The Rag Blog

A U.S. Army captain in Africa waxes philosophical. It’s like the old saying, he opines; “give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever.”

Is he talking about skills-building, or community empowerment? No: Captain Joseph Cruz goes from channeling the musician Speech from the American hip-hop group Arrested Development back to his military-approved talking points: “the same can be said about military to military training and that’s why we do it.”

The Delta company soldier is one of 1,800 based in Djibouti at an old French Foreign Legion base, and he is comparing lessons in small naval patrol boat tactics, approaches to counter terrorism operations, and how to use an M-16 rifle, to teaching a man to fish.

It is not just the Djiboutians who are receiving these lessons — members of the Ethiopian, Ugandan and Kenyan armed forces have also been on “fishing trips” with the U.S. military.

Most Americans have never heard of Djibouti, and fewer can pronounce it correctly, but here — far from the bombed bridges of Baghdad and the flourishing poppy fields of Afghanistan — is the third front of the war on terrorism. As Rear Admiral Richard Hunt, the Commander of Combined Joint Taskforce-Horn of Africa (or CJT-HOA, in inimitable military style), explains: “Africa is the new frontier that we need to engage now, or we are going to end up doing it later in a very negative way.”

As part of the CJT-HOA these soldiers are also building schools, digging wells and sanitizing slaughterhouses. Their work is delineated by the four Ps and the three Ds: Prevent conflict, promote regional stability, protect coalition interests and prevail against extremism in East Africa and Yemen through diplomacy, development and defense.

Amid the commemorations, tributes, and critiques that cluster around the September 11 anniversary, we should not lose sight of how the war on terrorism is militarizing Africa. With under-tapped oil reserves, vast stretches of ungoverned space, impoverished populations and pandemics of AIDS/HIV and other diseases, Africa is now on Washington’s radar screen. The National Security Strategy for the United States, 2006 says: “Africa holds growing geo-strategic importance and is a high priority of this administration.” But the most significant way that high priority status is being expressed is through commitments of military aid, training, troops and equipment.

The U.S. base in Djibouti is just one plank in a new platform of military engagement in Africa. There is also the Trans Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI), which Congress funded at $500 million over six years in 2005. There are also increased naval maneuvers in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, and establishment of a P3 Orion aerial surveillance station in Algeria.

And now, as though the Pentagon does not have enough on its plate, President George W. Bush has established United States African Command (AFRICOM) as the newest U.S. military sphere of influence. The command brings together most of the continent (Egypt will remain under CENTCOM) for the first time, and according to President Bush it “will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa.”

But the administration is mostly trying to define AFRICOM by what it is not:

Theresa Whelan, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, says: “Africa Command is not going to reflect a U.S. intent to engage kinetically in Africa. This is about prevention. This is not about fighting wars.” At another point, Whelan also said “This is not about a scramble for the continent.”

“We are not at war in Africa. Nor do we expect to be at war in Africa. Our embassies and AFRICOM will work in concert to keep it that way,” notes Jendayi Frazer, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa.

Despite these reassurances, many African nations view this move with a healthy dose of skepticism. They are expressing this view by shutting their doors. AFRICOM is temporarily based in Germany, but commanders hope to make the move to the region by fall 2008. The military seems to be favoring a “lily pad” approach of small bases across West Africa and the Horn region so as to not commit significant troops or lend credence to African concerns of a U.S. occupation. But where are these lily pads going to go?

Zambia has said no. In early September, President Levy Mwanawasa said that within the Southern African Development Community (a network of fourteen nations) “none of us is interested” in hosting the command. The South Africa Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota has refused to meet with U.S. General William “Kip” Ward, who will command AFRICOM. Lekota said recently, “Africa has to avoid the presence of foreign forces on her soil.”

But, some countries are viewing AFRICOM as an opportunity. The United States has already secured access agreements with Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Gabon and Namibia. And the United States’ close ally Liberia has aggressively promoted of the Command. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf penned a widely cited and circulated op-ed for AllAfrica.Com that hyped the Command as an opportunity for African nations. She has lobbied hard for AFRICOM to come to Liberia. The United States is also looking at Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia as possible locations.

In case none of these options work out, the Navy has a novel (and very expensive) idea to forgo land completely and house AFRICOM on a high-tech joint command and control ship that would circumnavigate the region.

Even as these discussions continue, some African nations are receiving significant increases in military aid and weapons sales; most of these increases have gone to oil-rich nations and compliant states where the U.S. military seeks a strategic toehold. The Center for Defense Information recently completed “U.S. Arms Exports and Military Assistance in the “Global War on Terror;” an analysis of increases in military aid since September 11, 2001. The report compares the military aid and weapons sales in the five-year leading up to 2001 and the five years since.

For example: since September 11, Kenya, which the State Department describes as a “frontline state” in the war on terrorism, has received eight times more military aid than in the preceding five years.

Djibouti, which has opened its territory to U.S. forces, received forty times more military aid, and an eightfold increase in the value of weapons transfers.

Oil-rich Algeria, where the surveillance equipment is based, has received ten times more aid and a warm embrace from Washington.

Nigeria, the fifth largest supplier of oil to the United States, is slated to receive $1.35 million in Foreign Military Financing for 2008 despite persistent human rights abuses.

Mali is described as an “active partner in the war against terrorism” by the State Department and is a good example of a little military aid going a long way. The desert nation is slated to receive just $250,000 in International Military Education and Training (IMET funding) and no Foreign Military Financing in 2008. But, Mali participates in both the Regional Defense Counter Terrorism Fellowship Program and the Anti-terrorism Assistance program, receiving additional funding through these programs. Aid comes in other forms too. Just this week, a U.S. C-130 military transport plane dropped food aid to Malian soldiers as they pursued armed members of the Tuareg ethnic group. This sort of assistance is not documented or quantified in any ledger or report but — if repeated regularly — could significantly increase the Malian military’s capabilities.

U.S. arms sales to Ethiopia, which has one of Africa’s largest armies, have roughly doubled and military aid has increased two and a half times. But the nation has not received military Humvees since 2002, when it used them against its own people. During protests following the May 2002 elections, the Ethiopian military fired on crowds from the Humvees, killing 85 people. The U.S. sold the Humvees to Ethiopia for counter-terrorism operations. Will the other military assistance Ethiopia receives be similarly abused?

