by Justin Raimondo
3rd November 2007
http://www.voltairenet.org/article152689.html
Qui tire les ficelles du PKK ? En un mot: Washington
par Justin Raimondo
Article en français
Early last August – that is way before the subject was mentioned in mainstream media -, Thierry Meyssan revealed in our columns the project for a US-Turkey joint military intervention against the PKK. However, the Pentagon’s right hand ignoring what its left hand is doing, the plan was soon to face a new reality described here by Antiwar’s Justin Raimondo: the PKK itself is armed by the Pentagon!
The serial numbers of arms captured from PKK fighters have been traced back to U.S. shipments to Iraqi military and police units. Responding to Turkish complaints, the Americans claim these arms were diverted by the Iraqis – presumably the Kurdish regional government – but the Turks aren’t buying it: if the large quantity of U.S.-made arms (1,260 seized so far) turns out to have been directly provided to the PKK by the Americans, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul warned, U.S.-Turkish "relations would really break apart." U.S. diplomats immediately rebuffed this suggestion, and Washington dispatched the Pentagon’s general counsel, William J. Haynes, to the scene, where he met with top Turkish military leaders. According to at least one report, "The meeting discussed an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Defense into reports that U.S. arms were being sold by U.S. troops in Iraq."
Another clue to what is really going on here is provided by the news that the FBI has volunteered to help the Turks find out where the PKK is getting its funding and weapons – and doesn’t that strike you as odd? FBI director Robert Mueller said, "We are working with our counterparts elsewhere in Europe and in Turkey to address the PKK and work cooperatively, to find and cut off financing to terrorist groups, be it PKK, al-Qaeda," or whatever. Yet why would the FBI get involved at all, unless, of course, Americans were somehow involved? Foreign Minister Gul confirmed this to the Turkish media, stating:
"1,260 weapons captured from the PKK are American-made. We documented it to the U.S. These are of course not given directly to the PKK by the U.S. These are the ones that were given to the Iraqi army. Unfortunately some U.S. officers were corrupt. The Department of Defense informed us that a serious investigation is underway."
Is it that a few bad apples are "corrupt" – or something else?
As Seymour Hersh has reported, the U.S. and Israel are financing and otherwise aiding the Kurdish Party of Life, known as "Pejak," founded to "liberate" western Iran, which has a large and restive Kurdish population. Furthermore, the ties between the PKK and Pejak are more than merely fraternal: they are basically the same organization, sharing not only bases in the mountainous Quandil region of Kurdistan, but also common personnel and leadership.
The sudden outbreak of PKK violence – two spectacular ambushes, one of which resulted in the killing of 12 Turkish soldiers and the capture of eight, who are now being used as bargaining chips – also requires some explanation. Up until this point, the PKK had carried out low-level operations, with groups of six to eight militants planting bombs and generally harassing the Turks on a small scale. In recent months, however, the overall level of attacks has undergone a radical increase, with hundreds of PKK fighters deployed in a single attack and a new sophistication in terms of both firepower and the technical equipment required to pull off complex operations such as the recent ambush-and-capture.
Ever since the Syrians stopped supporting the PKK in the late 1990s, the group was largely incapable of launching major operations and had to content itself with terrorist actions directed at tourist facilities. Membership was down, cut virtually in half, and the capture of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, demoralized large sections of the PKK, amid reports of splits. The revival of the group’s fortunes coincided with news of the Pejak-U.S. connection and – tellingly – the disappearance of U.S. munitions and other equipment from Iraq.
Nearly one out of every 25 weapons provided to the Iraqis by the U.S. has disappeared. Furthermore, the system for tracing them never functioned. 370,000 light weapons have been sent to Iraq by the U.S. since 2003, yet just 3 percent had their serial numbers recorded by the U.S. Defense Department prior to being handed over. For some unfathomable reason, the general who was in charge of that particular task – by the name of Petraeus – has never been held accountable for what is one of the biggest scandals of the war.
The idea that "corrupt" U.S. soldiers sold weapons on the black market to PKK guerrillas is not all that far-fetched, but the absence of any system to account for all these guns invites larger-scale suspicions. Could it have been set up that way precisely because the Pentagon – or someone else – wanted to make sure the weapons couldn’t be traced? This would certainly facilitate the arming of groups like Pejak, to put pressure on the Iranians and give the serial regime-changers in the Pentagon a huge weapons cache from which to draw at will.
We know that both the U.S. and Israel have been aiding Pejak, and surely this allowed the PKK to feed off of the arms pipeline, albeit "indirectly." The Israeli factor is yet another angle to this story: Seymour Hersh also reported that the Israelis have taken out a rather large stake in Kurdistan, not only investing in several major business operations but also involving themselves in the training of Kurdish "commandos." Could some of these commandos possibly be PKK operatives?
Both Iran and Turkey have pledged to cooperate in eradicating the Kurdish threat, and this cooperation is yet another reason for the general decline in relations between Ankara on the one hand and Washington and Tel Aviv on the other. What was once a tight alliance started to unravel when the Turks refused to let the U.S. use their territory as a launching pad for the invasion of Iraq, and things have gone rapidly downhill since. The regime-changers inside the administration, centered around Dick Cheney’s office and the civilian upper reaches of the Pentagon, may have decided that the Turks have to be thrown overboard now that the campaign to target Tehran is going full-gear.
If the Kurds’ price for subverting the Iranian regime is covert aid for their continuing assault on Turkey, then it hardly beggars belief that the War Party is willing to pay it: loyalty is not one of their strong suits, as Iraq’s Shi’ites can readily attest.
I have a great deal of difficulty believing that the large number of confiscated American weapons that apparently found their way into the hands of PKK fighters just happened to show up on the black market, without any knowledge or complicity by higher authorities. How high the "corruption" goes, remains to be seen. What we do know is this: the War Party isn’t shy about engaging in "rogue" operations and doing end-runs around the properly constituted authorities when it suits their purposes.
A recent demonstration by Turkish students against PKK terrorism had the protesters denouncing both the Kurds and the U.S. government: "Down with the PKK!" – they shouted – "Down with the U.S.!" In Turkey, at least, they seem to know who and what is behind the wave of terrorism that has shaken the country.
In America, however, it’s a different story altogether: the "news" media hasn’t really said anything about the FBI investigation and the possible involvement of Americans, nor do we hear much about the U.S. – or Israeli – connection to the Kurdish "liberation" groups, such as Pejak, except from Hersh and a few others.
As far as the "mainstream" media is concerned, what’s going on between the Turks and the Kurds is just another of those ancient, endless Middle Eastern blood feuds. No one bothers to ask: Why is this old problem escalating now?
That the PKK and Pejak have turned themselves into pawns of the War Party is quite understandable: after all, they want to liberate their people and unite them in the age-old dream of a "Greater Kurdistan." Like Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, they are ready, willing, and able to use the Americans in order to advance their own agenda. The question for the U.S. Congress, however, is whether the American taxpayers are now subsidizing terrorism directed at the Turks in order to further the War Party’s agenda.
mercredi 7 novembre 2007
Communiqué des AMITIES FRANCO-IRAKIENNES
Communiqué :
La France prête à entraîner
des membres des services de sécurité irakiens ?
Les sept propositions adressées à Nicolas Sarkozy
« pour contribuer au rétablissement
de la concorde et de la paix en Irak »
Le 30 octobre 2007, Cédric Goubet, Chef de Cabinet du Président de la République, a assuré aux Amitiés franco-irakiennes que Nicolas Sarkozy a « pris connaissance avec attention des proposition » que l’association lui a soumis après la réunion de son bureau élargi, le 4 octobre dernier.
Ces propositions étaient les suivantes :
1. Accorder des visas et des titres de séjour aux réfugiés irakiens – en particulier aux francophones - jusqu'à la réunion des conditions leur permettant de retourner dans leur pays, comme cela a été le cas pour les Kurdes irakiens dans les années 80 et pour les réfugiés du Kosovo.
2. Renoncer au projet de former des policiers et des gendarmes irakiens en France ou à l’étranger, jusqu’au changement significatif de la situation.
3. Interdire sous peine de sanctions aux sociétés de sécurité françaises d’intervenir en Irak.
4. Interdire en application de la loi du 14 avril 2003 aux mercenaires français d’intervenir en Irak, y compris au sein de sociétés de sécurité étrangères.
5. Refuser toute participation de forces armées françaises en Irak, y compris dans le cadre de l’ONU, de l’OTAN ou de l’Union Européenne.
6. Reconnaître la Résistance nationale irakienne comme représentante légitime du peuple irakien, sans attendre que Etats-Unis, qui négocient secrètement avec elle, en donnent le signal.
7. Oeuvrer pour l’organisation, à Paris, d’une « Conférence internationale pour la concorde et la paix en Irak », avec la participation de la Résistance irakienne.
L’association demandait également que ces mesures soient adoptées par l’Union européenne, et que des décisions soient prises pour que les troupes d’occupation se retirent d’Irak.
L’association des Amitiés franco-irakiennes se réunira fin novembre pour décider de la suite à donner à la réponse de Nicolas Sarkozy, notamment après avoir appris par une dépêche de l’agence de presse koweïtienne Kuna (4/11/07) que le « Président » irakien Jalal Talabani a déclaré le 3 novembre, après une réunion avec Jawad Al-Boulani, son « ministre » de l’Intérieur, que « la France est prête à entraîner des membres des services de sécurité irakiens ».
Cet accord, s’il est confirmé, rendrait la France complice des exactions commises par les escadrons de la mort irakiens.
Paris, le 7 novembre 2007
Contact AFI : Gilles Munier, Secrétaire général - 06 19 74 45 99 – gilmun@club-internet.fr
La France prête à entraîner
des membres des services de sécurité irakiens ?
Les sept propositions adressées à Nicolas Sarkozy
« pour contribuer au rétablissement
de la concorde et de la paix en Irak »
Le 30 octobre 2007, Cédric Goubet, Chef de Cabinet du Président de la République, a assuré aux Amitiés franco-irakiennes que Nicolas Sarkozy a « pris connaissance avec attention des proposition » que l’association lui a soumis après la réunion de son bureau élargi, le 4 octobre dernier.
Ces propositions étaient les suivantes :
1. Accorder des visas et des titres de séjour aux réfugiés irakiens – en particulier aux francophones - jusqu'à la réunion des conditions leur permettant de retourner dans leur pays, comme cela a été le cas pour les Kurdes irakiens dans les années 80 et pour les réfugiés du Kosovo.
2. Renoncer au projet de former des policiers et des gendarmes irakiens en France ou à l’étranger, jusqu’au changement significatif de la situation.
3. Interdire sous peine de sanctions aux sociétés de sécurité françaises d’intervenir en Irak.
4. Interdire en application de la loi du 14 avril 2003 aux mercenaires français d’intervenir en Irak, y compris au sein de sociétés de sécurité étrangères.
5. Refuser toute participation de forces armées françaises en Irak, y compris dans le cadre de l’ONU, de l’OTAN ou de l’Union Européenne.
6. Reconnaître la Résistance nationale irakienne comme représentante légitime du peuple irakien, sans attendre que Etats-Unis, qui négocient secrètement avec elle, en donnent le signal.
7. Oeuvrer pour l’organisation, à Paris, d’une « Conférence internationale pour la concorde et la paix en Irak », avec la participation de la Résistance irakienne.
L’association demandait également que ces mesures soient adoptées par l’Union européenne, et que des décisions soient prises pour que les troupes d’occupation se retirent d’Irak.
L’association des Amitiés franco-irakiennes se réunira fin novembre pour décider de la suite à donner à la réponse de Nicolas Sarkozy, notamment après avoir appris par une dépêche de l’agence de presse koweïtienne Kuna (4/11/07) que le « Président » irakien Jalal Talabani a déclaré le 3 novembre, après une réunion avec Jawad Al-Boulani, son « ministre » de l’Intérieur, que « la France est prête à entraîner des membres des services de sécurité irakiens ».
