Tom Hayden : U.S. Special Forces are Back in Iraq

Special Forces patrol in Iraq, 2005. U.S. Army photo.
U.S. Special Forces Deployed in Iraq, again

The irony is that the U.S. is protecting a pro-Iran Shiite regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency while at the same time supporting a Sunni-led movement against the Iran-backed dictatorship in Syria

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2012

Despite the official U.S. military withdrawal last December, American special forces "recently" returned to Iraq on a counterterrorism mission, according to an American general in charge of weapons sales there. The mission was reported by The New York Times, in the 162nd line in the fifteenth paragraph of a story about deepening sectarian divides.

The irony is that the U.S. is protecting a pro-Iran Shiite regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency while at the same time supporting a Sunni-led movement against the Iran-backed dictatorship in Syria. The Sunni rebellions are occurring in the vast Sunni region between northwestern Iraq and southern Syria where borders are porous.

During the Iraq War, many Iraqi insurgents from Anbar and Diyala provinces took sanctuary in Sunni areas of Syria. Now they are turning their weapons on two targets, the al-Malaki government in Baghdad and the Assad regime in Damascus.

The U.S. is caught in the contradictions of proxy wars, favoring Iran's ally in Iraq while trying to displace Iran's proxy in Syria.

The lethal complication of the U.S. Iraq policy is a military withdrawal that was propelled by political pressure from public opinion in the U.S. even as the war could not be won on the battlefield. Military "redeployment," as the scenario is described, is a general's nightmare.

In the case of Vietnam, a "decent interval" was supposedly arranged by the Nixon administration to create the appearance of an orderly American withdrawal. During the same "interval," Nixon massively escalated his bombing campaign to no avail. Two years after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, Saigon collapsed.

It is unlikely that the Maliki regime will fall to Sunni insurgents in Iraq, if only because the Sunni population is only about 20 percent of the population. However, the return of U.S. Special Forces is not likely to restore Iraqi stability, and they may become trapped in crossfire as the sectarian tensions deepen.

The real lesson may be for Afghanistan, where another unwinnable, unaffordable war in support of an unpopular regime is stumbling towards 2014, the timeline for the end of U.S. combat. That's the same year in which Hamid Karzai's presidential term ends.

Was anyone in the US/NATO alliance planning a "decent interval" for the Humpty Dumpty in Kabul? The US military "surge" there ended just this week, with 68,000 U.S. troops to be radically reduced in two years.


2. America's last months in Iraq: Michael Gordon's version

The New York Times often relies on its national security correspondent, Michael Gordon, an insider with close ties to military and intelligence professionals, to obtain a quasi-official version of events in the Long War. Gordon's Sept. 23 account of "failed efforts and challenges of America's last months in Iraq" is illuminating but hardly the final word.

To what is already known, Gordon adds that the White House tried to lobby for a widening of the Maliki government to include a role for Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya mainly-Sunni bloc. Those efforts failed. The Americans also hoped that the Baghdad regime would accept up to 16,000 "residual" troops for training, air support and counterterrorism. The proposal was pushed hard by the Pentagon after "an earful" from Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

The White House, "looking toward Mr. Obama's re-election campaign, had a lower number in mind." On April 29, the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, asked the defense secretary, Robert Gates, if he could accept "up to" 10,000. Gates said yes but was circumvented by the Joint Chiefs, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, who sent a classified letter to Obama warning that 16,000 were needed.

The secret proposal was endorsed by the U.S. commander in Iraq and the head of Central Command. The letter "arrived with a thud" at the White House, stirring an angry response.

Then on June 2, the president emphasized to Maliki that any new agreement would need ratification by the Iraqi parliament -- a virtual impossibility. The agreement would require "airtight immunities" for any U.S. troops left behind -- another nail in the coffin.

Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta revived the proposal for 10,000.

On Aug. 13, Obama "settled the matter" by rejecting the 10,000 figure and a lower version of 7,000. He offered a token rotating presence of 1,500 U.S. troops at a time, up to 3,000 in all, plus six F-16s. The question Gordon never addresses is whether Obama knew his proposals would be rejected by the Iraqis, allowing him to withdraw while leaving responsibility with the Iraqis.

On a personal note, I have interviewed one American official present in the small White House discussions about those numbers. This former official told me that Donilon proposed the 10,000 figure. Aside from being national security adviser, I asked, did he say he was making an official offer from President Obama, or was he authorized to float the number as part of a continuing discussion? The number, he said, came from Donilon as an offer.

We may never know what was Obama's bottom line. He must have known the Iraqi parliament was a hotbed of sovereignty where a deal with the Americans would take weeks of rancor before failing. He must have known that an offer to discuss 1,500 troops and six jets would be an embarrassing token to leave behind.

On Oct. 21, the president video-conferenced Malaki -- for the first time in four months -- and told him the negotiations were over and all the U.S. troops were coming home.

Gordon's account, published in a book this week, is a critique of Obama's withdrawal, which he says leaves Iraq "less stable domestically and less reliable internationally." He complains of no troops on the ground, no Americans to "patrol the skies," and severe cuts in Iraq's police force.

Gordon never explains why leaving behind a small handful of American troops would have secured American objectives, which he says in hindsight were to create a "stable and representative government," avoid a power vacuum for terrorists, and "sufficient influence" so that Iraq would be an American partner, or at least not an opponent, in the Middle East.

What Gordon doesn't say is that those objectives were impossible to achieve in an almost nine-year war that cost the US 4,446 deaths and 32, 227 wounded, a taxpayer bill of $807 billion in direct costs, and left Iraq itself a ravaged wasteland.

This is an expanded version of an article that appears in The Nation.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Life During Wartime : Courts Release Terrorists!

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Political cartoon by Joshua Brown / Historians Against the War / The Rag Blog
Thanks to Dr. S.R. Keister /The Rag Blog

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The Shoe: 'Out of Loyalty to Every Drop of Innocent Blood That Has Been Shed'

Why I threw the shoe

I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents

By Muntazer al-Zaidi / September 17, 2009

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacres of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

[Muntazer al-Zaidi is an Iraqi reporter who was freed this week after serving nine months in prison for throwing his shoe at former US president George Bush at a press conference. This edited statement was translated by McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Sahar Issa www.mcclatchydc.com.]

Source / The Guardian, U.K.

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Baghdad Embassy Too Big for Reduced American Mission in Iraq - Duhhhh!!

And how many other King George projects will prove to be just a bit oversized for reality? We won't be hearing the last of this sort of thing for awhile, me thinks.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Report: Big cuts needed at huge Baghdad embassy built by Bush
By Warren P. Strobel / July 22, 2009

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Embassy in Iraq, the government's largest overseas diplomatic mission, is significantly overstaffed and needs to be downsized to reflect the reduced American role in the country, according to a new State Department report.

"There is a clear consensus from the top to the bottom of the embassy: The time has come for a significant rightsizing," says the report Wednesday by the department's inspector general.

The report came as President Barack Obama met Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki in Washington for talks on the significant changes in the U.S.-Iraqi relationship. American combat troops ceased operations in Iraqi cities on June 30, Maliki's government has become more assertive about exercising Iraqi sovereignty and Obama has shifted the attention that his predecessor put on Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In addition to downsizing the embassy, the report recommends ending the Provincial Reconstruction Teams by 2011, which have been the prime U.S. tool for rebuilding civilian life in Iraq's provinces.

"For some, it (the downsizing) is much overdue, as they believe the 'civilian surge' went too far," the report says. "For others, it is a necessary result of the now-changed circumstances in Iraq and in our bilateral relationship."

The American Embassy in Baghdad became a symbol of the Bush administration's ambitions to remake Iraq. A huge new structure was built on the banks of the Tigris River, at a cost of more than $700 million, and hundreds of civilian experts from agencies across the U.S. government were deployed to help with reconstruction.

The 103-page inspector general's report gives high marks to embassy personnel for what it calls an exemplary relationship between American civilians and the U.S. military in Iraq.

It also reports that there is "a culture of working seven days a week." Given the near-constant security threats, "almost any other (American diplomatic) mission would have remained closed," it says.

