Bollettino

Was LI harsh about the intertwining of colonial and financial interests in Iraq in our last post? We have an irrepressible lowness of mind, which gets a sick kick out of reading such items as this, from a column by Hussein Ibish in today's LA Times:

"The management of the port of Umm al Qasr, one of the few places in Iraq under complete Western control, has produced a split between British and American authorities. The British view is that the Iraqi manager, who has been in his position for years, is capable of doing the job. Our government insisted, however, in providing a lucrative contract to run the port to Stevedoring Services of Seattle."

So, of course, we wondered, who is Stevedoring Services? Phillip Mattera, of the Corporate Research Project, tracks down the ideology of this company:

"Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), the contractor chosen for this task, has never worked in a war zone, but it has been in the middle of another kind of struggle: the battle between labor and management in the West Coast ports of the United States. In fact, Seattle-based SSA -- the largest marine terminal operator in the country -- was considered the main corporate culprit in the lockout of dockworkers last fall; the International Longshore and Warehouse Union accused the company of union-busting. �While most employers want to work with us to implement new technologies,� ILWU President James Spinosa said last September, �SSA is undermining negotiations because their primary interest is breaking the union.� ILWU spokesman Steve Stallone was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying� �It�s ideological with these people. They are ideologically anti-union and anti-ILWU.�

SSA has a reputation in the region -- much as a dead rat behind the wall soon gets a reputation in a household. SSA was involved in a dispute in Bangladesh, according to Mattera, that involved a proposal to build a 500 million dollar containerized terminal. When Bangledesh's government seemed unappreciative of SSA's hardball tactics, the US ambassador there operated as a useful company cut-in, uttering a few threats of her own.

The company is privately held. The founder, Jon Hemingway, is, you might have guessed, a Bush man. During the Dockworkers lock-out, the Seattle paper published a little profile of the company. We especially like the trick they pulled in New Zealand --declaring bankruptcy, then reforming and rehiring their workers on a non-union basis. Nice way to violate contract law and get away with it, guys! No wonder President Bush loves ya.

So... it looks suspicious. Luckily, we know Smilin' Jay Garner, the choice of the Iraqi people, would never allow his country to be violated by predatory American companies with ties to the White House. It would just go against his grain.

Bollettino

As the H.G. Wells aspect of the War deepens -- is this the War between the Worlds, or is it the end of the Island of Doctor Moreau? -- it seems to be the case that all of Saddam's horses and all of his men can't put the guy's moustache together again. If, in fact, the war was directed by a double, with the Old Man conveniently buried under the ruins of some bunker, Smilin' Jay Garner should definitely hire that guy in one of the Gunga Din posts the Americans are preparing for a grateful, liberated Iraqi people. In fact, if he has any contacts in the double biz for a Bush look-alike...

Speaking of Smilin' Jay, since Democracy is being determined by American military forces, you would think that we would seek to win hearts and minds with a reality tv show in which four or five ex Ceos of various military hardware companies vied to be proconsul of Iraq. It could be like Survivor. A comic bit could involve all of them trying to speak arabic -- laughter all around, and it will be a two-fer: not only will it show that Americans have a sense of humor about the whole thing, but it will be an invitation to Iraqis to join in the laughter.

Winning their hearts and minds in the fog of war, of the fog of war journalism, is oh so hard. We need, as Rumsfeld might say, to think outside the box, here, guys.

The Republican Guard turned out to be a dud. The fedayeen, on the other hand, is scrapping out there in the countryside, and we doubt that Baghdad's fall is going to put a stop to them. The Guardian's Rory McCarthy reports that the Coalition of the Willing is beginning to understand that the second phase of the war is beginning. This phase does not contain Saddam Hussein. It contains an American occupying force and their consorts, hauled in from the swamps of the Potomac, and eager to make some bucks on the Iraqi frontier.
"If they blend into the city and become sleepers they could generate an enduring, destabilising influence in the aftermath," a senior British officer said. "We can envisage an aftermath in which some of these irregulars might re-emerge to champion some sort of cause."

Before the war few senior officers believed they would face such strong resistance from the paramilitaries ahead of the final battle for Baghdad. In fact, three groups, the Saddam Fedayeen, the Special Security Organisation and the Ba'ath party militia, emerged immediately, even in the very south of the country, as a significant fighting force. Militia groups are still holed up in the southern city of Basra, as well as other towns on the route north, including Nassiriya, Najaf and Kerbala."

