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As
the U.S. administration debates
escalating its war in Afghanistan, more and more
shocking stories are coming out about the extent of the ruin the
U.S.-led war has created in Iraq. And they also give an
indication of why it is so difficult for the U.S. government to get out of
what is clearly becoming a deepening abyss in Afghanistan. Moreover, and what is
worse from the standpoint of ruling rich, it is one from
which U.S. capitalism as a whole can extract little profit,
since Afghanistan has no oil.
The
most privatized war since the Spanish American war has spawned
a welter of parasitic big businesses, including Murder
Incorporated-type mercenary forces, that do profit enormously from
such operations, operations that bring only ruin to the peoples
who are their victims and waste the national wealth of the United
States and the lives of many of its young adults.
An
article in the Nov. 20 New York Times revealed that the more
than $53 billion that the U.S. has spent supposedly on
“reconstruction” in Iraq (the largest amount of
“aid” since the Marshall Plan) has been wasted. The article’s headline
put the blame on the Iraqi government, which was allegedly failing to
support the projects built by U.S. money, but reading further on shows
that in reality projects were not planned so much to benefit the
Iraqis as to fatten U.S. big corporations.
The
article acknowledged: “While Iraq has often been guilty of
poor management, American authorities have repeatedly failed to ask
Iraqis what sort of projects they needed and have not followed up with
adequate training. And whether or not the American-built
health centers and power plants are ever used as intended, the
American companies that won the lion’s share of rebuilding contracts
from federal government have been paid.”
The
article repeatedly stated that the Iraqis lacked the personnel to
properly use these facilities, but the writer did note:
“Exacerbating the problem, Iraqi and American officials say that
hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been
killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few
doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and others.”
And
whose fault is that? This is a discreet reference to the carnage
wreaked by the U.S.-led war and occupation, which has far exceeded
the crimes committed by the bloody Saddam Hussein regime, supposedly
the target of the U.S. attacks. The Iraqi people
have seen primarily the destruction wrought by the United States, not any benefits from its
“reconstruction.”
According
to The
Times article, “Ali
Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning,
said that U.S. expenditures had had no
discernable impact. ‘Maybe they spent it,’ he said, but Iraq doesn’t feel it.’ ...
“‘Where
is the reconstruction?’ asked Sahar Kadhum, a resident
of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. ‘The city is sleeping
on hills of garbage.’” The Times article pointed out that
40 percent of Iraqis still lack access to clean drinking water and
90 percent of hospitals still lack the basic medical equipment. It also
noted that according to one aid organization, “Iraqis also have disproportionately
high rates of infant mortality, cerebral palsy and cancer.”
The
rate of cancer and birth defects is particularly high in the
city of Falluja, where the U.S. launched a massive military
operation in reprisal for the popular lynching of four members of
the hated mercenary force, Blackwater. The British Guardian reported
Nov. 13: “Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing
with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike
in early life cancers that may [sic!] be
linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.
The Guardian article, moreover, pointed
out: “Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly
cited in Basra and Najaf—areas that have
in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have
been heavily used.”
The
real object of the U.S. assault is now generally
recognized as oil. Even some U.S. officials admit, as Jackson
Williams pointed out in the Nov. 15 Huffington
Post:
“Alan Greenspan noted in his 2007 memoir The Age of Turbulence, ‘I
am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what
everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about
oil.’”
Some
American oil companies have reaped a bonanza, most notably in the
Kurdish area, where the resentment of the U.S. is less.
(Saddam Hussein undertook a genocidal campaign against the Kurds.)
But in Iraq as a whole, the hatred
created by the destruction, repression, and abuse inflicted under the
aegis of the U.S. will undoubtedly
seethe for generations and eventually wipe out any oil concessions
U.S. companies have gained.
In the long run, Kurdistan may not be an exception, since the U.S. rulers have been and remain
opposed to the national aspirations of the Kurdish people.