The report recommends, however, that the State Department launch a review to downsize the embassy staff. It says that at the new compound, which became fully occupied in January, 1,200 people are "jammed into apartments designed for about 600."

"After rightsizing, the embassy should be able to carry out its mission in Iraq with a staff able to fit comfortably in 600 apartments," it says.

A senior State Department official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the official wasn't authorized to be quoted by name, said that newly arrived U.S. Ambassador Chris Hill was reviewing staffing levels in Baghdad.

The report says that with former President George W. Bush's emphasis on Iraq, the embassy was permitted to grow largely without regard to the usual budget constraints on U.S. missions overseas.

"Given the high priority placed on Iraq, and the policy of the previous administration to encourage all relevant U.S. agencies to send employees to the embassy and the PRTs, many of the normal limits on staffing have not been imposed," it says. "Cost has not seemed to be a factor."

The embassy employs 1,873 people, including locally hired staff, and more than 13,000 contractors, the report says.

Source / McClatchy

Thanks to Juan Cole, especially for the "Duhhh !!" in the headline / The Rag Blog

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Scott Ritter on 'Victory' in Iraq

Iraqi national police stand guard at a checkpoint in central Baghdad two days before U.S. troops withdraw from the city, as a sandstorm blankets Iraq’s capital. Photo: Hadi Mizban/AP.
So This Is What Victory Looks Like?
By Scott Ritter / July 7, 2009

Fireworks lit up the Baghdad sky on the evening of June 30th, signaling the advent of “National Sovereignty Day.” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared the new holiday to commemorate the withdrawal of American combat troops from the Iraqi capital and all other major urban centers, although thousands of “advisers” would remain in the cities, embedded with Iraqi forces. The celebration transpired inside a city that has been radically transformed over the past six years. Even with American combat forces ostensibly withdrawn, Baghdad remains one of the most militarized urban areas in the world. It wasn’t always so. When I was in Baghdad during the 1990s, I was struck by the lack of an overt military presence for a nation purported to be governed by one of the world’s worst militaristic dictatorships.

Of course, in the city areas housing Saddam Hussein, his family and inner circle, and the seat of government, one would see green-clad soldiers of the Special Republican Guard standing watch over the gates controlling access into and out of these islands of power and privilege. But in the rest of the city—the vast majority of the city—there was no military presence. Traffic police stood on little islands in the middle of busy intersections, keeping the bustle of a modern city moving along at a brisk pace. There were soldiers in uniform around, but they carried no weapons, being on leave from their duties in Iraq’s conscript military. Just like their fellow servicemen in other cities around the world, they would enjoy a day or two walking the streets and markets of Baghdad, taking in the sights and sounds, grabbing a glass of tea, a quick meal and the sight of pretty girls neatly attired in Western-style dress.

Let there be no doubt, Iraq was a police state, and the streets of the city were also filled with agents and informers of the regime, quick to detect any hint of rebellion or insurrection. Telephone calls were listened in on and conversations illicitly recorded in the hope of finding evidence of dissent. And when dissent was found, the forces of repression would mobilize quickly to crush it—secret police and paramilitary forces for small incidents, and the battalions of Special Republican Guard for larger threats. But Baghdad, like Mosul and other major cities, was also a place where someone—whether resident, visitor or even U.N. weapons inspector—could leave his or her home or workplace in the evening and travel freely without fear of endless roadblocks, checkpoints, car bombs and firefights.

One could take in a street market in what was then known as Saddam City (today we call it Sadr City), the Shiite-dominated neighborhood in the northeast corner of Baghdad. Or grab a kebab in Karrada, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood in the center of town. Or visit the shopping districts of Monsouriyah, or tour the gold-domed mosques in Khadamiyah (Shiite) or across the Tigris River in Adamiyah (Sunni). The quality of the Baghdad-Iraq experience fluctuated given the state of the economy (U.N. sanctions crippled Iraq from 1991 until 1996, when the controversial oil-for-food program breathed new life into what had become a stagnant existence). But whether the shelves in a given shop were full or empty, one thing remained constant—Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq functioned in a manner more in keeping with the open societies of Europe, and less like the municipality under siege that exists today.

Baghdad survives now as a city defined not by its thousands of years of history, but rather segregation brought on by policies of deliberate ethnic cleansing. The city is now a checkerboard of neighborhoods walled off from one another by giant concrete-block dividers installed by American troops in an effort to keep Iraqis from killing one another, a phenomenon born from ethnic and religious differences which have violently come to a head in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. Once we get beyond the pageantry and spectacle of the deception that is taking place in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities “formerly” occupied by U.S. troops, the pretense of progress is difficult to sustain.

Iraqi soldiers, primarily Shiite troops loyal to the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister al-Maliki, are everywhere. They man checkpoints and mini-garrisons throughout the city and constantly patrol streets and neighborhoods which function less as communities and more like tiny feudal fiefdoms. Militias, like street gangs in Western ghettos, lurk inside every walled-off zone, sometimes working with the Iraqi military, sometimes working against it. To attempt to move from zone to zone today is an exercise in futility and frustration, as well as a flagrant temptation of fate. Sunni and Shiite, Arabs and Kurds, Christians and Muslims—all used to be able to mingle freely in the streets of Baghdad. Today these diverse elements are segregated from one another, their daily existence dictated by a kill-or-be-killed mentality that manifests itself in violence and a growing diaspora of Iraqi refugees no longer able to sustain life in a city they once called home.

Many in the West continue to delude themselves into seeing progress—and therefore “victory”—when in fact the situation in Iraq has only regressed. It is in vogue for Western journalists, pundits and government officials to compare and contrast conditions in Baghdad today with those that existed in 2007, when the U.S. began its “surge” of military forces into the urban areas of Iraq in an effort to quell violence that had reached epidemic proportions. There is no debate over the fact that the level of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere throughout Iraq has dropped dramatically since the surge was instituted. But the cost paid by Iraqi society, shredded by ethnic cleansing and segregation, raises the question of whether or not the alleged “cure” is any better than the “disease” it purports to address. One thing is certain: Iraq remains a very sick patient. The U.S., in designing a surge that addressed only the most visible symptoms of the problems which ravage Iraq in the post-Saddam era, has created a false sense of accomplishment when in fact the underlying conditions that caused the violence prior to the surge still exist. It’s like a cancer temporarily stunned into remission by a drug that weakened the body and now is being withdrawn without actually curing anything. The Shiite-Sunni schism has only worsened, and there is increasing risk that the Arab-Kurd disagreement over oil rights will escalate from a war of words into something more violent.

The absolute failure of the surge is even more evident when one considers conditions inside Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003. There is simply no serious benchmark by which one can make a viable argument for improvement. Even the Bush administration stopped the pretense that we had brought democracy to the country. Stability is now the term of choice, and when one compares the situation in Iraq circa February 2003 to today, the facts scream out loud and clear that Iraq is far more unstable in its present condition than when governed by Saddam Hussein.

Take oil, the commodity that was going to pay for the invasion and guarantee the political and economic future of Iraq. Not only is the Iraqi government divided on how to move forward with a new legal framework designed to encourage foreign investment in Iraq’s oil sector, but the billions of dollars already spent on Iraq’s oil industry since the U.S. invasion have actually produced less oil per day than when Saddam was in power—and one must keep in mind that Saddam’s Iraq suffered under crushing economic sanctions.

The number of Iraqi refugees has more than quadrupled since the invasion. Some 500,000 Iraqis had fled the abuses of the Saddam regime, while today more than 2 million Iraqis have been compelled to leave the country as a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation. Another 2 million have been forced from their homes and are internally displaced.

Unemployment is rampant. Iraq’s health care system is in tatters, as is its education system. But apparently these figures are meaningless in the face of the one major statistic the Twitter-crazed Western media seems to have fallen in love with: There are nearly 18 million cell phones in use in Iraq today, up from a mere 80,000 when Saddam Hussein governed. The fact that most of these phones operate with intermittent or nonexistent service is irrelevant. Iraq has cell phone coverage. God Bless America.

