civilian professional with actual current cultural and military knowledge of the Middle East was excluded from that inner decision-making circle. And, as in all good tragedies, the seeds of pending disaster were sown early, and they were readily apparent to those watching the show.

  I and my co-workers – Army and Air Force colonels, Navy captains, senior civilians in Policy and Intelligence, and even the administrative professionals – observed in a kind of paralyzed numbness the march to preemptive war to topple Saddam Hussein, to found a friendly regime in Baghdad (at the time in the person of the clearly anointed Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress), and to establish military bases in the heart of the Middle East in order to better threaten Iran and Syria, and to allow us to vacate Saudi Arabia militarily.

  In retrospect, it is amazing to realize that the toppling of Saddam Hussein, threats to the Shiite government in Iran and the secular one in Syria, and the removal of American troops from Saudi Arabian territory are the same goals as those oft-stated by the Wahhabist Sunni radical, Osama bin Laden. But we didn't think in those terms then. Most of us mid-level officers and civilians simply watched in wide-eyed amazement as policy organs in the Pentagon, and in parts of the Departments of State and Energy, were hijacked by neoconservatives: political activists just as committed, organized, and disciplined as those who hijacked four jetliners on September 11.

  The Office of Special Plans apparently planned very little for the actual occupation of Iraq. In fact, the office was disbanded a year later, a few months after President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in May 2004. To this day, the OSP, and leading neoconservatives have had nothing to offer in terms of occupation guidance, beyond “kill the insurgents.” Of course, none of them would actually be doing that dirty work. For them the mission had been accomplished, in the re-creation of a Philippine experience, a Lebanon experience, or the creation of a new West Bank for the United States. The false patriotism and misplaced anger they manipulated in order to justify the invasion of Iraq would, they hoped, translate into a stubborn reluctance among the American people to ever retreat, admit a mistake, or recognize a lie. It was a good gamble for these Machiavellians, among at least 30% of the population.

  During the run-up to war, Abe Shulsky was the “approving” official for the talking points that all desk officers (including myself) were mandated to include in their written work. Copy and paste, we were told, no edits or deletes. These talking points on Iraq, WMD, and terrorism were carefully crafted to integrate bits of “intelligence” with lots of wishful thinking on the part of the neoconservatives. Not just for internal use, many of the same “talking points” were publicly repeated by key neoconserva-tive organs in the media, such as the National Review and the Washington Times, and by pundits like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, and Bill Kristol. Uncritical editors at the New York Times and Washington Post filled their news and editorial pages with the government-issued false flags. The President and vice president made numerous speeches in the summer and fall of 2002, lapping from the same dish of tasty fabrications: Saddam worked with al-Qaeda; Iraq assisted in the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon; Iraq recently sought, and even has, deliverable nuclear and active biological capability; and though Iraq had been bombed and sanctioned for over 12 years by the greatest military on earth, was intensively monitored by the global community, and was without an air force or navy, President Bush and his national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, blithely proclaimed that the threat of Saddam Hussein could be ignored only at the risk of a mushroom cloud rising over rubble in the heartland. Not since the fables collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have such stories captured the fearful imagination of whole nations.

  But these modern Bush-Cheney fantasies lasted less than a year. By summer 2003, the Congress and the American people were shown both evidence and commentary that began to reveal the level of deception disseminated by their own government, from key congressmen, to the President, vice president, and the secretary of defense. By late spring 2004 major newspapers around the country were already publishing mea culpa
s for their vacuous consumption of government lies regarding the reasons for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile, we stay in Iraq, we kill in Iraq, we die in Iraq; we help sow the seeds of future generations of committed anti-Americanism and hatred of Western politics. Iraqi patriots, like those who wrested our own independence from Great Britain centuries ago, will utilize techniques that some call terrorism, but military strategists from Sun Tzu to William Lind understand to be simply the weapons of fourth generation warfare, the methods of combat by the stateless hopefuls against the hopeless state.

  Over two years ago, America conducted what is now commonly understood to be an illegal invasion of a sovereign state. The invasion was supported by the majority in a democracy whose post-9/11 fear and anger were callously and calculatedly transferred to another secret enemy – not an enemy of that majority, but an enemy of the frenetic neoconservatives in Washington. It was an evidently undemanding bait and switch operation conducted on a national scale in a country purported to have an educated populace and an independent media.

  Today, the political challenge for Washington, especially neoconserva-tive and establishmentarian Washington, is to justify the occupation: one more costly, more deadly, and more resented than even neoconservatives familiar with Israel's costly, deadly, and resented 18-year Lebanon occupation had expected. Today, as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shatters the readiness of the National Guard and Reserve, and destroys morale in the standing Army, the neoconservatives and occupation supporters must find new stories to tell as Americans begin to wake up to the reality of Iraq, the wrongness of the occupation, the falseness of the rationale, and the real possibility of a re-institution of the draft.