[Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
Rachel Storm
rstorm2 at illinois.edu
Thu Oct 30 04:14:49 CDT 2008
I don't agree with you at all about the infomercial. I don't see how it came off as phony.
---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:24:18 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Jenifer Cartwright <jencart13 at yahoo.com>
>Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
>To: Peace-discuss Discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>, "Brussel Morton K." <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
>
> Obama and his advisors should focus on reading stuff like
> this, instead of creating that disgusting infomercial
> which made him look and sound like a complete phony and
> his message sound totally bogus. Ugh. Wouldn't be
> surprised if it costs him the election.
> --Jenifer
>
> --- On Wed, 10/29/08, Brussel Morton K.
> <mkbrussel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> From: Brussel Morton K. <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
> To: "Peace-discuss Discuss"
> <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
> Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 5:24 PM
>
> The Devastation in Iraq Is Systematic -- And It's About
> to Get Much Worse
>
> By Michael Schwartz, Tomdispatch.com. Posted October
> 27, 2008.
> Iraq's state of complete disrepair has created a
> population in steaming discontent.
>
> Controversial Status of Forces Agreement Facing Iraqi
> Opposition
>
> The Roman historian Tacitus famously put the following
> lines in the mouth of a British chieftain opposed to
> imperial Rome: "They have plundered the world,
> stripping naked the land in their hunger they are
> driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition,
> if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by
> false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the
> construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing
> remains but a desert, they call that peace."
>
> Or, in the case of the Bush administration, post-surge
> "success." Today, however, success in Iraq seems as
> elusive as ever for the President. The Iraqi cabinet is
> now refusing, without further amendment, to pass on to
> Parliament the status of forces agreement for
> stationing U.S. troops in the country that it's taken
> so many months for American and Iraqi negotiators to
> sort out. Key objections, as Juan Cole points out at
> his Informed Comment blog, have come from the Islamic
> Supreme Council of Iraq, which is [Prime Minister
> Nouri] al-Maliki's chief political partner, the support
> of which he would need to get the draft through
> parliament." That party, Cole adds tellingly, "is close
> to Tehran, which objects to the agreement." The Iranian
> veto? Hmmm
>
> Among Iraqis, according to the Dreyfuss Report, only
> the Kurds, whose territories house no significant U.S.
> forces, remain unequivocally in favor of the agreement
> as written. Frustrated American officials, including
> Ambassador Ryan Crocker ("Without legal authority to
> operate, we do not operate That means no security
> operations, no logistics, no training, no support for
> Iraqis on the borders, no nothing"), Secretary of
> Defense Robert Gates ("Without a new legal
> agreement,'we basically stop doing anything' in the
> country"), and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen
> ("We are clearly running out of time") are huffing and
> puffing, and threatening -- if the agreement is not
> passed as is -- to blow the house down.
>
> Without a mandate to remain, American troops won't
> leave, of course. At year's end, they will, so American
> officials insist, simply retreat to their bases and
> assumedly leave Maliki's government to dangle in the
> expected gale. Clearly, this is a game of chicken.
> What's less clear is who's willing to go over the
> cliff, or who exactly is going to put on the brakes.
>
> In the meantime, the administration that, only four
> years ago, imposed conditions on Iraq at least as
> onerous as those nineteenth century colonial powers
> imposed on their colonies, can no longer get an
> agreement it desperately needs from its "allies" in
> Baghdad. Could this, then, be the $700 billion
> kiss-off? Stay tuned and, in the meantime, consider, as
> described by TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz, what
> the Bush administration did to Iraq these last five
> years. Imagine it as a preview of the devastation the
> administration's domestic version of de-Baathification
> is now doing to the U.S. economy.
>
> Schwartz's striking piece encapsulates a story he's
> been following closely for years: the everyday economic
> violence that invasion and occupation brought to Iraq.
> It's being posted in honor of the just-released latest
> TomDispatch volume, his War Without End: The Iraq War
> in Context, beautifully produced by Haymarket Books.
> Think of this superb new work on the American war in
> Iraq as Tacitus updated. In it, Schwartz offers a
> gripping history -- the best we have -- of how (to
> steal a phrase from the Roman historian), "driven by
> greed [and] ambition," the U.S. dismantled Iraq
> economically. It's a nightmare of a tale, which you can
> watch Schwartz discuss in a brief video by clicking
> here. If this be "success," then we truly are wandering
> in the desert. (By the way, any author profits from the
> book will go to IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against the War.)
