What follows is an Iraq update. It’s important to keep in mind right now that knowledge of the future is no more within the grasp of the Bush administration – even were they to probe it with JDAMs and Moabs, Bradley fighting vehicles and Predator drones — than any of the rest of us. Despite neocon dreams of a remade Middle East and a remade world (which, if they came true, would certainly make us the empire of empires, though we might well be presiding over a ruined world), their actual planning simply for postwar Iraq seems to this point to be proving woeful indeed. Even on issues of the greatest concern to them – the oil of Iraq and the much proclaimed weapons of mass destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime – they have so far proved dreadful postwar planners. The oil fields were looted after the war and, far more terrifying, so were crucial sites where weapons of mass destruction, or at least unknown quantities of dangerous materials, might conceivably have been found.
The Washington Post has a bloodcurdling report on one of the two most crucial Iraqi nuclear sites – just outside Baghdad, no less – which was thoroughly looted before the other day American troops were finally sent in. Okay, so you skip the National Museum and the National Library, the local hospitals and the various governmental ministries, but the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility? Not a patrol, not a tank, not a single guard? Earth to Bush administration.
But this has, in fact, been a pattern of our occupation in its very early days. ABC News (Lost Viruses?) reported on April 17, for instance, that at Baghdad’s Central Public Health Laboratory,
“Dangerous strains of cholera, black fever, HIV, polio and hepatitis may have been lost during the postwar looting of Iraq’s key disease-control facility, ABCNEWS has learned. The U.S. military is worried they may be used as weapons. Scientists say looters took refrigerators full of the deadly viruses last Friday, but they’re not sure what’s actually missing. ‘They are in containers, all of these things taken together, cholera, AIDS and black fever,’ chemist Rasa Al-Alaq said. ‘The viruses that are lost, we have no idea where they went.’
“U.S. Marines were sent to guard the facility today after Iraqi scientists reported the dangerous material had been removed by looters. U.S. officials admit they have no idea what was in there, how much was taken or where it is now.”
Below, in addition to the Washington Post report, I include an assessment of postwar America’s first steps in and out of Iraq by openDemocracy‘s Paul Rogers as well as a first-hand account by ever-reliable Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy on the results in Fallujah of American troops firing into crowds of protesters (“Go Out From Our City…. Because You Are Come Here For Petrol Not for Freedom”) – perhaps a taste of things to come in Iraq — and, from the Foreign Policy in Focus website, an assessment by Ahmed Rashid, author of the definitive book, Taliban, and another reliable reporter on Islam and the region, on the rise of Islamic feeling in Iraq. None of this was foreseen before the war as in Iraq’s immediate “future.” Tom
Losing the peace
By Paul Rogers
openDemocracy
May 1, 20003
“U.S. Marines were sent to guard the facility today after Iraqi scientists reported the dangerous material had been removed by looters. U.S. officials admit they have no idea what was in there, how much was taken or where it is now.”
Below, in addition to the Washington Post report, I include an assessment of postwar America’s first steps in and out of Iraq by openDemocracy‘s Paul Rogers as well as a first-hand account by ever-reliable Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy on the results in Fallujah of American troops firing into crowds of protesters (“Go Out From Our City…. Because You Are Come Here For Petrol Not for Freedom”) – perhaps a taste of things to come in Iraq — and, from the Foreign Policy in Focus website, an assessment by Ahmed Rashid, author of the definitive book, Taliban, and another reliable reporter on Islam and the region, on the rise of Islamic feeling in Iraq. None of this was foreseen before the war as in Iraq’s immediate “future.” Tom
Losing the peace
By Paul Rogers
openDemocracy
May 1, 20003Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to the Middle East involved only the briefest of stops in Iraq, but it was evidently an occasion for celebrating a famous victory. In doing so, he made it clear that destroying the Saddam Hussein regime was only the first example of the US strategy of pre-empting possible threats.
This argument may lose some of its potency as a result of the failure to find the supposedly ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction, but this problem is hardly going to interfere with a triumphal ‘good news’ story.
After all, a brutal and repressive regime in Iraq has been destroyed and a people liberated. Once again, the irony that in a previous existence, Donald Rumsfeld was leader of a US mission to Baghdad when Saddam Hussein was a valued ally can be conveniently forgotten….
To read more Rogers click here
Bloodshed and bullets fuel rising hatred of Americans
By Ed Vulliamy
The Observer
May 4, 2003For 15 years, the three al-Ani brothers have run a taxi business from their adjacent houses, opposite the local school. It was a nice place to live, recalls Raid al-Hati, their neighbour and cousin, a quiet part of town.
The brothers shared one vehicle. ‘It was a living,’ said Osama, now in hospital and rasping through the pain of gunshot injuries to his head and side.
The family has been torn to shreds after their homes were sprayed by American gunfire during an incident that represents a turning point in the invasion of Iraq, as hostility to the US military intensifies.
A crowd gathered outside the al-Ani’s house last week, demanding that the Americans leave the school over the road so that children can return. The military opened fire, killing 13 and wounding some 35; they claimed they were shot at first.
To read more Vulliamy click here
Shiite And Sunni Muslims Struggle To Fill Leadership Void In Iraq
By Ahmed Rashid
Foreign Policy in Focus
May 2, 2003Anti-American protests in Iraq, such as the April 28 incident in Fallujah that left an estimated 15 Iraqis dead, should not come as a surprise to Washington. Most Iraqis don’t share the U.S. vision of a reconstructed Iraq resting on a foundation of Western-style democracy. For many, the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime has prompted a yearning for a religious and cultural revival, raising the prospect of an Islamic state based on conservative Shiite beliefs.
Although it appears certain that Iraq is set for a revival of Islamic values, at present there remains ample room for religious developments to move in many directions. The revival could move toward the recognition of Iraq’s Islamic legacy while making it compatible with greater freedom, economic development, and openness to the outside world.
Ahmed Rashid is a journalist and the author of Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia and a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and to Power Trip: Unilateralism and Global Strategy after September 11 (Seven Stories, 2003). This first appeared on EurasiaNet (online at www.eurasianet.org).)
To read more Rashid click here
Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted
U.S. Team Unable to Determine Whether Deadly Materials Are Missing
By Barton Gellman
The Washington Post
May 4, 2003NEAR KUT, Iraq, May 3 — A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.
The discovery at the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility was the second since the end of the war in which a known nuclear cache was plundered extensively enough that authorities could not rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen. The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country’s most dangerous technologies beyond anyone’s knowledge or control.