It is wishful thinking to believe that the Iraqi military and paramilitary forces under the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki will be able to hold the ruins of Iraqi society together without major U.S. intervention. The sad reality is not only that Baghdad is a far more militarized city today than at any time under Saddam Hussein, but the United States has assumed the role of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard. American soldiers are now an iron fist lurking on the edges of the city, waiting to be called in to crush any sign of rebellion or insurrection. That our role has so readily transformed from liberator to occupier should come as a surprise to no one.

In 1999 I warned Americans that a war between Iraq and the United States would appear on the surface to be deceptively easy. I predicted that a force of no more than 250,000 troops (we actually did it with less—about 200,000 troops deployed either in Iraq or in theater) would require less than a month (the U.S.-led attack began on March 19, and Baghdad was occupied on April 9), and would result in relatively few casualties (139 American military personnel died in action from March 20 through May 1, 2003). The easy part, I noted, would be getting rid of Saddam Hussein. The hard part would be securing victory in the aftermath of Saddam’s demise. And this task, I warned, would be made even harder, indeed virtually impossible, by the fact that the U.S.-led invasion would lack any justification under international law, especially if a case for war were to be cobbled together using U.N. weapons inspections and Iraqi WMD as an excuse. The U.S. did invade, and the rest is history.

The incompetence, corruption and futility of the U.S. occupation of Iraq are matters of record. America has failed in Iraq, a fact many Americans recognized when they voted for change in 2008 by electing Barack Obama over John McCain. And yet today these same Americans appear to be as self-deceiving as those who supported George W. Bush’s attempts to spin the tragedy of the American experience in Iraq as something noble and worthy of support. To date, the war in Iraq has cost more than 4,300 American service members their lives. Tens of thousands more have been physically wounded or permanently scarred by the psychological horror of participating in the Iraqi conflict. We’ve stopped seriously trying to count the number of Iraqi dead, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to more than a million.

Even before the U.S. “withdrawal” from Baghdad, acts of violence in that city and elsewhere were on the rise. There is little doubt that the many Iraqi enemies of the government of al-Maliki will soon try to flex their muscle. Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is all but assured. Some Iraqi military units will, at least initially, perform well; others will not. Neighborhoods once secured by U.S. occupiers will fall out of the control of central Iraqi authority. The more the Iraqi military tries to suppress this dissent, the more the dissent will grow. Though major U.S. combat forces are currently out of Baghdad, there is little doubt that there will soon be a call for their return, in force, either to respond to an ambush of a U.S. convoy supplying the American Embassy enclave in central Baghdad or to bail out the Iraqi military when it fumbles its effort to suppress the opponents of the government.

Iraq, for President Obama and his military leaders, is a lose-lose situation. There is no path toward military victory there today. With American forces out of the major urban areas of Iraq, the next step for Obama is to complete the planned withdrawal on schedule, with most U.S. forces leaving Iraq in 2010. This will be impossible to accomplish if America finds itself sucked back into the urban centers of the country to maintain the false perception of stability created through the surge.

The biggest challenge in Iraq facing the Obama administration is not to fall victim to the need to be seen as victorious. Victory today can be measured only in terms of mitigating the consequences of failure. There will be no “Battleship Missouri moment,” with the forces of a defeated Iraqi insurgency lined up to formally surrender. Instead, America will have to deal with the reality that, no matter how we spin facts, President Bush’s ill-advised Iraqi adventure has ended in defeat. Whether this defeat is memorialized with imagery reminiscent of the U.S. retreat from Saigon, with helicopters pulling the last occupiers from the roofs of the American Embassy in Baghdad (unlikely), or repeats the pathos of the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, with a convoy of American troops crossing over into Kuwait in orderly fashion (more likely), there is no victory to be had in the classic sense.

In one of the last patrols conducted by U.S. forces before the formal withdrawal from Baghdad, four American soldiers lost their lives. The patrol itself was wholly symbolic—a show of force and will at a time when every military reason for the patrol had ceased to exist—a tragic yet fitting analogy for the entire U.S. military presence in Iraq. No more American troops need to die, or be physically or psychologically maimed, participating in futile “last patrols” designed to salvage the reputations of politicians. There are those who will argue for sustaining the failed military misadventure in Iraq out of a misplaced sense of national pride and honor. President Obama must confront his own ego and hubris and accept the fact that in order to secure a lasting legacy as a peacemaker he will need to ride out the short-term criticism.

Source / TruthDig

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Juan Cole on Dick Cheney's Criminal Irrelevance

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Cheney Worries about Wasting the Sacrifices made in Iraq on behalf of Big Oil
By Juan Cole / July 2, 2009

Dick Cheney reacted to the cessation of unilateral US patrols of major cities in Iraq, saying that he had concerns that the "insurgents" might launch more attacks and that “I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point."

First of all, Cheney didn't make any sacrifices in Iraq. He deferred his own military service five times because he 'had other things to do.' The 'sacrifices' were caused because he purveyed falsehoods to the US public in order to get up that war, hinting around that Saddam was in bed with Usama Bin Laden and telling senators that Iraq was two years away from having a nuclear bomb. So the sacrifices were of other people's children, and his role was merely that of an Aztec high priest cutting the heart out of the victims.

Second of all, from the dawn of time until 2003, there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. Iraqis are not essentially violent. Like all human beings, they deploy violence at some points to further political goals. Cheney launched a violent illegal war of aggression on Iraq. And Cheney created the "insurgency" by invidious policies that unfairly disadvantaged the Sunni Arabs in the new Iraq he helped midwife.

Third, Cheney's own administration (it was Bush-Cheney, remember Dick?) that negotiated the Status of Forces agreement under which the cessation of stand-alone US patrols of major Iraqi cities was scheduled for this summer. Cheney is trying to imply that this policy is that of the Obama administration!

Fourth, Cheney kept talking about 'liberating' Iraq and democratizing the Middle East. The patrols are ceasing precisely because the elected Iraqi parliament insisted on it! Cheney only likes democracy when it functions as an elective dictatorship for him and his cronies.

Fifth, Jason Leopold reviews the documentary evidence that Dick Cheney combined his energy task force with planning for an overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

Leopold writes,

[An] April 2001 report, "Strategic Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," was prepared by the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations at the request of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. In retrospect, it appears that the report helped focus administration thinking on why it made geopolitical sense to oust Hussein, whose country sat on the world's second largest oil reserves.

"Iraq remains a de-stabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East," the report said.

"Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets . . . The advisory committee that helped prepare the report included Luis Giusti, a Shell Corp. non-executive director; John Manzoni, regional president of British Petroleum; and David O'Reilly, chief executive of ChevronTexaco. . . [the notorious crook] Ken Lay, then chairman of the energy-trading Enron Corp., also made recommendations that were included in the Baker report.

And then Leopold adds is this:

The New Yorker 's Jane Mayer later made another discovery: a secret NSC document dated Feb. 3, 2001 - only two weeks after Bush took office - instructing NSC officials to cooperate with Cheney's task force, which was "melding" two previously unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies towards rogue states" and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." [The New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004]

By March 2001, Cheney's task force had prepared a set of documents with a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a list titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," according to information released in July 2003 under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch.

In other words, what Cheney is really worried about is that a US military withdrawal from Iraq on the timetable his administration negotiated with the Iraqi parliament might lead to further instability of a sort that would keep the US oil majors from getting at Iraqi petroleum in a big way. His invocation of the 'sacrifices' made by other people's children on the basis of his hateful manipulations is the ultimate desecration.

For my own account of Cheney, Iraq and Big Oil, see Engaging the Muslim World.

Source / Informed Comment

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New Abu Ghraib Photos Said to Depict Graphic Rape Scenes

Previously released photo from Abu Ghraib prison. The new photos, many reportedly depicting sexual abuse, are said to be much worse. Photo from Telegraph, U.K.
Photographs which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

By Duncan Gardham and Paul Cruickshank / May 28, 2009

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

In April, Mr Obama’s administration said the photographs would be released and it would be “pointless to appeal” against a court judgment in favour of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

But after lobbying from senior military figures, Mr Obama changed his mind saying they could put the safety of troops at risk.

Earlier this month, he said: “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

It was thought the images were similar to those leaked five years ago, which showed naked and bloody prisoners being intimidated by dogs, dragged around on a leash, piled into a human pyramid and hooded and attached to wires.