> Tom
>
> Wrecked Iraq
>
> What the Good News from Iraq Really Means
> By Michael Schwartz
>
> As the Smoke Clears in Iraq: Even before the
> spectacular presidential election campaign became a
> national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since
> the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage
> of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing.
> National newspapers had long since discontinued their
> daily feasts of multiple -- usually front page -
> reports on the country, replacing them with meager
> meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On
> broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq
> had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went
> by without a mention of the war.
>
> The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful
> reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis
> disappeared. There are still occasional stories about
> high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure
> places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in
> old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions,
> and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life.
>
> A typical "return to normal life" piece appeared
> October 11th in the New York Times under the headline,
> "Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety."
> Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her
> students by assuring them that "security has returned
> to Baghdad, city of peace."
>
> Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam
> Dagher hedged the "return to normal" theme. Here was
> his first paragraph in full:
> "On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama
> looked uneasy standing in formation under an already
> stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates
> listened to a teacher's pep talk -- probably a
> necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn
> playground."
>
> This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad
> public school, amplified in the body of Dagher's
> article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger
> reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated)
> decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign
> reporters to move around enough to report on the real
> conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided
> U.S. readers with a far fuller picture of the
> devastation George Bush's war wrought.
>
> In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign
> reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news
> is coming out of that wrecked land. The major
> newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their
> staffs there and -- with a relative trickle of
> exceptions like Dagher's fine report -- what's left is
> often little more than a collection of pronouncements
> from the U.S. military, or Iraqi and American political
> leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American
> public's image of the situation there.
>
> In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of
> a kind that can always be easily explained in a short
> report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily
> repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on
> artillery and air power during the worst days of
> fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure.
> Political and economic changes imposed by the American
> occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving
> Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very
> tools they would now need to launch a major
> reconstruction effort in their own country.
>
> As a consequence, what was once the most advanced
> Middle Eastern society -- economically, socially, and
> technologically -- has become an economic basket case,
> rivaling the most desperate countries in the world.
> Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches,
> which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used
> until U.S. forces withdraw from the country, provides a
> glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out
> of the abyss into which the U.S. invasion pushed it.
>
> Consider only a small sampling of the devastation.
>
> The Economy: Fundamental to the American occupation was
> the desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein's Baathist
> state apparatus and the economic system it commanded. A
> key aspect of this was the closing down of the vast
> majority of state-owned economic enterprises (with the
> exception of those involved in oil extraction and
> electrical generation).
>
> In all, 192 establishments, adding up to 35% of the
> Iraqi economy, were shuttered in the summer and fall of
> 2003. These included basic manufacturing processes like
> leather tanning and tractor assembly that supplied
> other sectors, transportation firms that dominated
> national commerce, and maintenance enterprises that
> housed virtually all the technicians and engineers
> qualified to service the electrical, water, oil, and
> other infrastructural systems in the country.
>
> Justified as the way to bring a modern free-enterprise
> system to backward Iraq, this draconian program was put
> in place by the President's proconsul in Baghdad, L.
> Paul Bremer III. The result? An immediate depression
> that only deepened in the years to follow.
>
> One measure of this policy's impact can be found in the
> demise of the leather goods industry, a key
> pre-invasion sector of Iraq's non-petroleum economy.
> When a government-owned tanning operation, which all by
> itself employed 30,000 workers and supplied leather to
> an entire industry, was shuttered in late 2003, it
> deprived shoe-makers and other leather goods
> establishments of their key resource. Within a year,
> employment in the industry had dropped from 200,000
> workers to a mere 20,000.
>
> By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the
> inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment.
> Meanwhile, the country's agriculture, a key component
> of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling
> of government establishments and services. The lush
> farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers
> suffered badly. The once-thriving date palm industry
> was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations
> of pests when the occupation eliminated a
> government-run insecticide spraying program. Even oil
> refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became
> cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum
> activities were shuttered.
>
> This economic devastation fueled the insurgency by
> generating desperation, anger, and willing recruits.
> The explosion of resistance, in turn, tended to obscure
> -- at least for western news services -- the desperate
> circumstances under which ordinary Iraqis labored.
>
> As violence has subsided in Baghdad and elsewhere,
> demands for relief have come to the fore. These are not
> easily answered by a still largely non-functional
> central government in Baghdad whose administrative and
> economic apparatus was long ago dismantled, and many of
> whose key technical personnel had fled into exile.
