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NOVEMBER *FRIDAY NOVEMBER 10th 2006* ALL CHANGE IN IRAQ THEN? THE RUMSFELD LEGACY … UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS Of course there is room for jubilation that the Bush administration, so arrogant and so hubristric for so long have been forced to buckle. Bye bye Donald Rumsfeld and buried in the mid-term election press frenzy the day before voting, Zalmay Khalizad the US ambassador in Iraq and arch-neo-con of old, said he expected he would be stepping down in the next few months. Even the prospect of Saddam Hussein dangling on the end of a rope, could not pull a rabbit out of the hat for Karl Rove. *"Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are* *something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be* *characterised as a pause. There will be some things that people will* *see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes* *on."* Donald Rumsfeld October 2001 at the outset of 'the long war'. Rumsfeld will forever be associated with the utter disaster of the war on Iraq, but as the head of the Pentagon, that was only part of his job, and in racking up defense budgets of half a trillion dollars a year (most of which was NOT spent on the extra-budgetary wars on Afghanistan and Iraq) he set in motion policies and projects that will last long after his departure. Just prior to his nomination for the position of Defence Secretary in the new George W. Bush administration in late 2000, Rumsfeld, chaired the US government’s space commission, the Commission to Assess United States National Security in Space Management and Organisation, which reported in 2000 that: "If the US is to avoid a 'space Pearl Harbor,' it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on US space systems." "The Commissioners believe the U.S. Government should vigorously pursue the capabilities... to ensure that the President will have the option to deploy weapons in space... It is possible to project power from space in response to events anywhere in the world. Having this capability would give the U.S. ... in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage." Thus the now infamous neo-conservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), were only echoing the major currents of US secret planning when their equally infamous blueprint for George W. Bush's national security policy, Rebuilding America's Defenses was issued in September 2000, saying that: "for US armed forces to continue to assert military pre-eminence, control of space ... must be an essential element of our military strategy." Military pre-eminence has been shored up like never before during Rumsfled's years at the Pentagon. Rome was not built in a day nor in one and a half presidential terms as Defense Secretary, but certain groundwork which has mapped out the years between 2000 and 2020 has been laid out. The US "national missile defence,” system, a euphemism if ever there were one, currently being built is only part of the picture. The headlines relating to this Son of Star Wars programme, generally refer to it as a defensive shield, designed to counter the highly precarious proposition that A) rogue states would even dare to launch ballistic missiles against the US and B) that such missiles could be shot down in mid-flight. However, in their enthusiasm for the massively scaled up version of the system, the authors of Rebuilding America's Defenses (September 2002) could barely contain themselves in revealing the true nature of missile defence that: " no system of missile defences can be fully effective without placing sensors and weapons in space." The real agenda then is not only to dominate space, but to be able to dominate the planet below from what Paul Wolfowitz called the "truly … ultimate high ground" of space. Leaked US Air Force (USAF) documents entitled Counterspace Operations, dated August 2004, which found their way into the public domain a couple of months later, revealed that the US had formally "adopted a doctrine to establish 'space superiority." Likening it to the US's existing and "very rigorous and aggressive doctrine of control of the air," Counterspace Operations was all about applying the same principles to space, that: *"the first thing (the US) do(es) in any military campaign or combat* *operations is* *to gain mastery of the skies and deny the skies to the* *adversary."* There should be no illusions as to where this is leading, in a world with diminishing oil resources. Counterspace Operations went on to reveal the obvious, but usually guarded, fact that: "space superiority provide(s) the freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" (my emphasis.) How easily the US government's brand of "freedom" slips into the language of the secret planning for war. With the inclusion of research into 'space-based interceptors' included in the 2005 US military budget proposals, and as yet unknown ongoing and all-new, 'black budget' proposals for the US expansion into space, the W.Bush-Rumsfeld years have been an unqualified success on their own hidden agenda terms. Will the real legacy of the Rumsfeld years be that in a time of increasing wars over dwindling resources he made the weaponisation of space, in the US's favour, a reality? THE REPLACEMENT: THE NEW OLD GUYS ON THE BLOCK There is much hollering and cheering, over Rumsfeld's departure, and even arch neo-cons like Richard Perle have been jumping