Mr Obama seemed to reinforce that view by adding: “I want to emphasise that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”

The latest photographs relate to 400 cases of alleged abuse between 2001 and 2005 in Abu Ghraib and six other prisons. Mr Obama said the individuals involved had been “identified, and appropriate actions” taken.

Maj Gen Taguba’s internal inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, included sworn statements by 13 detainees, which, he said in the report, he found “credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses.”

Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: “I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid’s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures.”

The translator was an American Egyptian who is now the subject of a civil court case in the US.

Three detainees, including the alleged victim, refer to the use of a phosphorescent tube in the sexual abuse and another to the use of wire, while the victim also refers to part of a policeman’s “stick” all of which were apparently photographed.

Source / Telegraph, U.K.

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Lest We Forget the Horror That Is Iraq

Statistics
By Dr.Mohammed / May 15, 2009

Yesterday, I was chatting with my colleague about the situation in Iraq and specially regarding the social aspect…we both reached an agreement that we would witness a social crisis or a disaster…the Iraqis' ethics and manner have really changed in the years after the war…so many people lost the good sides of the Iraqi manners.

And since he is much older than me, he said that after each war Iraqis losses some of their good manners, and I think he is right.

And today I received an email with some very interesting statistics that are gathered together…and I thought those statistics would be a great way to show my point.

1,000,000 widowed women according to a statistic published by the Iraqi woman's ministry in 2008

4,000,000 orphan child (estimated by the ministry of planning if the average of the Iraqi family is 4-6 children)

2,500,000 killed (according to the statistics of the Iraqi ministry of health and the forensic medicine (morgues) till December 2008)

800,000 missing (according to the ministry of anterior till December 2008)

320,000 prisoners inside the USA and government jails (the USA announced the presence of 120,000 prisoners inside their jails)

4,500,000 refugees outside Iraq (according to the statistics of people who requested the new passport G)

2,500,000 displaced inside Iraq (according to the Iraqi ministry of immigration and refugees)

76,000 cases of HIV (according to the Iraqi ministry of health) (it was 114 cases before the war)

40% of the Iraqi people are under the line of poverty (according to the statistics of the Iraqi human rights' ministry)

126 foreign security companies (registered at the Iraqi ministry of anterior)

43 armed militias (registered at the Iraqi ministry of anterior and ministry of defense)

Well, it's really frightening. Just look well at the numbers of orphans, widowed, killed and missing and you would certainly know why I said where are going to have a social crisis.

May God be with you.

Source / Last of the Iraqis

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From the Iraqi-Turkish Border : Airstrikes or Apples?

Survivor surveys results of Turkish air strike against Kurdish PKK in northern Iraq, this from April, 2008.
Airstrikes or Apples?

Merkegia, and neighboring villages in this region have been beset by cross-border airstrikes and shelling by Turkey that have destroyed orchards, crops, livestock and homes. The people have seen their way of life, once threatened by Saddam, now at the mercy of a foreign air force.

By Charlie Jackson / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2009

MERKEGIA, Iraq -- At the unpaved end of the road near Iraq's border with Turkey lies the tiny village of Merkegia. The coral pink buildings and church stand in contrast to the lush green of Kurdistan. A few families have ventured back to their apple orchards -- famous even in far away Baghdad -- despite Turkish forts and tanks at bases inside Iraq that they must pass each day to reach their town.

The villagers celebrate St. George's Day, hopeful that they will be able to harvest their crops this year -- if Turkish airstrikes cease.

Merkegia, and neighboring villages in this region have been beset by cross-border airstrikes and shelling by Turkey that have destroyed orchards, crops, livestock and homes. The people have seen their way of life, once threatened by Saddam, now at the mercy of a foreign air force.

They ask "Why?"

"We only want to live peaceably and harvest our apples," says one resident who returned with his family to the town that once held more than 100 families. They don't understand why their own central government, along with the United States, doesn't stop Turkey from bombing.

As we travel to other villages we hear a similar refrain. "In past years, Saddam tried to empty our villages and kill our families," says the father of a displaced family. "Now, it appears that others want to do the same." More than 190 villages in the region have been attacked and their families forced to flee from airstrikes during the past two years -- even as recently as a week ago. Bridges to their homes have been destroyed as well and the land is littered with mines, cluster bombs and other unexploded ordinance.

When asked, officials in Ankara claim that armed insurgents with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) have crossed over into Iraq from Turkey. The villagers say there may be PKK in the mountains, but not in their towns so they can't understand why their rural livelihood is under attack. The faces of their children, eager to play amidst the trees and fields, don't reflect the fears and sadness of those who have witnessed the ongoing destruction of this bountiful land. They only know that today is a beautiful Sunday.

[Charlie Jackson is the founder of Texans for Peace.]

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Tom Hayden Comic : The Tragedy of Iraq

Iraqis Bear Tragedy of American EmpireText by Tom Hayden.Illustrated by Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen. Edited by Paul Buhle.
Published by The Rag Blog.
CLICK TO ENLARGE

See additional frames, Below.

Comic art is growing up
By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2009

Comic art is growing up. And the youngest generation promises to be the best yet, building upon the work of the past. That is to say: the previous generations of newspaper and comic book art, but especially the Underground Comix days of The Rag and others, and the alternative art (Austin’s Jack Jaxon notably) that began to take history seriously. I’m happy to have had a small role in much of this since the appearance of RADICAL AMERICA KOMIKS in 1969, with Gilbert Shelton in charge editorially and me, a mere publisher.

It was the happiest of coincidences that brought artist Ellis Rosen and Sam Marlow together with me, through a particularly wonderful student of mine at Brown. I’d been working fitfully on a Tom Hayden Comic, given it up a couple years ago, now see it come to life in a new way, from Tom’s passing observations on the global scene.

Keep tuned, this is something new and exciting.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

CLICK TO ENLARGE

[Tom Hayden, a prime mover in the Sixties New Left, was a California State Senator. A respected activist and author, he was a founder of Progressives for Obama and is the author of Ending the War in Iraq (2007), The Voices of the Chicago Eight (2008), and Writings for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader (2008).]

[Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen are graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Together they self-published two comics. Marlowe also worked as a digital colorist for Chicago comic artist, Paul Hornshemeier, on titles such as “The Three Paradoxes”, and Marvel Comics’ “Omega the Unknown.” He recently completed a short science fiction comic about the end of the world. He is currently volunteering at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Rosen lives in NewYork where he also works part time at the Barry Friedman Gallery.]

[Paul Buhle is an educator and a historian. He published the New Left journal Radical America during the 1960s and has written or edited many books on radicalism and culture. He now organizes leftwing comic books.]

Coming Soon: "Partial Peace, Looming War," by Tom Hayden, a Rag Blog comic.

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Blackwater Is Staying in Iraq, Against Iraqi Wishes

Blackwater Chief Executive Officer Erik Prince defends his company's performance in Iraq before the House oversight committee in 2007. Photo: Associated Press.
New Deal for Blackwater
By Jim McElhatton / March 17, 2009

Days after the Baghdad government decided it no longer wanted the company then known as Blackwater in Iraq, the State Department signed a $22.2 million deal in February to keep the embattled contractor working there through most of the summer, contract records show.

The decision keeps Blackwater - since renamed Xe - in Iraq months longer than anyone has suggested publicly, while raising questions about why the U.S. would pay a contractor for work in Iraq if it may not be able to operate there legally.

The State Department has been under pressure from Blackwater critics, including several in Congress, not to renew the company's contracts in Iraq. Much of the concern stems from a 2007 incident that left 14 Iraqi civilians dead and six former Blackwater guards facing manslaughter charges. One of the guards pleaded guilty, but the company was accused of no wrongdoing in the incident.

In late January, the Iraqi government said it would not renew Blackwater's operating license and that the company would have to leave as soon as a joint Iraqi-U.S. committee completes its work on guidelines for the operation of private security companies. State Department officials said they would honor the decision.

On Feb. 2, a department spokesman was asked whether officials planned to renew one of Blackwater's contracts past May. The spokesman, Robert Wood, said the department had told Blackwater "we did not plan to renew the company's existing task force orders for protective security details in Iraq."