Cet accord, s’il est confirmé, rendrait la France complice des exactions commises par les escadrons de la mort irakiens.
Paris, le 7 novembre 2007
Contact AFI : Gilles Munier, Secrétaire général - 06 19 74 45 99 – gilmun@club-internet.fr
Communiqué from AMITIES FRANCO-IRAKIENNES
AMITIES FRANCO - IRAKIENNES
Communiqué
Is France about to train Iraqi security forces?
Seven propositions to Nicolas Sarkozy
“to promote peace and concord in Iraq”
On October 30, Cédric Goubert, Head of the Cabinet of the President of France, wrote to the French-Iraqi Friendship Organisation that Nicolas Sarkozy “read attentively the propositions” that the Organisation submitted to him after an enlarged meeting of its Bureau on October, 4th.
These propositions were :
1. To grant visas and residence permits to Iraqi refugees – in particular, French-speaking individuals- till all conditions allowing for their return to Iraq would be met as was the case for Iraqi Kurds in the 80s and for refugees from Kosovo.
2. To abandon the idea of training members of the police and security forces in France or elsewhere unless a significant change of the situation occurs.
3. To forbid and impose sanctions on any activity of French security companies in Iraq
4. To declare unlawful in application of the 14 April 2003 Law any intervention of French mercenaries in Iraq, even as members of foreign companies.
5. To reject any participation of French armed forces in Iraq whether in the framework of the UN, NATO or the European Union.
6. To recognize the National Iraqi Resistance as the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people without waiting for the United States, which are secretly negotiating with it, to permit it.
7. To endeavour to organize in Paris an “International Conference for Peace and Concord in Iraq” with the participation of the Iraqi Resistance.
The Organisation required as well that those propositions be adopted by the European Union and that decisions be adopted for the withdrawal of occupation troops in Iraq.
The Organisation will hold a meeting late November so as to decide what should be the response to Mr. Sarkozy’s as it has learnt from the Koweit Press Agency (KUNA) dated November, 4, 2007 that the Iraqi “President”; Jalal Talabani, has declared after meeting Jawad Al Boulani, his “minister “of Interior, on November 3rd, that “France intended to train Iraqi security forces.”
If confirmed, this agreement would make France an accomplice of all mistreatments committed by death squads in Iraq.
Paris, November 7th, 2007
Contact AFI : Gilles Munier, Secrétaire général - 06 19 74 45 99 – gilmun@club-internet.fr
Communiqué
Is France about to train Iraqi security forces?
Seven propositions to Nicolas Sarkozy
“to promote peace and concord in Iraq”
On October 30, Cédric Goubert, Head of the Cabinet of the President of France, wrote to the French-Iraqi Friendship Organisation that Nicolas Sarkozy “read attentively the propositions” that the Organisation submitted to him after an enlarged meeting of its Bureau on October, 4th.
These propositions were :
1. To grant visas and residence permits to Iraqi refugees – in particular, French-speaking individuals- till all conditions allowing for their return to Iraq would be met as was the case for Iraqi Kurds in the 80s and for refugees from Kosovo.
2. To abandon the idea of training members of the police and security forces in France or elsewhere unless a significant change of the situation occurs.
3. To forbid and impose sanctions on any activity of French security companies in Iraq
4. To declare unlawful in application of the 14 April 2003 Law any intervention of French mercenaries in Iraq, even as members of foreign companies.
5. To reject any participation of French armed forces in Iraq whether in the framework of the UN, NATO or the European Union.
6. To recognize the National Iraqi Resistance as the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people without waiting for the United States, which are secretly negotiating with it, to permit it.
7. To endeavour to organize in Paris an “International Conference for Peace and Concord in Iraq” with the participation of the Iraqi Resistance.
The Organisation required as well that those propositions be adopted by the European Union and that decisions be adopted for the withdrawal of occupation troops in Iraq.
The Organisation will hold a meeting late November so as to decide what should be the response to Mr. Sarkozy’s as it has learnt from the Koweit Press Agency (KUNA) dated November, 4, 2007 that the Iraqi “President”; Jalal Talabani, has declared after meeting Jawad Al Boulani, his “minister “of Interior, on November 3rd, that “France intended to train Iraqi security forces.”
If confirmed, this agreement would make France an accomplice of all mistreatments committed by death squads in Iraq.
Paris, November 7th, 2007
Contact AFI : Gilles Munier, Secrétaire général - 06 19 74 45 99 – gilmun@club-internet.fr
More Pontification, More Propaganda on Iraq
Dissecting the Disinformation on Western Secret Strategy in the New Middle East Wars
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed / November 5th, 2007
Watching journalist John Ware’s two-part BBC television documentary aired on Sunday and Monday evening this past week, “No plan, no peace in Iraq”, one came away with the impression that the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq was nothing more than one incredibly inept debacle after another. Stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance are about the only factors that explain the overwhelming reality of Anglo-American role in Iraq by Ware’s depiction: total and utter mismanagement.
Enforced by the spate of testimonials from British military leaders, such as retired General Sir Mike Jackson, or Major General Tim Cross, this has now become the standard conventional critique of our role in Iraq. John Ware’s investigations provided a systematic investigation fleshing out the contours of this critique. But as I’ll argue here, there are serious deficiencies in this perspective.
Writing on the BBC News website, Ware explained that:
“… it’s now clear that Mr Blair knew before the invasion that America’s planning for post-war recovery was woefully inadequate — and so was Britain’s.
There was no properly worked-out strategy for the key longer term objective of transforming it into a stable, prosperous nation that the Blair-Bush vision held out.”1
He goes on to blame “the rush to war” and “the blur of ideology” for the apparent lack of postwar planning. Ware takes it as given that “the Bush-Blair vision” for postwar Iraq was indeed to build a stable, prosperous democratic nation. Having accepted this as his starting assumption, all and any evidence that what happened in Iraq departed from this vision becomes obvious evidence, for Ware, of how incompetent and bumbling the Americans and British were in failing to plan properly for how to effect this noble vision. Although officials across the Atlantic are eager to blame the other side, he concludes that they’re both at fault:
“The truth is both governments got just about everything wrong in their assumptions as to what would follow the fall of Saddam. … The evidence suggests that in the rush to war, planning for what came afterwards was not a first order priority in either Washington — or London.”2
Ineptitude, lack of foresight and mismanagement no doubt played a role. Ware would have us believe they played the only role. Seemingly critical of Anglo-American policymaking, it’s important to note that Ware’s BBC investigation rarely attempts to actually subject any of the individuals he interviews to meaningful scrutiny. The entire programme assumes that Anglo-American objectives in Iraq were, and are, fundamentally to create a stable, democratic country; that officials were genuine and sincere in their intentions, but were so pre-occupied by rushing to war and some unspecified “ideology”, that they simply “recklessly” failed to plan properly. This failure then, while worthy of harsh criticism, was still a matter of sheer stupidity on the part of our governments.
The outcome of Ware’s analysis is, in many ways, one of moral relief. We’re able to feel satisfied that whatever horrendous disasters and loss of life have occurred in Iraq, it was all the result of unfortunate miscalculations and lack of foresight; nothing to do with our politico-economic institutions, nothing to do with actual government planning, but rather simply to do with lack of such planning.
The implication is obvious. The Americans and British, bearing the heavy (white man’s?) burden of responsibility for Iraq — having now occupied the beleaguered nation for the last 4 years — have a moral responsibility to rectify the unfortunate consequences, all totally regretful, of our governmental recklessness. Although Ware doesn’t spell it out, there is a solution logically implicit in his narrative: to have not less Anglo-American interventionism, by for instance withdrawing troops, but rather to have more and better full-on planning and involvement to ensure that Iraq returns to the course of stability, prosperity and democratization — as undoubtedly originally intended.
In the ensuing discussion, we will discuss how badly John Ware’s BBC television project serves the public interest, by completely ignoring documented facts, all in the public record for the last few years. The result is a programme that is partial, inaccurate, and untruthful; rather like much of the official justifications for intervention and occupation. In preparing this response to Ware, and the trend of thinking he represents, I draw liberally from my book on the Iraq War, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (Clairview, 2003), which critiques the record of Anglo-American intervention in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman empire all the way up to the 2003 Iraq War.
The Bush-Blair Vision for Iraq and the Middle East
If we are to believe John Ware, the Anglo-American vision for Iraq was to develop a stable, prosperous and democratic nation. But it has long been clear that this was never the real agenda in Iraq. Ware avoids all mention of the abundance of evidence that shows, to the contrary, that the Bush-Blair vision for Iraq was part of a wider grand strategy of American expansionism in the Middle East, motivated by extremely dubious interests.
This was not a plan about Iraq. The Iraq War plan was only one stage in a wider strategy to re-configure and thereby dominate the entire Middle East. According to former CIA political analyst Kathleen Christison and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis Bill Christison:
“… [T]wo strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors - the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil — probably factor in more or less equally to the administration’s calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq.”3
Ware seems utterly oblivious to all this, and indeed to the fact that numerous American military intelligence experts have confirmed the role of the Iraq War as part of a wider regional strategy.
According to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism operations of the CIA: “Clearly Iraq is not the last phase of what the administration tends to do in the Middle East.”
Former State Department and CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson similarly agreed that: “The administration may be working on the theory that by taking care of a secondary target like Syria, you bring tremendous pressure on primary targets” such as Iran, which may force changes in behaviour “without resorting to force.” Johnson continues that “By rights [Iran] should be the next target.”
Former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations for over two decades spending most of his career in the Middle East, further observed that the Bush administration wants “to divide up Syria, give part of Iraq to Turkey, overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz,” a very center of Saudi Arabian culture. “The underlying motivation” for this “is Israel. They think the demographics are going badly for Israel, for the US.”4
Democracy? Security? Naah, it’s Oil and Power, Stupid!
That democracy was far removed from the intentions of the war-planners is indisputable. John Ware echoes the government’s own justifications for the war in the form of Saddam himself. He points out that Tony Blair displayed a consistently unhealthy interest in trying to prove that Saddam was “uniquely evil”. The thrust of this, in hindsight, was clearly that Saddam was supposed to be a “uniquely evil” threat to both his own Iraqi people, as well as to the security of the international community. Thus, sincere concern for democracy and human rights meant that the Americans and British had to act against Saddam.
As Ware ought to know, this absurd story was refuted as long ago as one year before 9/11, four years before the Iraq invasion, by the notorious neo-conservative think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose sponsors were ranking members of the Bush administration at that time, including Vice-President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff; Elliott Abrams, Middle East director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, White House liaison to Iraqi opposition groups; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; John Bolton, Ambassador to the UN; and so on.
In September 2000, PNAC published a document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which dismissed the relevance of Saddam’s tyrannical security threats to the need for military involvement in Iraq:
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
So Saddam’s anti-democratic regime provided an immediate justification for a military intervention in Iraq that was motivated by other more transcendental issues. Issues like control of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. In 2001, a report on “energy security” — commissioned by Vice-President Dick Cheney and sponsored by two leading government-influenced U.S. think-tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy, concluded ominously that: “The world, is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity.” The impending crisis is increasing “US and global vulnerability to disruption” and now leaves the US facing “unprecedented energy price volatility,” One of the key “consequences” of the fact that “the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma” is the “need for military intervention.” The report thus recommends that energy and security policy be integrated to prevent “manipulations of markets by any state.”
The principal source of disruption to the existing energy system, the report concludes, lies in “Middle East tension”, due to which “chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption.” The threat posed by Iraq is highlighted. In 2000, Iraq had “effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so.” There is a “possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time” in order to damage prices.
“Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.
“This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader… and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.
