The Rag Blog

BAGHDAD — Iraq is hemorrhaging doctors as violence racks the nation. To stem the flow, the Iraqi government has recently taken a cue from Saddam Hussein: Medical schools are once again forbidden to issue diplomas and transcripts to new graduates.

Hussein built a fine medical system in part by withholding doctors’ passports and diplomas. Although physicians can work in Iraq with a letter from a medical school verifying their graduation, they say they need certificates and transcripts to work abroad.

It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Electricity in Baghdad was more reliable; sectarian hostility was rare; Iraq was safe — except for the many victims of Hussein’s tyranny. But rarely has the government embraced a policy that so harshly evokes the era of dictatorship. To some students and doctors, the diploma decision, like Iraq’s crumbling medical system, provides clear proof of the government’s helplessness and the nation’s decline.

“I don’t think anybody would think now to go back like it was in Saddam’s time. It would be a scandal,” said an incredulous Akif al-Alousi, a leader of the Iraqi Medical Association, upon hearing about the measure from a reporter. After verifying it, Alousi said that the association would challenge the rule, which he called a violation of “basic rights.”

Noor Jassem, 24, a fifth-year medical student at Mustansiriyah Medical College in Baghdad, agreed.

WASHINGTON, May 4 (IPS) – With just over 18 months left in office, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush appears once again to be moving in a more “realist” direction in its dealings with the rest of the world, including the Middle East.

The most obvious sign came during this week’s regional meeting in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent a 30-minute tete-a-tete with her Syrian counterpart, Walid al-Moallem, reportedly focused on securing greater cooperation from Damascus on sealing its border with Iraq.

It was the first bilateral cabinet-level encounter between the U.S. and Syria since the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in protest of which Washington recalled its ambassador from Damascus.

While Rice later insisted that her meeting differed from last month’s controversial visit to Damascus by Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi because the discussion was both confined to Iraq and no photographers were present to record the occasion, most analysts here saw it one as the latest — and potentially most significant — in a series of tentative steps toward implementing key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), co-chaired by super-realist James Baker.

“Gee, all of a sudden meeting with the Syrian government is not an act of high treason,” wrote Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan on his influential blog, who noted that Rice had even sought Pelosi’s advice before setting out on her trip.

“I can only think that Condi’s meeting with Mouallem is a sign that (Vice President) Dick Cheney’s grip on power inside the White House is slipping badly, and that Condi has Bush’s ear on the need to engage.”

Cheney, the leader of the administration’s hawks, had publicly condemned Pelosi’s visit to Damascus as “bad behaviour”, while some of his neo-conservative allies outside the administration even called for her prosecution under a 200-year-old law that makes it a crime for individual citizens to communicate with hostile foreign governments to influence their behaviour.

Cheney, who is still smarting from Bush’s approval — following a personal appeal by Rice — of a controversial nuclear deal with North Korea in February, suffered another setback this week when the White House announced the resignation of Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch, II, a veteran hard-liner who has overseen the day-to-day management of the National Security Council (NSC) during Bush’s second term.

Crouch, who served first as assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs and then as ambassador to Romania, during Bush’s first term, chaired the inter-agency deliberations that led to the adoption of Bush’s “Surge” strategy to send some 30,000 more troops to Baghdad beginning in February.

He first worked for the vice president when Cheney headed the Pentagon under former President George H.W. Bush. In that capacity, Crouch, long a proponent of developing new nuclear weapons and missile defence systems, helped prepare the 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) overseen by then-Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and the vice president’s future chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, both of whom played key roles in Bush’s first term.

The DPG draft, which was leaked to the New York Times and subsequently repudiated by the elder Bush administration, called, among other things, for Washington to pursue military dominance in and around Eurasia, carry out pre-emptive attacks against potential treats, and rely on ad hoc alliances rather than multilateral mechanisms, such as the U.N. or NATO, to promote U.S. interests — ideas which were incorporated 10 years later in the younger Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy.

