Ten lessons from Iraqs past that we might have considered.

They say that hind sight is 20/20. President Bush said mistakes were made in planning for the Iraq invasion. As you will see there are a lot of similarities from Iraqs past history. Might it have been helpful to learn some of the history of the Nation that we were invading?

Here are ten lessons that I picked up from Iraq history from the end of WWI.

1. We will view ourselves as liberators.
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. When the British invaded Iraq in 1919 they also called them selves liberators:

When the British General Sir Stanley Maude invaded Iraq in 1917 during the First World War and initiated the process of the colonization of that country, he too claimed that 'our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators'.

2.We will talk up `liberation from tyranny : Bush "liberation of Iraq from the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein" and Talk up helping set up new government : Bush : "I think its necessary work to help them [Iraqi people] establish a functioning democracy."

As if to ensure that their message to the people of Iraq was clearly understood, in November 1918 the British (together with the French) issued a declaration (called the Anglo-French Declaration) which purported to set out their vision for the future of Iraqi and other Arab peoples formerly ruled by Ottoman Turkey. Their goal, they proclaimed, was 'the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks, and the setting up of national governments and administrations that shall derive their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous population'.

3.Put in your own government, that eventually you can say the Iraqis chose Decisions on the government's composition appear to be entirely in US hands,particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.(Gaurdian))

These pious pronouncements in 1918 about 'liberation' and the right of peoples to self-determination were, of course, public declarations. In private discussions, British government Ministers and advisers expressed very different views about the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination. Only a month before the Anglo-French Declaration was proclaimed (i.e. October 1918), as British troops reached the outskirts of Mosul, at a meeting of the Eastern Committee of the British War cabinet, some of the key British officials who were to shape British policy in the Middle East revealed what they really thought about 'self-determination'.

Among those who attended this meeting were the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour (of Balfour Declaration fame), Lord Robert Cecil, Assistant Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and T E Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia').

4.Believe that it is unwise to leave important decisions to the Iraqi people, who are barbarous.

At the meeting Mr Balfour expressed the view that 'it would be unwise to become pedantic about self-determination because it was inapplicable to 'wholly barbarous, undeveloped and unorganised black tribes'; to which Lord Robert Cecil added the bewildering warning that while self-determination should be 'an indication ... we should not attempt to leave it to the populations to say, because you would have the most awful rows if you did that ...' Lawrence at any rate had an understandable point of view: 'Self-determination has been a good deal talked about. I think it is a foolish idea in many ways."1



5.The Kurds will want their own state. Don't let them have it, but try to keep them happy

The Kurds of Iraq unfortunately took the Anglo-French Declaration at its face value and welcomed the British troops as liberators in the autumn of 1918. Their leader, Sheikh Mahmud al-Barzani, took the Declaration so seriously that it is alleged that he kept a copy of the Anglo-French pledge in an amulet as a talisman. Within six months of the Declaration, he had proceeded to exercise the promised right of 'setting up of national governments and administrations' deriving 'from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous population', by establishing a Kurdish state in the north.

In May 1919, however, Britain sent her troops to crush the fledgling Kurdish state. The Kurds were obviously to be 'liberated' from certain aspirations which the British could not entertain! The Kurds resisted fiercely and although the revolt was put down ruthlessly, British rule in Iraq continued to be punctuated by a series of Kurdish revolts.

The British attitude (or for that matter, Western attitude as a whole) to the Kurdish question was to remain throughout, an exercise in cynicism, a matter of pure expediency. As one American historian explained, the British had originally toyed with the idea of a British-protected Kurdish state because 'the support of Kurdish aspirations could be used as a lever of pressure on recalcitrant Kemalist Turkey, on Iran and especially on Iraq, in which the percentage of Kurds was higher than in any other country'. Subsequently, however, they abandoned this because it was too explosive. However, as the same historian noted, 'This did not mean that friendship with the Kurds was thrown overboard. On the contrary, it continued to be cultivated, especially on the local level, by various British agents, both in Iraq and in Iran. This served [among other purposes] ... to keep the Kurdish question as a tactical reserve in case of difficulties with Baghdad or Teheran.'2 (emphasis added)

6.Whatch out for Shi ites they will think the occupation is a disgrace to Arab honor and a deep humiliation inflicted on a proud people

The 1920 Shi'ite Revolt

But while Kurdish resistance was almost a permanent feature of British rule in Iraq, it was the Shi'ites who led what was perhaps the first national revolt against British rule. The spark that triggered the revolt was the news from the San Remo Conference that despite the earlier British and Allied pledges of liberation and self-determination for Iraq, the country was to be a mandated territory of the British ('mandated territory' was a euphemism for a colony). What is astonishing about the 1920 revolt, centered in Najaf, was the role of the Shi'ite ulama in not only mobilizing the Iraqi masses, but in forging a united front with the Sunnis in opposition to British colonialism. 'For the first time in many centuries, Shi'ites joined politically with Sunnis and townsmen from Baghdad and tribesmen from the Euphrates made common cause. Unprecedented joint Shi'ite-Sunni celebrations, ostensibly religious but in reality political, were held in all the Shi'ite and Sunni mosques in turn: special maulids, Sunni ceremonial observances in honour of the Prophet's birthday, were on occasions followed by ta'ziyahs, Shi'ite lamentations for the martyred Husain, the proceedings culminating in patriotic oratory and poetic thundering against the English.'3

In order to unite the two communities, the agitation was also focused on the disgrace to Arab honour and the deep humiliation inflicted on a proud people by the imposition of colonial rule - a point encapsulated by the following lines from a poem by a Sunni poet:

'O you the people of Iraq, you are not orphans to seek guardianship [a mandate] for Iraq. You shall no longer enjoy the water of the Tigris if you are content with humiliation and oppression.'4

7.When joined by a common cause the people of the separate religious factions will turn against the so called liberators.

The revolt began in May when two British soldiers were killed, and by July the whole country was up in arms against the invaders. Even with the 130,000 troops at their command in Iraq, the British found it impossible to put the revolt down. Reinforcements had to be rushed in and poison gas ('weapon of mass destruction') was requested to quell the revolt. When the British finally managed to crush the revolt in October, they had suffered some 2,500 casualties.

The revolt was to leave a permanent imprint on the emerging polity. And in view of current attempts by the Western media to portray the latest invasion of Iraq as the liberation of the Shi'ites long suppressed by a Sunni-dominated state, it is essential to underscore British culpability in designing this polity. It was the British, in their drive to undermine the power of the Shi'ite majority, who fashioned and designed the modern Iraqi state with the entrenched Sunni minority at its helm. 'Later generations of Iraq [Sunni] politicians,' wrote a British official in summarising the revolt, 'may appreciate the gratitude they owe the British for saving them from [Shi'ite] Najaf.'5

The process of fashioning this state began after the revolt when the British imported Faisal Hussein, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca - a man who had never previously set foot on Iraqi soil - and arranged for a 'spontaneous movement' for him to become the King of Iraq. After some deft footwork, they had him elected as the ruler by a majority of 96.8% - a feat equalled only by Saddam Hussein several decades later. This monarch and his hangers-on, together with a small urban group and powerful tribal leaders from the countryside, constituted the foundation of what was to become an overwhelmingly Sunni-dominated state.

