Iraq: seven views

1. From the Washington Post: A Tale of Two Wars: In Baghdad, I Hear Echoes of Saigon in '67 -- by Lewis M. Simons

I went to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press. It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq.

In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we'll cut out a vicious tumor metastasizing through the body of Western democracy. Today's cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we're winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they're doing it now.

My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won. What would "winning" in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that's free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers' expense? Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I'm afraid there's no good way to get out.

Americans didn't know what "winning" meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn't understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist "world domination," and the "domino theory" and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence. They didn't want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn't want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out.

Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth -- that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we're making it into one today -- has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.

The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon's daily "5 o'clock follies" -- as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps -- has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson's vision of "light at the end of the tunnel" has evolved into Dick Cheney's embarrassing "last throes." Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war's end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed "shock and awe." Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?

This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.

What we failed to understand in Vietnam -- that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes -- we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq.

I've returned repeatedly to Vietnam since the war. About 20 miles northwest of Saigon, in Cu Chi, I had one of the more harrowing experiences of my reporting career, crawling for an hour through black, airless, grave-like tunnels that spider-web for well over 100 miles beneath the jungle floor. (This was before the Tourism Ministry enlarged some of the passages, to accommodate super-size Western travelers.) Here, entire armies and civilian communities had lived and worked and plotted attacks, through not just the American war but the earlier war against the French. With dirt dropping into my sweat-stinging eyes, my imagination raced: What must it have been like with tanks and bombers rumbling overhead? When I stumbled out, heart pounding, I told my guide that finally I understood why his side had won.

Today, Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists are our Viet Cong. We can bring 'em on, smoke 'em out and hunt 'em down from now until doomsday, but the line of committed volunteers seems only to grow longer. The world -- not just the Middle East, but South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America -- is being populated with more and more alienated and bitter young Muslims who feel that they have nothing to lose. The ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq and across the Middle East doesn't intimidate them; it just stokes their fury.

That there is no military solution to this conundrum is clearly illustrated by a ride I took on my first day in Baghdad. The small plane I flew on from Amman, Jordan, corkscrewed into Baghdad airport early one afternoon. The South African pilot warned the 20 passengers that the stomach-heaving descent might be uncomfortable, but that it was necessary in order to avoid any heat-seeking missiles. The last time I'd made such a landing was in April 1975, on a flight into Phnom Penh as a correspondent for The Washington Post. Two weeks later, Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge.

I was bound this time for the relative security of the walled-in Green Zone, just five miles from the airport. For security reasons, we could not leave immediately. I was assigned one of two dozen canvas cots in a large tent. It was air-conditioned. (This -- along with Internet availability, 30-minute-guaranteed to-your-tent-door Pizza Hut delivery, Cuban cigars at the PX, fresh meals and regularly sanitized portable toilets -- is one of the gains the U.S. military has achieved since Vietnam.) We weren't told our departure time. At 3 a.m. a chipper sergeant with a bullhorn voice flicked on the tent lights and told us to get up and put on body armor and helmets. Three Rhino Runner buses, painted desert-tan and heavily steel-plated, were lined up and 90 of us, mostly GIs and civilian contractors, boarded. Three armed Humvees preceded us; three followed. Overhead clattered three Blackhawk helicopters.

Again I was reminded of Vietnam, where the GIs used to say that the night belonged to the VC. In Iraq, it's the roads -- where IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, have replaced punji sticks as the guerrilla weapon of choice. If, 2 1/2 years in, you don't control the only road linking your military airport to your headquarters, you don't control much of anything.

The next day, a U.S. Marine Corps brigadier general told a televised news conference that the escalating rate of car bombings in the capital and around the country was a sure sign of the enemy's "final desperation." (Two weeks later, Cheney issued his tweaked version.) The troops on the ground in Iraq, much like the grunts in Vietnam, know better. Yet by and large they're loyal, and most told me that they believe in the mission -- at least until they're ordered back for their second or third tours. These "stop loss" soldiers are most bitter about their perception that the administration's effort to wage the war on the cheap applies only to them, while private contractors grow rich.

On the green plastic wall of a portable toilet at Baghdad military airport, I read the following graffiti, scrawled by a civilian contract employee: "14 months. $200,000. I'm out of here. [Expletive] you Iraq." Beneath it was a response from the ranks: "12 months. $20,000. What the [expletive] is going on here?" Speaking of money, the administration has never come clean about the massive debt it's piling up for us and our descendants. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates that the Vietnam War cost the United States $600 billion in today's dollars. Iraq, according to the center, is costing between $5 billion and $8 billion a month -- $218 billion to date. That would mean $700 billion if the guns fall silent six years from now, a modest timetable according to numerous military analysts. Other estimates predict an eventual bottom line of over $1 trillion.

So, do we cut our losses -- human and financial -- and leave? If so, when? If not, how long do we stay? If we stay, the insurgency continues; if we go, it most likely expands into an all-out civil war, the fragmenting of Iraq and the intervention of its neighbors, Iran, Turkey and Syria, followed by the collapse of promised democracy in the Middle East: a kind of reverse domino theory. What likely will happen in the short term, it's beginning to appear, will be an attempt to spin a more positive illusion: President Bush will order several thousand troops sent home in time for the 2006 midterm election campaign. He will claim that the Iraqis are taking charge of their own security (see "Vietnamization") and leave the mess to his successor.