“The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”5
In all of this general evidence of strategic planning behind the 2003 Iraq War, we find that there is no evidence whatsoever of concern for stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq. What we do find is abundant evidence for an overarching concern with geostrategic ambitions rooted in a questionable neo-conservative ideology tied to the goals of sustaining US pre-eminence through both control of oil and manipulation of Israel.
It never occurs to Ware that stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq were never factored into postwar planning in Iraq because the postwar planning was never intended to secure stability, prosperity or democracy. Contrary to Ware’s argument, backed up only by a list of illustrious looking talking heads, postwar planning in Iraq did exist, and it was concerned fundamentally with these other regional strategic, political and economic objectives; those objectives obliterated all other concerns, and this is precisely why Anglo-American leaders remained studiously uninterested in postwar planning for stability, prosperity and democracy.
Er, Lots of Plans, None Involving Peace, in Iraq
Let’s now examine Ware’s overriding theme: There were no serious plans whatsoever for what would happen after the war.
All the evidence, he suggests, shows that the Americans wanted to conduct a quick operation permitting the immediate removal of US forces after the successful removal of Saddam. He reports that Donald Rumsfeld, “The hawkish defence secretary had required his generals to give America a ‘lite’ footprint — a small invasion force that could be rapidly withdrawn afterwards.” He also interviews Sir Christopher Meyer, then British Ambassador to Washington, who tells Ware that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that “there was a black hole in American planning for the aftermath.”
Ware even gets some American talking heads to confirm that any planning that was being done, was in fact not actual planning at all. Longstanding State Department planning, for instance, was “never intended as a post-war plan”, insisted Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq. Based on Crocker’s opinion, Ware concludes that whatever the State Department planning was, it only amounted to “a series of expert study groups whose purpose was to engage Iraqi Americans in thinking about their country’s future.” This explains the failure to get off the ground serious reconstruction efforts to help the Iraqi people.
Hmmm. Not quite. Extensive evidence in the public record, evidence that Ware failed to acknowledge let alone address, shows that the Bush administration was indeed working on a very specific postwar plan for Iraq. Such as the State Department’s detailed “reconstruction” plan, designed to rob the country of its resources.
American investigative journalist Greg Palast, who has reported for BBC Newsnight, the Observer and the Guardian, obtained a State Department document, “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth,” in February 2003. In 101-pages, the document detailed the Bush administration’s plans for a complete rewrite of Iraq’s “policies, laws and regulations”, based on low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq’s banks and bridges, “all state enterprises” to foreign investors.
Among other things, the document stipulates that Iraq would have to “privatize” its “oil and supporting industries.” Annex D of the document set out, Palast reports, “a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq.” Under the tutelage of Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority imposed in the aftermath of the invasion issued “exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan.” Palast lists several major examples, but one is worth citing here by way of illustration:
“Order 12, ‘Trade Liberalization’, permitted the tax- and tariff-free import of foreign products. One big winner was Cargill, the world’s largest grain merchant, which flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat. For Iraqi farmers, already wounded by sanctions and war, this was devastating. They could not compete with the US and Australian surpluses dumped on them. But ‘the import plan’ carried out the letter of the Economy Plan.”
It is no surprise then that Palast quotes a disgruntled US government insider who worked on the State Department plan, noting that it conflicted fundamentally with real Iraqi democracy. “They have [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz coming out saying it’s going to be a democratic country’ but we’re going to do something that 99 percent of the people of Iraq wouldn’t vote for.”
From the very beginning, reports from high-level sources indicated that the Americans and British were not very interested in facilitating Iraqi democratization. They originally wanted a “regime change” that focused on the removal of Saddam himself and his top associates, without a fundamental restructuring of the regime itself. This had been the strategy as early as the 1991 Gulf War, during which Richard Haas, then Senior Director of Near East Affairs at the US National Security Council, confirmed that: “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.” Haas, of course later became Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under the administration of President George W Bush.6
Daniel Neep — head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London — reported in late 2002 on the postwar thinking going in Anglo-American policymaking circles: “The ideal scenario is someone within Iraq, preferably within the army, killing Saddam and taking control. That would mean that entering Baghdad would not be necessary and would also solve the problem of who will govern once he has gone.”7
As the New York Times elaborated in late February 2003, “outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won’t be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life…
“Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don’t have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power.”8
British academic Patrick Cockburn, Visiting Fellow at Washington DC’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), further commented that:
Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials… are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers. It undercuts the argument by George Bush and Tony Blair that war is justified by the evil nature of the regime in Baghdad…9
Furthermore, superimposed over the entrenched Ba’athist military-political regime structure, the US had already been drawing up extensive plans to establish a colonial-style administration of direct control. The Independent in February 2003 described documents summarising the conclusions of 17 State Department working groups — the same groups that John Ware accepts were “never intended as a post-war plan” and only designed to help “Iraqi Americans” do some “thinking” about their country of origin.
That’s not how it was reported at the time, but Ware displays little interest in the boring details of recent history. “Britain and America have been working for months on detailed proposals on how to rebuild Iraq after President Saddam”, reported The Independent. “In the initial aftermath of any war, Iraq would be governed by a senior US military officer, probably General Tommy Franks, with a civilian administrator.” General Franks would be expected to “initially impose martial law,” while Iraqis would be relegated to the sidelines as “advisers” to the US administration.10
And what of Ware’s reiteration of belated official claims that Dick Cheney only wanted a “small invasion force” that would be “rapidly withdrawn” after Saddam’s removal?
Again, this is just plain false. The Washington Post also reported on the postwar planning performed by the State Department, noting that the “blueprints for Iraq’s future… outline a broad and protracted American role in managing the reconstruction of the country.” Particularly, US forces are expected to control Iraq’s oil reserves, something that Ware obviously sees as bearing little relevance to understanding the occupation.
“The [Bush] administration’s plans, which are nearing completion, envision installing a civilian administration within months of a change of government, US officials said. But the officials said that even under the best of circumstances, US forces likely would remain at full strength in Iraq for months after a war ended, with a continued role for thousands of US troops there for years to come… Among key roles for US forces would be the preservation of Iraq’s borders against any sudden claims by neighbours and the defence of the country’s oil fields.”11
Indeed, White House plans outlined in late February 2003 revealed that the US intended to take “complete control of post-Saddam Iraq ‘for an indefinite period.’”12 So why does Ware, four years later, take seriously Bush administration officials claiming that the original idea all along was to deploy a small invasion force with a view to pull out almost immediately?
The Carve-Up Strategy
One doesn’t need to be a historian of empire to know that divide-and-rule is a rather standard strategy of imperial domination. It was deployed by the British, for example, to great effect in key colonies in North America and India against natives who, once divided along artificially exacerbated ethnic, religious and tribal classifications, were far easier to play off against one another, and thus control to the benefit of the colonial regime.
From the very beginning, American planners envisaged that in the long-term, Iraq would be divided up to facilitate the Anglo-American military occupation. Fragments of a plan to fracture Iraq along ethnic and religious lines to facilitate control of the oil reserves and allow population control emerged in September 2002.
Richard Perle, who then chaired the prominent Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Policy Board, issued a briefing for Pentagon officials that month. Ha’aretz reported from a “top official in the Israeli security services” that Perle “showed two slides to the Pentagon officials. The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratisation of the Middle East: Iraq — a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia — a strategic goal, and Egypt - the great prize. The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom.”13
This outrageous idea advocates a fundamental reconfiguration of power across the Middle East, with a number of highly dubious parameters, including a greatly expanded Israel fully encompassing the Occupied Territories; the expulsion of the Palestinians to Jordan; and the incorporation of the Sunni areas of Iraq with Jordan to form a wider pro-US Sunni Arab Hashemite Kingdom. How influential was this plan? Extremely.
According to the private American intelligence firm, Stratfor, the United States was “working on a plan to merge Iraq and Jordan into a unitary kingdom to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty headed by King Abdullah of Jordan.” The plan was “authored by US Vice President Dick Cheney” as well as “Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz”, and was first discussed at “an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July” that year. Now under this plan, Stratfor reported, Iraq would be de facto ethnically partitioned into three autonomous cantons: The central and largest part of Iraq that is populated by the Sunni Arabs would be joined with Jordan, and would include Baghdad, which would no longer be the capital. The Kurdish region of northern and northwestern Iraq, including Mosul and the vast Kirkuk oilfields, would become its own autonomous state. The Shia Region in southwestern Iraq, including Basra, would make up the third state, or more likely it would be joined with Kuwait.
Why did Cheney and Wolfowitz, the architects of this postwar plan for Iraq in the Bush Cabinet, think this sort of partition would be a good idea? And did their plans have anything to do with facilitating Iraq’s emergence as a democratic sovereign state? Not according to Stratfor, who outlined the advantages for the US as follows:
“First, the creation of a new pro-US kingdom under the half-British Abdullah [king of Jordan] would shift the balance of forces in the region heavily in the US favor. After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.
“Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection — and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”14
Yet none of this seems remotely interesting to John Ware who remains adamant, based on the reassurances from either ill-informed or unscrupulous American and British officials, that the allies were well and truly planless.
It is not a coincidence, of course, that a few years later a large number of American politicians security experts began popping out of the woodwork, seemingly at random, all advocating that the best way forward for Iraq was to undergo partition. When this happened, the public was led to believe that the partition proposal was a radically new idea that could solve Iraq’s entrenched problems. But we know that the partition lobby didn’t come out of the blue at all. It was inspired directly by the original architects of the 2002 postwar plan, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.
There is no conceivable way that such tripartite partitioning of an entire country could be achieved peacefully. Violence, conflict, civil war, along sectarian lines, would be inevitable if this was to be achieved. The task of “eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state” by fracturing the country along ethnic and religious lines, in other words, was precisely the postwar strategy being explored by Dick Cheney as the most effective means of securing American control over the country, and the wider region. It is not simply some sort of accident of Anglo-American stupidity.
Fostering Internal Conflict in Iraq
It is no surprise then to find that at the core of the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq one consistently finds the involvement of the United States. Although systematically ignored by the vast majority of mainstream media, that US strategy has deliberately attempted to foster internal conflict between various Iraqi factions as a tool to consolidate the occupation has been officially acknowledged.
In the November 2005 edition of the US Joint Special Operations University Report, Thomas H. Henriken, a senior fellow at the university and a former member of the US Army Science Board, reported that:
The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ firefights (this color-coding derives from US training exercises, in which red designates enemy combatants and blue designates friendly forces). Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam, US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level…
Events during fall 2004 within the central Iraqi city of Fallujah showcased the wily machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents. … But Fallujah was hardly a unified camp — the city seethed with internecine tensions. Zarqawi’s strict Salafi beliefs clashed with the more moderate Sufi views of the Sunni residents. Additionally, the Zarqawi jihadis and nationalistic Fallujans disagreed over the use of terror tactics. Both wanted the Americans out of Fallujah and out of Iraq, but they differed on the methods…. Evidence of factional fighting between the residents came to light with nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces. US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists took advantage of the internal warring by tapping into Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis. The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities—and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters—thereby diminishing his folk-hero image. Battles among anti-coalition forces killed enemy combatants and heightened factionalism. Thus, red-on-red battles enhanced the regular blue-on-red engagements by eliminating many insurgents.Thomas H. Henriken, “The War: Divide et Impera”, Hoover Digest, 2006, No. 1.
I’ve documented some of the evidence confirming a US strategy of tension in Iraq two years ago for Raw Story, and that evidence is still relevant now; I also updated it somewhat and in the latter half of a piece put up earlier this year by Dissident Voice.
Conclusion
The BBC programme portrays itself as a work of solid, investigative journalism, one that takes a thoroughly critical perspective of our governments’ involvement in Iraq. The truth of the matter, however, is that John Ware’s narrative is mired in a set of unquestioned assumptions that systematically misrepresents the reality of the Iraq War 2003 by taking at face value the claims of various British and American officials.