But ultimate power lay in the hands of British advisers whose 'advice' had to be accepted at any cost; and even after Iraq became nominally independent in 1932, it was the British Embassy which called the shots. The crucial role of British military power in propping up this structure was graphically explained by a British Cabinet Minister in 1925 when he remarked that: 'If the Writ of King Faisal runs effectively throughout the Kingdom, it is entirely due to British aeroplanes. If the aeroplanes were removed tomorrow, the whole structure would immediately fall to pieces.'6

8. Watch out for Iran

It was this colonial regime that undertook after the 1920 revolt the measures necessary to undermine the power of the Shi'ite religious establishment. Since the majority of the Shi'ite mujtahids were of Iranian origin, immigration laws were amended to provide for the deportation of foreigners who were engaged in 'anti-government' activities. This power was ruthlessly exercised to break the power of the Shi'ite clergy opposed to British rule. These measures also had the effect of severing the links between Iraqi and Iranian Shi'ites. Moves were also taken to restrict and curb the incomes of Shi'ite clergy from traditional sources such as charities and pilgrimages. Shi'ite educational institutions lost their independence and were brought under state control. As a result of these measures, power slowly gravitated away from the Shi'ite cities of Najaf and Karbala to Baghdad. By 1925, Shi'ite clerics rarely intervened in politics.

9. Watch out for unexpected outcomes coming from out of the blue

The 1958 Revolution

In July 1958 Brigadier Abd al-Karim al-Qasim and the Free Officers movement led an army revolt which developed into a revolution that swept aside the monarchy and the colonial political order.

Qasim had no political party of his own and it was the powerful Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) which provided him with a mass political base. Founded in 1934, the party had an impressive record of anti-colonial resistance and commanded widespread respect because of the tenacity with which it had pursued its struggle. In the 1940s and 1950s, its membership and support had expanded dramatically, particularly within the Shi'ite community. The tilt towards the Communist Party by the Shi'ite community has been explained as the response of a politically disenfranchised community from which 'the poorest of the poor' were drawn. In the 1960s the drift of Shi'ite youth towards the party was so alarming that the traditional Shi'ite ulama even issued a fatwa against those supporting or joining the party.

But despite this development, the real political struggle was not between the secular Communists and the religious Shi'ite opposition, but between the two main secular forces, the Communists and the Ba'athists - a struggle which also reflected the Sunni-Shi'ite divide as the Ba'ath Party was overwhelmingly a Sunni-dominated party. The latter also turned against Qasim after initially backing him because of his lukewarm response to pan-Arabism. After a failed assassination attempt in 1959 against Qasim (in which Saddam Hussein participated), most of the Ba'athist leaders fled the country. As a result the Communists emerged even stronger.

The growing strength and influence of the Communists however set alarm bells ringing in Washington. In 1959, the then CIA director, Allen Dulles, had already described Iraq as 'one of the most dangerous places on earth'. Fear of the growing influence and power of the Communists led the CIA to establish contacts with the exiled Ba'ath leaders to work out plans for the overthrow of Qasim. 'The plans to overthrow the Iraqi leader, led by William Lakeland who was stationed at the Baghdad embassy as an attache, represented one of the most elaborate CIA operations in the history of the Middle East.'7

Coup

On 8 February 1963, a coalition of Ba'athist and independent officers overthrew the Qasim regime. Ba'ath Party supporters took to the streets and their principal targets were the Communists. About 1,500 Communists died in street fighting nationwide and hundreds of others, including seven of the Party's 19 central committee members, were executed.

10.Remember the CIA plays by it's own rules

An interesting point about the CIA role in this coup was that, as in Indonesia in 1965, the Agency was instrumental in supplying the names of the Communists to be eliminated. This has been confirmed by different sources. For example, Qasim's foreign minister later told two analysts that 'the Iraqi Foreign Ministry had information of complicity between the Ba'ath and the CIA. In many cases the CIA supplied the Ba'ath with the names of individual communists, some of whom were taken from their homes and murdered.' King Hussein told a similar story to the Egyptian journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal:

'I know for a fact that what happened in Iraq on 8 February was supported by American intelligence ... Many meetings were held between the Ba'ath Party and American intelligence - the most critical ones in Kuwait. Did you know that on 8 February, the day of the coup in Baghdad, there was a secret radio broadcast directed toward Iraq that relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of Communists there so that they could be seized and executed.'

Jamal Atasi, a member of the Syrian cabinet, who confronted the Iraqi Ba'ath exiles when he learnt about their secret meetings with the CIA, realised the significance of this development:

This was 'a push from the West and in particular from the United States for the Ba'ath to seize power and monopolise it and push away all the other elements and forces [i.e., both the Communists and the Nasserists]'.8

Revival of Shi'ite Opposition

This decimation of the ICP in 1963, coupled with continued persecution of Communists during the ascendancy of Saddam Hussein from 1968 onward, left a political vacuum which enabled the Shi'ite opposition to revive their strength. To be sure, the Shi'ite revival had already begun in the 1960s but there cannot be any doubt that the weakening of the Communist Party was a major factor in the renewed expansion of Shi'ite political influence. As the great scholar on Iraq, the late Hanna Batatu, explained in respect of the Shi'ite stronghold of Al-Thaurah in Baghdad:

' ... the deep wound inflicted upon the Communists in 1963, the course of compromise with the Ba'ath regime that their leadership steered from 1973 to 1978, and the departure into exile in 1979 of no fewer than three thousand of the Communist Party's hardened members left the disadvantaged of the capital with no organised means of protest and produced a void in the underground which the Da'wah and Mujahidin hastened to fill.'9

To be sure, there was no lack of setbacks for the Shi'ite opposition in the 1980s. The execution in 1980 of Mohammed Baqer al-Sadr, probably the most important Shi'ite opposition figure in modern Iraq, the ruthless repression coupled with the successful attempts by Saddam to woo and co-opt some of the Shi'ite establishment leaders clearly weakened the Shi'ite opposition. Moreover, the Shi'ite opposition was plagued by disunity and factionalism - a feature that has continued till today.

Despite all this, it has been clear to any serious observer that if the Ba'ath regime which had monopolised control over all aspects of social life fell, the group best positioned to emerge from the rubble would be the Shi'ite opposition with its clergy and institutions. In his essay written in 1985-86 on Shi'ite organisations in Iraq, Hanna Batatu posed the question of the future prospects of Iraq's Shi'ite movement. His answer was almost prophetic. Despite the setbacks of the 1980s 'Shi'ite themes and symbols remain powerful, and the Shi'ite opposition is poised to benefit if the regime of Saddam Hussein falters politically or suffers a serious military defeat.'10

Overthrowing Sada mm is one thing - Taking the entire Ba'ath party out of power and disbandment of their military will lead to the cycle of fighting between factions, followed by a unified attack against the occupiers, loss of many `coalition force soldier's lives, eventual retreat and loss of any gains and a new anti western government.


In planning its invasion of Iraq, the US seems to have been oblivious to this factor; having unraveled Saddam's political order, it has now been forced to face this bitter reality. But it is not only the Shi'ite opposition that the US has now to confront. As in the 1920s, a growing pervasive unity that transcends the Sunni/Shi'ite divide is now evident. A mass movement is developing which is animated by a single demand: the US invaders must go!

In the face of this growing opposition, it is astonishing that the US can still harbour illusions that it can somehow stitch together a neo-colonial structure like the British did in 1921 and prop it up by force of arms.

But the British were to discover, somewhat painfully, that there is a limit to what can be done to prop up such structures. They made that shock discovery on 14 July 1958 when the whole political edifice that they had erected came tumbling down, and the British Ambassador had to flee for his life when the long-suppressed Iraqi people took to the streets of Baghdad. Hanna Batatu describes this moment of truth before the curtain finally came down on Britain's imperial enterprise in Iraq:

'Before very long the capital overflowed with people - shargawiyyas [those dwelling in mud-huts] and others - many of them in a fighting mood and united by a single passion: 'Death to the traitors and agents of imperialism!' It was like a tide coming in, and at first engulfed and with a vengeance Nuri's house [Nuri was the Prime Minister under the monarchy] and the royal palace, but soon extended to the British consulate and embassy and other places, and became so terrible and overwhelming in its sweep that the military revolutionaries, ill at ease, declared a curfew and later, in the afternoon, martial law. When in the end, after nightfall, the crowds ebbed back, the statue of Faisal, the symbol of the monarchy, lay shattered, and the figure of General Maude, the conqueror of Baghdad, rested in the dust outside the burning old British Chancellery.'11

History in this post by *T Rajamoorthy, a senior lawyer of the Malaysian Bar, is one of the Editors of Third World Resurgence.