Then what? If the bulk of the 130,000 U.S. troops are kept in Iraq for the rump of the Bush presidency and into the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic, the insurgency will go on.

The tax dollars we'll be spending on that military presence might be better spent on helping educate new generations of Iraqis, and millions of other young Muslims around the world, on the basics of running a country.They need it: "Democracy is wonderful," exclaimed a mother of two teenagers whom I met in the southern city of Basra. "It means you're free to do whatever you want." While that may be an understandable interpretation from a people who weren't free to do anything under Saddam Hussein's 35-year dictatorship, surely it's not what Americans are fighting and dying for.

The ultimate lesson of Vietnam -- one that is applicable to Iraq -- has been that once Americans declared victory and returned home, the Vietnamese went through the inevitable, sometimes brutal, shakeout that we had merely delayed. Eventually, the realities of the marketplace and the appeal of capitalism resulted in a nominally communist but vibrant nation. Today, Americans feast on low-cost Vietnamese shrimp and wear inexpensive Vietnamese T-shirts. Two month ago, President Bush welcomed Prime Minister Phan Van Khai to the White House and promised him increased trade and military cooperation.

So, what happens if we don't apply that lesson to our Iraq adventure? One of the most senior diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad told me that what he and his colleagues believed, and what kept them awake at night, was that if the United States is serious about establishing democracy in Iraq, and attempts to do so under current policies, it would take two generations of our soldiers fighting there. That's 40 years.

You may want to pass that along to your grandchildren.

(Lewis Simons, a former foreign correspondent for The Post and for Knight Ridder newspapers, is a contributor to National Geographic.)


2. From the Weekly Standard: A War to Be Proud Of: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied? -- by Christopher Hitchens

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had actually lasted. Whether you chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history" and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an epoch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in another way, and within approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for the suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.

One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.

The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?

I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination with complete credit. There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who couldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. There were leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps because of a bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't face a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even when he annexed a neighbor state that was a full member of the Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.

The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas.

Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one still cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without the feeling that one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected home. I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof.

One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?

THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:

"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.

Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)

There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.

It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.

Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every time an antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse mythology has been permitted to take hold in the present case, where bad news is deemed to be bad news only for regime-change. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism (and the "divide-and-rule" tactics by which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.

At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.

Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who go out on the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The first is contingent: There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So that's easy enough.

The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism. The more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark Danner and Harold Meyerson, like to employ the term "a war of choice." One should have no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .

DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves. But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.
(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.
(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)
(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.
(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.
(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.
(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.
(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

(Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. A recent essay of his appears in the collection A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, newly published by the University of California Press.)


3. FromCommon Dreams by David Michael Green:

George Bush has said we must honor the sacrifice of those who have given their lives in Iraq.

At last we agree on something.

Mr. Bush, of course, is famously unable nowadays to articulate just what honorable cause our soldiers have been killing and dying for, despite the hundreds at Camp Casey demanding of him precisely that.

Perhaps I can be of some service to the president. I'd like to offer him an answer he can give to Cindy Sheehan's simple question.

You see, in a sense, Mr. Bush was right to analogize Iraq to World War II. Just as in that horrific war, Americans soldiers have been sacrificing their lives in Iraq to save the world from the scourge of a ravenous imperialist with the power to destroy millions of lives.

No, I'm not talking about Adolf Hitler. And I'm not talking about Saddam Hussein. The menace to world peace these soldiers are saving us from is none other than their commander-in-chief, George W. Bush.

The political present in America is replete with the strangest and most intense ironies, but surely there is no greater one than this. For the truth is that the greatest service being performed by American soldiers in Iraq is the dismantling of the very evil regime which sent them there in the first place.

Let there be no mistake - ironies and counterintuitions aside - that this is precisely what they are doing. Every day now, and with every additional soldier senselessly blown to eternity, George W. Bush's nightmarish experiment in proto-fascism sinks deeper into the grave to which it so deservedly belongs.

Chickenhawks like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest love to wrap themselves up in the flag and call our troops heroes at every public relations opportunity. Off stage, however, it is probably too much to assume that they even bother to sneer contumeliously at these foolish hoi polloi, these cannon fodder for the sport of kings. A more likely guess is that they don't have the time or concern even for contempt.

But these soldiers are indeed heroes, and not only because they have the courage to grapple with hellish conditions their pampered political leaders could never begin to survive. They are heroes because they are sacrificing to save more of their brothers and sisters from dying for a lie, and they are heroes because they are saving the world from the creation of an American empire.

This is no exaggeration. Empire is precisely what is detailed in the Project for a New American Century playbook. As if one was even necessary. As if the organization's very name didn't scream imperialism from the get-go. These are the same people who brought us the Iraq debacle. The same people who have been agitating for this war for a decade. The same people who were calling for attacking Iraq on September 12, 2001. The same people who were so hungry to do so they left Afghanistan an unfinished mess and Osama bin Laden a free man. The same people who carelessly send other people's kids off to fight their war for American hegemony, but never their own.

