how long have we known?

iraq as a pentagon construction site for the middle east

Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site

How the Bush Administration ‘Endures’

by Tom Engelhardt, December 3, 2007

TomDispatch

The title of the agreement, signed by President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in a “video conference” last week, and carefully labeled as a “non-binding” set of principles for further negotiations, was a mouthful: a “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America.” Whew!  Words matter, of course. They seldom turn up by accident in official documents or statements. Last week, in the first reports on this “declaration,” one of those words that matter caught my attention. Actually, it wasn’t in the declaration itself, where the key phrase was “long-term relationship” (something in the lives of private individuals that falls just short of a marriage), but in a “fact-sheet” issued by the White House. Here’s the relevant line: “Iraq’s leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America, and we seek an enduring relationship with a democratic Iraq.” Of course, “enduring” there bears the same relationship to permanency as “long-term relationship” does to marriage.  In a number of the early news reports, that word “enduring,” part of the “enduring relationship” that the Iraqi leadership supposedly “asked for,” was put into (or near) the mouths of “Iraqi leaders” or of the Iraqi prime minister himself. It also achieved a certain prominence in the post-declaration “press gaggle” conducted by the man coordinating this process out of the Oval Office, the President’s so-called War Tsar, Gen. Douglas Lute. He said of the document: “It signals a commitment of both their government and the United States to an enduring relationship based on mutual interests.”  

In trying to imagine any Iraqi leader actually requesting that “enduring” relationship, something kept nagging at me. After all, those mutual vows of longevity were to be taken in a well publicized civil ceremony in a world in which, when it comes to the American presidential embrace, don’t-ask/don’t-tell is usually the preferred course of action for foreign leaders. Finally, I remembered where I had seen that word “enduring” before in a situation that also involved a “long-term relationship.” It had been four-and-a-half years earlier and not coming out of the mouths of Iraqi officials either.  

Back in April 2003, just after Baghdad fell to American troops, Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt reported on the front page of the New York Times that the Pentagon had launched its invasion the previous month with plans for four “permanent bases” in out of the way parts of Iraq already on the drawing board. Since then, the Pentagon has indeed sunk billions of dollars into building those mega-bases (with a couple of extra ones thrown in) at or near the places mentioned by Shanker and Schmitt.  When questioned by reporters at the time about whether such “permanent bases” were in the works, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. was “unlikely to seek any permanent or ‘long-term’ bases in Iraq” — and that was that. The Times’ piece essentially went down the mainstream-media memory hole.

On this subject, the official position of the Bush administration has never changed. Just last week, for instance, General Lute slipped up, in response to a question at his press gaggle. The exchange went like this:  “Q: And permanent bases?  “GENERAL LUTE: Likewise. That’s another dimension of continuing U.S. support to the government of Iraq, and will certainly be a key item for negotiation next year.” White House spokesperson Dana Perino quickly issued a denial, saying: “We do not seek permanent bases in Iraq.”  

Back in 2003, Pentagon officials, already seeking to avoid that potentially explosive “permanent” tag, plucked “enduring” out of the military lexicon and began referring to such bases, charmingly enough, as “enduring camps.” And the word remains with us — connected to bases and occupations anywhere. For instance, of a planned expansion of Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a Col. Jonathan Ives told an AP reporter recently, “We’ve grown in our commitment to Afghanistan by putting another brigade (of troops) here, and with that we know that we’re going to have an enduring presence. So this is going to become a long-term base for us, whether that means five years, 10 years — we don’t know.”  

Still, whatever they were called, the bases went up on an impressive scale, massively fortified, sometimes 15-20 square miles in area, housing up to tens of thousands of troops and private contractors, with multiple bus routes, traffic lights, fast-food restaurants, PXs, and other amenities of home, and reeking of the kind of investment that practically shouts out for, minimally, a relationship of a distinctly “enduring” nature.  

The Facts on Land — and Sea  These were part of what should be considered the facts on the ground in Iraq, though, between April 2003 and the present, they were rarely reported on or debated in the mainstream in the U.S. But if you place those mega-bases (not to speak of the more than 100 smaller ones built at one point or another) in the context of early Bush administration plans for the Iraqi military, things quickly begin to make more sense.  