Endnotes

1. Phillip Knightley and Colin Simpson (1969), The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, London: Nelson, p. 112.
2. George Lenczowski (1962), The Middle East in World Affairs, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, p. 266.
3. Hanna Batatu (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p.23.
4. Yitzhak Nakash (1994), The Shi'is of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 69.
5. Ibid., p. 72.
6. Peter Sluglett (1988), 'Iraq', in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 341.
7. Said K. Aburish (2001), Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, London: Bloomsbury, p. 55.
8. Malik Mufti (1996), Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, p. 144.
9. Hanna Batatu (1986), 'Shi'i Organizations in Iraq: Al-Da'wah al-Islamiyah and al-Mujahidin', in Juan RI Cole and Nikki R Keddie (eds.), Shi'ism and Social Protest, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 184.
10. Ibid., p. 200.
11. Hanna Batatu (1978), op.cit., pp.804-5

RECOMENDED READ:

The hubris of predictions — and our perpetual surprise when the not-predicted happens — are themes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s engaging new book, “The Black Swan.” It concerns the occurrence of the improbable, the power of rare events and the author’s lament that “in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it.” We expect all swans to be white and are shocked when a black swan swims by.

Iraq War: Three new books shed light in a historical perspective.

AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM My Years at the C.I.A. By George Tenet
with Bill Harlow Illustrated. 549 pages. HarperCollins. $30.

Former CIA director tries to clear his embattled reputation concerning his role in the Bush White House decision to go to war in Iraq: "Mr. Tenet says he doubts that W.M.D.’s were the principal cause of the United States’ decision to go to war in Iraq in the first place, that it was just “the public face that was put on it.” The real reason, he suggests, stemmed from “the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price.”

Mr. Tenet notes that his “slam dunk” remarks came “10 months after the president saw the first workable war plan for Iraq,” and “two weeks after the Pentagon had issued the first military deployment order sending U.S. troops to the region.” He points out that many senior Bush administration officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq long before 9/11, and that Mr. Cheney asked Bill Clinton’s then-departing secretary of defense, William Cohen, before the 2001 inauguration to give the incoming president a comprehensive briefing on Iraq and detail possible future actions.

The New York Times review claims he stonewalls on certain issues, such as treatment of detainees, and that he tries to give positive lip service to Bush and Chaney while serving a subtext of these two as arrogant who believe what they wanted despite intelligence. He does attack Condolica Rice, Perl and others with much less reserve.

Interestingly he is not optimistic about the Administartions `surge plan' sectarian violence, he argues, has “taken on a life of its own,” and he sees American forces becoming increasingly “irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

This book has already stirred up quite a bit of interest- though it will be officially released tomorrow.




The Times also reviews Bill Bradely's new book THE NEW AMERICAN STORY (364 pages. Random House. $25.95.) under an article with the diminutive title of: From the Sidelines, a View of the Middle as the Loser.

"Bill Bradley, the former United States senator from New Jersey and former presidential candidate, got out of politics in 2000 after losing the Democratic nomination to Al Gore, and so wrote this book, he says, from “outside the political pressure cooker,” with “no ax to grind and no political ambition to accomplish.”

Mr Bradley gives his assessment of not only the Bush administrations "is handling of the Iraq war — which the former senator bluntly calls an “oil war” — and for leading the country “down a dangerous path toward empire." He claims that “The case can be made that George Bush has destroyed the Republican Party by his profligacy, his arrogance, his stubborn machismo, and his absolute conviction that whatever he does is right.”.

Bradley doesn't pull punches with the Democrats- calling Clinton's administration a lost opportunity, and blames Hillary Clinton for the failed Health care initiative.

Maybe the `loser' position puts a chip on his shoulder, but Bradley really wants to make some suggestion to try to put the US back on a progressive track, including "implementing a gasoline tax of $1 a gallon to providing up to $12,000 in college tuition money for high school students in the top third of their graduating classes."

According to the Times review his main argument is that the focus of those in power is most often on the issues that matter to a few "peripheral issues"- like abortion, gay rightes, medical marijuana- then on issues that matter to a larger majority- like social security for example.

It's hard to speculate how this book will fare with so many other `election' time book coming out, and because of it's overt / hos overt - Democrat bias. But diatribes against Bush I think will be selling well as frustration over his failed Presidency grows.

The third book of interest this week is not about Bush or Iraq, but the Times reviewer writes about Robert Dallek's new book Nixon & Kissinger, "One cannot help regarding his account of the Nixon White House and its handling of the Vietnam War as a kind of parable about the presidency of George W. Bush and its determination to stay the course in Iraq.



NIXON AND KISSINGER: Partners in Power By Robert Dallek
Illustrated. 740 pages. HarperCollins. $32.50.

Dallek works at combining insights from other books about these notorious leaders and intertwines them "shrewdly" with "recently declassified archives, including transcripts of Mr. Kissinger’s phone calls and the papers of Alexander M. Haig Jr., Mr. Kissinger’s deputy on the National Security Council and later Nixon’s chief of staff."

The correlations between Nixon and Kisseneger with Bush and his cronies has it's obvious differences, as Nixon and Kissenger did not get along well:" President Nixon would ask his aide John Ehrlichman to talk to Mr. Kissinger about getting therapy, while Mr. Kissinger would frequently refer to his boss as “that madman,” “our drunken friend” and “the meatball mind." Bush doesn't seem to be working with anyone who has anything but total loyalty to him, nor anyone with quite the intelligent ambition as Kissinger (Cheney?).

With history to aid in the analysis of the Nixon regime it is easier to make judgments then it is to make good historic judgements about Bush's missteps currentlly. But to use this book for it's insightful analysis's leaves one with a greater understanding of arrogance and paranoia that our current administration exhibits.

Neocon Eliot Cohen Chosen as State Department Counselor

Rice Picks Neocon Champion of Iraq War as Counselor

In a move that has surprised many foreign policy analysts here, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has appointed a prominent neoconservative hawk and leading champion of the Iraq war to the post of State Department Counselor.

Counselor of the department

The Counselor of the Department, is a principal officer who serves the Secretary as a special advisor and consultant on major problems of foreign policy and who provides guidance to the appropriate bureaus with respect to such matters. The Counselor conducts special international negotiations and consultations, and also undertakes special assignments from time to time, as directed by the Secretary.

Eliot A. Cohen

Eliot A. Cohen, who teaches military history at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) here and has also served on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB) since 2001, will take up the position next month that was left vacant late last year by Rice's long-time confidant and "realist" thinker, Philip Zelikow.

A close friend and protégé of former Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ( See Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation )and advisory board member of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Cohen most recently led the harsh neoconservative attack on the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton.

Like his fellow neocons, he was particularly scathing about its recommendations for Washington to directly engage Syria and Iran and revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process – recommendations which Rice herself has explicitly endorsed in the last few weeks.
"This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war," Cohen wrote in column entitled "No Way to Win a War," published by the Wall Street Journal the day after the ISG released its report in early December.

"A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results," he went on in a wholesale dismissal of the relevance of what he called the "Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the
1960s..."

Will he be a Counselor or a critic
for Rice?

"Eliot brings a lot to the table in terms of being a counselor, being somebody who can be an intellectual sounding board for her [Rice]," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack in confirming Cohen's appointment Friday.

Some analysts here, however, said they thought the appointment was designed instead to reduce or pre-empt criticism from neoconservatives and other hawks in and outside the administration for the direction she hopes to take U.S. policy, particularly in the Middle East. With no operational responsibilities, the State Department Counselor can be used – or ignored – at the secretary's discretion.

"Condi may feel she needs to have a neocon right next to her to protect her flanks," said Chris Nelson, editor of the widely read Washington insider newsletter, The Nelson Report.