The whole rest of the world understands this, of course, and has done so from the beginning. Only shallow and intellectually lazy Americans were ever fooled by the Bush administration's palpably deceitful and ridiculously urgent case for war (oh, and cowardly Congressional Democrats - forgive the redundancy in terms - as well). World opinion always opposed this war, rightly perceiving it as no less a case of naked aggression than Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Even after kicking out the jams to hurl every conceivable carrot and stick at often vulnerable UN member-states, BushCo Inc. could never muster more than three other votes (one being the British poodle) out of fifteen Security Council members to fig-leaf its lust for war.

The reason was obvious. There was no case for war. Saddam had never attacked America. Saddam had never threatened America. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and even had hostile relations with al Qaeda. Saddam was sanctioned and boxed-in, lacking control of most of his own national territory. When he had previously used weapons of mass destruction, it had been under American acquiescence, if not sponsorship and supply. The inspectors were finding no evidence of WMD, and thus had to be yanked off-site urgently, before Bush's casus belli was proven the bogus crap that it transparently was anyhow, for anyone who would look.

And, even disregarding all of that, what made Saddam any more immune from the laws of political physics than anybody else? Had he had WMD, he would have well understood that the repercussions of using such weapons against the US would have been the complete and literal atomization of himself and of Iraq. This is no more or no less than the simple concept of deterrence, the fundamental keystone of American defense policy for half a century. It is the same reason the Soviets - with their stockpile of over 20,000 strategic nuclear warheads - never attacked the US, or vice versa. It is the same reason we don't worry that China or Pakistan might attack us today. Why isn't their very real WMD an urgent problem for US security (when Saddam's non-existent arsenal was)? The answer is deterrence (and lies).

In short, the French were right. And every contemptuous insult ugly Americans angrily flung across the Atlantic was a marker of our shame, not theirs. This war was based on a pack of lies, a fact the Downing Street revelations served only to reaffirm for those who had already been paying attention from the beginning.

And so it is that Americans are not dying meaningless deaths in Iraq today, but are heroes in the truest sense of the word. Their sacrifices make clear to all but those dwindling numbers locked in the deepest state of denial just how callous, cowardly, selfish and dishonest is their president. Their sacrifices are driving George Bush's credibility crisis skyward in equal proportion and rapidity to the free fall of his job approval ratings.

What their sacrifices mean, ultimately and crucially, is that Iranians and Syrians and North Koreans and Cubans and Venezuelans (and Americans) don't have to die in the future, as Iraqis and Americans have died in the past.

Because, above all, the sacrifices of these soldiers mean that Americans will no longer follow this infantile Caligula of the New World off on his dress-up soldier's Fun Adventures in (Other People's) Death and Destruction.

Even Americans - so indolent and insolent, so self-reverential, so clueless about the destructive side of their impact in the world - even Americans have now had enough.

The era of George Bush is over. The emperor has no clothes, and everyone can now see it. America is finally awakening, its head pounding and its stomach churning, from the 9/11-induced credulity binge of the last half decade. The shrillness with which the Limbaughs and the O'Reillys attack the truth-speaking mother of a deceased US serviceman is but a measure of their panicked desperation as they watch the wheels coming off the wagon in every imaginable way, and as they stand helpless to stop it. None of the old bad magic works anymore - not the lies, not the diversions, not the endless repetition of hollow slogans, and not the character assassination of White House 'enemies'. Game over.

So rest in peace, brave and noble American soldiers, so vastly the moral superiors of your political superiors. Odd as it may seem, and inadvertent as the effects may be, you have done humane and necessary work in Iraq, despite the disaster it has become and despite the complete disingenuousness of its premise. You have made the supreme sacrifice for the greatest of imaginable purposes. With each of your lives prematurely ended, you bring closer the end of the Bush presidency, and the end of manic American aggression in the world. With your sacrifice in war, you are making peace, no less than your grandfathers did at Normandy or Guam.

It is sad beyond words that it took your lives to stop this juggernaut of greed and violence, but not nearly as sad as what would now be happening had you not given them.

We humbly and gratefully thank you.


4. SOMEONE just say it for once, along with Noam Chomsky. Why did your boychick Casey die in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan? What "noble cause"? Nothing more or less than "soil and oil," in this euphonymous formulation:

War in Iraq is Really All About Soil and Oil -- by Robert Kimbrough

The Iraqi mission was accomplished in two months. Bush's "noble cause" was to secure oil fields and 14 strategic sites for permanent bases.

This American success was celebrated in Baghdad by the pre-planned "spontaneous" toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue and the seizing of Saddam's palace complex. The only other building occupied "to prevent looting" was the Ministry of Oil.

The ludicrous photo-op aboard the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln appalled those of us who had joined millions in the worldwide call "No Attack on Iraq," but we were so shocked by the banner "Mission Accomplished" and so amused by the awkwardly costumed president-as-pilot - Falstaff would have been jealous of Bush's codpiece - that we did not see the truth of the statement hung out before our eyes.

For once the Bush administration did not lie.

The mission was never about saving America from destruction by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, was never about bringing democracy to the Middle East, was never about winning "the war against terrorists" - it was about oil and empire.

