Tomgram

Covering preparations for war as a "minuet"

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[A number of readers wrote me that the web address I gave out for the Art Spiegelman interview on quitting the New Yorker led them to something about Winnie the Pooh. I assure you, it wasn’t a joke. The interview was there. Once. Undoubtedly, it’s now somewhere else. As a 58-year-old computer techno-idiot, I have no idea where, or why it’s gone, and although I have the full interview myself, free use only allows me to put 150 words of it on my weblog. There must be someone among you who can find it again somewhere in the Internet universe and let me know how to send the rest of you there. I throw myself on your mercy. It’s an interview worth reading, especially since I gather that in this week’s New Yorker, which, being in transit, I have yet to see, editor David Remnick comes out in some fashion in favor of an American war in Iraq.]

As for today’s final dispatch, the very day of Colin Powell’s “Adlai Stevenson” moment at the UN, I thought a little something different might be in order — a roundup of the sorts of subjects you don’t see much of in your local paper or that get relegated, at best, to opinion pages re: the UN and war in Iraq. So here goes.

First, there’s that “Adlai Stevenson” moment itself. Again, I’m struck by the way the UN is being covered here. After all, when the empire strikes back, it strikes with force, even if behind the scenes. The reportage in our press just doesn’t measure up to the reality. There were, for instance, three UN pieces in today’s New York Times. One by Craig Smith, “Blair Tries to Sell a Military Solution for Iraq, but Chirac Won’t Buy It,” discusses the “elaborate and quickening diplomatic minuet among leaders from America, Europe and the Arab world as war appears increasingly likely.” A second, Dexter Filkins’ “Top Politician Indicates Turkey May Join U.S. Effort Against Iraq,” starts, “American officials stepped up their diplomatic campaign for permission to use Turkish military bases today… ,” then mentions a Dick Cheney call to the Turkish Prime Minister, who knows about what, and finally says, “American officials have been pressing Turkey for weeks for permission…” Pressing — an apt image only if you imagine that the U.S. has sent Turkey to the cleaners. The third piece, a front-pager by Julia Preston and Steven Weisman on Powell’s upcoming speech at the UN speaks of support from Bulgaria, Estonia, Albania, etc., for an American war as “a sign of gratitude for Washington’s efforts to help them enter the NATO circle.” And so on.

From none of this would you have any sense of how the world’s hyperpower can put the pressure on or what exactly it can bring to bear on the matter. Our mainstream covers itself reads like a delicate “minuet.” Here, on the other hand, is part of a piece from several days ago, “The UN game and the logic of war,” by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times online:

“The Bush administration – including words by Powell himself – may in the past have promised to hold Iraqi oil fields ‘in trust’ for the people of Iraq. Nobody seriously believed that this would happen. The Bush administration instead is now promising behind closed doors to spread the riches among American, French, Russian and Chinese oil companies by enforcing contracts signed by Saddam Hussein himself. Saddam had already offered French giant TotalFinaElf exclusive rights to Iraq’s largest oil field, the Majnoon, which may hold 30 billion barrels of oil. Iraq has also signed a contract with Russia’s Stroytransgaz to develop Iraq’s Western desert. And Russia and China want to strike deals to explore the West Qurna and Rumaila fields.

“If that is the case, it means no French, Russian or Chinese veto in a second Anglo-American-sponsored Security Council resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq. Germany – which is presiding over the Security Council in February – will most certainly abstain.”

To read more Escobar click here

Whether his prediction on the final vote proves right or not, most of the time you can look high and low in our press without ever finding out what’s at stake and what’s truly being peddled at the UN. You certainly can’t find a sentence like the following from Ian Williams at the Foreign Policy in Focus website (To read the Williams piece click here):”Powell’s presentation was not an ultimatum to Iraq–but to other Council members. The U.S. is prepared to wreck the organization if it does not get its own way on this.”

“If that is the case, it means no French, Russian or Chinese veto in a second Anglo-American-sponsored Security Council resolution authorizing an attack on Iraq. Germany – which is presiding over the Security Council in February – will most certainly abstain.”

Whether his prediction on the final vote proves right or not, most of the time you can look high and low in our press without ever finding out what’s at stake and what’s truly being peddled at the UN. You certainly can’t find a sentence like the following from Ian Williams at the Foreign Policy in Focus website (To read the Williams piece click here):”Powell’s presentation was not an ultimatum to Iraq–but to other Council members. The U.S. is prepared to wreck the organization if it does not get its own way on this.”

Here’s a little backup piece, “France & Russia warned support US war on Iraq or no Iraqi oil,” pointed out to me by a friend, that appeared on January 27 in Oil and Gas International:

“France and Russia have been warned they must support the US military invasion and occupation of Iraq if they want access to Iraqi oilfields in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. According to a report in today’s Tehran Times, US Senator Richard Lugar, a leading member of the Bush administration and Republican Party chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Russia and France “must be ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in any US-led military intervention” if they want a share of Iraqi oil.

“The paper quoted Lugar as saying that Paris and Moscow oil companies will be deprived of Iraqi oil and have no share in the country’s resources if they refuse to join in the US war to oust Hussein. It noted that both the Russian Duma and the French parliament have both expressed opposition to a US military attack on Iraq.”

For this piece click here

Of course, who’s going to believe the Tehran Times?