"And, if she's really planning to put her foot down on the Israelis, which [Washington] will have to do if it wants to get a real process with the Palestinians underway as part of a bigger regional deal with the Saudis and Iranians, then a guy like Cohen up there on the [State Department's] seventh floor who is in on it and can claim influence on the outcome can help."

Rice may be appeasing Vice President Cheney

"Bringing on Cohen could help inoculate her from criticism by the Cheney camp," agreed Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation in a reference to the vice president and the neoconservatives and other hawks who surround him. "One of the things that's been consistent is that Rice never takes Cheney head-on and is very careful not to take on people who might antagonize him."

In that respect, Cohen is a nearly ideal choice. Like Cheney, Cohen was a founding member in 1997 of the Project for the New American Century whose positions on how to prosecute the "war on terror" – including the invasion of Iraq and cutting ties to the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yassir Arafat – he has consistently endorsed.

Elliot is Opinionated

Although lacking in any regional expertise or policy-making experience, Cohen has written prolifically in recent years on U.S. policy in the Middle East.
(See books below) Cohen first gained national prominence shortly after the 9/11 attacks when he published a Wall Street Journal column entitled "World War IV" – a moniker quickly adopted by hard-line neocons like former CIA director and fellow-DPB member James Woolsey, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, and Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney (on whose board Cohen also sits) – to put Bush's "war on terror" in what he considered to be the appropriate historical context and to define its enemy as "militant Islam."

After defeating the Taliban, he argued, Washington should not only "finish off" Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom he accused of having "helped al Qaeda," but also seek to overthrow "the mullahs" in Iran whose replacement by a "moderate or secular government would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of [Osama] bin Laden."

Elliot Strong Supporter of Israel -Against Palestinian Authority


In another Journal article in April 2002 when the second Palestinian intifada was at its height, Cohen, who had just signed a PNAC letter which called for severing ties to the PA and asserted that "Israel's fight against terrorism is our fight," argued that proposals to send an international force that would separate Israeli forces from the Palestinians were "not serious." "[T]here are times when well-intentioned measures can only make matters worse," he warned.
Cohen has also been quick to label critics of Israel and the so-called "Israel Lobby" in the U.S. as anti-Semites.
"Only a reshuffling of the deck – through the disappearance of Arafat, or an event, (such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein) that profoundly changes the mood in the Arab world – will make something approaching truce, let alone peace, possible," he argued in a favorite pre-Iraq war neoconservative theme.

May have Promoted Bush's Personal Identification as a War President

The following summer, Cohen achieved new fame when Bush was photographed carrying Cohen's just-published book, "Supreme Command," which argued that the greatest civilian wartime leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, had a far better strategic sense than their generals. It was a particularly timely message in the months that preceded the Iraq war when a surprising number of recently military brass here were voicing strong reservations about the impending U.S. invasion.

Pro Iraq War - Shifting Opinion on it's Execution

He also became a charter member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an administration-supported group both to lobby for war in Iraq, largely on behalf of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC). Indeed, Cohen, like his friend Wolfowitz, was already arguing publicly for Washington to rely heavily on the INC in any effort to overthrow Hussein in December 2001.

After the Iraq invasion, however, Cohen became progressively more critical of the way in which the subsequent occupation and counterinsurgency were being carried out, although, after a Pentagon-sponsored tour of Iraq that featured interviews with top U.S. military commanders there, including Gen. George Casey, last February, he became briefly more optimistic.

"After a wretched start, we have the right people at the top and the right policies in effect – and even more importantly, the right philosophy behind it all," he wrote in yet another Journal article entitled "Will We Persevere?"
Just nine months later, however, he had changed his mind.

In the same article in which he attacked the ISG, he described U.S. difficulties as "stem(ming) not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made" – an inability, for example, "as personal as picking the wrong people for key positions."

Surge Booster (supporter of President Bush's plan to send in more troops.)


Still, while admitting in a Vanity Fair interview late last year that U.S. choices in Iraq range between "bad and awful," Cohen has called for perseverance and played a key role in selling AEI-hatched plan to add some 30,000 troops to the 140,000 soldiers in Iraq to Bush with whom he met personally as part of a small group of "surge"-boosters at the White House in mid-December.

Elliot's Plan B

If the surge should fail, however, Cohen's preferred and "most plausible" option, which he laid out in an October 2006 Journal column titled "Plan B," would be a coup d'etat ("which we quietly endorse") that would bring to power a "junta of military modernizers," a development which, as he noted himself, would call into question the administration's and Rice's avowed goal of democratization.

In any event, he argued in the same column, "American prestige has taken a hard knock [in Iraq]; it will probably take a harder knock, and in ways that will not be restored without a considerable and successful use of American military power down the road."

"The tides of Sunni salafism (Salafism is not a sect per se but describes a simplified version of Islam, in which adherents follow a few commands and practices) and Iran's distinct combination of messianism
(Messianism is any field of philosophy which concerns itself with the interpretations of stories about a world hero or the establishment of a Utopian world) and power politics have not crested, and will not crest without much greater violence in which we too will be engaged," he asserted.

In a Vanity Fair interview last fall, Cohen said, "I'm pretty grim. I think we're heading for a very dark world, because the long-term consequences of this are very large, not just for Iraq, not just for the region, but globally – for our reputation, for what the Iranians do, all kinds of stuff."

f Rice's intent was to reassure Cheney and the neoconservatives that she is not a captive of the ISG and the "Washington establishment," that passage alone should do the trick. (Inter Press Service)

Books by Mr. Cohen




Books including contributions by Mr. Cohen





First Sentence:
WE SHALL BEGIN OUR EXPLORATION of military misfortune by looking at the five explanations most commonly offered by historians trying to account for defeat and disaster on the field of battle




The Power of Nightmares -Documentary

A documentary about neoconservatives and radical Islamists by the BBC

Part One


Part two:

Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation

Wolfowitz Emerges as Key Figure in Intel Manipulation
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 12 February 2007

Paul Wolfowitz, former under secretary of defense, has been identified in recently released grand jury transcripts as being involved in a White House smear campaign against Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

The previously undisclosed development comes on the heels of a scathing report released last week by the Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General that said Wolfowitz played a key role in the cooking of intelligence related to Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda and its supposed cache of chemical and biological weapons. That effort helped the White House lay the groundwork for a US-led invasion.

Taken as a whole, the involvement of Wolfowitz in a full-scale effort to undermine the credibility of an Iraq War critic, and his hands-on role in knowingly providing the White House with the sort of dubious intelligence that came under scrutiny by people like Wilson, shows how widespread the issues surrounding manipulated intelligence truly were, and how crucial it became for senior members of the Bush administration to discredit anyone who threatened to expose their ruse.

The transcripts were released in conjunction with other documents in the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. They state that Wolfowitz was chosen by Vice President Dick Cheney in mid-July 2003 to leak a highly classified portion of the National Intelligence Estimate to the Wall Street Journal as a way to rebut Wilson's claims that the White House "twisted" intelligence related to Iraq's attempts to build an atomic bomb. The section of the NIE that Wolfowitz leaked to the Journal claimed Wilson's assertions were flat-out wrong. However, it was later revealed that the section of the NIE that Wilson called into question was based on crude forgeries.

The transcript detailing Wolfowitz's involvement in attacks against Wilson's credibility would appear to support similar charges made by career CIA analysts. The analysts told Democratic lawmakers four years ago that they were pressured by Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to fix the intelligence on Iraq around the administration's policy toward the country.

In September 2002, according to testimony given Friday by Thomas Gimble, a briefing took place at the White House, attended by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Libby and others purporting a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that "was not supported by the available intelligence." Gimble is the acting Defense Department inspector general who prepared the report on pre-war Iraq intelligence,

The meeting took place seven months after Wilson was sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from the African country. Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were unfounded. But Libby, Cheney, Wolfowitz, President Bush and other senior members of the White House ignored the findings of the intelligence community that said Iraq was not an immediate threat, and they pressured CIA analysts to cherry-pick intelligence that would help lay the groundwork for a US-led invasion, according to the DoD report.