Remember, Iraq is essentially the hot seat at the center of the Middle East. It had, in the previous two-plus decades fought an eight-year war with neighboring Iran, invaded neighboring Kuwait, and been invaded itself. And yet, the new Coalition Provisional Authority, run by the President’s personal envoy, L. Paul Bremer III, promptly disbanded the Iraqi military. This is now accepted as a goof of the first order when it came to sparking an insurgency. But, in terms of Bush administration planning, it was no mistake at all.  At the time, the Pentagon made it quite clear that its plan for a future Iraqi military was for a force of 40,000 lightly armed troops — meant to do little more than patrol the country’s borders. (Saddam Hussein’s army had been something like a 600,000-man force.)

It was, in other words, to be a Military Lite — and there was essentially to be no Iraqi air force. In other words, in one of the more heavily armed and tension-ridden regions of the planet, Iraq was to become a Middle Eastern Costa Rica — if, that is, you didn’t assume that the U.S. Armed Forces, from those four “enduring camps” somewhere outside Iraq’s major cities, including a giant air base at Balad, north of Baghdad, and with the back-up help of U.S. Naval forces in the Persian Gulf, were to serve as the real Iraqi military for the foreseeable future.  

Again, it’s necessary to put these facts on the ground in a larger — in this case, pre-invasion — geopolitical context. From the first Gulf War on, Saudi Arabia, the largest producer of energy on the planet, was being groomed as the American military bastion in the heart of the Middle East. But the Saudis grew uncomfortable — think here, the claims of Osama bin Laden and Co. that U.S. troops were defiling the Kingdom and its holy places — with the Pentagon’s elaborate enduring camps on its territory. Something had to give — and it wasn’t going to be the American military presence in the Middle East. The answer undoubtedly seemed clear enough to top Bush administration officials.

As an anonymous American diplomat told the Sunday Herald of Scotland back in October 2002, “A rehabilitated Iraq is the only sound long-term strategic alternative to Saudi Arabia. It’s not just a case of swopping horses in mid-stream, the impending U.S. regime change in Baghdad is a strategic necessity.”  

As those officials imagined it — and as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz predicted — by the fall of 2003, major American military operations in the region would have been re-organized around Iraq, even as American forces there would be drawn down to perhaps 30,000-40,000 troops stationed eternally at those “enduring camps.” In addition, a group of Iraqi secular exiles, friendly to the United States, would be in power in Baghdad, backed by the occupation and ready to open up the Iraqi economy, especially its oil industry to Western (particularly American) multinationals.

Americans and their allies and private contractors would, quite literally, have free run of the country, the equivalent of nineteenth century colonial extraterritoriality (something “legally” institutionalized in June 2004, thanks to Order 17, issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, just before it officially turned over “sovereignty” to the Iraqis); and, sooner or later, a Status of Forces Agreement or SOFA would be “negotiated” that would define the rights of American troops garrisoned in that country.  At that point, the U.S. would have successfully repositioned itself militarily in relation to the oil heartlands of the planet. It would also have essentially encircled a second member of the “axis of evil,” Iran (once you included the numerous new U.S. bases that had been built and were being expanded in occupied Afghanistan as part of the ongoing war against the Taliban). It would be triumphant and dominant and, with its Israeli ally, militarily beyond challenge in the region. The cowing of, collapse of, or destruction of the Syrian and Iranian regimes would surely follow in short order.  

Of course, much of this never came about as planned. It turned out that, once the Sunni insurgency gained traction, the Bush administration had little choice but to reconstitute a sizeable, if still relatively lightly armed, Iraqi military (as a largely Shiite force) and then, more recently, arm Sunni militias as well, possibly opening the way for future clashes of a major nature. It had to accept a Shiite regime locked inside the highly fortified Green Zone of the Iraqi capital that was religious, sectarian, largely powerless, and allied to some degree with Iran.