But records available through a federal procurement database show that on that same day, the State Department approved a $22.2 million contract modification for Blackwater "security personnel" in Iraq, with a job completion date of Sept. 3, 2009.

"Why would you continue to use Blackwater when the Iraqi government has banned the highly controversial company and there are other choices?" asked Melanie Sloan, executive director of the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

State Department spokesman Noel Clay said the contract modification involves aviation services. "The place of performance is Iraq, but it is totally different than the Baghdad one that expires in May," he said.

Ms. Sloan called the State Department's explanation of the Feb. 2 deal a "parsing of words" and said "they should just be straight with us."

Xe spokeswoman Anne Tyrell declined to comment on the status of the company's work in Iraq or the Feb. 2 contract modification. She said the company was aware that the State Department had indicated that it did not plan to renew its contracts in Iraq but that Xe officials had not received specific information about leaving the country.

"We're following their direction," she said.

The Iraqi Embassy in Washington had no comment on the Blackwater contract when contacted on Monday.

The State Department has given clear indications for months that the Iraqi government might not be renewing Blackwater's operating license.

Harold W. Geisel, the State Department's inspector general, told the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting at a Feb. 2 hearing that officials were awaiting the outcome of an FBI report into the 2007 shooting incident before deciding whether to keep Blackwater in Iraq.

"The issue is not only one of, well, what we would like to do, but it also is to some extent what the department can do," Mr. Geisel said of decisions about the future of Blackwater's role in Iraq, according to a transcript of the hearing.

"Blackwater had certain assets that the department determined the other contractors did not have," he said, citing the company's 24 aircraft as an example.

Nonetheless, Mr. Geisel said his office did "advise the department that they better start planning for when the Iraqis say this is it with Blackwater. And without getting into diplomatic negotiations, I believe the department is planning for this eventuality, which is clearly not too far off."

Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that investigates federal contracting, said the State Department's decision to continue paying Blackwater for security in Iraq raises broader questions about federal procurement practices.

"This case highlights the fact that the U.S. government over-relies on contractors and that it isn't in a position to hold them accountable," he said. "Continuing to do new business with questionable actors flies in the face of spreading trust, peace and democracy around the world."

The contractor, based in North Carolina, recently underwent a big shake-up. The company changed its name to Xe, pronounced "zee," last month. Also, a subsidiary, Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, which secured the State Department's $22.2 million contract modification, was renamed.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince and company President Gary Jackson have resigned.

Mr. Prince has donated nearly a quarter-million dollars over the years to political causes. More than half of the donations went to the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee, according to a 2007 Democrat-led House committee report, citing data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Blackwater also had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying Congress, according to Senate records. It contributed between $10,001 and $25,000 to former President Bill Clinton's charitable foundation. Mr. Clinton released the donor information last year to avoid conflict-of-interest questions about his fundraising activities and the duties of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as President Obama's secretary of state.

Despite any political good will that the company might have generated from its lobbying and political activities, it was unable to dodge fallout from the Sept. 16, 2007, shooting incident in Baghdad, in which prosecutors said six former guards went on an unprovoked rampage, shooting innocent Iraqi civilians.

Five of the former guards have pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges, while a sixth pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempted manslaughter. Attorneys for the former guards say they fired in self-defense.

Source / Washington Times

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Cheney's Version of Iraq Accomplishment Tainted

Cheney's Mission Accomplished
By Juan Cole / March 17, 2009

Dick Cheney: "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...."

What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

* An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

* It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

* Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

* In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

* Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.



* Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.

* $32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

* Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

* The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.

* The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.

Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.

Source / Informed Comment

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US Iraqi Refugee Program: Not Exactly Successful

Tarek Darwish kisses his wife Nahida Mahmoud goodbye outside the family's apartment. For for Iraqi attorney Tarek Darwish, his wife Nahida Mahmoud and their 5 children, the hope of obtaining the "American Dream" was quickly fleeting in the five months they have lived in Murray under refugee status. Photo: Leah Hogsten/ The Salt Lake Tribune.
Iraqi refugees returning to danger zone to escape poverty in Utah
By Julia Lyon / February 28, 2009

Frustration » "We're human beings there. … Here we are mice."

Murray, UT -- Six months ago, Tarek Darwish and his family arrived in Utah as refugees craving a new and better life. Last week, his family wept and kissed his hand in farewell as the former lawyer, disillusioned, left to return to Iraq.

Life in Utah has been a list of disappointments. His family of seven lives in a two-bedroom apartment. None of the adults have jobs. His wife needs glasses and dental work but has been told Utah's Medicaid won't cover them.

He feels betrayed by the United Nations' promises and the scant help offered by the American resettlement system. He hopes his family will follow when school is out.

"If you have a drop of brain, don't leave Iraq," he said through an interpreter.

After the truck taking him to the airport drove away, his wife of 38 years released a small cry.

As human rights organizations call for aid and resettlement for millions of Iraqi refugees, some who are exasperated by America's refugee system are going home or attempting to return to other countries in the Middle East. They feel abandoned by federal policies that offer limited and brief financial support and leave many refugees living in poverty.

Refugees planning to leave acknowledge they may be less safe in Iraq, but believe they will be better able to afford food, pay rent and receive medical care.

Educated Iraqis eager to re-establish their middle-class lifestyle are making flaws in the U.S. resettlement system more apparent, while the troubled economy is compounding them, critics charge.

"They're brought out of one crisis into another," said Bob Carey, the chairman of Refugee Council USA, a coalition of refugee advocacy groups. "It's not the type of welcome the U.S. refugee program was envisioned to provide."

From the U.S. State Department to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is not recommending large-scale return, officials say they have heard the stories of Iraqis returning but believe it to be more a trickle than a flood. The number is not tracked.

About a dozen Utah Iraqis have left or are on the verge of leaving for Iraq or other Middle Eastern countries. For some, Utah's Muslim community has collected donations for plane tickets.

An Iraqi family with seven children living in Utah returned to Iraq a few weeks ago. Another Iraqi single mother is planning to leave for Syria soon. "We feel like we're human beings there," said Mohammed Abd, an Iraqi refugee whose family briefly considered leaving Utah. "We feel like here we are mice."

'We are the victims.' When Darwish's 25-year-old daughter, Nada, arrived in Utah ahead of the family last August, she was shown to a bare room without a bed -- a sign of the strain on agencies that contract to aid new arrivals with few federal dollars and a small staff.

Thirty years after America began welcoming the world's refugees, the world has changed but resettlement has not adequately evolved, critics say. Adjusted for inflation, the aid to refugees is less than the amount provided to Southeast Asian refugees decades ago.

Hoping for reform, the Refugee Council USA and other organizations are requesting a review of the system by President Barack Obama and the federal agencies that administer it.

Today, the government allots $850 per refugee to set up households, but the agencies take up to half for administrative costs and the remainder can disappear in a family's first month. Depending on a refugee's family size or employment, additional cash assistance may be available for a few more months. Refugees are also eligible for the benefits that all poor Americans can receive such as food stamps.

The U.S. has a special obligation to some Iraqi refugees, Carey believes -- those who had to flee their country due to their work and connection to the U.S. military. Such assistance to the U.S. added to advocates' frustration over delays in bringing Iraqis here.

When Iraqis finally arrive, their expectations are often high. Many were part of their country's intellectual and professional elite. Their potential contributions to the U.S. are now at risk of being lost, Carey said, as they languish in poverty.

Some Iraqis agree they should be treated differently in light of their sacrifices and suffering during the war.

"We are the victims of the 'Iraqi Freedom,' " said Darwish's wife, Nahida Mahmoud, 53, through an interpreter, referring to the slogan for the conflict in Iraq. "We have zero hope, but we are hoping to change the future for others."

Despite the problems with America's system, advocates and refugees say Iraqis in need of a safe haven should continue to be brought to the U.S.

"Resettlement is not a tourist ticket to the U.S.," said Kristele Younes, senior advocate at Refugees International. "It's a tool to provide protection to those who are the most vulnerable."

'I expect better.' In Iraq, one of Darwish's daughters was murdered, shot in the back while her toddler was nearby. She and Nada Shammar, the sister who first arrived in the U.S., did security work with the American military, helping to make their family a target. Anonymous calls and letters demanded $20,000 and threatened rocket attacks. Their five-bedroom home was sprayed with bullets .

