[Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
Jenifer Cartwright
jencart13 at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 30 12:12:49 CDT 2008
Wayne: YOU misunderstood me (tho' you pretended otherwise). Rachel: you got it right. No, I don't think Obama is a phony and I don't think his message is bogus. Yes, I think that's the way it came off in the (ugh) infomercial. I'm glad you BOTH agree that it didn't throw the election to McCain.
--Jenifer
--- On Thu, 10/30/08, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:
From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Wrecked Iraq--analysis.
To: "Rachel Storm" <rstorm2 at illinois.edu>
Cc: jencart13 at yahoo.com, "Peace-discuss Discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>, "Brussel Morton K." <mkbrussel at comcast.net>
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 9:24 AM
Rachel, you misunderstood Jenifer. Its not the "disgusting infomercial" but Barack Obama
who comes off as a "complete phony" <which is, of course, actually true>
and his message as "totally bogus" <also true>.
But I disagree with Jenifer, in that I doubt Obama could lose this year's election
even if his real birth certificate were somehow produced and made public
and it showed that John S. McCain was his real father.
Rachel Storm wrote:
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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