[Peace-discuss] Scott Ritter's view from Bagdad

[Jenifer Cartwright]

THANKS for sending this, Mort. 
   
  Have you all read this??? It's PERFECT!!!
   
  Jenifer 


"Morton K. Brussel" <brussel4 at insightbb.com> wrote:
  He understands.


Reporting From Baghdad

Posted on Sep 6, 2007
Couric and troops

What I did on my summer vacation: Katie Couric poses with Marines 
while awaiting a presidential visit in Anbar province.

By Scott Ritter

It should come as no surprise that the Bush administration’s newest 
military-man-of-substance-turned- political lapdog, General Petraeus, 
maintains that the situation in Iraq is not only salvageable, but 
actually improving, due to the “surge” of U.S. combat troops into 
Iraq over the past year. All the president and his collection of GI 
Joe hand-puppets ask for is more time, more money and more troops.

There is no reason to believe that the compliant war facilitators who 
comprise the “anti-war” Democratic majority in Congress will do 
anything other than give the president what he is asking for. No one 
seems to want to debate, in any meaningful fashion, what is really 
going on in Iraq.

Why would they? The Democrats, like their Republican counterparts, 
have invested too much political capital into fictionalizing the 
problem with slogans like “support the troops,” “we’re fighting the 
enemy there so we don’t have to fight them here,” and my all-time 
favorite, “leaving Iraq would hand victory to al-Qaida.”

There simply is no incentive to put fact on the table and formulate 
policy that actually seeks a solution to a properly defined problem. 
Like the Republicans before them, the Democrats today seek not to 
govern with the best interests of the people in mind, but rather to 
game the system in order to consolidate political power. Political 
sloganeering has so trumped reality that any political backlash that 
is generated from the so-called “Petraeus Report” will be limited to 
how the Democrats could better sustain a conflict that kills American 
troops, since no mainstream Democratic leader has expressed a true 
“get out of Iraq now” policy.

Nearly 4 1/2 years after President Bush’s ill-fated (and illegal) 
decision to invade and occupy Iraq, few people in a position to 
influence policy formulation and implementation in America have 
actually grasped the horrible truth about what has transpired, and 
what is transpiring, in Mesopotamia today. As the United States 
places the finishing touches on Fortress America, the new half- 
billion-dollar Embassy complex in the heart of the Green Zone in 
downtown Baghdad, and more troops pour into mega-bases throughout 
Iraq, the reality (and futility) of permanent occupation has yet to 
sink in. What could be going through the minds of those members of 
Congress who keep signing blank checks for the president? Is there 
no oversight of how and why this money is spent? How can someone 
fund permanent infrastructure one day, then speak of the need to get 
out of Iraq the next?

The compliant mainstream media, of course, is no help. The war in 
Iraq has become a major generator of advertising revenue for these 
corporations, so there is no incentive to actually report the truth, 
but rather manipulate the fiction. Iraq has become a prestige 
destination for every aspiring journalist or struggling anchor, 
determined to get “the big story.” The most recent manifestation of 
this syndrome is CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who earlier this week 
traveled to Iraq because she was (in her own words), “Curious about 
very basic questions regarding living conditions, about how much fear 
there is in the street, about how the soldiers really are doing.” 
That the situation in Iraq has been boiled down to these three big, 
burning issues (living conditions, fear in the streets, and how the 
troops are really doing), and that CBS is sending their multi-million- 
dollar investment to investigate, speaks volumes about the truly 
degenerate state of American journalism today.

The real big three she should be addressing are “Why do Americans 
keep dying?” “Who is killing them?” and “Why?” Of course, answering 
these questions would undermine the very fantasy world Couric is 
being sent to cover, one where Americans are doing good deeds in the 
name of peace and justice for downtrodden Iraqis. Couric’s jaunt is 
fraud on a massive scale. Ironically, she herself acknowledged this 
when she admitted that her upbeat reports from Iraq were reflective 
of what the U.S. military wanted her to see, and not honest 
“reporting” on her part.

If Couric and her ilk won’t answer these questions, I will. “Why do 
Americans keep dying?” Simple: Because we are in Iraq. We don’t 
belong there. Our presence is derived from our own violation of law, 
not someone else’s, and as such any effort to sustain our presence is 
tainted by this same foundation of illegitimacy. In short, Americans 
will keep dying in Iraq as long as we remain in Iraq. If Katie 
wanted to really get to the bottom of this story, she could venture 
out on her own to any one of the villages and towns where Americans 
have been killed recently. Of course, she would probably end up dead 
herself, which would defeat the purpose of trying to report the story.

“Who is killing them?” Another easy answer: Iraqis. We are 
occupying their homeland. We are violating their sovereignty. We 
are butchering, abusing and torturing their citizens. Our continued 
presence is an affront to the socioeconomic-political fabric that is 
(or was) Iraqi society. If someone occupied my hometown in the same 
manner Americans occupy Iraq, I’d be killing them any way I could. 
And I would be called a hero by my own people, not a terrorist. The 
Bush administration, in an effort to deflect public attention away 
from this reality, has created the fiction of a massive al-Qaida 
presence in Iraq, working in parallel with a similarly large Iranian 
Revolutionary Guard Command presence, which apparently is responsible 
for the majority of anti-American violence and dead U.S. troops.


