Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed | ukwatch.net

Peak Food: Blaming the Victims

Ellie Keen — Thu, 08 May 2008 23:48:27 +0000

I’ve already written about this in previous posts under the ‘hidden holocaust’ theme, but am prompted to re-address this issue given the way it’s been dealt with by mainstream media and associated ‘experts’.

In today’s Independent we see an eye-opening article revealing that amidst what is described as a series of “global food shortages”, a new “government-backed report” shows that “the British public” annually throws away “4.4 million apples, 1.6 million bananas, 1.3 million yoghurt pots, 660,000 eggs, 550,000 chickens, 300,000 packs of crisps and 440,000 ready meals. And for the first time government researchers have established that most of the food waste is made up of completely untouched food products – whole chickens and chocolate gateaux that lie uneaten in cupboards and fridges before being discarded” — adding up to “a record £10b” every year.

And that’s just us Brits. Imagine what the totals are for the Western world combined: Scary and revealing stuff that makes the word “overconsumption” seem like a gross understatement.

But despite the shock value of such important revelations, I’m increasingly concerned at the way in which the food crisis is being portrayed. The Independent goes on to explain the causes of the food crisis as follows: “... millions of the world’s poor face food shortages caused by rising populations, droughts and increased demand for land for biofuels, which have sparked riots and protests from Haiti to Mauritania, and from Yemen to the Philippines.”

So the food crisis comes down to three things:

1) rising populations (presumably not us in the advanced West, but rather those Third World crazies breeding like rabbits despite being so poor)

2) droughts (which may be exacerbated by climate change but in any case often occur naturally and therefore we purportedly can’t do much about)

3) and the drive from energy corporations for investment in biofuels.

Indeed, according to the British government’s new chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington speaking at a government conference two months ago:

“price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. ‘The agriculture industry needs to
double its food production, using less water than today.’“

So again, population and economic growth in the ‘developing nations’, plus climate change, are to blame, and can only be addressed by doubling food production using less water (technologically impossible for all intents and purposes, but we’ll come back to that). It’s Them again — too many of Them, wanting More.

As if to emphasise the point, we hear in the same piece that:

“Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said at the conference that the world’s population was expected to grow from 6.2bn today to 9.5bn in less than 50 years’ time. ‘How are we going to feed everybody?’ he asked.”

Only a rhetorical question of course. Sorry to break it t’ya folks, but ‘feeding everybody’ has never really been one of the state’s major concerns. That’s why “Each tonne of wheat and sugar from the UK is sold on international markets at an average price of 40% and 60% below the cost of production respectively (ie, it is dumped)”, thus undercutting local farmers across the South, who thus lose any semblance of agricultural-independence they may have once had (i.e. the ability to feed their own people), thus becoming subject to the whims of the global food market, manipulated through speculation in the interests of Northern investors and consumers.

But the important point for now is that as far as Hilary Benn is concerned, it’s clear that the cause of the problem is “their” population growth.

Later in the article, Professor Beddington is cited pointing out that global grain stores are currently at the lowest levels ever, just 40 days from running out. He again emphasises the question of food production: “I am only nine weeks into the job, so don’t yet have all the answers, but it is clear that science and research to increase the efficiency of agricultural production per unit of land is critical.”

According to Beddington, food security is the “elephant in the room” that politicians must face up to quickly. In reality, the “elephant in the room” goes far deeper than the surface issues scratched at lamely by the government, and sits in the heart of global food production. Some of Beddington’s observations show that he is dimly aware of this problem. He understands that production needs to be increased drastically. But his solution is a technological one, “science and research” in order to maximise “efficiency” so we can produce faster and better to meet escalating global demand. This is unlikely to happen. Beddington knows it. Benn knows it. The supermarket chains know it.

From this conventional analysis of the food crisis, we are not left with many solutions. We may, however, pick among the following: 1) the proliferation and prolongation of droughts due to climate change means that we need to slow down our CO2 emissions by introducing ‘market incentives’ (i.e. big taxes) targeted largely at consumers, who are blamed for having no regard for the size of their individual carbon footprints. transfering to alternative renewable energies is, for some odd reason, irrelevant. 2) reducing population growth in developing countries to decrease demand for food (nothing at all to do with NSSM 200, of course). 3) go easy on the biofuels (but fail to propose investment in other viable alternative energy sources). 4) pray day and night that Science will somehow generate a technological miracle of agricultural production.

Obviously, none of these ‘solutions’ seems to really offer a way out for the food crisis — and that’s because the analysis is fundamentally flawed. It’s not completely wrong, it just misses out half the picture, and so comes up with a false diagnosis of what’s actually gone wrong. The result is that the institutions that require urgent re-structuring are being absolved. The government, the state, and the network of giant multinational corporations that govern global agribusiness, are excused of any culpability. The cause of the crisis, we keep hearing is, WE, THE PEOPLE! It’s the developing nations, who just won’t stop breeding, dammit. It’s us Western consumers, who won’t stop eating and throwing a third of our food away. It’s everyone except the state-corporate complex that controls the food industry.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you and I are NOT culpable. Of course we are. We do throw away tonnes, literally, of food. We do, each of us, have large carbon footprints that we should try to reduce in our own ways. Populations are increasing. But the question is this: are these factors the fundamental causes of the current global food crisis? Or are they exacerbating factors that are accentuating and intensifying the impact of the food crisis? Following mainstream news coverage of food shortages, one would be forgiven for believing that rising food prices are all because of you and me, the public, the general consumer. We have been thoroughly pathologised. And the British government, with its eye-opening study of how much food the British consumer chucks away without thinking, is complicit in this pathologisation.

Why is that the government-backed report discussed in today’s Independent, says nothing about the institutions who are primarily responsible for food wastage, the supermarkets, the multinational food chains? If the government is genuinely concerned about food wastage in this country, why won’t they do something about the fact reported by the same newspaper in February, that:

“Retailers generate 1.6 million tonnes of food waste each year… An influential watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), will condemn targets set by the Government’s waste-reduction programme as ‘unambitious and lacking urgency’. It will also say multi-buy promotions are helping to fuel waste and obesity in Britain. Speaking to The Independent on Sunday ahead of the report’s publication on Saturday, Tim Lang, SDC commissioner, said it was ‘ludicrous’ that the Government had not pressured retailers into setting tougher targets to cut waste.