It is always heartening (and non-threatening) to hear soldiers speaking of their mission in altruistic terms. “The hope is to prevent another Iraq or Afghanistan by giving back,” says John Harris, commander Command Senior Enlisted Leader of CJT-HOA. But, the soldiers are not there to make friends. The base had been used twice to launch incursions into Somalia (without the permission or even knowledge of the Djiboutian government).

Richard Lugar (R-IN), one of the wise men in the Senate, commented during an AFRICOM hearing that the Pentagon enjoys far greater resources than the State Department. He observed, “This imbalance within our own structure will be reflected in AFRICOM initially — hopefully not perpetually.” There is no indication that humanitarian investments will outpace military contributions any time soon — especially when the justification for aid remains the war on terrorism.

The Congressional Research Service’s latest accounting of the Global War on Terrorism, of which AFRICOM would be a part, puts the cost at $611 billion since 2001, not including additional recent requests of $147 billion and another $50 billion.

For less than that $808 billion spent in the last six years, we could provide universal primary education, reduce infant mortality by two thirds and provide universal access to potable water and not just for the United States, but also for the world. These Millennium Development Goals have languished with sporadic investment and big promises, while military solutions to problems are funded robustly.

Reexamining this imbalance seems like a crucial first step. And the battle for African hearts and minds will not be won if it’s clear that it is being waged more for the sake of U.S. strategic interests than African needs.

Six courageous families in the small Louisiana town of Jena sent out a call for justice that has now been amplified around the world. Yesterday’s mass protests in Jena were unlike anything I have seen in my life, a beautiful and enormous outpouring of energy and outrage that may have the potential to ignite a movement.

The basic facts of the case are by now widely known. In this 85% white town, where the high school yard was segregated by race, a Black student asked to sit under a tree that had been reserved for white students only. The next day, three nooses hung from the tree. The white students who hung the nooses received only a minor punishment, and more importantly, no one in the white power structure of LaSalle Parish, where Jena is located, seemed to take the nooses seriously as racial incident. There were no lectures to the students on the meaning of the nooses, or the legacy of racism, slavery and Jim Crow in the rural south. Instead, the Parish’s district attorney told protesting Black students that he could take away their lives, “with a stroke of my pen.” He then proceeded to attempt to do just that, charging six students with attempted murder after a schoolyard fight later that year.

In the nine months since their children were charged with attempted murder, the family members of the Jena Six organized meetings, hosted rallies, sent out press releases and letters and made phone calls – whatever they could think of. They were determined to not let this stand. For months, they stood nearly alone, accompanied by solidarity visits from activists from nearby towns and cities in Louisiana and Texas. Many of their friends and neighbors were afraid to speak out, and some reported having their jobs threatened. One white couple who spoke out said they felt pressured to leave town. But, in the face of what seemed like overwhelming obstacles, and with no organizing experience or friends in high places, the people of Jena continued to struggle. After months of silence from the media and from mainstream civil rights organizations, the first media stories began appearing, which were widely forwarded by mail, and amplified by homemade videos. After Mychal Bell’s conviction at the end of June, and stories on Democracy Now and in the Final Call newspaper, support started growing exponentially, with hundreds of letters bringing tens of thousands of dollars in donations. By September, it became a movement that even the corporate media could not ignore.

At 5:00am, the buses were already arriving. A full bus from Chicago emptied out, some people brushing their teeth as they stepped into the slightly cold pre-dawn air. They seemed exhausted, but also charged and energized. Next came buses from Baton Rouge, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. By 7:00am, reports were coming in that hundreds of buses were lined up outside of town, some having been briefly prevented by State police from entering. Meanwhile, hundreds of people, from cars and buses and motorcycles, were pouring into Jena, while many thousands more were gathering in the streets outside the Jena courthouse. As simultaneous rallies began in the two locations, thousands of more people streamed into the city. By 9:00am, there were, by some estimates, up to 50,000 people in this town of 2,500. Almost every business in town was shut down, many roads were closed by police checkpoints, and a sea of protest filled the city for miles.

This demonstration was not initiated by any one national organization, and there was little coordination between some of the major organizations involved. The initial call came from the families themselves, and most people had heard about the demonstration through local Black radio stations, especially on syndicated shows like the Michael Baisden and Steve Harvey shows, as well as through blogs and youtube (one activist-made youtube video, recommended by Baisden, has already been seen well over a million times) as well as on social networking sites like myspace. As Howard Witt has pointed out in the Chicago Tribune, “Jackson, Sharpton and other big-name civil rights figures, far from leading this movement, have had to scramble to catch up. So, too, has the national media, which has only recently noticed a story that has been agitating many black Americans for months.”

This decentralization was beautiful, although sometimes chaotic. As thousands gathered at the rally at the ball field, which was sponsored by the NAACP, thousands more demonstrators marched from the courthouse to the Jena High School, and tens of thousands continued to arrive and fill the streets around downtown Jena. Because this movement was without central leadership, there were many agendas, and also some confusion, as people were unsure when the march began, or if there was a march, and also unsure about parallel events, such as an afternoon hiphop concert at the ball field, which was mostly attended by people from the local community. People seemed unconcerned about the lack of clarity, however, and marched on their own schedule, which led to a more democratic feel to the day, unlike the more controlled, and sometimes disempowering, marches that some mainstream groups have organized in the past.

The t-shirts on display reflected the lack of central control – every community had made their own t-shirt, literally hundreds of variations on the theme of Free The Jena Six, many personalized to reflect their school or community. Hours of speakers delivered messages of solidarity and calls to action, from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to performers such as Mos Def and Sunni Patterson, while the enormous crowds marched and chanted, and also simply basked in a truly historic outpouring of activism. Participants varied from children and teens at their first demonstration to civil rights movement veterans. Many people who had never before been to a demonstration ended up organizing a delegation or booking a bus for this journey.

While the vast majority of the white community of Jena chose to stay either indoors or out of town, hundreds of Black Jena residents proudly displayed their “Free The Jena Six” shirts, and continued to gather in the ball field hours after most out of town visitors had left. White activists from across the US also largely stayed away from this historic event – perhaps 1 to 3 percent of the crowd was white, in what amounts to a disturbing silence from the white left and liberals. This silence indicates that the US Left is divided by race in many of the same ways this country is.

