Running the Show

"Victory against al-Qaeda was in our grasp, and we were releasing the pressure" -- General Tommy Franks, CentCom Commander

Ever since September 11, 2001, we in 'the land of the free' and 'the home of the brave' have seen a steady assault on our liberties. Yet from the very beginning while the so-called "War on Terror" was being used to justify an unprecedented and unconstitutional expansion of executive power, the purported 'enemy' who must be be fought by 'all possible means' was being conveniently 'forgotten'.

"It took me a second to digest what he had told me. General Franks' mission in Afghanistan--which, as a good soldier, he was loyally carrying out--was being downgraded from a war to a manhunt. What's more, the most important tools for a manhunt, the Predators, had been redeployed to Iraq at the moment they were most needed in Afghanistan.

I was stunned. This was the first time I had been informed that the decision to go to war with Iraq had not only been made but was being implemented, to the substantial disadvantage of the war in Afghanistan.

Franks continued, "We can finish this job in Afghanistan if we are allowed to do so. And there is a set of terrorist targets after Afghanistan. My first priority would be Somalia--there is no effective government to control the large number of terrorist cells. Next, I would go to Yemen. Iraq is a special case. Our intelligence there is very unsatisfactory. Some Europeans know more than we on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction..." so writes former Senator Bob Graham in Intelligence Matters.

Now we learn that months before Sen. Graham the Chairman of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence had that conversation, General Franks was in Oxfordshire drawing up secret plans for the Iraq invasion with Britain's' RAF.

So who is really in charge of U.S. foreign policy? The Framers of the Constitution specifically vested in Congress the sole and exclusive authority to initiate military hostilities, including full-blown war, as well as lesser acts of armed force, on behalf of the American people. The constitutional grant to Congress of the war power, which Justice William Paterson described in United States v. Smith (1806) as "the exclusive province of Congress to change a state of peace into a state of war," constituted a sharp break from the British model.

Yet here was the general in charge of U.S. military command drawing up war plans with a foreign government without informing the Congress. To illustrate the extent to which the American people have seen their rights routinely abused and eroded since George W. Bush took office, now the Justice Dept in defending against suits charging civil violations feels bold enough to invoke 'states secrets privilege' in order to circumvent the courts and carry on more illegal surveillance and even the assassination of U.S. citizens without so much an indictment of treason.

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
-Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 1952

So much for the Constitution. Like the Magna Carta it will remain an inspiring document, the one that set the standard in places like Kenya. Here at home we have bravely surrendered the right to be ruled Law. Instead we are to be ruled by men and women, their secretive goals enforced without question -- and if the teabaggers get their way, perhaps one day soon, by a President Palin.

Mad Money

George W. Bush, when asked how is history likely to judge his invasion of Iraq war, replied, "History, we don't know. We'll all be dead."

While some us shivered, wondering if this was the forecast of a Premillennial Dispensationalist with his thumb on a nuclear arsenal, it exposed the mind of a typically Western, short-term thinker. This is crucial to recognize if we are to survive these enormous financial and environmental crises of our own making. When John Keynes quipped to those who contend that in the long run the market always corrected itself that "in the long run everyone is dead” he meant that, by blindly pursuing profit, classical economists were sowing the seeds of Destruction. Marx knew he was railing at deaf ears. The committed capitalist will happily sell the rope that hangs him, for in his heart he adores a thief.

U.N. chief: "Drug Money saved Banks in Global Crisis"--the Guardian

"Drug money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year."

"Global crime has become an integral part of an economic system . . . the relationship among criminals, politicians, and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions . . . this system of global trade has fostered an unprecedented accumulation of private wealth alongside the impoverishment of large sectors of the world population," --Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, the University of Ottawa.

Mad For War

'When weighing possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraq Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.'-- the Center for American Progress

How early 20th century of our Progressive friends. To fathom neocon policy one has to grasp that for the Calvinist and committed capitalist their greatest impediment is the developed nation state. There is nothing more painfully amusing than listening to Dick Cheney bluster on about "defending America's interests". There are certainly many interests both here and abroad to be "defended" but they have nothing to do with the well-being of most Americans.

The Miraculous Rebound

In October 1983 the First National Bank of Midland, the largest independent bank in Texas went belly-up. The oil industry boom was over and by 1984 prices had tumbled. The number of Texas rigs fell from over 600 to 311. The downturn saw Halliburton's net income fall from $197 million in 1990 to $27 million in 1991 forcing a dramatic restructuring. The company was reduced to its Energy Services while retaining its engineering and construction subsidiary, Brown and Root. Come 1992 and the end of Gulf War I: Enter Dick.

