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August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
July 30, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Branding September 11
PS Burton
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
Tom Stephens
Hypocrites in the House:
Fast Track After Midnight
Dave Marsh
Censorship
Goes Global
July 29, 2002
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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The New Intifada:
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August
5, 2002
Iraq and the
New Great Game
by Rahul Mahajan
In the run-up to the Gulf War, government officials
put forth a bewildering array of reasons for the war, culminating
with Secretary of State Baker's fatuous claim that "it's
about jobs."
In this coming war, perhaps the earliest
and most consistently telegraphed since Cato the Elder's repeated
calls for the destruction of Carthage, a similar confusion reigns.
The same reflexively secretive administration that didn't want
to disclose which companies it met with and for how long when
formulating its energy policy has released at least four different
plans for achieving "regime change" -- widely-announced
"covert" operations, the "Afghan strategy,"
"Gulf War lite," and the "Baghdad/inside out option."
It has also released numerous reports of generals, military strategists,
and other insiders who oppose the war, to the point that people
seriously wonder what's going on.
This confusion has reached such heights
that many are beginning to call this a "Wag the Dog"
war, an attempt to avoid a Republican disaster in the November
elections. While the exact timing may be affected by domestic
considerations, the claim that they are the reason for the war
itself is implausible when you consider that there has been talk
about war on Iraq ever since 9/11, at a time when the world was
Bush's oyster. In fact, the war is simply a continuation of the
"regime change" policy of over ten years' standing
-- except that in the post-9/11 world the government believes
that it can get away with anything by invoking terrorism as a
threat.
So what is really going on?
Let's start with what are not the reasons
for the war. None of those put forth by the Bush administration
hold water.
Shortly after 9/11, there was an attempt
to relate Iraq to the attacks. The original claim that Mohammed
Atta, one of the hijackers, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague
earlier in the year, quickly fell apart, as Czech officials engaged
in an array of recantations and re-recantations. There are also
allegations, recently resurrected, that Iraq had a terrorist
training camp at Salman Pak, where Islamic fundamentalists were
trained in how to hijack planes. It's hard to argue against any
of this simply because there's so little there there; in fact,
for months the administration stopped claiming any connection,
unthinkable had there been any concrete evidence. The best current
argument for this connection is Donald Rumsfeld's dictum that
"the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
The main reason given for the war, of
course, is the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Scott Ritter, formerly one of the most
hawkish of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, has stated repeatedly
that Iraq is "qualitatively disarmed;" although there's
no way to account for every nut and bolt and gallon of biological
growth medium in the country, it had (as of December 1998) no
functional capacity to develop biological, chemical, or nuclear
weapons. The common counter-argument is that Iraq could acquire
them and the longer we wait the greater the chances.
Given the widespread credulous acceptance
of this argument, it's worth nothing that even the extremely
one-sided pro-war panel on the first day of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee's hearings on Iraq was unable to produce
any reason why Saddam would jeopardize his position by plotting
an attack that would surely invite massive retribution. In fact,
although he has used weapons of mass destruction before, most
notably against the Kurds (at which time he was aided and abetted
by the United States), the most plausible scenario in which he
would use them again is under threat of American attack.
Beyond that, successive U.S. administrations
have done all they could to sabotage arms control in Iraq and
worldwide.
First, in December 1998, President Clinton
pulled out the weapons inspectors preparatory to the "Desert
Fox" bombing campaign -- even though he knew this meant
the end of weapons inspections. This is normally reported in
the press as the "expulsion" of the weapons inspectors.
Next, in a move that stunned and angered
the international community, George W. Bush killed the proposed
enforcement and verification mechanism for the Biological and
Toxin Weapons Convention -- in December 2001, after the threat
of bioweapons attacks was particularly clear.
Passed in 1972, the convention has over
100 signatories, including Iraq and the United States. Because
of the lack of an enforcement mechanism, countries were free
to violate it, as did Iraq and the United States -- both have
attempted to weaponize anthrax, for example, as we found out
when <U.S.-developed> anthrax killed six Americans in the
fall of 2001.
In 1995, those signatories started negotiations
to provide enforcement through mutual, intrusive inspections.
For six years, the U.S. government threw up constant roadblocks,
finally terminating negotiations. The reason? Biological weapons
inspections in the United States might imperil the profits of
biotech companies. Of course, had the enforcement mechanism passed,
it could have been used to press for inspections in Iraq.
Even worse, in March 2002, the United
States removed Jose Bustani, head of the Organization to Prevent
Chemical Weapons, from office. According to George Monbiot of
the Guardian, it was because Bustani's efforts to include Iraq
in the Chemical Weapons Convention (subjecting it to chemical
weapons inspections) would deprive the United States of a casus
belli.
There is consensus by arms control experts
that weapons inspections in Iraq were extraordinarily effective
in finding and dismantling weapons of mass destruction. Clearly,
the administration isn't really concerned about this threat.
Constant protestations in the Senate
hearings and elsewhere to the contrary, the administration is
also not concerned about democracy in Iraq.
Consider the U.S. reaction to the Iraqi
intifada, the mass uprising of Iraqis after the Gulf War, in
response to a call by George Bush, Sr., to the Iraqi people to
overthrow Saddam. In February and March of 1991, at the peak
of that rebellion, Saddam's regime was seriously imperiled.
