No doubt people in Kosovo were killed by NATO bombs and by the extensive land war between Yugoslav and KLA forces. Some of the dead may have expired from natural causes, as would happen in any large population over time, especially one under such stress. No doubt there also were grudge killings and summary executions as in any war, but not on a scale that would warrant the label of “genocide.” The German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was ever a component of Yugoslav policy: “Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters.”60 Still, Miloseviç was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced expulsion of Kosovar Albanians, and with summary mass executions.
We repeatedly have seen how “rogue nations” are targeted. The process is predictably transparent and not very original. First and foremost, the leaders are demonized. Qaddafi of Libya was a “Hitlerite megalomaniac” and a “madman.” Noriega of Panama was a “a swamp rat,” “one of the world’s worst drug thieves and scums,” and “a Hitler admirer.” Saddam Hussein of Iraq was “the Butcher of Baghdad,” a “madman,” and “worse than Hitler.” Demonization of the leader then justifies U.S.-led sanctions and military attacks upon the leader’s country and people. What such leaders really had in common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development not in compliance with the dictates of the global free market.61
In keeping with this practice, Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloseviç was described by Bill Clinton as “a new Hitler.” Earlier he had not be considered so. Initially, Western officials, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian nationalist who might hasten the break-up of the federation, hailed him as a “charismatic personality.” Only later, when they saw him as an obstacle rather than a tool, did they begin to depict him as the demon who “started all four wars.” This was too much, even for the managing editor of the U.S. establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria. He noted in the New York Times that Miloseviç who rules “an impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors—is no Adolf Hitler. He is not even Saddam Hussein.”62
Miloseviç was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that included four parties, while opposition parties and publications openly denounced him and demonstrated against his government. These facts went almost unnoticed in the U.S. news media. To reject the demonized image of Miloseviç and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim that Serb forces were faultless. It is merely to challenge the notions fabricated to justify NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia.
While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and leftists were convinced that “this time” the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight. “Yes, the bombings don’t work. The bombings are stupid!” they said at the time, “but we have to do something.” In fact, the bombings were other than stupid: they were profoundly immoral. And in fact they did work; they destroyed much of what was left of Yugoslavia, turning it into a privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, impoverished cluster of mini-republics, submissive wards of the free-market global empire. For U.S. foreign policy it was another smashing success.
32 TO KILL IRAQ
In October 2002, after a full-dress debate in the House and Senate, the U.S. Congress fell into line behind almost-elected president Bush Jr., giving him a mandate to launch a massive assault against Iraq, a nation already battered by twelve years of bombings and sanctions. The debate in Congress was marked by its usual evasions. Even many of the members who voted against the president’s resolution did so on the narrowest procedural grounds, taking pains to tell how they too detested Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, how they agreed with the president on many points, how something needed to be done about Iraq and about fighting terrorism, but not quite in this way. Few members dared to question the imperial right of U.S. rulers to decide which nations shall live and which shall die.
PRETEXTS FOR WAR
Bush Jr. and other members of his administration gave varied reasons to justify the invasion of Iraq. They claimed it was to insure the well-being of the Middle East and the security of the United States itself, for Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear missiles. In fact, right up to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, U.N. inspection teams maintained that Iraq had no such nuclear capability and actually had been in compliance with yearly disarmament inspections.
If the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t they use them against the invader? Why weren’t they ever found by the occupying forces? Such questions were never answered. Iraq once did have factories that produced chemical and bacteriological weapons, but it was the United States that had supplied these materials to Baghdad. The quip circulating at the time was: “We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction—we have the receipts.” But according to United Nations inspection reports, Iraq’s chemical warfare capability had been dismantled.
Still the White House kept talking about that country’s dangerous “potential.” Through September and October of 2002, the White House made it clear that Iraq would be attacked if it had weapons of mass destruction. In November 2002, Bush Jr. announced he would attack if Saddam denied that he had weapons of mass destruction. In sum, if the Iraqis admitted to having such weapons, they were to be invaded. If they denied having them, they still would be invaded—whether they had them or not.
Bush Jr. also charged Iraq with having close links with al-Qaeda and allowing terrorists to operate within its territory. But U.S. intelligence sources themselves let it be known that the Baghdad government was not connected to Islamic terrorist organizations. When a House committee in closed sessions asked administration officials whether they had information of an imminent terrorist threat from Saddam against the United States, they stated unequivocally that they had no such evidence.63
Bush and company seized upon another pretext for war: Saddam had committed war crimes and acts of aggression, including the war against Iran and the gassing of Kurds at Halabja. The Pentagon’s own study, however, found that the massacre of Kurds was committed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis.64 Another seldom-mentioned fact: U.S. leaders gave Iraq encouragement and military support in its war against Iran. If war crimes and wars of aggression are the issue, it might be recalled that U.S. leaders themselves had launched invasions of Grenada and Panama and sponsored wars of attrition against civilian targets in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and scores of other places, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. No communist state or “rogue nation” had a comparable record of military aggression.
