[Peace-discuss] corp. looting and book burning in Iraq

[Ricky Baldwin]

[Below are two articles on Iraq, one (viciously funny
but true) by Terry Jones on corporate looting of Iraq
and one (depressingly serious) by Robert Fisk on book
burning.  Together, they seem to fill out the picture
of US "liberation". - Ricky]

> Welcome Aboard the Iraq Gravy Train
> 
> Let the Corporate Looting Begin
> 
> by TERRY JONES
> 
> Congratulations to all the winners of tickets to
> take part in the greatest 
> rebuilding show on earth
> 
> Terry Jones Sunday April 13, 2003 The Observer
> 
> Well the war has been a huge success, and I guess
> it's time for 
> congratulations all round. And wow! It's hard to
> know where to begin.
> 
> First, I'd like to congratulate Kellogg Brown & Root
> (KBR) and the Bechtel 
> Corporation, which are the construction companies
> most likely to benefit 
> from the reconstruction of Iraq. Contracts in the
> region of $1 billion 
> should soon coming your way, chaps. Well done! And
> what with the US dropping
> 
> 15,000 precision-guided munitions, 7,500 unguided
> bombs and 750 cruise 
> missiles on Iraq so far and with more to come,
> there's going to be a lot of 
> reconstruction. It looks like it could be a bonanza
> year.
> 
> Of course, we all know that KBR is the construction
> side of Halliburton, and
> 
> it has been doing big business with the military
> ever since the Second World
> 
> War. Most recently, it got the plum job of
> constructing the prison compound 
> for terrorists suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Could be
> a whole lot more deluxe 
> chicken coops coming your way in the next few
> months, guys. Stick it to 'em.
> 
> I'd also like to add congratulations to Dick Cheney,
> who was chief executive
> 
> of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, and who currently
> receives a cheque for $1
> 
> million a year from his old company. I guess he may
> find there's a little 
> surprise bonus in there this year. Well done, Dick.
> 
> Congratulations, too, to former Secretary of State,
> George Schultz. He's not
> 
> only on the board of Bechtel, he's also chairman of
> the advisory board of 
> the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group
> with close ties to the 
> White House committed to reconstructing the Iraqi
> economy through war. 
> You're doing a grand job, George, and I'm sure
> material benefits will be 
> coming your way, as sure as the Devil lives in
> Texas.
> 
> Oh, before I forget, a big round of appreciation for
> Jack Sheehan, a retired
> 
> general who sits on the Defence Policy Board which
> advises the Pentagon. 
> He's a senior vice president at Bechtel and one of
> the many members of the 
> Defence Policy Board with links to companies that
> make money out of defence 
> contracts. When I say 'make money' I'm not joking.
> Their companies have 
> benefited to the tune of $76bn just in the last
> year. Talk about a gravy 
> train. Well, Jack, you and your colleagues can
> certainly look forward to a 
> warm and joyous Christmas this year.
> 
> It;s been estimated that rebuilding Iraq could cost
> anything from $25bn to 
> $100bn and the great thing is that the Iraqis will
> be paying for it 
> themselves out of their future oil revenues. What's
> more, President Bush 
> will be able to say, with a straight face, that
> they're using the money from
> 
> Iraqi oil to benefit the Iraqi people. 'We're going
> to use the assets of the
> 
> people of Iraq, especially their oil assets, to
> benefit their people,' said 
> Secretary of State Colin Powell, and he looked
> really sincere. Yessir.
> 
> It's so neat it makes you want to run out and buy
> shares in Fluor. As one of
> 
> the world's biggest procurement and construction
> companies, it recently 
> hired Kenneth J. Oscar, who, as acting assistant
> secretary of the army, took
> 
> care of the Pentagon's $35bn-a-year procurement
> budget. So there could also 
> be some nice extra business coming its way soon.
> Bully for them.
> 
> But every celebration has its serious side, and I
> should like to convey my 
> condolences to all those who have suffered so
> grievously in this war. 
> Particularly American Airlines, Qantas and Air
> Canada, and all other travel 
> companies which have seen their customers dwindle,
> as fear of terrorist 
> reprisals for what the US and Britain have done in
> Iraq begins to bite.
> 
> My condolences also to all those British companies
> which have been 
> disappointed in their bid to share in the bonanza
> that all this wonderful 
> high-tech military firepower has created. I know it
> must be frustrating and 
> disheartening for many of you, especially in the
> medical field, knowing 
> there are all those severed limbs, all that burnt
> flesh, all those smashed 
> skulls, broken bones, punctured spleens, ripped
> faces and mangled children 
> just crying out for your products.
> 
> You could be making a fortune out of the drugs,
> serums and surgical 
> hardware, and yet you have to stand on the sidelines
> and watch as US drug 
> companies make a killing.
> 
> Well, Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, has
> some words of comfort for 
> us all. As he recently pointed out, this adventure
> by Bush and Blair will 
> have created such hatred throughout the Arab world,
> that 100 new bin Ladens 
> will have been created.
> 
> So all of us here in Britain, as well as in America,
> shouldn't lose heart. 
> Once the Arab world starts to take its revenge,
> there should be enough 
> reconstruction to do at home to keep business
> thriving for some years to 
> come.
> 
> Terry Jones was a member of Monty Python.
> 
> ********************************************
> 
> April 15, 2003
> 
> The Sacking of Baghdad
> Burning the History of Iraq
> by ROBERT FISK
> 
> Baghdad.
> 
> So yesterday was the burning of books. First came
> the looters, then the 
> arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking
> of Baghdad. The National 
> Library and Archives ? a priceless treasure of