An executive summary of the report, released Friday, stated that Douglas Feith, who headed the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, "was inappropriately performing intelligence activities of developing, producing, and disseminating that should be performed by the intelligence community."

The report concluded that these "inappropriate" activities were authorized by Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense, or Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of defense.

Furthermore, senior administration officials, including Vice President Cheney, made numerous public statements that reflected the views of the Feith alternative analysis, which were inconsistent with the analysis and judgments of the intelligence community. Indeed, Vice President Cheney said the principal Feith office assessment was the "best source of information" on the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Those in the intelligence community who dissented found themselves wholly discredited by Libby, Cheney and officials in the Office of the President.

That is exactly what happened to Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who worked in a division of the CIA that dealt with issues related to weapons of mass destruction. When Wilson went public in July 2003 with his criticism of the administration's use of pre-war intelligence, his wife's identity and undercover status were compromised.

Still, Libby and Cheney continued to hammer away at Wilson, for reasons unknown, days after Plame's name turned up in a newspaper column, and a week after the White House had acknowledged that the intelligence related to Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium from Niger was unreliable.

According to Libby's March 2004 grand jury transcripts, he said that Vice President Cheney discussed with him getting Wolfowitz to contact the Journal to leak the NIE as a way of undermining Wilson.

"After July 14, in that week, the Vice President thought we should still try and get the [NIE] out. And so he asked me to talk to the Wall Street Journal. I don't have as good a relationship with the Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did, and so we talked to Secretary Wolfowitz about trying to get that point across [to the Journal], and he undertook to do so," Libby testified.

Wolfowitz faxed the Wall Street Journal a set of "talking points" about the former ambassador that the paper's editors could use to discredit him in print, according to Libby's grand jury testimony, and then leaked to the paper a portion of the then-still-classified NIE that claimed Iraq did in fact attempt to acquire uranium from Niger. The Journal printed, verbatim, Wolfowitz's talking points in an editorial in its July 17, 2003, edition and then misled its readers about the source of the information.

According to the editorial, "Yellowcake Remix," the Journal said the data the newspaper received about Iraq's interest in uranium "does not come from the White House," despite the fact that Libby testified that he personally lobbied Wolfowitz to leak the NIE to the Journal, and that arguably Wolfowitz's position as Undersecretary of Defense made him a senior member of the Bush administration.

A spokeswoman for the Wall Street Journal said Saturday she was unfamiliar with the issue and was not interested in responding.

Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.

Video Documentary part 3 :PNAC/Neocon Crusades - Pin 9/11 on Iraq

1. Cheny convinced Bush to attack Iraq
2. Paul Wolfowitz pushed for regimne change in Iraq constantly
3. The neoconservitives knew that there was no link between 9/11 and Iraq
4. Ricahard Pearl said on news interview that Saddam was responsable for 9/11- when he knew there was no bases for that statement
5. The administration knowinglly lied to the public- well organized and repetitive propoganda similiar to the German Nazi tactics. it was the Nazi Gerbals who said: If you repeat a lie often enough, people swallow it.
6. The administration had a two part plan - A. Get rid of weapons inspectors who keep saying that Iraq has no WMD and B> Find wepons
7. Bush Administration went on a smear campagien against Hans Blix - who angrilly left his post ( read his commnts here)

posted by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)

Video, Documentary: PNAC/Neocon Crusades - Who Pulls the Strings?

Notes on this section of the documentary.

1. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl and Bernard Lewis push the neocon agenda.
2. Richard Pearl, though he has an office in the Pentagon near Donald Rumsfeld and has access to top security documents- is just an average citizen.
3. Bush gets his information from what people tell him
4. Bush didn't have a passport till he was President- doesn't know the world
5. The neocons believe that they are justified in supporting any Democratic revolution in the world
6. The neocons wanted to crush Saddam Hussein for the benefit of Israel
7. The White House on 9/11- on the day- called Richard Clark and said: Pin it on Iraq

posted by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)

The Rise and Fall of Chalabi: Bush's Mr. Wrong - Newsweek: World News - MSNBC.com

 

Back to Complete 
War News Index

Newsweek

Chalabi is an expert manipulator who knows how to work the press as well as congressmen, lobbyists and think-tankers. He began coming up with Iraqi defectors who told reporters stories of Saddam's allying with terrorists and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. After lurid stories appeared in the press (and softened up bureaucratic skepticism in the government), Chalabi would pass on the defectors to American intelligence agencies. Thus, in December 2001, Chalabi produced a defector who told The New York Times that he had seen biological- and nuclear-weapons labs hidden around Baghdad, including one underneath a hospital. The defector later became a source for the Defense Intelligence Agency. To Vanity Fair, Chalabi peddled another defector, a supposed former general in the Iraqi secret police, who told of terrorists-in-training practicing to hijack passenger aircraft at a secret base near Baghdad. (The defector, Abu Zeinab, was dismissed by the CIA as a "bullsh----er," according to an intelligence source; newly coached by the INC, he went back to the CIA and was again rejected.)
Story continues below ↓ advertisement

When American spooks proved resistant, Chalabi cozied up to their counterparts in foreign intelligence services. To the Germans, Chalabi provided a source code named "Curveball" (appropriately, as it turned out), who told of Saddam's building mobile bioweapons labs. Another defector sent to the DIA by Chalabi supported Curveball's tale. DIA labeled this defector a "fabricator" and attached a warning notice to his report, but the notice was so highly restricted that other intelligence officials never saw it. Both defectors' reports—apparently pure fiction—worked their way into official pronouncements and became part of the Bush administration's building case for war. Months later, when Colin Powell was feeling burned for having dramatically presented "facts" to the United Nations Security Council that turned out to be shaky at best, the secretary of State privately, but bitterly, blamed Chalabi.

Powell also faults the neocons in the Bush administration who swallowed Chalabi's phony stories and pushed them into speeches by the president and vice president. With his clever sense for bureaucratic gamesmanship, Chalabi fed the neocons' hunger for raw intelligence. If the CIA and other spy services weren't going to come up with the goods on Saddam, then Chalabi would. He found a receptive audience in the office of the vice president and at the Pentagon. I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the veep's chief of staff, and Wolfowitz were eagerly looking for links between Saddam and Al Qaeda. With his media friends, Chalabi hyped a story, often cited by the neocons, about a secret meeting in Prague between Muhammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, and a high-level Iraqi intelligence officer. (After months of investigation, the CIA and FBI determined that the meeting had never taken place.)


Much of Chalabi's dubious intelligence was funneled to the DIA through top Pentagon civilians. Under Secretary Feith himself signed a long and detailed summary of the intelligence linking Saddam to terrorists and WMD. The Feith memo, stamped secret, submitted to Congress and leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine last summer, reads like a conspiracy theorist's greatest hits. Interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK, Feith was a little defensive about his relationship with Chalabi. "The press stories would have him as my brother. I met him a few times. He was very smart, very articulate," Feith said. Feith allowed he has always been drawn to the stories of exiles who come back to save their countries. But he rejected the idea that he had been Chalabi's tool or dupe.

Over at the State Department and CIA, career bureaucrats viewed Chalabi with a jaundiced eye. State Department auditors found that Chalabi had not always kept the most meticulous records of the funds flowing into the Iraqi National Congress. Diplomats suspected Chalabi was using taxpayers' money to fund his own war-propaganda campaign, which was barred by law. In the summer of 2002, the State Department moved to cut off Chalabi's funding, but he was rescued by his friends at the Pentagon. That fall the Defense Department began picking up the check using secret intelligence funds. All told, Chalabi's INC has been paid about $33 million by State and some $6 million by the DIA. (Not all of Chalabi's intelligence operation was dodgy; last week, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told Congress that some of the information turned over by the INC had saved the lives of American soldiers.)

