What Lies Ahead in Iraq?
The Confessions of John Perkins
April 4, 2006
What Lies Ahead in Iraq?
By Tom Hayden / Special to The-Edge
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| The US maintains more that 200 military bases in Iraq and is building an estimated 14 permanent bases. The red circles indicate US military airbases. Source: Global Security. |
The strong possibility that Pentagon commanders will recommend the beginning of American troop withdrawals this week is vanishing, derailed by the February 22 bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra as well as the Democratic Partys default on the war.
The British press has been more forthright in reporting troop withdrawal plans since last Septembers peace rallies. On February 2, the London Times announced an acceleration of plans by Britain and America for pulling out one-third of their troops this year.
On March 5, the Telegraphs defense correspondent followed up by reporting that all British and American troops will be withdrawn in the next 12 months. Two days later, the British commander in Iraq withdrew the withdrawal hints, saying instead that a pullout of most troops might be reasonable by summer 2008. [NYT, March 8, 2006]. The New York Times says that the widely expected announcement of US troop cuts now was muted.[NYT, March 2, 2006]
The stated reason, or pretext, for suspending the withdrawal plan was the bombing of the Shiite shrine and several days of sectarian bloodletting at the end of February. The US ambassador delivered the message just before key US decisions are expected on whether the situation in Iraq has improved enough to allow for a reduction in US forces this year, the Los Angeles Times reported. [March 7, 2006]
A Western Role in the Golden Dome Bombing?
We may never know who blew up the mosque and, with it, the prospects for troop withdrawals. It is assumed that the villains were either deranged Sunnis acting on their own, or al-Zarqawi cadres intent on civil war.
There is another perspective for close observers of dirty wars, the possibility that the bombing was planned and handled by elements of Western counter-terrorism forces. Similar tactics were employed by British agents during the long conflict in Northern Ireland, and heavily armed British commandos disguised as Arabs were captured in Basra just last year.
One of the oldest imperial stratagems is to divide and conquer, incite sectarian divisions, and justify military occupation to keep the natives from killing each other. This is precisely the justification for continued war that is heard from those who have admitted the original invasion was a mistake.
Bernard Lewis, the leading American Arabist authority, himself a former British intelligence officer in the Middle East, and later an advisor to the Democratic hawk Senator Henry Scoop Jackson, has long defended the strategy of dismembering Arab states through violent sectarianism. He calls it Lebanonization. A decade ago, as the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein was underway, Lewis wrote about Arab states that:
If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity...the state then disintegrates as happened in Lebanon into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and critics. [Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992]
A former director-general of Israels foreign ministry, Shlomo Avineri, has expressed similar views more diplomatically. In an op-ed piece titled Israel could live with a fractured, failed Iraq, he wrote:
An Iraq split into three semi-autonomous mini-states, or an Iraq in civil war, means that the kind of threat posed by [Saddam] Hussein... is unlikely to rise again. [LA Times, December 4, 2005]
'Strategic Redeployment' -- The Democrats' Default
The default of the national Democrats, who seemed poised to oppose the war when Rep. John Murtha called for a six-month pullout in December, is about the refusal of leaders to put rank-and-file Democrats first in their thinking. Instead, Democratic consultants obsess for political reasons on erasing any image of weakness left over from the days when Democrats at least stood for something.
More deeply, those who aspire to the presidency begin to worry personally about weakening the nations status as a superpower. Internal divisions among Democratic Party elites, such as the Democratic lobby for Israel, play an unspoken role too. For all these reasons, as a top Democratic source explains:
There will not be a unified position on Iraq...theres a recognition, pragmatically, that [unity] aint there, it hasnt been there, and isnt going to be there. [Roll Call, February 21, 2006]
The tragedy is that key Democrats at the Center for American Progress (CAP), headed by former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, have been promoting a careful but realistic withdrawal plan since last fall, code-named Strategic Redeployment to avoid any posture of retreat. The tone is like a hawks guide to withdrawal, but substantively it calls for the withdrawal [drawdown] of 80,000 US troops this year, beginning as soon as a new regime is installed in Baghdad.