The Iraq war and the inquiry into its origins has provoked interest in a number of subjects formerly considered obscure, the discussion of which was once limited to the rarified aeries of academia and specialty journals. Some examples are neoconservatism, just war theory, and, most surprisingly, the theories of Leo Strauss, the philosophical avatar of a cynical Machiavellianism that promotes the idea of the “noble lie.” As the disaster in Iraq unfolded, subjects once considered abstruse were introduced into the pages of the popular press, so that, at one point, we were treated to a long explanation of the doctrines of Strauss in the pages of the New York Times.

As Jeet Heer put it in the Boston Globe,

“Odd as this may sound, we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss, a controversial philosopher who died in 1973. Although generally unknown to the wider population, Strauss has been one of the two or three most important intellectual influences on the conservative worldview now ascendant in George W. Bush’s Washington. Eager to get the lowdown on White House thinking, editors at the New York Times and Le Monde have had journalists pore over Strauss’s work and trace his disciples’ affiliations. The New Yorker has even found a contingent of Straussians doing intelligence work for the Pentagon.”

This sudden interest was due to the unusual number of Straussians who had found their way into close proximity to the centers of power in Washington – an extraordinary number of Strauss’s students (or students of his leading followers) were employed in and around the Bush administration, particularly at key points in the national security bureaucracy, as William Pfaff pointed out, including then- “Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Abram Shulsky of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, Richard Perle of the Pentagon advisory board, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, and the writers Robert Kagan and William Kristol.”

One can easily see how the concept of the “noble lie” fits neatly into the neoconservative scheme of things, and the run-up to the Iraq war is surely a textbook example of the Straussian method in action: an enlightened elite deceives the public into an action that must be taken, after all, for their own good. In this case, we were lied into invading and occupying Iraq, for reasons that had nothing to do with “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s alleged links to al Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both of which the promulgators knew to be lies, and yet reiterated ceaselessly.

Since we are now permanently at war, the ideal atmosphere for a Straussian (or any authoritarian) to theorize in, this is the time for the War Party to come out in the open with its theory of government, which, in normal times, is dressed up as “peace through strength,” and now comes out of the closet as “peace through dictatorship.” Aside from rationalizing a regime based on lies, the Straussian method, and philosophy, is useful in other ways. The prominent Straussian Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, demonstrates his usefulness as a promoter of the regime’s authority, and specifically the supremacy of the executive branch of government in wartime. Mansfield makes “The Case for the Strong Executive” in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and it is an argument that constitutes a vital part of the intellectual blueprint for the dictatorship I wrote about the other day.

Mansfield starts out with a paean to the incorrect and unfortunately near-universal conception of the Constitution as a “flexible” document, and the resulting reference to “the living Constitution” is one of those cliches that no one ever thinks to challenge – except when it’s too late. When the tanks are already rolling through the streets, that is …

Look: there is nothing “flexible” about the Constitution. It means precisely what it says, and its language is not in any way obscure or complex. Furthermore, I would note that every time someone is about to take away our liberties, or in some way circumvent the plain intent of the Founders, they inevitably preface it with odes to the Constitution’s “flexibility.” Balderdash! The Founders meant what they said, and said what they meant in plain and simple English, language that even a Harvard professor can understand. Yet, examining Mansfield’s case for an executive dictatorship – and that is surely the intent of his piece – we see at work the old Straussian method of “reinterpreting” an author’s clear intent to mean its exact opposite.

Now it would seem that the Founders, being revolutionaries, and even libertarians of a sort (except for Hamilton), were intent on setting up a republic of freemen, that is, a form of government that was constitutionally limited and certainly had nothing to do with the royalism against which they had recently rebelled. Ah, but a Straussian can find “hidden” meanings that the rest of us are blind to, and Mansfield detects a built-in contradiction, a deliberate tension between “one-man rule” and the republican spirit that imbues the Constitution with – yes, an authoritarian streak:

“Now the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. The first is that law is always imperfect by being universal, thus an average solution even in the best case, that is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot, who can judge particular circumstances. This defect is discussed by Aristotle in the well-known passage in his ‘Politics’ where he considers ‘whether it is more advantageous to be ruled by the best man or the best laws.’

