|
The
Bush administration is relying increasingly on maneuvers in order to avoid
accepting the consequences of its failure in Iraq. In the occupied
country itself, it is trying to buy off local corrupt factions, so far
mainly Sunni Arab tribal chiefs who are often hardly more than bandits.
In the homeland, it is offering the American people a shell game. Bush
says in effect that “if you want withdrawal, we are withdrawing"
and "if you want security, we are getting more security. So
everybody should be happy."
The
U.S. government is trying to create an illusion of withdrawal by shifting
its forces around. At the same time, it has been revealing that it
intends to maintain U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely. But it is not
saying how many troops or how it expects to deploy them.
The
reality is that the U.S. is neither withdrawing nor achieving security
in Iraq. Thus, an AP dispatch of Sept. 22 reported: "Even with
cutbacks promised by President Bush, the United States may wind up with
thousands more troops in Iraq next summer than before the buildup of
forces he ordered in January.
“Bush
approved the redeployment of five Army combat brigades and three Marine
contingents between now and July 2008, but that does not account for
thousands of support forces—including military police and an Army
combat aviation brigade—that were sent as ‘enablers’ and that
apparently will stay longer."
The
dispatch also pointed to some revelations in an interview Gen. Petraeus
gave to AP on Sept. 20: "... Petraeus mentioned one concrete
example of a support element that likely will be kept after the 'surge'
combat forces leave. He cited some 2000 military police sent last
spring to help manage the extra detainees captured in stepped-up U.S.
offensives in Baghdad and elsewhere. Some of those, he said, probably
would remain after the extra combat units are withdrawn because
detainee control will remain a challenge.
"He
gave other, largely overlooked examples during his congressional
testimony. In an exchange Monday with House Armed Services Committee
Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., he said other forces were brought to Iraq
this year for a variety of tasks.
"They
include an unspecified number of personnel associated with work on
countering the insurgents' weapon of choice, the roadside bomb,
Petraeus said. He also mentioned, without elaboration, that additional
'intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance assets' were added to
the force. He did not say how many would be brought home as the 'surge'
winds down; he described them as resources and people that 'we would
have wanted regardless of whether we were surging or not.'"
Another
component of the U.S. forces in Iraq that Petraeus did not mention is
the "security companies," whose personnel is almost equal to
the numbers of members of the U.S. military. The majority of them may
not perform combat tasks, but certainly tens of thousands of them do.
Their involvement represents a new aspect of the U.S. deployment of
forces abroad to maintain its economic interests—the privatization of
the U.S. armed force.
The
New York Times of Sept. 21 reported: "In recent congressional
testimony, Scott Horton, an international lawyer who teaches at
Columbia University in New York, explained the growth in reliance on
military contractors. In World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam
War, the share of the total force represented by civilian contract
employees seldom exceeded 5 percent. That doubled during the Gulf War.
But in the Iraq conflict, the ratio is nearly equal.
Horton
pointed out that before the so-called surge, “the total community of
contractors in Iraq was around
100,000, and the number of uniformed service personnel was around
125,000. … This represents an extremely radical transformation in the
force configuration.”
The
Times continued, “The largest of these security companies, Blackwater,
has reportedly collected from $500 million to $700 million in contracts
from the U.S. government. Its operatives are especially hated by the
Iraqi people because the Iraqis see that they can act with impunity,
ruthlessness, and are particularly trigger-happy. It was the lynching
of four Blackwater operatives in Falluja that touched off the largest
battle that U.S. forces have waged since they occupied Iraq, a battle
that led to the evacuation and destruction of a city of more than a
quarter of a million people.
“Notably,
Blackwater is under contract from the State Department to protect U.S.
diplomatic personnel in Iraq. … On Sept. 16, allegedly in response to
an insurgent attack on a diplomatic convoy, Blackwater guards opened
fire, killing 11 Iraqi passersby, including a mother with a baby in her
arms. … ‘One family’s car, approaching from the south along Yarmouk
Street, apparently did not stop quickly enough, and the Blackwater
guards opened fire, killing the man who was driving,’ the ministry
account says.
“‘The
woman next to the driver had a baby in her arms,’ said an official who
shared the report, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he
was not authorized to share it. ‘She started to scream. They shot her,’
the official said, adding that the guards then fired what appeared to
be grenades or pump guns into the car as it continued to move. The car
caught
fire. ‘The car kept rolling, so they burned it,’ the official said.”
The
head of the U.S. client government in Iraq, Premier Nuri al-Maliki,
declared that Blackwater had been responsible for six other such
shootings. The Washington Post of Sept. 22 reported: “To bolster their
case against Blackwater, Interior Ministry officials included six other
incidents in their preliminary report, [Brigadier Gen.] Khalaf [main spokesman
of the ministry] said. The government had videotapes of some attacks,
license plate numbers of Blackwater vehicles involved, and eyewitness
accounts implicating Blackwater, he said."