on the band wagon to stick the knife in, but considering the US record of institutionalised coveting the oil of the Middle East for the past sixty years, it would be somewhat premature to think this actually signals any meaningful change in the US geopolitical policy in the region. The current Bush administration have long known 'off the record' that the war on Iraq was not working nearly as well as they would have liked. And, it is nothing like the post-invasion Iraq envisaged by as neo-conservative planners such a Paul Wolfowitz, along eastern European lines, where US interests had co-opted the 'fall of the Berlin Wall' model, exaggerating their own influence as the catalyst for the 'overnight' flowering of democracy, with US economic muscle moving in the very next day. Much has been made of the idea of the Oedipean struggle between Bush the son and Bush the father. As a result of the mid-term elections, and an apparent forced retreat from overt belligerence, it is said George W. Bush, is more and more having to rely on the more moderating influences of his father's people. James Baker was Bush senior's right hand man (his Gordon Brown)and Secretary of State , whilst Robert Gates, the current nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, was Bush Sr's CIA director in the early nineties. Such familial struggle whilst making good copy and stimulating amatuer psychologists everywhere, have been overplayed. The rush to judgement of Saddam Hussein whilst failing to save some Republican seats, ensures the silence of the key witness, and the burial of further delving into the period when the west actively supported Saddam between 1983 and 1990. More a case of Bush the son using all his influence as president to help his father stay out the reckoning over exhumed skeletons in Iraq. As John Pilger reminds us: "in 1992, a congressional inquiry found that Bush (senior) had ordered a cover-up to conceal his secret support for Saddam, and the illegal arms shipments being sent to Iraq via third countries." The differences between father and son and the two respective political schools of thought are much exaggerated, for whilst there may be subtly different approaches at work, the common ground that comes from operating within the political wing of the same corporate community of US interests, is a much more decisive factor. It was James Baker who was drafted in to head the legal team which ensured that George W. got away with stealing the presidential election from Al Gore in the first place in Florida in 2000. James Baker's last report of note, ie the one co-sponsored by the think-tank bearing his name, (the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy in tandem with the Council on Foreign Relations) was the Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century report , which emerged as part of the broader thinking canvassed by Dick Cheney and his Energy Task Force in the early part of the W. administration in 2001. Whilst never as forthright as the Defence Planning Guidance of the Project for the New American Century (September 2000), which re-emphasised PNAC acolytes long held belief that Saddam Hussein should be removed by force, this Baker report did identify the "the need for military intervention" on behalf of US energy interests. In other words back then Baker was urging that national security and energy policies be more formally integrated to prevent any manipulations of the oil market by any state. That is, any state other than the United States, of course. This, for anyone even slightly familiar with US geo-political planning was in many respects merely a call for clarification and consolidation of secret policy that had existed since the end of World War II. Of course these needs are perceived as much more urgent by mnay degrees, by all in the US corporate community in the early part of the twenty first century than they were back in the mid-twentieth century. In this respect US secret planners have long escalated their attempts to keep tabs on the prize of Middle Eastern oil by locking it into actionable US national security. Since the oil shocks of the 1970's US planners were always keen to find excuses to have their troops deployed in and around the Middle East. The National Security Directive 26 "US Policy Toward the Persian Gulf" dated October 2nd 1989 and signed by George H.W. Bush the father, in his first year as President, was for the express attention of the likes of the then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, then Secretary of State James Baker, and the incoming Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell . The document began with the overview: *"Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in* *the area are* *vital to US national security. The United States remains* *committed to defend its* *vital interests in the region, if necessary and* *appropriate through the use of US* *military force , against the Soviet* *Union or any other regional power with* *interests inimical to our* own." The document remained secret for ten years, and was signed off prior to the first Gulf War and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as soon as Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, as the facts on the ground speak loud, it very quickly became actionable policy. Baker's message in 2001 was that Saddam's incessant meddling, signing oil deals with Russia and France, and his switch from trading oil