Joined by Bush the Elder, the newly minted CEO promptly toured the Persian Gulf in search of business. With the former president at his side previously shut doors were suddenly flying open. As Halliburton’s CFO, Gary Morris, observed in wonder: ‘Having access is a great thing.’ There was just one problem: the biggest deals Mr. Cheney was being offered ran counter to U.S. law. So our Dick did what any red-blooded patriot would do, he sought a waiver. As the future Vice President said when challenged to explain his company's lavish deals with "terrorist states" like Iran and Libya: “The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States.” [And just in case Uncle Sam tried poking his nose where it didn't belong Halliburton would tuck the loot in the Cayman islands]

Things were going swimmingly. Thanks to the former Secretary of Defense, from 1994 to 2002 Brown & Root was awarded over 600 Pentagon contracts. The company had expanded its global reach, and with the help of some well-greased hands, profits were soaring. Then our Dick made his one bad blunder: he acquired Dresser Industries and with it that company's 300,000 pending asbestos claims. Now our Vice-President Dick owed the company that had made him a very rich man (Cheney received $34 million when he resigned from Halliburton to return to government) and he owed them big time.

Cui Bono

Forget the Taliban, Lets Talk Iraq

It is hard to convince most folks that the people they elect are willing to see them and their children die for a ten percent return. Of all the rationales after the fact for Bush's decision to invade Iraq the only one to prove its value has been the Halliburton stock price.

"Halliburton's stock doubles as troop deaths double"--Halliburton Watch, Sept,2005.
"Since the beginning of the Iraq war, Halliburton, the Texas energy giant once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has seen its stock price more than triple in value. When the U.S invaded Iraq in March of 2003, Halliburton's stock was selling for $20 per share. The stock price at the close of market activity on Monday was $66."

Doh je: That's Cantonese for "thank you very much ..."

'The UK's Beyond Petroleum and China's CNPC have signed a contract to develop Iraq's Rumaila field, the largest oil field in the country. Rumaila holds the third biggest oil reserves in the world and the deal marks Iraq's biggest energy deal since Saddam Hussein was overthrown.'-- BBC World News

'China has emerged as one of the biggest economic beneficiaries of the war, snagging five lucrative deals. While Western firms were largely subdued in their interest in Iraq's recent oil auctions ... a testament to the lengths to which China will go to secure the oil it sorely needs to fuel its galloping economy' -- China Daily

Reading those quotes one has to wonder exactly how Cheney and his "neo-Conservatives" are still allowed to blow their smoke. They insist that our security demands spending ever more on the military even as we close down hospitals and lay off teachers. Are we credulous enough to believe Bill Kristol after his Weekly Standard describes the PRC as "a regime of hair-curling, systematic barbarity, or Washington Times' Bill Gertz bloviates about the great and present danger being posed by "Communist" China. Its past time someone ask their great benefactor, the Reverend Moon.

Automotive News: DETROIT, Sept. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- The Unification Church has joined a former U.S. diplomat and a major Korean industrial concern in an effort to create China's biggest car manufacturing facility. The project is being promoted by Panda Motors, a U.S.-registered corporation. The treasurer of Panda Motors is Pak Bo-Hi. He is also chairman of Newsworld Communications, which publishes the Washington Times and is controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church.

"In the late 1980s and 90s, transnational corporations (TNCs) saw China as the last frontier, the unlimited market that could endlessly absorb investment and endlessly throw off profitable returns. However, China's restrictive rules on trade and investment forced TNCs to locate most of their production processes in the country. By playing according to China's rules, TNCs ended up building a manufacturing base that produces more than China or the rest of the world can consume." --The Global Politician

64 million empty apartments

"Mainland’s property market remains dangerously overheated and failing to tame the speculative bubble could threaten financial and social stability," --South China Morning Post According to hedge fund manager, Tyler Durden, "China is covertly funding and creating a housing bubble that is at least 5 times as big as that of the United States."

Acknowledgment and Denial

The irony is that for centuries the Chinese rejected Western thinking. For our world to survive we need them to teach us to think less like Friedman and more like Confucius.