“The other defect is that the law does not know how to make itself obeyed. …There must be police, and the rulers over the police must use energy (Alexander Hamilton’s term) in addition to reason. It is a delusion to believe that governments can have energy without ever resorting to the use of force.

OTTAWA, May 2 — Reconstruction efforts in Iraq are largely doomed to failure, the former chairman of the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq said Tuesday in an interview.

“Reconstruction is difficult enough in a relatively pacific environment,” said Michael Bell, a retired Canadian diplomat whose two-year term as chairman ended in March. “In this environment it is almost impossible, if not impossible. Over all, the picture is dire, dire.”

His assessment followed a report by inspectors from a United States federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that seven projects the United States had declared successes were no longer operating.

The United States has contributed to the fund, but the fund has mostly been supplied by the European Commission with contributions from Japan and Canada. It is operated by the World Bank and the United Nations.

Mr. Bell, who now teaches at the University of Windsor in Ontario, cited as an impediment a desire by the United States and Britain to initially promote high-profile, high-cost projects like repairing utilities, rather than first developing institutions and personnel for their continued operation.

“The objective was to improve the conditions of life for Iraqis through infrastructure development so Iraqis would conclude that they were better off and prospering from the new situation,” Mr. Bell said. “In retrospect, it was too much, too soon.”

He also criticized reconstruction plans for making private ownership, rather than government ownership, of infrastructure “an overriding objective.” But those plans have been undermined by the widespread instability in Iraq, he said.

Poverty is rampant throughout Iraq with more than half the population lacking basic means to survive, a government survey shows.

The survey by the Central Statistical Bureau says that 43 percent of Iraqis suffer from ‘absolute poverty’ and another 11 percent of them live in ‘abject poverty’.

Both terms are measures aid organizations use to quantify poverty in the world and they refer to people below poverty level.

People in absolute poverty lack the necessary food, clothing or shelter to survive and 43 percent of Iraqis now fall into that category, the survey says. People in abject poverty lack a minimum income or consumption level necessary to meet basic needs and 11 percent of Iraqis are in that category, according to the survey.

The study is the result of a nation-wide survey of families across the country and takes into consideration the millions of Iraqis who have been displaced or forced to flee abroad.

Looking down from the captain’s deck some six stories high, the flight deck of the USS Nimitz is an impressive sight indeed: 80 sleek warplanes armed with bombs and missiles are poised for takeoff at any minute, day or night. The sight of these planes coming and going from that 1,100-foot-long flight deck is almost beyond description. I can attest to this, having sailed on the Nimitz 25 years ago as a reporter for Mother Jones magazine.

Today, the Nimitz is rapidly approaching the Persian Gulf, where it will join two other U.S. aircraft carriers and the French carrier Charles De Gaulle in the largest concentration of naval firepower in the region since the launching of the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years ago.

Why this concentration now? Officially, the Nimitz is on its way to the Gulf to replace the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is due to return to the United States for crew leave and ship maintenance after months on station. But the U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which exercises command authority over all U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf area, refuses to say when the Eisenhower will actually depart — or even when the Nimitz will arrive.

For a time, at least, the United States will have three carrier battle groups in the region. The USS John C. Stennis is the third. Each carrier is accompanied by a small flotilla of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support vessels, many equipped with Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles (TLAMs). Minimally, this gives modern meaning to the classic imperial term “gunboat diplomacy,” which makes it all the stranger that the deployment of the Nimitz is covered in our media, if at all, as the most minor of news stories. And when the Nimitz sailed off into the Pacific last month on its way to the Gulf, it simply disappeared off media radar screens like some classic “lost patrol.”

