Crisis: Iraq? Terrorism? Oil? Empire?

I. CRITIQUE OF BUSH JR's DIPLOMACY

The following quote and image was widely circulated last Spring by those opposed to George Bush's ordering US military forces into Iraq and to the crack-down on domestic civil liberties embodied in the Patriot Act

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A webpage, originally called "Crisis in Iraq" that was created by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to "help media, policy makers, scholars and the public better follow the complicated issues surrounding the situation in Iraq." The website is updated frequently. It contains many links to Endowment reports, including a link to its Iraq: A New Approach that contains the proposal for "coercive inspections" that was applied so successfully - despite US accusations - by the UN in Iraq. It also contains links to a great many other important sites, some of which are linked in various sections below.

* Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000.

More than a report outlining how to strengthen the US military, this book-length conservative essay bases its discusion of military needs on the premise that the "grand strategy" of the United States should be the maintenance and extension of what it frankly calls Pax Americana - global American dominance. This essay - that has reportedly played a key role in the formulation of Bush Jr. foreign policy - calls for the United States to create, and base throughout the world, the military muscle to manage multiple, simultaneous interventions, including both large-scale wars [such as an invasion & occupation of Iraq] and smaller "constabulary" actions [such as "humanitarian" interventions as in Kosovo].

Sebastian Mallaby, "Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire," Foreign Affairs, March-April 2002. Available through ERes

Washington Post editor on how the US should assert global leadership, although not entirely unilaterally.

Giles Trendle, "The Aftermath of Regime Change," The Middle East, August/September 2003.

Analysis of the results of "nation building" in Afghanistan 18 months after the US overthrow of the Taliban regime. As the opening line of the article suggests: the experience in Afghanistan has sobering implications for Iraq.

Dusko Doder, "How Not to Overthrow Saddam: The Bush Plan and the Alternatives," The American Prospect, July 15, 2002.

Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Eagle Has Crashed Landed," Foreign Policy, July-Ausgust 2002. Available through ERes

Marina Ottaway, "Nation Building," Foreign Policy, September - October 2002.

*Jay Bookman, "The President's Real Goal in Iraq," The Atlantic Journal-Constitution, September 29, 2002. Available through ERes

Bookman's editorial is based on his reading to two documents: President Bush's National Security Strategy statment, and the right-wing document Rebuilding America's Defenses report on which he thinks the former is based. He argues that these documents - which the Bush Jr. adminstration is now trying to implement - lay out plans for a new globe-spanning "American Empire" - a new American imperialism.

*The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002.

This is the official statement of Bush Jr. foreign policy

State of the Union Address to Congress, January 2004.

The President's annual speech to Congress. In an election year, towards the end of the president's first term, it is also the unofficial beginning of the President's re-election campaign. In this speech he defends his "War on Terrorism", his invasion of Iraq and the Patriot Act and attacks his critics.

*Donald Kagan,"Comparing America to ancient empires is 'ludicrous'," Atlantic Journal-Constitution, October 6, 2002. Available through ERes

Kagan was a director of the "Rebuilding American's Defenses" Project and ofters a rather lame response to Bookman's critique - a response that ignores, and therefore doesn't answer, many of Bookman's points.

John Lewis Gaddis, "A Grand Strategy of Transformation," Foreign Policy, January - February 2003. Available through ERes

Another interpretation of Bush Jr.'s "National Security Strategy."

Midnight Notes, Respect your Enemies - The First Rule of Peace: An Essay Addressed to the U.S. Anti-war Movement, 2002.

CNN, Ex-CIA head James Woolsey on Fourth World War, April 2, 2003.

*Subcomandante Marcos, What are the Characteristics of the Fourth World War?, November 20, 1999. Translated from Revista Rebeldia, February 2003.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "An Unnecessary War," Foreign Policy, January - February 2003. Available through ERes

George W. Bush, Jr., "State of the Union Address," January 2003. Also available through ERes

Partially a "state of the union" and partially a statement of the rationale for attacking Iraq. Compare with documents above.

II. GULF WAR II: OIL, TERRORISM OR EMPIRE?

1. Sources of Information

A webpage created by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to "help media, policy makers, scholars and the public better follow the complicated issues surrounding the situation in Iraq." The website is updated daily. It also contains a link to the Endowment's report Iraq: A New Approach that contains the proposal for "coercive inspections" that was being applied by the UN in Iraq before Bush decided to blow off the UN and attack.