Short-term orientation [can be] identified with Truth, while long-term orientation can be identified with Virtue. "When information is manipulated or held to obtain a certain result, then one is simply going after the short-term orientation. There may be truth to the results, but the virtue of it has been removed."

Our "Masters of the Universe" are clearly worried about those torches and pitchforks. But can they perceive the distinction between equity and profit? Here's some of our committed capitalists' half-baked notions on "reform". Note the token Asian presence.

Where speculation ends, where real life starts, there consequently begins real, positive science,"--Karl Marx

Until our cherished Mad Men on Wall St. and TNC boardrooms recognize that without an ethos of pursuing virtue there is no useful reward. We will continue to see the fruits of all our labors blown up in the next best war-- then disappear on a dying planet.

Murder for Profit pt 3: The Stench of Avarice

Greed without end, spasmodic lust; Murderers' hands, usurers' hands, hands of prayer; Exhales in foetid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood war,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war...
-"The Immortals", Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf

It began long before the Iraq invasion.

As George Monbiot reported back in 2005- The government of the US, though it had been informed about a smuggling operation which brought Saddam Hussein's regime some $4.6bn, decided to let it continue. It did so because it deemed the smuggling to be in its national interest, as it helped friendly countries (Turkey and Jordan) evade the sanctions on Iraq... But this isn't the half of it.

Four days before Volcker reported his findings about Saddam Hussein, the US inspector general for Iraq reconstruction published a report about the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the US agency which governed Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004. The inspector general's job is to make sure that the money the authority spent was properly accounted for. It wasn't. In just 14 months, $8.8bn went absent without leave. This is more than Mobutu Sese Seko managed to steal in 32 years of looting Zaire."

It appears that the moment U.S. boots hit Iraqi ground the army brass was preparing to arrange its kickbacks. Though the CPA's inspector general claimed that the agency was "burdened by severe inefficiencies and poor management", more serious investigations now reveal that it was actually "burdened" by endemic fraud, corruption and false accounting-- the "Enron model".

From as early as 2004 officials in the CPA were demanding bribes of up to $300,000 in return for awarding contracts. Iraqi money seized by US forces simply disappeared. Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. $1.4billion was secreted out of Baghdad and somehow ended up with the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil. The Iraq invasion had given the military and its co-dependents a license to steal.

As the Guardian reports: "Contracts to US companies were awarded by the CPA without any financial safeguards. They were issued without competition, in the form of "cost-plus" deals. This means that the companies were paid for the expenses they incurred, plus a percentage of those expenses in the form of profit. They had a powerful incentive, in other words, to spend as much money as possible."

They shoot reporters, don't they?

Imagine you are a young journalist, say with the NYTimes and you've been shipped to Baghdad to cover a war that half the world and the U.S. military already know is an all out lie. There you discover that your new army buddies, the very men you may need to rely on should you be forced to leave the Green Zone and report from a "free fire zone" are getting a cut of the loot. Just how deeply would you dig to get that story? In hindsight, not that far...

"Until now, the investigations have never reached the people at the top," The London Independent's Patrick Cockburn told Radio National's Fran Kelly.

"One scandal in 2004-05 saw the entire military procurement budget for Iraq's Ministry of Defence, $US1.3 billion, disappear.

"Disappear in the sense that contracts were signed with small companies in Poland and Pakistan and a few bits of some ancient Soviet helicopters were purchased and never delivered. At that time the ministry was being run by American officers. Either they were incredibly negligent or they were in on it, and most of the Iraqis believe they were in on it."

For the NYTimes the scandal apparently comes as a grand surprise. Despite having reported on the conviction of a former Coalition Provisional Authority official for money laundering, bribery and conspiracy. In fact although little of the U.S. military's role in the widespread corruption was reported on in the paper itself both the Sydney Herald and the Christian Scientist Monitor quote the NYTimes International edition as saying that the probe was certain to expand to include US Army Reserve officers.

Of course, now that there is a new Obama administration it is safe for the mind-boggling breadth of the scandal to be exposed, but for all the good intentions of Justice officials as Cockburn notes: "[The corruption] was pervasive. There were very large sums of money to be made and the guys in charge realized that [having been given what amounts to blanket immunity by the Bush regime] there wasn't going to be any comeback."

President Obama's Shoes

Responding to the instantly famous "shoe attack" Bush quipped, "That’s what happens in free societies – people try to bring attention to themselves.”

No, Mr. Bush, that's what oppressed people do when their lives are being destroyed and people like you aren't listening.