in dollars to trading in Euros in November 2000 represented new transgressions that would not be tolerated. In both these respects the war on Iraq has thus far been a 'success' for US planners on their own terms. The pressure on the current Iraqi government to sign binding agreements regarding its oil by this December (2006) (see previous entries below) , is heavily weighted in US favour, and pushing its competitors back down the list in the pecking order. Whilst Iran and Venezuela are or have have flirted with the idea of switching to the Euro for oil trading, a wider switch by all the OPEC countries — a move which would bankrupt the US — has been averted. The people responsible for the new Baker Report on where next for the war on Iraq, also due this December, not least the incoming Robert Gates are fully aware of this sixty year institutionalised history and are inherently complicit in ensuring that whatever they produce for public consumption, consolidates the US grip on the levers of control of Iraqi oil, in secret. Commenting on the preferred replacement of Donald Rumsfeld by Robert Gates (pending his acceptance by the now Democrat controlled Congress) John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org said: "I think that changing the Secretary of Defence is a way of creating the impression of change given the impossibility of the reality of change." Furthermore, he said that: "I don't know what (James) Baker is going to come up with but it is not going to be very different from what they are doing now." Gates an ex-head of the CIA for Bush's father in the early 90's, despite his involvement at the Iranian end of the Iran-Contra arms deal of the 1980's, is assumed to favour a more diplomatic approach to Iran. He even wrote a report suggesting opening talks with Iran a couple of years back, however he still has to convince the most powerful Vice President in history. As CIA man Melvin Goodman remembers, when gates was head of the CIA and Cheney was Defense Secretary in the Bush Sr administration in the early 1990's, Gates has never had the strength of character to stand up to Cheney before "so it would be the first time" if it happened now. Perhaps Gates's appearance as a more diplomatic player means that it will be his job to ensure that whacking Iran's nuclear facilities will be left to Israel, now that the Bush administration is on the back foot? As soon as Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 Robert Gates as head of the CIA, Dick Cheney as Defense Secretary and Paul Wolfowitz as the Deputy Defense Secretary were the first ones on a plane to the Middle East ... to Saudi Arabia. Their mission was to reassure the royal family there that the US would never allow Saddam to threaten Saudi Arabia, and in so doing to set up US garrisons and air bases there, in what had been the US secret planner's dream since the 1970's oil shocks to get US boots on the ground and keep them there in close proximity to the prime oil supplies on the planet. The US super-bases stayed in Saudi Arabia until April 2003, when Rumsfeld announced they were no longer necessary, and indeed the whilst US skeleton facilities doubtless still exist in Saudi Arabia the prime US bases have been built in Iraq. The stock answer is that the US bases are not permanent. State of the art fortification, protecting military installations the size of towns, are not considered permanent, because in the chessboard of geo-politics in the Middle East the world's hyperpower can up and shift them on a sixpence. About that difference between father and son then? Any forthcoming hyped-up US and British military withdrawls from Iraq will simply be the next move in the game. ARE THE DEMOCRATS ANY SAFER A BET FOR THE FUTURE OF THE PLANET? The Democrats won the no-brainer argument that they had for so long played chicken on: that below the Fox News radar, the war on Iraq has long been widely unpopular, even in the US. Moreover, it belatedly dawned upon their strategists that this could be transformed into a vote winning campaign. Having come a full four years since most Democrats voted in Congress in October 2002 in favour of using force to bring about regime change in Iraq, their cross contamination has now sufficiently ameliorated to enable them to present themselves as being 'different' to the Bush Republicans. In actual fact this amounts to little more than dipping their toe in the waters of changing course in Iraq, with Bush trying desperately to play catch-up, but without anyone having to say too loudly that they will recall troops and dismantle US forward operating locations in Iraq any time soon. In other words the Democrats strategists, having been handed the opportunity on a plate by the mire Bush et al have created for the Republicans, have just about been able to cobble together an alignment with the zeitgeist without anyone having to give any real indication of what their change in strategy might entail, and thus without anyone having to go on record to actually commit to anything. Of course this is the quintessential quality of modern electioneering: get elected by whatever means necessary and then worry later about actual detail, (or not at all if public perception can be refocussed on other 'concerns'.) And of course, whilst the Democrats can now frustrate the Bush administration in Congress, they still have another two years until the presidential elections to hone the specifics of their