Yesterday’s march, however, was not about division. It was a generational moment – the kind of watershed event that could signal a turning point in our movements. But what does the gigantic crowd in Jena mean? For some supporters, it felt like a fulfillment of those months that the families stood alone – a moment where the world stood with them, and the power structure backed down. In the last week Mychal Bell’s convictions have been overturned, and most of the other students saw their charges lessened. Yesterday was also a moment for grassroots independent media, who built this story, and kept it alive until the 24 hour news channels could no longer ignore it. It was a moment for historically black colleges and universities to shine – Student activists organized bus convoys – five or more buses arrived from many southern schools – which were quickly filled by a broad range of students.

Yesterday was a moment for the unaffiliated left, for people everywhere concerned about a criminal justice system that has locked up two million and keeps growing. It was a moment for those concerned about school systems in the US, and especially the policing of our schools, what activists have called the School to Prison Pipeline. It was a moment for those that feel that the US has still not dealt with our history of slavery and Jim Crow, and our present realities of white supremacy. Perhaps that is where the power in yesterday’s demonstration lies; if this undirected and uncontrolled outrage can be directed towards real societal change, if outrages like Jena can finally bring about the conversation on race in this country that we were promised after Katrina, if this united movement to support these six kids can show that we can unite for justice and win, then Jena will truly have been a victory.

As writer Andre Banks asked yesterday, “What would happen if every person who wore a t-shirt today or handed out a flyer or wrote a blog post woke up tomorrow and looked for the Mychal Bell in their own backyard? He, or she, won’t be hard to find. What if our outrage, today directed at the small Louisiana town of Jena, extended to parallel injustices in Detroit or Cincinnati or Sacramento or Miami? What if we viewed this mobilization not as the end of a successful, innovative campaign, but as the moment that catalyzes us into broader and deeper action in every place where we are?” If this happens, we can say that it all began with six families in Jena, Louisiana, who refused to stay silent.

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Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine , a journal of grassroots resistance. His May 9, 2007 article from Jena was one of the first to bring the case to a national audience. His previous articles from Jena are online at http://www.leftturn.org. To contact Jordan, email: neworleans@leftturn.org. On myspace: http://www.myspace.com/secondlines.

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Resources:

New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) and Network of Teacher Activist Groups (TAG) have developed: Revealing Racist Roots: The 3 R’s for Teaching About the Jena 6, a curriculum guide for teachers to address what’s happening in Jena. Download the resource guide in PDF Version or Word Version for free at: www.nycore.org OR www.t4sj.org.

Donate to support the legal defense fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
PO BOX 2798
Jena, LA 71342

Sign the petitions at: http://www.colorofchange.org/jena/

For more information or to offer concrete support, email:
jena6defense(at)gmail.com

Coverage from The Final Call newspaper: http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3937.shtml

Andre Banks’ Blog: writewhatilike.typepad.com

The Jena Six and the School To Prison Pipeline: http://naacpldf.org/content.aspx?article=1208

If you are in nyc and want to get involved Jena Six Support, email: da_bla2@yahoo.com.
In New Orleans, email: neworleans@leftturn.org.

Has anyone noticed that our commander-in-chief no longer plays dress up? He hasn’t done so for a while and that’s no small thing. It’s a phenomenon that came and went almost without comment in the media.

I don’t remember the first time I noticed that George W. Bush liked to dress up. It could have been in May 2003 when he strutted across that carrier deck all togged out to announce that “major combat operations had ended” in Iraq, or when he started appearing before massed, hoo-ahing troops in military-style jackets with “George W. Bush, Commander in Chief” hand-stitched across the chest, or when he served that inedible turkey in Baghdad. I can’t tell you either when it first registered that he was visibly enjoying himself “in uniform”; or when it occurred to me that this was not just play-acting, but actual play of a very young and un-presidential sort; or when I first noticed that, “in uniform,” he looked strangely like a life-sized version of the original 12-inch GI Joe doll. (“Action figure” was the term first invented for it, because who wanted a boy to think he had a Barbie, even if it came with its own “beach assault fatigue shirt” and “bivouac pup-tent set”?)

Here’s something I suspect goes with the above. With rare exceptions, the fiercest post-9/11 “warriors” of this administration were never in the military. They had, in the Vice President’s words, “other priorities in the ’60s.” Hence that old (and not very useful) term “chickenhawks.” On the other hand, a surprising number of Democrats in Congress had actually served in the military — not that, from Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry to Jack Reed, it’s done them much political good. Americans have preferred, it seems, to hear their war stories from the men who sat out the wars.

The reason, I suspect, is simple enough. I’m about George Bush’s age. My father, like his, fought in Asia in World War II. In the 1950s, my childhood years, that generation of fathers — the ones I knew, anyway — were remarkably silent on their actual war experiences, but to us kids that made no difference. All we had to do was walk to the nearest neighborhood movie theater, catch Merrill’s Marauders, or some other war flick, and it was obvious enough just what heroic things they had accomplished. George Bush and I both sat in the dark, enveloped in the same American mythic tradition — already then a couple of hundred years old — that I’ve called “victory culture”; we knew Americans deserved to, and would, triumph against savage enemies out on some distant frontier; we both thrilled to the sound of the bugle as the blue coats charged; we both felt the chills run up our spine as, with the Marine Hymn welling up, the Marines advanced victoriously while “The End” flashed on the screen.

Here’s the difference: I left that movie theater in the Vietnam era. Much of the Bush administration seems to have remained in the dark. There, it seems, they sat out defeat and emerged strangely untouched, as I’ve written elsewhere, as the Peter Pans of American war play. While, in the 1980s, G.I. Joe shrunk to 3¾-inch size to squeeze into the Star-Wars universe and began fighting fantasy villains, while others absorbed the Vietnam lesson, they arrived in the post-9/11 moment with a still untarnished dream of American triumphalism. And that, as Ira Chernus makes clear in a recent essay, “Glued to Our Seats in the Theater of War,” is what Americans wanted–and many, against all odds, still want–to hear.

The President and his top officials were the ones who could still embody the idea of a “Good War,” both enjoying the performance themselves and making it seem thrilling; and, for some years, a remarkable number of Americans suspended Vietnam-style disbelief and went with the flow. Under the circumstances, a surprising number still do. It just turned out–and who in the “reality-based” world can truly be surprised–that they couldn’t translate their all-American fantasy world, or the President’s dress-up dreams, into reality. Fighting actual wars proved a painfully different matter.