In order to save Saddam's regime, the
U.S. military deliberately lifted the existing no-fly zone, allowing
Saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the rebels; it
seized arms depots so the rebels couldn't arm themselves; and
it even allowed the Republican Guards safe passage through its
ranks to put down the uprising.
At the time, Richard Haas of the State
Department explained, "What we want is Saddam's regime without
Saddam." In 1996, on ABC, Brent Scowcroft explained further
that the United States did not want a popular democratic movement
that overthrew Saddam -- it wanted a palace coup.
When all the official justifications
collapse, what is left is the same ugly three-letter word that
has always been at the core of U.S. Middle East policy -- oil.
It's important to clarify, however, that U.S. policy is neither
simply about access to oil, which is how mainstream commentators
frame it, nor is it completely dictated by oil companies, as
some on the left claim.
Access to oil can be obtained by paying
for it, as other countries do. The United States has a different
attitude because it is an empire, not merely a nation. On any
given day, U.S. troops are in 140 countries around the world,
with permanent bases in over half of those. After two decades
of structural adjustment and one of "free trade," the
United States has more control over the internal policies of
other countries than the elected governments of those countries.
Although "globalization" was recently the more visible
face of this imperial expansion, it always had a military underpinning
-- and currently the military aspect is dominant.
This empire is predicated, like past
empires, on political control for the purpose of economic control
and resource and surplus extraction. Oil is the world's most
important resource, and control of the flow and pricing of oil
is a potent source of political power, as well as a significant
source of profits. Oil companies, arms companies, and general
corporate America are all intimately concerned with U.S. Middle
East policy.
Iraq nationalized its oil in 1972, taking
complete control over its own selling and pricing of oil and
over the use of oil revenues. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait put an
end to that.
The sanctions imposed after that and
maintained to this day have had many effects. In addition to
causing the death of over 500,000 children under the age of five
(according to a UNICEF study), sanctions have partially broken
Iraqi control of Iraq's oil. Starting with a complete ban on
oil sales, they were gradually modified so that now there are
no restrictions on sales. Iraq cannot make its own decisions
about oil exploration and investment, nor until recently about
repair of existing oil production facilities. Most important,
all revenues from oil sales are deposited in a bank account in
New York administered by the Security Council. Money is disbursed
from that account, only with the permission of the United States,
and almost exclusively to foreign corporations.
The sanctions have turned the Iraqi regime
permanently against the United States. If they were lifted, the
government would make oil exploration deals with French and Russian
companies, not American ones. Continuation of the sanctions is
a constant political burden for the United States. The Bush administration
wants a war to extricate itself from this stalemate, by replacing
Saddam with a <U.S.-friendly> dictator who will make deals
with American companies and follow American dictates.
The Afghanistan war was the opening move
in a potentially far-reaching gambit. It was not particularly
about fighting terrorism -- it was planned before 9/11, and even
U.S. government officials have concluded (in a June 16 New York
Times article) that it may have made "rooting out"
al-Qaeda more, not less, difficult, because of the geographic
dispersion caused by the war. It was also not just about a natural
gas pipeline through Afghanistan, although those plans seem to
be going forward. It also got the U.S. military into all seven
"stans," including potentially oil-and-gas-rich Kazakhstan
and Turkmenistan.
If Bush gets his Iraq war, given Russia's
rapprochement with NATO, there will also be a complete military
encirclement of Iran, the other part of the "axis of evil"
(North Korea was thrown in for ballast). At that point, Iran
will find it increasingly difficult not to accede to U.S. wishes.
ExxonMobil, Shell, and other companies
are currently negotiating with Saudi Arabia to do natural gas
exploration. Although the Saudis say they will never allow foreign
corporations to get their hands on crude oil, this is an important
beginning.
According to "The New Oil War,"
an article in the March/April 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs,
OPEC countries have not increased their pumping capacity in over
twenty years. This is the natural consequence, though the article
doesn't say it, of the dual U.S. policy of propping up corrupt
feudal elites that use the revenues from oil sales to invest
in U.S. and European corporations instead of investing them in
their own economies and of "containment" (i.e., targeting
for destruction) those few countries, like Iraq and Iran, that
do try to develop their internal economies. Over the next twenty
years, world requirements for Middle East oil are expected to
double.
The United States seeks nothing less
than the establishment of complete control over all significant
sources of oil, especially of the Middle East, which holds roughly
two thirds of the world's proven reserves. The twin requirements
of U.S. imperial control and the constant feeding of an industrial
system based on ever-increasing levels of fossil fuel consumption
dovetail with the systematic attempts of the United States to
keep Middle Eastern countries from developing independent economies
to set the stage for large-scale re-colonization, through war,
"covert" action, and economic coercion.
This war is not about minor domestic
squabbles between Democrats and Republicans, but about a very
ugly New World Order, in which innocents in the Middle East,
Central Asia, and in the United States pay for the imperial dreams
of an increasingly detached American elite.
Rahul Mahajan
is a member of the Nowar
Collective and the Green Party candidate for Governor
of Texas. His book, "The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism," (Monthly Review
Press, April 2002) has been described as "mandatory reading
for anyone who wants to get a handle on the war on terrorism."
He is currently writing a book on Iraq titled "Axis of Lies:
Myths and Reality about the U.S. War on Iraq."
He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca.
Today's Features
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
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