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The war-mongering vis-a-vis Iraq is only part of
the United States' larger global design for the 21st century - to
attain unchallenged supremacy of the world.
U.S. marines on board USS Tarawa depart on January 6 from the San
Diego naval station in California for the Gulf region on a
six-month assignment.
WITH 1,20,000 troops of the United States already stationed in the
Gulf region, reservists being called up across the country, and
the U.S. gripped by war hysteria, all the way from its leaders to
its media networks to the overwhelming majority of the population,
it now seems beyond doubt that the full-scale invasion - and
possible occupation - of Iraq by the U.S. shall come sooner rather
than later, even though the United Nations-appointed inspectors,
who are doing the U.S. bidding, have so far failed to produce any
evidence of Iraq's having in its possession or having the capacity
to produce any weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear or
biological or chemical weapons. The U.S. seems determined to
proceed with its plans, however, regardless of any evidence
proving or disproving its claims, while it is also likely that
some sort of evidence may well be manufactured in the foreseeable
future; for all the current posture of impartiality, Hans Blix,
the chief U.N. inspector, is deeply committed to the imperial
agenda. In any case, the invasion shall come because it is part of
a much larger, inflexible global design which we shall detail
below. Before proceeding with that wider analysis, though, it is
important to recall some salient features of the situation as it
has prevailed in the immediate past.
In an article that was published some months ago ("In the shadow
of permanent war", Frontline, October 11, 2020) I had pointed out
that the Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq had lasted longer than
the U.S. war on Vietnam, indeed longer than the combined duration
of the two World Wars. This began with the Gulf war of 1991 which,
in a very important sense, has never ended. It was then, some 12
years ago, that George W. Bush Senior, the father of the current
U.S. President, first determined that the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein and the achievement of full mastery over Iraq was a key
objective, and the U.S. has never swerved away from that
objective. The only reason why the full-scale invasion, which is
now impending, did not come sooner is that while the objective of
overthrowing Saddam and defeating the Iraqi Army could be achieved
very quickly, thanks to the overwhelming U.S. military
superiority, the U.S. has never been quite sure what would follow
that victory and has therefore toyed with various more or less
dubious scenarios while its unremitting war-mongering has held a
nation of 22 million suffering people to ransom.
In an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times on January 5, 2003,
Victor Marshall reminds us of some of that suffering: "A United
Nations mission in March 1991 described the allied bombing of Iraq
as `near apocalyptic' and said it threatened to reduce `a rather
highly urbanised and mechanised society to a preindustrial age'...
A subsequent demographic study by the U.S. Census Bureau concluded
that Iraq probably suffered 1,45,000 dead 40,000 military and
5,000 civilian deaths during the war and 1,00,000 post-war deaths
because of violence and health conditions. The war also produced
more than five million refugees. Subsequent sanctions were
estimated to have killed more than half a million Iraqi children,
according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and other
international bodies." Meanwhile, air power was used to destroy or
cripple Iraqi infrastructure and industry. This included
destruction of electric power stations and refineries which
deprived Iraq of 92 per cent of its installed power capacity as
well as 80 per cent of its oil production capacity, not to speak
of the destroyed petrochemical complexes, telecommunications
centres (including 135 telephone networks), bridges (more than
100), roads, highways, railroads, hundreds of locomotives and
boxcars full of goods, radio and television broadcasting stations,
cement plants, and factories producing aluminium, textiles,
electric cables, and medical supplies. The losses were estimated
by the Arab Monetary Fund to be $190 billion.
Having done all that about a decade ago, the Anglo-American axis
has kept up it pressure in numerous ways. U.S. officials have
owned up to seven
coup attempts that they have instigated; how many more there were,
we do not know. The failure of those coup attempts is sometimes
cited as a reason why nothing short of a full-scale invasion is
likely to work. All of Iraq initially, and much of it
subsequently, has been declared a "no-fly zone" where the
Anglo-American axis powers do not allow the government of the
country to fly its own aircraft, in flagrant violation of Iraq's
sovereignty and without any basis in international law or a U.N.
Security Council resolution; they have bombed most of the country
at will, again without any sanction from the Security Council.