09/21/07 “The Nation” – – Blackwater USA’s mercenary mission in Iraq is very much in the news this week, and rightly so. The private military contractor’s war-for-profit program, which has been so brilliantly exposed by Jeremy Scahill, may finally get a measure of the official scrutiny it merits as the corporation scrambles to undo the revocation by the Iraqi government of its license to operate in that country. There will be official inquiries in Baghdad, and in Washington. The U.S. Congress might actually provide some of the oversight that is its responsibility. Perhaps, and this is a big “perhaps,” Blackwater’s “troops” could come home before the U.S. soldiers who have been forced to fight, and die, in defense of these international rent-a-cops.

But it is not the specific story of Blackwater that matters so much as the broader story of imperial excess that it illustrates.

If Blackwater, with an assist from the U.S. government, beats back the attempt by the Iraqis to regulate the firm’s activities — as now appears likely, considering Friday’s reports that the firm has resumed guarding U.S. State Department convoys in Baghdad — we will have all the confirmation that is needed of the great truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: This is a colonial endeavor no different than that of the British Empire against America’s founding generation revolted.

But even if Blackwater loses its fight to stay, even if the corporation is forced to shut down its multi-billion dollar, U.S. Treasury-funded operation in Iraq, the brief “accountability moment” may not be sufficient to open up the necessary debate about Iraq’s colonial status. The danger, for Iraq and the United States, that honest assessment of the crisis will lose out to face-saving gestures designed to foster the fantasy of Iraqi independence.

It is not enough that Blackwater is shamed and perhaps sanctioned. A Blackwater exit from Iraq will mean little if its mercenary contracts are merely taken over by one or more of the 140 other U.S.-sanctioned private security firms operating in that country — such as Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

Whatever the precise play out of this Blackwater moment may be, the likelihood is that the colonial enterprise will continue. That’s because, in the absence of intense pressure from grassroots activists and the media, Congress is unlikely to go beyond a scratch at the surface of what is actually going on in Iraq.

The deeper discussion requires that a discussion about the substance that no less a figure than former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan describes as the reason for the invasion and occupation of this particular Middle Eastern land: oil

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. aptly observed that “colonialism was made for domination and for exploitation,” and there is no substance that the Bush-Cheney administration is more interested in dominating and exploiting than oil.

Thus, while it is right to pay close attention to the emerging discussion about Blackwater’s wicked work in Iraq, Americans would do well to pay an equal measure of attention to the still largely submerged discussion about an Iraqi oil deal that will pay huge benefits to the Hunt Oil Company, a Texas firm closely linked to the administration. How closely? When he was running Halliburton, Cheney invited Hunt Oil Company CEO Ray Hunt to serve on the firm’s board of directors. Hunt, a “Bush Pioneer” fund raiser during in 2000 who went on to serve as donated the tidy sum of $35 million to the Bush presidential library building fund.

The new “production sharing agreement” between Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government puts one of the administration’s favorite firms in a position to reap immeasurable profits while undermining essential efforts to assure that Iraq’s oil revenues will be shared by all Iraqis. Hunt’s deal upsets hopes that Iraq’s mineral wealth might ultimately be a source of stability, replacing the promise of economic equity with the prospect of a black-gold rush that will only widen inequalities and heighten ethnic and regional resentments.

The Hunt deal is so sleazy — and so at odds with the stated goals of the Iraqi government and the U.S. regarding the sharing of oil revenues — that even Bush has acknowledged that U.S. embassy officials in Baghdad are deeply concerned about it. What Bush and Cheney have been slow to mention is the fact that Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, says the deal is illegal.

As with the Blackwater imbroglio, however, there is no assurance that the stance of the Iraqi government is definitional with regard to what happens in Iraq.

That is why it is disturbing that, for the most part, members of Congress — even members who say they do not want the United States to have a long-term presence in Iraq — have been slow to start talking about Hunt’s oil rigging.

One House member who has raised the alarm is Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich, who in his capacity as a key member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has asked the committee’s chairman, California Democrat Henry Waxman, to launch an investigation into the Hunt Oil deal.

“As I have said for five years, this war is about oil,” Kucinich, who is mounting an anti-war bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, declared on the floor of the House this week. “The Bush Administration desires private control of Iraqi oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up control of their oil. We have no right to set preconditions to Iraq which lead Iraq to giving up control of their oil. The Constitution of Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property for all Iraqi people.”

With that in mind, Kucinich explains, “I am calling for a Congressional investigation to determine the role the Administration may have played in the Hunt-Kurdistan deal, the effect the deal will have on the oil revenue sharing plan and the attempt by the Administration to privatize Iraqi oil.”

Waxman has been ahead of the curve on Blackwater, seeking testimony from the firm’s chairman at hearings scheduled for early October.

But Waxman needs to expand his focus, and the way to do that is by heeding Kucinich’s call for an investigation into the Hunt deal.

That inquiry should begin with two fundamental questions:

And, if the claim is that the Iraqis are in charge, then why is Ray Hunt about to start steering revenues from that country’s immense oil wealth into the same Texas bank accounts that have so generously funded the campaigns of George Bush and Dick Cheney?

WASHINGTON (Sept. 22) – Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock, N.C.

A spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking comment Friday. The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George Holding, declined to comment, as did Pentagon and State Department spokesmen.

Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad .

The officials could not say whether the investigation would result in indictments, how many Blackwater employees are involved or if the company itself, which has won hundreds of millions of dollars in government security contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is under scrutiny.

In Saturday’s editions, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that two former Blackwater employees – Kenneth Wayne Cashwell of Virginia Beach, Va., and William Ellsworth “Max” Grumiaux of Clemmons, N.C. – are cooperating with federal investigators.

Cashwell and Grumiaux pleaded guilty in early 2007 to possession of stolen firearms that had been shipped in interstate or foreign commerce, and aided and abetted another in doing so, according to court papers viewed by The Associated Press. In their plea agreements, which call for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the men agreed to testify in any future proceedings.

Calls to defense attorneys were not immediately returned Friday evening, and calls to the telephone listings for both men also were not returned.

The News & Observer, citing unidentified sources, reported that the probe was looking at whether Blackwater had shipped unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq without a license.