It had to accept chaos, significant and unexpected casualties, continual urban warfare, and an enormous strain and drain on its armed forces (as well as a black hole of distraction from other global issues). None of this had been predicted, or imagined, by Bush’s top officials.  On the other hand, the Bush administration has demonstrated significant “endurance” of its own, especially when it came to the linked issues of oil and bases.

In a recent report for Harper’s Magazine, “The Black Box, Inside Iraq’s Oil Machine,” Luke Mitchell describes traveling the southern Iraqi oil field of Rumaila with a petroleum engineer working for Foster Wheeler, a Houston engineering firm hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “to oversee much of the oilfield reconstruction,” and protected by private guards employed by the British security company Erinys. He describes what’s left of the Iraqi oil industry after decades of war, sanctions, civil war, sabotage, and black-market theft — a run-down industrial plant with a rusting delivery system that, at a technical level, is now largely in the hands of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Energy, the State Department, and private contractors like KBR, the former division of Halliburton.

At the most basic level, he reports that many of “Iraq’s native oil professionals,” who heroically patched up and held together a broken system in the years after the first Gulf War, have (along with so many other Iraqi professionals) fled the country. He writes:  “The Wall Street Journal in 2006 called this flight a ‘petroleum exodus’ and reported that about a hundred oil workers had been murdered since the war began and that ‘of the top hundred of so managers running the Iraqi oil ministry and its branches in 2003, about two-thirds are no longer at their jobs.’ Now most of the [oil] engineers in Iraq are from Texas and Oklahoma.” 

Similarly, in Baghdad, the government of Prime Minister Maliki is not expected to handle the crucial energy problems of its country alone. Here’s a relevant (if well-buried) passage from a recent New York Times piece on the subject: “Earlier this month, the White House dispatched several senior aides to Baghdad to work with the Iraqis on specific legislative areas. They include the under secretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, Reuben Jeffery III, who is working on the budget and oil law…” This is what passes for “sovereignty” in present-day Iraq.  

In this context, the following line of text about agreed-upon subjects for negotiation in last week’s Bush/Maliki “declaration” caused eyebrows to be raised (at least abroad): “Facilitating and encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments, to contribute to the reconstruction and rebuilding of Iraq.” As the British Guardian put the matter: “The promise was immediately seen as a potential bonanza for American oil companies.”

A BBC report commented, “Correspondents say US investors benefiting from preferential treatment could earn huge profits from Iraq’s vast oil reserves, causing widespread resentment among Iraqis.” (American coverage regularly ignores or plays down the oil aspect of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies, even though that country has the third largest reserves on the planet.)  

Bases, Bases Everywhere  

Among the most tenacious and enduring Bush administration facts on the ground are those giant bases, still largely ignored — with honorable exceptions — by the mainstream media. Thom Shanker and Cara Buckley of the New York Times, to give but one example, managed to write that paper’s major piece about the joint “declaration” without mentioning the word “base,” no less “permanent,” and only Gen. Lute’s slip made the permanence of bases a minor note in other mainstream reports. And yet it’s not just that the building of bases did go on — and on a remarkable scale — but that it continues today.  

Whatever the descriptive labels, the Pentagon, throughout this whole period, has continued to create, base by base, the sort of “facts” that any negotiations, no matter who engages in them, will need to take into account. And the ramping up of the already gigantic “mega-bases” in Iraq proceeds apace. Recent reports indicate that the Pentagon will call on Congress to pony up another billion dollars soon enough for further upgrades and “improvements.”  

We also know that frantic construction has been under way on three new bases of varying sizes. The most obvious of these — though it’s seldom thought of this way — is the gigantic new U.S. Embassy, possibly the largest in the world, being built on an almost Vatican-sized plot of land inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. It is meant to be a citadel, a hardened universe of its own, in, but not of, the Iraqi capital. In recent months, it has also turned into a construction nightmare, soaking up another $144 million in American taxpayer monies, bringing its price tag to three-quarters of a billion dollars and still climbing. It is to house 1,000 or so “diplomats,” with perhaps a few thousand extra security guards and hired hands of every sort.  

