http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5400.htm
Best-Laid Plans
By Chris Floyd
12/19/03: (Moscow Times)
One of the constant refrains we hear from the
malcontents carping about George W. Bush's triumphant crusade in Iraq
is the charge -- the canard -- that the president and his crack team
of advisers "had no plan" for the post-war period, that they've
stumbled from crisis to crisis, changing policies without rhyme or
reason, or have even "plunged off a cliff," as erstwhile war-hawk Newt
Gingrich declared last week.
But to anyone not blinded by partisan ideology or irrational
Bush-hatred, the evidence clearly shows that Team Bush has always had
a very specific plan for remaking Iraq -- and is following it
faithfully to this very day.
Of course, it's not always easy to discern the president's steadfast
adherence to principle through the defeatist fog of the liberal
American media. For instance, this month saw perhaps the most
significant progress yet toward the fulfillment of Bush's master plan,
yet there was not a word about it anywhere in America's media
"Establishment." No, Britain's Financial Times and South Africa's
Sunday Times provided the unvarnished truth last week.
We refer, of course, to the $40 million contract awarded by occupation
authorities to a private security company called Erinys Iraq. This
plucky start-up is one of the great success stories of the occupation,
having already bagged big money to ride shotgun for Halliburton and
Bechtel as they spread their beneficent tentacles throughout the
conquered land. Now little Erinys will guard the Holy Grail of the
entire invasion project: Iraq's oil industry.
Erinys is a joint venture between a large South African freebooting
firm and a few choice Iraqi investors. How choice? They are intimates
of Ahmad Chalabi: leader of the Iraqi National Congress exile group,
member of the Bush-appointed Governing Council, convicted swindler,
darling of the Pentagon -- and the Bush plan's designated
tyrant-to-be, the Iraqi face of a compliant, corporate-run colonial
outpost in Mesopotamia.
This has been the plan all along: to install a "strongman" in Iraq who
can "hold the country together" and protect the imperial flank while
America "projects its dominance" over the oil wealth -- and political
life -- of the Middle East and Central Asia. There's no great secret
here: Team Bush has been talking about it for years in the
corporate-funded "think tanks" they inhabited during the Clinton
interregnum. There, they published their dreams about a "new Pearl
Harbor" that would "catalyze" the American public into supporting
wide-ranging militarization at home and extensive "interventions"
abroad. This vision was most clearly articulated in a September 2000
report published by the Cheney-Rumsfeld group, Project for the New
American Century.
Central to this dream -- besides the Pearl Harbor bit, which those
lucky duckies got only a year later -- was the conquest of Iraq, a
project that PNAC said "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam
Hussein." The crimes of their now-captured errand boy -- most of which
(including "gassing his own people") were committed when he was being
serviced and pampered by the Reagan-Bush administrations -- were
always irrelevant to the PNAC catalyzers, except as a PR pitch to help
sell their "transcendent" invasion.
And Chalabi was always their main man, the horse they were going to
ride in on. Despite his conviction in Jordan for massive bank fraud,
despite his dubious husbandry of the millions in covert aid thrown at
him by U.S. officials, despite the fact that even the CIA finally
washed its hands of him, dismissing him as an ineffectual poseur
peddling false intelligence to inflate his importance and attract more
funding, the PNAC boys kept faith with Chalabi, as American Prospect
reports.
Thus when PNAC seized power in Washington, Chalabi's star rose again
in the East. As Newsweek reports, his group was given a direct funnel
to the White House for its "intelligence" about Saddam's nonexistent
weapons of mass destruction -- and Chalabi's nonexistent popularity
with the Iraqi people. He also supplied The New York Times with a
steady stream of WMD scare stories that helped stoke the fever for
war, the Washington Post reports. His private, American-funded militia
was ferried into Iraq in the midst of the invasion and took part in
the staged toppling of Saddam's statue by a small, hand-picked crowd
in Baghdad -- the much-televised symbol of "victory" in the war,
Harper's reports. He was then named to Iraq's "rotating interim
presidency" by the Bushist conquerors.
Now, Chalabi's cronies at Erinys are hiring Chalabi's militiamen for
the new "security" contract. In other words, Bush has given Chalabi
armed control over Iraq's oil industry. This has drawn strident
protests from other members of the Governing Council, who know exactly
what it means: Chalabi's gun is pointed at the nation's jugular. But
their voice is meaningless; Bush's word alone is law in Babylon.
That's why the occupation seems such a shambles. The stated policies
don't really matter; they're just window dressing for the master plan.
Thus they can be discarded the moment they're no longer politically
expedient. What matters is getting the strongman in place -- Saddam
2.0, a more obedient, more presentable, less quirky upgrade, who will
"invite" a lasting American military presence and uphold Bush's
arbitrary decrees granting foreign corporations a stranglehold on the
Iraqi economy.
Now, is this an evil plan, conceived in ignorance and arrogance,
predicated on the war crime of military aggression, an act of
terrorism on a scale than bin Laden could only dream of? You bet. But
let's be fair: it is a plan. You can't say that Bush hasn't got one.
Annotations
Rival Former Exile Groups Clash Over [Oilfield] Security in Iraq
Financial Times, Dec. 11, 2003
South African Company to Protect Iraqi Oil
Sunday Times of South Africa, Dec. 7, 2003
Needed: An Iraqi Boss With Mo'
The Australian, Dec. 8, 2003
U.S. Arrests Iraqi Union Leaders
Pacific News Service, Dec. 10, 2003
Buying Up Iraq
Humanities and Social Scienes On-Line, Nov. 29, 2003
Ahmad Chalabi: Tinker, Tailor, Neocon, Spy
The American Prospect, Nov. 18, 2002
Intra-Times Battle Over Iraqi Weapons
Washington Post, May 25, 2003
he Same Old Racket in Iraq
The Guardian, Dec. 13, 2003
heney and the 'Raw Intelligence,'
Newsweek, Dec. 15, 2003
echtel Gets Black Marks on Iraqi School Repairs
Scripps-Howard, Dec. 8, 2003
echtel Fails Reconstructions of Iraq's Schools
Corpwatch, Dec. 2, 2003
S to Form Paramilitary Force From Party Militias
Washington Post, Dec. 2, 2003
ebuilding America's Defenses
Project for the New American Century, Sept. 2000,
merican Dominance [PNAC]
The Bergen Record, Feb. 23, 2003
ase for War Confected, Say U.S. Officials
The Independent, Nov. 9, 2003
Copyright: Moscow Times
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