The paper’s report that the company itself was under investigation could not be confirmed by the AP.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a review of security practices for U.S. diplomats in Iraq following a deadly incident involving Blackwater USA guards protecting an embassy convoy.

Rice’s announcement came as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad resumed limited diplomatic convoys under the protection of Blackwater outside the heavily fortified Green Zone after a suspension because of the weekend incident in that city.

In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, rebels.

The Turks provided serial numbers of the weapons to U.S. investigators, said a Turkish official.

The Pentagon said in late July it was looking into the Turkish complaints and a U.S. official said FBI agents had traveled to Turkey in recent months to look into cases of missing U.S. weapons in Iraq.

Investigators are determining whether the alleged Blackwater weapons match those taken from the PKK.

It was not clear if Blackwater employees suspected of selling to the black market knew the weapons they allegedly sold to middlemen might wind up with the PKK. If they did, possible charges against them could be more serious than theft or illegal weapons sales, officials said.

The PKK, which is fighting for an independent Kurdistan, is banned in Turkey, which has a restive Kurdish population and is considered a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department. That designation bars U.S. citizens or those in U.S. jurisdictions from supporting the group in any way.

The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it, perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan .

Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.

In response, Krongard said in a written statement that he “made one of my best investigators available to help Assistant U.S. Attorneys in North Carolina in their investigation into alleged smuggling of weapons into Iraq by a contractor.”

His statement went further than Waxman’s letter because it identified the state in which the investigation was taking place. Blackwater is the biggest of the State Department’s three private security contractors.

The other two, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, are based in Washington’s northern Virginias suburbs, outside the jurisdiction of the North Carolina’s attorneys.

On January 6, 2007, two days after Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, about 1,000 activists laid down on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach to spell out the word “IMPEACH!” in 100-foot letters. Photos of the clear message to Pelosi taken from a helicopter appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and on websites around the world (for photos and footage, see www.beachimpeach.org).

On April 28, five days after Representative Dennis Kucinich filed articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, the second “Beach Impeach” event spelled out the words “IMPEACH NOW!” In the neighborhood of 1,500 people participated in that event, which also involved standing in formation to spell out “PEACE NOW!”

When by mid-summer Pelosi was still disinterested taking action against Cheney or Bush, Brad Newsham, the principal organizer of the first two events, was ready for a third. On September 15, he struck again on Crissy Field near San Francisco’s Marina district.

Newsham wrote in a September 7 email: “Today I managed to speak to the senior staff member in Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office, and through him I invited Ms. Pelosi to occupy the fourth seat in our helicopter. After all, there is going to be a crowd of impeachment-impassioned folks right there in her constituency, and maybe this would be a perfect time for her to at least have a bird’s eye view of them. When he said that Rep. Pelosi was not available that day, I invited him, the senior staff member himself, but he quickly said he was not available either — in fact no one from Pelosi’s office would be available that day. ‘So is this a dead end?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ End of curt, even icy, conversation.”

As with the first two beach mobilizations, at the September 15 protest volunteers circulated with postcards and pens to generate constituent messages to Pelosi, while a photographer circled in a helicopter overhead.

I spoke to San Francisco resident Valerie Coshnear at the event’s end, who told me, “The last two times I did the Impeach-on-the-beach-thing, I did it with “E”s. I did not have to become any other letter. Just get up and down and do the wave thing, touch the sea wall, do the boogey woogey.”

Warming to the topic, Ms. Coshnear went on, “This time I wanted more of a challenge. I decided to be in the “M” in IMPEACH, which required moving to make up the the “N” in ” REASON:” and “TREASON!” [the second two words spelled out]. It was a wonderful letter to be in because previously I could only say “I think therefore I “M”, but today I was lying with over a thousand people in the grass at Crissy Field, tendrils of fog stretching from the tip of the Golden Gate swirling overhead. In our 100 foot letter alone, several hundred people who don’t buy the lies of those unconscionable traitors and warmongers in the White House, could lay down their bodies and say as one mammoth letter “We think, and are willing to move, therefore we ‘M.'” Other participants seemed equally giddy with enthusiasm, and Brad Newsham, who directed the sitting-to-standing human wave activities from a step ladder, was jubilant afterward. (It was also the cabdriver/writer/activist’s birthday, and the assembled protestors serenaded him with “Happy Birthday to You” several times.)

Like many of those I spoke to at Crissy Field, Newsham was pleased that anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan recently threw her hat into the ring to run against Pelosi. Sheehan committed to running against the veteran politician because of the Speaker’s refusal to push impeachment.

“Cindy is a Voice of the People ­ the freshest one I’ve heard recently,” he told me. “She strikes me as uniquely un-bought, and seems fueled not by ambition but by the pain of having her son ripped away from her by a band of criminals. Imagine a House of Representatives full of people like Cindy — like us — instead of the elite who have eternally toyed with us.”

Sheehan’s son Casey was killed in Iraq, which led her to camp out near President Bush’s vacation ranch in Crawford, Texas, to send an unwavering anti-war message to Bush and the entire world.

Sheehan’s statement upon launching her candidacy clearly showed she was out to rock the boat: “An electorate disgusted with the policies of the Bush regime put the Democrats in the majority in Congress in November ’06. We voted for change, however, Congress, under the Speakership of Ms. Pelosi has done nothing but protect the status quo of the corporate elite and, in fact, since she has been the Speaker, the situation in the Middle East has grown far worse, with Congress’ help, and recently more of our essential freedoms were given to BushCo by Congress. That is not what we elected them to do!”

In a commentary largely supportive of Sheehan’s initiative, Nation Magazine political corresponent John Nichols noted, “Pelosi has all the advantages of incumbency — and more. Closely tied for decades to the Democratic political establishment of San Francisco, Pelosi and her campaign team know just about everything there is to know about winning elections there. And, as the Speaker of the House, she has the ability to deliver both on the practical and egotistical needs of the city by the bay. Additionally, she has the ability to raise and spend more money than any opponent.”

But given that 58% of San Franciscans voting in November 2006 endorsed Proposition J, which called for impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney, on one of the most important issues of the day Sheehan is clearly more in line with the majority of Pelosi’s constituents than the Speaker. It should be an interesting campaign.