Indeed, the conversion of the Security Council into a tool to
implement U.S. designs with respect to Iraq and Palestine as much
as various parts of former Yugoslavia, has been a singular
achievement of the United States and its supine allies during this
period. As Denis Halliday, a former U.N. Assistant Secretary
General and U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq during 1997-98,
put it in his recent speech in Cairo: "We have a U.N. Security
Council out of control. A Council corrupted by the U.S., the sole
hyper-power, and undermined by the veto power of the five
permanent members." He then goes on to point out that the claim
that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction is a "Washington
fiction" and that the sanctions against Iraq, which have been in
place for 12 years and have caused unspeakable sufferings for
millions of people, "are built on U.S. war crimes" and constitute
an "ongoing collective punishment of the Iraqi people".
Under cover of this "no-fly zone" and incessant bombardment, the
U.S. has tried to install a parallel government of its choosing,
stationed in the U.S.-protected Kurdish territory in northern Iraq
and comprised of the Iraqi National Council (INC), which it has
spawned under the shadowy leadership of Ahmed Chalabi, a scion of
a monarchist Iraqi family who was sentenced in absentia some years
ago to a total of 34 years of hard labour by the Central Court of
Amman for embezzlement of funds from the Petra Bank of Jordan.
Chalabi is a great favourite of the Far Right super-hawks in power
at the Pentagon, who are generally known as the "Wolfowitz cabal"
named after the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz and
may yet be imposed on Iraq pretty much the way Hamid Karzai, a
former employee of UNOCAL Corporation, was imposed on Afghanistan.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is said to have invested
$100 million in propping up that puppet entity (of Chalabi) which
was then routed by the Iraqi Army in 1997. Chalabi fled to the
United Kingdom, thousands of his followers fled to Turkey and
perhaps an equal number of them lost their lives in the battle
with the Iraqi troops.
One of the consequences of that misadventure has been that the CIA
has lost faith in Chalabi while the Pentagon hawks, with little
experience, continue to believe in him, so that the CIA continues
to rely on its own professional operatives for
information-gathering while the Pentagon hawks, not getting from
the CIA the information they want, have created a parallel agency
of their own, which listens more to Chalabi and his "dissidents".
The prompted testimony of these hired "dissidents" shall soon be
used to justify a full-scale invasion. The U.S. has also
instructed the U.N. inspectors to get Iraqi scientists to defect.
Once in U.S. custody, these captive scientists shall be required
to corroborate the "evidence" provided by those U.S. manufactured
dissidents. SUHAIB SALEM/REUTERS
The convoy of U.N arms inspectors passes a large mural of
President Saddam Hussein in Mosul, Iraq, on January 4. This focus
on Iraq has taken remarkable turns. We now know that on the
morning of September 12, 2001, the day after the World Trade
Centre (WTC) events, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued
vigorously in favour of invading Iraq as the first target and was
only dissuaded by Secretary of State Colin Powell's argument that
Al Qaeda was more clearly connected with Afghanistan, that
Afghanistan was an easier country to invade and conquer, and that
the U.S should not be engaged in two theatres of war
simultaneously. A month later, on October 13, 2001, The
International Herald Tribune revealed that the Pentagon-based
Defence Policy Board, a powerful bipartisan group of national
security experts, met for 19 hours on September 19 and 20, and
members of the board agreed "on the need to turn to Iraq as soon
as the initial phase of the war against Afghanistan and Mr. Bin
Laden's organisation was over" (emphasis added). The dates of the
meeting (September 19-20) are significant: this was before Bush
famously declared his "global war on terrorism". If anything, the
membership of the 18-member bipartisan board is even more
significant, as it includes Harold Brown, President Jimmy Carter's
Defence Secretary; Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State;
James Woolsey, Director of the CIA in the Clinton administration;
Admiral David Jeremiah, former Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff; Dan Quayle, former Vice-President; and James
Schlesinger, a former Defence and Energy Secretary.