When, in the future, you read in the papers about administration plans to withdraw American forces to bases “outside of Iraqi urban areas,” note that there will continue to be a major base in the heart of the Iraqi capital for who knows how long to come. As the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler put it, the 21-building compound “is viewed by some officials as a key element of building a sustainable, long-term diplomatic presence in Baghdad.” Presence, yes, but diplomatic?  

In the meantime, a relatively small base, “Combat Outpost Shocker,” provocatively placed within a few kilometers of the Iranian border, has been rushed to completion this fall on a mere $5 million construction contract.

And only in the last weeks, reports have emerged on the latest U.S. base under construction, uniquely being built on a key oil-exporting platform in the waters off the southern Iraqi port of Basra and meant for the U.S. Navy and allies. Such a base gives meaning to this passage in the Bush/Maliki declaration: “Providing security assurances and commitments to the Republic of Iraq to deter foreign aggression against Iraq that violates its sovereignty and integrity of its territories, waters, or airspace.”  As the British Telegraph described this multi-million dollar project: “The US-led coalition is building a permanent security base on Iraq’s oil pumping platforms in the Gulf to act as the ‘nerve centre’ of efforts to protect the country’s most vital strategic asset.”

Chip Cummins of the Wall Street Journal summed up the project this way in a piece headlined, “U.S. Digs In to Guard Iraq Oil Exports — Long-Term Presence Planned at Persian Gulf Terminals Viewed as Vulnerable”: “[T]he new construction suggests that one footprint of U.S. military power in Iraq isn’t shrinking anytime soon: American officials are girding for an open-ended commitment to protect the country’s oil industry.”  Though you’d never know it from mainstream reporting, the single enduring fact of the Iraq War may be this constant building and upgrading of U.S. bases.

Since the Times revealed those base-building plans back in the spring of 2003, Iraq has essentially been a vast construction site for the Pentagon. The American media did, in the end, come to focus on the civilian “reconstruction” of Iraq which, from the rebuilding of electricity-production facilities to the construction of a new police academy has proved a catastrophic mixture of crony capitalism, graft, corruption, theft, inefficiency, and sabotage. But there has been next to no focus on the construction success story of the Iraq War and occupation: those bases.  

In this way, whatever the disasters of its misbegotten war, the Bush administration has, in a sense, itself “endured” in Iraq. Now, with only a year left, its officials clearly hope to write that endurance and those “enduring camps” into the genetic code of both countries — an “enduring relationship” meant to outlast January 2009 and to outflank any future administration. In fact, by some official projections, the bases are meant to be occupied for up to 50 to 60 years without ever becoming “permanent.”  

You can, of course, claim that the Iraqis “asked for” this new, “enduring relationship,” as the declaration so politely suggests. It is certainly true that, as part of the bargain, the Bush administration is offering to defend its “boys” to the hilt against almost any conceivable eventuality, including the sort of internal coup that it has, these last years, been rumored to have considered launching itself.  In an attempt to make an end-run around Congress, administration officials continue to present what is to be negotiated as merely a typical SOFA-style agreement. “There are about a hundred countries around the world with which we have [such] bilateral defense or security cooperation agreements,” Gen. Lute said reassuringly, indicating that this matter would be handled by the executive branch without significant input from Congress.

The guarantees the Bush administration seems ready to offer the Maliki government, however, clearly rise to treaty level and, if we had even a faintly assertive Congress, would surely require the advice and consent of the Senate. Iraqi officials have already made clear that such an agreement will have to pass through their parliament in a country where the idea of “enduring” U.S. bases in an “enduring” relationship is bound to be exceedingly unpopular.  

Still, a formula for the future is obviously being put in place and, after more than four years of frenzied construction, the housing for it, so to speak, is more than ready. As the Washington Post described the plan, “Iraqi officials said that under the proposed formula, Iraq would get full responsibility for internal security and U.S. troops would relocate to bases outside the cities. Iraqi officials foresee a long-term presence of about 50,000 U.S. troops…”  

No matter what comes out of the mouths of Iraqi officials, though, what’s “enduring” in all this is deeply Pentagonish and has emerged from the Bush administration’s earliest dreams about reshaping the Middle East and achieving global domination of an unprecedented sort. It’s a case, as the old Joni Mitchell song put it, of going “round and round and round in the circle game.”  

