It was another one of those discouraging weeks in Iraq — you know the type. Bombs going off. People dying in large numbers. Very… well… discouraging. But far be it from our leaders to become discouraged with the project itself. And no, I don’t mean this project they call “Middle East democracy”, because that’s just some policy hack yammering. I mean the real Iraq project involving permanent U.S. bases in country and an Iraqi government compliant with (or at least sensitive to) our wishes. Something tells me that project will withstand a good many setbacks of the type that involve loss of life and limb, so long as those lives and limbs belong only to the relatively poor and poorly connected. It was with this goal in mind that our leaders insisted on starting this disastrous war back in March 2003, and if they’ve shown an element of regret over that decision during the last four years, I’ve missed it.

Actually, the “project” was dealt a minor blow in the past couple of weeks with the drafting of legislation regulating the Iraqi oil industry. I say minor because the legislation does actually appear to allow foreign (i.e. U.S.-based) companies to invest in the Iraqi oil industry without significant limits and to repatriate most if not all of the profits from those investments. However, outright privatization of the industry has been left out of this draft. According to Christian Parenti in last week’s Nation, the law has not provided for productions sharing agreements — contracts that allow massive profit-taking and asset management advantages on the part of the petroleum multinationals. (Previous iterations of the law had been a bit kinder to Bush’s friends in the industry.) I’m certain they haven’t exhausted all of their options on this point, and the law does allow them a strong foothold in some of the richest oil fields on earth. But what isn’t really being reported on is the role these efforts play in fueling the insurgency.

Imagine just for a moment that the Iraqis are not simple, ignorant people who have been waiting since the bronze age for us to come and grant them “freedom”. Imagine that people in the insurgency and folks like Moqtada al Sadr have a somewhat subtle understanding of their own national self-interest. Imagine, too, that they have been paying attention to U.S. policy in the region over the past half century… perhaps paying it greater attention than we ourselves have done. How can we expect that they would show any enthusiasm over our apparent intention to settle in for a good long stay? How can we think that they would willingly submit themselves to a government dominated by people who were living in exile prior to the arrival of U.S. forces in 2003? Do we really think that they will sit still while our armed forces (government-run and private) are in occupation of their country and our commercial sector lobbies for greater influence?

If so, we suffer from a morbid kind of optimism, tacking somewhere between Pollyanna and Pangloss. Kind of late in the game for these sorts of illusions, isn’t it?

luv u,

jp

In their efforts to paper over a catastrophe, the Bush administration (and Iraq war supporters in general) are beginning to look like Saddam’s old press spokesman, “Comical” Ali, who steadfastly denied the advance of U.S. troops to Baghdad in 2003 when his audience could easily see American tanks in the street behind him. There’s a P.R. hero for you. Bush really needs that guy! All he’s got is his lame cousin Tony Snow, his even lamer “uncle” Dick Cheney, and the ever faithful bride of Frankenstein, Laura, who opined to Larry King recently that things are going not too badly in Iraq except for that one bombing that discourages everyone. I think she may have meant to use another word that begins with “dis”, like “dismembers”. In any case, all this minimizing does have some effect. Some recent polling shows that large numbers of Americans have no even semi-realistic notion of how many Iraqis have been killed since we unilaterally decided to “liberate” their country (by destroying it). People seem to think about 10,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003 — that’s only 1/3 of the ludicrously low-ball estimate Bush himself offered some months back.

Would it make a difference if people were more broadly aware of, say, Les Roberts’ Johns Hopkins study that estimates the death toll at as high as 650,000? I mean, imagine it were explained to the American people that the type of statistical model used in this study is the same that is routinely applied to war zones all around the world. What would we do with that knowledge? Would we force our leaders to end the war now? Or do we really only care about American lives? Hard to say. I like to think that many of us would be appalled to know that Bush had brought us back into Rwanda territory (we’ve certainly been there before). I don’t know if that would be enough to bring a stop to all this. What worries me is the degree to which people tolerate this war. This sort of permissiveness merely encourages bad behavior on the part of our leaders. Let one president get away with mass murder, and you can bet the next one will try the same thing. There are precedents.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ll have to wait for the next president. This one and his team are ready to strike a blow against Iran and, more broadly, what they view as Shi’ite extremism on the rise throughout the region. They appear to think that they can attack the center of regional Shi’ism without pissing off the millions of co-religionists who live in neighboring Iraq. (Check out Sy Hersh’s article in this week’s New Yorker.) And sure, I know the administration has said they will sit around a table with representatives of Iran, but that’s likely just so that they can say they went the extra diplomatic mile before bombing Tehran. It’s hard to imagine any foreign policy team that includes creatures like Elliott Abrams would offer the hand of friendship to a regime in whose vilification they’ve invested so much of their political capital. As Hersh and others have reported, the Bush administration is wittingly or unwittingly setting the stage not just for war with Iran, but for a regional conflict between Shi’as and Sunnis. Think they wouldn’t dare push their luck? Think harder.

As long as we don’t hold people accountable for this disaster, they will cause new disasters. And we will be left with the bill.