The Saddam-ist tendency will do much better without the old man around to bloodily dodder about. And they will certainly gain traction from the resistance to Smilin Jay. Mother Jones reports that there is even a dumpjaygarner web site. Well, that sounded to us like a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, so we clicked on over to it, and signed a letter to dump the guy. The letter goes to George Bush, so there 's no chance it will be heard, or have an effect -- but there's always the possibility leadership doubles will rise up and overthrow him, so we sent it anyway. And finally, The NYT published an extended trawl through the wonderland of Wolfowitz, giving us such tidbits as this:
-- Iraqi freedom fighters (these are tough guys -- they jog on some of toughest paths by the Potomac every day, five miles sometimes) by unanimous verdict, give the information ministers post to Robert Reilly, formerly of the Voice of America.

---Timothy Carney, former U.S. ambassador to Sudan, just seems so right to take on Iraq's Ministry of Industry. Hey, he's just the kind of guy to throw an impartial glance at all those plans to re-build the Iraq we bombed to shit... until he finds, by utter coincidence, an engineering conglomerate with close ties to the Bush administration to do the work!

---Iraqis have long had their eye on Robin Raphel, ex ambassador to Tunisia. Finally a chance to get him to work for them! Yes, in the post of Ministry of Trade. Shi'ites will no doubt be in the dancing and flower throwing mood when Robin ascends to the seat -- they've longed for him, as we all know, for years.

---Ministry of Foreign Affairs was, of course, a tough one. Now, liberals, who no doubt would like some mamby pamby quota system to throw up an Iraqi as Minister for Iraq's Foreign Affairs, are going to grumble. Let em grumble -- the Supreme Court will sort em out! Ha ha! But we know the grateful Iraqi masses can't wait for Kenton Keith to take the reins there. No doubt Keith will be much more understanding, shall we say -- enthusiastic, even -- about what Donald Rumsfeld calls the "so called Occupied Territories."

So, in the words of our Prez himself, "And the liberation of millions is the fulfillment of America's founding promise." So modest, our Bush. The fullfillment of so many dreams -- the starry dreams of Raytheon, of Brown and Root, of Fluor, Inc. -- are embodied in the sturdy of these men and women, standing straight for their companies and their country.

Bollettino

My friend H. writes in to tell us to knock off "Saddam the H." -- too much H. ambiguity going on. Well, soon we will be able to draw a line through Saddam's name. In our humble opinion, if he isn't dead, he might as well be. As we've said, monotonously, the war's second phase -- Iraqi liberation by Iraqis -- succeeded its first phase -- Saddam the letter-after-G's mother of all battles --so quickly that they were one and the same.
H. also wondered about the oil, and the fires that didn't consume the oilfields. We don't know why the fires weren't started. But we are interested in the fate of the oil, too. Anatole Kaletsky, the financial editor of the London Times, has a sanguine view of the economic consequences of the War. But it seems to us it is not only sanguine -- it seems improbable. In the Times, he lays out, justly, the present state of play on the battlefield Iraq. The oil fields of Iraq are securely under American control.

"Financial markets think only of profits and economic prospects � and the threat to the global economy from the war has diminished almost to vanishing point in the past ten days, regardless of what may or may not be happening on the streets of Baghdad. To understand what I mean it is sufficient to glance at the map on the right. This shows the main oilfields, pipelines and pumping stations of Iraq. As is evident, the great bulk of Iraq�s oil assets are in the southeast and north, around Basra and Kirkuk. Indeed, the four great oilfields of the Basra region � Rumaila, West Qurna, Majnoon and Nahr Umar � account for about two thirds of Iraq�s oil production of 3.5 million barrels a day. The giant Kirkuk oilfield, the first to be developed in the Middle East and, 80 years later, still one of the most productive, provides about half the remaining output. This leaves less than 15 per cent of Iraq�s oil output coming from the other fields dotted around the centre of the country, including the large, but relatively underdeveloped, production area in east Baghdad."

The seizure of thes fields undamaged, Kaletsky writes, will quickly bring about pre-91 levels of oil production. And that is that, as far as Iraq's economic importance is concerned.