[Note: Spencer Ackerman has been offering especially good coverage of developments surrounding the recent Bush/Maliki declaration at TPM Muckraker. I’d also like to offer one of my periodic statements of thanks to Iraq-oriented sites that give me daily aid and succor in gathering crucial material and analysis, especially Juan Cole’s invaluable Informed Comment, Antiwar.com, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context.]   Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, where this article first appeared, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has recently been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.  

buying the war: bill moyers’ analysis of journalistic bias and media failure

Buying the War

April 25, 2007

BILL MOYERS: FOUR YEARS AGO THIS SPRING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TOOK LEAVE OF REALITY AND PLUNGED OUR COUNTRY INTO A WAR SO POORLY PLANNED IT SOON TURNED INTO A DISASTER. THE STORY OF HOW HIGH OFFICIALS MISLED THE COUNTRY HAS BEEN TOLD. BUT THEY COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT ON THEIR OWN; THEY NEEDED A COMPLIANT PRESS, TO PASS ON THEIR PROPAGANDA AS NEWS AND CHEER THEM ON.

SINCE THEN THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE DIED, AND MANY ARE DYING TO THIS DAY. YET THE STORY OF HOW THE MEDIA BOUGHT WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WAS SELLING HAS NOT BEEN TOLD IN DEPTH ON TELEVISION. AS THE WAR RAGES INTO ITS FIFTH YEAR, WE LOOK BACK AT THOSE MONTHS LEADING UP TO THE INVASION, WHEN OUR PRESS LARGELY SURRENDERED ITS INDEPENDENCE AND SKEPTICISM TO JOIN WITH OUR GOVERNMENT IN MARCHING TO WAR.

OUR REPORT WAS PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY KATHLEEN HUGHES AND EDITED BY ALISON AMRON.

BILL MOYERS: TWO WEEKS BEFORE (THE PRESIDENT)…WILL ORDER AMERICA TO WAR, PRESIDENT BUSH CALLS A PRESS CONFERENCE TO MAKE THE CASE FOR DISARMING SADDAM HUSSEIN.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Iraq is a part of the war on terror. It’s a country that trains terrorists; it’s a country that could arm terrorists. Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this country.

BILL MOYERS: FOR MONTHS NOW, HIS ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO LINK IRAQ TO 9/11.

PRESIDENT BUSH: September the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a battle field.

BILL MOYERS: AT LEAST A DOZEN TIMES DURING THIS PRESS CONFERENCE HE WILL INVOKE 9/11 AND AL QAEDA TO JUSTIFY A PREEMPTIVE ATTACK ON A COUNTRY THAT HAS NOT ATTACKED AMERICA.

BILL MOYERS: BUT THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS WILL ASK NO HARD QUESTIONS TONIGHT ABOUT THOSE CLAIMS:  ….HE PRESIDENT’S STAFF HAS GIVEN HIM A LIST OF REPORTERS TO CALL ON.  (Explanation:  ERIC BOEHLERT: He sort of giggled and laughed. And, the reporters sort of laughed. And, I don’t know if it was out of embarrassment for him or embarrassment for them because they still continued to play along after his question was done. They all shot up their hands and pretended they had a chance of being called on.)  …I think they felt like the war was gonna happen and the best thing for them to do was to get out of the way.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you for your questions.

BILL MOYERS: OUR STORY BEGINS WITH THE HORROR OF 9/11….

CHARLES GIBSON: (ABC NEWS 9/11/01) Oh my God.

DIANE SAWYER: Oh my God. Oh my God.

CHARLES GIBSON: That looks like a second plane.

BILL MOYERS: LIKE EVERYONE ELSE JOURNALISTS WERE STUNNED BY THE DEATH AND DEVASTATION.

REPORTER (ABC NEWS 9/11/01): This is as close as we can get to the base of the World Trade Center. You can see the firemen assembled here. The police officers, FBI agents. And you can see the two towers – a huge explosion now raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way!

AARON BROWN: (CNN LIVE 9/11/01): And there as you can see, perhaps the second tower, the front tower, the top portion of which is collapsing. Good Lord.

