Welcome to what will be a weekly feature. For the last 11 years I’ve reviewed the news of the week in a 30-minute segment of a radio show in Seattle (it airs starting at 8:30 AM PLT, for those curious), and for the last five of those years an immensely popular feature has been the weekly rundown of news in and about Iraq — a compilation of recent news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous war. Mainstream media tends to focus on the numbing drip of casualty reports (a couple dead American soldiers here, a few score Iraqis blown up in a market there) and the tedious spin of the White House and (now) Democratic presidential hopefuls. I don’t. A lot more is going on.
Recently I started putting my show notes in blog format, with the assumption that you’ll know some of this and you’ll get links for the pieces you don’t. Additions welcome in the comment threads. It can be a dreary and depressing laundry list, but, well, they’re our tax dollars, and knowing how they’re being (mis)used is a key step in stopping this madness.
It’s hard to know which locale in the war is more surreal, Iraq or D.C., but let’s start this week in D.C. The U.S. House of Representatives passed 399-24 Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)’s bill to ban both permanent military U.S. bases and U.S. control of Iraqi oil. Before you get too excited over the lopsided vote, however, remember that there is absolutely no downside to a “yes” vote for electorate-conscious Republicans trying to distance themselves from a war they’ve been rubber-stamping, because even if the Senate passes the exact same bill, there’s no way in Baghdad George Bush will ever sign it. How they vote to override the veto would be a lot more instructive, unless it’s clear the less electorally vulnerable Senate will do the dirty work for them.
Wednesday, Rep. Henry Waxman’s ever-busy House Oversight Committee held hearings on waste and fraud in the construction of the Taj Mahal new US embassy in Baghdad. Most alarming in the litany of worker abuses and contractual extravagance was a former worker’s testimony that at least 52 Filipino nationals had been kidnapped to work, essentially, as slave labor at the construction site. Stories of abuse of foreign workers on the site (Iraqis aren’t to be trusted) have been legion in recent months, but this is a new and despicable low.
Speaking of oversight, the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has so consistently been pointing out the naked emperor that the White House actually defunded their office this past fiscal year (after a popular outcry, the still Republican-led Congress passed a separate bill to restore funding). They were at it again this week, releasing results of an audit showing that of 24 Bechtel projects in a $1.8 billion 2004 contract, 13 were never finished (and some never started); there was “limited” oversight by USAID, the granting agency; and only 59 percent of taxpayer money went to actual construction, with the rest going to “security and Bechtel fees.” On a similar theme, three members of a Houston family were arrested this week on bribery and money laundering charges, having allegedly plotted over $15 million in kickbacks on KBR contracts.
A coalition of injured Iraq war vets is suing disgraced outgoing VA Secretary Jim Nicholson, saying he “broke the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.”
For a couple months now, the US military in Baghdad has been buttressing White House spin by trying to blame everything bad that it can (to the extent that the liberal media just doesn’t report all the good news coming from Iraq) on Iran. The idea is to promote the notion that Iran is an integral combatant in the illegal occupation of Iraq Global War On Terror, and so when President Cheney Bush decides to launch a military strike on Iran, he can do so without consulting Congress on the claim that it’s all the same war and Congress has already authorized it. This week’s sublime contribution to the genre: blaming the “improved aim” of insurgent mortar attacks on their “training in Iran.” Note that this is fundamentalist Sunni mortar fire we’re talking about here. Trained in fundamentalist Shiite Iraq. Riiiiiggghhht.
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker is reported in a Guardian story as saying the Iraqi employees at the US Embassy will quit unless given hope of asylum in the US after the US, well, leaves or flees. They’re quite justifiably skeptical without such a guarantee; of the four million Iraqis displaced since the U.S. invasion, our immigrant-friendly nation has allowed in exactly 825 Iraqi nationals. It’s the perfect confluence of Beltway upper class mentality: we’re having the hired help work for almost nothing over there so they don’t work for almost nothing over here.
In Karbala Friday, nine died in a firefight between U.S. soldiers and members of a rogue Mahdi Army group. Why is this significant among all the week’s combat and death in Iraq? Because the Mahdi Army (loyal to cleric Moktada al-Sadr) has largely laid off engaging American troops since February, agreeing to do so in exchange for an escalation “surge” that has largely targeted Sunni insurgents and the Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq. That tacit understanding may be coming to an end.
Dahr Jamahl, in an essay on the surreal disconnect between life in Iraq and life in America, cites some sobering recent statistics: A WHO report that 70 percent of Iraqis now have no access clean water, and 80 percent “lack effective sanitation”; and noting that 54 percent of Iraqis now live on less than $1 a day.
On that theme, last week I noted that in a patented White House Friday Afternoon News Dump, where the Bush administration routinely tries to quietly bury unflattering news, a Pentagon report concluded that the US military needs to revise its tarnished brand in Iraq. “We want something we can learn from Madison Avenue or from the marketers, the best in the world, that might help us when we’re trying to deliver a message about what democracy is,” said Duane Schattle of US Joint Forces Command, which ordered the report. Apparently the whole “Democracy is: invading a country under false pretenses, killing and torturing its people, stealing its oil, and destroying everything we touch” thing isn’t quite panning out, so we need…a new way to sell the same old behavior. It’s all about marketing; pay no attention, Iraqis, to the illegal, immoral war that is destroying your country.