By the way, according to Dan Plesch of the British Guardian, before Powell could even give his speech, “The chief UN weapons inspector yesterday dismissed what has been billed as a central claim of the speech the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, will make today to the UN security council. Hans Blix said there was no evidence of mobile biological weapons laboratories or of Iraq trying to foil inspectors by moving equipment before his teams arrived….” For more Plesch click here

Blix, whose stern report on Iraqi noncompliance, was featured front and center in the U.S. press, will undoubtedly not get the same sort of attention for such comments, though mention will be made of course. The thing that’s hard to shake is how normal it feels here, how normal the media makes it feel — after Grenada, Panama, Lybia, the Gulf War, Kosovo and a few wars and near wars I’ve undoubtedly missed, to assume that war is not the last desperate resort of a country in its own defense, but a reasonable way to go when problems arise. Does Saddam Hussein’s Iraq have weapons of mass destruction hidden? I wouldn’t be surprised. We do, after all; the Russians do; the Israelis do; the Pakistanis do; god knows who else does. If you happen to be an aggressive and aggrieved dictator, the “dear leader” of some not so powerful land, it’s the coin of the realm to build them and hold onto them for dear life. But war, dear god…

On Powell’s speech — and the fact that UN officials felt it necessary to cover over Picasso’s Guernica mural for the Secretary of State’s arrival — don’t miss Maureen Dowd’s remarkable column in the Times today, “Powell Without Picasso” (“Mr. Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses.”), which is devastating on the shifting sands of American arguments for this war. For more Dowd click here

By the way, the post-Powell turn out on TV tonight was remarkable in itself. CNN, MSNBC, and FOX were spinning with administration (and administration encouraged) spinners, ranging from Condi Rice to former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger. It was a veritable propaganda fiesta. What do you do, after all, when Rice’s first tough question from Larry King is, what did she think of the speech Powell gave (that she evidently helped to craft)? Hmm, give me a few minutes to consider that one.

As for the war to come, here’s a grim note, picked up off antiwar.com the other day from the St. Petersburg Times: “Pentagon stocks up on body bags”): To be exact, the Pentagon has ordered 9,640 “human remains pouches,” as they began to be called during the Gulf War. (“Body bags” brought back too many forbidden Vietnam memories.) This, at least, speaks to the fears of the military high command, which has been dragging its feet on this war from the beginning — as top military officials imagine what matters might be like if the Iraqi regime does not collapse as expected and they have to take a city of many millions, as refugees stream out. For more St. Peterburg Times click here

As for the war’s aftermath, a piece in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald claims:

“The United States has chosen a successor to Saddam Hussein from Iraq’s notoriously fractious opposition groups, according to a former Iraqi diplomat who lives in Sydney. Mohamed al-Jabiri, who has just returned from in talks with Washington, said the White House has given its ‘blessing’ to the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, to lead a transitional coalition government in Iraq once Saddam has been deposed.”

For more Sydney Morning Herald click here

If true, that would, at least, settle an internecine struggle in Washington over which “opposition” to back. One of the strangest things about all discussions of the “liberation” of and bringing of “democracy” to Iraq and the Middle East is that democracy has largely been disconnected from elections. If the Sydney Morning Herald is right, the only elections that matter have already taken place and the Pentagon has outpolled the State Department for the right to pick the new leader of Iraq.

Tom Friedman, in a piece in today’s New York Times, more or less backing an American invasion as long as the American public accepts what it’s actually in for, had this far more accurate description of what’s likely to come:

“…breaking apart Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, its governing structure, party system and intelligence networks, and replacing them with a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq — under Gen. Tommy Franks — à la the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan. A hit-and-run invasion is not an option. Iraq will be controlled by the iron fist of the U.S. Army and its allies, with an Iraqi civilian ‘advisory’ administration gradually emerging behind this iron fist to run daily life and produce an Iraqi self-governing authority.”

For more Friedman click here

An “iron fist” leading to “an Iraqi self-governing authority,” that’s more like it. At least, call reality by its name.

Oh, and, by the way, on that occupation to come, after a “successful” war, have you noticed that the “success” of the postwar process in Afghanistan isn’t much mentioned anymore in our media? Below is a savage piece by Robert Fisk, the British correspondent for the Independent, that explains why. (Though as Fisk is always a little over-the-top he doesn’t bother to mention the missing element in his post-Soviet invasion analogy — there is no United States to arm, fund, and generally support the new Mujahedeen.)

Finally, I include a Reuters piece that ran in the Washington Post in which a Saudi makes the Afghan comparison and draws the obvious Iraq conclusions — the only example I’ve noticed of such a discussion recently in our major papers. Tom

Don’t mention the war in Afghanistan
The near collapse of peace in this savage land is a narrative erased from the mind of Americans
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
February 5, 2003

There’s one sure bet about the statement to be made to the UN Security Council today by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell – or by General Colin Powell as he has now been mysteriously reassigned by the American press: he won’t be talking about Afghanistan.

For since the Afghan war is the “successful” role model for America’s forthcoming imperial adventure across the Middle East, the near-collapse of peace in this savage land and the steady erosion of US forces in Afghanistan – the nightly attacks on American and other international troops, the anarchy in the cities outside Kabul, the warlordism and drug trafficking and steadily increasing toll of murders – are unmentionables, a narrative constantly erased from the consciousness of Americans who are now sending their young men and women by the tens of thousands to stage another “success” story.

For more Fisk click here

Saudi Warns War Can Splinter Iraq Like Afghanistan
By Mona Megalli
Reuters
February 5, 2003

RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia said Wednesday it feared a U.S.-led war to overthrow President Saddam Hussein would transform Iraq into another Afghanistan with rival ethnic and religious factions fighting for power.

“If things fall apart, who will come back and bring it all back together?” Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told a news conference ahead of a key speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to make a case for war at the United Nations.
“All the factions inside Iraq will present their visions for a new government like they did in Afghanistan. These are the consequences of a conflict, and if that happens, it will result in the division of Iraq,” he said in the Saudi capital.

Critics of the U.S. war which toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan say Western countries have failed to end ethnic and religious rivalries, and the country faces years of instability.

For more of this Reuters piece click here