posturing. With regard to Iraq the questions we should be asking regarding the reinvented moderate Republicans and the rebranded Democrats are A) can they really do anything differently and B) do they even want to do anything fundamentally differently given that US economic, political and military hegemony over the planet is still so heavily committed to having its palms greased, its machinery lubricated, and its weapons propelled by, oil? Hints and intimations about genuinely withdrawing from Iraq mean nothing unless the US gets serious about dumping its fundamental reliance on all things oil-based. Anything less than a fundamental shift away from oil ie diverting primary thinking and key resources and tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions into non fossil fuel technologies, will not achieve any long standing change of US positions on and in the Middle East. Of course such a radical policy shift necessarily means in effect the US government going to war with the big US oil companies, which is something US politicians old and new at present simply dare to contemplate. Incoming Democrats and those like Hilary Clinton, with their eyes on the White House know all this only too well. Are the Democrats any more likely to actually start dismantling Rumsfeld's weaponisation of space or will they continue arming the US to the teeth in its now institutionalised quest to head off any potential rivals by being so unreachably far ahead of them in terms of advanced military technology? There is however the great unknown unknown. Like the first ripple of a tsunami, the 'thumping' that Bush received this past week is a portent of the far greater force of the turning tide of public opinion. The battle to put global warming at the very top of the political agenda is being won in Britain, and there are signs that things are moving in this direction in the US. It used to be said that the turning point in revolutions came when the armed forces being forced by circumstances to see the writing on the wall changed sides from defending the government of the day to joining the people who made up the revolutionaries. Perhaps the real turning point in the struggle to put the planet back on a more environmentally sustainable and humane track will be when future politicians realise that to save their own skin and/or have any kind of future that they will have to join battle against the oil giants and declare war on the very machine that sustains US hegemonic power? Like with the puppy dog who keeps shitting on the carpet, it is our duty to keep rubbing our so called representatives' noses in the mess they create until they get the message. BACK TO TOP *FRIDAY NOVEMBER 3rd 2006* ... AND FIVE MORE YEARS DOWN THE FAST TRACK TO GLOBALLY WARMED OBLIVION 'FUTURE OIL WARS' WITH BUILT IN GLOBAL WARMING CONSEQUENCES, HAPPENING NOW. In the 'apocalyptic' report Abrupt Climate Change commissioned in 2003 by Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's in-house, out-of-the-box, seer into future threats to the US, the notion was put forward that as a result of increasingly unstable weather with the distinct near-future possibility of abrupt climate change events, that the future between 2007 and 2020 would begin to be characterised by wars over key resources. In fact the increasingly violent storms predicted by the report as hitting say Netherlands (their example) by 2007, we have already seen in the form of Katrina hitting New Orleans in 2005. And, the struggle to lock down oil resources in the era of post-peak oil, has been in actionable progress, (as detailed above) regarding Iraq since November 2001. Moreover, the current US geoil- realpolitik policy on Iraq, is but a ramped up form of its policy towards the Gulf oil and the Middle East since 1945. (see for starters the Noam Chomsky pocket book What Uncle Sam Really Wants.) If we were in any doubt of this, it is worth remembering that in January 1998, the Project for The New American Century (PNAC) a neo-conservative think-tank sent a letter to President Clinton, urging him to "seize (the) opportunity" regarding Iraq "and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavour." The letter was signed by Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, and Elliot Abrahams, all of whom have worked or still work in senior roles for George W. Bush's administrations, and by other key influential neo-conservbative thinkers such as Richard Perle, William Kristol and Frances Fukuyama,most of whom are protogees of Andrew Marshall school of thinking (or the Jedi Knights to his Yoda as they have been called by admirers). There seems to be an obvious omission, Dick Cheney who at the time was CEO of Haliburton. Cheney did not need to sign the letter, having generally worn his feelings on the 'divine' right of the US to assert the controlling influence over oil, wherever it exist on the planet, on his sleeve. During his tenures in the Pentagon Cheney had been intimately involved in maintaining high defense budgets, and was on-side regarding regime change in Iraq since 1992, having overseen the key post Cold War neo-conservative document Defense Planning Guidance, of that year. Indeed, in 1992 in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the decision to leave Saddam in power as the 'hard man' who could be boxed in to accommodate US interests, Cheney became the most high profile member of the school of thought which regretted this decision. Defense