Throughout his investigation, Ware consistently refrains from doing any serious research into his subject. He ignores overwhelming evidence that the grave humanitarian, military and political crisis in Iraq is not simply a regrettable consequence of insufficient planning by well-meaning but hasty politicians; it was a direct consequence of a set of plans prepared before and during the war designed fundamentally to secure Anglo-American strategic and economic interests at the expense of the Iraqi people.
These criticisms of John Ware and the BBC by no means stop there. They are prominent facets of an edifice of disinformation endorsed by a mainstream media that uncritically swallows official government claims all too routinely, as part of its normal functioning.
Throughout, one finds in Anglo-American plans for Iraq no evidence whatsoever that the impact on the Iraqi people was ever factored into the strategic and economic equation. Thus, the catastrophe that currently wracks Iraq was not simply a result of the paucity of planning due to lack of foresight; it is the result of a deliberate set of plans to consolidate Anglo-American political, economic and strategic interests in the region, plans which advocated social, political and economic policies that systematically marginalized and slaughtered Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, in this context, there was indeed a paucity of planning to make Iraq a stable, prosperous and democratic, sovereign state. But that paucity didn’t issue forth from some inexplicably bumbling incompetence. It came from carefully thought-out, properly-mapped, conscious decisions that were fully cognizant of the ramifications of the policies being proposed, but derived from a wilful and reckless indifference to the lives and rights of the Iraqi people.
1. John Ware, “No Peace, No Plan in Iraq”, BBC News (27 October 2007). #
2. Ware, “UK and US Play Iraq ‘Blame Game’” BBC News (29 October 2007). #
3. Kathleen and Bill Christison, “The Bush Administration’s Dual Loyalties: A Rose By Any Other Name,” Counterpunch (13 December 2003). #
4. Richard Sale and Nicholas M. Morris, “War talk sweeps city,” United Press International, 11 February 2003; reprinted in Washington Times, 12 February 2003. #
5. Neil Mackay, “Official: U.S. oil at the heart of Iraq crisis,” Sunday Herald, 6 October 2002; Neil Mackay, “The West’s battle for oil,” Sunday Herald. For full text see Report of an Independent Task Force, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy / Council on Foreign Relations, April 2001. #
6. Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 37. #
7. Observer, 17 November 2002, p. 20. #
8. Paul Krugman, “The Martial Plan,” New York Times, 21 February 2003. #
9. Patrick Cockburn, “Kurdish leaders enraged by ‘undemocratic’ American plan to occupy Iraq,” The Independent, 17 February 2003. #
10. Andrew Buncombe, “US sees ‘someone like Jimmy Carter’ to oversee administration after overthrow of Saddam,” The Independent, 13 February 2003. #
11. Washington Post, 17 January 2003. #
12. Ian Bruce, “General Franks ‘to run Iraq after war,’” The Herald, 24 February 2002. #
13. Akiva Eldar, “Perles of wisdom for the Feithful,” Ha’aretz,1 October 2002. #
14. Stratfor, Uniting Jordan and Iraq Might Be Prime Post-War Strategy, 26 September 2002; Stratfor Press Release, “US plan to merge Iraq, Jordan after war”, 26 September 2002; Gary D. Hallbert, “US Considers Dividing Iraq into Three Separate States after Saddam is Gone”, Forecasts & Trends, 1 October 2002. #
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Overlook, 2006) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch, 2005), among other books. He teaches international relations at the University of Sussex, and directs the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. Read other articles by Nafeez, or visit Nafeez's website.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/11/more-pontification-more-propaganda-on-iraq/
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed / November 5th, 2007
Watching journalist John Ware’s two-part BBC television documentary aired on Sunday and Monday evening this past week, “No plan, no peace in Iraq”, one came away with the impression that the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq was nothing more than one incredibly inept debacle after another. Stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance are about the only factors that explain the overwhelming reality of Anglo-American role in Iraq by Ware’s depiction: total and utter mismanagement.
Enforced by the spate of testimonials from British military leaders, such as retired General Sir Mike Jackson, or Major General Tim Cross, this has now become the standard conventional critique of our role in Iraq. John Ware’s investigations provided a systematic investigation fleshing out the contours of this critique. But as I’ll argue here, there are serious deficiencies in this perspective.
Writing on the BBC News website, Ware explained that:
“… it’s now clear that Mr Blair knew before the invasion that America’s planning for post-war recovery was woefully inadequate — and so was Britain’s.
There was no properly worked-out strategy for the key longer term objective of transforming it into a stable, prosperous nation that the Blair-Bush vision held out.”1
He goes on to blame “the rush to war” and “the blur of ideology” for the apparent lack of postwar planning. Ware takes it as given that “the Bush-Blair vision” for postwar Iraq was indeed to build a stable, prosperous democratic nation. Having accepted this as his starting assumption, all and any evidence that what happened in Iraq departed from this vision becomes obvious evidence, for Ware, of how incompetent and bumbling the Americans and British were in failing to plan properly for how to effect this noble vision. Although officials across the Atlantic are eager to blame the other side, he concludes that they’re both at fault:
“The truth is both governments got just about everything wrong in their assumptions as to what would follow the fall of Saddam. … The evidence suggests that in the rush to war, planning for what came afterwards was not a first order priority in either Washington — or London.”2
Ineptitude, lack of foresight and mismanagement no doubt played a role. Ware would have us believe they played the only role. Seemingly critical of Anglo-American policymaking, it’s important to note that Ware’s BBC investigation rarely attempts to actually subject any of the individuals he interviews to meaningful scrutiny. The entire programme assumes that Anglo-American objectives in Iraq were, and are, fundamentally to create a stable, democratic country; that officials were genuine and sincere in their intentions, but were so pre-occupied by rushing to war and some unspecified “ideology”, that they simply “recklessly” failed to plan properly. This failure then, while worthy of harsh criticism, was still a matter of sheer stupidity on the part of our governments.
The outcome of Ware’s analysis is, in many ways, one of moral relief. We’re able to feel satisfied that whatever horrendous disasters and loss of life have occurred in Iraq, it was all the result of unfortunate miscalculations and lack of foresight; nothing to do with our politico-economic institutions, nothing to do with actual government planning, but rather simply to do with lack of such planning.
The implication is obvious. The Americans and British, bearing the heavy (white man’s?) burden of responsibility for Iraq — having now occupied the beleaguered nation for the last 4 years — have a moral responsibility to rectify the unfortunate consequences, all totally regretful, of our governmental recklessness. Although Ware doesn’t spell it out, there is a solution logically implicit in his narrative: to have not less Anglo-American interventionism, by for instance withdrawing troops, but rather to have more and better full-on planning and involvement to ensure that Iraq returns to the course of stability, prosperity and democratization — as undoubtedly originally intended.
In the ensuing discussion, we will discuss how badly John Ware’s BBC television project serves the public interest, by completely ignoring documented facts, all in the public record for the last few years. The result is a programme that is partial, inaccurate, and untruthful; rather like much of the official justifications for intervention and occupation. In preparing this response to Ware, and the trend of thinking he represents, I draw liberally from my book on the Iraq War, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (Clairview, 2003), which critiques the record of Anglo-American intervention in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman empire all the way up to the 2003 Iraq War.
The Bush-Blair Vision for Iraq and the Middle East
If we are to believe John Ware, the Anglo-American vision for Iraq was to develop a stable, prosperous and democratic nation. But it has long been clear that this was never the real agenda in Iraq. Ware avoids all mention of the abundance of evidence that shows, to the contrary, that the Bush-Blair vision for Iraq was part of a wider grand strategy of American expansionism in the Middle East, motivated by extremely dubious interests.
This was not a plan about Iraq. The Iraq War plan was only one stage in a wider strategy to re-configure and thereby dominate the entire Middle East. According to former CIA political analyst Kathleen Christison and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis Bill Christison:
“… [T]wo strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors - the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil — probably factor in more or less equally to the administration’s calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq.”3
Ware seems utterly oblivious to all this, and indeed to the fact that numerous American military intelligence experts have confirmed the role of the Iraq War as part of a wider regional strategy.
According to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism operations of the CIA: “Clearly Iraq is not the last phase of what the administration tends to do in the Middle East.”
Former State Department and CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson similarly agreed that: “The administration may be working on the theory that by taking care of a secondary target like Syria, you bring tremendous pressure on primary targets” such as Iran, which may force changes in behaviour “without resorting to force.” Johnson continues that “By rights [Iran] should be the next target.”
Former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations for over two decades spending most of his career in the Middle East, further observed that the Bush administration wants “to divide up Syria, give part of Iraq to Turkey, overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz,” a very center of Saudi Arabian culture. “The underlying motivation” for this “is Israel. They think the demographics are going badly for Israel, for the US.”4
Democracy? Security? Naah, it’s Oil and Power, Stupid!
That democracy was far removed from the intentions of the war-planners is indisputable. John Ware echoes the government’s own justifications for the war in the form of Saddam himself. He points out that Tony Blair displayed a consistently unhealthy interest in trying to prove that Saddam was “uniquely evil”. The thrust of this, in hindsight, was clearly that Saddam was supposed to be a “uniquely evil” threat to both his own Iraqi people, as well as to the security of the international community. Thus, sincere concern for democracy and human rights meant that the Americans and British had to act against Saddam.
As Ware ought to know, this absurd story was refuted as long ago as one year before 9/11, four years before the Iraq invasion, by the notorious neo-conservative think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose sponsors were ranking members of the Bush administration at that time, including Vice-President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff; Elliott Abrams, Middle East director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, White House liaison to Iraqi opposition groups; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; John Bolton, Ambassador to the UN; and so on.
In September 2000, PNAC published a document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which dismissed the relevance of Saddam’s tyrannical security threats to the need for military involvement in Iraq:
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
So Saddam’s anti-democratic regime provided an immediate justification for a military intervention in Iraq that was motivated by other more transcendental issues. Issues like control of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. In 2001, a report on “energy security” — commissioned by Vice-President Dick Cheney and sponsored by two leading government-influenced U.S. think-tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy, concluded ominously that: “The world, is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity.” The impending crisis is increasing “US and global vulnerability to disruption” and now leaves the US facing “unprecedented energy price volatility,” One of the key “consequences” of the fact that “the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma” is the “need for military intervention.” The report thus recommends that energy and security policy be integrated to prevent “manipulations of markets by any state.”
The principal source of disruption to the existing energy system, the report concludes, lies in “Middle East tension”, due to which “chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption.” The threat posed by Iraq is highlighted. In 2000, Iraq had “effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so.” There is a “possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time” in order to damage prices.
“Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.
“This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader… and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.
“The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”5
In all of this general evidence of strategic planning behind the 2003 Iraq War, we find that there is no evidence whatsoever of concern for stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq. What we do find is abundant evidence for an overarching concern with geostrategic ambitions rooted in a questionable neo-conservative ideology tied to the goals of sustaining US pre-eminence through both control of oil and manipulation of Israel.
It never occurs to Ware that stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq were never factored into postwar planning in Iraq because the postwar planning was never intended to secure stability, prosperity or democracy. Contrary to Ware’s argument, backed up only by a list of illustrious looking talking heads, postwar planning in Iraq did exist, and it was concerned fundamentally with these other regional strategic, political and economic objectives; those objectives obliterated all other concerns, and this is precisely why Anglo-American leaders remained studiously uninterested in postwar planning for stability, prosperity and democracy.
Er, Lots of Plans, None Involving Peace, in Iraq
Let’s now examine Ware’s overriding theme: There were no serious plans whatsoever for what would happen after the war.
All the evidence, he suggests, shows that the Americans wanted to conduct a quick operation permitting the immediate removal of US forces after the successful removal of Saddam. He reports that Donald Rumsfeld, “The hawkish defence secretary had required his generals to give America a ‘lite’ footprint — a small invasion force that could be rapidly withdrawn afterwards.” He also interviews Sir Christopher Meyer, then British Ambassador to Washington, who tells Ware that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that “there was a black hole in American planning for the aftermath.”