The family first fled to Syria, where the United Nations provided generous food and supplies and they could sometimes sell what they didn't need. Their health care was essentially free.

In contrast, life in Utah has been harsh. "I don't expect the same lifestyle I had before, but I expect better than this," said Mahmoud.

Back home in Diala, an area in Iraq known for its oranges, 70-year-old Darwish plans to live with his daughters and to rent properties he owns to earn income.

But he is also leaving because diabetes and strokes have ransacked his body. The family hoped his health would improve in America. But now, were he to die here, they would have to pay thousands to return his body home.

With his departure, the family loses his monthly $674 Social Security payment. And the cash assistance they receive as refugees ends soon. Their rent is $720 a month.

If their situation doesn't improve, Mahmoud said, the family will have no choice but to go back to Iraq. They will need donations to buy plane tickets.

Some refugees and their supporters predict the number of Iraqis leaving will grow in the months ahead. Arkan Alnawafleh, who paid for Darwish's return trip, believes the U.S. government needs to take greater responsibility for refugees, if it chooses to bring them to America.

Darwish is "willing to risk his life and go back to Iraq where hundreds of people die every day rather than live here," said Alnawafleh, who was born in Jordan but is now a U.S. citizen. "I still believe American people have big hearts. They care, but the government doesn't."

Not everyone in Darwish's family is eager to go. His 17-year-old son, Husham Shammar, would like to stay and finish high school, attend college and become a doctor. But older sister Nada Shammar has been looking for a job since she arrived in August and wants to go back to the Middle East.

In Utah, their father dreamed of home. At the foot of his narrow bed sat a thrift store painting of a beach at twilight. Looking at the picture reminds him of relaxing in his backyard in Iraq among his orange and lime trees. The air was sweet.

"I can't watch my kids suffer," he said, lying in his bed the night before he left Utah, his face occasionally contracting in grief. "I don't want to be the extra weight."

Source / Salt Lake Tribune

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Iraqi Medicine: Bad and Getting Worse

Here is an example of that wonder of American generosity: "bringing democracy to the Middle East." If only George could've left well enough alone. And his successor is proving to be equally incompetent.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Dr. Thana Hekmaytar. Photo: Dahr Jamail.
Iraqi Doctors in Hiding Treat as They Can
By Dahr Jamail / February 21, 2009

BAGHDAD - Seventy percent of Iraq's doctors are reported to have fled the war-torn country in the face of death threats and kidnappings. Those who remain live in fear, often in conditions close to house arrest.

"I was threatened I would be killed because I was working for the Iraqi government at the Medical City," Dr. Thana Hekmaytar told IPS. Baghdad Medical City is the largest medical complex in the country.

Dr. Hekmaytar, a head and neck surgeon, has now been practising at the Saint Raphael Hospital in Baghdad for the last five years.

It is difficult now both as woman and as doctor, she says. Most women are now living in repressive conditions because the government is less secular. And that is besides the chaotic conditions around Iraq.

"It is particularly difficult for female doctors," Dr. Hekmaytar says. "Large groups in Iraq only want us to stay at home, and certainly not be professionals."

"We've had doctors kidnapped, and so many others have fled," said Khaleb, a senior manager at the hospital who requested that his last name not be used. He named several doctors who had been kidnapped. This IPS correspondent, he said, was the first media person allowed into the hospital since the U.S. invasion of March 2003.

Doctors and other professionals become targets for kidnapping since they earn more money than most, and so fetch higher ransom.

"I've had to ask for security to protect the hospital," Khaleb said. "After this, I went to Amman and convinced many of our doctors there to return. They did, but now they live in the hospital and never go outside. This has been the case since 2005. Every two months they leave to go visit their families in Jordan."

Saint Raphael is a 35-bed hospital, but sees more than a thousand patients daily, says Khaleb. "Of our specialist doctors, ten live here full time. In addition, we have three younger doctors living here full time."

Large concrete blocks restrict entry to the street leading up to the hospital. Iraqi army personnel guard the front door. Everyone entering the hospital is searched.

The hospital is located in the Karrada area of Baghdad, just across the Tigris river from the Green Zone. The neighbourhood is relatively safe by Baghdad standards, although attacks and car bombings still take place.

The hospital is on a side street close to several apartment buildings and private homes. Unlike most government hospitals it is clean and well stocked.

Dr. Hekmaytar is one of the doctors Khaleb persuaded to return to Baghdad. "Of course nobody likes to leave her home country, I was so sad," she said. "I am grateful to be back, but wish it wasn't under these difficult circumstances."

Sitting with several doctors outside an operating room, she told IPS that death threats have never gone away.

"This is common here even now, but was especially so during 2004," she said, as other doctors nodded in agreement. "Now I live and work in the hospital, and never leave."

Dr. Hekmaytar, a Christian, received death threats twice. One came by way of a note in an envelope telling her to convert to Islam, or else. The second time she received a note in an envelope instructing her to where hijab. The note was enclosed with a bullet.

Dr. Shakir Mahmood Al-Robaie, an anaesthetist, too lives on the premises of the hospital where he works. "I both live and work here because I was threatened," he told IPS. "My family is in Jordan."

The doctor said his family received an envelope containing just a single bullet. After this, he moved his family to Jordan, and then returned to Iraq to get an income for himself and his family.

"Common? These threats are not just common," said Dr. Jafir Hasily, a surgeon sitting across from Dr. Hekhaytar. "They are routine. This happens all the time."

The Iraqi government estimates there were 36,000 doctors and medical personnel in Iraq when the U.S. invasion was launched in March 2003. Most escaped to neighbouring Arab countries, especially Jordan and Syria.

In early 2008, the Iraqi Health Ministry said that 628 medical personnel have been killed since 2003. Many believe the real figure is far higher, and that there is additionally a very large number of doctors who have been kidnapped and tortured.

In the absence of the doctors who left, particularly of senior doctors, the medical system is on the brink of collapse. It is short not just of doctors but also of other qualified staff, equipment and drugs. Patients are often forced to buy their own medicines on the black market.

Source / IPS News

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Progress in Iraq: 65 % Unemployment

Layla Anwar's piece reminds of the tragic toll of the American folly in Iraq over two decades. Millions have been affected and we go on blithely ignoring the mass of this tragedy. Think about 65% unemployment rate; think about half a million kids dead because of the American sanctions through the 1990s; think about 5 million people perhaps permanently displaced from Iraq by our arrogant claim to bring democracy to the Middle East. When is Barack Obama going to start talking about war reparations? When will he well and truly remove the American presence from the Middle East? When will justice be served?

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Behind Walls of Silence...
By Layla Anwar / February 8, 2009

A very sporadic Internet access has been a blessing...it has freed me to pursue other things - away from politics, accursed and damned politics...it has freed me to read, and read and read, watch tons of TV and renew my ties with the real world of the living...as opposed to the dead.

The dead end of politics.

Yet, still, some things keep screaming in your face, and no amount of eyes shutting or plugging cotton wool in your ears, will do.

A profound cry, a deep injustice that refuses to go away, that refuses to sit still, that refuses to be silenced. No amount of books, reading or any mundane activity will quell.

That profound cry, that deep injustice was and remains Iraq.

I am sure you are expecting me to comment on the new democracy, the sham democracy, the fraudulent democracy...

I have a lot to say, essential things to say, that your democracy will not uncover, because your democracy is based on a lie, on a deceptive lie that has cost over a million souls...the democracy of the dead.

They spoke to me...they said they will file a complaint to the supervising electoral bodies because they did not get to cast their votes. They did not get to dip their fingers in a purple ink and plaster a fake smile to the cameras...They said the only thing purple they remember is their purple black corpses murdered by Democracy...

I did not want to reply, I just nodded my head and hoped to fall asleep, hoped that they will fall asleep for good, once and for all...but they kept me awake and gripped my hand with firmness and ordered me to write, to write in the dead end of politics...in the dead end of Arab politics, in the dead end of Western politics...in the dead end of World politics, in the dead end.

So here I am again, the faithful daughter of this land, of this earth...that screams to me at night when all is dead silent...