The coupling of our desire for empire and the need for oil beyond domestic sources became apparent only after the extraordinary military and industrial buildup during World War II.
As the war was winding down, President Roosevelt pledged the Saudi family of Arabia our protection in return for a free flow of oil from the Middle East to America.

After the war, Truman decided that the United States should keep substantial forces in Germany and in Japan. (We now have forces in 179 countries.)

The details of the "Plan for America's Future" (empire and oil) began to take shape in the 1970s with the birth of the neocons, who, in 1980, found a political home in the Reagan administration: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al.

Immediately, the United States urged Saddam to attack Iran, starting an eight-year war that ended in 1988 in a stalemate: Neither country lost or gained territory, but the armies of both countries were decimated, an outcome we engineered because we had helped both countries militarily and monetarily.

In 1990, Saddam turned his attention to Kuwait, hoping to get the extended seaports on the Persian Gulf that he failed to gain in the war with Iran. We tricked him into the invasion that we needed to forward our plans for oil and empire.

When Iraq occupied Kuwait, a huge U.S. underground air terminal suddenly was activated in Saudi Arabia, and that country was rapidly turned into an American staging ground for 500,000 troops.

The United States went to the United Nations to point out that Saddam had performed a pre-emptive strike against an unarmed sovereign state and got permission to expel the Iraqi occupiers of Kuwait.

Before moving to "mop up" the invading army, we bombed Iraq from Baghdad to the Kuwaiti border, demolishing the health and material infrastructure of the country: bridges, dams, hospitals, hotels, schools, radio and TV stations, communications systems, highways, and civilian populations in general.

Within weeks, Iraq had no army and a plagued society. As if this were not defeat enough, the United States forced the United Nations to place sanctions on Iraq, as punishment for having broken international laws.

Furthermore, Iraq was not "allowed" to rebuild its destroyed infrastructure. Then, as if this total destruction were not enough, the United States (and Britain), without U.N. authority, unilaterally declared "no-fly" zones over most of Iraq and began aerial photographic surveillance and air attacks by bombs and machine guns on the average of five days a week from 1991 to 2001, more often after 9/11, and even more by the summer of 2002, at which point we "knew" an attack on Iraq was coming.

Even if we had had an idiot in the White House, he would have known that after 13 years of photo surveys and bombing of every inch of Iraq, no WMDs could possibly have survived as a threat to our country and our "freedom."

March 19, 2003, did not begin the mission of securing for the United States the Iraqi oil fields and the land for 14 permanent military bases needed for our strategic control of the Middle East.

This mission was decades long in the planning and gradual implementation. No wonder that the new, "successful" administration wanted to celebrate on the USS Lincoln the accomplishment at last of the neocon's ultra right-wing goal.

Fourteen bases mean that so long as this administration is in control American troops will be stationed in Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan asked President Bush: "What is your 'noble cause'?" Cindy, the ugly answer is, "Oil and bases."

Bush admitted as much when he said that he would not bring the troops home now because we must honor our dead "by completing the mission" (italics added).

In blunt terms, "Mission Accomplished" means a continuous expenditure of blood for soil and oil.

(Robert Kimbrough is a professor-emeritus of English literature at the UWMadison. He is a combat veteran of the Korean War, a colonel (ret.) in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, and an active member of Veterans for Peace.)


5. From TomDispatch.com: More Blood, Less Oil: The Failed U.S. Mission to Capture Iraqi Petroleum -- by Michael T. Klare

It has long been an article of faith among America's senior policymakers -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil -- a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.

American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish -- rather than enhance -- America's access to foreign oil.

An Occupation Floating on a Sea of Oil

Oil was certainly not the only concern that prompted the American invasion of Iraq, but it weighed in heavily with many senior administration officials. This was especially true of Vice President Dick Cheney who, in an August 2002 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, highlighted the need to retain control over Persian Gulf oil supplies when listing various reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein. Nor is there any doubt that Cheney's former colleagues in the oil industry viewed Iraq's oilfields with covetous eyes. "For any oil company," one oil executive told the New York Times in February 2003, "being in Iraq is like being a kid in F.A.O. Schwarz." Likewise oil was a factor in the pre-war thinking of many key neoconservatives who argued that Iraqi oilfields -- once under U.S. control -- would cripple OPEC and thereby weaken the Arab states facing Israel.

Still, for some U.S. policymakers, other factors were preeminent, especially the urge to demonstrate the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine, the precept that preventive war is a practical and legitimate response to possible weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions on the part of potential adversaries. Whatever the primacy of their ultimate objectives, these leaders shared one basic assumption: that, when occupied by American forces, Iraq would pump ever increasing amounts of petroleum from its vast and prolific reserves.

This sense of optimism about Iraq's future oil output was palpable in Washington in the months leading up to the invasion. In its periodic reports on Iraqi petroleum, the Department of Energy (DoE), for example, confidently reported in late 2002 that, with sufficient outside investment, Iraq could quickly double its production from the then-daily level of 2.5 million barrels to 5 million barrels or more. At the State Department, the Future of Iraq Project set up a Working Group on Oil and Energy to plan the privatization of Iraqi oil assets and the rapid introduction of Western capital and expertise into the local industry. Meanwhile, Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi -- then the Pentagon's favored candidate to replace Saddam Hussein as suzerain of Iraq (and now Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister in charge of energy infrastructure) -- met with top executives of the major U.S. oil companies and promised them a significant role in developing Iraq's vast petroleum reserves. "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," he insisted in September 2002.