With the various pretexts for war ringing hollow, the Bush administration resorted to the final indictment: Saddam was a dictator; the Iraqis needed democracy. The United States stood for democracy and human rights. Ergo, U.S. leaders were obliged to use force and violence to effect regime change and bring the blessings of democracy to Iraq. Again, questions leaped to the fore: There was no denying that Saddam was a dictator, but how did he and his cohorts come to power? Wasn’t Saddam’s conservative wing of the Baath party backed by the CIA? Weren’t they enlisted to destroy the popular revolution, torturing and murdering every democrat, progressive, reformer, communist, and constitutionalist they could get hold of, including the left wing of their own Ba’ath party? During the years he was committing his worst atrocities, Saddam Hussein was Washington’s poster boy. All this the U.S. press let slip down the memory hole.
A former U.S. Army special forces commando, Kevin Tillman, who served in Iraq and whose brother, famed NFL football star Pat Tillman, was killed in Afghanistan, summed up his frustration:
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br /> Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or it harbored terrorists, or it was involved in the 9/11 attacks, or it received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or it had mobile bio-weapons labs, or it had WMD, or it had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or to stop an insurgency, or to stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.65
When policymakers keep providing new and different explanations to justify a particular action, they most likely are lying. When people keep changing their story, you can be fairly sure it’s a story. Having seen that the reasons given by the White House to justify war were highly questionable, some observers incorrectly concluded that the administration had no sensible reasons for its policy, and was simply unwilling to admit its befuddlement. But just because the Bush people were trying to mislead and confuse the public does not perforce mean they themselves were confused. In fact there were some tempting and compelling reasons for war, kept from the American public because they reveal too much about what U.S. rulers are doing in the world. Consider the following.
GLOBAL POLITICO-ECONOMIC SUPREMACY
As enunciated by leading members of the Bush administration, a central goal is to advance U.S. global supremacy.66 The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to foist upon people everywhere—including North America—the blessings of an untrammeled free-market globalism.
To achieve that goal, the emergence of any potentially competing superpower or, for that matter, any competing regional power must be prevented. Iraq is a case in point. In 1958 a popular revolution in Iraq kicked out the oil companies. Ten years later, the rightwing of the Baath party took power, with Saddam Hussein serving as point man for the CIA. His assignment was to undo the democratic revolution, which he did with vicious repression. But then, instead of acting as a comprador collaborator to Western investors in the style of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Chile’s Pinochet, Peru’s Fujimora, and numerous others, Saddam committed economic nationalism, pursuing policies of public ownership and development, even retaining some of the social programs of the earlier progressive government. By 1990, Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East.
A major goal of the U.S. invasion was to bring Iraq firmly within the free-market sphere, as a client state with a puppet government open to Western investors on terms entirely favorable to the investors. Things did not go quite that way. The invasion and occupation destroyed Saddam’s secular military regime. The nationalist Baathist elements were systematically eradicated in assassination attacks, some of which were directed by the Ministry of Interior under CIA auspices.67 Meanwhile the most retrograde sectarian elements in the region were incited. Sectarian terrorism, which had not been a problem before the invaders arrived, became a growth industry afterward.
PRIVATIZATION AND MONETARY CONTROL
Soon after the overthrow of the Soviet Union, U.S. rulers decided that Third World development no longer needed to be tolerated. The last thing the plutocrats in Washington wanted in the Middle East or any other region was independent, self-developing nations that controlled their own labor, capital, natural resources, and markets. The Iraq economy under Saddam was entirely state-owned, including the media. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld vented his alarm about Iraq’s “Stalinist economy.” Months before the March 2003 invasion, the White House had put together a committee whose purpose was to supervise the privatization and deregulation of the Iraqi economy.
In the subsequent years of U.S. occupation, the Iraqis may not have received much electricity, clean water, or human services but one “reform” was delivered to them in abundance: privatization. Just about every major component of the Iraqi economy was either destroyed, shut down, or privatized at easy prices. Poverty and underemployment climbed precipitously, so too the Iraqi national debt as international loans were floated in order to help the Iraqis pay for their own victimization.
