2004-08-04

The Making Of A Banana Republic

How to steal a oil-producing Middle-Eastern country.

• Q. Mr. President, some will see the presence of Iraqi exiles — some of whom have received money from the United States government in the past — as proof, in their minds, that this is a puppet government of the United States. Could you answer that criticism? And explain what role, if any, you had in the names, as they —

  THE PRESIDENT: I had no role. I mean, occasionally, somebody said, this person may be interested, or that — but I had no role in picking, zero. Secondly, in terms of whether or not our government helped, we did help some of the figures now in the interim government. We helped them because they were fierce (sic) anti-Saddam people. We helped their organizations, which were — which believed that the tyranny of Saddam was bad for the Iraqi people.

• Asked how big a role the American administration had in forming the government and selecting the prime minister and president, the UN envoy Lakdhar Brahimi reminded reporters that American Ambassador L. Paul Bremer runs things in Iraq. Bremer is the dictator of Iraq, he said. He has the money. He has the signature. He also added, I will not say who was my first choice, and who was not my first choice … I will remind you that the Americans are governing this country.
• The Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies (ICRSS) conducted a poll in May 2004 asking Iraqis to rank 17 prominent religious and political leaders. Iyad Allawi, Prime Minister of the interim government finished in sixteenth place. Behind him, dead last, was Ghazi al-Yawer, the President of the interim government.

Do you know who sealed the fate of Saddam Hussein? Was it the Neocons? Or the US Congress? Maybe George W. Bush? All wrong. It was Oprah Winfrey. Oprah is the most powerful woman in the United States. For millions of housewives across the US, her word is the gospel. She can make obscure ideas into a national obsession. Books that she reviews invariably end up in the New York Times Bestsellers list. She is so powerful that when she declared that she wasn’t going to eat any more beef from nonvegetarian cows, meat futures fell and several American states enacted laws to prevent people from talking about unsafe food. Realising her immense potential and since women form half the population, Bush & Co. decided to tap her show for promoting the war in Iraq.

Normally, her show features issues such as embracing your womanhood, weight reduction, or debt relief. Sometimes, she does interview people like Jennifer Lopez or Jim Carrey. Because Star World shows reruns* of old episodes, I got to see this episode, which was originally aired in the US in October 2002. I did not see the entire show because it interferes with CNBC’s Breakfast Briefing and Zee English’s The Benny Hill Show. One of her guests was a former CIA analyst called Kenneth Pollack. His book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq was featured prominently in the program. There was one thing that he said which caught my attention. He said that information from scores of defectors from Iraq has provided the intelligence community with intcontrovertible evidence that Saddam had a credible WMD programme going on and it would be a short time before he used it on the United States.

This is indicative of pattern before the war when tall tales from defectors was provided to the public via the media as evidence. Hundreds of millions of American taxpayers money was spent by the CIA and the Pentagon for educating the media. One Iraqi group called the Iraqi National Congress had provided the U.S. Senate a list of 108 articles that were published with their information. The contents of the list was revealed by Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells in an article titled Global Misinformation Campaign was Used to Build Case for War.

Now, the US government officials want everyone to believe that the defectors misled them with false information. When it really mattered, defectors were not used. Because Saddam was such a ruthless killer, few people volunteered with information or agreed to act as spies. Even victims of his atrocities would not dare to cooperate because they were afraid of being betrayed. The only reliable intelligence that the US could obtain was via weapons inspectors. They went to all potential military targets and provided the US military with GPS readings. This was the reason why the US insisted on inspecting Saddam’s presidential palaces. A journalist named Judith Miller of the New York Times insisted that Saddam kept biological and chemical weapons under his palace of all places. Saddam may have been a cruel man but he was certainly not an idiot!

In May 1998, US Congress enacted the Iraqi Liberation Act, which authorized the US president to give away millions in American tax dollars to one or more Iraqi democratic opposition organizations. The Iraqi National Congress headed by the alleged Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Accord headed by hired killer Iyyad Allawi were then identified as a legitimate Iraqi democratic opposition organizations. Over the years, Iraqi outfits such as these made more money than was officially sanctioned.