The 2006 withdrawals would include all National Guard and Reserve troops. The second phase, beginning in January 2007, would remove the nearly all other troops in the next 12 months, leaving unspecified counter-terrorist units, military advisers, and 14,000 troops re-positioned to Kuwait and the Persian Gulf. The document is strikingly similar to what some commanders have been advising Murtha and others from behind the scenes. The principal author is Lawrence Korb, a Pentagon official under Ronald Reagan.
Iraqis Have Their Own Plan for US Withdrawal
On the Iraqi side, there also is a proposed withdrawal plan that generally fits the contours of the American strategic redeployment proposal. According to reliable sources in Amman, the author is Dr. Khair-eddin Haseeb, a former governor of Iraq in the Sixties. The core provisions of the draft, titled Iraqi National Initiative to End Occupation of Iraq Unconditionally, Reflecting the Will and View of the Iraqi National Resistance and Other Major Political Forces Opposing Occupation, are these:
an American declaration of intention to full withdrawal in six months;
a cease-fire by the insurgents during the American withdrawal;
a United Nations-authorized transitional government, pending internationally-supervised elections;
a peacekeeping force composed of countries not involved in the present occupation;
US and UK commitments to compensation in the range of $70 billion US.
permission for US-based contractors to bid on reconstruction contracts.
This document suggests a Sunni nationalist agenda, and will require further dialogue, but it is Arab nationalism, mainly Sunni but also Shiite, that the US is fighting on the battlefield. In addition, according to recent surveys, 45 percent of all Iraqis support armed resistance against occupation, while 70 percent support a timetable for withdrawal between six months and two years. If Sunnis constitute only 20 percent of the population, then the demands of the peace proposal must be supported far beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle, though one would never be aware of this from reading the American press.
The Iraqi National Initiative to End Occupation document also proves that political negotiations are possible, and have been possible for some while, despite claims by the war camp that there is no other side to negotiate with. Negotiating is a process, sometimes indirect, not necessarily representatives sitting down at one table.
The Political Resilience of the Insurgency
There is growing evidence that the Iraqi resistance, leaving aside the al-Zarqawi elements, has significant capacity to coordinate its operations without being represented through a political organization or party. They observed a several-day cease-fire in observance of the recent elections. More recently, the activities of the resistance are at a halt, now until we have a new government... thats the information we have from the resistance, said one tribal source. [LA Times, February 10, 2006].
When the political negotiations stalled and bombs went off in Samarra, it was Iraqi religious, military and political forces, not American troops, that restored considerable calm in comparison to the initial counter-attacks.
It is at least conceivable that social violence could be minimized and contained during an American pullout, rather than the specter of a post-occupation bloodbath that justifies the perpetual war.
The situation is unpredictable. No one knows at this point what the generals will tell President Bush behind closed doors. When and if the new Iraqi government is established, the issue of troop withdrawals will return, since several of the winning political parties campaigned on a promise to set a withdrawal date. One source tells me that perhaps they would encourage American withdrawal from the quiescent Kurdish north though the Kurds would not like to see them go. It seems unlikely that the reduction would reach 40,000 this year. Ten thousand seems the more likely figure, but that is conjecture. [Private communication.]
The Role of the US Peace Movement
All this is somewhat disorienting for an American peace movement built around the core demand of Out Now. But the movement continues to make a major contribution, here and abroad, in putting pressure against the key pillars of power. Public opinion supports withdrawal. Thousands of activists continue taking to the streets. Hawkish candidates face huge pressure as they face their constituents. Bush may be facing his Watergate moment.
Military recruiting is nearing a catastrophic dead-end, and a decision to deploy, rather than reduce, several Army combat brigades will destroy the all-volunteer Army, in the words of the CAP report. The coalition of the willing has a sagging façade. Establishment heavyweights, not to mention ordinary taxpayers and their congressional representatives, are pondering the trillion-dollar cost of the war recently projected by leading economist Joseph Stiglitz and a team at Harvard.
Anything may happen. An exit strategy is available, but US policy is based on "no exit." So for now it appears that the long war will continue to the bitter end.