Planning Guidance, which was leaked in various draft forms was worked on by Cheney's staff, the then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfoitz's and his deputies I Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad, and is where the idea of overthrowing Saddam had its roots. Decoded, the text of the 1998 PNAC letter, as Clinton would well have known, meant that 'the interests of the US' translated as: securing, consolidating and extending the opportunities of US businesses to exert a controlling influence in a particular market. With regard to Iraq, the only thing of any conceivable value to US interests was securing and exploiting the controlling interest in its oil. This always was, and remains the case nearly nine years later, and will remain the case for as long as the planet remains tethered to an oil addiction, which has traditionally proen to be such good business for those who run the planet. Hot air about changing course in Iraq, or pulling out troops will always be subservient to this primary geo-political resource-war agenda. Clinton stalled, maintaining that sanctions and intermittent bombing of Iraq, using the no-fly zones cover, was effective enough, (remember Madeliene Albright's response to the question of whether she thought the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were worth it ... she said "yes") and thus Clinton deferred the decision over whether to change c ourse in Iraq to his successor. Given the death rates in Iraq during the Clinton-Blair years of US-UK led UN sanctions, George W. Bush's self evident policy — in the words of one of his Special Forces operatives: to "export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our greta nation" — remains pretty much par for the course. In all of the current public deliberation and furore over Iraq, the central plank of the crucial reason for US meddling in the country since the 1950's, remains unstated and unseen. In a world where oil supplies are diminishing the 'prize of Iraq' is one that US planners simply could not allow to fall under the controlling influence of rivals, such as China and Russia and any would-be rivals such as Iran. As stated in these pages before the US's problem with Iran is its posturing enabled by its own Persian oil power, and the geo-political position it inhabits regarding the Strait of Hormuz as a potential choking point for the servicing of western Europe demands with the broader span of Gulf oil. In this respect the Iranian nuclear programme is providing US war planners with a causus belli whether, it is anywher near fruition or not. Meanwhile, the major western oil companies are increasingly under existential threat from the simmering sea change of public opinion regarding the action needed to face current, and mitigate future catastrophic threats, to the planet as a result of man-made, oil-fuelled global warming. Having successfully fought their own PR war since 1989 to sow doubt in the public mind questioning the hardness of the science of global warming (on completely bogus and false pretences), big oil is at last on the defensive. There have been occasional tucked away reporting this year that the Pentagon is experimenting with non fossil fuel propulsion fuels, and they would be utterly incompetent by their own standards of job descriptions not to be pursuing alternatives. However, to date there is nil evidence that if US planners do actually even envisage a shift from oil to non fossil fuel power — to fund, lubricate and propel their military hardware —that this will be in place at any time over the next twenty years (their general forward looking window of threat assessment). The problem is that another ten to twenty years of fossil fuel dependency wipes out the window of opportunity for the planet to actually stabilise and seriously reduce fossil fuel usage. The now $500 billion annual US defense budgets, and all that it takes to keep these budgets constant and rising, destroy our hopes of mitigating the worst effects of global warming and avoiding runaway abrupt climate change in more ways than one. Of course, having our noses continually rubbed in the need prioritise a War on Terror , and a global economy that has to keep growing for the sake of our western well-being, remain at the heart of diverting our attention from the real and over-riding problems of prioritising the needs of people and the planet. The two things, asserting the controlling influence on dwindling world supplies of oil, and mitigating world opinion re global warming to minimise existential threats to the corporate community are connected and converging. GE-OIL POLITICS AS THE NEW USUAL The US military complex and the Big Power complex got married a long time ago and since the election campaign of 2000 have been forever renewing their vows. Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history, set up his top secret Energy Task Force in February 2001, and has thus far fought successful legal battles "all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at (its) meetings a secret." See AlterNet's Joshua Holland's detailed article, Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil October 2006 at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43045/ When the Task Force was set up as a priority in the first days of the first George W. Bush term, it quickly ensured the reneging on the Bush 2000 election promise to cut CO2 emissions in the US. Whilst we do not know the exact membership, of the Task Force we can guess that it was made up of the big Bush campaign sponsors, not least big oil, natural gas, coal, big energy generating conglomerates, and big pharmaceutical representatives, with honorary membership for nuclear industry. No representatives of environmental groups were invited. Nuclear power got its free pass, not only because of the historical connections between nuclear power generation and its military applications in the US, but also because it keeps with the tried and tested modes of centralised power generation and distribution. These maximise corporate profit at the expense of safety and environmental concerns, and remain in diametric opposition to localised more economic and more efficient and more environmentally friendly modes of micro-power generation. Moreover, they are the reason why micro-power was repeatedly strangled at birth throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Whilst it is unclear if military personnel were physically hands on in the group, the political civilian administration of the military dimensions was assured, if not through Donald Rumsfeld's probable membership, then by the fact that Dick Cheney himself was the old Pentagon boss for George H.W. Bush the father. Holland tells us that we do know an outline of the gist of the Energy Task Force meetings in early 2001: "thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch. As Mark Levine wrote in The Nation: *"A map of Iraq and an accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors"* *were the* *center of discussion. The map erased all features of the* *country save the* *location of its main oil deposits, divided into nine* *exploration blocks. The* *accompanying list of suitors revealed that* *dozens of companies from thirty* *countries --but not the United* *States--were either in discussions over or in direct* negotiations for rights to some of the best remaining oilfields on earth. Levine wrote, "It's not hard to surmise how the participants in these meetings felt about this situation." According to The New Yorker, at the same time, a top-secret National Security Council memo directed NSC staff to "cooperate fully with the Energy Taskforce as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy." The administration's national security team was to join "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq, and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields." (Joshua Holland ibid) There is no conspiracy theory involved here, it is rather the institutional conspiracy facts of the long established guiding lights of US vested interests sitting down and formulating plans not only for the years which still remain in our future, but for plans which were embarked upon in 2001 and are now our immediate past and present. Moreover, if the Task Force no longer exists in it's original form , we can safely assume that it has mutated and become even more secretive in pursuing its ongoing agendas. In other words the future oil wars are happening now. Moreover, we can no longer disassociate this reality from a planet in the early throes of accelerating global warming. The PR wars of big oil companies to keep us hooked on their product, and the doubt-sowing campaigns that they have mobilised since 1989 regarding the validity of then established science of global warming, have combined with every ounce of subterfuge and lies that preceded, fire-started and have maintained the war on Iraq. The two factors are intrinsically connected through the US corporate community with lines running directly into and out of the White House. The current pre-election fan-fare and spike in the coverage of what is happening regarding the war on Iraq, and the very belated surplus of moral hand-wringing in the mainstream again obscures the primary drives that keep western troops in the Middle East. Whilst the utter chaos of the real situation on the ground in Iraq makes the distant memories of the invasion of Iraq and the priority of US troops in those early weeks to lock down Iraq's oil producing facilities, now seem hazy, the machinations of that strategy continue apace. In fact, as Holland again elucidates: " The Iraqi government faces a December (2006) deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue."** (Holland ibid.) With so much at stake for the corporate community do not expect any 'cut and run' from Iraq any time soon, and do not expect the current mid-term elections in the US to be fought on anything approaching fair and genuinely democratic lines. For those of us human citizens concerned about our planet and fellow people, who count ourselves as part of the wide and varied axis of dissent ringing the planet, in order to arrest our accelerating slide into oblivion, it remains our duty in any way we can to draw out the linkage between these forces so wilfully mis-governing our planet. There are turbulent seas ahead, whatever happens next (because of the industrial amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere) but the political battles of the twenty first century will be defined by how, we the great 'unknown unknown' respond to the gravity of the situation. One way or another an information tipping point is fast approaching. Either the dissemination of the truth of what is happening to our planet reaches critical mass, and we realise en masse the lousy inheritance that our power-mongers (recently past