> Ottoman historical documents,
> 
> including the old royal archives of Iraq, were
> turned to ashes in 3,000 
> degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the
> Ministry of Religious 
> Endowment was set ablaze.
> 
> I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I
> tried to reclaim a book of 
> Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the
> ashes of Iraqi history, 
> I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of
> handwritten letters 
> between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who
> started the Arab revolt 
> against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the
> Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
> 
> And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy
> yard they blew, letters 
> of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands
> for ammunition for 
> troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks
> on pilgrims, all in 
> delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding
> in my hands the last 
> Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for
> Iraq, this is Year Zero;
> 
> with the destruction of the antiquities in the
> Museum of Archaeology on 
> Saturday and the burning of the National Archives
> and then the Koranic 
> library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being
> erased. Why? Who set these 
> fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage
> being destroyed?
> 
> When I caught sight of the Koranic library
> burning--flames 100 feet high 
> were bursting from the windows--I raced to the
> offices of the occupying 
> power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An
> officer shouted to a 
> colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic]
> library is on fire". I 
> gave the map location, the precise name--in Arabic
> and English. I said the 
> smoke could be seen from three miles away and it
> would take only five 
> minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there
> wasn't an American at the 
> scene--and the flames were shooting 200 feet into
> the air.
> 
> There was a time when the Arabs said that their
> books were written in Cairo,
> 
> printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn
> libraries in Baghdad. 
> In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman
> records of the Caliphate,
> 
> but even the dark years of the country's modern
> history, handwritten 
> accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal
> photographs and 
> military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic
> newspapers going back to 
> the early 1900s. But the older files and archives
> were on the upper floors 
> of the library where petrol must have been used to
> set fire so expertly to 
> the building. The heat was such that the marble
> flooring had buckled upwards
> 
> and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been
> cracked.
> 
> The papers on the floor were almost too hot to
> touch, bore no print or 
> writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked
> them up. Again, standing 
> in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the
> same question: why? So,
> 
> as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means,
> let me quote from the 
> shreds of paper that I found on the road outside,
> blowing in the wind, 
> written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime
> Porte in Istanbul or to 
> the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of
> loyalty and who signed 
> themselves "your slave". There was a request to
> protect a camel convoy of 
> tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya
> al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul 
> Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a
> request for perfume and 
> advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of
> Sharif Hussein to Baghdad 
> to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to
> give you our advice for 
> which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If
> you don't take our 
> advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam
> there, I thought. The 
> date was 1912.
> 
> Some of the documents list the cost of bullets,
> military horses and 
> artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia,
> others record the 
> opening of the first telephone exchange in the
> Hejaz--soon to be Saudi 
> Arabia--while one recounts, from the village of
> Azrak in modern-day Jordan, 
> the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin
> Kassem, who attacked his 
> interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them
> but was restrained and 
> later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of
> recommendation for a 
> merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest
> morals, of good conduct and
> 
> who works with the [Ottoman] government." This, in
> other words, was the 
> tapestry of Arab history--all that is left of it,
> which fell into The 
> Independent's hands as the mass of documents
> crackled in the immense heat of
> 
> the ruins.
> 
> King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose
> staff are the authors of
> 
> many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by
> the Saudis. His son Faisel
> 
> became king of Iraq--Winston Churchill gave him
> Baghdad after the French 
> threw him out of Damascus--and his brother Abdullah
> became the first king of
> 
> Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the
> grandfather of the present-day 
> Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
> 
> For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the
> cultural capital of the Arab 
> world, the most literate population in the Middle
> East. Genghis Khan's 
> grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so
> it was said, the Tigris 
> river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday,
> the black ashes of 
> thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of
> Iraq.
> 
> Why?
> 
> 
> 
> 


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