It was at this meeting that Woolsey was directed to proceed to
Europe to (a) "find" information that would link Iraq with the
September 11 events and (b) consult with the London-based Iraqi
"dissidents" (Chalabi and company) about the feasibility of
instigating uprisings within the country. That same report in The
International Herald Tribune quoted Newt Gingrich, former Speaker
of the U.S. House of Representatives and a member of the group, as
saying: "If we don't use this as the moment to replace Mr. Saddam
after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for
disaster." The report also went on to say that the group was
"laying the groundwork for a strategy that envisions the use of
air support and the occupation of southern Iraq with American
ground troops to install an Iraqi opposition group based in London
at the helm of a new government... Under this notion, American
troops would also seize the oilfields around Basra, in
southeastern Iraq, and sell the oil to finance the Iraqi
opposition in the south and the Kurds in the north."
WE shall return to the matter of this rather incredible "strategy"
but the matter of this group, and especially of its leading lights
such as Wolfowitz himself as well as former Assistant Secretary of
Defence Richard Perle who chairs it, should detain us somewhat
longer. These two, along with the current Vice-President Cheney,
were prominent figures at the Pentagon during Bush Senior's
administration and were then - along with Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby
(Cheney's Chief of Staff), William Bennet (former President Ronald
Reagan's Education Secretary) and Zalmay Khalilzad (Bush Junior's
Ambassador to Afghanistan) - founders of the key think-tank called
`Project for the New American Century' (PNAC), which was itself
one of the chain of rightwing think-tanks, such as the American
Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for
Democracy and so on. Jason Vest of The Village Voice (November
21-27, 2001), Neil Mackey of The Sunday Herald (September 15,
2002) and John Pilger of New Statesman (December 16, 2020) are
among journalists who have drawn our attention to the PNAC's
seminal report, `Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategy, Forces
and Resources for a New Century', drafted as a blueprint of
American aims for Bush Junior before he actually won - rather,
stole - the presidential election. As Pilger phrases it, "Two
years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48 bn so
that Washington could `fight and win multiple, simultaneous major
theatre wars'. This has happened. It said the United States should
develop `bunker-buster' nuclear weapons and make `star wars' a
national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event
of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is."
That report had described the global spread of the U.S. military
forces as "the cavalry on the new American frontier". It
recommends that the U.S. replace the U.N. in "peacekeeping"
projects; that bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere in the
Gulf be maintained even after Saddam's overthrow; that the U.S.
encourage a "regime change" in China and undertake "increase of
American forces in South-east Asia"; that "U.S.
Space Forces" be created to ensure supremacy in space and total
control of cyberspace; that the U.S. consider developing "advanced
forms of biological warfare; and that North Korea, Libya, Syria
and Iran as among the states that require the U.S. to establish a
"world-wide command-&-control system". As Neil Mackey points out,
"The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document written by
Wolfowitz and Libby that said the U.S. must `discourage advanced
industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role'." This aspect of the
recommendation is clearly directed against Japan and western
Europe.
It is now, after September 11, 2001, rather eerie and astonishing
that this report, drafted a year before those events, actually
suggested that what America needed as justification for putting in
place its global design for the 21st century was "some
catastrophic and catalysing event like a new Pearl Harbour". As
images of the WTC tragedy were flashed across the world,
incessantly, day in and day out, dozens of commentators indeed
compared that event to Pearl Harbour again and again and again,
until the analogy - the two great and evil attacks on America -
were indelibly inscribed in the minds of viewers, especially
within the U.S. And, the tragedy of thousands of grieving families
was soon turned into the empire's golden opportunity. Nicholas
Lemann revealed in The New Yorker of April 2002 that Condoleezza
Rice, Bush's National Security Advisor, told him she had called
her senior officers and asked them "to think about `how do you
capitalise on these opportunities'." AMR NABIL/AP
Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks
to crew members inside the hangar of the aircraft carrier USS
Constellation in the Gulf region, on December 22, 2002. AS regards
the military design, that thinking has centred essentially on one
question: should the U.S. fight several wars at the same time (a
view held by many in the Pentagon) or should it go after its
designated little enemies around the globe one by one (the Powell
view)? According to James Webb, a former Assistant Secretary of
Defence and Secretary of Navy in the Reagan administration, this
debate as well as the unwavering focus on Iraq has been going on
for over a decade. As he puts it, it is "a rift that goes back to
the Gulf war itself, when neo-conservatives were vocal in their
calls for `a MacArthurian regency in Baghdad'." (The Washington
Post, September 4, 2020) In other words, they have been arguing
all these years in favour of a full-scale U.S. occupation that
would last long enough to remake the Iraqi state much as the U.S.