"In Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City, thousands rallied to demand the reporter's release: "Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head." They called the reporter a "hero."

"I’m sure many Iraqis want to do what Muntazer did. Muntazer used to say all the orphans whose father were killed are because of Bush," his brother, Udai al-Zaidi, told Reuters Television.

Dividing the Spoils

Joe Biden's proposition in 2006 to divide Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions arrived in Baghdad virtually DOA after having won hands-down support in the U.S. Senate. As Biden laid out in an Op-Ed to the NYTimes, the notion that the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites would each be responsible for their own laws, administration and security was hardly radical, after all, the Iraqi Constitution already provided for a federal structure in which "the provinces combine to form regional governments."

His argument ran thus: [Iraq] was already heading toward partition:"The Sunnis, who until recently believed they would retake power in Iraq, are beginning to recognize that they won't and don't want to live in a Shiite-controlled, highly centralized state with laws enforced by sectarian militias. The Shiites know they can dominate the government, but they can't defeat a Sunni insurrection. The Kurds will not give up their 15-year-old autonomy."

Ironically, there are many in Iraq who believe that the Senate's approval of the Biden proposal actually helped to quell the sectarian violence that had been rising exponentially, as more and more tribes and neighborhood gangs sought revenge. Even the Kurds who already enjoy de facto autonomy were said to "oppose" the “Biden plan”.

“We don’t support establishing federal regions on a sectarian basis. For example our region is not ethnic, it contains Kurds and non-Kurds. The regions should be established on a geographic basis,” said Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman.

Ezzet al-Shabender, a member of parliament from the secularist Iraqi List of former prime minister Ayad Allawi, credited the broad-based disgust triggered by Biden’s proposal for helping Iraqi politicians bury their differences.

“His project was the reason behind the unity of many political blocs that once differed in viewpoints,” he said, comparing it to the Balfour Declaration, a 1917 British note that backed the creation of Israel andis regarded across the Arab world as the ultimate colonial injustice.

Indeed one wonders, now that Obama has Biden as his chief-counselor, whether the original neocon plan to divide up Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, is to be continued under a Democratic face. It certainly seems that way to the Iraqis, most of whom viewed the Senate resolution with near-apoplectic outrage.

"The Iraqi government categorically rejects the resolution. Iraq is not a US property," said a spokesman for the Sunni-led National Dialogue Front. The Association of Muslim Scholars, which calls itself the political arm of the Iraqi armed resistance, stated, "The Senate's adoption of [the] resolution…is not shocking, because [partitioning the country] was one of the objectives behind the invasion of Iraq."

Indeed, from Richard Perle to David Wurmser, who recently resigned as Vice President Cheney's chief Middle East adviser, the neoconservatives who pushed for the war eagerly embraced the notion of redrawing the map of the region, and it didn't stop at Iraq's borders.

Map of an imaginary reconstituted Iraq, published by the Goals For Americans Foundation. Note the placement of Mosul, the biggest city of north-western Iraq, in the middle of the “Kurdish Republic”. Another version is available here, with Najaf located approximately in the marshlands north of Basra instead of in central Iraq

The wild-card in all this remains Iran which has gained the most from Bush's poorly planned invasion. There is little doubt that if such a partition were put into effect the Shia region would be Iran's closest ally and Iraq would cease to exist as an Arab state. Stranded without direct access to the country's oil one need not be a pessimist to see the Sunnis, sandwiched between Kurds and Shia, becoming like the Tamil Tigers , prompting more chaos. In fact a mere cursory reading of Sri Lankan history suggests that all the ingredients: regional, religious and ethnic division are there waiting to be exacerbated. This is the heavy price of "divide and conquer". Replace Iraq for "Sri Lanka" and Sunni and Shia for "Buddhist and Hindu" or "Sinhalese and Tamil" you have a tendentious state where the region's powerbrokers depend on constant turmoil.

"The Tigers need a ‘Sinhala Sri Lanka’ (as opposed to a pluralist Sri Lanka) to justify the creation of Tiger Eelam; the Southern extremists need Tigers and their quest for Tiger Eelam to justify ‘Sinhala/Buddhist Sri Lanka’. Co-existing side by side these two opposing but mutually dependent extremisms endeavour to expand themselves and wipe out the middle ground, thereby destroying the environment necessary for the survival of the democratic Tamils and the centrist Sinhalese."