Ahmed Chalabi had previously left Iraq when he was 13. In 1989, Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for embezzlement, fraud and currency-trading irregularities in Jordan related to his Petra bank. He was accused of spiriting away $70 million to secret Swiss bank accounts. In 1992, he started the INC at a meeting in Vienna. In 1993, James Woolsey (the CIA director under the Clinton administration) made him the major recipient of funds meant subversion activities in Iraq. Despite allegations of misappropriation and failure to submit proper accounts, funds kept flowing to the INC. In 1995, the INC backed by special forces from the US launched an offensive against Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish North. Chalabi had then convinced the CIA that Iraqi troops would desert en masse and join ranks with the INC. This however did not happend and the Iraqi Bay of Pigs adventure was a complete disaster. Over 600 INC men were airlifted and resettled in the US under new identities. The Iraqi Liberation Act was enacted in 1998 and the INC started receiving funds overtly. Chalabi was also working with the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency and made numerous visits to Israel. His Israeli contacts brought him closer to the neoconservative movement (neocon) in the US. When George W. Bush became President, his cabinet was practically run by neocons. Soon, Chalabi was America’s favorite to succeed Saddam Hussein. In the run up to the war, Chalabi met executives of big American oil companies such as Chevron and ExxonMobil and assured them huge bounties of oil in a post-Saddam Iraq. In the last days of the war, Chalabi returned to his native country at the ripe old age of 60. Inside Iraq, he was backed by a small American-funded army called the Free Iraqi Forces. At best, they did not number more than 1500. Sometimes, they were loaned from Kurdish parties. On 6 April 2003, Chalabi was airlifted to Nasiriyah, where his men enacted a welcoming party, which involved jumping and chanting, for the benefit of print and TV journalists. For the BBC and the CNN, this stunt was a sign of the crook’s growing popularity in Iraq. The Time magazine has published a more glowing account of Chalabi rally in Nasiriyah. It is really a gem of American journalism. Please read it. Anyway, the Free Iraqi Forces accompanied US military’s psyops (psychological operations) squads to take part in publicity stunts so that Iraqi faces can be shown to TV cameras and press photographers. Their most famous exploit was the toppling of the saddam statue, which has now been declared as an elaborate fake. After Baghdad fell, Chalabi prevailed upon the US administration to dismiss everyone associated with the former regime. The Iraqi army was disbanded. Everyone in the civilian administration were dismissed. The result was chaos. In the meantime, Chalabi was helping his friends win huge contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In exchange, he agreed to take the entire blame for misleading the US government about Iraqi weapons program, Al Qaeda ties, and the Iraqi hospitality towards US occupation.

Iyad Allawi, the head of the Iraqi National Accord (INA), has been brought in as a replacement for the now disgraced Chalabi. Iyad Allawi was the guy who gave the British Prime Minister Tony Blair the information on the notorious 45-minute claim. Nevertheless, he has been made the interim prime minister of Iraq by the Americans. Allawi had lived for 32 years outside Iraq. He was originally member of the Baath Party. His college buddies allege that his medical degree was a bogus and that it was conferred on him by the Baath Party to enable him to go to London on a WHO scholarship grant. According to Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Allawi was then a paid Mukhabarat agent. In the 60s, Allawi sought out Iraqi dissenters and killed them on behalf of the Baath Party. According to his official history, he broke his links with Saddam in 1971. It also states that Iraqi agents broke into his room and attacked him with an axe (yes, an axe) behind his head, on his chest and on his thigh. The final blow, it says, almost severed his leg. Allawi however bears no sign of that attack and has no discernible limp. Allawi never completely cut his ties with Ba’athist army and intelligence officers. One year after Chalabi’s failed northern push, Allawi tried a coup inside Iraq involving Iraqi army officer with financial help from the US, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Allawi’s vanity led him to boast about an impending coup in Baghdad to the Washington Post. Whether the coup was real or not, Saddam took notice. Some 30 generals had lost their lives.

With Iyyad Allawi as PM, the Americans are now trying to get the death penalty back, which was abolished by Paul Bremer in the wake of the US invasion with great fanfare. Because the US could not do this themselves, it was necessary to have an Iraqi do it. The interim prime minister has kindly obliged. In July, the interim government printed out a new law, which gave Allawi extraordinary powers to declare curfews, restrict communications, seize assets, and restrict civic associations.