Three years ago, the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) left it up to supermarkets to find voluntary ‘solutions to food waste’ in an agreement dubbed the Courtauld Commitment. ‘The Government is frankly not using its leverage adequately. It really should toughen up on Courtauld, which must be enforced because this is ludicrous,’ said Mr Lang, who is also professor of food policy at City University, London.

The 18-month study, which found that ‘too many supermarket practices are still unhealthy, unjust and unsustainable’, said Wrap should adopt a ‘more aspirational approach to reducing waste in food retail by setting longer-term targets and [supporting] a culture of zero waste’...

A separate study by Imperial College for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, found that supermarkets preferred to throw away food that was approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price.”

So three months after being hit over the head by the Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s waste reduction programme completely ignores the warnings that supermarket profit-maximisation policies are not only directly generating billions of pounds of waste by dumping good food, they are encouraging consumers through excessive advertising, multi-buy offers, and refusal to slash prices on older foods, to also buy excess food they don’t need, a third of which they dump in turn.

Instead, the government simply blames consumers. Period. Don’t penalise Profit, nor Power. Pathologise People.

The corporate-biased law doesn’t help either, because: “The scale of the wastage from supermarkets, food processors, wholesalers and restaurants is not known, because many companies refuse to make their data public, citing commercial confidentiality.” In other words, we don’t even know the real scale of corporate food wastage. Worse, the government regularly does the same thing — here’s an example: “In the past 10 months, the government’s food intervention board dumped almost 30,000 tonnes of fresh vegetables and fruit which had been withdrawn from the market to guarantee farm prices.”

So the problem is far more complex, rooted in a consumerist culture that is tied to a political economy being deliberately sustained by those institutions with the most to gain from this entrenched structure. The government has no interest in transforming that political economy. So the result is an insistence on inspecting only half the picture, ignoring the role of the global corporate food industry.

Driven by capitalist imperatives for short-term profit maximisation and long-term cost-minimisation, global agribusiness has established an international food production system that is, basically, dying.

Most of the Earth’s fertile land is already now being used for food production. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 reported that “there is now little room for further agricultural expansion.” One of the scientists, Dr Navin Ramankutty, points out: “The real question is, how can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences such as deforestation, water pollution and soil erosion?” Or, more bluntly, how are we going to keep producing food if our production-system continues to destroy the very means to produce food?

It’s not that the Earth can’t produce the food. Its that corporate agribusiness can’t produce the food. In fact, as I’ve warned previously, it has been failing to produce the food since the 1990s, during which grain production has increasingly slowed. The frenzied application of fertilisers and other modern agricultural practices served to temporarily escalate production, but simultaneously have intensified soil erosion, destroying in years essential nutrients for crop-growth that take centuries to replace. The imminent peak of world oil production, oil being the chief underpinning for industrial agricultural methods, which is either just round the corner in 2010-ish (or worse, passed in 2005) means that the global corporate food production system is up against its own physical limits.

For us to keep eating, it’s true, we have to put an end to our insane overconsumption and wastefulness. But there are real limits to what the consumer can do within the existing global corporate food system. So we need to turn our attention to that system, and demand that it changes fundamentally, which means, of course, a wholesale transformation of our political economies in ways which rely on renewable energy resources and localised less-intensive but no less successful traditional agricultural practices. We need some kind of grassroots action, which makes our voices impossible to ignore. It will take time to develop, to become strong, to gather momentum. But it needs to be done, and now. Because at current rates of declining food production and rising prices, fuelled by unscrupulous market speculation, many, many people are likely to die, not just in the South, but here too. And while this death escalates, a few at the helm of the global corporate food industry will reap unprecedented windfall profits from their deaths. That’s why real solutions aren’t being put on the table. Death is regrettable, but when it comes wrapped in £££$$$, it’s not so bad…

The Iraqi Holocaust: 90 Years of Imperial Genocide

Tim Holmes — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 16:12:05 +0000

We hear a lot about the “new” imperialism these days. Indeed, it’s become somewhat of an intellectual fad. Pundits, political commentators, and even professors have been busy debating the “new” Anglo-American empire. The one that spontaneously burst into existence sometime after 9/11, probably around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Volumes of academic verbiage along with pages of distilled analytical wisdom are poured into efforts to try and understand whether this “new” empire is good or bad for the world. Occasionally, we get a little bit of criticism of the failures of Bush and his neoconservative ideologues. Consistently left out of the debate is, of course, the existence of an overwhelmingly enormous Elephant occupying the Living Room of intellectual freedom.

What is this Elephant, and from whence does it come?

This Elephant symbolises that rather difficult subject matter known as the Brute Facts of History, the absence of which is what permits mainstream commentators to pontificate endlessly in a manner that serves not to illuminate, but to obscure.

Ignoring the Brute Facts of History, unfortunately, is integral to Western political culture. It permits a war for oil and power based on genocide to be paraded as exporting democracy and protecting security; it allows the systematization and globalization of mass death to be legitimized as necessary violence in the service of life itself. Western political culture survives on such methods of misinformation. For suppressing History is precisely how Western imperial power legitimizes its violence.

It is this systematic incapability to practice serious, sustained self-critique and self-reflection that prevents our societies from envisioning what we have been doing in Iraq as it truly is. For what we have perpetrated, and continue to perpetrate, is no less than a protracted 90-year Holocaust. The term “Holocaust” is not used loosely here, but in its full import. Its aptness emerges self-evidently from a brief inspection of the Brute Facts of History. It reveals that our political culture is utterly morally bankrupt, if not pathologically narcissistic; our political party system is hopelessly corrupt and irrelevant, thoroughly complicit in the sponsorship of a century or more of imperial genocide, yet still enamoured of its own “civilized” stature; our mass media, equally bankrupt, narcissistic, corrupt and indeed in many ways irrelevant as far as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights are genuinely concerned.

For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood.

A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. Throughout this 90 year period, American, British and other Western states have facilitated, sponsored, commissioned and participated in acts of genocidal violence against the Iraqi people. Yet this brutal, shocking history, so overwhelming, so integral to the fundamental interests of Western power in one of the world’s most strategic regions (the Middle East) is simply not part of the historical consciousness of our societies. It is not part of our self-identity. Because our governments don’t do such things. We are, of course, “civilized.”

With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that were genocidal. If this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations. We will proceed by dividing the Iraqi Holocaust into four major historical phases, which we discuss in chronological order.