Kaletsky is right to point out that Iraq's significance, for the World Economy, is all about bubblin' crude. However, it is hard to imagine that instability in post -Saddam Iraq -- an Iraq that seems, by American account, to be here, since Saddam the H. has been laid to rest in the rubble -- is not going to impinge on oil flow. However, the Bush-ites, ever eager to make Iraq a colony of D.C.'s wildest wishes, has already sharpened up a plan for that oil. As per usual, they've dug up some self-interested old capitalist crony of (no doubt) Rumsfeld, and they've got lawyers working on how to transfer the oilfields to American power -- for the benefit, of course, of the Iraqi people, always first in our minds and hearts. The WP has a nice article today about the picking of Philip J. Carroll, former Shell executive. Here's one of the deeper-in grafs:


"Carroll, the former Shell executive, who retired last year as chief executive of Fluor Corp., would report to retired Army lieutenant general Jay M. Garner, named by the Pentagon to direct postwar reconstruction as head of a new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Fluor, an engineering and construction firm, is one of the companies bidding for reconstruction contracts. Carroll declined to comment today.

"If it's correct, it's a splendid choice," said Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty III, the Clinton White House chief of staff who is now president of Kissinger McLarty & Associates. "I think he's particularly well suited. He's thoroughly knowledgeable in the industry. He's had a proven record of success."

The Iraq war, it is turning out, is just an M&A of Rumsfeld, Inc. In gratitude for his outstanding work, we are waiting to see if Bush gives the country to him. A sort of stock option to keep his interests aligned with the company's, as it were.

Bollettino

MSNBC�s Michael Morin makes the LI case that the War, if it isn�t being seen as a Liberation, will be seen as an invasion. Of course, a piece like this should have been run in February � it was all entirely predictable then. That is, we knew that the D.C. ultra-hawks didn�t know a thing about Iraq. They showed no knowledge of the place, beyond their conviction that Saddam the H. was a bloody tyrant. So they made up an alternative Iraq. In this Iraq, America and American ways were much loved. They were so loved that the people would beam with joy as Smilin� Jay Garner assumed the proconsul�s role. They were so loved that the two years of occupation the Rumsfeldian plan calls for would be, itself, a love fest � imagine the scene! Starving and semi-starving Iraqis would look upon the act of divvying up oilfields to private American companies as the least they could do to say, well, thanks old buddy! And as for using the territory as a staging ground for future American liberations of various other Moslem countries � why, there�d be no Turkish tergiversations about that!

Morin has a nice graf about the future � which is within twenty miles of Baghdad, apparently, if we can trust today�s news.

� The quick victory many had hoped for � one that swept Saddam and his cronies from power, accompanied by mass surrenders and an outburst of relief on the part of ordinary Iraqis � would have been viewed as almost a mandate for the war. Its critics at home and among U.N. Security Council members would have been muted.
So far, quite the opposite has occurred.
Iraq�s own plan to resist the invasion has entranced the Arab world and other countries who felt the U.S.-led war bordered on bullying.
Within Iraq itself, the bitterness of the resistance being put up to U.S. and British troops, even in regions where Saddam�s rule is heavily resented, does not bode well for postwar forces.�

Compare Morin to Kanan Malikya�s latest

Those who imply that a rising surge of ''nationalism'' is preventing Iraqis from greeting American and British troops with open arms are wrong. What is preventing Iraqis from rising and taking over the streets of their cities is confusion about American intentions. That is confusion created by the way this war has been conducted and by fear of the murderous brown-shirt thugs, otherwise known as Saddam's Fedayeen, a militia loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who control the streets of Iraqi cities and who are conducting the harassing attacks on American and British soldiers.

The coalition forces have not yet sent clear and unmistakable signals to the people of Iraq that, unlike 1991, there will be no turning back before Saddam Hussein's regime has been overturn. But in order to do this effectively they must count on the Iraqi opposition, which has so far been marginalized.