With his eye on Saddam's soon-to-be-empty throne, Chalabi took an active interest in planning for postwar Iraq. In retrospect, his involvement was unfortunate. At best, it contributed to government paralysis and fed a standoff between the ever-feuding State and Defense departments. Chalabi's closest ally, Richard Perle, vigorously denied to NEWSWEEK that the neocons wanted to "install" Chalabi as the new head of Iraq. "No one installed by the United States could survive," said Perle. But the neocons did want to help train and equip Iraqi exiles loyal to Chalabi who could be airlifted into Iraq and take over as a security force (or as Chalabi's private army, depending on your point of view).

The State Department stood against this plan. A team of diplomats and Arab experts worked up a 15-volume Future of Iraq project that Defense Department officials dismissed as overly academic and "nonoperational." At Feith's office in the Pentagon, charged with postwar reconstruction, the Future of Iraq documents were consigned to the dustbin. When various Iraqi-exile groups met outside London in the fall of 2002 to try to compromise on a post-Saddam government, the outcome was the mild anarchy of dueling press conferences to announce vague and uncertain plans.

Doomed by bureaucratic infighting and a notable lack of enthusiasm among the community of potential freedom fighters, the plan to build an Iraqi-exile force fizzled. Something like 100 Iraqi men showed up to be trained as soldiers at a camp in Hungary. Nonetheless, Chalabi and his INC entourage were airlifted into southern Iraq by the Pentagon shortly after the American invasion in April 2003.

As soon as Saddam's statue was toppled, Chalabi moved into Baghdad to become, in effect, the new nation's first warlord. He set up office in the Baghdad Hunting Club, a comfortable, vaguely colonial-sounding establishment in a posh neighborhood, and then moved his operation into an edifice with outlandish pagoda-style turrets and vast corridors, known as "the Chinese House." Through associates, he took over the old Finance Ministry and later his clan set up one-stop shopping for foreign companies that wanted to do business in the new Iraq.

Chalabi was not universally endorsed in the upper echelons of the Bush administration. True, when President Bush went to the United Nations last September to proclaim a free Iraq, the man sitting in Iraq's seat at the General Assembly was Ahmad Chalabi. But when Chalabi was first flown into Iraq by the Defense Department, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice was visibly startled when reporters gave her the news that Chalabi was on the ground and had rounded up a 700-man local army. Even Rumsfeld was less than a totally committed Chalabi partisan. "Why do people keep saying that Chalabi is my candidate?" Rumsfeld would wonder aloud at meetings of the Defense Advisory Board, according to Perle, who was a member. But a quick and sure Chalabi takeover offered Rumsfeld the one thing above all he wanted: a fast way to get American troops out of Iraq. No fan of "nation-building," Rumsfeld wanted a new Iraqi government that could take over and run the place.

Iraq war -It's about the oil remember

Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on October 16, 2006, Printed on October 18, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/43045/

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series. Go here to read the second installment.

Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.

The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.

Iraq's energy reserves are an incredibly rich prize. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq contains 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, the second largest in the world (behind Saudi Arabia), along with roughly 220 billion barrels of probable and possible resources. Iraq's true potential may be far greater than this, however, as the country is relatively unexplored due to years of war and sanctions." For perspective, the Saudis have 260 billion barrels of proven reserves.

Iraqi oil is close to the surface and easy to extract, making it all the more profitable. James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, points out that oil companies "can produce a barrel of Iraqi oil for less than $1.50 and possibly as little as $1, including all exploration, oilfield development and production costs." Contrast that with other areas where oil is considered cheap to produce at $5 per barrel or the North Sea, where production costs are $12-16 per barrel.

And Iraq's oil sector is largely undeveloped. Former Iraqi Oil Minister Issam Chalabi (no relation to the neocons' favorite exile, Ahmed Chalabi) told the Associated Press that "Iraq has more oil fields that have been discovered, but not developed, than any other country in the world." British-based analyst Mohammad Al-Gallani told the Canadian Press that of 526 prospective drilling sites, just 125 have been opened.

But the real gem -- what one oil consultant called the "Holy Grail" of the industry -- lies in Iraq's vast western desert. It's one of the last "virgin" fields on the planet, and it has the potential to catapult Iraq to No. 1 in the world in oil reserves. Sparsely populated, the western fields are less prone to sabotage than the country's current centers of production in the north, near Kirkuk, and in the south near Basra. The Nation's Aram Roston predicts Iraq's western desert will yield "untold riches."

Iraq also may have large natural gas deposits that so far remain virtually unexplored.

But even "untold riches" don't tell the whole story. Depending on how Iraq's petroleum law shakes out, the country's enormous reserves could break the back of OPEC, a wet dream in Western capitals for three decades. James Paul predicted that "even before Iraq had reached its full production potential of 8 million barrels or more per day, the companies would gain huge leverage over the international oil system. OPEC would be weakened by the withdrawal of one of its key producers from the OPEC quota system." Depending on how things shape up in the next few months, Western oil companies could end up controlling the country's output levels, or the government, heavily influenced by the United States, could even pull out of the cartel entirely.

Both independent analysts and officials within Iraq's Oil Ministry anticipate that when all is said and done, the big winners in Iraq will be the Big Four -- the American firms Exxon-Mobile and Chevron, the British BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell -- that dominate the world oil market. Ibrahim Mohammed, an industry consultant with close contacts in the Iraqi Oil Ministry, told the Associated Press that there's a universal belief among ministry staff that the major U.S. companies will win the lion's share of contracts. "The feeling is that the new government is going to be influenced by the United States," he said.

During the 12-year sanction period, the Big Four were forced to sit on the sidelines while the government of Saddam Hussein cut deals with the Chinese, French, Russians and others (despite the sanctions, the United States ultimately received 37 percent of Iraq's oil during that period, according to the independent committee that investigated the oil-for-food program, but almost all of it arrived through foreign firms). In a 1999 speech, Dick Cheney, then CEO of the oil services company Halliburton, told a London audience that the Middle East was where the West would find the additional 50 million barrels of oil per day that he predicted it would need by 2010, but, he lamented, "while even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow."

Chafing at the idea that the Chinese and Russians might end up with what is arguably the world's greatest energy prize, industry leaders lobbied hard for regime change throughout the 1990s. With the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 -- the first time in U.S. history that two veterans of the oil industry had ever occupied the nation's top two jobs -- they would finally get the "greater access" to the region's oil wealth, which they had long lusted after.

If the U.S. invasion of Iraq had occurred during the colonial era a hundred years earlier, the oil giants, backed by U.S. forces, would have simply seized Iraq's oil fields. Much has changed since then in terms of international custom and law (when then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did in fact suggest seizing Iraq's Southern oil fields in 2002, Colin Powell dismissed the idea as "lunacy").

Understanding how Big Oil came to this point, poised to take effective control of the bulk of the country's reserves while they remain, technically, in the hands of the Iraqi government -- a government with all the trappings of sovereignty -- is to grasp the sometimes intricate dance that is modern neocolonialism. The Iraq oil grab is a classic case study.

It's clear that the U.S.-led invasion had little to do with national security or the events of Sept. 11. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that just 11 days after Bush's inauguration in early 2001, regime change in Iraq was "Topic A" among the administration's national security staff, and former Terrorism Tsar Richard Clarke told 60 Minutes that the day after the attacks in New York and Washington occurred, "[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq." He added: "We all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan."

On March 7, 2003, two weeks before the United States attacked Iraq, the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein's cooperation with the inspections protocol had improved to the point where it was "active or even proactive," and that the inspectors would be able to certify that Iraq was free of prohibited weapons within a few months' time. That same day, IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei reported that there was no evidence of a current nuclear program in Iraq and flatly refuted the administration's claim that the infamous aluminum tubes cited by Colin Powell in making his case for war before the Security Council were part of a reconstituted nuclear program.