One
incident was the Feb. 7 shooting of three Iraqi security guards at the
Iraqi Media Network. Khalaf said that the incident was videotaped and
that the film was "very ugly."
The
Washington Post article continued: "Habib al-Sadr, the head of
Iraqiya television, said, 'Blackwater neither paid any compensation to
the victims' families nor offered a letter of apology to them for this
horrible, unjustifiable act.'
"On
Sept. 9, Blackwater guards killed five people and wounded 10 near the
Baghdad municipality building, Khalaf said, and three days later
Blackwater guards severely wounded five people in east
Baghdad." Obviously, the
outrages committed against Iraqis by foreign mercenaries are an acute
embarrassment to the Iraqi government. The New York Times reported
Sept. 20: “‘What happened in Al Nisour was that citizens felt their
dignity was destroyed,’ Jawad al-Bolani, Iraq’s interior minister, said
in an interview. The
Iraqi
‘looks at the state and wonders if it can bring him back his rights.’”
Premier
al-Maliki was forced to declare that he was revoking Blackwater's right
to operate within the country. He was quoted in the Sept. 20 Washington
Post as saying: “We will not allow Iraqis to be killed in cold blood. …
There is a sense of tension and anger among all Iraqis, including the
government, over this crime.” But he soon backed down, saying that he
was only suspending Blackwater’s permission to operate.
And
within a few days the company resumed operations. However, this case does not look
like it is going away. On Sept. 22, AP reported: “Iraqi investigators
have a videotape that shows Blackwater USA guards opened fire against
civilians without provocation in a
shooting
last week that left 11 people dead, a senior Iraqi official said
Saturday."
The
U.S. security companies were given immunity from prosecution in Iraqi
courts by former U.S. viceroy Paul Bremmer on the day before formal
sovereignty was handed over to an Iraqi government.
An
article in the Sept. 21 Christian Science Monitor pointed out that Blackwater
has very powerful political connections: "From the start, the firm
has had connections to high-ranking Republican officials. Its vice chairman is Cofer Black,
State Department coordinator for counterterrorism during President
Bush's first term. Blackwater founder and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince
has been a major donor to Republican committees and candidates."
Undoubtedly,
however, Blackwater is not just armed Republicans. It is an integral
part of the U.S. corporate structure, which has extracted enormous
booty from Iraq and which has a general agenda of returning to the days
of the Robber Barons. It is part of a world where private profit can
overshadow even the interests of the political power that protects it.
Thus,
Blackwater is now being investigated for possible traffic in black
market arms with Iraqi insurgents. AP reported Sept. 22: “The U.S.
Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with
help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded
there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The
Associated Press.”
Even
some of the U.S. military commanders have been drawn into the web of
private capitalist corruption.
Thus, an article in the Aug. 31 New York Times reported the case
of Lee Dynamics International, accused of paying hundreds of thousands
of dollars to U.S. military officers to get contracts. The company is
denying the charges.
But
one of the officers implicated committed suicide when she was touched
by the investigation: "Maj. Gloria D. Davis, a contracting
official in Kuwait, shot and killed herself in Baghdad in December
2006. Government officials say
the suicide occurred a day after she admitted to an Army investigator
that she had accepted at least $225,000 in bribes from the
company." The major's final testimony is certainly more powerful
than the company's denials.
The
revelations about the increasingly tangled web of U.S.-funded
corruption in Iraq and the basket of crabs of private profit seekers
cast a certain light on the U.S. military's claims of success in
achieving local alliances against insurgents.
These
alliances are based on the specific interests of local strongmen who
are generally feudal remnants surviving essentially by gangsterism. By
appealing to their specific interests, the wealthy and powerful U.S.
occupiers can get them to collaborate to a certain extent, but only at
the expense of undermining the coherence of any national legal or
political system.
In
a long feature in The New York Times of Sept. 2, the poster boy for
this policy of local alliances, Lt. Colonel Mark Odom, was quoted as
saying: “We have not made political progress at the national level. …
We have taken on a decentralized effort with the concerned citizens at
the local level and somehow hope that we can tie it back into the local
and national government at the end of the day.”
However,
these local alliances and a national solution seem fundamentally
contradictory and fated to promote increasing social decay. Certainly
that seems to be the opinion of the great majority of Iraqis. The BBC
webpage reported Sept. 10 that a poll commissioned by the BBC and ABC
showed that 70 percent of Iraqis believe that security has deteriorated
in the parts of the country covered by the "surge."
|