Phase 1 – The “Arab Façade”

Shortly after the First World War, a number of European powers including England turned their eyes toward the Middle East, with a view to weaken the regional hegemony of Ottoman Turkey, the Muslim caliphate for four centuries. The region encompassed by the Ottoman caliphate included the areas of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and much of Saudi Arabia. Amidst a plethora of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and even religious differences, Islam provided the basis of political unity sustaining the caliphate. [Aburish, Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Indigo, London, 1998] The Ottomans were hardly saints, and had their own fair share of violence and repression. Among other things, they were complicit in the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide.

Yet that doesn’t absolve the British for what they planned and did in the Middle East, which has now amounted to the continuation of relations of violence and even genocide. British officers in the Arab Bureau in Cairo improvised plans to sponsor local uprisings. According to Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, British aims were explicitly to divide, and thus weaken, the Arabs, not unify them. Despite public overtures of support for Arab unity and independence, the British secretly signed the 1916 Sykes-Pikot Agreement with France, which made official the task of controlling Middle East oil by exploiting internal divisions. Under the Agreement, Iraq was to be carved-up between France and Britain. Thus, Britain invaded southern Iraq as soon as war with the Ottomans had been declared, taking Baghdad in 1917, and Mosul in November 1918. Iraq was not the only innovation. British, French, American and other European manoeuvres saw the creation of twelve new fictional Middle East nation-states from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The contents of the Sykes-Pikot agreement were revealed in 1921 when the Bolsheviks retrieved a copy. Oil was, of course, a major factor in its formulation, as was officially recognised in the 1920 San Remo Treaty, and in the illegal 1928 Red Line Agreement, involving the British and French sharing of the oil wealth of former Turkish territories originally under Ottoman rule. Here, percentages of future oil production were allocated to British, French and American oil companies. [Aburish, ibid.]

In the aftermath of the war, what remained of the Ottoman empire was divided among the colonial powers in the mandate system established under the League of Nations, by which formerly Ottoman territories were to be governed by the European powers to guide them toward self-government. Britain managed to obtain the mandate for Iraq, even threatening war to keep the oil-rich Mosul province in the country. The announcement of British mandate rule in Iraq in 1920 led to widespread indigenous revolts, which were ruthlessly suppressed by British forces. That year, then Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill, proposed that Mesopotamia “could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.” His proposal was formally adopted the next year at the Cairo conference, and Iraqi villages were bombed from the air. [Edward Greer, ‘The Hidden History of the Iraq War,’ Monthly Review, May 1991]

Subsequently, emir Faysal I – who belonged to the Hashemite family of Mecca – was appointed by the British High Commissioner as the King of Iraq. Faysal immediately signed a treaty of alliance with Britain that virtually re-instated the British mandate. To counter the widespread nationalist protests to this continuation of colonial rule by proxy, the British High Commissioner forcefully deported nationalist leaders, while establishing an Iraqi constitution granting King Faysal dictatorial powers over the Iraqi parliament. Iraqi popular unrest, however, was intolerable enough to make this state of affairs increasingly unsustainable, forcing Britain to grant Iraq formal independence in 1932 as part of the process of decolonisation. The gesture, however, was only token. Britain had already signed a new treaty with Iraq establishing a “close alliance” between the two countries and a “common defence position.” With King Faysal still in charge and British bases remaining in Basra and west of the Euphrates, British rule was rehabilitated in an indirect form. When elements of the Iraqi army and political parties toppled King Faysal in 1941, Britain invaded and occupied Iraq again to re-install him.

This policy in Iraq — which included both the colonial phase of direct rule and the transition to effective indirect rule under decolonisation — was candidly described by Lord George Curzon, then British Foreign Secretary, who noted that what the UK and other Western powers desired in the Middle East was an:

“Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff…. There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.” [William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1982, p. 28, 34]

Lord Curzon had defined in explicit terms the regional framework of political order as a network of surrogate client-regimes. Hence, in attempting to ensure that these client-regimes remain fundamentally compliant with the overall parameters of “British guidance”, regional policy was designed to sustain their internal stability at all costs. As the global hegemony of the British empire faded, virtually eclipsed after the Second World War by the United States, the same policy was pursued. As one US State Department official stated in 1958: “Western efforts should be directed at… the gradual development and modernisation of the Persian Gulf shaikhdoms without imperiling internal stability or the fundamental authority of the ruling groups.” And similarly, the US National Security Council noted in 1958: “Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries.” [Curtis, Mark, The Great Deception, (London: Pluto) p. 147, 127] Yet a further secret British document from the same year concurs, detailing other relevant strategic considerations:

“The major British and other Western interests in the Persian Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued availability of that oil on favourable terms and for surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism in the area and subsequently to defend the area against the brand of Arab nationalism.” [File FO 371/132 779. ‘Future Policy in the Persian Gulf’, 15 January 1958, FO 371/132 778. Cited in Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)]

Phase 2 – Our “Policeman”

The period after the Second World War saw renewed imperial overtures from both Britain and the United States to regain hegemony over Iraq. After taking power in 1958, Iraqi president Abdul Qarim Qassem was tolerated by the Eisenhower administration as a counter to the pan-Arab nationalist aspirations of Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. [Roger Morris, ‘A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,’ New York Times, 14 March 2003] But by 1961, he challenged US-led Western interests again by nationalising part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company. He also declared that Iraq had a legitimate historical claim to the oil-rich Western client regime Kuwait. [Aburish, op. cit.]

He thus became “regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.” Consequently, plans were laid to overthrow him enlisting the assistance of Iraqi elements hostile to Kassim’s administration, with the CIA at the helm.” In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshalled opponents of the Iraqi regime,” notes the NY Times. “Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents.” Former Ba’athist leader Hani Fkaiki has confirmed that Saddam Hussein – then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after attempting to assassinate Kassim in 1958 – was colluding with the CIA at this time. [Aburish, op. cit.]

Aburish collects together official documents and testimony showing that the CIA had even supplied the lists of people to be eliminated once power was secured. Approximately 5,000 people were killed in the 1963 coup, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors, resulting in the decimation of much of the country’s educated class. Iraqi exiles such as Saddam assisted in the compilation of the lists in CIA stations throughout the Middle East. The longest list, however, was produced by an American intelligence agent, William McHale. None were spared from the subsequent butchery, including pregnant women and elderly men. Some were tortured in front of their children. Saddam himself “had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors [and] was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.” [Aburish, op. cit.]