Aside from the purely pecuniary benefits of seizing Iraqi oil, administration officials of all persuasions saw another key attraction: once Iraqi fields were pumping oil again, the resulting revenues would essentially pay for the war and the costs of occupation. "We can afford it," White House economic adviser Larry Lindsey said of the planned U.S. invasion, because rising Iraqi oil output would invigorate the U.S. economy. "When there is regime change in Iraq, you could add three to five million barrels [per day] of production to world supply," he told the Wall Street Journal in September 2002. Hence, "successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy." In one of the most striking comments of this sort, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel, "The oil revenue of [Iraq] could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Clearly, gaining control of what Wolfowitz once described as a country that "floats on a sea of oil" was one of the Pentagon's highest priorities in the early days of the invasion. As part of its planning for the assault, the Department of Defense established detailed plans to seize Iraqi oil fields and installations during the first days of the war. "It's fair to say that our land component commander and his planning staff have crafted strategies that will allow us to secure and protect these fields as rapidly as possible," a top Pentagon official told news reporters on January 24, 2003. Once U.S. troops entered Iraq, special combat teams spread out into the oil fields and occupied key installations. In fact, the very first operation of the war was a commando raid on an offshore loading platform in the Persian Gulf. "Swooping silently out of the Persian Gulf night," an over-stimulated reporter for the New York Times wrote on March 23, "Navy Seals seized two Iraqi oil terminals in bold raids that ended early this morning, overwhelming lightly armed Iraqi guards and claiming a bloodless victory in the battle for Iraq's vast oil empire."

This early "victory" was followed by others, as U.S. forces occupied key refineries and, most conspicuously, the Oil Ministry building in downtown Baghdad. So far, so good. But almost instantaneously things began to go seriously wrong. Lacking sufficient troops to protect the oil facilities and all the other infrastructure in Baghdad and other key cities, the military chose to protect the oil alone -- allowing desperate and rapacious Iraqis to go on a rampage of looting that fatally undermined the authority of the military occupation and the U.S.-backed interim government. To make matters worse, the very visible American emphasis on protecting oil facilities while ignoring other infrastructure gave the distinct -- and not completely inaccurate --impression that the United States had invaded Iraq less to liberate it from a tyrannical regime than to steal, or at least control, its oil. And from this perception came part of the anger and resentment that constituted the essential raw materials for the outbreak of an armed insurgency against the American occupation and everything associated with it. The Bush administration never recovered from this disastrous chain of events.

An Occupation Engulfed in a Sea of Fire

The Iraqi insurgency is not monolithic, and it is not always possible to determine the intentions of its various components. Nevertheless, it is clear that oil -- that is, the association between Iraqi oil and the American occupation -- plays a central role in the insurgents' hazy ideology. "The insurgents used this," Iraqi-born oil consultant Falah Alijbury said of American plans to privatize the Iraqi oil industry. As he put it, the insurgents are telling fellow Iraqis, "Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable." From Alijbury's perspective, this is one of the insurgency's most powerful appeals.

The disparate Iraqi insurgent groups were also aware of Washington's intent to finance its war and occupation through sales of Iraqi petroleum, and so have made sabotage of Iraq's pipelines, pumping stations, and loading terminals one of their most important strategic objectives. According to one source, insurgents conducted 230 major attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure between January 2004 and September 7, 2005, causing billions of dollars in losses. Here, for instance, is a listing of some of the most recent attacks, as compiled by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security:

August 20: Attack on a major pipeline between Bayji and Baghdad stopped electricity to the capital.
August 26: Insurgents sabotaged an exporting oil well north of Kirkuk.
August 27: Bomb beneath an oil pipeline supplying the Daura oil refinery in Baghdad, causing an hour-long fire.
August 29: Rebels fired a mortar at Iraq's oil ministry building in Baghdad.
August 30: Lt. Colonel Mohammed Rashad, commander of a unit protecting Iraq's oil pipeline network, was assassinated in front of his home in Kirkuk as he was leaving for work.
Sept 3: An explosion on oil pipeline 2.5 miles from Fatha, between Kirkuk and Bayji, stopping oil flow from Kirkuk to Ceyhan after insurgents ignited an oil leak.
Sept. 5: Oil pipeline connecting Bayji and Baghdad was set on fine west of Samarra.

As a result of such attacks, which continue to occur on a near-daily basis, Iraqi oil output has actually declined since the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. According to the DoE, total production stood at 1.9 million barrels per day in May 2005, compared to 2.6 million barrels in January 2003, just before the American invasion. Quite the opposite of paying for the American occupation, as promised by administration officials, Iraqi production is costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars per year. Underwriting the costs of using American soldiers and U.S.-paid private guards to protect Iraq's highly vulnerable pipelines and refineries has proved expensive indeed.

