Iraq: not civil war, occupation
Sami Ramadani, 7 December 2006, Open Democracy
The Iraq Study Group has still not understood what people in Iraq well know, says Sami Ramadani: that it is the United States military occupation of Iraq itself that is fuelling the violence there.
Excerpt: ‘They’ refers to the Iraq Study Group:
They do not even dare to go as far as the chief-of-staff of the British army, Richard Dannatt, and suggest that the occupation forces, which “kicked the door in”, are “exasperating” the situation and creating more violence. They do not tell us about some of the disturbing facts on the ground.
They do not tell us about the “Salvador option” and the presence in Iraq of US death-squads, trained at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and Israel, nor will they spill the beans (as US generals have started to do).
They do not tell us about the secret militias trained and financed by the US, partly uncovered by the Wall Street Journal (in February 2005), but in any case common knowledge in Iraq.
They do not tell us why the occupying power should secretly smuggle 200,000 Kalashnikovs and tons of explosives into Iraq from Bosnia within one year (2004-05); nor to whom these weapons were supplied.
They do not tell us about the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on covert political operations and the backing of proxy political forces.
They do not tell us about continuing work on building the biggest US embassy in the world in Baghdad’s Green Zone embassy (fortress), about the roughly fourteen permanent military bases (including four massive ones) being constructed.
They do not tell us about the post-Abu Ghraib contracting-out of most of the torture to the Iraqi state, the backing of Iraqi state-sponsored violence against civilians.
They do not tell us – last but very from least – about the silent killers of Iraqi people.
Some Iraqi doctors think that more people are dying prematurely because of other occupation-related factors than from the violence itself. More than 654,000 Iraqis are estimated (by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) to have been killed since the US-led invasion. But the silent killers are claiming lives almost unnoticed.
The country’s infrastructure has all but been destroyed; people are exposed to the health danger of depleted uranium from US and British military ordnance; the health service is near collapse and hospitals have been reduced to impotence in the face of mounting injuries and disease, particularly water-born diseases affecting children. The electricity shortage is affecting the sewage plants, which are pumping raw sewage into the rivers.
About 300 of the country’s leading academics and scientists have been assassinated and its educational system is approaching collapse. How much more should the Iraqi people be subjected to for Bush and Blair to have their chosen puppets firmly installed in Baghdad?
What the Iraq Study Group does say:
Oil for Sale: Why the Iraq Study Group is Calling for the Privatization of Iraq’s Oil Industry
Among its recommendations, the Iraq Study Group advised that Iraq privatize its oil industry and to open it up to international companies. Author and activist Antonia Juhasz writes “Put simply, the oil companies are trying to get what they were denied before the war or at anytime in modern Iraqi history: access to Iraq’s oil under the ground.”
AMY GOODMAN: The Iraq Study Group also recommended for Iraq to privatize its oil industry and to open it up to international companies. The author and activist, Antonia Juhasz, has been closely watching this aspect of the Iraq reconstruction process. She’s author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Antonia Juhasz, thanks for joining us in studio in San Francisco. Your response to the report, not talked about almost at all, the issue of privatization?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah, absolutely. And good morning, Amy. It’s a completely radical proposal made straightforward in the Iraq Study Group report that the Iraqi national oil industry should be reorganized as a commercial enterprise. The proposal also says that, as you say, Iraq’s oil should be opened up to private foreign energy and companies. Also, another radical proposal: that all of Iraq’s oil revenues should be centralized in the central government. And the report calls for a US advisor to ensure that a new national oil law is passed in Iraq to make all of this possible and that the constitution of Iraq is amended to ensure that the central government gains control of Iraq’s oil revenues.
All told, the report calls for privatization of Iraq’s oil, turning it over to private foreign corporate hands, putting all of the oil in the hands of the central government, and essentially, I would argue, extending the war in Iraq to ensure that US oil companies get what the Bush administration went in there for: control and greater access to Iraq’s oil. [More]