Wednesday 6 August 2003

Iraq isn't working

Doesn't it just make you positively bubble with excitement to know that your taxes are paying for this shit! They are denying money to public-services, transport and just about everything else and instead spending it on Tony's airfair to Barbados and goddamn cruise missiles that they're shooting at innocent people. And all the while Blair the Deciever is sunning is pasty white butt and drinking Pina Coladas whilst scrounging of yet another rich person - as if he doesn't have enough cash himself! Yup, just another day on planet earth brought to you by the Sons of Satan Himself!

I wonder if I asked nicely enough if Sir Cliff would let me use his retreat as well... Not bloody likely!


by Robert Fisk

click here to visit his website Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" very well. He wears a business suit and combat boots. As the proconsul of Iraq, you might have thought he'd have more taste. But he is a famous "antiterrorism" expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast army of international companies - most of them American, of course - and creating the first democracy in the Arab world. Since he seems to be a total failure at the "antiterrorist" game - 50 American soldiers killed in Iraq since President George Bush declared the war over is not exactly a blazing success - it is only fair to record that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well.

In theory, the news is all great. Oil production is up to one million barrels a day; Baghdad airport is preparing to re-open; every university in Iraq is functioning again; the health services are recovering rapidly; and mobile phones have made their first appearance in Baghdad. There's an Iraqi Interim Council up and hobbling.

But there's a kind of looking-glass fantasy to all these announcements from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the weasel-worded title with which the American-led occupation powers cloak their decidedly undemocratic and right-wing credentials. Take the oil production figures. Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, even chose to use these statistics in his "great day for Iraq" press conference last week, the one in which he triumphantly announced that 200 soldiers in Mosul had killed the sons of Saddam rather than take them prisoner. But Lt-Gen Sanchez was talking rubbish. Although oil production was indeed standing at 900,000 barrels per day in June (albeit 100,000bpd less than the Sanchez version), it fell this month to 750,000. The drop was caused by power cuts - which are going to continue for much of the year - and export smuggling. The result? Iraq, with the world's second-highest reserves of oil, is now importing fuel from other oil-producing countries to meet domestic demands.

Then comes Baghdad airport. Sure, it's going to re-open. But it just happens that the airport, with its huge American military base and brutal US prison camp, comes under nightly grenade and mortar attack. No major airline would dream of flying its aircraft into the facility in these circumstances. So weird things are happening. The Iraqis are told, for example, that the first flights will be run by "Transcontinental Airlines" (a name oddly similar to the CIA's transport airline in Vietnam), which is reported to be a subsidiary of "US Airlines" and the only flight will be between Baghdad and - wait for it - the old East Berlin airport of Schönefeld. A British outfit calling itself "Mayhill Aviation" has printed advertisements in the Iraqi press saying that it intends to fly a Boeing 747 once a week from Gatwick to Basra, a route which suggests that it is going to be British military personnel and their families who end up using the plane.

Open universities are good news. And few would blame Bremer for summarily firing the 436 professors who were members of the Baath party. In the same vein, the CPA annulled the academic system whereby student party members would automatically receive higher grades. This is real de-Baathification. But then it turned out that there wouldn't be enough qualified professors to go round. Quite a number of the 436 were party men in name only and received their degrees at foreign universities. So at Mustansiriyah University, for example, the very same purged professors were re-hired after filling out forms routinely denouncing the Baath party. Bremer seems to have a habit of reversing his own decisions; having triumphantly announced that he'd sacked the entire Iraqi army, he was humiliatingly forced to put them back on rations in case they all decided to attack US soldiers in Iraq.

Health services? Well, yes, the new Iraqi health service is being encouraged to rehabilitate the country's hospitals and clinics. But a mysterious American company called Abt Associates has turned up in Baghdad to give "Ministry of Health Technical Assistance" support to the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and "rapid response grants to address health needs in-country". It has decreed that all medical equipment must accord with US technical standards and modifications - which means that all new hospital equipment must come from America, not from Europe.

And then there's the mobile phones. Just over a week ago, my roaming Lebanese cellular pinged into life at midnight and, after a few hours of scrambled voice communication, picked up mobile companies in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain (depending on where you happened to be in Baghdad). Less than a week later, however, the Americans ordered the system shut down because the Bahrain operating company, by opening its service so early, was supposedly not giving other bidders a fair chance at the contract. Those other companies are largely American.

Of course, Iraqis protest at much of this. They protest in the streets, especially against the aggressive American military raids, and they protest in the press. Much good does it do them. When ex-Iraqi soldiers demonstrated outside Bremer's office at the former Presidential Palace, US troops shot two of them dead. When Falujah residents staged a protest as long ago as April, the American military shot 16 dead. Another 11 were later gunned down in Mosul. During two demonstrations against the presence of US troops near the shrine of Imam Hussein at Karbala last weekend, US soldiers shot dead another three. "What a wonderful thing it is to speak your own minds," Lt-Gen Sanchez said of the demonstrations in Iraq last week. Maybe he was exhibiting a black sense of humour.

All this might be incomprehensible if one forgot that the whole illegal Iraqi invasion had been hatched up by a bunch of right-wing and pro-Israeli ideologues in Washington, and that Bremer - though not a member of their group - fits squarely into the same bracket. Hence Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime instigators of this war - he was among the loudest to beat the drum over the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist - is now trying to deflect attention from his disastrous advice to the US administration by attacking the media, in particular that pesky, uncontrollable channel, Al-Jazeera. Its reports, he now meretriciously claims, amount to "incitement to violence" - knowing full well, of course, that Bremer has officially made "incitement to violence" an excuse to close down any newspaper or TV station he doesn't like.

Indeed, newspapers that have offended the Americans have been raided by US troops in the same way that the Americans have conducted raids on the offices of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader, Ayatollah Mohammed al-Hakim, is a member of the famous Interim Council - not exactly a bright way to keep a prominent Shia cleric on board. But the council itself is already the subject of much humour in Baghdad, not least because its first acts included the purchase of cars for all its members; a decision to work out of a former presidential palace; and - this the lunatic brainchild of the Pentagon-supported and convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi - the declaring of a national holiday every 9 April to honour Iraq's "liberation" from Saddam.

This sounds fine in America and Britain. What could be more natural than celebrating the end of the Beast of Baghdad? But Iraqis, a proud people who have resisted centuries of invasions, realised that their new public holiday would mark the first day of their country's foreign occupation.

Full story...