Why are a growing number of young women in this relatively safe corner of Iraq showing up in local hospitals, dying of suspicious burns?

Sept. 18, 2007 – The doctor knows, just from glancing at the burns, that someone is lying to him. Srood Tawfiq, a reconstructive surgeon at Sulaimaniya Hospital in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region, buttons his white lab coat and steps into the burn unit. “Busy day yesterday,” he says, pulling back a curtain to reveal a sleeping 16-year-old girl with kerosene burns over 90 percent of her body. The mother of the young woman, hovering over the hospital bed, tells Tawfiq that her daughter slipped and scalded herself while carrying a portable stove. The doctor listens sympathetically. But later, out of the woman’s earshot, he explains that he doubts the mother’s explanation. If it were really an accident, he whispers, “you don’t get this degree of burn.” Outside the hospital room he pulls off his hygienic mask and shakes his head. “We never tell them that they’re going to die,” he says quietly.

Kurdistan has long been considered the one consistently safe and relatively prosperous region of Iraq. So why, in increasing numbers, are the territory’s young women showing up at local hospitals dying of suspicious burns? According to the Women’s Union of Kurdistan, there were 95 such cases in the first six months of 2007, up 15 percent since last year. A December 2006 report from the Asuda women’s rights group in Sulaimaniya says that the “phenomenon is increasing at an alarming rate.” Ninety-five percent of the victims are under 30, and roughly half are between 16 and 21. On the day before I stopped by the emergency hospital in Sulaimaniya, six young women were admitted with major burns, three of them telling suspicious stories. When I called Zryan Yones, the Kurdish health minister, he said that the trend among young women is more disturbing than a recent outbreak of cholera. He provided a startling statistic: since August 10, Kurdistan had had nine deaths from its cholera epidemic; in the same period, there were 25 young women dead of burns. “I have one young girl lying in our morgues every single day,” he told me.

So what’s going on? Most of the survivors tell doctors that the burns resulted from a “cooking accident.” But surgeons told me they can tell that the vast majority are not telling the truth. Kerosene, the fuel used to cook here, is not particularly volatile; if a woman comes in with burns over the majority of her body, it is likely intentional. Women’s rights advocates in Sulaimaniya believe that the majority of the burn cases are suicide attempts; the remainder are suspected to be honor killings or other murders disguised as accidents or suicide. (“Cooking accident” has long been a euphemism for dowry killing in India.) Doctors told me that it’s virtually impossible to distinguish between murder and suicide based on the burns and the women’s stories. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests that the trend may be aggravated by a copycat effect among Kurdistan’s teenagers. One 20-year-old woman, Heshw Mohammad, who briefly considered burning herself after her father killed her boyfriend two years ago, told me that self-immolation has become a sort of fashion among teenage Kurdish women. “They imitate each other,” she says.

Four fresh developments – involving Israel, France, and Washington and Tehran themselves – are bringing closer a war that could happen by accident.

The two most recent columns in this series have focused on the increasing tensions between the United States and Iran, evident in the belligerent statements coming out of Tehran and the even more sustained, hostile rhetoric emanating from the George W Bush administration and the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party (see “Baghdad spin, Tehran war” [6 September 2007] and “Iran: war and surprise” [13 September 2007]).

On the American side, the political offensive has been accompanied by comments from the United States military and diplomatic leadership, not least General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker’s related criticisms of Iranian involvement in Iraq at the congressional hearings of 10-11 September 2007.

There are strong arguments that the warlike rhetoric aids the political leaderships on both sides in their respective domestic predicaments. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has even been criticised within his own party for a cavalier attitude to inflation (now running at over 20%), while for his part Bush is widely seen as a lame-duck president. In these circumstances, the danger is that a febrile, antagonistic atmosphere reinforces a climate that could – quite possibly by accident – quickly escalate into war.

Indeed, even in the past week four additional developments have ratcheted up the tensions even further. In the context of the underlying balance of forces in the Persian Gulf region, make it necessary to analyse what would happen if there really was a war with Iran.

A spark, and a flame

The first development was the unexpected statement from France’s foreign minister Bernard Kouchner that war with Iran could not be ruled out. Kouchner is one of Nicolas Sarkozy’s appointees from the political left, and is routinely regarded as a foreign-policy liberal; his record includes advocacy of intervention on human-rights grounds in disaster-zones and “failed states”. This context, and the fact that Kouchner’s comment (misunderstood or not) no doubt reflects the views of his president, reinforces the sense that the French government is moving closer into line with the Bush administration – indeed, more so than Germany, Italy, Spain or even Britain.

France’s motives may include an oil-related desire to improve relations with Washington; the French oil company, Total, is now linked with Chevron in plans to develop the Majnoun oilfield in southeast Iraq (see Pepe Escobar, “French-kissing the war on Iran”, Asia Times, 18 September 2007). This is a potentially lucrative deal, but requires the acquiescence of the Iraqi parliament – and that is unlikely without American involvement.

The second development is the claim made by Iran that 600 of its Shihab-3 medium-range missiles are available to target United States forces in Iraq and selected sites in Israel (see “Response to pro-Zionists on Oct. 12′”, Jerusalem Post, 17 September 2007).

The third development is Israel’s enigmatic air-raid in northern Syria on 12 September (supplemented by the declaration on 19 September that it now considered Gaza an “enemy entity”). The Syrian raid is particularly worrying for Iran, less because it was directly affected but more because the response among Arab states (some of whom Iran has been attempting to cultivate) has been so muted. This at least suggests – and it must be a worry for Tehran – that whatever else might ensue if war does break out, there will be little regional support for Iran.

The fourth development is the convening by the Bush administration of a meeting of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council in Washington on 21 September directed against Iran. The principal aim is to intensify and strengthen the sanctions already in place against Iran on account of its nuclear-power programme; the US will also seek backing for its blacklisting of the Pasdaran-e Inqilab (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) on the grounds that it supports terrorism.

This combination of events does not – any more than the pre-existing tensions outlined in the previous column in this series – mean that war between the United States and Iran is inevitable. It is the case, however, that public and media discourse in the US is moving in the direction of “preparing” citizens for that possibility. Such a situation opens out the field of potential dangers, among which is one or more relatively small incidents could precipitate a full-blown conflict.