Ware even gets some American talking heads to confirm that any planning that was being done, was in fact not actual planning at all. Longstanding State Department planning, for instance, was “never intended as a post-war plan”, insisted Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq. Based on Crocker’s opinion, Ware concludes that whatever the State Department planning was, it only amounted to “a series of expert study groups whose purpose was to engage Iraqi Americans in thinking about their country’s future.” This explains the failure to get off the ground serious reconstruction efforts to help the Iraqi people.
Hmmm. Not quite. Extensive evidence in the public record, evidence that Ware failed to acknowledge let alone address, shows that the Bush administration was indeed working on a very specific postwar plan for Iraq. Such as the State Department’s detailed “reconstruction” plan, designed to rob the country of its resources.
American investigative journalist Greg Palast, who has reported for BBC Newsnight, the Observer and the Guardian, obtained a State Department document, “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth,” in February 2003. In 101-pages, the document detailed the Bush administration’s plans for a complete rewrite of Iraq’s “policies, laws and regulations”, based on low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq’s banks and bridges, “all state enterprises” to foreign investors.
Among other things, the document stipulates that Iraq would have to “privatize” its “oil and supporting industries.” Annex D of the document set out, Palast reports, “a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq.” Under the tutelage of Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority imposed in the aftermath of the invasion issued “exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan.” Palast lists several major examples, but one is worth citing here by way of illustration:
“Order 12, ‘Trade Liberalization’, permitted the tax- and tariff-free import of foreign products. One big winner was Cargill, the world’s largest grain merchant, which flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat. For Iraqi farmers, already wounded by sanctions and war, this was devastating. They could not compete with the US and Australian surpluses dumped on them. But ‘the import plan’ carried out the letter of the Economy Plan.”
It is no surprise then that Palast quotes a disgruntled US government insider who worked on the State Department plan, noting that it conflicted fundamentally with real Iraqi democracy. “They have [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz coming out saying it’s going to be a democratic country’ but we’re going to do something that 99 percent of the people of Iraq wouldn’t vote for.”
From the very beginning, reports from high-level sources indicated that the Americans and British were not very interested in facilitating Iraqi democratization. They originally wanted a “regime change” that focused on the removal of Saddam himself and his top associates, without a fundamental restructuring of the regime itself. This had been the strategy as early as the 1991 Gulf War, during which Richard Haas, then Senior Director of Near East Affairs at the US National Security Council, confirmed that: “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.” Haas, of course later became Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under the administration of President George W Bush.6
Daniel Neep — head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London — reported in late 2002 on the postwar thinking going in Anglo-American policymaking circles: “The ideal scenario is someone within Iraq, preferably within the army, killing Saddam and taking control. That would mean that entering Baghdad would not be necessary and would also solve the problem of who will govern once he has gone.”7
As the New York Times elaborated in late February 2003, “outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won’t be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life…
“Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don’t have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power.”8
British academic Patrick Cockburn, Visiting Fellow at Washington DC’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), further commented that:
Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials… are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers. It undercuts the argument by George Bush and Tony Blair that war is justified by the evil nature of the regime in Baghdad…9
Furthermore, superimposed over the entrenched Ba’athist military-political regime structure, the US had already been drawing up extensive plans to establish a colonial-style administration of direct control. The Independent in February 2003 described documents summarising the conclusions of 17 State Department working groups — the same groups that John Ware accepts were “never intended as a post-war plan” and only designed to help “Iraqi Americans” do some “thinking” about their country of origin.
That’s not how it was reported at the time, but Ware displays little interest in the boring details of recent history. “Britain and America have been working for months on detailed proposals on how to rebuild Iraq after President Saddam”, reported The Independent. “In the initial aftermath of any war, Iraq would be governed by a senior US military officer, probably General Tommy Franks, with a civilian administrator.” General Franks would be expected to “initially impose martial law,” while Iraqis would be relegated to the sidelines as “advisers” to the US administration.10
And what of Ware’s reiteration of belated official claims that Dick Cheney only wanted a “small invasion force” that would be “rapidly withdrawn” after Saddam’s removal?
Again, this is just plain false. The Washington Post also reported on the postwar planning performed by the State Department, noting that the “blueprints for Iraq’s future… outline a broad and protracted American role in managing the reconstruction of the country.” Particularly, US forces are expected to control Iraq’s oil reserves, something that Ware obviously sees as bearing little relevance to understanding the occupation.
“The [Bush] administration’s plans, which are nearing completion, envision installing a civilian administration within months of a change of government, US officials said. But the officials said that even under the best of circumstances, US forces likely would remain at full strength in Iraq for months after a war ended, with a continued role for thousands of US troops there for years to come… Among key roles for US forces would be the preservation of Iraq’s borders against any sudden claims by neighbours and the defence of the country’s oil fields.”11
Indeed, White House plans outlined in late February 2003 revealed that the US intended to take “complete control of post-Saddam Iraq ‘for an indefinite period.’”12 So why does Ware, four years later, take seriously Bush administration officials claiming that the original idea all along was to deploy a small invasion force with a view to pull out almost immediately?
The Carve-Up Strategy
One doesn’t need to be a historian of empire to know that divide-and-rule is a rather standard strategy of imperial domination. It was deployed by the British, for example, to great effect in key colonies in North America and India against natives who, once divided along artificially exacerbated ethnic, religious and tribal classifications, were far easier to play off against one another, and thus control to the benefit of the colonial regime.
From the very beginning, American planners envisaged that in the long-term, Iraq would be divided up to facilitate the Anglo-American military occupation. Fragments of a plan to fracture Iraq along ethnic and religious lines to facilitate control of the oil reserves and allow population control emerged in September 2002.
Richard Perle, who then chaired the prominent Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Policy Board, issued a briefing for Pentagon officials that month. Ha’aretz reported from a “top official in the Israeli security services” that Perle “showed two slides to the Pentagon officials. The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratisation of the Middle East: Iraq — a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia — a strategic goal, and Egypt - the great prize. The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom.”13
This outrageous idea advocates a fundamental reconfiguration of power across the Middle East, with a number of highly dubious parameters, including a greatly expanded Israel fully encompassing the Occupied Territories; the expulsion of the Palestinians to Jordan; and the incorporation of the Sunni areas of Iraq with Jordan to form a wider pro-US Sunni Arab Hashemite Kingdom. How influential was this plan? Extremely.
According to the private American intelligence firm, Stratfor, the United States was “working on a plan to merge Iraq and Jordan into a unitary kingdom to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty headed by King Abdullah of Jordan.” The plan was “authored by US Vice President Dick Cheney” as well as “Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz”, and was first discussed at “an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July” that year. Now under this plan, Stratfor reported, Iraq would be de facto ethnically partitioned into three autonomous cantons: The central and largest part of Iraq that is populated by the Sunni Arabs would be joined with Jordan, and would include Baghdad, which would no longer be the capital. The Kurdish region of northern and northwestern Iraq, including Mosul and the vast Kirkuk oilfields, would become its own autonomous state. The Shia Region in southwestern Iraq, including Basra, would make up the third state, or more likely it would be joined with Kuwait.
Why did Cheney and Wolfowitz, the architects of this postwar plan for Iraq in the Bush Cabinet, think this sort of partition would be a good idea? And did their plans have anything to do with facilitating Iraq’s emergence as a democratic sovereign state? Not according to Stratfor, who outlined the advantages for the US as follows:
“First, the creation of a new pro-US kingdom under the half-British Abdullah [king of Jordan] would shift the balance of forces in the region heavily in the US favor. After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.
“Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection — and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”14
Yet none of this seems remotely interesting to John Ware who remains adamant, based on the reassurances from either ill-informed or unscrupulous American and British officials, that the allies were well and truly planless.
It is not a coincidence, of course, that a few years later a large number of American politicians security experts began popping out of the woodwork, seemingly at random, all advocating that the best way forward for Iraq was to undergo partition. When this happened, the public was led to believe that the partition proposal was a radically new idea that could solve Iraq’s entrenched problems. But we know that the partition lobby didn’t come out of the blue at all. It was inspired directly by the original architects of the 2002 postwar plan, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.
There is no conceivable way that such tripartite partitioning of an entire country could be achieved peacefully. Violence, conflict, civil war, along sectarian lines, would be inevitable if this was to be achieved. The task of “eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state” by fracturing the country along ethnic and religious lines, in other words, was precisely the postwar strategy being explored by Dick Cheney as the most effective means of securing American control over the country, and the wider region. It is not simply some sort of accident of Anglo-American stupidity.
Fostering Internal Conflict in Iraq
It is no surprise then to find that at the core of the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq one consistently finds the involvement of the United States. Although systematically ignored by the vast majority of mainstream media, that US strategy has deliberately attempted to foster internal conflict between various Iraqi factions as a tool to consolidate the occupation has been officially acknowledged.
In the November 2005 edition of the US Joint Special Operations University Report, Thomas H. Henriken, a senior fellow at the university and a former member of the US Army Science Board, reported that:
The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ firefights (this color-coding derives from US training exercises, in which red designates enemy combatants and blue designates friendly forces). Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam, US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level…
Events during fall 2004 within the central Iraqi city of Fallujah showcased the wily machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents. … But Fallujah was hardly a unified camp — the city seethed with internecine tensions. Zarqawi’s strict Salafi beliefs clashed with the more moderate Sufi views of the Sunni residents. Additionally, the Zarqawi jihadis and nationalistic Fallujans disagreed over the use of terror tactics. Both wanted the Americans out of Fallujah and out of Iraq, but they differed on the methods…. Evidence of factional fighting between the residents came to light with nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces. US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists took advantage of the internal warring by tapping into Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis. The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities—and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters—thereby diminishing his folk-hero image. Battles among anti-coalition forces killed enemy combatants and heightened factionalism. Thus, red-on-red battles enhanced the regular blue-on-red engagements by eliminating many insurgents.Thomas H. Henriken, “The War: Divide et Impera”, Hoover Digest, 2006, No. 1.
I’ve documented some of the evidence confirming a US strategy of tension in Iraq two years ago for Raw Story, and that evidence is still relevant now; I also updated it somewhat and in the latter half of a piece put up earlier this year by Dissident Voice.
Conclusion
The BBC programme portrays itself as a work of solid, investigative journalism, one that takes a thoroughly critical perspective of our governments’ involvement in Iraq. The truth of the matter, however, is that John Ware’s narrative is mired in a set of unquestioned assumptions that systematically misrepresents the reality of the Iraq War 2003 by taking at face value the claims of various British and American officials.
Throughout his investigation, Ware consistently refrains from doing any serious research into his subject. He ignores overwhelming evidence that the grave humanitarian, military and political crisis in Iraq is not simply a regrettable consequence of insufficient planning by well-meaning but hasty politicians; it was a direct consequence of a set of plans prepared before and during the war designed fundamentally to secure Anglo-American strategic and economic interests at the expense of the Iraqi people.
These criticisms of John Ware and the BBC by no means stop there. They are prominent facets of an edifice of disinformation endorsed by a mainstream media that uncritically swallows official government claims all too routinely, as part of its normal functioning.
Throughout, one finds in Anglo-American plans for Iraq no evidence whatsoever that the impact on the Iraqi people was ever factored into the strategic and economic equation. Thus, the catastrophe that currently wracks Iraq was not simply a result of the paucity of planning due to lack of foresight; it is the result of a deliberate set of plans to consolidate Anglo-American political, economic and strategic interests in the region, plans which advocated social, political and economic policies that systematically marginalized and slaughtered Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands. Yes, in this context, there was indeed a paucity of planning to make Iraq a stable, prosperous and democratic, sovereign state. But that paucity didn’t issue forth from some inexplicably bumbling incompetence. It came from carefully thought-out, properly-mapped, conscious decisions that were fully cognizant of the ramifications of the policies being proposed, but derived from a wilful and reckless indifference to the lives and rights of the Iraqi people.
