Okay, let’s try to get our heads around the Iraq situation. Admittedly the world doesn’t want this war, but there are a small group of people, hardly larger than a Latin American junta, deeply entrenched atop our government, who desperately do. They are undoubtedly frustrated to find a world so unexpectedly out of their control — an ill-timed strike in Venezuela that they would, under other circumstances, be supporting for everything they were worth is driving the price of oil uncomfortably high; the Turks are dragging their feet on an American invasion force in Turkey; the North Koreans are withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty and threatening to resume missile testing; Ariel Sharon is suddenly embroiled in a bribery scandal in Israel with a surprisingly up-for-grabs election now to take place only weeks before an Iraq war might begin. It’s enough to make a tough guy cry.
But the most obvious “on the ground” reality is that the massive American mobilization in the Gulf area only gains momentum by the week. The fact is, as was true with those World War I armies, past a certain point you can’t mobilize on this scale and turn back. That undoubtedly is part of the plan in Washington. Let the world do its damnedest, let the inspectors search, let the UN yak, let the hoi polloi demonstrate, and in the meantime just create the on-the-ground momentum for war, or as military analyst William Arkin put it in today’s Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section, “As tens of thousands of ground troops and their vast support infrastructure arrive in Kuwait, any options other than war fade further and further. This is the military corollary to the ‘Field of Dreams’: If they come, you will use them.”
Arkin adds in “An Old-fashioned Fight,” a piece about how Donald Rumsfeld “capitulated” to traditional military planners, that the war being planned is now anything but futuristic.
“Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has approved a war plan that owes more to D-day and World War II than to the 21st century vision of lightning-fast, flexible warfare that has become his hallmark. Last month [he] surrendered to the traditionalists, secretly approving a blueprint for war that has the American force relying heavily on tanks, artillery and heavy mechanized infantry. The plan does assign critical roles to air power, Special Forces and covert operators But they would operate in subordination to the kind of ground assault the Army has trained itself to conduct in Europe since the beginning of the Cold War.”
To read more of Arkin click here
Just as important, the same group of high officials, planners, and their acolytes are deep into making dreams reality when it comes to a postwar Middle East. They are, in a fashion that might be recognized by anyone who recalls how the British and French divvied up the area after World War I, already cutting and dealing the “spoils of war.” Both the articles that follow deal with that subject in the sort of clear and down to earth way that you rarely see on our news pages, and interestingly both cite that phrase, “the spoils of war.” And — I know you’ll be surprised by this — the spoils of greatest concern to us (not to speak of the French, the Russians, and, as columnist Eric Margolis points out in the Toronto Sun, the Turks), are the oil resources of Iraq.
As Knut Royce writes in a report for Newsday on our plans for making use of Iraq’s oil (referred to by a “senior official” in a recent New York Times account of postwar planning as “Iraq’s patrimony”), “There are people in the White House who take the position that it’s all the spoils of war.” Patrimony, smatrimony, it’s the oil, stupid. Tom
To read more of Arkin click here
Just as important, the same group of high officials, planners, and their acolytes are deep into making dreams reality when it comes to a postwar Middle East. They are, in a fashion that might be recognized by anyone who recalls how the British and French divvied up the area after World War I, already cutting and dealing the “spoils of war.” Both the articles that follow deal with that subject in the sort of clear and down to earth way that you rarely see on our news pages, and interestingly both cite that phrase, “the spoils of war.” And — I know you’ll be surprised by this — the spoils of greatest concern to us (not to speak of the French, the Russians, and, as columnist Eric Margolis points out in the Toronto Sun, the Turks), are the oil resources of Iraq.
As Knut Royce writes in a report for Newsday on our plans for making use of Iraq’s oil (referred to by a “senior official” in a recent New York Times account of postwar planning as “Iraq’s patrimony”), “There are people in the White House who take the position that it’s all the spoils of war.” Patrimony, smatrimony, it’s the oil, stupid. Tom
Tough decisions for bankrupt Turkey
Moderate Islamic government faces pressure from the U.S. and Arab neighbours
By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
January 12, 2003The Bush administration is arm-twisting Turkey’s new government to allow the U.S. to deploy up to 80,000 troops in eastern Anatolia, whose mission will be the invasion of northern Iraq.
Turkey’s government, led by Justice and Development Party chairman Recep Erdogan and Prime Minister, Abdullah Gul, are caught between Iraq and a hard place. Ninety percent of Turkey’s 67 million citizens strongly oppose any attack on Iraq.
Erdogan’s moderate Islamic party recently won a landslide election victory due to public anger over the devastated economy, corruption and resentment against the heavy-handed role of the intrusive Turkish military, which has long been the real “deep power” behind a thin facade of democratic government, and opposition to war against Iraq.
To read more of Margolis click here
Plan: Tap Iraq’s Oil
U.S. considers seizing revenues to pay for occupation, source says
By Knut Royce
Newsday
January 10, 2003WASHINGTON – Bush administration officials are seriously considering proposals that the United States tap Iraq’s oil to help pay the cost of a military occupation, a move that likely would prove highly inflammatory in an Arab world already suspicious of U.S. motives in Iraq.
Officially, the White House agrees that oil revenue would play an important role during an occupation period, but only for the benefit of Iraqis, according to a National Security Council spokesman.
Yet there are strong advocates inside the administration, including in the White House, for appropriating the oil funds as “spoils of war,” according to a source who has been briefed by participants in the dialogue.
“There are people in the White House who take the position that it’s all the spoils of war,” said the source, who asked not to be further identified.