> Meanwhile, in early 2006, the American occupation
> declared that further reconstruction work would be the
> responsibility of Iraqis. It is not clear into what
> channels the growing discontent over an economy that
> remains largely in the tank and a government that still
> cannot deliver ordinary services will flow.
>
> Electricity: A critical factor in Iraq's collapse has
> been its decaying electrical grid. In areas where the
> insurgency raged, facilities involved in producing and
> transmitting electricity were targeted, both by the
> insurgents and U.S. forces, each trying to deprive the
> other of needed resources. In addition, Bremer
> eliminated the government-owned maintenance and
> engineering enterprises that had been holding the
> electrical system together ever since the U.N.
> sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War deprived Iraq
> of material needed to repair and upgrade its
> facilities. Maintenance and replacement contracts were
> given instead to multinational companies with little
> knowledge of the existing system and -- due to
> cost-plus contracting -- every incentive to replace
> facilities with their own proprietary technology. In
> the meantime, many Iraqi technicians left the country.
>
> The successor Iraqi governments, deprived of the
> capacity to manage the system's reconstruction,
> continued the U.S. occupation policy of contracting
> with foreign companies. Even in areas of the country
> relatively unaffected by the fighting, those companies
> did the lucrative thing, replacing entire sections of
> the electric grid, often with inappropriate but
> exquisitely expensive equipment and technology.
>
> A combination of factors -- including pressure from the
> insurgency, the soaring costs of security, and an
> almost unparalleled record of endemic waste and
> corruption -- led to costs well beyond those originally
> offered for the already overpriced projects. Many were
> then abandoned before completion as funding ran out.
> Completed projects were often shabbily done and just as
> often proved incompatible with existing facilities,
> introducing new inefficiencies.
>
> In one altogether-too-typical case, Bechtel installed
> 26 natural gas turbines in areas where no natural gas
> was available. The turbines were then converted to oil,
> which reduced their capacity by 50% and led to a rapid
> sludge build-up in the equipment requiring expensive
> maintenance no Iraqi technicians had been trained to
> perform. In location after location, the turbines
> became inoperative.
>
> Even before the invasion, the decrepit electrical
> system could not meet national demand. No province had
> uninterrupted service and certain areas had far less
> than 12 hours of service per day. The vast investments
> by the occupation and its successor regimes have
> increased electrical capacity since the invasion of
> 2003, but these gains have not come close to keeping up
> with skyrocketing demand created by the presence of
> hundreds of thousands of troops, private security
> personnel, and occupation officials, as well as by the
> introduction of all manner of electronic devices and
> products in the post-invasion period. Recent U.N.
> reports indicate that, in the last year, electrical
> capacity has slipped to less than half of demand. With
> priority going to military and government operations,
> many Baghdad neighborhoods experience less than two
> hours of publicly provided electricity a day, forcing
> citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive
> and polluting gasoline generators.
>
> In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that
> they had experienced inadequate electricity in the
> previous month. During the heat of summer and the cold
> of winter, these shortages create real health
> emergencies.
>
> In 2004, the U.N. estimated that $20 billion in
> reconstruction funds would be needed for a fully
> operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from
> $40 billion to $80 billion.
>
> Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow
> through the country from the northwest to the
> southeast, have since time immemorial irrigated the
> rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the
> fish that are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided
> water for animal and human consumption. American-style
> warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and air
> power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in
> upstream Sunni cities like Tal Afar, Falluja, and
> Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One result
> was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage
> systems. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, for
> instance, where much fighting has taken place and
> American air power was called in regularly, there is
> now a lake of sewage clearly visible on satellite
> photographs.
>
> The ultimate destination of significant parts of the
> filth from devastated sewage systems was the two
> rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing through
> the streets and into those rivers has left them
> thoroughly contaminated. Their water can no longer be
> safely drunk by humans or animals, the remaining fish
> cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water
> reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.
>
> Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has
> proven woefully insufficient to handle this massive
> flow of contamination, while inadequate electric
> supplies insure that the country's few functional
> purification plants are less than effective.
>
> In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely
> reconstructed, but repairs cannot even begin without a
> viable electrical system, a reinvigorated engineering
> and construction sector, and a government capable of
> marshalling these resources. None of these
> prerequisites currently exist.