PAT DAWSON (NBC NEWS 9/11/01): If there is a war, it’s a war against terrorism that started, rather ongoing right now, it started here at about quarter to nine this morning.

DAN RATHER: There are no words that can describe this.

DAN RATHER (on LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN, 9/17/01): George Bush is the President, he makes the decisions and you know, as just one American wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.

BILL MOYERS: What I was wrestling with that night listening to you is; once we let our emotions out as journalists on the air, once we say, “We’ll line up with the President,” can we ever really say to the country, “The President’s out of line”?

DAN RATHER: ….there’s no question that we didn’t do a good job.

BILL MOYERS: AND AS THE ADMINISTRATION ORGANIZED TO STRIKE BACK AT THE TERRORISTS, THERE WAS LITTLE TOLERANCE FOR CRITICAL SCRUTINY FROM JOURNALISTS.

WALTER ISAACSON: There was a patriotic fervor and the Administration used it so that if you challenged anything you were made to feel that there was something wrong with that.

BILL MOYERS: Walter Isaacson was then Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CNN.

WALTER ISAACSON: And there was even almost a patriotism police which, you know, they’d be up there on the internet sort of picking anything a Christiane Amanpour, or somebody else would say as if it were disloyal….

BILL MOYERS: We interviewed a former reporter at CNN who had been there through that period. And this reporter said this quote, “Everybody on staff just sort of knew not to push too hard to do stories critical of the Bush Administration.”

WALTER ISAACSON: Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on. There was a real sense that you don’t get that critical of a government that’s leading us in war time. SOLDIER: Move out!

BILL MOYERS: WHEN AMERICAN FORCES WENT AFTER THE TERRORIST BASES IN AFGHANISTAN, NETWORK AND CABLE NEWS REPORTED THE CIVILIAN CASUALTIES.THE PATRIOT POLICE CAME KNOCKING.

WALTER ISAACSON: We’d put it on the air and by nature of a 24-hour TV network, it was replaying over and over again. So, you would get phone calls. You would get advertisers. You would get the Administration.

BILL MOYERS: You said pressure from advertisers?

WALTER ISAACSON: Not direct pressure from advertisers, but big people in corporations were calling up and saying, “You’re being anti-American here.”

BILL MOYERS: SO ISAACSON SENT HIS STAFF A MEMO, LEAKED TO THE WASHINGTON POST: “IT SEEMS PERVERSE” HE SAID, “TO FOCUS TOO MUCH ON THE CASUALTIES OR HARDSHIP IN AFGHANISTAN.”

AND HE ORDERED HIS REPORTERS AND ANCHORS TO BALANCE THE IMAGES OF CIVILIAN DEVASTATION WITH REMINDERS OF SEPTEMBER 11TH.

….NEWSPAPERS WERE SQUEEZED, TOO. THIS ONE IN FLORIDA TOLD ITS EDITORS, “DO NOT USE PHOTOS ON PAGE 1A SHOWING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES… OUR SISTER PAPER …HAS DONE SO AND RECEIVED HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF THREATENING E-MAILS …”

AND THEN THERE WAS FOX NEWS: WHOSE CHIEF EXECUTIVE – THE VETERAN REPUBLICAN OPERATIVE AND MEDIA STRATEGIST ROGER AILES – HAD PRIVATELY URGED THE WHITE HOUSE TO USE THE HARSHEST MEASURES POSSIBLE AFTER 9/11…

WALTER ISSACSON: … so we were caught between this patriotic fervor and a competitor who was using that to their advantage; they were pushing the fact that CNN was too liberal that we were sort of vaguely anti-American.

To read the entire transcript click on “destruction of the fourth estate?” above

archbishop of canterbury speaks out against hegemony in iraq

archbishop of canterbury challenges christian zionism and current u.s. war policies

Statement of Archbishop of Canterbury

 

Sarah Joseph, Times On Line

At one end of the spectrum you have Christian Zionism which is very interested in the Holy Land in ways which I find very strange, and not at all easy to accept.  At the other end of the spectrum you have Christians for whom the Holy Land is some distant theme park.”  He does however feel that a “growing number of Christians have become aware of the reality of the situation on the ground” and journeys there have helped “expose their minds and hearts to the realities.”  He wants to see those numbers growing.