At
least one American official is set to garner a huge windfall,
but not for service to an American oil company. The
New York Times reported on Nov. 12, “we
learn that Peter Galbraith, former ambassador, foreign
policy expert to Joe Biden and John Kerry, and son of the famed
economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is in line to reap $100 million
dollars—maybe more—from contracts between a Norwegian oil company and
the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. As an advisor to DNO, Galbraith
and a partner received a 10% stake in a large Kurdish oil field back in
2004.” A hundred million dollars (or more!) is quite a perk for a
diplomatic assignment.
It
is not only ruin and robbery that the Iraqis can remember the
occupation forces for. It is also the abuse, in particular
the humiliation of detainees. The story of the abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by U.S. military at Abu Ghraib
prison has become a legend, throughout the entire Muslim world in
particular. And recently there have been parallel revelations about
outrages by the junior partner of the United States in the Brotherhood of
Torturers, Great Britain. But in Britain, at least, the victims of
torture and humiliation at the hands of British military personnel
have found legal advocates.
The
Nov. 14 British Guardian reported: “The Ministry of
Defence has confirmed it is investigating 33 cases of alleged
abuse, including rape and torture, of Iraqi civilians by British
soldiers. The lawyer representing the alleged victims, Phil Shiner,
said there could be hundreds of uninvestigated claims of abuse.
“One
claimant alleges that soldiers based the abuse they allegedly subjected
him to on photographs of the abuse at the notorious US detention centre at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, the Independent reported. In one case,
British soldiers are accused of piling up Iraqi prisoners on top
of one another before subjecting them to electric shocks.”
Shiner
said: “Given the history of the UK’s involvement in
the development of these techniques alongside the US, it is deeply concerning
that there appears to be strong similarities between instances of the
use of sexual humiliation.”
Some
American officials, including the lavishly rewarded
ex-ambassador Galbraith and the current vice president, Joe Biden,
favor the partition of Iraq into three mini-states, which they
claim would be more stable than the ethnically and religiously divided
present country. They probably think that smaller entities would
be more easily dominated. But the likelihood is that they would
have even less legitimacy than Iraq in its present form.
That
is, of course, except for an independent Kurdistan, which is
what the overwhelming majority of the Kurdish people want.
But U.S. imperialism’s major ally in
the region, Turkey, is violently opposed to
the independence of any part of Kurdistan. And a small Shiite
majority entity in the south would almost certainly become a
satellite of Iran. That is an
inevitable geopolitical reality. A “Shii-istan” in the south of Iraq would confirm that the
major gainer from the U.S. assault on Iraq would end up being Iran.
Moreover,
given the ruin and degradation inflicted on the Iraqi people by
the U.S.-led wars and occupation, how could any
government established under the aegis of the United States have any authority? In
fact, the continuation of guerrilla attacks—although the
most active guerrilla organization, al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, has
become discredited by its ruthlessness and sectarianism—has revealed
that the Iraqi army and police are far from faithful to their
government.
In
the case of a recent major bombing in central Baghdad near important government
buildings, the Iraqi government arrested 61 military officers and
men for negligence or collusion with the bombers (Washington
Post, Nov. 30).
After
almost a decade of involvement in Iraq, it is evident that the U.S. has achieved nothing but
create a massive festering sore. But out of the chaos and ruin U.S. big businesses and corrupt
officials have reaped huge profits. So, they want to extend
operations to Afghanistan and Pakistan and beyond.
U.S.
imperialism has reached a morbid state that mirrors the decadence
of the crumbling capitalist system as a whole, and actually is coming
more and more into conflict with the interests of preserving the
system overall.
The
U.S. capitalist class now
apparently recognizes that the Iraq adventure was a
fiasco. That is probably one of the reasons that decisive sections of
it backed Obama in order to try to give U.S. policy a new look. But all
the corruption they fostered is like a tar pit in which they find
themselves stuck. Only mass mobilizations in the U.S. and
elsewhere for immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Iraq and
Afghanistan and an ending of the covert intervention in Pakistan can
end the descent into ruin—not only in the countries that are victims of
U.S. military intervention, but in the United States itself.
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