Who silenced the outrage ? Was there an outrage to start with ?

I am glad that the outrage against the holocaust in Gaza has not ceased. Tons of articles, tons of songs, tons of poems, tons of theatrical plays, tons of speeches, tons and tons...That is very good, very promising. It should continue.

But where is your outrage at over 1 million Iraqis killed by Democracy ?

Where is your outrage at the 5 million refugees who refuse to return to the state of Democracy ?

Where is your outrage at the use of phosphorus bombs, napalm, DU, for well over 15 years against an innocent people ?

Where is your outrage at 13 years of a barbarian embargo that is still not lifted ?

Ban Ki Moon was in Baghdad discussing with the puppet Talabani, what measures he will take to lift the sanctions. Still ? Yes still...

Where is your outrage at the 500’000 Iraqi kids killed by the sanctions ?

Where is your outrage at the demolished homes, buildings, institutions, infrastructure and when Iraqis are still living in tents in their own country and others in slums outside their country ?

Where is your outrage when billion of dollars have been stolen from Iraq and no one is there to prosecute ?

Where is your outrage when militias, the same militias that form the current government who wants to pass itself as non - sectarian, tortured and murdered people and dumped them in mass graves ?

Did you know that some of the Sahwa men in the Anbar province have a new job ? They are fishermen today. Do you know what they fish until this very day ? Corpses from the Diyala river. Not one corpse, not two, but so far over 300 corpses, some of which were women, one in her wedding dress, have been fished from the Tigris and the Euphrates...the rivers of Democracy.

Did you know that still over 65 % of Iraqis are unemployed ?

Did you know that only 10’000 medical doctors are left in Iraq , the rest have been killed or in exile ?

Did you know that 99% of women in Iraq are veiled today, including little girls below the age of 5 ?

Did you know that the medical sector is in total shambles, that there is still no electricity, that the educational system is a total wasteland, that there are no professors left, that there are no teachers left, that that there are no services provided for the average Iraqi ?

Did you know that we still have 5 million orphaned kids and over 3 million widows ?

No they did not disappear with “democracy”

Did you know...did you know ?

Yes you knew...you knew...but you kept silent and you have remained silent.

Where is the same outrage that you showed for Lebanon and Gaza ? Where the fuck is it ?

I suppose we are not as plastically sexy of a cause as the Lebanese nor as romantically nostalgic as that of the Palestinians...

You knew, and you know and you are hiding behind walls of silence. All of you. Iraqis included.

Hiding behind the finger dipped in purple ink, hiding behind the chador of the politically correct, hiding behind the thick curtains of hypocrisy, hiding behind the walls of lies, hiding behind the mass graves of the innocent ones, hiding behind theories and analysis, hiding behind propaganda, hiding behind illusions of change...hiding.

Hiding the corpses that float, hiding the woman in her wedding dress mutilated beyond recognition because she was an Arab and a Sunni, hiding the orphans, hiding the refugees, hiding the torture marks, hiding...

A conspiracy of Silence.

A conspiracy of Silence in the dead end of politics.

Damn them all, the living and the dead. They keep nudging at me, screaming in my face, in the obscurity of the night.

Leave me alone and stop tugging at me with your skeletons.

But their voices are much stronger than mine, their cries much higher than mine and their loud silence much greater than mine...

So here I am again, in between the sporadic access, in between the virtual and the real, in between the living and the dead...Sitting behind a wall, that of your Silence.

Source / An Arab Woman Blues

The Rag Blog

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The Missing Billions from Iraq Reconstruction: A Story That Won't Go Away

The missing billions - the story that no one ever really cared to follow to its conclusion. Why? I could probably make a pretty fair case that it's a function of racism - most of the money wasn't American taxpayer cash; it was Iraqi money that was held in the Federal Reserve after the US decided that Saddam was a despot and garnisheed everything possible from the Iraqi government. When it is only money from the Iraqi people, who fuckin' cares, eh?

Blood Money, Christian Miller's book about this was published in August 2006, and everyone ignored it. The Vanity Fair article below made the airwaves in October 2007. And everyone ignored it. And it is clear that the rudiments of the blatant theft were already known as early as 2004 (if not earlier). What conceivable reason would anyone have for believing that this new investigation will somehow make a difference? Fools errands.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Dale C. Stoffel, an American contractor in Iraq, described cash delivered in pizza boxes and payoffs dropped in paper sacks. Photo: courtesy David Stoffel.
Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers
By James Glanz, C.J. Chivers and William K. Rashbaum / February 14, 2009

Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.

Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.

It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.

Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.

Mr. Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Mr. Stoffel’s lawyer, John H. Quinn Jr. There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption.

Prosecutors have won 35 convictions on cases related to reconstruction in Iraq, yet most of them involved private contractors or midlevel officials. The current inquiry is aiming at higher-level officials, according to investigators involved in the case, and is also trying to determine if there are connections between those officials and figures in the other cases. Although Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle were military officers, they worked in a civilian contracting office.

“These long-running investigations continue to mature and expand, embracing a wider array of potential suspects,” a federal investigator said.

The reconstruction effort, intended to improve services and convince Iraqis of American good will, largely managed to do neither. The wider investigation raises the question of whether American corruption was a primary factor in damaging an effort whose failures have been ascribed to poor planning and unforeseen violence.

The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.

“You had no oversight, chaos and breathtaking sums of money,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who helped create the Wartime Contracting Commission, an oversight board. “And over all of that was the notion that failure was O.K. It doesn’t get any better for criminals than that set of circumstances.”

In one case of graft from that period, Maj. John L. Cockerham of the Army pleaded guilty to accepting nearly $10 million in bribes as a contracting officer for the Iraq war and other military efforts from 2004 to 2007, when he was arrested. Major Cockerham’s wife has also pleaded guilty, as have several other contracting officers.

In Major Cockerham’s private notebooks, Colonel Bell is identified as a possible recipient of an enormous bribe as recently as 2006, the two senior federal officials said. It is unclear whether the bribe was actually offered or paid.

When asked if Major Cockerham had ever offered him a bribe, Colonel Bell said in a telephone interview, “I think we’ll end the discussion,” but stayed on the line. Colonel Bell’s response was equally terse when asked if he thought that Colonel Hirtle had carried out his duties properly: “No discussion on that at this time.”

The current focus on Colonel Bell is revealed in federal court papers filed in Georgia, where he has a residence and is trying to quash a subpoena of his bank records by the Special Inspector General. The papers, dated Jan. 27, indicate that Colonel Bell’s records were sought in connection with an investigation of bribery, kickbacks and fraud.

Colonel Bell said that he sought to quash the subpoena not because he had anything to hide, but because the document contained inaccuracies. “If they clean it up, I won’t have a problem,” he said, suggesting that he would cooperate. He declined to detail the inaccuracies, although his handwritten notations on the court papers indicated that the home address and the bank account number on the subpoena were incorrect.

Asked whether he knew why the records had been subpoenaed, he said, “That is not for me to direct what they’re going to do.”

Another case that has raised investigators’ suspicions about top contracting officials involves a company, variously known as American Logistics Services and Lee Dynamics International, that repeatedly won construction contracts for millions of dollars despite a dismal track record.

One contracting official committed suicide in 2006 a day after admitting to investigators that she had taken $225,000 in bribes to rig bids in favor of the company. At least two other former contracting officials in Iraq have admitted to taking bribes in the case and are cooperating with investigators. It is unknown what information they may have provided on Colonel Hirtle, a high-ranking contracting official in Baghdad. But Colonel Hirtle signed the company’s first major contract in Iraq in May 2004, a roughly $10 million deal to build arms warehouses for the fledgling Iraqi security forces, according to a copy of the contract and federal officials. The warehouses went largely unbuilt. Investigators said the inquiry into the Lee case was continuing.

“I can’t talk to any media right now, because I don’t know anything about this and I’ve got to do some research on it,” Colonel Hirtle said when reached by phone in California, before abruptly hanging up.

The next day, Colonel Hirtle said he had been “taken aback” by questions about an investigation involving himself. “I try to keep things as transparent and aboveboard as I can,” he said, referring questions to an Air Force public affairs office.