Such an incident might be engineered by Israel, by US forces entering Iranian territory or waters, or (perhaps more likely) by radical elements within the Revolutionary Guards seeking to regain their diminishing status within Iranian society. If a crisis did develop rapidly to the point of major US air-strikes on Iranian targets, ultra-radicals on both sides would be delighted. For Washington’s neo-conservatives, it would be a near-ultimate vindication. But what would happen when the balloons popped?

A war and its aftermath

A war with Iran, irrespective of how it started, would stretch well beyond a couple of days of strikes by US air-force and navy planes, and missiles against Iranian nuclear facilities (see “The next Iran war”, 16 February 2006). There would also be attacks against four other sets of Iranian targets: air defences, air bases, missiles and command- and-control systems. Some of these would be targeted even before nuclear facilities were hit, partly to reduce the risk of US aircrew casualties (and hostages, a recurrent American nightmare in relation to Iran).

The US requirement to counter Iranian retaliation, especially by Revolutionary Guard units against Iraq and oil facilities in the western Gulf, means that its forces would have to attack numerous “forward bases” of the guard. This will involve a strenuous effort to severely damage transport and communications nodes, especially in western Iran; there could even be attempts to destroy the Iranian political leadership.

All these plans make operational sense from a strictly military standpoint, but two of their aspects are immediately apparent. The first is that the scale of the assault is such that it could not be completed within a few days. The combined US air force and navy might be formidable, but even this degree of force would be stretched to undertake hundreds of sorties stretching over many days; repeated reconnaissance, including bomb-damage assessments in between the raids; many repeat operations; and improvised reactions to setbacks, accidents or unexpected events. It would be clear, almost from the start, that this would not be over within a week.

The second aspect is the mismatch that would soon appear between early appearance and underlying reality. It is highly likely that the early indications from a sustained US military operation against Iran would be of a crippling of Iranian military power and of serious damage to its nuclear programme. America, in other words, would appear to have “won” this brief war. This, however, would be an even greater illusion than the three-week race to Baghdad in March-April 2003. It is highly unlikely that, however much wishful thinking there might be to this effect in Washington, the governance of Iran will fall apart at the seams – let alone evacuate the scene to social collapse and implosion, as happened in Iraq.

What is far more probable on the Iranian side is that the Revolutionary Guards would be revitalised to spearhead a vigorous campaign in Iraq, and to back retaliation against US allies in the western Gulf (including strikes against their oil facilities). This strategy might evolve over many weeks or even months – just as in Iraq four months passed between the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime and the first big indication of the war that was unfolding, the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003.

It is also as certain as can be that the Iranians would seek every means possible to speed the development of nuclear weapons. These two processes – Iran’s deepening involvement in Iraq and its intensified nuclear programme – would in turn provoke further US military action, involving both the deployment of ground forces across the border from Iraq and repeated air-raids.

There is more. As a war with Iran escalated, the impact on the al-Qaida movement would be galvanising. Al-Qaida might have little or no affinity for Shi’a Iran but the Islamic identity of the republic would in the midst of war against the “great satan” transcend confessional differences. Islam would be under renewed attack in a new theatre of war, and that war would moreover be covered in great depth by the regional satellite news-channels with their commanding, engaged audiences across the middle east and beyond.

A perilous moment

This is only the rudimentary outline of the broad, probable consequences of a United States war with Iran. There must be many more detailed calculations available to strategists in the Pentagon and military colleges across the US. But whether the Pentagon or openDemocracy is the preferred source, this sketch is already enough to indicate why many among the US military – as well as senior figures in the US state department – are strongly opposed to the idea of an escalating conflict with Iran.

Such internal dissent over the drive to war also means that a sudden, large-scale attack by the United States on Iran remains unlikely. What becomes more plausible by the week is that a spark might start a conflagration – a war not entirely by accident but not by direct design either. And once it started, there would be little prospect of turning back.

The impulse that drives United States policy in Iraq is reflected in the professional character of its leading military and diplomatic figures, says Tareq Y Ismael.

A potentially decisive season of hearings and discussions about the performance and future of United States forces in Iraq has come to a provisional conclusion with the Congressional testimony of the US’s two leading players in Baghdad: military commander General David H Petraeus and ambassador Ryan Crocker. But any expectation that their or their predecessors’ reports assessing the progress of the military “surge” and its accompanying political efforts has proved futile. Instead, Washington – and United States political discourse about Iraq more generally – sleepwalks (see Gideon Rachman, “Many contenders but just one voice”, Financial Times, 18 September 2007).

This outcome suggests that the feverish predictions of a momentous opening of real debate about the consequences of the US invasion of Iraq were always grounded in fantasy. As with the frenzied anticipation that surrounded the Iraq Study Group report of December 2006, the real attention is better focused on the underlying character and dynamics of the US project than on official, establishment discourse, which tends to evade this key issue (see “The Iraq Study Group report: an assessment”, 8 December 2006).

The immediate pre-history of the Petraeus and Crocker reports is a healthy corrective to the temptation – indulged by critics of the George W Bush administration too – to overestimate the chances of a new course in Iraq as long as the existing power-brokers in Washington are in charge.

The background of policy

Most analysis and commentary on Petraeus’s and Crocker’s reports have been presented without due attention to the background of the men who wrote the reports, as well as outside the larger and relevant context of occupation and destruction. Many observers have focused attention on the minutiae of the so-called “Anbar model” – whose speciousness was in any case highlighted by the subsequent killing of Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the chief Iraqi figure of the “Anbar Salvation Council”. Few have sought clues to the reports’ findings in the professional character of their putative authors; but they are there to be found.

General David H Petraeus is an ambitious, intelligent officer who holds a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University. His first combat mission was the Iraqi invasion in 2003, where he served as the commander of the 101st airborne division. In post-invasion Iraq, General Petraeus has been charged with three roles, each ending in debacle.

First, he was responsible for ensuring stability by recruiting and training the local police force in Mosul. After his efforts had been deemed successful, he left Mosul in February 2004. In November 2004, insurgents had captured most of the city; 7,000 police recruited by General Petraeus either changed sides or simply went home; thirty police stations were captured; 11,000 assault rifles and other military equipment worth $41 million disappeared; and Iraqi army units abandoned their bases (see Patrick Cockburn, “General Surge”, Independent, 9 September 2007).