and present) have bequeathed to us, and the even higher stakes that beckon our children. Or catastrophe intervenes and catalyses all manner of climate revolt turning more and more lives upside down, ending many lives prematurely and unleashing a social upheaval the planet has never seen? BACK TO TOP *WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 1st 2006* FIVE YEARS OF WAR ON IRAQ ... THE SECOND US-LED WAR ON IRAQ - False rationales aside, regarding Iraq being a 'clear and present danger' to the US or the UK, the current war on Iraq remains in essence an unprovoked attack. When such a war has caused so much routine death and destruction, by design and/or by default across a whole country, it is not inaccurate to describe it as a war on that country. Describing it simply as the 'Iraq war' thus becomes a euphemism, as it carries no responsibility for the prime agents of that war ie the ongoing US-planned, US-UK led bombing of, US-UK led invasion of, and US-UK occupation of Iraq. It is the 'second' such war because 1991 Gulf War (principally fought in Kuwait) against Iraqi forces was followed by US-UK-led sanctions throughout the remainder of the Bush Sr. years and through all of the Clinton years, which was war by other means on the Iraqi people. THE PERSISTENT INFORMATION GAP It was almost five years ago, on November 21st 2001 that George W. Bush formally instructed his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to take the existing but hypothetical war plans for targetting Iraq, off the shelf. This was first 'reported' by Bob Woodward in the publication of his book, Plan of Attack, and its serialisation in the Washington Post in April 2004, that is, nearly two and a half years after the fact, and a full year after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Bob- save it for the book- Woodward, had the chance to share his certain prior knowledge with the world — of the aforementioned advanced invasion plans and details of the secret war against Iraq which had been in progress since the summer of 2002 — in October 2002. It was then that his first book on the Bush years, Bush At War was published, and Woodward of course, having the keys to the kingdom, could have written in the Washington Post any time he liked. However, rather than rub his sources up the wrong way, Woodward declined to offer any serious insight into the war plans against Iraq until after the invasion had happened. The first book, Bush At War (Oct 2002) was obviously mostly concerned with 9-11 the war on Afghanistan, but the eight-weeks-before-going-to-publication-epilogue does consider the Bush administration's Iraq policy in the post 9-11 climate. Thus, Woodward interviewed Bush on August 20th 2002. However, the conclusions that Woodward drew about Bush's Iraq policy, were framed in the most ambiguous and general terms. "What he wanted to achieve seemed clear: He wanted Saddam out, ... but the president was keen to stress that ' he had not yet seen a successful (military) plan for Iraq." (my emphasis) Non-committal as ever, Woodward leaves the reader with the impression that no hard and fast decisions had been made and that there was still everything to play for in terms of choosing a diplomatic versus a military option against Iraq. In fact, as both Bush and Woodward would have been aware that very same morning (August 20th 2002) US and British war planes had hit targets in Iraq as part of the escalating attacks. Moreover, it was the third attack that week and one of eight raids in the month of August 2002, and set the escalating pattern until US and British tanks rolled over the border the following March. At the time, in the small print reported by Reuters, US Central Command spokesmen peddled the lie that : "Coalition strikes in the no-fly zones are executed as a self- defense *measure in response to Iraqi hostile threats and acts against* coalition forces and their aircraft," http://www.ccmep.org/usbombingwatch/2002.html Such bombing raids by US and British planes had been happening since 1992, and euphemistically referred to as routine patrolling the no-fly zones, over Iraq. The establishment of these zones were never UN approved and in effect remained illegal under international law until the UN agreement in 2003 which enabled US and UK led troops to stay in Iraq, after they had already invaded and occupied it. The purpose of the no-fly zones were said to be to protect local Shia and Kurdish minorities from Saddam's tyranny. In fact after the Gulf War, which destroyed Saddam's air force, the US allowed Saddam to keep his helicopter gunships to police his population as he wished. In reality the no-fly zones provided the cover and a fake heir of legitimacy, so that the US-UK bombers could prevent Saddam regaining any air power which might challenge their own; so that the means to with apply pressure on Saddam Hussein at will could be retained; and not least to provide an excuse for the US and Britain to have its military deployed and active in the oil rich Gulf region, operating from bases in Saudi Arabia. Of course the latter point, figured in the thinking of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri in making the US a prime target of their terror-raising activities in the late nineteen nineties. We now know that the US-UK bombing raids, which began escalating in summer 2002 were the first strikes of the US-led secret war which preceded the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. There