US intelligence was integrally involved in planning the details of the operation. According to the CIA’s royal collaborator: “Many meetings were held between the Ba’ath party and American intelligence – the most critical ones in Kuwait.” Although Saddam’s Ba’ath party was then only a minor nationalist movement, the party was chosen by the CIA due to the group’s close relations with the Iraqi army. Aburish reports that the Ba’ath party leaders had agreed to “undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies” in return for CIA support. He cites one Ba’ath party leader, Hani Fkaiki, confessing that the principal orchestrator of the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad. [Aburish]

In 1968, another coup granted Ba’athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr control of Iraq, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. The violent coup was also supported by the CIA. Roger Morris, formerly of the US National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, recalls that he had “often heard CIA officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.” [Morris] Thus, two gruesome CIA military coups brought the genocidal Ba’ath party, and with it Saddam Hussein, to power, in order to protect US strategic and economic interests.

Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these Anglo-American interventions and occupations. Using United Nations data and the concept of “excess mortality” – “the difference between actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics” — Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself obtained power [Gideon Polya, “Iraq Death Toll Amounts to a Holocaust”, Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43); Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne: LaTrobe, 2007)]

Western sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, now well-documented, continued through to the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. During that period, funds and technologies supplied by the US, Britain, France, to name only three major powers, served to support Saddam during his war with Iran (1980-88) — killing 1.7 million people on both sides; and his internal repression such as the genocidal Anfal campaign (1987-89) against the Kurds — killing 100,000 people including the gassing of 5,000 at the village of Halabja in 1988. Although the US Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the Anfal atrocities, the Reagan administration pressured the House of Representatives to block the bill. In 1989, a year after the attacks, the US government doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to Saddam to more than US$1 billion. A declassified National Security directive issued by then President Bush Snr. in October that year prioritised the provision of funds and technology to Saddam’s regime, describing it as the “West’s policeman in the region.” The international community, in other words, under US leadership, was complicit in Saddam’s acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing [Anthony Burke, “Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering”, Global Change, Peace & Security (June 2005, Vol 17, No 2) p. 206; Curtis, p. 129]

Phase 3 – “Paying the Price”

Finally, of course, we have the scale of deaths resulting from direct Western interventions in the post-1991 period until today. According to a demographic study by Beth Daponte, formerly of the US Commerce Department’s Census Bureau of Foreign Countries, Iraqi deaths due to the 1991 Gulf War totalled 205,500. Out of these, 148,000 civilians were killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the war, including due to adverse health effects resulting from the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure during the Allied bombing campaign. [Beth Osborne Daponte, “A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War” Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (1993)]

1991 is also the year in which the Allies imposed via the United Nations comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq, purportedly to prevent Saddam’s access to weapons of mass destruction, but which tended to entrench the power of his regime while fatally depriving the Iraqi people of essential items to survive. Thus, from 1991 to 2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children. In fact, officials had occasionally acknowledged that the Iraqi population was the primary target of the sanctions regime, a means of waging protracted war on Saddam. “Iraqis will pay the price while [Saddam] is in power”, warned Robert Gates, then presidential national security adviser and current Defense Secretary [Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)]

Arguments that the UN sanctions regime constituted a form of genocide are supported by multiple United Nations officials who were directly involved in the administration of the regime, such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Hans von Sponeck, former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Generally, the argument has pointed not only at the immense scale, in terms of numbers of people who have died due to the sanctions, but has also highlighted direct evidence of Western intent at senior levels, by proving that officials responsible for sanctions policies were fully cognizant of their impact in the deaths of Iraqi civilians [George E. Bisharat, “Sanctions as Genocide,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2001, Vol. 11, No. 2) pp. 379-425; Thomas Nagy, “The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others”, Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Minnesota, 12 July 2001)

Phase 4 – Exporting Democracy

Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War. Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the epidemiological study by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures, which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry’s figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser described the survey’s methods as “close to best practice” and its results “robust”, advising ministers not to criticise the study in public. [Paul Reynolds, “Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates”, BBC News (20 October 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6045112.stm; Owen Bennett-Jones, “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’” BBC News (26 March 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm].

Indeed, Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005. Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the invasion. [Tina Susman, “Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million”, Los Angeles Times (14 September 2007)] The ORB findings tally with those of the John Hopkins team, whose data-set, according to independent experts such as Australian biochemist Dr. Gideon Polya, calculated for a year later confirms at least one million post-2003 Iraqi deaths due to the war.

These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to 3 million people.

Hand on his heart, Tony Blair told the world before his resignation that he “believed” what he did in Iraq was “right”. I’m sure he did. No doubt, so did Hitler with regard to his exterminatory campaigns in Europe.

We may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial power are doing in Iraq is right. But the truth is that some of the worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly believed that what they were doing was right. What is worse is that the Iraqi Holocaust is only the tip of the iceberg, a mere fragment of the imperial violence that has been, and is being, committed throughout the world, in our name.

If we have any semblance of humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile, at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our most urgent task must be to find ways to challenge and oppose this global system, which has expanded not only during the era of traditional modern “colonization” but even moreso in the era of postmodern “globalization”, systematically generating genocidal violence against hundreds of millions of people across the South; and systematically finding ways to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary… for us to live, breathe and prosper.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society, 2003) and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (www.globalcrisis.org.uk) in London. He teaches globalisation, empire and international relations at Brunel and Sussex Universities in the UK.

John Ware's BBC Iraq fiasco

Tim Holmes — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 21:22:26 +0000

Weary of Ware’s wares

Watching journalist John Ware’s two-part BBC television documentary aired on Sunday and Monday, 28th and 29th October 2007, “No plan, no peace in Iraq”, one came away with the impression that the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq was nothing more than one incredibly inept debacle after another. Stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance are about the only factors that explain the overwhelming reality of Anglo-American role in Iraq by Ware’s depiction: total and utter mismanagement.

Enforced by the spate of testimonials from British military leaders, such as retired General Sir Mike Jackson, or Major General Tim Cross, this has now become the standard conventional critique of our role in Iraq. John Ware’s ruminations and interviews fleshed out the contours of this critique, which has been so entrenched in mainstream discourse that it sorely requires a systematic counter-critique. Hence, John Ware’s BBC programme on Iraq offers an ideal opportunity to do this.

