Reality show in the Green Zone

Bush can't hide debacle in Iraq

By Deirdre Griswold

Once again, the White House, with the help of the powerful U.S. mass media, has created a “reality” television show designed to turn the reality in Iraq upside down. According to the show’s script, the war is going so well, and “democracy” is now so firmly implanted in Iraq, that the U.S. occupiers are going to turn over authority to an Iraqi government chosen in free and fair elections, etc.

Iraqis chant anti-U.S. slogans during a protest march denouncing the visit of George Bush in Baghdad, June 14.

There was George W. Bush, sitting side by side with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on June 13 in the middle of Baghdad’s somewhat secure Green Zone, telling him that Washington was now ready to put the fate of Iraq “in your hands.” Later, the outwardly upbeat commander-in-chief was shown praising and god-blessing a roomful of U.S. troops who cheered the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The official line—dutifully elaborated by all the networks and front-page news editors—was that Bush’s trip to Baghdad was a clever coup, since the story had been put out earlier that he was at Camp David in the Maryland mountains with his top policy makers for a teleconferenced meeting with the new Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad. Photos to prove it had been distributed to the media. They showed Bush and his colleagues around a large table, ready to start the dialog in cyberspace.

Instead, just in time to dominate the day’s airwaves, he turned up in Iraq, where none of the Iraqis knew he was coming until five minutes before his arrival, not even the new prime minister.

As with the emperor’s new clothes, it doesn’t take much smarts to see through all this. If some portion of the U.S. population believes the line, enough to give Bush an uptick in his dismal poll numbers, it is only because questioning by the media wasn’t allowed on prime time but was reserved for the talking heads.

The fact is that Bush’s visit completely negated the claim that Iraq has any kind of sovereign government. Obviously, the U.S. completely controls Iraq’s airspace, Baghdad’s Green Zone, the schedules of its “leaders” and whatever security arrangements exist. Otherwise, how could an unexpected guest with the vast entourage U.S. presidents now take for granted sneak into the country without any of its top officials knowing a thing about it?

The whole trip was an embarrassment for the new Iraqi “government.” After months of internal struggle, Maliki had finally rammed through his appointments for the key cabinet posts of ministers of security, defense and national security. They presumably have authority over the exercise of state power in Iraq. Except they don’t, as Bush’s visit showed. The U.S. calls the shots and tells them what to do.

When Bush told Maliki he was putting the future of Iraq “in your hands,” he was really telling the Iraqis: “We’ve destroyed your country and brought it to the verge of civil war. Now you fix it.”

Three years after the massive “shock and awe” bombing campaign that pulverized much of Iraq’s infrastructure and left its cultural institutions in shambles, the U.S. is walking away from any responsibility to repair the damage. With more than 100,000 Iraqis dead and an untold number wounded, with the population traumatized by daily air strikes and periodic “sweeps” on the ground that leave cities in ruins and undying anger in the hearts of the people, Washington is saying, “This is your problem.”

According to news accounts, the Bush administration has a plan by which the proceeds from Iraqi oil production, which remains below pre-war levels, will be used to rebuild the country. U.S. oil service firms will undoubtedly get the lion’s share of this.

That’s who benefited after Bush appointed L. Paul Bremer III to the title of Director of Reconstruction and Human i tarian Assistance in Iraq. Bremer awarded only 2 percent of the contracts to Iraqi firms; most went to administration favor ites like Halliburton, formerly headed by Bush’s right-hand man, Dick Cheney. Mean while, life for the Iraqis only got worse.

In January 2005, six months after Bremer left his post, an official report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen said that $9 billion earmarked for the reconstruction of Iraq under Bremer might have disappeared in fraud, corruption and other misbehavior.

Congress votes ‘emergency’ funds for Pentagon

On the same day that Bush was grabbing the headlines in Iraq, the House passed an “emergency” funding bill that gives $65.8 billion more to the Pentagon for the wars/occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is on top of the $419 billion military budget already appropriated for fiscal 2006.

What about the real emergency in the Gulf area since hurricanes Katrina and Rita?

Just saving New Orleans from future floods caused by storms now on the horizon requires billions in better levee construction. Billions more are needed to rebuild homes and facilities destroyed. Thousands from the Gulf Coast still live in tiny trailers while tens of thousands more dispersed throughout the country, all poor and most Black, are losing their housing subsidies.

Yet Congress approved less than $20 billion for this massive social emergency at home. And the capitalist news media barely blinked.

While trying to duck responsibility for all the damage they have caused, the U.S. government and military have no plans to get out of Iraq.

They are hunkered down in places like Forward Operating Base Speicher north of Baghdad, headquarters of the 101st Airborne Division, “one of a handful of gigantic bases around Iraq to which American forces are being pulled back.... Speicher has an area of 24 square miles and the appearance of a small, flat, modular Midwestern city; there is a bus system, a cavernous dining hall that serves four flavors of Baskin-Robbins ice cream, a couple of gyms, and several movie theaters. At least 9,000 soldiers live there, and many of them seemed to leave the base rarely or not at all.” (New Yorker, April 10)

The reporter “spent two days at Speicher without seeing an Iraqi.”

From Speicher, U.S. planes roar off to bomb Iraqi towns and villages suspected of harboring “insurgents.” This is part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to carry out the occupation with fewer troops but more high-tech firepower, thus hopefully averting an anti-war rebellion at home.

It was from bases like Speicher that U.S. planes launched the bombs that the Pentagon says killed Abu Musab al-Zar qawi, a Jordanian, supposedly an Islamic fundamentalist who organized many of the sectarian attacks on Shiites in Iraq. Zarqawi had been built up by the U.S. occupiers as leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, even though Al Jazeera writes that he was publicly criticized by Osama bin Laden’s closest adviser.

The circumstances of Zarqawi’s death are murky. There is evidence that his elimination had been planned for some time in order to give Bush a political boost. The U.S. had put a $25 million bounty on his head. But even Bush acknowledges that the “insurgency” will continue—though the media gave him extraordinary coverage, Zarqawi was a relatively small player in the overall resistance to the occupation, which comes overwhelmingly from Iraqis enraged by what the U.S. has done to their country.

Bush’s in-and-out visit to Baghdad can’t hide the fact that the U.S. has lost the war to control Iraq. The atrocities committed by Marines in Haditha last Nov. 19, where whole families were gunned down in their homes, reflects the desperation of an army that knows it is hated by the Iraqi people, not just by Zarqawi and other “foreign fighters,” as the foreigners from Washing ton like to call them.

Those Marines were on their third tour of duty in Iraq and a year earlier had engaged in house-to-house fighting in Falluja. Under this kind of pressure, some troops become ruthless killing machines capable of any atrocity. But others can break out of the chain of command and refuse to fight. Bush hopes that the hyped “success” of killing Zarqawi will gain him time as military discipline further unravels under the hammer blows of the resistance.

British troops in Iraq face the same conditions. “In the south of Iraq, in the Basra region, the British who occupy that sector have all but given up aggressive patrol. They are holed up in their encampments on the defensive. Some reports have it that it is now too dangerous for them to fly helicopters by day.” (The Guardian, June 13)

The ruling class that spans the U.S. and Britain, the world’s leading oil imperialists, has not yet acknowledged what much of the world now senses: that the days when gunboat diplomacy could quickly quell resistance and firm up puppet regimes are over. The brutal effort to return Iraq to a colonial status has instead generated profound anti-imperialist sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world that have affected the oppressed and the enlightened everywhere. Bush’s latest propaganda stunt can’t turn that around.

---