At present, American forces are protecting two main components of Iraq's oil infrastructure: the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan export pipeline in the north, near Iraq's border with Turkey; and offshore loading terminals in the south, on the edge of the Persian Gulf. Protection of the northern pipeline is the responsibility of Task Force Shield, a mobile combat unit made up of Army forces drawn from Fort Wainright, Alaska and Fort Lewis in Washington State. In the Gulf, protection of the loading platforms is the responsibility of the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard.

These oil-protection operations have proved extremely hazardous. In April 2004, for example, suicide bombers in a small boat approached the Khor al-Amaya offshore loading terminal and detonated their explosives when approached by a U.S. patrol ship, killing two Navy sailors and one Coast Guard sailor -- the latter being the first Coast Guardsman to be killed in combat since the Vietnam War. Adding further symbolism to this event, the platform involved was one of those occupied by Navy Seals in March 2003 in that "bloodless victory in the battle for Iraq's vast oil empire."

Despite the deployment of American troops at key oil facilities and the ever-rising amounts of money invested in pipeline security, the Department of Defense has made zero progress in its drive to boost Iraqi oil output. "In the north, Iraq's main export pipeline looks all but impossible to protect from sabotage," the British Financial Times reported in June. "Meanwhile in the south, local tribal disputes, which often go unreported, hamper efforts to restore oilfields, while security costs and other reconstruction bills all reduce the amount of money available for [the rehabilitation of] the oil industry."

Efforts to boost Iraqi oil production have also been hampered by two other problems: pervasive corruption in the Oil Ministry and severe differences between the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shiites over the future allocation of oil revenues.

Just how much Iraqi oil has been lost to corruption or black-market transactions is impossible to determine, but experts believe the amounts are substantial. "Administrative corruption takes on so many forms," Muhammad al-Abudi, the Oil Ministry's director-general of drilling, observed in March 2005. "The robberies and thefts that are taking place on a daily basis and on all levels... are committed by low-level government employees and also by high officials in leadership positions in the Iraqi state," he noted. Typically, these losses are blamed on insurgent activity, thereby diverting attention from the government figures actually responsible. "It seems there that there is an implicit alliance between the smuggling and sabotage forces aimed at increasing the rates of exhaustion of the state resources," Diya al-Bakka, another senior Oil Ministry official told Oil & Gas Journal in May.

The corruption and mismanagement has had another serious consequence for Iraq's long-term oil potential: in order to maximize output now, and thereby keep the dollars rolling in, Iraqi oil executives are employing faulty pumping methods, thus risking permanent damage to underground reservoirs. For example, managers are continuing to pump oil from Iraq's main Rumailia oilfield, one of the world's largest, even though water injection systems (used to maintain underground pressure) have failed; in so doing, they are thought by experts to be causing irreversible damage to the field. "The problem is that [underground] pressure problems could lead to a permanent decline in production," observed one European buyer of Iraqi oil quoted in the Financial Times last June. Even if U.S. companies later were to gain access to Iraqi fields, therefore, they might find yields to be disappointing.

Just as significant is the warring between Iraq's three main ethnic and religious communities over the distribution of future oil royalties. Most of Iraq's large oilfields are concentrated in the Kurdish north and the Shiite south. The Kurds and Shiites want most of the royalties to be distributed to Iraq's provinces on a per capita basis which would benefit them, but leave funds relatively scarce for the Sunni region and for any future central government in Baghdad. A failure to reach agreement on this issue was one of the main obstacles to final adoption of the new Iraqi constitution, and helped prompt the Sunni delegates to reject the final text. The Sunnis are also worried by provisions of the proposed constitution that allow groups of provinces (presumably in the Kurdish and Shiite areas) to form self-governing regional entities which could lead to the breakup of Iraq into three semi-independent statelets, with the Sunnis occupying the smallest and poorest region in the center. Not only would such a breakup enhance the Sunnis' sense of alienation from the Iraqi nation-building project -- thereby further invigorating an already vigorous insurgency -- but it would also disrupt Iraqi oil operations and make investment in Iraq's petroleum industry even less attractive to foreign oil companies. The net result, in all likelihood, will be a further decline in Iraqi petroleum output.

The Oil Evaporates

From all that can be seen, oil production in Iraq is likely to remain depressed for years, no matter how much more blood is shed in its pursuit. It is already evident that American military action will not lead to democracy in Iraq, merely to the division of the country into separate ethnic enclaves, one possibly ruled by Iranian-like ayatollahs; it can now also be said that we will not gain any additional petroleum supplies as a result of all this sacrifice and tragedy. Not only has the use of force to procure Iraqi oil failed to achieve its intended results, it has actually made the situation worse.

This is an important conclusion to draw from Iraq as the United States becomes ever more dependent on imported petroleum. Even before Katrina struck a blow to our domestic oil industry, the Department of Energy was already projecting our reliance on imports to grow from about 53% of total consumption in 2002 to 66% by 2025. As a result of the hurricane, that percentage will in all likelihood be pushed much higher, because most of the growth in domestic petroleum output was expected to occur in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico -- the area most heavily affected by Katrina and its 2004 predecessor Ivan. A number of the drilling platforms in these waters were sunk by the storms which also played havoc with the pipelines connecting them to shore. True, many of the platforms that survived will be repaired and put back into operation, but insurance rates have skyrocketed; and investors may prove hesitant, even with oil prices soaring, to put up billions of dollars to install new platforms that will only be washed away in the next major hurricane. As a result, domestic U.S. output may fall well below DoE projections, and so more of our supply will have to be imported.