was very limited inference of this in the mainstream media at the time (in the UK there was sporadic reporting that the raids were even happeneing, by Raymond Whittaker in The Independent, Richard Norton Taylor in The Guardian and the Channel 4 TV news). Woodward saved his knowledge of the details of this secret war for the second book Plan of Attack (April 2004), and even then he glosses over it as if it were mere window dressing for the main act. Instead, the last few pages of his contemporaneous first book Bush At War (October 2002) simply sketched the official narrative of the months before the invasion of Iraq, with bad cop Cheney ramping up the pressure for military action, and good cops Colin Powell and Tony Blair urging going down the UN route. Whilst there were genuine tensions between these two camps they both wanted the same end result (ie the US military in control of Iraqi oil with the UK as teacher's pet frist in the bread line), and differed only in their means of achieving it. As we found out conclusively in May 2005, with the "Downing Street' memos, (what many of us had suspected from the political body language at the time) Blair had been on board supporting an invasion at the latest by early April 2002 when he visited the Crawford Ranch to discuss that very purpose. In this respect, instead of putting forward a possible case for war, Blair's infamous dossier of September 2002, was a hastily cobbled together document, pasted together after the fact, to patch up the gaps in the narrative, because he knew full well that full scale war was imminent in a mtter of months. INFORMATION WARS AND THE MOUNTING HUMAN COST Why does any of this matter now? Well US and British troops are still fully deployed in Iraq, and whilst the cracks are certainly showing in glaring fashion, the illusion exists that some shift in policy is inevitable. It is not. Moreover, much of the current fan-fare may evaporate in an instant once next week's US mid-term election results have been digested. On the one hand, everyone from British army commanders to opposition front runners are beginning to label the war and its aftermath an unqualified disaster. Even Woodward has given the impression of getting off the fence, with his third book on the Bush years called State of Denial (October 2006) regarding the disastrous aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the information gap between what was happening on the ground and what the Bush administration were telling the public. (Duh Woodward! They are at war, and in accordance with vitally basic principles, all the smart lies of the information war are still being deployed to sway the minds of the people at home into accepting the ongoing chaos as progress) Moreover, for the people of Iraq the new book is five years too late. The idea that the real effect of the invasion and occupation on the ground, makes life worse and death more common, than under Saddam, is now becoming common currency. The Lancet recently published a study that 655,000, mostly civilians have died in violent circumstances in Iraq since March 2003. That death rate is one person dying every three minutes, extra to naturally accountable deaths since March 18th 2003, far far worse than under Saddam. Of these deaths some 200,000 can be directly attributed to US-UK led forces, themselves. For the PR war deployed to ignore and/or rubbish the study in terms of the ongoing management of the public perception of the war, see: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/061018_democracy_and_debate.php To question the motives and actions of our leaders does not imply any defence of Saddam or the insurgents and al Qaida operatives who have filled the void in his wake. The portrayal of dissent that criticises US foreign policy, as promoted by the left, as automatically implying support for Saddam/insurgents, because they are one's enemy's enemies, remains a wildly innacurate textbook caricature. Such cheapshots remain a dimunition of what is actually the widespread and wide ranging anti-war feeling. In other words it remains another PR tactic liberally deployed against genuine dissent against the war on Iraq, by those actively keen of promoting that war, or interested in salvaging their reputations for having been amongst the war's original cheer-leaders. However, until we take on board the real impact of US led wars upon the ordinary people at the sharp end of the smart bombs, then such wars will continue to happen. This is precisely because the PR information-war element, and the management perception of public opinion therein, remains utterly, utterly crucial in getting the war planes out of their bases in the first place. Whilst October 2006 is being hailed as the month when all the lies and fanfare of 'the Iraq mission' finally cracked, we will have to wait until after the US mid-term elections, to see whether it results in any changes in stated (and false) goals of US policy in Iraq. Remember, the hot air about 'maybe changing course,' comes from the same channels as the hot air which sold the war, and the channels of hot air which has sustained the pr narrative for three and a half years since the invasion, that Iraq is making great leaps down the road towards effective democratic self-rule. The likelihood remains that 'staying the course' will mean exactly that, but where the real course is the one not often publicly stated … BACK TO TOP