Rest assured, unlike us, the Iranians have noticed. After all, with the arrival of the Nimitz battle group, the Bush administration will be — for an unknown period of time — in an optimal position to strike Iran with a punishing array of bombs and missiles should the President decide to carry out his oft-repeated threat to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program through military action. “All options,” as the administration loves to say, remain ominously “on the table.”

Meanwhile, negotiations to resolve the impasse with Iran over its pursuit of uranium-enrichment technology — a possible first step to the manufacture of nuclear weapons — continue at the United Nations in New York and in various European capitals. So far, the Iranians have refused to give any ground, claiming that their activities are intended for peaceful uses only and so are permitted under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which it is a signatory. The United States has made vague promises of improved relations if and when Iran terminates its nuclear program, but the full burden of making initial concessions falls on Tehran.

Just this weekend, a conference in Egypt, called by Iraqi officials to explore regional approaches to stability in the region (with Iranian officials expected to be in attendance), was being viewed in Washington as yet another opportunity to pressure Tehran to be more submissive to the West’s demands on a wide range of issues, including Iranian support for Shiite militias in Iraq.

President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these “diplomatic” endeavors — as he describes them — succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response.

And so, knowing that his “diplomatic” efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has “tried everything”; that “his patience has run out”; and that he can “no longer risk the security of the American people” by “indulging in further fruitless negotiations,” thereby allowing the Iranians “to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making,” and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz — and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well — will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum.

[Note for Tomdispatch readers: On this fourth anniversary of the President’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, I urge you to consider ordering yourself a copy of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books). James Carroll, Chalmers Johnson, Katrina van den Heuvel, Howard Zinn, Juan Cole, Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark Danner, and other interviewees provide the best guide possible to the years we’ve just lived through. It’s empire-on-the-run and great reading — and, of course, I’ll be appreciative to each of you forever and ever… Tom]

Bush’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre …Or The Clock Ticks for Thee (in Baghdad and Washington)
By Tom Engelhardt

It had taken much thought and planning that wartime May Day four years ago when George W. Bush co-piloted an S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer, had “embedded” himself on that aircraft carrier days before the President landed. Along with Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and lighting specialist, and Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News television producer, he had planned out every detail of the President’s arrival — as Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times put it then — “even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush’s right shoulder and the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call ‘magic hour light,’ which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.”

Before the President could descend jauntily from that plane into the perfect light of a late spring afternoon, and onto what was essentially a movie set, the Abraham Lincoln, which had only recently hit Iraq with 1.6 million pounds of ordnance, had to be stopped just miles short of its home base in San Diego. No one wanted George W. Bush simply to clamber aboard.

Who could forget his Tom-Cruise-style “Top Gun swagger” across that deck — so much commented on in the media in the following days — to the carefully positioned podium where he gave his speech? It was to be the exclamation point on his invasion of choice and provide the first fabulous photos for his presidential campaign to come. Only two things about that moment, that speech, are remembered today — that White House-produced “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him and his announcement, with a flourish, that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

If his landing and speech are today remembered as a woeful moment, an embarrassment, if those fabulous photos never made it into campaign 2004, that was, in part, because of another event — a minor headline — that very same May day: Halfway around the world, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, occupying an elementary school in Fallujah, fired on a crowd of angry Iraqi demonstrators. Perhaps 15 Iraqis died and more were wounded. Two days later, in a second clash, two more Iraqis would die.

On CNN’s website the day after the President’s landing, the main headline read: “Bush calls end to ‘major combat.'” But there was that smaller, secondary headline as well: “U.S. Central Command: Seven hurt in Fallujah grenade attack.” Two grenades had been tossed into a U.S. military compound, leaving seven American soldiers slightly injured.