remade the Japanese state after the Second World War. Webb
himself, who confesses to being a former Marine officer and an
abiding Republican, offers unanswerable arguments as to why this
is pure fantasy. However, that kind of argument gained great
momentum after September 11, especially because those who
represented that view were now fully in control of the U.S.
military policy at the Pentagon. Thus, Jason Vest was already
reporting in November 2001
According to both Pentagon and intelligence sources, in
mid-September the Project for the New American Century - a hawkish
private policy group whose membership overlaps with the official
Defence Policy Board - sent President Bush a letter after a
two-day conference, declaring that failure to promptly remove
Saddam would constitute a "decisive surrender in the war against
terrorism". Ominously, it also held that if Syria and Iran refused
to drop all support for Hezbollah, "the administration should
consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these known
state sponsors of terrorism"... Perle's Defence Policy Board also
sent Bush a letter recommending all measures be taken to install
the heretofore dubious and ineffectual Iraqi National Congress of
Ahmed Chalabi as the new leadership in Baghdad, backed by the
deployment of American troops to secure Iraqi oilfields.
By December 2, 2001, The Observer was reporting that "America
intends to depose Saddam Hussein by giving armed support to Iraqi
opposition forces across the country... President George W. Bush
has ordered the CIA and his senior military commanders to draw up
detailed plans for a military operation that could begin within
months... the planning is being undertaken under the auspices of
the U.S. Central Command at McDill air force base in Tampa,
Florida, commanded by General Tommy Franks, who is leading the war
against Afghanistan." This same Tommy Franks was to go on record
later as saying that the post-war settlement in Iraq will require
the stationing of substantial U.S. forces there for a long time,
on the model of South Korea (where U.S. troops have been stationed
for half a century). This of course goes far beyond the earlier
idea of a short-term "MacArthurian regency". General Tommy
obviously fancies himself a proconsul for life, and then to be
succeeded by similar proconsuls, into infinity.
By February 2002, Colin Powell, the Jamaican-born Secretary of
State who is generally credited to be the moderate and prudent
voice in the Bush Administration, was declaring that the question
of U.N. inspections of Iraqi facilities had become irrelevant and
that the U.S. was in any case committed to the removal of Saddam
Hussein. Afghanistan had been captured by then and the U.S. felt
more confident of concentrating on this other, larger prize. Since
then, a new generation of weapons are being churned out by the
military-industrial complex; the U.S. has established new military
bases and upgraded the existing ones in the whole region; prepared
its own corporations and negotiated with other countries the
parameters for the sharing of the Iraqi oil bonanza; cajoled the
more powerful countries and intimidated the weaker ones into
giving it a Security Council resolution which can be easily
interpreted as permission to wage war in case Iraq fails to meet
any of the impossible demands that the U.S. keeps making,
including a "regime change", that is, the imposition of a regime
comprising U.S. clients. By now, of course, virtually all of
Iraq's neighbours, from Qatar to Turkey, have fallen in line; as
have, in the world of great powers, France, Germany and Russia. I
HAVE traced this earlier history to illustrate how predictable the
more recent events have been, and how much Iraq has been at the
centre of an unfolding strategic design of a global scope.
This design is rooted in the fact that we are living through an
extremely dangerous phase of history, in which (a) the U.S.