Christian Zionists support the return of Jews to Israel because they believe the second coming of Jesus will not occur until all Jews are in Israel.  The Archbishop is scathing, accusing them of being connected to “the chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens to America is very much as the heart of God’s purpose for humanity.”

In today’s world it is easy to see why people would believe such an idea:  America seems so intrinsically involved in everything.  The Archbishop recognizes that “We have only one global hegemonic power at the moment.”  But, he propounds, “it is not  accumulating territory, it is trying to accumulate influence and control.  That’s not working.  “Far from seeing this positively he describes it as “the worst of all worlds,” saying, “It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering and normalizing it.  Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did–in India for example.  It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put things  back together–Iraq,  for example” 

Wikipedia (non-Williams) hegemony quote:  recently, many scholars have argued that the complex events of September 11, 2001 were instantly and deliberately conflated with “The War on Terror,” a tool with which George W. Bush exploited nationalism, racism, Christianity, and fear so as to pursue corporate profiteering in the energy sector, pharmaceuticals, armaments, telecommunications, and other key sectors.^[3]

krongard, state department inspector general, exposed as having inability to oversee Blackwater

At a hearing of the House oversight committee, State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard was confronted with evidence of conflict of interest, including that his brother is on Blackwater’s advisory board. (By Linda Davidson, The Washington Post)

Glenn Kessler, WP

State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard (click to read source article) said yesterday that he will no longer participate in high-profile probes of Blackwater Worldwide and of the State Department‘s troubled construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Iraq, after a House panel confronted him with evidence of conflicts of interest, including his brother’s role as a strategic adviser to Blackwater.

Krongard’s announcement, made under pressure from House Democrats, means that the top independent investigator at the State Department will recuse himself from examining two of the biggest management headaches facing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has investigated allegations that Krongard impeded State Department probes in Iraq — including potential criminal activity involving alleged gun smuggling by Blackwater and the awarding of the Baghdad embassy construction contract — and has harmed his office with a mercurial management style.

Krongard, under oath before the committee, emphatically denied yesterday that he had thwarted any investigations or that he had done so because of a partisan political agenda, as initially alleged by Democrats. He contended that he had to make choices while working with a relatively small staff and budget. He also stressed that many of the complaints about his style stemmed from his vigorous efforts to reform an office that was dysfunctional and produced poor work.

“I know I was being too hard,” he said. “I know I was expecting too much.”

The State Department inspector general’s office plays a key role in auditing programs, evaluating embassies, and uncovering fraud and misconduct, but a report released yesterday by the committee’s majority staff charged that the office’s effectiveness has been greatly diminished since Krongard, a former chief counsel for an accounting firm, took the helm in 2005.

The majority report, based on interviews with 13 current or former officials of the inspector general’s office, asserts that Krongard inappropriately intervened in probes, including ones involving Blackwater and the Baghdad embassy.

In the case of Blackwater, the Justice Department told the committee that Krongard had resisted helping with a probe of possible gun smuggling by Blackwater into Iraq and had taken steps that had “certainly impacted the investigation.”

Blackwater security personnel are under contract with the State Department to protect diplomats in Iraq, but the deadly shootings of 17 civilians in Baghdad in September raised new questions about State’s oversight of their activities.

Regarding the Baghdad embassy, the report said Krongard for months refused to refer potential criminal conduct uncovered in the awarding of the construction contract to a company called First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting — until after he learned of the committee’s investigation. The report, citing Krongard’s colleagues and the Justice Department, also charged that Krongard had inappropriate contacts with officials under scrutiny for alleged crimes.

In a moment of drama, House Democrats surprised Krongard with documents showing that his brother, former CIA official Alvin B. “Buzzy” Krongard, is a member of the Blackwater Worldwide advisory board. Krongard initially testified that he had been assured by his brother that he was not involved with Blackwater.