Tom Hayden is a former California State Assemblyman and Senator. He is the director of No More Sweatshops! and the author of eleven books on American political history, ecology and the human spirit.
The Confessions of John Perkins
By Gar Smith / The-Edge
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| The Economic Hitman takes a hit in Berkeley. |
BERKELEY, California -- During a visit to Berkeley's Martin Luther King Jr., High School, John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, gave an audience at a couple of chilling anecdotes and took a few unexpected hits from local activist Anuradha Mittal. Perkins explained how his tell-all book was rejected by 25 publishers before SF's Barret-Koelher agreed to print it. Perkins praised B-K's chief as a "man with guts of steel and a heart of gold" and invited the publisher and his staff to stand for an ovation. Perkins also asked Berkeley's Daniel Ellsberg to stand for a round of applause and wondered aloud: "How come Daniel Ellsberg isn't a resource on local TV?"
Perkins began by talking about the US role in Iraq -- 40 years ago, when the CIA arranged to have the reigning leader executed. The head of Washington's assassination team was "a young high school kid named Saddam Hussein."
Perkins recapped the pyramid of techniques the US uses to bring foreign leaders under Washington's control: "If the economic hit-men don't succeed, we bring in the jackals and, if the jackals fail, we bring in the military
. In the last two decades," he added, "we've given up every principle we ever held."
"The Founding Fathers and their families were traitors and terrorists," Perkins said. "And they did the right thing -- it was their country." The crowd responded with loud applause.
Perkins noted that in recent elections, 80% of South Americans -- 300 million people -- voted for anti-corporate candidates. "South America has sent a message and we must listen." He recalled the words of a Nigerian chief who warned a Westerner: "If you won't share your wealth with us, we will share out poverty with you."
It was big news when Argentina paid off its huge debt to the International Monetary Fund. Less attention was paid to the means by which Argentina was able to free itself. Venezuela's democratically elected populist leader Hugo Chavez used his nation's oil wealth to erase the debt.
When someone asked what Washington's response would be to the rising tide of independent democracies in Venezuela, Peru, Chile, and Colombia, Perkins brought the audience to a dead-still silence with the following scenario:
"I can tell you with a certainty that, within 24 hours of the election results, the new leader will receive a visit. It will be someone he knows. Perhaps and man; perhaps a woman. That visitor will say: 'Congratulations on your election, your Excellency!' And then that person will lean in very close and whisper: 'I want you to know that in my hand I hold $300,000 for you and your family. If you do not accept this gift, I want you to know that, in my other hand, I hold a gun. It contains a bullet with your name on it."
But, after Perkins had enthralled the crowd with his polished musings and insider's stories, Mittal, the feisty head of the Oakland Institute, pole-axed Perkins with the following question: "You are personally responsible for the deaths of thousands, perhaps millions of people around the world. I find myself asking: 'How can you possibly live with yourself.'"
Mittal's bluntness stripped Perkins' veneer like a bucket of paint-remover. After a stunned moment, Perkins replied: "Well, they never said Berkeley would be easy."
He admitted that he had trouble living with what he had done but he countered that it had all been legal. He spoke of working abroad to undo the damage he had done through his foundation, the Pachamama Alliance. He mentioned the concluding chapter in his book, which points out that all Americans share responsibility for this evil and asks: "What are you doing to change things?"
"More than half the world is living on $2 a day, exactly the same as 40 years ago," he said. Holding up one of the 3x5 cards passed out to collect questions, Perkins asked: "Do you pause to think about where this paper came from? About the working conditions of the men who cut it? About their families?
At least the plantation owners in the Old South offered their slaves room and board, provided food and medical care." Compared to working conditions under globalization in many countries today, "many of the slaves in the South were better off."
An organizer announced that a green van was blocking a driveway and asked the owner to move it. "I wouldn't go anywhere near a green van," Perkins blurted. "The NSA [National Security Agency] loves green vans!"
Perkins finished with a warning about "the domestic version of economic hit-men." One example was the intentional dismemberment of labor unions. And, just as alarming, he warned, extending "credit cards for kids is part of the privatization plot."
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