And there is no question where this additional oil will have to be procured: in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, the Andes, and other areas beset by chronic instability and conflict. These are the only areas capable of increasing oil output sufficiently to satisfy rising U.S. demand, and so these are the areas that will attract the greatest American attention and potential Pentagon involvement. If past experience is any indication, U.S. policymakers will respond to the dilemma of our growing dependence on unstable foreign providers by sending more and more American military forces to these areas in a desperate attempt to ensure uninterrupted access to oil. This is, in fact, the underlying reason for the Pentagon's search for new military bases in Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Africa.

Despite the debacle of Iraq, most senior policymakers appear to retain their blind faith in the efficacy of military force as a tool for securing access to foreign sources of petroleum. This, as Iraq makes painfully clear, is delusional. Yet they persist in risking the lives of young Americans and others in their continued adherence to a failed and immoral strategy. Any attempt to reconstruct American foreign policy on a more rational and ethical basis must, therefore, begin with the repudiation of the use of force in procuring foreign oil and the adoption of a forward-looking energy strategy based on increased conservation and the rapid development of alternative fuels.

(Michael T. Klare is the Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (Owl Books) as well as Resource Wars, The New Landscape of Global Conflict.)


6. From TomDispatch.com: Blood for No Oil -- by Tom Engelhardt

The strangest aspect of media coverage of our invasion and occupation of Iraq involved that country’s oil. Everyone, including the Bush administration, was well aware that Iraq sat on a sea of it. It was obvious that Middle Eastern oil was a global lifeline and an ever more valuable commodity; and yet, unless you were a faithful reader of the business pages, for days, weeks, even months on end, it was impossible to find serious discussion of Iraqi oil in the mainstream media. Forget the fact that a number of the major players in the Bush administration came out of the energy business; that Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, had had an oil tanker named after her (when she was still on Chevron's board of directors); that the neocons and their supporters evinced a special interest in the oil heartlands of our planet (a.k.a. "the arc of instability"); or that the Pentagon was staking those heartlands out, base by base.

Nonetheless, when it came to the punditocracy just about the only discussion of Iraqi oil was restricted to the dismissal of claims by the antiwar movement that oil was either the (or a) significant factor in the invasion, a position supposedly too simpleminded to be taken seriously. If Iraq's main export had been video games, the press would have been flooded with pieces of every sort about our children's entertainment future; and yet, until the Iraqi resistance began blowing up pipelines, reports on Iraqi oil were as few and far between as oases in a desert. Even today, with pump prices through the ceiling and global energy supplies tight, Iraqi oil -- or the lack of it -- is not exactly headline material. As Jonathan Schell said recently, speaking of media attitudes, "If the Bush administration is not supposed to be interested in oil in Iraq, why are they so interested in it in Alaska?"

In the prewar period, the President simply swore that we were religiously ready to respect and preserve what he referred to as Iraq's "patrimony" -- and, when it came to serious coverage, that was about that.

On the other hand, you had an antiwar movement, one part of which was focused almost solely on the issue of Iraqi oil. The iconic oil sign of the prewar protest period (sure to be found again at the big demonstration in Washington this Saturday) was: "NO BLOOD FOR OIL." But, with two years-plus of Iraqi experience under our belts, it should now be clear that this slogan was misconceived in at least one crucial way. It should have read: "BLOOD FOR NO OIL."

This is perhaps the strangest, most instructive, and least written about aspect of the Iraqi invasion, occupation, and present chaos. We can be assured that, in the next few years, we're going to be hearing far more about "resource wars," tight energy supplies, and the need to nail down raw materials militarily. It may not be long before administration officials start telling us that we can't withdraw from Iraq exactly because of the world energy situation. Already, two days after Katrina hit, there was the President standing in front of the USS Ronald Reagan -- this administration's advance men have never seen an aircraft carrier they didn't want to turn into a photo op -- offering a new explanation for the war in Iraq: "If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions..."

We're guaranteed to see more Pentagon planning and war gaming based on the control of world energy supplies, not to speak of more and ever better military bases planted in far-flung, oil-rich areas of the world. So it's important to take stock of what actually happened to Iraqi oil and the dreams of global dominance that went with it.

Energy is a strange thing to control militarily. As Iraq showed and Katrina reminded us recently, its flow is remarkably vulnerable, whether to insurgents, terrorists, or hurricanes. It's next to impossible to guard hundreds, not to say thousands, of miles of oil or natural gas pipelines. It's all very well to occupy a country, set up your "enduring camps," and imagine yourself controlling the key energy spigots of the globe, but doing so is another matter. (As the saying went in a previous military age, you can't mine coal with bayonets.) In the case of Iraq, one could simply say that the military conquest and occupation of the country essentially drove Iraq's oil deeper underground and beyond anyone's grasp. Hence, the signs should indeed say: "BLOOD FOR NO OIL." It's the perfect sorry slogan for a sad, brainless war; and even the Pentagon's resource-war planners might consider it a lesson worthy of further study as they think about our energy future.

(Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War.)