1. John Ware, “No Peace, No Plan in Iraq”, BBC News (27 October 2007). #
2. Ware, “UK and US Play Iraq ‘Blame Game’” BBC News (29 October 2007). #
3. Kathleen and Bill Christison, “The Bush Administration’s Dual Loyalties: A Rose By Any Other Name,” Counterpunch (13 December 2003). #
4. Richard Sale and Nicholas M. Morris, “War talk sweeps city,” United Press International, 11 February 2003; reprinted in Washington Times, 12 February 2003. #
5. Neil Mackay, “Official: U.S. oil at the heart of Iraq crisis,” Sunday Herald, 6 October 2002; Neil Mackay, “The West’s battle for oil,” Sunday Herald. For full text see Report of an Independent Task Force, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy / Council on Foreign Relations, April 2001. #
6. Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 37. #
7. Observer, 17 November 2002, p. 20. #
8. Paul Krugman, “The Martial Plan,” New York Times, 21 February 2003. #
9. Patrick Cockburn, “Kurdish leaders enraged by ‘undemocratic’ American plan to occupy Iraq,” The Independent, 17 February 2003. #
10. Andrew Buncombe, “US sees ‘someone like Jimmy Carter’ to oversee administration after overthrow of Saddam,” The Independent, 13 February 2003. #
11. Washington Post, 17 January 2003. #
12. Ian Bruce, “General Franks ‘to run Iraq after war,’” The Herald, 24 February 2002. #
13. Akiva Eldar, “Perles of wisdom for the Feithful,” Ha’aretz,1 October 2002. #
14. Stratfor, Uniting Jordan and Iraq Might Be Prime Post-War Strategy, 26 September 2002; Stratfor Press Release, “US plan to merge Iraq, Jordan after war”, 26 September 2002; Gary D. Hallbert, “US Considers Dividing Iraq into Three Separate States after Saddam is Gone”, Forecasts & Trends, 1 October 2002. #
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Overlook, 2006) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Olive Branch, 2005), among other books. He teaches international relations at the University of Sussex, and directs the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. Read other articles by Nafeez, or visit Nafeez's website.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/11/more-pontification-more-propaganda-on-iraq/
MHP leader Bahçeli labels Erdoğan-Bush meeting a ‘fiasco’
Leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Devlet Bahçeli termed the results of a meeting between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and US President George W. Bush at the White House a mere “fiasco.”
Erdoğan and Bush met on Monday to discuss cooperation against the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has carried out a series of deadly attacks over the past weeks in Turkey from bases in northern Iraq. Bush said he was committed to countering the militants and offered to share intelligence with Ankara without pledging further support or suggesting a joint military operation against the PKK contrary to expectations.
Speaking at his party’s group meeting yesterday, Bahçeli lamented: “There was no mention of eradication of the PKK, a possible Turkish cross-border operation into northern Iraq, a joint Turkish-US operation against the PKK that would yield effective results, disbanding the PKK camps in northern Iraq, handing over of the PKK leaders to Turkey or cutting logistical support to the PKK, PKK militants in Mahmour and the Kandil Mountains at the Oval Office meeting. Instead, the two leaders beat the air and made special efforts to give a message of unity on some issues of secondary importance. The leaders reached a limited agreement at a time when Turkey has run out of patience [due to PKK violence]. This is a total disappointment. The end result for Turkey has been disappointment and failure.”
Accusing the US of not being willing to take any concrete steps against the PKK, Bahçeli stressed that Erdoğan’s last US visit has once again proved this.
“The prime minister, who went to Washington to get Bush’s approval about the steps to be taken for Turkey’s national security, could not find the support he expected and had to return to Turkey with empty pledges about some ineffective steps.
I would like to mention that I am deeply agitated due to the US adopting such a stance against Turkey and the prime minister placing Turkey in such an embarrassing situation. This meeting has shown that stability of a handful of peshmergas in northern Iraq is more important and of greater priority than Turkey’s security and territorial integrity for our ally, the US,” Bahçeli told his party members.
Bahçeli also directed harsh criticism at the members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) who acted as mediators for the release of eight Turkish soldiers who were taken hostage by the PKK militants last month.
“The group who signed a so-called handover document at a roadside table with a poster of the İmralı murderer [PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan] has merely shown an example of treason. The desperate events taking place during the release of our soldiers are a clear sign of the separatist PKK’s willingness to start a new term of propaganda to legitimize itself,” Bahçeli added.
07.11.2007
Today’s Zaman Ankara
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=126501
Erdoğan and Bush met on Monday to discuss cooperation against the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has carried out a series of deadly attacks over the past weeks in Turkey from bases in northern Iraq. Bush said he was committed to countering the militants and offered to share intelligence with Ankara without pledging further support or suggesting a joint military operation against the PKK contrary to expectations.
Speaking at his party’s group meeting yesterday, Bahçeli lamented: “There was no mention of eradication of the PKK, a possible Turkish cross-border operation into northern Iraq, a joint Turkish-US operation against the PKK that would yield effective results, disbanding the PKK camps in northern Iraq, handing over of the PKK leaders to Turkey or cutting logistical support to the PKK, PKK militants in Mahmour and the Kandil Mountains at the Oval Office meeting. Instead, the two leaders beat the air and made special efforts to give a message of unity on some issues of secondary importance. The leaders reached a limited agreement at a time when Turkey has run out of patience [due to PKK violence]. This is a total disappointment. The end result for Turkey has been disappointment and failure.”
Accusing the US of not being willing to take any concrete steps against the PKK, Bahçeli stressed that Erdoğan’s last US visit has once again proved this.
“The prime minister, who went to Washington to get Bush’s approval about the steps to be taken for Turkey’s national security, could not find the support he expected and had to return to Turkey with empty pledges about some ineffective steps.
I would like to mention that I am deeply agitated due to the US adopting such a stance against Turkey and the prime minister placing Turkey in such an embarrassing situation. This meeting has shown that stability of a handful of peshmergas in northern Iraq is more important and of greater priority than Turkey’s security and territorial integrity for our ally, the US,” Bahçeli told his party members.
Bahçeli also directed harsh criticism at the members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) who acted as mediators for the release of eight Turkish soldiers who were taken hostage by the PKK militants last month.
“The group who signed a so-called handover document at a roadside table with a poster of the İmralı murderer [PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan] has merely shown an example of treason. The desperate events taking place during the release of our soldiers are a clear sign of the separatist PKK’s willingness to start a new term of propaganda to legitimize itself,” Bahçeli added.
07.11.2007
Today’s Zaman Ankara
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=126501
OPINION: 'Bush's Turkey shoot' by Pepe Escobar
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK07Ak01.html
Excerpt
For any Turk with an Ottoman Empire memory, Mosul's oil fields, only 120km from the border, should belong to Turkey; after all they were stolen by the British Empire as it drew the artificial borders of Iraq in the early 1920s.
Both the treaties of Sevres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) did everything to exclude Mosul and Kerkuk - both with a Turkmen majority - from Turkey, so the new republic would be deprived of oil.
It's not hard to imagine Turkish generals dreaming of a modern Turkey swimming in oil wealth as a certified regional superpower, spreading its wings over the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and as far as Central Asia. The equation is inescapable: if Washington could invade Iraq to grab its oil, why not neighbor Turkey, who owned the oil in the first place?
Excerpt
For any Turk with an Ottoman Empire memory, Mosul's oil fields, only 120km from the border, should belong to Turkey; after all they were stolen by the British Empire as it drew the artificial borders of Iraq in the early 1920s.
Both the treaties of Sevres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) did everything to exclude Mosul and Kerkuk - both with a Turkmen majority - from Turkey, so the new republic would be deprived of oil.
It's not hard to imagine Turkish generals dreaming of a modern Turkey swimming in oil wealth as a certified regional superpower, spreading its wings over the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus and as far as Central Asia. The equation is inescapable: if Washington could invade Iraq to grab its oil, why not neighbor Turkey, who owned the oil in the first place?
mardi 6 novembre 2007
Hayret, kimse sesini çıkarmadı
http://www.kerkuk.net/default.aspx?dil=1055
06 Kasım 2007, Salı .
"Bazı Türkmen evlerine dün gece kapının altından bazı bildiriler atılmış. Türkiye askeri operasyon yaparsa, buraya girerse, biz de size şunu yaparız, bunu yaparız diye."
GEÇEN cumartesi günü Milliyet Gazetesi'nde Hasan Cemal'in, Irak'tan yazdığı gözlemleri okurken çok önemli bir ayrıntı dikkatimi çekti. Bu ayrıntının Türkiye'de kıyamet koparacağını sanıyordum. Hayret, hiçbir gazetenin köşesinden en küçük tepki gelmedi.
Düşündüm.
Acaba onu ben yazsaydım, aynı köşeler bu kadar sessiz kalır mıydı?
Hasan Cemal'in yaptığı gözlemi aktarmadan önce, bazı vicdansızların bana yaptığı eleştiriyi hatırlatayım.
Çünkü bu hatırlatma, Hasan Cemal'in aktardığı olayı daha iyi anlamanıza yardımcı olacak.
* * *
Ben yıllardan beri şunu yazıyorum: Türkiye, 20 yıldan fazladır PKK belasıyla mücadele ediyor. Binlerce insanı bu mücadelede hayatını kaybetti. Mağazalara bombalar atıldı, sivil insanlar katledildi. Bütün bu tahriklere rağmen, Türkiye'de Kürtlere karşı en küçük hareket olmadı. Balkanlar'da olduğu gibi bir tek Kürt'ün evi işaretlenmedi. İşte Türkiye'nin en büyük gücü, en medeni yanı budur. Bir gün teröre karşı savaşı kazandığımızda, Türk milletinin bu güzel ve medeni tavrı çok önemli bir rol oynamış olacak. Bu tutumumuzla ne kadar iftihar etsek yeridir.
Bazı vicdansız kalemler, bu sözlerimi tam tersine çevirip, beni "Kürtlere karşı 6-7 Eylül kışkırtıcılığı yapmakla" suçladı.
Oysa tam aksini yapıyordum.Hayatımın sonuna kadar da bu kardeşliği savunmaya devam edeceğim.
* * *
Şimdi Hasan Cemal'in 3 Kasım günkü Milliyet'te aktardığı bir gözleme geliyorum.
Yer Kerkük'te Muhsin Restoran.
Türkmen Partisi'nin milletvekillerinden Ali Mehdi, bir ara Hasan Cemal'in kulağına eğilip şunu anlatıyor: "Bazı Türkmen evlerine dün gece kapının altından bazı bildiriler atılmış. Türkiye askeri operasyon yaparsa, buraya girerse, biz de size şunu yaparız, bunu yaparız diye."
Hasan Cemal, Kuzey Iraklı Kürtlerin Türkmenlere ne yapacağını anlatmıyor. Ama tahmin etmek zor değil. Şimdi bana "Kürt 6-7 Eylül'ü tahrikçiliği" iftirası atanlara soruyorum.
"Ey arkadaşlar, bu sözlerle ilgili edeceğiniz tek kelime yok mu?"
Biraz vicdanınız varsa söyleyin.Benim söylediklerim mi tahrikçilik, yoksa bunlar mı? Aradan tam üç gün geçti.Bir Allah'ın kulundan ses yok.Ama şimdi bakın görün, ben bunu yazdım ya, aynı kalemler yine atışa başlayacak.
* * *
Hürriyet'te bir karar aldık.
Anadolu'da, orada burada meydana gelen ufak olayları hiç yayınlamıyoruz.
Neden mi, tahrik ateşi yayılmasın diye. Ama bakıyorum, o köşesinden bu köşesinden sadece bana değil, Hürriyet'e yaylım ateşi açan bir gazete, bu olayları manşet yapmış.Söyleyin bunun hangisi tahrikçilik?Anadolu'daki genç bir insan bu manşeti acaba nasıl okuyor?
