On Christmas Eve 2006, an off-duty Blackwater mercenary, freshly drunk from a party in Baghdad’s Green Zone, got into an argument with a security guard for one of Iraq’s vice presidents. Apparently, the Blackwater guard was trying to force his way into an area where senior Iraqi officials live when he was confronted.
It’s not known what exactly transpired next, but it ended with the Blackwater contractor emptying “the entire magazine of his pistol into the Iraqi,” killing him. Rather than being turned over to the government, the mercenary - one of 1000 Blackwater security guards serving there under a State Department contract - fled to the U.S. Embassy and was whisked out of the country.
Afterwards, iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi reportedly “assured the U.S. ambassador that he was trying to keep the incident out of the public eye.” Abdul-Mahdi told the ambassador that “he hoped the contractor would be brought to justice because Iraqis would not understand how a foreigner could kill an Iraqi and be spirited back home a free man.”
Eight months later, the Blackwater contractor still hasn’t been brought to justice, much less identified.
What makes this incident noteworthy is its disturbing similarity to another killing in 1988 when Uday Hussein, the eldest son of Saddam Hussein, clubbed to death one of his father’s bodyguards. In that case, the Iraqi leader threw his notoriously cruel son in jail for 40 days.
While singular episodes, the two incidents reveal both the impunity of the Hussein and U.S. regimes and how the two states function. Some analysts have described Hussein’s rule as the “tribalization” of Iraqi politics, that is, the power of the state came to rest upon those tribes and clans closest to him, mainly from his home region. thus Uday, as part of his kinship network, was spared any significant punishment for wanton murder.
As for the Bush administration, it has radically privatized warfare beyond war materials or logistical support. Corporations now wage war in secret, without accountabiiity and for profit. The unnamed Blackwater mercenary is part of the 180,000-strong army of guards, engineers, cooks, construction workers, drivers, and others that outnumbers U.S. troops in Iraq. There are numerous accounts of contractors engaging in human rights abuses, torture, and murder. The number of Iraqis killed and wounded at their hands may be in the thousands. But only two private contractors have been indicted on charges of violence, and one involved an incident in Afghanistan.
Judging by these events, the U.S. occupation may seem as tyrannical as its predecessor. Extrajudicial killings are widespread, corruption rampant and deprivation the norm. In fact, the Bush administration has created a regime far more cruel, deadly, and venal than anything that existed under Hussein.
Iraq’s healthcare system is virtually nonexistent. Childhood malnutrition has jumped by nearly 50 percent. Nearly half the population lives in absolute poverty. Access to food, sanitation, and clean drinking water has deteriorated markedly. And these indices compare to a country crushed by severe sanctions. The U.S. military has made Iraq a killing field by arming and funding dozens of sectarian militias. Perhaps more than 100,000 Iraqis have died from aerial bombing. Torture is far more widespread with the proliferation of U.S.-backed death squads and unaccountable security units. And in 2006, Iraq tied for the second-most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International.
Perhaps the grimmest measure is the death toll. During Hussein’s 25-year rule, the highest estimates of how many Iraqis died from his follies and fiendishness is 1 million. Under U.S. rule, the death toll in just four-and-a-half years may already exceed 1 million. (This is based on extrapolating from a study of excess mortality in Iraq conducted by epidemiologists and published in the medical journal Lancet in October 2006.) The number of wounded may exceed this figure. Add in the more than 4 million displaced Iraqis, and nearly one-quarter of the Iraqi population has been killed, wounded, or turned into refugees. At this point, the only way to describe the U.S. war is one of genocide, at least against the beleaguered Sunni Arabs.
So how did a war that was marketed as a crusade to topple a dictator and free a people turn into genocide and perhaps the greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history?
The Iraq War was supposed to be the first step in “democratizing” the Middle East through the barrel of a gun. The Bush administration planned to use Iraq as a base to initiate wars against Syria, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hizbullah. Even Saudi Arabia was considered for regime change. It was the most brazen plan to remake the geoopolitical map through force since fascist Germany and Japan launched World War II.
The plan has backfired, however. U.S. policy has stoked enormous animosity in the Muslim and Arab worlds because it launched two failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stoked a third against Hizbullah, and provoked internecine warfare among Palestinian factions. Iran’s authoritarian theocracy and Hizbullah have benefited, and U.S. policy has brought Iran-friendly Shiite parties to power in Iraq. The Bush administration now looks to corrupt Sunni Arab regimes - Egypt, Jordan,and Saudi Arabia - for support, whereas these countries were denounced as incubators of terrorism after September 11.
The reversal of White House policy is so complete that it’s eating its own tail. It’s now setting up Sunni militias in Iraq to counter the Shiite parties it helped bring to power. Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseing the “surge” (i.e. escalation), has been arming Sunnis to fight the homegrown Al Qaeda in Iraq. But U.S. generals are also encouraging the Sunni militias to fight Shiite militias that proliferated as part of a dirty war against Sunni Arabs that Petraeus helped create in 2004-05.
It’s breathtakingly cynical - arming all sides in a civil war and calling the counterinsurgency a success because Iraqis are killing each other with more gusto than they are killing Americans. These forces are also destabilizing the barely functioning Iraqi state and ensure unrelenting sectarian violence, which the Bush administration and its supporters are now using as the excuse for why U.S. forces must remain.
Two years ago war enthusiasts argued that U.S. forces must remain to prevent civil war. Now that Iraq is in a full-blown civil war, the argument is that U.S. forces must remain to prevent genocide. Yet just as U.S. military and political policies stirred up the civil war, the Bush administration is responsible for the genocide currently occurring in Iraq.