Rhetoric aside, however, American officials who make these claims 
have been unable to back them up with hard facts and figures. There 
is an al-Qaida presence in Iraq. However, the majority of what is 
known as “al-Qaida in Iraq” is composed of Iraqis, not foreigners. 
The whole phenomenon is a direct result of the American occupation of 
Iraq, and would dissipate the moment America left the country. 
Likewise, the accusation of direct Iranian involvement in anti- 
American violence is questionable. Iranian political support of 
Iraqi Shiite groups who violently oppose the American occupation of 
Iraq is real, but then again we know this: We invited the Supreme 
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to join us in toppling 
Saddam. Based out of Iran, functioning as a de facto arm of the 
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command, SCIRI did as we asked. Why, 
then, are we shocked when SCIRI maintains ties with the very entity 
that created and nurtured it? It is Iraqi Shiites who are killing 
Americans, not Iranians. And they would kill us with or without the 
support of Iran.

Now we come to the third and perhaps most difficult question: “Why?” 
In some odd way, Katie Couric’s jaunt to Iraq answers that question: 
Because Americans truly don’t care. Oh, we care about vague softball 
issues, such as “conditions in the street,” “fear,” and of course, 
“how the American troops are really doing,” especially when they are 
fed to us in 30-second sound bites or three-minute “in-depth” 
stories. Little feel good segments planted in between commercials, 
designed not to infringe on our intellectual curiosity for more than 
30 minutes so we don’t loose our focus watching the latest “reality” 
show or made-for-television drama.

The fact is, Couric’s made-for-television news is to what is really 
happening in Iraq as “CSI: Las Vegas” is to what is really happening 
on the streets of Sin City. CBS knows that, which is why they are 
packaging Katie in this fashion. The shame is that for most 
Americans watching, they think they’re getting the real deal. They 
are not, but will continue to wallow in their ignorant indifference. 
Katie will struggle to tell us that our kids keep dying in Iraq to 
“improve the quality of life” and “reduce the level of fear” on the 
streets of Baghdad. She solemnly informs us that “our boys and 
girls” are suffering, but they know it is in support of a just and 
noble cause. Katie will continue to report the story in Iraq from 
the perspective of an American political dynamic, not Iraqi reality.

She won’t go visit one of the American mercenary units in Iraq, the 
private military contractors who challenge the American military for 
numerical supremacy. She won’t burrow into the never-never land of 
legal ambiguity that allows these mercenaries to commit murder at 
will, to treat Iraq (and Iraqis) as second-class citizens in their 
own nation, and whose continued abuse of Iraq results in a deep and 
undying hatred for all things American. Katie may catch a movie in a 
hardened underground theater on one of the Pentagon’s mega-bases, or 
go shopping in a PX inside the “Green Zone” to get a “feel” of life 
for our troops, but she won’t venture up north, into Kurdistan, where 
other secure outposts of foreign occupation sit, out of sight and 
mind. If Couric would visit the Iraqi Oil Ministry, she might be 
shocked to witness the legal maneuvering and exploitation carried out 
by foreign oil companies (including, directly or indirectly, American 
oil companies).

Working with local Kurdish officials, small oil exploration and 
drilling camps are sprouting up all over northern Iraq, where they 
siphon off the wealth of the Iraqi people. Shipped out of Iraq via 
Turkey and (surprisingly) Iran, using long-established smuggling 
routes, these illegal ventures are generating billions of dollars in 
income for oil companies, and because these ventures aren’t supposed 
to exist, this income goes unreported. You can’t miss these sites. 
Any review of Google-Earth imagery would show these facilities 
springing up like mushrooms over the last few years. The U.S. 
military knows about them, and yet does nothing. Note to Richard 
Kaplan (Katie Couric’s producer): If you want to investigate this 
story, I’ll provide you with the geographic coordinates. Drive up 
and try to talk your way into the security perimeter. Position Katie 
well for the camera shot and demand answers. Just look out for the 
Canadian, South African or American mercenaries who are charged by 
“Big Oil” to keep this dirty little secret “secret.”

Instead of going to Iraq to report on why Americans keep dying, Katie 
could just stay here, in America. There are any number of 
corporations whose boardrooms she could visit. Or she could smooth- 
talk her way into a number of country clubs, to interview the human 
face of the “military industrial complex” that President Eisenhower 
warned us about a half-century ago. She might take a look at 
congressional campaign financing, where the profits from these 
corporations fund the campaigns of the politicians who continue to do 
nothing about Iraq. Then, and just then, would Katie come close to 
answering the question of “Why?”

But she won’t. Or should I say, she can’t. CBS is owned by General 
Electric. GE is working hard to get favorable trading status with 
any number of foreign trading partners. The U.S. trade 
representative is working hard on GE’s behalf. Hard-nosed 
“reporting” by the likes of Couric would not go over well in the 
bowels of the White House, where instructions to the U.S. trade 
representative are issued. “I’m Katie Couric,” her broadcast could 
begin. “Tonight I am declaring independence from corporate control 
over how I report (i.e., read) the news.” Answering the “why” of Iraq 
requires confronting the layers of corruption and corporate 
domination of America on so many levels that even if Katie wanted to, 
she couldn’t—at least not from her perch as anchor of the CBS Evening 
News.

In a way, Iraq is a manifestation of all that ails America today. A 
complete breakdown of fundamental societal checks and balances 
brought on by greed and hubris. From General Petraeus who will give 
it, to the mindless corporate-owned minions who populate much of 
Congress who will receive it, to the entertainment-as-news media 
which will report on it, and to the American people who will consume 
it with no foundation upon which to evaluate it, the “Petraeus 
Report” will have little relevance to what is really going on in 
Iraq. Once again, Americans will be searching for a solution to a 
problem they have yet to properly define.

Just ask Katie Couric. Or better yet, watch her. _______________________________________________
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