Writing on the BBC News website, Ware explained that:

“… it’s now clear that Mr Blair knew before the invasion that America’s planning for post-war recovery was woefully inadequate – and so was Britain’s. There was no properly worked-out strategy for the key longer term objective of transforming it into a stable, prosperous nation that the Blair-Bush vision held out.” [John Ware, “No Peace, No Plan in Iraq”, BBC News (27 October 2007)]

He goes on to blame “the rush to war” and “the blur of ideology” for the apparent lack of postwar planning. Ware takes it as given that “the Bush-Blair vision” for postwar Iraq was indeed to build a stable, prosperous democratic nation. Having accepted this as his starting assumption, all and any evidence that what happened in Iraq departed from this vision becomes obvious evidence, for Ware, of how incompetent and bumbling the Americans and British were in failing to plan properly for how to effect this noble vision. Although officials across the Atlantic are eager to blame the other side, he concludes that they’re both at fault:

“The truth is both governments got just about everything wrong in their assumptions as to what would follow the fall of Saddam. ... The evidence suggests that in the rush to war, planning for what came afterwards was not a first order priority in either Washington – or London.” [Ware, “UK and US Play Iraq ‘Blame Game’” BBC News (29 October 2007)]

Ineptitude, lack of foresight and mismanagement no doubt played a role. Ware would have us believe they played the only role. Seemingly critical of Anglo-American policymaking, it’s important to note that Ware’s BBC investigation rarely attempts to actually subject any of the individuals he interviews to meaningful scrutiny. The entire programme assumes that Anglo-American objectives in Iraq were, and are, fundamentally to create a stable, democratic country; that officials were genuine and sincere in their intentions, but were so pre-occupied by rushing to war and some unspecified “ideology”, that they simply “recklessly” failed to plan properly. This failure then, while worthy of harsh criticism, was still a matter of sheer stupidity on the part of our governments.

The outcome of Ware’s analysis is, in many ways, one of moral relief. We’re able to feel satisfied that whatever horrendous disasters and loss of life have occurred in Iraq, it was all the result of unfortunate miscalculations and lack of foresight; nothing to do with our politico-economic institutions, nothing to do with actual government planning, but rather simply to do with lack of such planning.

The implication is obvious. The Americans and British, bearing the heavy (white man’s?) burden of responsibility for Iraq – having now occupied the beleaguered nation for the last 4 years – have a moral responsibility to rectify the unfortunate consequences, all totally regretful, of our governmental recklessness. Although Ware doesn’t spell it out, there is a solution logically implicit in his narrative: to have not less Anglo-American interventionism, by for instance withdrawing troops, but rather to have more and better full-on planning and involvement to ensure that Iraq returns to the course of stability, prosperity and democratization – as undoubtedly originally intended.

In the ensuing discussion, we will discuss how badly John Ware’s BBC television project serves the public interest, by completely ignoring documented facts, all in the public record for the last few years. The result is a programme that is partial, inaccurate, and untruthful; rather like much of the official justifications for intervention and occupation. In preparing this response to Ware, and the trend of thinking he represents, I draw liberally from my book on the Iraq War, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (Clairview, 2003), which critiques the record of Anglo-American intervention in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman empire all the way up to the 2003 Iraq War. For some reason this book is not very well known, but it provides, if I do say so myself, the most comprehensive and properly documented treatment of the lead-up to the 2003 invasion so far.

The Bush-Blair Vision for Iraq and the Middle East

If we are to believe John Ware, the Anglo-American vision for Iraq was to develop a stable, prosperous and democratic nation. But it has long been clear that this was never the real agenda in Iraq. Ware avoids all mention of the abundance of evidence that shows, to the contrary, that the Bush-Blair vision for Iraq was part of a wider grand strategy of American expansionism in the Middle East, motivated by extremely dubious interests.

This was not a plan about Iraq. The Iraq War plan was only one stage in a wider strategy to re-configure and thereby dominate the entire Middle East. According to former CIA political analyst Kathleen Christison and former Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis Bill Christison:

“… [T]wo strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice president heavily invested in oil. All of these factors - the dual loyalties of an extensive network of policymakers allied with Israel, the influence of a fanatical wing of Christian fundamentalists, and oil – probably factor in more or less equally to the administration’s calculations on the Palestinian-Israeli situation and on war with Iraq.” [Kathleen and Bill Christison, “The Bush Administration’s Dual Loyalties: A Rose By Any Other Name,” Counterpunch (13 December 2003)]

Ware seems utterly oblivious to all this, and indeed to the fact that numerous American military intelligence experts have confirmed the role of the Iraq War as part of a wider regional strategy.
According to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism operations of the CIA: “Clearly Iraq is not the last phase of what the administration tends to do in the Middle East.”

Former State Department and CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson similarly agreed that: “The administration may be working on the theory that by taking care of a secondary target like Syria, you bring tremendous pressure on primary targets” such as Iran, which may force changes in behaviour “without resorting to force.” Johnson continues that “By rights [Iran] should be the next target.”

Former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations for over two decades spending most of his career in the Middle East, further observed that the Bush administration wants “to divide up Syria, give part of Iraq to Turkey, overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, restore the Hashemites to the Hijaz,” a very center of Saudi Arabian culture. “The underlying motivation” for this “is Israel. They think the demographics are going badly for Israel, for the US.”

[CIA sources cited in Richard Sale and Nicholas M. Morris, “War talk sweeps city,” United Press International, 11 February 2003; reprinted in Washington Times, 12 February 2003, http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030211-065953-3776r.htm/]

Democracy? Security? Naah, it’s Oil and Power, Stupid!

That democracy was far removed from the intentions of the war-planners is indisputable. John Ware echoes the government’s own justifications for the war in the form of Saddam himself. He points out that Tony Blair displayed a consistently unhealthy interest in trying to prove that Saddam was “uniquely evil”. The thrust of this, in hindsight, was clearly that Saddam was supposed to be a “uniquely evil” threat to both his own Iraqi people, as well as to the security of the international community. Thus, sincere concern for democracy and human rights meant that the Americans and British had to act against Saddam.