Iraqis do not get CNN. They have not heard, as we have, constant iterations of how Hussein's demise is imminent. More important, they have not seen evidence of his difficulties, as they did in 1991, when they revolted after two months of not seeing his image on TV or hearing him and his henchmen on the radio. Coalition forces so far have been content to position themselves outside cities in southern Iraq; only after incessant urging from members of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) have they finally begun to disrupt Iraqi TV, Hussein's principal means for not losing face in Iraq. And above all, coalition forces have not allowed Iraqis to go in and organize the population, something they are eager and willing to do.�

LI is, oddly enough, in agreement with the ultrahawks on this issue -- at least insofar as the employment of Iraqi troops is concerned. We have a feeling that the reason the Free Iraqi troops have not been �embedded� � Frank Gaffney�s term in the Washington Times � is that the Coalition forces fear that they will fall on their faces. This has happened before, as we know. Here�s a link to a history of the INC � the Iraqi opposition group that Kanan Malikya and Ahmad Chalabi belong to. Now, it looks pretty bad � these are by no means the Garibaldis of Iraq. Rather, the INC looks more like the anticommunist Chinese groups set up by the CIA in the fifties � groups which were invariably defeated, due to an absolute disconnect between the people and their supposed champions. Luce, the owner of Time, etc., was the godfather of those earlier groups. The INC started out with a less elevated patronage:

�The agency turned to Washington insider John Rendon, whose "strategic communications" consulting firm The Rendon Group had provided support in 1988 to "spin" both the Panamanian and American media during Panama's doomed presidential election campaign. One of Rendon's most recent clients, in fact, had been the Kuwaiti royal family to help them in creating a sympathetic image in the U.S. during the Gulf War. This was a man not only with a proven track record but who also had experience in the Middle East. If anyone could get the job done, it was John Rendon.
Rendon and his team worked with the CIA to build the Al-Mu'tamar al-Watani al-Iraqi (Iraqi National Congress - INC) in 1991, and according to ABC News, "provided it with its name and more than US$12 million in covert funding between 1992 and 1996." Intelligence officers correctly saw Iraqi Kurd factions as the most potent force against Hussein's autocracy, but needed a platform for which to unite them under. So they recruited Ahmad Chalabi, an American-educated Arab Shi'ite banker who has extensive ties with Iraqi Kurds, to head the INC so that it could bring together Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, and dissident Sunni Muslims against Hussein.�

According to the Clandestine Radio article, Chalabi nearly defeated the Republican Guard in 1995. His defeat was caused by lack of American air support. This is the spin put on it ever since, by Chalabi's Perle-ish friends. According to the BBC, however, the Chalabi offense did have limited support, but was defeated anyway. Chalabi seems to have put together his troops and made his deals with the Kurds on the promise of US air support, even though there was no such promise. Thinking that a fait accompli would draw in the Americans, he attacked with 15,000 troops and was defeated.

Zero hour has been striking -- in fact, it has been striking for the last two weeks -- and the Kurds seem to be able to coordinate with the Americans to move towards Kirkuk. We wonder if Chalabi's absence from that advance is wholly fortuitous. The man might not be very liked in Northern Iraq, after the 1995 debacle.

Bollettino

In all the American media attention given to the suicide bomber, little has been made of the fact that the guy was a Shi'ite. Hmm. The Guardian carries a thumbsucker by the usually reliable Dilip Hiro that reports on the theologico-politico complexities into which Americans, whistling like Donnie Rumsfeld soaping himself up in the shower, have wandered

"Earlier, any prospects of an uprising in the predominantly Shi'ite city of Basra disappeared on Tuesday when Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani issued a fatwa, calling on "Muslims all over the world" to help Iraqis in "a fierce battle against infidel followers who have invaded our homeland". Sistani is based in Najaf, the third holiest place of Shi'ite Muslims, and it is likely that Nomani, a Shi'ite, was following his fatwa. As the only grand ayatollah of Iraq, Sistani is the most senior cleric for Iraqi Shi'ites, who form 70% of ethnic Arabs in Iraq. Any Anglo-American attempt to devalue Sistani's opposition to the invasion - by saying he's a Saddam stooge, for example - will boomerang because of his status; there are only five grand ayatollah's in the world.

By now it is apparent that the Anglo-American decision-makers made a monumental miscalculation by imagining that Iraqis in the predominantly Shi'ite southern Iraq would welcome their soldiers as liberators. It stems from their blind faith in the unverified testimonies of the Iraqi defectors combined with their failure to realise the complexity of the task of overthrowing President Saddam Hussein's regime."