In the months to follow, those two headlines would jostle for dominance, a struggle now long over. Before May 1, 2004 ever rolled around, “mission accomplished” would be a scarlet phrase of shame, useful only to critics of the administration. By that one-year anniversary, Fallujah had morphed into a resistant city that had withstood an assault by the Marines. In November 2004, it would be largely destroyed by American firepower without ever being subdued. Now, the already failed American method of turning largely destroyed Fallujah into a giant “gated” prison camp for its residents is being applied to the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, where huge walls are slated to rise around 10 or more recalcitrant neighborhoods as part of the President’s Baghdad Security Plan, or “surge.”

Four years later, casualty figures are so terrible in Iraq that the government, locked inside the Green Zone in the capital, has, for the first time, refused to reveal the monthly figures to the United Nations, though figures do show a continuing epidemic of assassinations of Iraqi academics and of torture of prisoners, a steep rise in deaths among policemen, and a rise in “honor killings” of women by their own families. Four years later, those few “slightly injured” men of the 82nd Airborne Division have morphed into last week’s 9 dead and 20 wounded from a double-truck-bomb suicide attack on one of that division’s outposts in Diyala Province; over 100 Americans were killed in the month of April alone; 3,350 Americans in all (not including hundreds of “private security contractors”).

Four years later, the American military has claimed dramatic success in reducing a wave of sectarian killings in the capital — but only by leaving out of its count the dead from Sunni car/truck/motorcycle-bomb and other suicide-bomb attacks; with over 100 car bombings last month, and similar figures for this one, Sunni militants are outsurging the U.S. surge in Baghdad, making “a mockery of the US and Iraqi security plan,” according to BBC reporter Andrew North.

Four years later, not only has the Bush administration’s “reconstruction” of the country been a record of endless uncompleted or ill-completed projects and massive overpayments, not to speak of financial thievery, but even the projects once proclaimed “successes” turn out, according to inspectors from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, to be disasters “no longer operating as planned”; the biggest business boom in a country in which unemployment is sky-high may be “a run on concrete barriers” for security, which are so in demand that sometimes they “are not fully dry when military engineering units pick them up”; electricity availability and potable water supplies are worse than ever; childhood malnutrition is on the rise; no one even mentions Iraqi oil production which remains well below the worst days of Saddam Hussein and billions of dollars of which are being siphoned off onto the black market.

Four years later, U.S. prisons, one of the few reconstruction success stories in Iraq, are chock-a-block full, holding 18,000 or more Iraqis in what are essentially terrorist-producing factories; Iraq has the worst refugee problem (internal and external) on the planet with perhaps 4 million people in a population of 25 million already displaced from their homes (202 of whom were admitted to the United States in 2006); the Iraqi government inside the Green Zone does not fully control a single province of the country, while its legislators are planning to take a two-month summer “vacation”; a State Department report on terrorism just released shows a rise of 25% in terrorist attacks globally, and 45% of these attacks were in Iraq; 80% of Iraqis oppose the U.S. presence in their country; 64% of Americans now want a timetable for a 2008 withdrawal; and the President’s approval rating fell to its lowest point, 28%, in the most recent Harris poll, which had the Vice President at a similarly record-setting 25%.

During this grueling, destructive downward spiral through the very gates of hell, whose end is not faintly in sight, the administration’s war words and imagery have, unsurprisingly, undergone continual change as well. In the course of these last years, the “turning points,” “tipping points,” “milestones,” and “landmarks” on the road to Iraqi democracy and freedom have turned into modest marks on surveyor’s yardsticks (“benchmarks”), not one of which can be met by the woeful Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The “magic hour light” of May 2003 has disappeared, along with those glorious photos from the deck of the carrier. The sort of descriptions you see today, as in a recent David Ignatius column in the Washington Post, sound more like this: “Republicans voice the bitterness and frustration of people chained to the hull of a sinking ship.” (The USS George W. Bush, undoubtedly.) Oh, and the President and what’s left of his tattered administration have stopped filming on a Top Gun-style movie set and seem now to be intent on remaking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.