"Yahu çok kötü, bak biz bunu yapmayalım" biçiminde mi?
Öyleyse ne álá. Ama ya aksini düşünüyorsa?Var mı garantiniz?
* * *
Barzani, arkadaşımız Hasan Cemal'le görüşürken, cebinden bir káğıt çıkarmış.Üstünde benim adım yazılıymış. Sesi titriyormuş. Ben de elimi her cebime atışta, önüme, kalleşçe katledilen çocukların fotoğrafları geliyor. Benim de sesim titriyor.
O yüzden durmadan ona sesleniyorum:"Ya komşumuz ol, ya hedefimiz olursun..."
Hálá savaş kışkırtıcılığı yaptığımı düşünüyor musunuz? "Komşunuz olacağım" dersen, ortada ne savaş kalır, ne operasyon...
En barışsever yaklaşım bunu istemek değil mi?.. Hürriyet
06 Kasım 2007, Salı .
"Bazı Türkmen evlerine dün gece kapının altından bazı bildiriler atılmış. Türkiye askeri operasyon yaparsa, buraya girerse, biz de size şunu yaparız, bunu yaparız diye."
GEÇEN cumartesi günü Milliyet Gazetesi'nde Hasan Cemal'in, Irak'tan yazdığı gözlemleri okurken çok önemli bir ayrıntı dikkatimi çekti. Bu ayrıntının Türkiye'de kıyamet koparacağını sanıyordum. Hayret, hiçbir gazetenin köşesinden en küçük tepki gelmedi.
Düşündüm.
Acaba onu ben yazsaydım, aynı köşeler bu kadar sessiz kalır mıydı?
Hasan Cemal'in yaptığı gözlemi aktarmadan önce, bazı vicdansızların bana yaptığı eleştiriyi hatırlatayım.
Çünkü bu hatırlatma, Hasan Cemal'in aktardığı olayı daha iyi anlamanıza yardımcı olacak.
* * *
Ben yıllardan beri şunu yazıyorum: Türkiye, 20 yıldan fazladır PKK belasıyla mücadele ediyor. Binlerce insanı bu mücadelede hayatını kaybetti. Mağazalara bombalar atıldı, sivil insanlar katledildi. Bütün bu tahriklere rağmen, Türkiye'de Kürtlere karşı en küçük hareket olmadı. Balkanlar'da olduğu gibi bir tek Kürt'ün evi işaretlenmedi. İşte Türkiye'nin en büyük gücü, en medeni yanı budur. Bir gün teröre karşı savaşı kazandığımızda, Türk milletinin bu güzel ve medeni tavrı çok önemli bir rol oynamış olacak. Bu tutumumuzla ne kadar iftihar etsek yeridir.
Bazı vicdansız kalemler, bu sözlerimi tam tersine çevirip, beni "Kürtlere karşı 6-7 Eylül kışkırtıcılığı yapmakla" suçladı.
Oysa tam aksini yapıyordum.Hayatımın sonuna kadar da bu kardeşliği savunmaya devam edeceğim.
* * *
Şimdi Hasan Cemal'in 3 Kasım günkü Milliyet'te aktardığı bir gözleme geliyorum.
Yer Kerkük'te Muhsin Restoran.
Türkmen Partisi'nin milletvekillerinden Ali Mehdi, bir ara Hasan Cemal'in kulağına eğilip şunu anlatıyor: "Bazı Türkmen evlerine dün gece kapının altından bazı bildiriler atılmış. Türkiye askeri operasyon yaparsa, buraya girerse, biz de size şunu yaparız, bunu yaparız diye."
Hasan Cemal, Kuzey Iraklı Kürtlerin Türkmenlere ne yapacağını anlatmıyor. Ama tahmin etmek zor değil. Şimdi bana "Kürt 6-7 Eylül'ü tahrikçiliği" iftirası atanlara soruyorum.
"Ey arkadaşlar, bu sözlerle ilgili edeceğiniz tek kelime yok mu?"
Biraz vicdanınız varsa söyleyin.Benim söylediklerim mi tahrikçilik, yoksa bunlar mı? Aradan tam üç gün geçti.Bir Allah'ın kulundan ses yok.Ama şimdi bakın görün, ben bunu yazdım ya, aynı kalemler yine atışa başlayacak.
* * *
Hürriyet'te bir karar aldık.
Anadolu'da, orada burada meydana gelen ufak olayları hiç yayınlamıyoruz.
Neden mi, tahrik ateşi yayılmasın diye. Ama bakıyorum, o köşesinden bu köşesinden sadece bana değil, Hürriyet'e yaylım ateşi açan bir gazete, bu olayları manşet yapmış.Söyleyin bunun hangisi tahrikçilik?Anadolu'daki genç bir insan bu manşeti acaba nasıl okuyor?
"Yahu çok kötü, bak biz bunu yapmayalım" biçiminde mi?
Öyleyse ne álá. Ama ya aksini düşünüyorsa?Var mı garantiniz?
* * *
Barzani, arkadaşımız Hasan Cemal'le görüşürken, cebinden bir káğıt çıkarmış.Üstünde benim adım yazılıymış. Sesi titriyormuş. Ben de elimi her cebime atışta, önüme, kalleşçe katledilen çocukların fotoğrafları geliyor. Benim de sesim titriyor.
O yüzden durmadan ona sesleniyorum:"Ya komşumuz ol, ya hedefimiz olursun..."
Hálá savaş kışkırtıcılığı yaptığımı düşünüyor musunuz? "Komşunuz olacağım" dersen, ortada ne savaş kalır, ne operasyon...
En barışsever yaklaşım bunu istemek değil mi?.. Hürriyet
Juan Cole's article in 'The Nation'
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/cole
Combating Muslim Extremism
by JUAN COLE
[from the November 19, 2007 issue]
All the major Republican presidential candidates have bought into George W. Bush's rhetoric of a central struggle against Muslim extremism and have thus committed themselves to a generational, often self-generating war. By foregrounding this issue, they have ensured that it will be pivotal to the 2008 presidential race. The Democratic candidates have mostly been timid in critiquing Bush's "war on terror" or pointing out its dangers to the Republic, a failing that they must redress if they are to blunt their rivals' fearmongering.
Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani in his recent Foreign Affairs article complains that the United States has been on the "defensive" in the war on "radical Islamic fascism" and says with maddening vagueness that it must find ways of going "on the offensive." He promises that "this war will be long." Giuliani is being advised on such matters by Representative Peter King, who has complained that "unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country"; by Daniel Pipes, who has questioned the wisdom of allowing American Muslims to vote; and by Norman Podhoretz, author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Combining the word "Islam" with a European term like "fascism" is profoundly offensive; a subtext of anti-Muslim bigotry pervades Giuliani's campaign, a sop to the Christian and Zionist right.
John McCain depicts withdrawal from Iraq as "defeat," saying in Michigan on September 21 that it would "would strengthen Al Qaeda, empower Iran and other hostile powers in the Middle East, unleash a full-scale civil war in Iraq that could quite possibly provoke genocide there and destabilize the entire region.'' But continued occupation of Iraq, a major Muslim country, is just as likely to lead to the consequences McCain fears. Some front-runners, like Mitt Romney, argue for a big expansion in US military forces, without explaining how that would help with counterterrorism.
The Republican candidates have taken their cues from Bush and his Administration. They have continued to vastly exaggerate the threat from terror attacks (far more Americans have died for lack of healthcare or from hard drugs) and have demonized Muslims. India's Hindu-extremist RSS, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Lord's Resistance Army of Uganda and Colombia's FARC (a hard-drug smuggler) are seldom referred to by Republican politicians worried about terrorists, even though all these movements have been extremely violent and have threatened US interests.
Advocates of the "war on terror" fantasize about the Muslim world as a Soviet Union-type challenge to the United States. In fact, the dozens of countries with majority Muslim populations are mostly strong allies of the United States. One, Turkey, is a NATO ally, and six (Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan) are non-NATO allies. Only fourteen countries have this status, so Muslim states make up nearly half. The United States counts many other friends in the region, having significant frictions only with Sudan, Syria and Iran, and those are mixed pictures (Syria and Sudan helped against Al Qaeda, and Iran sought a strategic alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein in early 2003).
The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with America's future with their bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric. Muslims may constitute as much as a third of humankind by 2050, forming a vast market and a crucial labor pool. They will be sitting on the lion's share of the world's energy resources. The United States will increasingly have to compete with emerging rivals such as China and India for access to those Muslim resources and markets, and if its elites go on denigrating Muslims, America will be at a profound disadvantage during the next century.
Some Muslim extremist groups are indeed a threat, but they have not been dealt with appropriately. Bush has argued that terrorist groups have state backing, a principle that authorizes conventional war against their sponsor. In fact, asymmetrical terrorist groups can thrive in the interstices of states, and September 11 was solely an Al Qaeda operation. In his speech about the conquest of Iraq on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush announced, "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." It was a bald-faced lie.
Imperial occupations under the pretext of fighting terrorism suck up scarce resources and multiply terrorism, and so are self-defeating. They benefit only the military-industrial complex and political elites pursuing American hegemony. The backlash is growing. Sympathy bombings deriving from Muslim distress at brutal US military actions against Iraqis have been undertaken in Madrid, London and Glasgow, and a handful of formerly secular Iraqi Sunnis have suddenly expressed interest in Al Qaeda.
Worse, the hypocritical Bush Administration has ties to Muslim terror groups. The US military, beholden to Iraqi Kurds for support, permits several thousand fighters of the PKK terrorist organization, which bombs people in Turkey, to make safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Bush Administration has used against Tehran the expatriate Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq terror network, on which Saddam Hussein bestowed a base in Iraq. Democrats have mysteriously declined to denounce these unsavory alliances.
The Administration clearly is not very interested in doing the hard work of dealing effectively with small fringe terrorist networks. That is why Osama bin Laden is at large and the CIA unit tracking him disbanded. Successful counterterrorism involves good diplomacy and good police work. A case in point is the plot last summer by young Muslim men in London to bomb several airliners simultaneously using liquid explosives in innocent-looking bottles and detonators hidden in disposable cameras. Contrary to the allegations of skeptics, the techniques they envisaged were perfectly workable. The plotters were determined enough to make chilling martyrdom videos.
The plot was broken up in part because some of the conspirators were turned in to Scotland Yard by British Muslim acquaintances disturbed by their behavior. They had been alerted to the seriousness of radical views by the bombing of London's public transport system in July 2005. British police infiltrated an undercover operative into the group. The Pakistani security forces helped monitor a radical in that country, Rashid Rauf, who was in contact with the London group. That is, the foiling of this operation depended very largely on the good will of other Muslims. Such police and community awareness work has had proven results. In contrast, invading and occupying Muslim states risks reducing the fund of good will on which successful terror prevention depends.
Since resources are scarce, it is important that the magnitude of the threat not be exaggerated. Al Qaeda has at most a few thousand members. It holds no territory and its constituent organizations have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Algeria and other Muslim nations. Its command and control networks have been effectively disrupted. Most threats now come from amateur copycats. Al Qaeda has no prospect whatsoever of taking over any state in the Muslim world. It probably would be dead altogether if Bush had not poured gasoline on the flames with his large-scale invasions and occupations. For John McCain to proclaim that Al Qaeda is a bigger threat to US security than was the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at this country, is to enter Alice's Wonderland.
Very few Muslims are either violent or fundamentalist; most are traditionalist, mystic, modernist or secularist. Murder rates in the Muslim world are remarkably low. About 10 to 15 percent of Muslims throughout the world, or 130 million to 215 million, generally support a fundamentalist point of view, including the implementation of Islamic law as the law of the state. But they are not typically violent, and the United States has managed to ally with some of them, as with the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The fundamentalists are atypical. In a 2006 Pew poll, majorities in Egypt, Jordan and Indonesia were optimistic that democracy would work in their countries.