The intervention also undid another act of troublesome independence. In October 2000, less than half a year before the invasion, Saddam Hussein dumped the U.S. dollar (“the currency of the enemy”) and made the euro the reserve currency for his oil trade. Shortly after that, Iraq converted its $10 billion reserve fund at the United Nations to euros. Instead of buying up U.S. currency to keep it from collapsing, Saddam was now cashing in his dollars. For an oil-rich country to do that, perhaps inducing other OPEC countries to follow suit, could have had a shattering effect on U.S. currency markets. Saddam’s ruling clique had to be replaced with a pliant puppet government that would revert to a dollar standard—as indeed happened. According to some critics, this was a central consideration behind the U.S. invasion and occupation.68
NATURAL RESOURCE GRAB
Another reason for targeting Iraq can be summed up in one word: oil. As of late 2002 Saddam had offered exploratory concessions to France, China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia. But with the U.S. takeover and a new puppet regime in place, all such agreements were pretty much forgotten. The Bush Jr. administration is composed in part of oilmen who are both sorely tempted and threatened by Iraq’s oil reserve, one of the largest in the world. With 113 billion barrels of quality crude at $55 a barrel, Iraq’s supply comes to over $6 trillion dollars, the biggest resource grab in the history of the world.
During the late 1990s, because of the slumping price of crude, U.S. leaders were interested in keeping Iraqi oil off the market. As reported in the London Financial Times, oil prices fell sharply because Iraq’s agreement with the United Nations would allow Baghdad to sell oil on the world market in larger volumes “competing for market shares.”69 The San Francisco Chronicle headlined its story in no uncertain terms: “IRAQ’S OIL POSES THREAT TO THE WEST.” In fact, Iraqi crude posed no threat to “the West,” only to Western oil investors. If Iraq were able to reenter the international oil market, the Chronicle reported, “it would devalue British North Sea oil, undermine American oil production and—much more important—it would destroy the huge profits which the United States [read U.S. oil companies] stands to gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production, especially in Azerbajian.”70 Direct control of Iraqi oil was the surest way to keep it off the world market when the price was not right, and the surest way to profit from its eventual sale.71
WAR PROFITEERING
The aggression against Iraq was extremely good for the powerful military-industrial contractors and their many subcontractors. Billions of dollars in no-bid contracts resulted in astronomical profits for Halliburton, Bechtel, and some one hundred other companies, while producing paltry results for the Iraqi people. Most of the sewers remained unconnected, the utilities dysfunctional, and water supplies chancy or nonexistent. For the big companies, however, the combination of brazen corruption and lack of oversight made Iraq the place to be. As much as one-third to one-half of the immense funds allocated by Congress remained unaccounted for. It could not get any better than that for those feeding at the trough.
ISRAEL FIRST
The neoconservative officials in the Bush Jr. administration—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Lewis Libby, Abram Shulsky, and others—were strong proponents of a militaristic and expansionist strain of Zionism linked closely to the right-wing Likud Party of Israel. With impressive cohesion these “neocons” played a determinant role in shaping U.S. Middle East policy.72 In the early 1980s Wolfowitz and Feith were charged with passing classified documents to Israel. Instead of being charged with espionage, Feith temporarily lost his security clearance and Wolfowitz was untouched. The two continued to enjoy ascendant careers, becoming second and third in command at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld.
For these right-wing Zionists, the war against Iraq was part of a larger campaign to serve the greater good of Israel. Saddam Hussein was Is
rael’s most consistent adversary in the Middle East, providing much political support to the Palestinian resistance. The neocons had been pushing for war with Iraq well before 9/11, assisted by the well-financed and powerful Israeli lobby, as well as by prominent members of Congress from both parties who obligingly treated U.S. and Israeli interests in the Middle East as inseparable. The Zionist neocons provided alarming reports about the threat to the United States posed by Saddam because of his weapons of mass destruction. At that same time, reports by both the CIA and the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) registered strong skepticism about the existence of such weapons in Iraq.73
The neocon goal has been Israeli expansion into all Palestinian territories and the emergence of Israel as the unchallengeable, perfectly secure, supreme power in the region. This could best be accomplished by undoing the economies of pro-Palestinian states including Syria, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia. A most important step in that direction was the destruction of Iraq as a nation, including its military, civil service, police, universities, hospitals, utilities, professional class, and entire infrastructure, an Iraq torn with sectarian strife and left in shambles.74
DOMESTIC POLITICAL GAINS
As of 10 September 2001, Bush Jr.’s approval ratings were sagging woefully. The stock market was down, unemployment was up, wages remained flat, and a recession showed no sign of easing. But the next day’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, swiftly followed by the newly trumpeted war against terrorism and the massive bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, sent Bush’s approval ratings soaring.
Then came the corporate scandals of 2002. By July, both President Bush Jr. and Vice-President Cheney were implicated in fraudulent accounting practices with Harken and Halliburton respectively. The companies claimed false profits to pump up stock values, followed by heavy insider trading, selling at great profit (by Bush, Cheney and others) just before the stock was revealed to be nearly worthless and collapsed in price. By October 2002, the impending war against Iraq blew this whole issue out of the news. Daddy Bush had done the same thing in 1990–1991, sending the savings and loan scandal into media limbo by waging war against that very same country, thus keeping at least two of his sons from criminal prosecution.
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