>
> Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various
> pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the
> initial invasion, the U.S. military often commandeered
> schools as forward bases, attracted by their
> well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and
> many rooms for offices and barracks. Two incidents in
> which American gunfire from an occupied elementary
> school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni
> city of Falluja may have been the literal sparks that
> started the insurgency. Many schools would subsequently
> be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles fought
> in or near them.
>
> Under the U.S. occupation's de-Baathification policy,
> thousands of teachers who belonged to the Baath Party
> were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of students
> teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government
> enterprises deprived the schools of supplies --
> including books and teaching materials -- as well as
> urgently needed maintenance.
>
> The American solution, as with the electric grid, was
> to hire multinational firms to repair the schools and
> rehabilitate school systems. The result was an orgy of
> corruption accompanied by very little practical aid.
> Local school officials complained that facilities with
> no windows, heating, or toilet facilities were
> repainted and declared fit for use.
>
> The dwindling central government presence made schools
> inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with
> administrators, teachers, and especially college
> professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for
> ideological reasons. This, in turn, stimulated a mass
> exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from
> the country, removing precious human capital essential
> for future reconstruction.
>
> Finally, in Baghdad, the U.S. military began installing
> ten-foot tall cement walls around scores of communities
> and neighborhoods to wall off participants in the
> sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were
> often separated from their schools, reducing attendance
> at the few intact facilities to those students who
> happened to live within the imprisoning walls.
>
> This fall, as some of these walls were dismantled,
> residents discovered that many of the schools were
> virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid
> description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie
> neighborhood which "is falling apart, and overwhelmed
> by the children of almost 4,000 Shiite refugee families
> who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof
> is caving in, classroom floors and hallways are
> stripped bare, and in the playground a pile of burnt
> trash was smoldering."
>
> The Dysfunctional Society: Much has been made in the
> U.S. presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil
> surplus the Iraqi government built up in these last
> years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is
> currently being held in American financial
> institutions, with various American politicians
> threatening to confiscate it if it is not
> constructively spent. Yet even this bounty reflects the
> devastation of the war.
>
> De-Baathification and subsequent chaos rendered the
> Iraqi government incapable of effectively administering
> projects that lay outside the fortified,
> American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad.
> A vast flight of the educated class to Syria, Jordan,
> and other countries also deprived it of the managers
> and technicians needed to undertake serious
> reconstruction on a large scale.
>
> As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted
> for facility construction and reconstruction last year
> were even spent. Some government ministries spent less
> than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the
> large oil surpluses have become magnets for massive
> governmental corruption, further infuriating frustrated
> citizens who, after five years, still often lack the
> most basic services. Transparency International's 2008
> "corruption perceptions index" listed Iraq as tied for
> 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.
>
> The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion
> and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land,
> housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a
> million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their
> homes; many millions of others have been scarred by
> war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations,
> extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of
> common criminality. Education and medical systems have
> essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind
> of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most
> dangerous societies on earth.
>
> As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and
> technical devastation became ever more entwined,
> reinforcing one another. The country's degraded sewage
> and water systems, for example, have spawned two
> consecutive years of widespread cholera. It seems
> likely that this year, the disease will only subside
> when the cold weather makes further contagion
> impossible, but this "solution" also guarantees its
> reoccurrence each year until water purification systems
> are rebuilt.
>
> In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's
> once vaunted medical system, since two-thirds of the
> country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are often in
> a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain
> scarce, and equipment, if available at all, is
> outdated. The rebuilding of the water and medical
> systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the
> electrical system is restored to reasonable shape.
> Repair of the electrical grid awaits a reliable oil and
> gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and
> this cannot be constructed without the expertise of
> technicians who have left the country, or newly trained
> specialists that the educational system is now
> incapable of producing. And so it goes.
>
> On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews
> powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why
> American military leaders regularly insist that the
> country's current relative quiescence is, at best,
> "fragile." They believe only the most minimal
> reductions in U.S. forces in Iraq (still hovering at
> close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.
>
> Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities,
> military officials working close to the ground know
> that the country's state of disrepair, and an inability
> to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a
> population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this
> could explode in further sectarian violence or yet
> another violent effort to expel the U.S. forces from
> the country.
>
> See more stories tagged with: iraq, reconstruction
>
> Michael Schwartz is a professor of sociology and
> faculty director of the Undergraduate College of Global
> Studies at Stony Brook University.
>
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