The Air Force referred questions to the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command, where a spokesman, Christopher Grey, said the command “does not discuss or confirm the names of persons who may or may not be under investigation.”

An extraordinary element of the current investigation is a voice from beyond the grave: that of Mr. Stoffel, who died with a British associate, Joseph J. Wemple, in a burst of automatic gunfire on a dangerous highway north of Baghdad in December 2004 as he returned from a business meeting at a nearby military base.

A previously unknown Iraqi group claimed responsibility for the killings, which remain unsolved. The men may simply have been unlucky enough to be engulfed in the violence that was then just beginning to grip the country.

On May 20, 2004, a little more than a week after Colonel Hirtle signed the Lee company’s warehouse contract, Mr. Stoffel was granted limited immunity by the Special Inspector General for what amounted to a whistle-blower’s complaint. Copies of the immunity document were obtained from two former business associates of Mr. Stoffel.

The picture of corruption Mr. Stoffel painted, including the clandestine delivery of bribes, was “like a classic New York scenario,” said a former business associate.

“Fifty thousand dollars delivered in pizza boxes to secure contracts,” said the former associate, a consultant in the arms business with whom Mr. Stoffel sometimes worked in the former Eastern bloc. “Of course, it just looked like a pizza delivery.”

It was Mr. Stoffel’s experience with Eastern bloc weaponry that helped him win a contract to refurbish Iraq’s Soviet-era tanks as part of a program to rebuild Iraq’s armed forces. Mr. Stoffel’s company remains locked in a dispute over payments it says are owed by the Iraqi government.

His problems with American officials were what led him to make the accusations of corruption. Mr. Stoffel, the associate said, “was trying to do this as quietly as possible, to blow the whistle.”

“He knew enough about what was going on, and he was getting pretty frustrated.”

Source / New York Times


And lest we forget, this article from Vanity Fair, October 2007:

Illustration by John Blackford. By Peter van Agtmael/Polaris (desert), Konstantin Inozemtsev/Alamy (money).
Billions over Baghdad
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele / October 2007

Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency — much of it belonging to the Iraqi people — was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.

Hidden in plain sight, 10 miles west of Manhattan, amid a suburban community of middle-class homes and small businesses, stands a fortress-like building shielded by big trees and lush plantings behind an iron fence. The steel-gray structure, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is all but invisible to the thousands of commuters who whiz by every day on Route 17. Even if they noticed it, they would scarcely guess that it is the largest repository of American currency in the world.

Officially, 100 Orchard Street is referred to by the acronym eroc, for the East Rutherford Operations Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The brains of the New York Fed may lie in Manhattan, but xeroc is the beating heart of its operations—a secretive, heavily guarded compound where the bank processes checks, makes wire transfers, and receives and ships out its most precious commodity: new and used paper money.

Pallets of American currency arriving in Baghdad.

On Tuesday, June 22, 2004, a tractor-trailer truck turned off Route 17 onto Orchard Street, stopped at a guard station for clearance, and then entered the eroc compound. What happened next would have been the stuff of routine—procedures followed countless times. Inside an immense three-story cavern known as the currency vault, the truck's next cargo was made ready for shipment. With storage space to rival a Wal-Mart's, the currency vault can reportedly hold upwards of $60 billion in cash. Human beings don't perform many functions inside the vault, and few are allowed in; a robotic system, immune to human temptation, handles everything. On that Tuesday in June the machines were especially busy. Though accustomed to receiving and shipping large quantities of cash, the vault had never before processed a single order of this magnitude: $2.4 billion in $100 bills.

Under the watchful eye of bank employees in a glass-enclosed control room, and under the even steadier gaze of a video surveillance system, pallets of shrink-wrapped bills were lifted out of currency bays by unmanned "storage and retrieval vehicles" and loaded onto conveyors that transported the 24 million bills, sorted into "bricks," to the waiting trailer. No human being would have touched this cargo, which is how the Fed wants it: the bank aims to "minimize the handling of currency by eroc employees and create an audit trail of all currency movement from initial receipt through final disposition."

Forty pallets of cash, weighing 30 tons, were loaded that day. The tractor-trailer turned back onto Route 17 and after three miles merged onto a southbound lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, looking like any other big rig on a busy highway. Hours later the truck arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C. There the seals on the truck were broken, and the cash was off-loaded and counted by Treasury Department personnel. The money was transferred to a C-130 transport plane. The next day, it arrived in Baghdad.

That transfer of cash to Iraq was the largest one-day shipment of currency in the history of the New York Fed. It was not, however, the first such shipment of cash to Iraq. Beginning soon after the invasion and continuing for more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency was airlifted to Baghdad, ostensibly as a stopgap measure to help run the Iraqi government and pay for basic services until a new Iraqi currency could be put into people's hands. In effect, the entire nation of Iraq needed walking-around money, and Washington mobilized to provide it.

What Washington did not do was mobilize to keep track of it. By all accounts, the New York Fed and the Treasury Department exercised strict surveillance and control over all of this money while it was on American soil. But after the money was delivered to Iraq, oversight and control evaporated. Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for. A portion of that money may have been spent wisely and honestly; much of it probably wasn't. Some of it was stolen.

Once the money arrived in Iraq it entered a free-for-all environment where virtually anyone with fingers could take some of it. Moreover, the company that was hired to keep tabs on the outflow of money existed mainly on paper. Based in a private home in San Diego, it was a shell corporation with no certified public accountants. Its address of record is a post-office box in the Bahamas, where it is legally incorporated. That post-office box has been associated with shadowy offshore activities.

Coalition of the Billing

The first shipment of cash to Iraq took place on April 11, 2003—it consisted of $20 million in $1, $5, and $10 bills. It was arranged in small bills on the theory that these could quickly be circulated into the Iraqi economy "to prevent a monetary and financial collapse," as one former Treasury official put it. Those were the days when American officials worried that the gravest threat facing Iraq might be low-grade civilian unrest in Baghdad. They didn't have a clue as to the power of the insurgency that was to come. The initial $20 million came exclusively from Iraqi assets that had been frozen in U.S. banks as long ago as the Gulf War, in 1990. Subsequent airlifts of cash also included billions from Iraqi oil revenues controlled by the United Nations. After the creation of the Development Fund for Iraq (D.F.I.)—a kind of holding pit of money to be spent for "purposes benefitting the people of Iraq"—the U.N. turned over control of Iraq's oil billions to the United States.

When the U.S. military delivered the cash to Baghdad, the money passed into the hands of an entirely new set of players—the staff of the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. To many Americans, the initials C.P.A. would soon be as familiar as those of long-established government agencies such as D.O.D. or hud. But the C.P.A. was anything but a conventional agency. And, as events would show, its initials would have nothing in common with "certified public accountant." The C.P.A. had been hastily created to serve as the interim government of Iraq, but its legality and paternity were murky from the start. The Authority was in effect established by edict outside the traditional framework of American government. Not subject to the usual restrictions and oversight of most agencies, the C.P.A. during the 14 months of its existence would become a sump for American and Iraqi money as it disappeared into the hands of Iraqi ministries and American contractors. The Coalition of the Willing, as one commentator observed, had turned into the Coalition of the Billing.

The first mention of the C.P.A. came on April 16, 2003, in a so-called freedom message to the Iraqi people by General Tommy R. Franks, commander of the coalition forces. A week after mobs ransacked Iraq's National Museum of its treasures, unchallenged by American troops, General Franks arrived in Baghdad for a six-hour whirlwind tour. He met with his commanders in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, held a video conference with President Bush, and then quickly flew off. "Our stay in Iraq will be temporary," General Franks wrote, "no longer than it takes to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and to establish stability and help Iraqis form a functioning government that respects the rule of law." With that in mind, General Franks wrote that he created the Coalition Provisional Authority "to exercise powers of government temporarily, and as necessary, especially to provide security, to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and to eliminate weapons of mass destruction." Three weeks later, on May 8, 2003, the U.S. and British ambassadors to the United Nations sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council, effectively delivering the C.P.A. to the United Nations as a fait accompli.

Read the rest of this remarkably informative article here. / Vanity Fair

See also, A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff, Patrick Cockburn's expose dated today of this issue of the missing billions.

Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog

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