As Ware ought to know, this absurd story was refuted as long ago as one year before 9/11, four years before the Iraq invasion, by the notorious neo-conservative think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose sponsors were ranking members of the Bush administration at that time, including Vice-President Dick Cheney; I. Lewis Libby, the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff; Elliott Abrams, Middle East director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, White House liaison to Iraqi opposition groups; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; John Bolton, Ambassador to the UN; and so on. In September 2000, PNAC published a document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which dismissed the relevance of Saddam’s tyrannical security threats to the need for military involvement in Iraq:

“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

So Saddam’s anti-democratic regime provided an immediate justification for a military intervention in Iraq that was motivated by other more transcendental issues. Issues like control of one of the world’s largest oil reserves. In 2001, a report on “energy security” – commissioned by Vice-President Dick Cheney and sponsored by two leading government-influenced U.S. think-tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy, concluded ominously that: “The world, is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity.” The impending crisis is increasing “US and global vulnerability to disruption” and now leaves the US facing “unprecedented energy price volatility,” One of the key “consequences” of the fact that “the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma” is the “need for military intervention.” The report thus recommends that energy and security policy be integrated to prevent “manipulations of markets by any state.”

The principal source of disruption to the existing energy system, the report concludes, lies in “Middle East tension”, due to which “chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption.” The threat posed by Iraq is highlighted. In 2000, Iraq had “effectively become a swing producer, turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest to do so.” There is a “possibility that Saddam Hussein may remove Iraqi oil from the market for an extended period of time” in order to damage prices.

“Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets.

“This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader… and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments.

“The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.”

[Neil Mackay, “Official: U.S. oil at the heart of Iraq crisis,” Sunday Herald, 6 October 2002, http://www.sundayherald.com/print28285; Neil Mackay, “The West’s battle for oil,” Sunday Herald, http://www.sundayherald.com/28224. For full text see Report of an Independent Task Force, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy / Council on Foreign Relations, April 2001, available online at the Baker Institute website, http://www.rice.edu/projects/baker/Pubs/workingpapers/cfrbipp_energy/energytf.htm]

In all of this general evidence of strategic planning behind the 2003 Iraq War, we find that there is no evidence whatsoever of concern for stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq. What we do find is abundant evidence for an overarching concern with geostrategic ambitions rooted in a questionable neo-conservative ideology tied to the goals of sustaining US pre-eminence through both control of oil and manipulation of Israel.

It never occurs to Ware that stability, prosperity and democracy in Iraq were never factored into postwar planning in Iraq because the postwar planning was never intended to secure stability, prosperity or democracy. Contrary to Ware’s argument, backed up only by a list of illustrious looking talking heads, postwar planning in Iraq did exist, and it was concerned fundamentally with these other regional strategic, political and economic objectives; those objectives obliterated all other concerns, and this is precisely why Anglo-American leaders remained studiously uninterested in postwar planning for stability, prosperity and democracy.

Er, Lots of Plans, None Involving Peace, in Iraq

Let’s now examine John Ware’s overriding theme: There were no serious plans whatsoever for what would happen after the war. This has virtually become established dogma, particularly here in the UK; and the main basis of conventional “criticism” of the war.

All the evidence, Ware suggests, shows that the Americans wanted to conduct a quick operation permitting the immediate removal of US forces after the successful removal of Saddam. He reports that Donald Rumsfeld, “The hawkish defence secretary had required his generals to give America a ‘lite’ footprint – a small invasion force that could be rapidly withdrawn afterwards.” He also interviews Sir Christopher Meyer, then British Ambassador to Washington, who tells Ware that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that “there was a black hole in American planning for the aftermath.”

Ware even gets some American talking heads to confirm that any planning that was being done, was in fact not actual planning at all. Longstanding State Department planning, for instance, was “never intended as a post-war plan”, insisted Ryan Crocker, US Ambassador to Iraq. Based on Crocker’s opinion, Ware concludes that whatever the State Department planning was, it only amounted to “a series of expert study groups whose purpose was to engage Iraqi Americans in thinking about their country’s future.” This explains the failure to get off the ground serious reconstruction efforts to help the Iraqi people.

Hmmm. Not quite. Extensive evidence in the public record, evidence that Ware failed to acknowledge let alone address, shows that the Bush administration was indeed working on a very specific postwar plan for Iraq. Such as the State Department’s detailed “reconstruction” plan, designed to rob the country of its resources.

American investigative journalist Greg Palast, who has reported for BBC Newsnight, the Observer and the Guardian, obtained a State Department document, “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth,” in February 2003. In 101-pages, the document detailed the Bush administration’s plans for a complete rewrite of Iraq’s “policies, laws and regulations”, based on low taxes on big business, and quick sales of Iraq’s banks and bridges, “all state enterprises” to foreign investors.

Among other things, the document stipulates that Iraq would have to “privatize” its “oil and supporting industries.” Annex D of the document set out, Palast reports, “a strict 360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq.” Under the tutelage of Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority imposed in the aftermath of the invasion issued “exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of the Economy Plan.” Palast lists several major examples, but one is worth citing here by way of illustration:

“Order 12, ‘Trade Liberalization’, permitted the tax- and tariff-free import of foreign products. One big winner was Cargill, the world’s largest grain merchant, which flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat. For Iraqi farmers, already wounded by sanctions and war, this was devastating. They could not compete with the US and Australian surpluses dumped on them. But ‘the import plan’ carried out the letter of the Economy Plan.”

It is no surprise then that Palast quotes a disgruntled US government insider who worked on the State Department plan, noting that it conflicted fundamentally with real Iraqi democracy.