After a break, Krongard informed the committee that his brother had confirmed his Blackwater role. “I had not been aware of that,” Krongard said. “I hereby recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater.”

Republicans on the committee had mounted a spirited defense of Krongard, denouncing many of the allegations as “gossip” and offering a lengthy report to rebut them. But Krongard’s admission of his brother’s role appeared to deflate his defenders. “He has done you a tremendous damage,” Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) told Krongard.

In a twist last night, the Web site TPM Muckraker quoted Alvin Krongard as saying that he had told his brother of his Blackwater role. Alvin Krongard did not respond to an e-mail or a call left at his home. Reached at his office and told of his brother’s comments, Howard Krongard said only, “I am not responding to you.”

A family acquaintance, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Krongard brothers for many years have had a tense relationship.

 see 9/19/2007 iraq update posting regarding this story

making war

Militarism: the new American virtue

October 25th, 2007 — Monte

Several quotes are worthy of note in The Next War, And the Next, Part 1 by Jack A. Smith in the Asia Times (emphases are mine, of course):

• “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation.” – President George W. Bush (quoted in Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack)

Nicholson cartoon

torture is not torture: “the day the law died”

 

Bush, Defending Justice Nominee, Sees Unfairness (Excerpted)

Doug Mills/The New York Times, President Bush arriving on Thursday to address a crowd at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 — The White House began a campaign Thursday to save the candidacy of Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general, with President Bush defending him in a speech and in an Oval Office interview, where he complained that Mr. Mukasey was “not being treated fairly” on Capitol Hill.

With Mr. Mukasey’s confirmation in doubt over his refusal to state a clear legal position on a classified Central Intelligence Agency program to interrogate terrorism suspects, Mr. Bush took the unusual step of summoning a small group of reporters into the Oval Office to preview remarks he planned to make later in the day at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization here.

“I believe that the questions he’s been asked are unfair,” Mr. Bush said. “He’s not been read into the program — he has been asked to give opinions of a program or techniques of a program on which he’s not been briefed. I will make the case — and I strongly believe this is true — that Judge Mukasey is not being treated fairly.”

Mr. Bush, in the Oval Office meeting, declined to address waterboarding. “I’m not going to talk about techniques,” he said, adding, “My view is this: The American people have got to understand the program is important and the techniques used are within the law.”

Waterboarding, a centuries-old method that simulates a feeling of drowning, has become a symbol of the larger debate over the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program, and the Mukasey nomination has become a kind of proxy fight for that battle. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney made the war on terror and the C.I.A. program a central theme of their speeches on Thursday, with Mr. Cheney suggesting that the agency’s efforts had spared Americans another terrorist attack.

“Because we’ve been focused, because we’ve refused to let down our guard, we’ve done — gone more now than six years without another 9/11,” the vice president said, addressing the American Legion in Indianapolis.

I AM THE THE LAW AND THE LAW IS MINE

bush defends u.s. interrogation

Oct 6th, 2007 by faithful |

Bush Defends US Interrogation Methods, By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush  defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects on Friday, saying both are successful and lawful.

“When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them,” he said during a hastily called Oval Office appearance. “The American people expect us to find out information, actionable intelligence so we can help protect them. That’s our job.”

Bush volunteered his thoughts on a report on two secret 2005 memos that authorized extreme interrogation tactics against terror suspects. “This government does not torture people,” the president said.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.

rummy’s snowflakes revealed

Rumsfeld’s ‘Snowflakes’

Excerpts from some of the memos sent out by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld:

From 2002 to 2006 Mr Rumsfeld encouraged those working for him to develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally the public into supporting the war on Iraq.

He also stated in these notes, known as ‘snowflakes’, that Muslims avoid physical labor.

The memos revealed aides were urged to highlight the threat of terrorism from other surrounding countries to the American public.

After a conference call with military analysts, he wrote in one memo, “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists.”

In addition, Mr Rumsfeld was also keen to re-name terrorism fight as a “worldwide insurgency” and felt the UN and Europe misunderstood the threat of terrorism from other countries.

The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to “end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world.”

He then advised aides “to test what the results could be” if the war on terrorism is renamed.