But serious planning for the war had begun in February of 2002, as Bob Woodward revealed in his book, Plan of Attack. Planning for the future of Iraq's oil wealth had been under way for longer still.

In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush was sworn in, the same energy executives that had been lobbying for Saddam's ouster gathered at the White House to participate in Dick Cheney's now infamous Energy Task Force. Although Cheney would go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at those meetings a secret, we do know a few things, thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch. As Mark Levine wrote in The Nation($$):

… a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors" were the center of discussion. The map erased all features of the country save the location of its main oil deposits, divided into nine exploration blocks. The accompanying list of suitors revealed that dozens of companies from 30 countries -- but not the United States -- were either in discussions over or in direct negotiations for rights to some of the best remaining oilfields on earth.

Levine wrote, "It's not hard to surmise how the participants in these meetings felt about this situation."

According to the New Yorker, at the same time, a top-secret National Security Council memo directed NSC staff to "cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The administration's national security team was to join "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

At the State Department, planning was also underway. Under the auspices of the "Future of Iraq Project," an "Oil and Energy Working Group" was established. The full membership of the group -- described by the Financial Times as "Iraqi oil experts, international consultants" and State Department staffers -- remains classified, but among them, according to Antonia Juhasz's "The Bush Agenda," was Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, who would serve in Iyad Allawi's cabinet during the period of the Iraqi Governing Council, and later as Iraq's oil minister in 2005. The group concluded that Iraq's oil "should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war."

But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun. Specifically, they wanted an Iraqi government that would enter into production service agreements (PSAs) for the extraction of Iraq's oil.

PSAs, developed in the 1960s, are a tool of today's kinder, gentler neocolonialism; they allow countries to retain technical ownership over energy reserves but, in actuality, lock in multinationals' control and extremely high profit margins -- up to 13 times oil companies' minimum target, according to an analysis by the British-based oil watchdog Platform (PDF).

As Greg Muttit, an analyst with the group, notes:

Such contracts are often used in countries with small or difficult oilfields, or where high-risk exploration is required. They are not generally used in countries like Iraq, where there are large fields which are already known and which are cheap to extract. For example, they are not used in Iran, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, all of which maintain state control of oil.

In fact, Muttit adds, of the seven leading oil producing countries, only Russia has entered into PSAs, and those were signed during its own economic "shock therapy" in the early 1990s. A number of Iraq's oil-rich neighbors have constitutions that specifically prohibit foreign control over their energy reserves.

PSAs often have long terms -- up to 40 years -- and contain "stabilization clauses" that protect them from future legislative changes. As Muttit points out, future governments "could be constrained in their ability to pass new laws or policies." That means, for example, that if a future elected Iraqi government "wanted to pass a human rights law, or wanted to introduce a minimum wage [and it] affected the company's profits, either the law would not apply to the company's operations or the government would have to compensate the company for any reduction in profits." It's Sovereignty Lite.

The deals are so onerous that they govern only 12 percent of the world's oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency. Nonetheless, PSAs would become the Future of Iraq Project's recommendation for the fledgling Iraqi government. According to the Financial Times, "many in the group" fought for the contract structure; a Kurdish delegate told the FT, "everybody keeps coming back to PSAs."

Of course, the plans for Iraq's legal framework for oil have to be viewed in the context of the overall transformation of the Iraqi economy. Clearly, the idea was to pursue a radical corporatist agenda during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority when the U.S. occupation forces were a de facto dictatorship. And that's just what happened; under L. Paul Bremer, the CPA head, corporate taxes were slashed, a flat-tax on income was established, rules allowing multinationals to pull all of their profits from the country and a series of other provisions were enacted. These were then integrated into the Iraqi Constitution and remain in effect today.

Among the provisions in the Constitution, unlike those of most oil producers, is a requirement that the government "develop oil and gas wealth … relying on the most modern techniques of market principles and encouraging investment." The provision mandates that foreign companies would receive a major stake in Iraq's oil for the first time in the 30 years since the sector was nationalized in 1975.

Herbert Docena, a researcher with the NGO Focus on the Global South, wrote that an early draft of the constitution negotiated by Iraqis envisioned a "Scandinavian-style welfare system in the Arabian desert, with Iraq's vast oil wealth to be spent upholding every Iraqi's right to education, health care, housing, and other social services." "Social justice," the draft declared, "is the basis of building society."

What happened between that earlier draft and the constitution that Iraqis would eventually ratify? According to Docena:

While [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay] Khalilzad and his team of U.S. and British diplomats were all over the scene, some members of Iraq's constitutional committee were reduced to bystanders. One Shiite member grumbled, "We haven't played much of a role in drafting the constitution. We feel that we have been neglected." A Sunni negotiator concluded: "This constitution was cooked up in an American kitchen not an Iraqi one."

With a constitution cooked up in D.C., the stage was set for foreign multinationals to assume effective control of as much as 87 percent of Iraq's oil, according to projections by the Oil Ministry. If PSAs become the law of the land -- and there are other contractual arrangements that would allow private companies to invest in the sector without giving them the same degree of control or such usurious profits -- the war-torn country stands to lose up to 194 billion vitally important dollars in revenue on just the first 12 fields developed, according to a conservative estimate by Platform (the estimate assumes oil at $40 per barrel; at this writing it stands at more than $59). That's more than six times the country's annual budget.

To complete the rip-off, the occupying coalition would have to crush Iraqi resistance, make sure it had friendly people in the right places in Iraq's emerging elite and lock the new Iraqi government onto a path that would lead to the Big Four's desired outcome.

See part two tomorrow.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/43045/

ccc

THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Click here to comment on this report.

President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ

Role In Going To War: Wolfowitz said the U.S. would be greeted as liberators, that Iraqi oil money for pay for the reconstruction, and that Gen. Eric Shinseki’s estimate that several hundred thousand troops would be needed was “wildly off the mark.” [Washington Post, 12/8/05]

Where He Is Now: Bush promoted Wolfowitz to head the World Bank in March 2005. [Washington Post, 3/17/05]

Key Quote: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” [Wolfowitz, 3/27/03]

DOUGLAS FEITH

Role In Going To War: As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Feith spearheaded two secretive groups at the Pentagon — the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans — that were instrumental in drawing up documents that explained the supposed ties between Saddam and al Qaeda. The groups were “created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true.” Colin Powell referred to Feith’s operation as the Gestapo. In Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, former CentCom Commander Gen. Tommy Franks called Feith the “f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” [LAT, 1/27/05; NYT, 4/28/04; New Yorker, 5/12/03; Plan of Attack, p.281]

Where He Is Now: Feith voluntarily resigned from the Defense Department shortly after Bush’s reelection. He is co-chairman of a project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to write an academic book on how to fight terrorism. Feith’s secretive groups at the Pentagon are under investigation by the Pentagon and the Senate Intelligence Committee for intelligence failures. [Washington Post, 1/27/05, 11/18/05; Washington Times, 3/3/06]

Key Quote: “I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is — we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible.” [Washington Post, 7/13/05]

STEPHEN HADLEY

Role In Going To War: As then-Deputy National Security Advisor, Hadley disregarded memos from the CIA and a personal phone call from Director George Tenet warning that references to Iraq’s pursuit of uranium be dropped from Bush’s speeches. The false information ended up in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. [Washington Post, 7/23/03]

Where He Is Now: On January 26, 2005, Stephen Hadley was promoted to National Security Advisor. [White House bio]

Key Quote: “I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue. … And it is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility in connection with the inclusion of these 16 words in the speech that he gave on the 28th of January.” [Hadley, 7/22/03]

RICHARD PERLE

Role In Going To War: Richard Perle, the so-called “Prince of Darkness,” was the chairman of Defense Policy Board during the run-up to the Iraq war. He suggested Iraq had a hand in 9-11. In 1996, he authored “Clean Break,” a paper that was co-signed by Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others that argued for regime change in Iraq. Shortly after the war began, Perle resigned from the Board because he came under fire for having relationships with businesses that stood to profit from the war. [Guardian, 9/3/02, 3/28/03; AFP, 8/9/02]