Bollettino

As liberation nears, and the irrepressible Iraqi will turns to the man whose picture is, secretly, in every Iraqi home (we mean smilin' Jay Garner, the American proconsul in waiting, who, if he could speak Arabic, would give a big shout out to all his Shi'ia buddies) we should contemplate how gracefully America is monetizing that gratitude. There's a nice piece by Frida Berrigan in In These Times (for which yours truly has written) concerning the Cheney-Halliburton connection. Dick Cheney chose to take his compensation from Halliburton (for moving down to a post as a Halliburton lobbyist - oops, I mean as Vice President of the United States), which comes out to between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per annum. And Brown and Root, everybody's favorite engineering squad, and a Halliburton subsidiary, seems on schedule for cleaning up in the great post-liberation afterwards:

"Critics argue that the U.S. Agency for International Development ignored the expertise and experience of well-regarded NGOs with decades of experience in humanitarian work in Iraq in their secretive contract process. USAID asked just five for-profit corporations to submit bids for $900 million in reconstruction contracts for the initial phase of work, scheduled to last just six months. Of course, these companies will be best situated to win billions in future contracts. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences report estimated that the reconstruction of Iraq could cost anywhere from $30 billion to $105 billion over the next decade.

KBR not only has the corner on postwar reconstruction, they were also granted a potentially huge contract to fight oil well fires throughout Iraq, even though they did not submit a bid for the job. In November, the Pentagon hired KBR to write a classified contingency plan for dealing with the fires, allowing the company to position itself for this job long before the war was a fait accompli. President Bush just asked Congress for $500 million for oil field repair, and KBR is standing by to take the money."

Sweet! Of course, it helps that Iraqi proconsul Garner is himself making a small pile on the war. As is Richard Perle. Berrigan could have included a link to Waters website, where there is a press release concerning her amendment. Here?s the link. We don't imagine this story is going to be coming to your local paper anytime soon.

Bollettino

Men have no right to what is not reasonable and to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, Licet perire poetis, when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have lept into the flame of a volcanic revolution, Ardentum figidus Aenam insulit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic licence, than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were a poet, or divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that wise, because more charitable thoughts would urge me rather to save the man, than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly. � Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

We received an email from an old friend, C. a couple of days ago. Among other remarks, C. said that he wasn�t as far to the left, of course, as LI. Moi, was our startled response. So we asked our friend S. When she said that of course, we were as left as they come, we explained that at least our anti-war impulse comes from a very Tory side of our character. The War violates American tradition; the War's shapers seek the installation of a new order from above, by state dictate, in Iraq; and the War's effects will be to initiate an enterprise founded, essentially, on a doctrine of might is right. Isn�t this the blank white face that Burke discerned behind the theorists and the idealists of the French Revolution as well as behind the krewe of British looters in Bengal? We are not Tory enough to accept Burke uncritically about the French Revolution, but we understand, in our middle age, a bit more about the damage done by the frolics of the intellectual in power. This war, in particular, has been designed, argued for, and implemented through the agency of a small, distinct cabal of such intellectuals. We know who they are because they are quite proud of who they are. We know how they spread their particular brand of fever. We know how they took advantage of an attack on this country, and we know that they did this with intent. And we know that their ideas are bad � and we will know this ever more intimately as those ideas are brought to the bloody test of reality in Iraq, where they will fail to meet even the most basic challenges of common sense. We know that their manners are appalling. We know that manners express, here, something deep about their desires. It isn�t just that the Bush administration fumbled the diplomatic niceties in the build-up to war � the message conveyed by all that Rumsfeldian bullying was that diplomatic niceties were so much sugarcoating, so much falsity, to be carelessly thrown over the new world order. Burke would have been the first to spot the rooted viciousness here. When your diplomats talk like thugs, generally you can bet they will act like thugs. Words dispose towards acts. Power lust is the enemy of all mankind, whenever it appears. It�s the booted devil in the horde, the militia, the brigade, the onslaught. It�s the killer in our midst. And it is impossible not to observe this lust at work in every facet of the appalling rush towards War � a rush that has now been quietly retired from the journalist�s lexicon in favor of the rush, as it were, towards Baghdad.

We didn�t convince S.