commands more power than any imperial centre ever has in the
entire human history, with no competitors worth the name; (b) the
U.S. is ruled by not just the usual Republican rightwing but a
regime so much of the Far Right that some of the more notorious
U.S. Presidents of this century, from `Teddy' Roosevelt to Richard
Nixon, seem positively more civilised; (c) the core of these Far
Right zealots have taken hold of the U.S. military establishment
in so complete a fashion that the Pentagon is emerging as
something of an autonomous centre of power which treats even the
CIA with contempt and as being too liberal and cautious. (Perle is
reported to have said that the information they are getting from
the CIA is "not worth the paper it is written on" and has helped
Rumsfeld create parallel agencies more loyal to this Far Right
cabal.) ODD ANDERSEN/AFP
Ahmed Chalabi, whom the U.S. has tried to install as the head of a
"parallel Iraqi government", at the opening session of the Iraqi
Opposition Conference in London, on Decemebr 14, 2002. Writing in
The London Review of Books, Anatol Lievan, a Senior Associate at
the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington D.C., has quite
correctly described this Far Right cabal as "the dominant
neo-conservative nationalists" and, more pointedly, as
representatives of "anti-Muslim American nationalism". Every
member of this cabal has had and continues to have extremely close
relations with leaders of the Likud, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's ruling party, in whose own policy formations Perle and
Wolfowitz have featured prominently, so that in addition to the
historic alignment of the U.S. and Israeli policies, we are also
witnessing a new and extremely dangerous convergence between the
politically organised Far Right in the two countries as well as a
historically unprecedented convergence between Zionism's
expansionist militarism and the American Christian fundamentalist
messianism. Aside from the key question of oil, Iraq is so central
in their thinking because, if left to peace and prosperity, Iraq
would be the last remaining Arab country that could effectively
oppose Israel as part of its own ambition to emerge as a leader of
secular Arab nationalism, which is the only ideology that is
capable of harnessing the immense anti-imperialist sentiment that
prevails in the Arab world.
Conversely, in case of a full-scale invasion of Iraq, Israel is
likely not only to complete its destruction of the Palestine
Authority (P.A.) and force the exodus of the maximum number of
Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza into such neighbouring
states as Jordan and Egypt, but also to move militarily into Syria
and Lebanon. If this design succeeds, Iran would be the next
target. Some 12 per cent of the Israeli Air Force is already in
south-eastern Turkey and parts of it are routinely flying around
the Iranian border for gathering intelligence, provocation and so
on. The U.S. and Israel are also encouraging Azari separatism in
Iran, with possible collusion from Turkey; and aggression against
Iran can be prepared any day, on the pretext of its own nuclear
programme. Similarly, if Saudi Arabia finds it in its own interest
to be less pliant or if there are radical, anti-monarchical
developments there, the U.S. may well move to create a separate
entity there in the Shia-dominated eastern zone where much of the
oil resources are located. And it is of course unclear what future
awaits Iraq itself.
The U.S. can dislodge Saddam easily and it is very likely that the
Iraqi Army will disintegrate under unbearable military pressure;
some commanders may even defect to the U.S. However, it is very
unlikely that men like Chalabi can provide a stable, even remotely
popular, government there.
Massive disorder, with various ethnicities getting played out
against each other, in an unending fight over the spoils of war,
is much more likely. The ongoing tussle among Kurdish, Turkish and
Arab groups in the oil-rich region around Kirkuk in northern Iraq,
thanks to the disintegration of the central Iraqi authority under
Anglo-American pressure, is perhaps a foretaste of things yet to
come, after the full-scale invasion. As Lieven puts it in his
article, "The planned war against Iraq is not after all intended
only to remove Saddam Hussein, but to destroy the structure of the
Sunni-dominated Arab nationalist Iraqi state as it has existed
since that country's inception. The `democracy' which replaces it
will presumably resemble that of Afghanistan - a ramshackle
coalition of ethnic groups and warlords, utterly dependent on U.S.
military power and utterly subservient to U.S. (and Israeli)
wishes." Meanwhile, it is also possible that the level of the
strife on the one hand, and the high stakes involved in
establishing its own oil monopoly on the other, shall force the
U.S. to station a substantial number of its own troops in
garrisons across Iraq and establish something of an "indirect
rule", in the style of colonialism's heyday, above the ethnic
clients.
In a much broader geo-political perspective, complete monopoly
over oil, the world's most strategic commodity, not only in the
Gulf region and the Caspian Sea basin but also all the way from
Venezuela to Indonesia, is also seen by these "neo-conservative
American nationalists" as a major weapon for coercion and
manipulation in their relations with secondary powers in the
advanced industrialised world itself - western Europe and Japan
surely, but also, increasingly, China. This, however, is a large
and complex matter to which we shall return in a subsequent piece
when we shall also detail some of the salient features of the new
weapons systems as well as the weapon dollar-petrodollar
connection in the U.S. military-industrial complex, which is the
driving force impelling the imperial authority towards permanent
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