Where He Is Now: Currently, Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he specializes in national security and defense issues. He has been investigated for ethical violations concerning war profiteering and other conflicts of interest. [Washington Post, 9/1/04]

Key Quote: “And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.” [Perle, 9/22/03]

ELLIOT ABRAMS

Role In Going To War: Abrams was one of the defendants in the Iran-Contra Affair, and he pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. He was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs during Bush’s first term, where he served as Bush’s chief advisor on the Middle East. His name surfaced as part of the investigation into who leaked the name of a undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. [Washington Post, 5/27/03, 2/3/05]

Where He Is Now: Abrams was promoted to deputy national security adviser in February of 2005. [Slate, 2/17/05]

Key Quote: “We recognize that military action in Iraq, if necessary, will have adverse humanitarian consequences. We have been planning over the last several months, across all relevant agencies, to limit any such consequences and provide relief quickly.” [CNN, 2/25/03]

DAVID WURMSER

Role In Going To War: At the time of the war, Wurmser was a special assistant to John Bolton in the State Department. Wurmser has long advocated the belief that both Syria and Iraq represented threats to the stability of the Middle East. In early 2001, Wurmser had issued a call for air strikes against Iraq and Syria. Along with Perle, he is considered a main author of “Clean Break.” [Asia Times, 4/17/03; Guardian, 9/3/02]

Where He Is Now: Wurmser was promoted to Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs; he is in charge of coordinating Middle East strategy. His name has been associated with the Plame Affair and with an FBI investigation into the passing of classified information to Chalabi and AIPAC. [Raw Story, 10/19/05; Washington Post, 9/4/04]

Key Quote: “Syria, Iran, Iraq, the PLO and Sudan are playing a skillful game, but have consistently worked to undermine US interests and influence in the region for years, and certainly will continue to do so now, even if they momentarily, out of fear, seem more forthcoming.” [Washington Post, 9/24/01]

ANDREW NATSIOS

Role In Going To War: Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Andrew Natsios, then the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, went on Nightline and claimed that the U.S. contribution to the rebuilding of Iraq would be just $1.7 billion. When it became quickly apparent that Natsios’ prediction would fall woefully short of reality, the government came under fire for scrubbing his comments from the USAID Web site. [Washington Post, 12/18/03; ABC News, 4/23/03]

Where He Is Now: Natsios stepped down as the head of USAID in January and is currently teaching at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh’s School of Foreign Service as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and Advisor on International Development. [AP, 2/20/06; Georgetown, 12/2/05]

Key Quote: “[T]he American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.” [Nightline, 4/23/03]

DAN BARTLETT

Role In Going To War: Dan Bartlett was the White House Communications Director at the time of the war and was a mouthpiece in hyping the Iraq threat. Bartlett was also a regular participant in the weekly meetings of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). The main purpose of the group was the systematic coordination of the “marketing” of going to war with Iraq as well as selling the war here at home. [Washington Post, 8/10/03]

Where He Is Now: Bartlett was promoted to Counselor to the President on January 5, 2005, and is responsible for the formulation of policy and implementation of the President’s agenda. [White House]

Key Quote: “President Bush understands that the need to disarm Saddam Hussein is necessary. He has made that case to the United Nations Security Council. He’s made that case to the United States Congress. The entire world rallied behind this resolution that gives him one last chance. He has that chance, but time is running out.” [CNN, 1/26/03]

MITCH DANIELS

Role In Going To War: Mitch Daniels was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2001 through June of 2003. In this capacity, he was responsible for releasing the initial budget estimates for the Iraq War which he pegged at $50 to $60 billion. The estimated cost of the war, including the full economic ramifications, is approaching $1 trillion. [MSNBC, 3/17/06]

Where He Is Now: In 2004, Daniels was elected Governor of Indiana. [USA Today, 11/3/04]

Key Quote: Mitch Daniels had said the war would be an “affordable endeavor” and rejected an estimate by the chief White House economic adviser that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion as “very, very high.” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/10/06]

GEORGE TENET

Role In Going To War: As CIA Director, Tenet was responsible for gathering information on Iraq and the potential threat posted by Saddam Hussein. According to author Bob Woodward, Tenet told President Bush before the war that there was a “slam dunk case” that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Tenet remained publicly silent while the Bush administration made pre-war statements on Iraq’s supposed nuclear program and ties to al Qaeda that were contrary to the CIA’s judgments. Tenet issued a statement in July 2003, drafted by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, taking responsibility for Bush’s false statements in his State of the Union address. [CNN, 4/19/04; NYT, 7/22/05]

Where He Is Now: Tenet voluntarily resigned from the administration on June 3, 2004. He was later awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. [Washington Post, 6/3/04]

Key Quote: “It’s a slam dunk case.” [CNN, 4/19/04]

COLIN POWELL

Role In Going To War: Despite stating in Feb. 2001 that Saddam had not developed “any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” Powell made the case in front of the United Nations for a United States-led invasion of Iraq, stating that, “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.” [Powell, 2/5/03; Powell, 2/24/01]

Where He Is Now: Shortly after Bush won reelection in 2004, Powell resigned from the administration. Powell now sits on numerous corporate boards. He is poised to succeed Henry Kissinger in May as Chairman of the Eisenhower Fellowship Program at the City College of New York. In September 2005, Powell said of his U.N. speech that it was a “blot” on his record. He went on to say, “It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.” [ABC News, 9/9/05]

Key Quote: “‘You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people,’ he told the president. ‘You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You’ll own it all.’ Privately, Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.” [Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack]

DONALD RUMSFELD

Role In Going To War: Prior to the war, Rumsfeld repeatedly suggested the war in Iraq would be short and swift. He said, “The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” He also said, “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” [Rumsfeld, 11/14/02; USA Today, 4/1/03]

Where He Is Now: Despite increased calls for his resignation, Donald Rumsfeld continues to be the most vocal supporter of staying the course in Iraq. Recently, he claimed that an early U.S. pullout would be the equivalent of leaving Germany in the hands of Nazis. [Bill Kristol, Washington Post, 12/15/04; Reuters, 3/19/06]

Key Quote: “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” [CNN, 12/9/04]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

Role In Going To War: As National Security Adviser, Rice disregarded at least two CIA memos and a personal phone call from Director George Tenet stating that the evidence behind Iraq’s supposed uranium acquisition was weak. She urged the necessity of war because “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” [Washington Post, 7/27/03; CNN, 9/8/02]

Where She Is Now: In December of 2004, Condoleezza Rice was promoted to Secretary of State and is being widely-mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. [ABC News, 11/16/04]

Key Quote: “We did not know at the time – maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency – but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course it was information that was mistaken.” [Meet the Press, 6/8/03]

DICK CHENEY

Role In Going To War: Among a host of false pre-war statements, Cheney claimed that Iraq may have had a role in 9/11, stating that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials. Cheney also claimed that Saddam was “in fact reconstituting his nuclear program” and that the U.S. would be “greeted as liberators.” [Meet the Press, 12/9/01, 3/16/03]

Where He Is Now: Cheney earned another four years in power when Bush won re-election in 2004. Despite recent calls from conservatives calling for him to be replaced, Cheney has said, “I’ve now been elected to a second term; I’ll serve out my term.” [CBS Face the Nation, 3/19/06]

Key Quote: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.” [Larry King Live, 6/20/05]

GEORGE W. BUSH

Role In Going To War: Emphasizing Saddam Hussein’s supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, supposed ties to al Qaeda, and supposed nuclear weapons program, Bush led the effort to build public support for an invasion of Iraq. [State of the Union, 1/28/03]

Where He Is Now: In November 2004, Bush won re-election. Since that time, popular support for the war and the President have reached a low point. [Washington Post, 3/7/06]

Key Quote: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” [Bush, 10/7/02]