Which is why for all the bloviating in the Western press about Iraq "descending into violence" once the U.S. army leaves we rarely hear from Iraqis themselves. If Obama wants to escape the indignity of being beaned with a pair of dirty shoes I "hope" that for a "change" the new president will listen to patriotic Iraqi voices such as these:

Haytham Hashim: “[Any] Iraqi federal system should be demarcated in a spirit free from racism and sectarianism..."

Nuha Zaki: “I think the concept of regions is a bad idea, especially in the current situation ... we should do our utmost to combat sectarianism and make Iraq return to its past as a unified country and a unified people from north to south. The establishment of regions will lead to barriers that will have consequences for such areas as the economy and trade,”

Abu Usama: “Iraq, the Land of the Two Rivers, was from the days of the monarchy a centralised state from north to south, and when the republic was declared, the late leader Abd al-Karim Qasim held on to every square inch (dharra, literally, “atom” or “tiny particle”) of our dear fatherland of Iraq. But today we live under fire of the loathsome occupation which is aimed at splitting Iraq into races and sects… Not everything that is workable in the West may be in harmony with Arab and Muslim Iraq.”

But then, bringing hope and democracy to Iraq was never why we went there.

Killing For Oil? Tragedy, Comedy or Farce?

Less than a fortnight after the Iraqi parliament agreed on a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) calling for U.S. forces to leave Iraq's cities by mid-2009 and withdraw from the country altogether by the end of 2011 a suicide bomber kills 55 people dining in Kirkuk.

Official reports say Arab tribal leaders were lunching with members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and were there to discuss ways of defusing tensions among Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen in the oil-rich province.

Cui Bono?

Mere hours after the fatal blast Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for Iraq's Shia-dominated government led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, announces that some residual U.S. forces will be needed for at least 10 more years. Curious since before the vote in parliament the Maliki government had been insisting that its military would be ready to take over security by the summer of 2009.

The SOFA agreement (without which any continued U.S. military presence would be in violation of international law) had only been achieved after drastic compromise. The Sunni Arabs seeing themselves as the vulnerable (oil-free) minority under a Shia-Kurdish government were determined to wring major concessions as a condition for their support (such as the release of Sunni political prisoners being currently detained by U.S. troops). And despite the ongoing ethnic and tribal tensions, most Iraqis remain firmly nationalistic so that anything less than the assurance of a complete American withdrawal would have doomed the Sadrists along with the current government in Iraq's upcoming provincial elections.

So Who Gets To Be Rich?

“We believe that oil and gas belong to the Iraqi people, to all the Iraqi people,” Wael Abdul Latif, an independent member of the Iraqi parliament and a former magistrate.

Good luck with that...

Iraqi oil dispute bubbles to the surface December 09. 2008 9:26PM UAE

Iraq has put the squeeze on private investors by saying it will not give preferential treatment to Kurdistan crude. Nabil al Juran / AP Photo

Prospects for settling a protracted Iraqi feud over regional oil development have once again receded, following an apparent breakthrough last month over negotiations to export crude from the country’s autonomous Kurdistan region.

Late last month, in a surprise visit to the north-eastern regional capital of Erbil, the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al Shahristani, agreed in principal to allow two recently discovered oilfields in Kurdistan to be connected to the state-owned pipeline that exports crude from northern Iraq to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

That constituted a major concession that seemed to break a deadlock in oil discussions between Iraqi central authorities and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The snag is that Baghdad last week made clear that it still planned to treat Kurdistani crude developed with private-sector investment in the same way as oil from state-owned fields.

It is both perverse and all too common to hear the Iraqi conflict described in terms of Islamic terrorism or sectarian strife, but just as in the tragedy that occurred in Mumbai, the antipathies of race and religion are merely the nurtured fuel being fed to the oil-war's consuming fire.

Ironically, just as the ill-conceived Iraq invasion has contributed to the United States becoming fiscally bankrupt, the fight for Iraq's resources has left the country's infrastructure so badly damaged, its leadership so steeped in corruption, its greedy occupiers will be hard-pressed to profit.

"While Iraq's oil industry will continue to face problems with security in 2009, the country's crumbling production and pipeline systems are more likely to disrupt crude exports"
-- the London-based Exclusive Analysis (EA).

"[T]he two 50-km subsea oil pipelines that transport the crude to the terminals are at imminent risk of failing due to severe corrosion and vulnerability to rupture"
--October report from the U.S. Congress.



There are but fine lines between comedy, tragedy and farce.