Shocked And
Awed Into 'Freedom'
By Pepe Escobar
22 March, 2005
Asia
Times
Two
years after being shocked and awed into "freedom", freedom
on the ground is a meaningless concept for large swathes of the Iraqi
population. Sunnis and Shi'ites alike tell Asia Times Online of a brutalization
of every-day life.Highways in and out of Baghdad are suicidal: the Americans
can't control any of them. Anyone is a potential kidnapping target,
either for the Sunni guerrilla or criminal gangs. Officials at the Oil
and Electricity Ministries tell of at least one attack a day. Oil pipelines
are attacked and distribution interrupted virtually every week. There's
a prison camp syndrome: almost 10,000 Iraqis incarcerated at any one
time, in three large jails, including the infamous Abu Ghraib. There's
also an Abu Ghraib syndrome: all-round denunciation of torture, electroshocks
and beatings. The Americans and the Iraqi police proceed with the same
"round up the usual suspects" tactic: but even if the "suspects"
are not part of the resistance, their families are always well taken
care of, so they inevitably join the resistance actively when they leave
jail.
The Sunni guerrillas
register an average of scores of attacks a day, all over the country.
Roadside and car bombs are still exploding in leveled Fallujah. The
Baghdad regional police commander was assassinated on Saturday. The
resistance has infiltrated virtually all government and police networks.
American counterinsurgency methods are going nowhere, because as the
Sunni guerrillas keep killing masses of Iraqi security forces, these
forces are retaliating in kind - abuses detailed, among others, by Human
Rights Watch. The majority of the Sunni population, complaining about
official brutality, has withdrawn support for the American-trained Iraqi
security forces. So the culture of brutalization has merged with the
emergence of sectarianism.
In contrast, life
inside the Green Zone bubble is totally virtual. There's no government
yet - the elections were on January 30 - so the Sunni guerrillas keep
up the pressure, while popular disillusionment with the political process
is on the rise. Prime-minister-in-waiting Ibrahim Jaafari of the Da'wa
Party recently said he would favor direct elections for prime minister
and parliament - not the American-imposed indirect method: it was not
good enough to placate popular impatience.
The Kurds for their
part block any move toward a new government as long as they don't get
written assurances establishing their control over Kirkuk - their Jerusalem.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), is basically worried about reimplementing
de-Ba'athification: the SCIRI in the next few days and weeks will virtually
take over the Interior Ministry.And all of this soaked in corruption
In its Global Corruption
Report 2005, Berlin-based Transparency International (TI) blasted the
widespread corruption in Iraq, which has benefited US contractors like
Halliburton and Bechtel. TI stressed that the new Iraqi government,
the American occupying power and international donors, such as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund, must urgently insist on decentralizing
governance, loans and aid projects; otherwise "Iraq will become
the biggest corruption scandal in history".
Many businessmen in Baghdad say that's already the case. According to
the TI report, the defunct L Paul Bremer-controlled Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA), alongside the Pentagon, initially had only 80 people
supervising the largest reconstruction agenda in history; both eventually
outsourced the oversight to private companies, and corruption spiraled
out of control. No one knows what happened to the US$ 8.8 billion of
Iraqi money which disappeared into a CPA-controlled black void.
Meanwhile, there's
no government because of the Kirkuk tinderbox. The Kurds want it all:
total control over Kirkuk, its oil, and their 100,000-strong peshmerga
(paramilitary) fighters detached from the future Iraqi national army,
in addition to army funding by the Iraqi national budget. This means
that a Kurdistan government, with Kirkuk as its capital, would be able
to block the Baghdad-controlled Iraqi armed forces from entering Kurdistan.
Kirkuk's Arabs and Turkomen are predictably furious. Inevitable consequence:
sectarianism on the rise.
From a strategic
Washington viewpoint, these questions are all minor.
Iraq is a crucial pawn in the US oil strategy - which includes the former
Yugoslavia (now with a permanent US military base in Kosovo, right in
the pipeline route from Russia and the Caspian to Europe); the Caspian
and Venezuela (major oil reserves); Afghanistan (now also with a permanent
US military base); Ukraine (a crucial pipeline route to Europe); Moldova
(oil reserves); Iran (oil reserves); and Syria (on the route of a pipeline
through which Israel wants to get Iraq's oil).
Bremer's CPA imposed
myriad laws over Iyad Allawi's transitional government. Washington controls
almost every excruciating detail of Iraq's economy: that's how the "new"
Iraqi administration was conceived by the neo-conservatives. The Ministry
of Energy is in effect American-controlled. American-paid officials
control all the key administrative positions in each relevant Iraqi
ministry. Their mandate lasts for five years. Gung-ho privatization
has not even started in full - and it will make a mockery of all the
warnings included in the TI report.
Hakim says that
the Iraqi population wants a full American troop pullout, and no American
"permanent military bases". He may be right, but it won't
happen. A Sunni Baghdad businessman was savvy enough to note, "We
all know the Americans are building 14 military bases all over the country.
And we all know they won't leave them. Does that sound like freedom
to you?"
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