UPDATED:  JUL 23, 2008 

“YOU KNOW ME AL: THE IRAQ WAR –
             SO WHAT WAS IT ABOUT, ANYWAY?” PART I

                                                            A Rerun

   On March 16, 2004 we ran my column no. 4 on The Political Junkies.net.  It was my first on the subject of the Georgite War on Iraq, I surely did not expect at the time that I would be writing on the same subject four-plus years hence, with no end in sight.  Last week I wrote about the centrality of the War on Iraq to the Presidential Campaign.  This week I am beginning what will be an occasional re-visit to columns that I have written on the War, over time.  Here I am presenting the first part of what has become a two-parter from that very column of mine on the subject, way back then.  For that column I did adopt a literary maneuver, putting some of my words into the mouth of a “friend” with the initials A.L.  With apologies to the late, great sports writer Ring Lardner, I entitled the column “You Know Me, Al.”   “Al’s thoughts” were actually written by me, in May, 2003.  So the column that you see here is all my writing, most of it dating back about a year before I started writing for TPJ.  And now, on to the subject at hand, going back to the time of the invasion and the run-up to it. 

   Widespread looting in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities.  The destruction of the museum of antiquities in Baghdad including the removal of such items as a tablet on which was inscribed the Code of Hammurabi. I believe that it was the first known set of rules of law. (How ironic that its disappearance is the result of the combined work of two men for whom the rule of law is viewed only as an impediment to their continued rule, Saddam Hussein and George Bush.) This destruction will go down in history as of the same order as the burning of the library at Alexandria, c. 400 CE.  [Well perhaps not that apocalyptic; there were some recoveries since the time of the looting, but I don’t know if the Tablet was among them.] The US, even six days later, was doing little to control the situation (although by that time it was doing more than the absolute nothing it did for the first four days or so).  As for the museum specifically and how it was allowed to fall to the mob, I have heard two stories, both on NPR.  One is that the museum directors, anticipating trouble, asked the US forces to guard the place, and were refused.  The other variant is that the US forces agreed to do so and then did not.

   Among the criticisms of the US/UK invasion, which resulted in the ongoing incapacity and partial destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, esp. electricity supply, pure water supply, sanitary sewage disposal, health services, fire-fighting, garbage collection, etc., has been "how could the invaders not plan for this predictable outcome?"  [Amazing, isn’t it, that most of the disruption of basic services to the people of Iraq has still not been effectively dealt with, except in limited areas, and in some places, like Falluja, it’s much worse.]  Thinking it over at the time, I think that they did plan for it, that in fact things are going pretty much according to plan, and that this plan for the humbling of Iraq and its inhabitants is part of a larger US plan (to which the UK may or may not have been privy) that has been going extremely well, from its perspective.  To wit.

    Let us assume that the primary reason for the invasion is oil and its control by the US (with a few drops here and there allowed to the UK).  An article by Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli, Senior Analyst for the Middle East Economics Study Program of the Middle East Media Research Institute of Washington, DC (www.memri.org, a generally pro-Israeli think tank) projects how US control of Iraqi oil could eventually be used, among other things, to destroy OPEC, or at least Saudi domination of it (No. 131, April 10, 2003).  An article by Bill Vann of the World Socialist Website (www.wsws.org, April 8, 2003) cites an article by Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger in The National Interest magazine that projects the privatization of Iraqi oil to the major Western (mainly US) oil companies.  (And now, lo and behold in 2008, comes the news of those first contracts, no-bid mind you, for the major US oil companies, with US “advisors” doing the “negotiating” for the Iraqi “government.)

   I, and many other observers, had thought that the US simply wanted a friendly government in Iraq, in control of its oil, but partial to US interests.  But now, two of the major planners of the whole project tell us that they want to go beyond that to a situation that has not existed since the Saudis nationalized ARAMCO in the mid-70s: actual US oil company ownership of Middle Eastern oil reserves, not just control over marketing and distribution.  Profits are even higher if you own the stuff in addition to selling it at the retail end.  And you are subject to the winds of no one else's fortunes. 

   [When I wrote the column in March, 2004, using the text above that I had originally written in 2003, I added the following note: For the past six months or so, published plans for the “privatization” of the Iraqi economy (read takeover by foreign --- read US with a few drops for the UK --- capital) have specifically excluded the oil industry.  I asked a knowledgeable friend about this and he said, “Just watch, in the dark of one of those desert nights, even though they couldn’t find any WMD, they’ll find a way around that one.”]

   We know that the Iraq war planning at the Pentagon has been going on for at least eight years and that, for example, Marines have training in urban warfare at a specially constructed "city" of the Middle Eastern type in the New Mexico desert for as many (Pentagon generals have said this on the air).  We know that the war was underway, through the use of Special Forces, for months (that is throughout the whole debate in the UN) before the main invasion.  We know that the Powell speech of Feb. 5 to the Security Council about the "evidence" of WMD was obviously false, as least to some extent if not in toto. 

   If the US knew that Saddam had WMD, and further if it knew where they were to the extent that it could demand that the UN act immediately: a) why did it not simply provide this intelligence to Blix and if it were not acted upon immediately then demand that the inspection process be changed to detection, with direct US participation, or b) why did it not know during the invasion to go directly to the WMD storage sites that it supposedly knew about?  Why and why not?  Because what the US knew, if it knew anything at all, was that either there were indeed no WMD at all, or that if there were, they existed in a severely degraded condition.  

   So why did Powell lie?  To get the Security Council to approve the "second resolution" (which would have specifically authorized the invasion of Iraq, under UN auspices and sponsorship, which the “first resolution” did not)?  I think not.  I think that the strategy was exactly the opposite. Before we go on to a consideration of what the strategy is, whether or not (UK then-Prime Minister) Tony Blair is privy to it is interesting, but immaterial, except for British politics of course.  Do note, however, that the British forces in the "coalition" have been sequestered in the South, nowhere near Baghdad.  They are near the southern oil fields, but plenty of US forces are too, and the Brits were bogged down for quite some time in subduing Basra, a large city.  They are certainly going to have no say in the future national military governance of Iraq.

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To be continued next week with Part II of this column, dealing in further detail about exactly what really happened at the UN in February, 2003, just before the US/UK invasion.

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