Anyway, once folks started reading the actual text of the report, it turned out, if possible, to be even more cynical and absurdist than it sounds. Read the grimly hilarious details (with quotes from the report itself, and a link to the report) here.
Til next week.
Are you ever going to write for the Seattle Weekly again?
Hey Donnie,
No. Seattle Weekly was bought by a new owner in 2006 which brought in a new management team to deemphasize news and eliminate political coverage and commentary. They were willing to have me continue to write so long as I would – well, let’s not go there. Let’s just say I left the paper in August of last year and have not once regretted it.
I am currently working with a number of well-known Seattle area bloggers and other new media and tech types to develop a comprehensive, community-driven, local multimedia progressive news site to compete directly with the dailies and TV stations. It’s very ambitious and includes some other names you know. This was underway before I left SW and we’re currently developing the software and putting funding in place. Hoping for a soft launch this fall. Wish us luck, and stay tuned. gp.
THE CRIMES OF NEO-LIBERAL RULE IN OCCUPIED IRAQ
Dave Whyte [FNa1]
British Journal of Criminology
March, 2007
47 Brit. J. Criminology 177
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/47/2/177
Copyright © 2007 by The Centre for Crime & Justice
Studies (ISTD); Dave Whyte
The scale and intensity of the appropriation of Iraqi
oil revenue makes the 2003 invasion one of the most
audacious and spectacular crimes of theft in modern
history. The institutionalisation of corporate
corruption that followed the invasion can only be
understood within the context of the coalition forces’
contempt for universal principles of international law
enshrined in the Hague and Geneva treaties.
Neo-liberal shock therapy imposed on Iraq by the
Anglo-American government of occupation provided
momentum to an economic order which privileged the
primacy and autonomy of market actors over laws
intended to enshrine universal protections for
civilian populations in war and conflict. As the US
government-appointed auditor has subsequently
established, an unknown proportion of Iraqi oil
revenue has disappeared into the pockets of
contractors and fixers in the form of bribery,
over-charging, embezzlement, product substitution, bid
rigging and false claims. At least $12 billion of the
revenue appropriated by the coalition regime has not
been adequately accounted for. This neoliberal
strategy of economic colonization was facilitated by
major violations of the international laws of conflict
and by unilaterally granting immunity from prosecution
to US personnel. The suspension of the normal rule of
law by the occupying powers, in turn, encouraged
Coalition Provisional Authority tolerance of, and
participation in, the theft of public funds in Iraq.
State–corporate criminality in the case of occupied
Iraq must therefore be understood as part of a wider
strategy of political and economic domination.
Saddam Hussein and his regime plundered your nation’s
wealth. While many of you live in poverty, they have
the lives of luxury …. The money from Iraqi oil will
be yours; to be used to guild prosperity for you and
your families. (Tony Blair, 10 April 2003 [FN1])
Bring a Bag! (Coalition Provisional Authority officer
instructs private security firm Custer Battles on the
method of collecting Iraqi oil revenue from the former
Presidential Palace in Baghdad, 31 July 2003 [FN2])
Access full-text version of this article at Ingenta
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oup/crimin/2007/00000047/00000002/art00177
“Economic sanctions may have been a necessary cause of
the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain
by all so-called weapons of mass destruction
throughout history.”
Source: John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of mass destruction”, Foreign Affairs (New York), vol. 78, no. 3 (May/June 1999), pp. 50, 51.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19990501faessay979/john-mueller-karl-mueller/sanctions-of-mass-destruc
tion.html
Iraq’s child malnutrition rate now roughly equals that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than rates in Uganda and Haiti.
Source: Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html
Since 1990, cancer incidence has increased by five-fold among Iraqi children, congenital birth defects and leukemia have tripled, and overall cancer rates among all Iraqis have risen by 38 percent, according to the Iraqi government. American official statements may explain the reasons behind the denial of DU and cancer correlation. Defense Department spokeswoman, Barbara Goodno, argued that Depleted Uranium is “an important component in the U.S. arsenal.” … Military experts say that the crucial edge that DU technology affords makes it too effective to pass up.
Source: The cost of war: the children of Iraq.
by Shereen T. Ismael.
Journal of Comparative Family Studies Spring 2007
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-165167557.html
.
Richard Holbrooke:
“How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world’s leading communications society?”
The Decisive Weapon: A Brigade Combat Team Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations
Read also:
Choosing Words Carefully: Language to Help Fight Islamic Terrorism
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
As CNNi reports from Baghdad. The Iraqi translators and civilian employees went onto the streets and bought Iraqi soccer shirts as a gift to US forces, joining them in watching the final match for the Asian Cup played in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Iraqi’s are united: Sunni and Shia, muslims and christians. There hasn’t been so much pleasure in Baghdad for years.
In the 70th minute of the match: Iraq leads Saudi Arabia 1-0.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
The office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in a statement that it had planned to send a Cabinet delegation to the game, but that it was not possible to organize a charter flight due to technical issues related to “the flight’s path and overflight permissions by countries through which the plane would have to cross en route to Jakarta.”
The jubilation over the ascension of the team known as the “Lions of the Two Rivers” to Sunday’s final in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the quarterfinals and semifinals gave Iraqis a rare respite from the daily violence. The victorious run sent men of all ages cheering and dancing in the streets in what politicians said was a show of unity that proved Iraqi factions could come together.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."