“They have [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz coming out saying it’s going to be a democratic country’ but we’re going to do something that 99 percent of the people of Iraq wouldn’t vote for.” [Greg Palast, “Adventure Capitalsism: the hidden 2001 plan to carve-up Iraq”, 27 October 2004, http://www.gregpalast.com/adventure-capitalism-the-hidden-2001-plan-to-carve-up-iraq/]

From the very beginning, reports from high-level sources indicated that the Americans and British were not very interested in facilitating Iraqi democratization. They originally wanted a “regime change” that focused on the removal of Saddam himself and his top associates, without a fundamental restructuring of the regime itself. This had been the strategy as early as the 1991 Gulf War, during which Richard Haas, then Senior Director of Near East Affairs at the US National Security Council, confirmed that: “Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime.” Haas, of course later became Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under the administration of President George W Bush. [Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 37]

Daniel Neep – head of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London – reported in late 2002 on the postwar thinking going in Anglo-American policymaking circles:

“The ideal scenario is someone within Iraq, preferably within the army, killing Saddam and taking control. That would mean that entering Baghdad would not be necessary and would also solve the problem of who will govern once he has gone.”
[Observer, 17 November 2002, p. 20]

As the New York Times elaborated in late February 2003:

“... outraged Iraqi exiles report that there won’t be any equivalent of postwar de-Nazification, in which accomplices of the defeated regime were purged from public life… Instead the Bush administration intends to preserve most of the current regime: Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced with Americans, but the rest will stay. You don’t have to be an Iraq expert to realize that many very nasty people will therefore remain in power” [Paul
Krugman, “The Martial Plan,” New York Times, 21 February 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/opinion/21KRUG.html?ex=1046832072&ei=1&en=b9794179c1952ba0]

Independent correspondent Patrick Cockburn, Visiting Fellow at Washington DC’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), further commented that:

“Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials… are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers. It undercuts the argument by George Bush and Tony Blair that war is justified by the evil nature of the regime in Baghdad…” [Patrick Cockburn, “Kurdish leaders enraged by ‘undemocratic’ American plan to occupy Iraq,” The Independent, 17 February 2003, http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=379060&host=3&dir=508]

Furthermore, superimposed over the entrenched Ba’athist military-political structure, the US had already been drawing up extensive plans to establish a colonial-style administration of direct control. The Independent in February 2003 described documents summarising the conclusions of 17 State Department working groups – the same groups that John Ware suggests were “never intended as a post-war plan” and only designed to help “Iraqi Americans” do some “thinking” about their country of origin.

That’s not how it was reported at the time, but Ware displays little interest in the boring details of recent history. “Britain and America have been working for months on detailed proposals on how to rebuild Iraq after President Saddam”, reported The Independent. “In the initial aftermath of any war, Iraq would be governed by a senior US military officer, probably General Tommy Franks, with a civilian administrator.” General Franks would be expected to “initially impose martial law,” while Iraqis would be relegated to the sidelines as “advisers” to the US administration. [Andrew Buncombe, “US sees ‘someone like Jimmy Carter’ to oversee administration after overthrow of Saddam,” The Independent, 13 February 2003]

And what of Ware’s reiteration of belated official claims that Dick Cheney only wanted a “small invasion force” that would be “rapidly withdrawn” after Saddam’s removal?

Again, this is just plain false. The Washington Post also reported on the postwar planning performed by the State Department, noting that the “blueprints for Iraq’s future… outline a broad and protracted American role in managing the reconstruction of the country.” Particularly, US forces are expected to control Iraq’s oil reserves, something that Ware obviously sees as bearing little relevance to understanding the occupation.

“The [Bush] administration’s plans, which are nearing completion, envision installing a civilian administration within months of a change of government, US officials said. But the officials said that even under the best of circumstances, US forces likely would remain at full strength in Iraq for months after a war ended, with a continued role for thousands of US troops there for years to come… Among key roles for US forces would be the preservation of Iraq’s borders against any sudden claims by neighbours and the defence of the country’s oil fields.” [Washington Post, 17 January 2003]

Indeed, White House plans outlined in late February 2003 revealed that the US intended to take “complete control of post-Saddam Iraq ‘for an indefinite period.’” [Ian Bruce, “General Franks ‘to run Iraq after war,’” The Herald, 24 February 2002] So why does Ware, four years later, take seriously Bush administration officials claiming that the original idea all along was to deploy a small invasion force with a view to pull out almost immediately?

The Carve-Up Strategy

One doesn’t need to be a historian of empire to know that divide-and-rule is a rather standard strategy of imperial domination. It was deployed by the British, for example, to great effect in key colonies in North America and India against natives who, once divided along artificially exacerbated ethnic, religious and tribal classifications, were far easier to play off against one another, and thus control to the benefit of the colonial regime.

From the very beginning, American planners envisaged that in the long-term, Iraq would be divided up to facilitate the Anglo-American military occupation. Fragments of a plan to fracture Iraq along ethnic and religious lines to facilitate control of the oil reserves and allow population control emerged in September 2002.

Richard Perle, who then chaired the prominent Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Policy Board, issued a briefing for Pentagon officials that month. Ha’aretz reported from a “top official in the Israeli security services” that Perle:

“... showed two slides to the Pentagon officials. The first was a depiction of the three goals in the war on terror and the democratisation of the Middle East: Iraq – a tactical goal, Saudi Arabia – a strategic goal, and Egypt – the great prize. The triangle in the next slide was no less interesting: Palestine is Israel, Jordan is Palestine, and Iraq is the Hashemite Kingdom.”
[Akiva Eldar, Perles of wisdom for the Feithful, Ha’aretz, 1 October
2002, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=214635]

This outrageous idea advocates a fundamental reconfiguration of power across the Middle East, with a number of highly dubious parameters, including a greatly expanded Israel fully encompassing the Occupied Territories; the expulsion of the Palestinians to Jordan; and the incorporation of the Sunni areas of Iraq with Jordan to form a wider pro-US Sunni Arab Hashemite Kingdom. How influential was this plan? Extremely.

According to the private American intelligence firm, Stratfor, the United States was “working on a plan to merge Iraq and Jordan into a unitary kingdom to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty headed by King Abdullah of Jordan.” The plan was “authored by US Vice President Dick Cheney” as well as “Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz”, and was first discussed at “an unusual meeting between Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and pro-US Iraqi Sunni opposition members in London in July” that year. Now under this plan, Stratfor reported, Iraq would be de facto ethnically partitioned into three autonomous cantons: The central and largest part of Iraq that is populated by the Sunni Arabs would be joined with Jordan, and would include Baghdad, which would no longer be the capital. The Kurdish region of northern and northwestern Iraq, including Mosul and the vast Kirkuk oilfields, would become its own autonomous state. The Shia Region in southwestern Iraq, including Basra, would make up the third state, or more likely it would be joined with Kuwait. Why did Cheney and Wolfowitz, the architects of this postwar plan for Iraq in the Bush Cabinet, think this sort of partition would be a good idea? And did their plans have anything to do with facilitating Iraq’s emergence as a democratic sovereign state? Not according to Stratfor, who outlined the advantages for the US as follows:

“First, the creation of a new pro-US kingdom under the half-British Abdullah [king of Jordan] would shift the balance of forces in the region heavily in the US favor. After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.

“Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection — and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”

[Stratfor, Uniting Jordan and Iraq Might Be Prime Post-War Strategy, 26 September 2002; Stratfor Press Release, “US plan to merge Iraq, Jordan after war”, 26 September 2002, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA209A.html; Gary D. Hallbert, “US Considers Dividing Iraq into Three Separate States after Saddam is Gone”, Forecasts & Trends, 1 October 2002, http://www.profutures.com/article.php/91/.]

Yet none of this seems remotely interesting to John Ware who remains adamant, based on the reassurances from either ill-informed or unscrupulous American and British officials, that the allies were well and truly planless.

It is not a coincidence, of course, that a few years later a large number of American politicians and security experts, not to mention the US Senate itself, began popping out of the woodwork, seemingly at random, all advocating that the best way forward for Iraq was to undergo partition. When this happened, the public was led to believe that the partition proposal was a radically new idea that could solve Iraq’s entrenched problems. But we know that the partition lobby didn’t come out of the blue at all. It was inspired directly by the original architects of the 2002 postwar plan, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.

There is no conceivable way that such tripartite partitioning of an entire country could be achieved peacefully. Violence, conflict, civil war, along sectarian lines, would be inevitable if this was to be achieved. The task of “eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state” by fracturing the country along ethnic and religious lines, in other words, was precisely the postwar strategy being explored by Dick Cheney as the most effective means of securing American control over the country, and the wider region. It is not simply some sort of accident of Anglo-American stupidity.

Fostering Internal Conflict in Iraq

It is no surprise then to find that at the core of the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq one consistently finds the involvement of the United States. Although systematically ignored by the vast majority of mainstream media, that US strategy has deliberately attempted to foster internal conflict between various Iraqi factions as a tool to consolidate the occupation has been officially acknowledged. In the November 2005 edition of the US Joint Special Operations University Report, Professor Thomas H. Henriken, a senior fellow at the US Joint Special Operations University and a former member of the US Army Science Board, reported that:

“The post-invasion stage in Iraq also is an interesting case study of fanning discontent among enemies, leading to ‘red-against-red’ firefights (this color-coding derives from US training exercises, in which red designates enemy combatants and blue designates friendly forces). Like their SOG predecessors in Vietnam, US elite forces in Iraq turned to fostering infighting among their Iraqi adversaries on the tactical and operational level…

Events during fall 2004 within the central Iraqi city of Fallujah showcased the wily machinations required to set insurgents battling insurgents. ... But Fallujah was hardly a unified camp—the city seethed with internecine tensions. Zarqawi’s strict Salafi beliefs clashed with the more moderate Sufi views of the Sunni residents. Additionally, the Zarqawi jihadis and nationalistic Fallujans disagreed over the use of terror tactics. Both wanted the Americans out of Fallujah and out of Iraq, but they differed on the methods…. Evidence of factional fighting between the residents came to light with nightly gun battles not involving coalition forces. US psychological warfare (PSYOP) specialists took advantage of the internal warring by tapping into Fallujans’ revulsion and antagonism to the Zarqawi jihadis. The PSYOP warriors crafted programs to exploit Zarqawi’s murderous activities —and to disseminate them through meetings, radio and television broadcasts, handouts, newspaper stories, political cartoons, and posters—thereby diminishing his folk-hero image. Battles among anti-coalition forces killed enemy combatants and heightened factionalism. Thus, red-on-red battles enhanced the regular blue-on-red engagements by eliminating many insurgents.”

[Thomas H. Henriken, “The War: Divide et Impera”, Hoover Digest, 2006, No. 1, http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/2904886.html.]

I’ve documented some of the evidence confirming a US strategy of tension in Iraq two years ago for Raw Story [here http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CAUGHT_RED__0923.html], and that evidence is still relevant now; I also updated it somewhat here [http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2006/08/four-frontal-war-covert-operations.html] and in the latter half of a piece put up earlier this year by Dissident Voice [here http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/07/whose-bombs/].

Conclusion

The BBC programme portrays itself as a work of solid, investigative journalism, one that takes a thoroughly critical perspective of our governments’ involvement in Iraq. The truth of the matter, however, is that John Ware’s narrative is mired in a set of unquestioned assumptions that systematically misrepresents the reality of the Iraq War 2003 by taking at face value the claims of various British and American officials.

Throughout his investigation, Ware consistently refrains from doing any serious research into his subject. He ignores overwhelming evidence that the grave humanitarian, military and political crisis in Iraq is not simply a regrettable consequence of insufficient planning by well-meaning but hasty politicians; it was a direct consequence of a set of plans prepared before and during the war designed fundamentally to secure Anglo-American strategic and economic interests at the expense of the Iraqi people.

These criticisms of John Ware and the BBC by no means stop there. They are prominent facets of an edifice of disinformation endorsed by a mainstream media that uncritically swallows official government claims all too routinely, as part of its normal functioning.

Throughout, one finds in the Bush administration’s plans for Iraq no evidence whatsoever that the impact on the Iraqi people was ever genuinely factored into the strategic and economic equation. Thus, the catastrophe that currently wracks Iraq was not simply a result of the paucity of planning due to lack of foresight; it is the result of a deliberate set of plans to consolidate Anglo-American political, economic and strategic interests in the region, plans which advocated social, political and economic policies that systematically marginalized and slaughtered Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands.

Yes, in this context, there was indeed a paucity of planning to make Iraq a stable, prosperous and democratic, sovereign state. But that paucity didn’t issue forth from some inexplicably bumbling incompetence. It came from carefully thought-out, properly-mapped, conscious decisions that were fully cognizant of the ramifications of the policies being proposed, but derived from a wilful and reckless indifference to the lives and rights of the Iraqi people. We are dealing here with war crimes, crimes against humanity and violations of international law — issues that Ware didn’t see fit to mention.

This is the line of inquiry that the BBC should have explored in uncovering the reasons for “no peace” in Iraq. Instead, the BBC ended up spouting what amounted to propaganda, by taking for granted the ill-informed nonsense and carefully contrived claims of Ware’s chosen talking heads, in effect concealing from public understanding the ongoing course of the Anglo-American strategy of tension in the Middle East. And that is exactly where the anti-war movement needs to focus its efforts in educating the public if we want to turn the tide of “national security” hysteria, on the back of which Western states are rushing through increasingly repressive policies of domestic and international militarization.