PHASE THREE IN IRAQ:
ELECTION
The fake ‘success’ of the Iraqi election was a foregone conclusion. The ‘victory for freedom and democracy’ was designed to convince the American public and a skeptical world opinion the invasion and occupation of Iraq was justified. The mass media’s drumbeat of ‘victory’ was so loud and insistent even critics of the Bush Administration began to ask in print: “What if Bush was right all along?” This ridiculous question was posed again and again as if the President’s original intention had been to stage an election rather then neutralize Saddam’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction and punish the Iraqi dictator for his non-existent links to Al-Qaeda.
The mainstream media, quick to fall into line to promote another American success story, peddled the idea Iraqis, anxious to embrace ‘freedom and democracy’ defied terrorism to cast their ballots. Few pundits explained voter attendance was guaranteed from the outset because both Shiites and Kurds saw an opportunity to become the dominant civic power in Iraq after having been excluded for decades. The Shiites, suppressed under the Saddam regime, make up two thirds of Iraq’s population. They were ordered to vote by their Grand Ayatollah, an Iranian national who could not vote but obviously has a dream of an Islamic State along Iranian lines –sometime in the future. The Kurds also pressed their people to vote - to promote Kurdish aspirations in any new power configuration.
The minority Sunni population, controlled by the insurgents and conscious it would no longer be the dominant power in Iraq, was ordered to boycott the election. It thus will virtually have no representation in the new democratic order envisaged by the Washington engineers of Iraq’s future.
That future, after the polls, looks as chaotic as the current situation. Neither the Sunnis nor the insurgents are likely to sit back and let ‘the others’ run Iraq. The climate is perfect for civil war, the main reason why the U.S. military has already created five ‘permanent’ military bases in Iraq. Their main task is to safeguard Iraq’s oil resources and ensure the black gold keeps flowing, most of it into the pockets of the American and Western oil cartels that will set global petrol prices. Outside these strategic petrol-producing areas the Iraqis may go on killing each other as long as their stamina holds out. Like in Vietnam and Korea the U.S. will even supply its favorite side with arms and know-how. That could keep the confrontation going for years and provide the excuse the U.S. military cannot leave Iraq.
There are, of course, flaws in this grand Washington stratagem, as there were flaws in Vietnam and Korea. Iraqis have a history of stubborn defiance of ‘colonial’ occupation. In fact one could venture with near certainty most voters cast their ballots in the belief they were also voting for an end to U.S. occupation. When this false assumption is debunked both Shiites and Kurds are more then likely to support the anti-American struggle. This in turn will add to the Administration’s argument the U.S. cannot pull out of Iraq. The justification for this argument is sure to be that freedom-loving Americans, the champions of human rights, can not leave Iraqis to murder one another – or, more realistically, allow the Iraqi oil, lifeblood of our existence, to fall into the hands of ‘the enemy.’
We all know who the enemy is: The ‘terrorists’ who have replaced the ‘communists’ as the scourge of our civilization.
Washington’s Grand Iraq Strategy is so perverse it is almost genial in its diabolical conception:
Phase One: Go to war against a tyrant who threatens you with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction - and intended to kill your Daddy.
Phase Two: When you cannot (obviously) find these weapons convert the war into a clarion call for freedom and democracy and the struggle against terrorism.
Phase Three: Hold an election which will give the country a democratic façade and legitimize legislation that will privatize the Iraqi oil industry, offering American investors a stake in the exploitation and ownership of Iraq’s vast oil resources. (Iraqi interim Finance Minister Abel Mahdi announced this law during a press conference - not reported by the mass media - on December 22, 2004 at the National Press Club in Washington.)
Phase Four: As civil war explodes in the wake of the election maintain your military occupation without a timetable for withdrawal. Peddle the excuse as the champion of human rights America cannot allow Iraqis to kill each other in a civil conflict (a conflict Washington has deliberately created in the first place).
Phase Five: As the civil war escalates concentrate your troops around the U.S. military bases in the oil producing areas turning these areas, de facto, into a canton under U.S. sovereignty.
In this Grand Iraqi Strategy the election to bring Iraqis ‘freedom and democracy’ was just one more phase in the plan to control and own the largest oil reserves in the world. Their control (coupled with the U.S. domination of Saudi Arabia’s oil) gives American interests the power to set the vital petrol prices and supply for the rest of the world. With this control the U.S. can squeeze out of the market or impose terms on its main industrial competitors, the European Union and China.
In our dispassionate corporate era all this makes corporate sense. The price is relatively small in corporate terms: Perhaps half a million dead Iraqis and some 10,000 dead American and allied soldiers, a nation devastated but easily rebuilt at huge profits during an envisaged reconstruction boom financed by the Iraqi share from its own oil revenues. In corporate terms this amounts to a major coup: You milk the oil from both sides - for your own profit.
Sadly, the equation has been successful – at least so far.