Even though the Iraq War is a disaster, ending it has proven vexing because it is difficult to grasp the historical structure of the war. One can see only a few trees on any given day as the forest is obscured by a mountain of propaganda adn herd reporting. Ephemeral events capture media attention: elections, the Abu Ghraib torture spectacle, the razing of Fallujah, the destruction of the Golden Mosque, the surge. As important as these events are, they are like a destructive earthquake. To know how and why the war began, and how the war is being conducted, we have to delve into historical sub-strata.
Specifically, the conflict has been shaped by these historical forces: the global oil order, U.S. imperialism adn the Middle East, neoliberal doctrine, the rise of the radical right, adn the nature of counterinsurgency war.
Certainly, 9-11 was the catalyst, allowing the U.S. Empire to enter the Middle East through Iraq. The Bush administration attacked Iraq not because it was a danger but for precisely the opposite reason: It posed no threat adn could be subdued easily, providing a potential base for more conquests. But why attack other countries in the region? While the United States invaded Iraq for various reasons - as a demonstration of its power and ability to punish and reward, as a lesson to “rogue states,” and to secure military bases - the issue of oil is inescapable. Prior to 2003, Iraq and Iran represented two of the four major oil producers in the world (Venezuela and Russia are the other two) not subservient to the United States. Controlling these hydrocarbon-rich states would give the United States a chokehold on the economies of its future rivals - West Europe, Japan and China.
This is the essence of imperialism: controlling vital economic and territorial interests, such as nations and oil, military bases, and trade. Across the board, the corporate media, Democratic and Republican Party leaders, pundits, policymakers, and foreign policy establishment support the imperial agenda, which is why they marched blindly to war in 2003. Even now, with both the U.S. public and soldiers clamoring for an end to the war, the major Democratic presidential candidates say they support a withdrawal but then talk about leaving “unspecified” numbers of troops and bases in Iraq for years.
The Bush administration has promoted outsourcing and privatization despite predictably negative outcomes. Outsourcing reconstruction resulted in massive fraud, shoddy work and a disdain of Iraqi experience and labor, but it proved lucrative for well-connected corporations that raked in $50 billion in Iraqi and U.S. government money. The White House tried to turn Iraq into a neoliberal fantasyland by imposing a flat tax, loosening controls on profit making and repatriation, cutting subsidies, selling off state-owned enterprises, and giving oil companies control of Iraq’s reserves.
Most of these policies have not been implemented, but the Bush administration, with assistance from the IMF and World Bank, has cut some food rations and eliminated subsidies on fuels Iraqis need for heating, cooking, transport, and electricity. This has alienated Iraqis through nonfunctioning infrastructure, incompetent security forces, and horrendous living conditions, showing how the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity has undercut its own efforts to subdue Iraq.
The outsourcing has led corporate contractors to favor employing low-wage laborers from Asia (one report states 40,000 from India alone) over Iraqis, creating willing recruits among the legions of alienated, unemployed Iraqi men for resistance groups. As for the contract laborers, Iraq is just another branch of the neoliberal sweatshop economy. Some have been tricked into Iraq and many have had their passports seized, rendering them captives. They are paid as little as $2 a day and perform deadly jobs while being denied basic safety equipment. Like migrant workers around the world they are subcontracted through multiple labor brokers, allowing U.S. corporations to claim ignorance when a scandal results.
The same process is evident in the use of mercenaries, which is anew stage in neo-liberalism, the privatization of warfare. Mercenaries give U.S. forces greater reach by freeing soldiers from many tasks. Their deaths are not included in the official tallies - more than 1,000 mercenaries and private contractors have been killed in Iraq - helping to suppress the official U.S. body count at a time when opposition to the war is largely based on the number of dead American soldiers. And the private forces can also be dispensed with once they are used up, saving the government both expense and any embarrassing Walter Reed Hospital-type scandals.
The Bush administration has been able to continue the war due to the rise of the radical right. Over the last 30 years, the right has created a parallel power structure to the U.S. government and civil society by establishing its own media outlets, a think tank and policy network, grassroots movements, schools and colleges, an executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It has only started to unravel in the last year. But because it does not depend on traditional levers of power and possesses enormous contempt for bourgeois democracy, it can pursue radical policies despite widespread opposition and will not hesitate to use illegal measures and extreme force to get its way.
The Democratic Party is dependent on the formal political structure and incapable of confronting power with power, which is the only way to stop the right. Since the Democrats regained both houses of Congress largely on promises to end the war, they have done the exact opposite and have supported and funded the escalation. Meanwhile, many on the left have forgotten a basic lesson from the Vietnam War: that the political establishment will not end the war on its own. The only way to force a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is to raise the political costs through creative tactics that disrupt the ability of the state to wage the war.
The antiwar movement has also made a mistake in focusing on American deaths. It has allowed the media and politicians to maintain the fiction that U.S. forces are there to “help” Iraqis or that they form a buffer between communities seized by ancient blood feuds.
There is little truth to this. While there are anti-Shiite biases among some Sunnis and animosity between many Arabs and Kurds, it is the U.S. policies that created the civil war. The image of the United States as a benevolent force ignores the reality of counterinsurgency warfare, which is to make the civilian population the primary target. This defined U.S. wars, in Korea, Vietnam and Central America, the French in Algeria and Vietnam, Russia in Chechnya and Afghanistan, India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine and Lebanon.
All these wars involved horrific crimes against the people. Mass round-ups, collective punishment, torture, death squads, mass killings, and indiscriminate bombardment are the tools of the occupier. Sometimes the terror works, as it has in Chechnya and Kashmir.
What the antiwar movement can and should be doing is to unmask the counterinsurgency as the machinery of genocide. It should constantly remind the public that it is Iraqis who are paying the heaviest price. This would make it more difficult for the politicians and generals to maintain that U.S. forces have a role to play in Iraq. In the final analysis, it is the occupation that is the disease, not the cure.