Unlike in Hollywood films, American soldiers have no appetite for any real fighting. During the invasion, the BBC showed live an event in which American special forces backed by hundreds of Peshmerga guerillas requested close air support to take on a few Iraqi snipers. An F-16 was then brought in to drop huge bombs on the small bunker. All throughout the invasion, American soldiers rarely engaged the Iraqi army. When they did, they dug in and brought in the heavy artillery. Now that Iraq is under full occupation, American soldiers are faced with a different kind of enemy – the Iraqi resistance consisting of ordinary Iraqi civilians. Instead of taking them on like men, the US military continues to use aircraft. Tanks are used to shell civilian areas. Places like Fallujah receive the worst punishment. After each attack, someone from the interim government gives out a statement saying that the civilian authority was asked for permission and the leader of the civilian authority Iyyad Allawi granted that permission.

Somewhere along the road, the US realized that the resistance offered by Iraqis was bad propaganda. So, they brought in a bogeyman called Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. He has been blamed for everything from the train bombing in Spain to all sorts of violence in Iraq. If a cat ate a mouse, then the spokesman for the American coalition would come out with a statement saying that it was a classic Zarqawi operation. Zarqawi is a convenient ruse for the US. Because Zarqawi is a Jordanian, the entire Iraqi resistance could be branded as the work of foreign fighters.

One of the most serious acts of terrorism that Zarqawi has been blamed is the beheading of an American businessman called Nick Berg. Many people believe that the beheading was staged by the CIA. The slain mans’s father has complained that the US government was not telling the whole truth about the incident. Analysis of the video had raised a lot of questions. CNN linguists found that the man who claimed to be Zarqawi did not speak in the Jordanian dialect. The scream, supposedly of Nick Berg’s, seemed to have been recorded at a different time than when the incident was videographed.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
– George W. Bush, President of the United States.

The Americanization of Iraq proceeds at an astonishing pace, the Iraqis are taking to freedom like fish to water, and the possibilities for this nation are endless.
– Ann Coulter, political commentator.

It is unlikely that Zarqawi will ever be caught. Otherwise, the coalition would not have someone to blame everything on. Apart from Zarqawi, a new player has joined the Baghdad scene – John Negroponte, who replaced Paul Bremer as the United States Ambassador to Iraq. Negroponte is a notorious figure. He has an intimate familiarity with mass killing, covert operations and death squads. Under Nixon, he went to Vietnam. Under Ronald Reagan, he was appointed as US ambassador in 1981 to the Honduras. There he oversaw export of CIA coke (cocaine) to the United States and import of weapons for onward shipment to Nicaragua and El Salvador. Honduras is the perfect stereotype of a banana republic. For several decades, the country was run by the United Fruit Company, Honduran military and the US embassy. Even though Honduras had no internal or external enemies, military aid to that country went up from $3.9 million in 1981 to $77.4 million in 1984. Under Negroponte, the CIA raised the notorius Battallion 3-16, which indulged in kidnapping, torture and murder of opponents of the Honduran regime. The Baltimore Sun revealed that the unit used electric shock and suffocation as its favored interrogation technique, murdering prisoners afterwards. Negroponte supervised the creation of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which also served as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. UN Truth Commission has gone on record that 85% of the 22,000 extra-legal murders in El Salvador were carried out by US sponsored death squads in alliance with the Salvadoran military. On March 25, the Los Angeles Times reported on the sudden deportation from the United States of several former Honduran death squad members who could have provided damaging testimony against Negroponte in his Senate confirmation hearings. One of the deportees was General Luis Alonso Discua, founder of Battalion 3-16. In the preceding month, Washington had revoked the visa of Discua who was Honduras’ Deputy Ambassador to the UN. Nonetheless, Discua went public with details of US support of Battalion 3-16.

• – The History Channel is showing reruns of a documentary titled Saddam Hussein: The Butcher Of Baghdad. This was also shown in the US before the second Gulf war. It is one more example of shrewd propaganda. In the final scenes, the voiceover says that Iraq was manipulating the UN. When the voice of Hans Blix is heard, he says that Iraqis have been relatively cooperative. The documentary ends with US President Bush giving a warning to Saddam Hussein and claiming that his patience was running out.