His second role, which began in May 2004, was training a new national Iraqi army, of which he wrote confidently four months later: “Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being re-established” (see Patrick Cockburn, “President Petraeus?”, Independent, 13 September, 2007). Three years later his trained Iraqi army is still inadequate and is affected by various levels of sectarianism and corruption.

Third, Petraeus was charged with being the executor and the public face of the “surge” policy, launched in February 2007 (see Tom Engelhardt, “Launching Brand Petraeus”, TomDispatch, 9 September 2007). This reflected the narrowing of US strategic goals from those proclaimed by President Bush in November 2005, when he defined victory in Iraq according to a set of short, medium, and long-term goals (the short-term goals included “meeting political milestones; building democratic institutions; standing up robust security forces to gather intelligence, destroy terrorist networks, and maintain security; and tackling key economic reforms to lay the foundation for a sound economy” (see White House, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, 30 November 2005).

When these eluded accomplishment, Bush was forced to lower the bar to the bare requirement of mission stability. Petraeus was picked to manage this objective in late January 2007, and the Senate confirmed the appointment in February, when the six-month US military “surge” commenced.

Ryan Crocker is a career foreign-service officer with long, high-level experience in the middle east and south Asia. He speaks good Arabic, and witnessed the marine withdrawal from Beirut after the suicide-attack that killed 241 of their number in 1983; a withdrawal that was equivalent, in his mind, to capitulation to terrorism. For a brief period in the summer of 2003, Crocker served as political advisor to occupation proconsul Paul Bremer (see Karen DeYoung, “The Iraq’s Report Other Voice”, Washington Post, 10 September 2007).

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, Crocker (then deputy assistant of state for near-eastern affairs), was heavily involved in planning post-Saddam Iraq in what came to be known as the “future of Iraq” project, which produced 1,200 pages of documents covering each facet of Iraqi society and state. As an advisor to Bremer, Crocker shared responsibility for the dissolution of the Iraqi army, implementing the recommendations of the “defense policy and institutions working group”, to the effect of depoliticising the Iraqi army in order to restructure along a positive unifying role (see Farrah Hassan, National Security Archive – Electronic Briefing Book, No 198 [1 September 2006]).

The disaster that followed the disbanding of the army later provided the base of the Sunni insurgency and drove spiralling violence in Iraq; the thinking and approach showed a remarkable ignorance of the indispensable role of the army in Iraqi state and society. Yet, Crocker went on to be appointed the man charged with effecting national reconciliation, economic revival and a re-building of Iraqi infrastructure, all under the shadow of an unpopular occupation.

Crocker is, moreover, an architect of the denationalisation of Iraq’s oil industry, which was a priority among the eighteen benchmarks; this has come to be known as the “oil law” – an opening of Iraq’s national industry to the control of foreign entities. The “oil law” is highly unpopular among huge numbers of Iraqis committed to their own country’s national interests; it is certain to drive fragmentation rather than reconciliation.

The ethos of power

It is now no secret that the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was based on intelligence that was spurious if not downright deceptive; and that the project owes much to longer-term American strategic objectives towards Iraq and the region.

Throughout the 1990s, US strategic concerns were dominated by a constantly growing domestic need for oil articulated by rising power-centres within the economy. In 1999, as CEO of Halliburton, the future vice-president Dick Cheney gave a speech to the Institute of Petroleum which highlighted his own vision of the absolute priority of oil in US grand strategy:

” … by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day … the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies … governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business” (see Energy Bulletin, 8 June 2004).

When Cheney entered the Bush administration, he developed the formula that those who control Iraq will control its vast oil reserves as well as the oil capacities of the larger region.

Today, the paramount role of oil in US grand strategy has become more widely acknowledged, even by establishment figures such as ex-chair of the federal reserve, Alan Greenspan (whose autobiography expresses sadness “that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil”.)

The wider regional and international context of US policy towards Iraq, against the background of the professional and personal profiles of Petraeus and Crocker, makes the political and public-relations aspect of their reports to Congress all the more evident. The heart of the matter was hollow: a campaign to salvage the eroding credibility of a lame-duck president.

The hollowness extends even to the provenance of the respective reports, in light of the close cooperation with the White House involved in generating them:

“Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect examinations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government. And though Petraeus and Crocker presented their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report’s data” (see Julian E Barnes & Peter Spiegel, “Top general may propose pullbacks”, Los Angeles Times, 15 August 2007).

The soft and collusive character of the Petraeus proceedings – with the session effectively framed by sympathetic Republican members ready pre-emptively to pillory those who would question the general’s credibility and/or independence – ensured that such critical questions as there were touched only on details of the general’s report, rather than on the fundamentals of the surge policy and the larger context of occupation (see Leila Fadel, “Security in Iraq still elusive”, McClatchy newspapers, 9 September 2007).

Even earlier “insider” assessments had offered a far bleaker view of US performance – including the government accountability office (GAO) report presented by General David Walker (see Karen DeYoung & Thomas E Ricks, “Report Finds Little Progress On Iraq Goals”, Washington Post, 30 August 2007) and the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, chaired by retired General James L Jones (see William H McMichael, “New Iraq war report echoes previous analysis”, AirForce Times, 18 September 2007).

The mismatch between the fantasies of US progress in Iraq and the realities on the ground suggests that the mindset ruling the strategy is impervious indeed. It recalls a remark directed at General Petraeus by his superior, Admiral William Fallon (commander of Centcom) in their final meeting in Baghdad, in March 2007 – “an ass-kissing little chicken-shit” (see Gareth Porter, “US-Iraq: Fallon Derided Petraeus, Opposed the Surge”, Interpress Service, 12 September 2007). It is in these unguarded soldiering words that the most unvarnished assessment of the ethos that animates Washington’s latest pronouncements on Iraq may lie.

Note: The author would like to thank his postgraduate research assistant, Chris Langille, who provided editorial suggestions and helpful comments.

Tareq Y Ismael is professor of political science at the University of Calgary, and editor of the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies.

In order to save the family farm, bring down skyrocketing health costs, slow down immigration of Mexican farmers who are being driven off their land, and save the Gulf of Mexico, we must stop the Farm Bill, passed by the House and now up in the US Senate.

There may be no better sign of the changing debate over the nation’s farm subsidies: A Midwestern governor running for president calls for cuts in a system that has steered hundreds of millions of dollars a year to his state.