7. We don't want to fight in Iraq -- by Robert Jensen

The failed war in Iraq - and its effect on the US military - has the potential to spark the US public to fundamentally rethink the role of force in US foreign policy, and one of the central questions for the future of the United States is whether this questioning can mature and deepen.

Can we in the so-called "lone superpower" face that we are now a nation of mercenaries?

As the bad news from Iraq continues to worsen by the day, it looks as if the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard all will miss their annual recruitment goals. A 2004 study commissioned by the Army found that recruiting has been undermined by casualties, objections to the war, and media coverage of such events as the Abu Ghraib scandal.

These statistics signal an important shift, especially when combined with anecdotal evidence suggesting that it is not just an aversion to physical risk that is curtailing enlistment but an understanding that this war isn't worth the risks. At the same time, however, public opinion polls reveal confusion and contradictory trends as well. Recent polls show that more than half the public believes the United States can’t win the war and can’t establish a stable democracy in Iraq, but surveys also indicate that many continue to believe that sending the troops was the right thing to do.

This suggests that a majority of the public can recognize that the United States has failed in the stated mission but cannot yet see that the stated mission was a lie. This was never a war about weapons of mass destruction or stopping terrorism (indeed, the war has created terrorism, on both sides), nor is it at heart about establishing democracy in Iraq. The US invasion of Iraq is - as all US interventions in Middle East have been - about extending and deepening US dominance in the region with the world's most crucial energy resources.

Part of the barrier to a clear understanding of this is the belief that the United States, by definition, always acts benevolently in the world. But also standing in the way of an honest analysis is the reality that the brutal imperialist US policies, while devised by elites, are being carried out by ordinary Americans. Can we in the United States come to terms with the fact that we are the "good Germans" of our era, routinely allowing pseudo-patriotic loyalties to override moral decision-making? Can we look at ourselves honestly in the mirror when so many of us are implicated in the imperialist system?

From the people who make the weapons to the military personnel who use them - and all the other people whose livelihoods or networks of friends and family connect them to the armed forces - most of the US public has some relationship to the military. Any talk of closing a military base sparks almost automatic resistance from neighboring communities that have become dependent on the base economically. Large segments of the corporate sector rely on military or military-related contracts, and executives and employees alike understand what that means for profits and wages.

As US anthropologist Catherine Lutz put it in her book Homefront, an insightful study of the effects of the militarization on American life: “We all inhabit an army camp, mobilized to lend support to the permanent state of war readiness... Are we all military dependents, wearers of civilian camouflage?”

The problem is not just that the United States now has a mercenary army but that we are a mercenary society.

The problem is not just that our army fights imperialist wars, but that virtually all of us are in some way implicated in that imperialist system.

It can be difficult to face the truth about an institution that has so deeply insinuated itself into our lives. Since the end of World War II, the US power elite have done a masterful job of transforming the country into a militarized state with a permanent wartime economy. There has always been resistance to that project on the margins, but because the United States is an incredibly affluent nation - and these policies promise continued affluence - there is strong motivation for many to ignore the consequences of this militarization.

Ironically, it may turn out that the weak link in this system will be not the civilian mercenaries but the military ones. Historically, colonial powers have imported mercenary forces to do the dirty work of conquest and control. In the United States, our own citizens are being forced into that role. If the armed forces' inability to meet recruitment goals continues, the effect may not be simply new constraints on the ability of US leaders to fight additional wars but a more widespread questioning of the imperial system itself.

Consider these stories, told in the book Generation Kill about the Iraq war. One Marine told author Evan Wright that a "bunch of psycho officers sent us into shit we never should have gone into." Another Marine, upon his return home, was invited to
speak to a wealthy community as a war hero. He told them: "I am not a hero. Guys like me are just a necessary part of things. To maintain this way of life in a fine community like this, you need psychos like us to go and drop a bomb on somebody's house."

How long can an army continue when combat personnel view both officers and themselves as psychos? What will happen if that Marine's recognition that imperial wars are fought to protect affluence and privilege at home spreads on the front lines of those wars?

US political elites have few options. Barring a serious economic collapse that forces more people into the military to survive, recruitment will continue to be a problem. Reinstituting a draft is not an option; there would be a huge political cost if middle- and upper-class Americans were asked to surrender their children to direct participation in the military wing of the mercenary machine. The offer of citizenship to immigrants who are willing to fight can't make up the gap.

Right now there is incredible tension in US culture. Many continue to hold on tightly to the idea that the service personnel are being killed and maimed in Iraq for a noble cause, which is hardly surprising; acknowledging that a loved one was killed in the pursuit not of liberty and justice, but instead for elite domination, can intensify the already deep pain of the loss. Others are abandoning illusions and recognizing the motivations of the powerful. Obituaries of dead soldiers talk of their "great pride" in serving their country, while a collective sense that the Iraq War is nothing to be proud of deepens every day. No one wants to demonize the front-line troops - those with the least power to change policy - but the reality of why the US military fights, along with the brutal way in which the wars are fought, become increasingly hard to ignore.

Tension can be creative, leading to deeper understanding and progressive social change. Or it can be exploited to suppress that understanding and block change. Elites almost always attempt the latter. The choice that the US public makes is crucial to our future, and the world’s.