Major Alternative News Sources: Russian Site #1, Russian Site #2, Indymedia, you can also access a large number of particular Indymedia sites such as the one at San Francisco, Al Jazeerah - a major source of news from Arab media, Arab News - from Saudia Arabia.

2. Media and the War: Critical Views

Both the content and the structuring of reporting on the conflicts before and during the second Gulf War have been hotly contested - as they were in the case of the first Gulf War. The American mass media has been criticized both at home and abroad for uncritically repeating Bush Administration and Pentagon propaganda filled with euphemisms and doublespeak. Other sources, such as those Arab media covering the war have also been attacked for either failing to report significant events or being biased in their reporting. There is no way to evaluate such claims other than by examining journalist reporting critically in the light of all available information. Compare what you find in your examination with Kellner's account in his Persian Gulf TV War

See especially FAIR's Action Alert "In Iraq Crisis Networks are Megaphones for Official Views", March 18, 2003.

Al Jazeerah on the difference between itself and CNN.

J.Donnelly & A.Barnard, "Differing TV Images Feed Arab, US Views", Boston Globe, March 3, 2003.

LaborStart, "International Federation of Journalists Say Attacks on Journalists are Crimes of War and Must be Punished," April 8, 2003. Available through ERes.

4. The Bush Jr. Administration, Background and Claims: Saddam, WMD & Terrorism

Because of the interrelationships between those corporations and Bush Administration figures who were involved in past traffic in both WMD technology and oil industry contracting, this section really overlaps with the next one: Oil War?

These two documents make up the basic administration foreign policy orientation and claims concerning Iraq and more generally the new doctrine of preemptive war and overthrowing foreign governments. You should read them both for understanding the general policies of this administration and for its claims vis a vis Iraq. A great many more official statements can be accessed through the Carnegie Endowment page linked below that covers the WMD inspections.

Excerpts from 2003 State of the Union Speech, January 28, 2003.

Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, 2002.

Typical of the arguments put forward by the Bush administration as to why invading Iraq would be a good idea, how it wouldn't cost much because it would be paid for by Iraq oil exports and how Iraqi's would welcome US soldiers with open arms. See Pollack's later book, and Myre's review below.

Lawrence Kaplan & William Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003. Chapters Seven to Nine. Available through ERes.

M.Dobbs, "US Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup: Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds", Washington Post, December 30, 2002.

*Institute for Policy Studies Report, Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured Government Focus on Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein, March 2003. Press Release: Rumsfeld Ignored Weapons of Mass Destruction in Pursuit of Oil Pipeline, March 24, 2003. Another report outlining essentials of IPS Report: Dave Lindorff, "Crude History Lesson: Is the War about oil after all?", In These Times, March 27, 2003.

This report provides detailed and documented information on the history of US corporate and US government cooperation to provide Saddam Hussein with capacity to produce chemical weapons, as well as detailing the history of current policy makers roles in efforts to win lucrative oil contracts for various corporations with which they were (and often continue to be) associated. The report is not long, the press release web page contains pdf files-for-download of many pertinent documents and the Lindorff article provides a sketch of the whole sordid history.

Richard Oppel, "Bechtel Has Ties in Washington, and to Iraq," New York Times, April 17, 2003. Available through ERes.

Doug Ireland, a review of: Peter Mantius, Shell Game: A True Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics - and the Arming of Saddam Hussein, The Nation, June 10, 1996. Available through ERes.

Please note how long the essentials of this story have been known.

Joost Hilterman, "America Didn't mind Poison Gas," International Herald Tribune, January 17, 2003. Available through ERes.

Steven Pelletiere, "A War Crime or an Act of War?", New York Times, January 31, 2003. Available through ERes.

An interesting assessment of what is, and is not, known about Hussein's use of chemical weapons against his own people by ex-CIA Senior Analyst who was in charge of Iraq desk during Iraq - Iran War. Basically Pelletiere says there is no evidence that the gas (that was used) was aimed at Iraqi's rather than at Iranians who were attacking the town in question.

Carnegie Endowment Collection of Materials on UN Inspections

John B. Kiesling, A US Diplomat's Letter of Resignation, New York Times, February 27, 2003.

