U.A.E.GulfNews: Patrick Seale: The grim balance sheet of the Iraq war

"Whether this week's transfer of sovereignty in Iraq proves to be a success or, as is more likely, a fiasco, it provides an occasion to draw up a balance sheet of the Anglo-American war.
The brutal invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 was a colonial enterprise. It was an even more violent replay of an adventure 50 years earlier when, in 1953, the same two powers, Britain and the United States, overthrew the prime minister of Iran, Dr. Mohammed Mosaddeq.
Mosaddeq's "crime" had been to nationalise Britain's dominant interest in the Anglo-Iranian Oil company, a move which threatened Britain's power throughout the Middle East.
In "Operation Ajax", American and British agents provoked riots in Tehran – during which the Shah fled in terror to Baghdad – while many of the nationalist anti-Shah army officers were executed, and Mosaddeq, the nationalists' hero, was arrested and sent to jail.
In turn, Saddam Hussain's "crime" in US and British eyes was not his terrible record of human rights abuses but his challenge to America's political and military control of the strategically vital Gulf region, home to two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves.
The 2003 Iraq war was the culmination of a long process, dating back to World War I, aimed at protecting "western" oil supplies.
High points of this process in our own time included the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s (when immoral western policy was to spin out the war as long as possible so as to exhaust both combatants) followed by America's policy of "dual containment", intended to neutralise both Iran and Iraq, while the US quickly built up an overwhelming military presence in the Gulf.
Saddam's rash invasion of Kuwait provided the pretext for "Operation Desert Storm" of 1991. A defeated Iraq was thrown out of Kuwait and was then dismembered by no-fly zones. Having been brought to its knees by a dozen years of cruel sanctions, it was, 15 months ago, ravaged by a second war, the "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
This time the Iraqi state and its institutions were deliberately and comprehensively destroyed. Seventeen out of 23 Iraqi ministries, the National Museum, the National Library, hospitals, universities and virtually every other public building were gutted by looters as American forces looked on. The only ministry the Americans protected was the Ministry of Oil.
Was the war about oil? Of course it was. Not only about Iraq's own oil, but about preserving America's unchallenged pre-eminence over this vital strategic resource. The American economy depends on an uninterrupted flow of cheap and plentiful Middle East oil. No local ruler or regime is allowed to challenge this "fact" of contemporary power.

The conspiracy

This, however, is not the whole story. On to the objective of America's global economic hegemony was grafted a set of specifically Israeli goals. A group of American Zionists, close to Israel's Likud, managed to penetrate the American government and, by giving each other a helping hand, secure key posts in the Defence Department, the Vice-President's office and the National Security Council.
As the Bush administration struggled to respond to Al Qaida's devastating attacks of 9/11, members of this Zionist cabal, led by Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, seized the opportunity to impose their agenda. Their number-one foreign policy goal was the overthrow of Saddam, whom they had identified as a major threat to Israel.
To boost their case for war in 2003, they invented the theory that "regime change" in Iraq and the imposition of "democracy" would, through a domino effect, lead to the overthrow of the Syrian and Iranian regimes and the taming of Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The entire balance of power in the Middle East would thus be altered in favour of Israel and the US. Israel's monopoly of WMDs would be protected forever, and Ariel Sharon, Israel's brutal prime minister, would be able to destroy the Palestinians, along with their national aspirations, once and for all and seize what remained of the West Bank.
In the meantime, the Arab-Israeli peace process could be shelved until an all-powerful Israel could impose otherwise impossible terms on a defeated Arab world.
Helped by numerous propagandists in the media and in the right-wing Washington think-tanks, the "neocons" came to dominate the Bush administration's national security apparatus, and, in a bitter inter-agency war, managed to silence critics in the State Department and the CIA.
Their names are now known to the whole world: Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eliot Abrams, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, David Wurmser, William Luti, and many lesser figures.
To make their case for war against Iraq, the conspirators had to "prove" that Saddam possessed WMDs, that he was linked to the 9/11 terrorists, and posed an imminent threat. This required fabricating and disseminating false information.
The task of corrupting US intelligence was performed by the Office of Special Plans headed by Abram Shulsky. This was a shadowy Pentagon intelligence unit created by Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, which relied on disinformation from Iraqi émigrés, supplied by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraq National Congress. Chalabi was the neocons' choice to head the Iraq government after Saddam's overthrow.
So eager were the neocons to make the case for war that they pretended American troops would be welcomed as liberators. As a result too few troops were actually deployed and post-war planning was completely neglected.
Other mistakes followed thick and fast, of which perhaps the gravest was the decision by Paul Bremer, the ex-US pro-consul in Iraq, to dissolve the Iraqi army and dismiss all Baath party members from government service, thereby throwing at least 450,000 people out of work.
As the insurgency grew, so did American repression, including the horrific bombing of Falluja, the pitched battles with Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi army in Shiísm's Holy Cities, the blanket arrest of more than 12,000 Iraqis and the gross abuse and torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and other US prisons in Iraq.
The costs have been heavy. At least 17,500 Iraqis, military and civilian, have been killed and another 40,000 wounded. The Coalition has lost about 1,000 men, most of them American, while nearly ten times that number have been wounded. The war has so far cost the American tax-payer over $150 billion, and more money will be needed as soon as next year.
Other costs are less easy to calculate, but certainly as heavy: the costs to America's credibility, to its place in the world, to the morale of its over-stretched armed forces, to its civil freedoms, to the rule of law, to human rights, to the authority of the United Nations, to transatlantic relations, to the cohesion of Europe, weakened by the slavish defection to the American camp of Britain's Tony Blair.
In the meantime, the war has mobilised a world-wide army of extremists ready and eager to hit America and its allies whenever and wherever they can.
Many countries from Indonesia to Spain and from Turkey to Saudi Arabia will continue paying a heavy price for US mistakes. Global security has rarely been so fragile.
The Bush administration's alliance with the Israeli Right and its American supporters has resulted in the greatest American foreign policy disaster of modern times. It has made the world a very dangerous place indeed."