Because of its support for or acquiescence to Israel's creeping erasure of the Palestinian nation and for Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006, and because of Washington's own brutal war in Iraq, the United States is poorly positioned to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, some 75 percent of the population of Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country) had a favorable view of the United States. By the time Bush had invaded two Muslim countries, in 2003, America's favorability rating there had fallen to 15 percent. It recovered a bit after US magnanimity during the tsunami but then fell back to less than half the pre-Bush level. In Turkey, the favorability rating has fallen from 52 to 12 percent in the same period (all polling figures from the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Charitable Trust).
America does itself no favors by neglecting to promote knowledge of the United States, of its political philosophies and social and political system, in the Muslim world. The United States Information Service was gutted and folded into the State Department in the late 1990s. There are very few American Studies programs at Arabophone universities, and very little US political philosophy or history has been translated. Likewise, Congress funds the study of the Middle East at American Universities at shockingly low levels, given the need for Americans who understand the region and its languages.
Extremist Muslim networks have a specific history, almost entirely rooted in reaction to many decades of European colonial domination or in the Reagan jihad against the Soviet Union, during which the United States gave extremists $5 billion, pressured Saudi Arabia to do the same and trained the extremists at CIA facilities in Afghanistan. Much of their subsequent violence can properly be seen as a form of blowback--black operations that go bad and boomerang on the initiating country.
Marc Sageman, a CIA case officer in Afghanistan in the late 1980s who is now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, has estimated the number of extremists who could and would do violence to the United States at less than a thousand. There is a larger group that supports the creation of Taliban-style rigid theocracies in their countries and who are willing to deploy violence to achieve that goal. While their ideology may be unpleasant, they do not necessarily pose a security threat to the United States.
American politicians should cease implying that Muslim nations and individuals are different from, or somehow more dangerous than, any other group of human beings, a racist idea promoted by the Christian and Zionist right. They should acknowledge that most Muslim nations are US friends and allies. A wise American policy toward the small networks of Muslim extremists would reduce their recruitment pool by the quick establishment of a Palestinian state and by a large-scale military drawdown from Iraq, thus removing widespread and major grievances. An increase in visible humanitarian and development aid to Muslim countries has a demonstrable effect on improving the US image.
The reconstitution of the United States Information Service as an independent body would allow better public diplomacy. Promoting American studies in the Muslim world, in its major languages rather than just in English, would help remove widespread misconceptions about the United States among educated Muslim observers. Increasing federal funding for Middle East studies at home would better equip this country to deal with this key region. More adept diplomacy with the Muslim states, most of which are as afraid of terrorism as we are, could lead to further cooperation in the security field. Better police work and cooperation with the police of Middle Eastern states would be much more effective than launching invasions. It would also help if we stopped insulting Muslims by calling their religion "fascist."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/cole
Combating Muslim Extremism
by JUAN COLE
[from the November 19, 2007 issue]
All the major Republican presidential candidates have bought into George W. Bush's rhetoric of a central struggle against Muslim extremism and have thus committed themselves to a generational, often self-generating war. By foregrounding this issue, they have ensured that it will be pivotal to the 2008 presidential race. The Democratic candidates have mostly been timid in critiquing Bush's "war on terror" or pointing out its dangers to the Republic, a failing that they must redress if they are to blunt their rivals' fearmongering.
Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani in his recent Foreign Affairs article complains that the United States has been on the "defensive" in the war on "radical Islamic fascism" and says with maddening vagueness that it must find ways of going "on the offensive." He promises that "this war will be long." Giuliani is being advised on such matters by Representative Peter King, who has complained that "unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country"; by Daniel Pipes, who has questioned the wisdom of allowing American Muslims to vote; and by Norman Podhoretz, author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Combining the word "Islam" with a European term like "fascism" is profoundly offensive; a subtext of anti-Muslim bigotry pervades Giuliani's campaign, a sop to the Christian and Zionist right.
John McCain depicts withdrawal from Iraq as "defeat," saying in Michigan on September 21 that it would "would strengthen Al Qaeda, empower Iran and other hostile powers in the Middle East, unleash a full-scale civil war in Iraq that could quite possibly provoke genocide there and destabilize the entire region.'' But continued occupation of Iraq, a major Muslim country, is just as likely to lead to the consequences McCain fears. Some front-runners, like Mitt Romney, argue for a big expansion in US military forces, without explaining how that would help with counterterrorism.
The Republican candidates have taken their cues from Bush and his Administration. They have continued to vastly exaggerate the threat from terror attacks (far more Americans have died for lack of healthcare or from hard drugs) and have demonized Muslims. India's Hindu-extremist RSS, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Lord's Resistance Army of Uganda and Colombia's FARC (a hard-drug smuggler) are seldom referred to by Republican politicians worried about terrorists, even though all these movements have been extremely violent and have threatened US interests.
Advocates of the "war on terror" fantasize about the Muslim world as a Soviet Union-type challenge to the United States. In fact, the dozens of countries with majority Muslim populations are mostly strong allies of the United States. One, Turkey, is a NATO ally, and six (Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan) are non-NATO allies. Only fourteen countries have this status, so Muslim states make up nearly half. The United States counts many other friends in the region, having significant frictions only with Sudan, Syria and Iran, and those are mixed pictures (Syria and Sudan helped against Al Qaeda, and Iran sought a strategic alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein in early 2003).
The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with America's future with their bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric. Muslims may constitute as much as a third of humankind by 2050, forming a vast market and a crucial labor pool. They will be sitting on the lion's share of the world's energy resources. The United States will increasingly have to compete with emerging rivals such as China and India for access to those Muslim resources and markets, and if its elites go on denigrating Muslims, America will be at a profound disadvantage during the next century.
Some Muslim extremist groups are indeed a threat, but they have not been dealt with appropriately. Bush has argued that terrorist groups have state backing, a principle that authorizes conventional war against their sponsor. In fact, asymmetrical terrorist groups can thrive in the interstices of states, and September 11 was solely an Al Qaeda operation. In his speech about the conquest of Iraq on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, George W. Bush announced, "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." It was a bald-faced lie.
Imperial occupations under the pretext of fighting terrorism suck up scarce resources and multiply terrorism, and so are self-defeating. They benefit only the military-industrial complex and political elites pursuing American hegemony. The backlash is growing. Sympathy bombings deriving from Muslim distress at brutal US military actions against Iraqis have been undertaken in Madrid, London and Glasgow, and a handful of formerly secular Iraqi Sunnis have suddenly expressed interest in Al Qaeda.
Worse, the hypocritical Bush Administration has ties to Muslim terror groups. The US military, beholden to Iraqi Kurds for support, permits several thousand fighters of the PKK terrorist organization, which bombs people in Turkey, to make safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Bush Administration has used against Tehran the expatriate Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq terror network, on which Saddam Hussein bestowed a base in Iraq. Democrats have mysteriously declined to denounce these unsavory alliances.
The Administration clearly is not very interested in doing the hard work of dealing effectively with small fringe terrorist networks. That is why Osama bin Laden is at large and the CIA unit tracking him disbanded. Successful counterterrorism involves good diplomacy and good police work. A case in point is the plot last summer by young Muslim men in London to bomb several airliners simultaneously using liquid explosives in innocent-looking bottles and detonators hidden in disposable cameras. Contrary to the allegations of skeptics, the techniques they envisaged were perfectly workable. The plotters were determined enough to make chilling martyrdom videos.
The plot was broken up in part because some of the conspirators were turned in to Scotland Yard by British Muslim acquaintances disturbed by their behavior. They had been alerted to the seriousness of radical views by the bombing of London's public transport system in July 2005. British police infiltrated an undercover operative into the group. The Pakistani security forces helped monitor a radical in that country, Rashid Rauf, who was in contact with the London group. That is, the foiling of this operation depended very largely on the good will of other Muslims. Such police and community awareness work has had proven results. In contrast, invading and occupying Muslim states risks reducing the fund of good will on which successful terror prevention depends.
Since resources are scarce, it is important that the magnitude of the threat not be exaggerated. Al Qaeda has at most a few thousand members. It holds no territory and its constituent organizations have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Algeria and other Muslim nations. Its command and control networks have been effectively disrupted. Most threats now come from amateur copycats. Al Qaeda has no prospect whatsoever of taking over any state in the Muslim world. It probably would be dead altogether if Bush had not poured gasoline on the flames with his large-scale invasions and occupations. For John McCain to proclaim that Al Qaeda is a bigger threat to US security than was the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at this country, is to enter Alice's Wonderland.
Very few Muslims are either violent or fundamentalist; most are traditionalist, mystic, modernist or secularist. Murder rates in the Muslim world are remarkably low. About 10 to 15 percent of Muslims throughout the world, or 130 million to 215 million, generally support a fundamentalist point of view, including the implementation of Islamic law as the law of the state. But they are not typically violent, and the United States has managed to ally with some of them, as with the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The fundamentalists are atypical. In a 2006 Pew poll, majorities in Egypt, Jordan and Indonesia were optimistic that democracy would work in their countries.
Because of its support for or acquiescence to Israel's creeping erasure of the Palestinian nation and for Israel's attack on Lebanon in 2006, and because of Washington's own brutal war in Iraq, the United States is poorly positioned to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, some 75 percent of the population of Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country) had a favorable view of the United States. By the time Bush had invaded two Muslim countries, in 2003, America's favorability rating there had fallen to 15 percent. It recovered a bit after US magnanimity during the tsunami but then fell back to less than half the pre-Bush level. In Turkey, the favorability rating has fallen from 52 to 12 percent in the same period (all polling figures from the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Charitable Trust).
America does itself no favors by neglecting to promote knowledge of the United States, of its political philosophies and social and political system, in the Muslim world. The United States Information Service was gutted and folded into the State Department in the late 1990s. There are very few American Studies programs at Arabophone universities, and very little US political philosophy or history has been translated. Likewise, Congress funds the study of the Middle East at American Universities at shockingly low levels, given the need for Americans who understand the region and its languages.
Extremist Muslim networks have a specific history, almost entirely rooted in reaction to many decades of European colonial domination or in the Reagan jihad against the Soviet Union, during which the United States gave extremists $5 billion, pressured Saudi Arabia to do the same and trained the extremists at CIA facilities in Afghanistan. Much of their subsequent violence can properly be seen as a form of blowback--black operations that go bad and boomerang on the initiating country.
Marc Sageman, a CIA case officer in Afghanistan in the late 1980s who is now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, has estimated the number of extremists who could and would do violence to the United States at less than a thousand. There is a larger group that supports the creation of Taliban-style rigid theocracies in their countries and who are willing to deploy violence to achieve that goal. While their ideology may be unpleasant, they do not necessarily pose a security threat to the United States.
American politicians should cease implying that Muslim nations and individuals are different from, or somehow more dangerous than, any other group of human beings, a racist idea promoted by the Christian and Zionist right. They should acknowledge that most Muslim nations are US friends and allies. A wise American policy toward the small networks of Muslim extremists would reduce their recruitment pool by the quick establishment of a Palestinian state and by a large-scale military drawdown from Iraq, thus removing widespread and major grievances. An increase in visible humanitarian and development aid to Muslim countries has a demonstrable effect on improving the US image.
The reconstitution of the United States Information Service as an independent body would allow better public diplomacy. Promoting American studies in the Muslim world, in its major languages rather than just in English, would help remove widespread misconceptions about the United States among educated Muslim observers. Increasing federal funding for Middle East studies at home would better equip this country to deal with this key region. More adept diplomacy with the Muslim states, most of which are as afraid of terrorism as we are, could lead to further cooperation in the security field. Better police work and cooperation with the police of Middle Eastern states would be much more effective than launching invasions. It would also help if we stopped insulting Muslims by calling their religion "fascist."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/cole
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