J.Cirincione, et al, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, Carnegie Endowment, January 2004.

While not the final word on the subject - as the report makes clear - this is an extremely valuable analysis of what was known as of the end of 2003 and of the implications of that information. It has a nice summary of findings and one of the conclusions it draws about the intelligence story, the Bush Administration handling of intelligence and what should be done to further document and detail the actual history of Iraqi efforts in the field of WMD.

*House Judiciary Committee (Democratic Staff), The Constitution in Crisis: The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution and Coverups in the Iraq War, 2005, Chapter Four: Legal Analysis.

James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, New York: Free Press, 2006.

Risen is National Security correspondent for the New York Times. Drawing largely on anonymous insiders of the American intelligence community, Risen gives a detailed account of how the Bush administration ignored the analysis of CIA professionals and drew on raw, unrealiable data that fit their already-decided decision to invade Iraq in order to justify that action to the world. In the process the Administration caused a crisis not only between itself and the intelligence community but within that community as well. For a non-anonymous insider account verifying Risen's tale, see the article by ex-CIA Officer Paul Pillar below.

*Paul R. Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.

Pillar was National Intelligence Officer in the CIA for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. This article, made available on the Foreign Affairs website in advance of publication, presents an insider's analysis of Bush Administrations cherry-picking of intelligence and the crisis it caused in the relationship between the Intelligence Community and the White House, and thus within that community itself. It verifies much of what appears in Risen's book, cited above.

*James Risen, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," The New York Times, December 16, 2005.

This is the article that broke the story of the Bush Administrations secret program of using the National Security Agency (NSA) to bypass the FISA courts and spy on Americans.

*Department of Justice, "The NSA Program to Detect and Prevent Terrorists Attacks: Myth v. Reality", January 27, 2006.

Unable to locate the Department of Justice letter to Congress mentioned in the article below, I did find summary of that department's rationale for President Bush's violation of the law mandating judicial clearance for NSA wiretapping: his supposedly legal right as Commander in Chief to ignore laws that constrain his actions in Defense of the United States. Read this, then the critique of the legal logic given in the letter by constitutional lawyers in the letter to Congress below.

*Constitutional Lawyers, On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 53, No. 2, February 9, 2006.

This letter, signed by fourteen scholars and former government officials, dissects and critiques the Department of Justice's rationale for President Bush's violation of existing law (FISA) on electronic surveillance and the surveillance of American citizens.

Kenneth M. Pollack, A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, New York: Random House, 2008.

On this book see Greg Myre's review in the Washington Post where he points reminds readers of Pollack's misjudgement in his earlier book (see above) endorsing the case for invading Iraq.

5. Oil War?

Global Policy Forum Web Site on Iraqi Oil.

The Global Policy Forum is an NGO that monitors the United Nations and issues associated with it, thus its concern with Gulf War II. The webpage on Iraqi Oil is one part of a larger series of pages on the Crisis in Iraq. On the site on Iraqi oil you will find numerous papers that you should read including the articles by James Paul Iraq: the Struggle for Oil, December 2002 and Oil in Iraq, the heart of the Crisis, December 2002 that are not long but informative. You should also read the article by Susan Warren and Chip Cummins that appeared in the Wall Street Journal called "For Iraqi Oil, a US Corporate Mold", April 25, 2003.

Baker Institute, "Strategic Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century," 2001. For an Executive Summary follow the links to Publications/Studies.

Neil MacKay, "Official: US Oil at the Heart of Iraq Crisis," Sunday Herald (Scotland), October 6, 2002.

Critical view of Baker Institute study.

Michael Renner, "Bood & Oil: Alternatives to War with Iraq", World Watch Institute, November 22, 2002.

6. War for Empire?

Antonio Negri, "The Order of War", Global Magazine(Italy), November 2002.

7. The Costs of War

Mark Stoker, "The Cost of Militry Intervention in Iraq," International Institute for Strategic Studies, no date given.

Letter from 1,000 War Veterans to George Bush, March 10, 2003.

Liam McDougall, "The Looting of Babylon: Western Inaction has led to the pillaging of priceless cultural treasures," The Sunday Herald, April 20, 2003.

"Aid Groups Warn of Disaster in Iraq", The Observer(UK), December 22, 2002.

*Institute for Policy Studies, "The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War," January 30, 2006.