Welcome to what will be a weekly feature. For the last 11 years I’ve reviewed the news of the week in a 30-minute segment of a radio show in Seattle (it airs starting at 8:30 AM PLT, for those curious), and for the last five of those years an immensely popular feature has been the weekly rundown of news in and about Iraq — a compilation of recent news you may or may not have seen or read regarding America’s most disastrous war. Mainstream media tends to focus on the numbing drip of casualty reports (a couple dead American soldiers here, a few score Iraqis blown up in a market there) and the tedious spin of the White House and (now) Democratic presidential hopefuls. I don’t. A lot more is going on.
Recently I started putting my show notes in blog format, with the assumption that you’ll know some of this and you’ll get links for the pieces you don’t. Additions welcome in the comment threads. It can be a dreary and depressing laundry list, but, well, they’re our tax dollars, and knowing how they’re being (mis)used is a key step in stopping this madness.
It’s hard to know which locale in the war is more surreal, Iraq or D.C., but let’s start this week in D.C. The U.S. House of Representatives passed 399-24 Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)’s bill to ban both permanent military U.S. bases and U.S. control of Iraqi oil. Before you get too excited over the lopsided vote, however, remember that there is absolutely no downside to a “yes” vote for electorate-conscious Republicans trying to distance themselves from a war they’ve been rubber-stamping, because even if the Senate passes the exact same bill, there’s no way in Baghdad George Bush will ever sign it. How they vote to override the veto would be a lot more instructive, unless it’s clear the less electorally vulnerable Senate will do the dirty work for them.
Wednesday, Rep. Henry Waxman’s ever-busy House Oversight Committee held hearings on waste and fraud in the construction of the Taj Mahal new US embassy in Baghdad. Most alarming in the litany of worker abuses and contractual extravagance was a former worker’s testimony that at least 52 Filipino nationals had been kidnapped to work, essentially, as slave labor at the construction site. Stories of abuse of foreign workers on the site (Iraqis aren’t to be trusted) have been legion in recent months, but this is a new and despicable low.
Speaking of oversight, the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has so consistently been pointing out the naked emperor that the White House actually defunded their office this past fiscal year (after a popular outcry, the still Republican-led Congress passed a separate bill to restore funding). They were at it again this week, releasing results of an audit showing that of 24 Bechtel projects in a $1.8 billion 2004 contract, 13 were never finished (and some never started); there was “limited” oversight by USAID, the granting agency; and only 59 percent of taxpayer money went to actual construction, with the rest going to “security and Bechtel fees.” On a similar theme, three members of a Houston family were arrested this week on bribery and money laundering charges, having allegedly plotted over $15 million in kickbacks on KBR contracts.
A coalition of injured Iraq war vets is suing disgraced outgoing VA Secretary Jim Nicholson, saying he “broke the law by denying them disability pay and mental health treatment.”
For a couple months now, the US military in Baghdad has been buttressing White House spin by trying to blame everything bad that it can (to the extent that the liberal media just doesn’t report all the good news coming from Iraq) on Iran. The idea is to promote the notion that Iran is an integral combatant in the illegal occupation of Iraq Global War On Terror, and so when President Cheney Bush decides to launch a military strike on Iran, he can do so without consulting Congress on the claim that it’s all the same war and Congress has already authorized it. This week’s sublime contribution to the genre: blaming the “improved aim” of insurgent mortar attacks on their “training in Iran.” Note that this is fundamentalist Sunni mortar fire we’re talking about here. Trained in fundamentalist Shiite Iraq. Riiiiiggghhht.
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker is reported in a Guardian story as saying the Iraqi employees at the US Embassy will quit unless given hope of asylum in the US after the US, well, leaves or flees. They’re quite justifiably skeptical without such a guarantee; of the four million Iraqis displaced since the U.S. invasion, our immigrant-friendly nation has allowed in exactly 825 Iraqi nationals. It’s the perfect confluence of Beltway upper class mentality: we’re having the hired help work for almost nothing over there so they don’t work for almost nothing over here.
In Karbala Friday, nine died in a firefight between U.S. soldiers and members of a rogue Mahdi Army group. Why is this significant among all the week’s combat and death in Iraq? Because the Mahdi Army (loyal to cleric Moktada al-Sadr) has largely laid off engaging American troops since February, agreeing to do so in exchange for an escalation “surge” that has largely targeted Sunni insurgents and the Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq. That tacit understanding may be coming to an end.
Dahr Jamahl, in an essay on the surreal disconnect between life in Iraq and life in America, cites some sobering recent statistics: A WHO report that 70 percent of Iraqis now have no access clean water, and 80 percent “lack effective sanitation”; and noting that 54 percent of Iraqis now live on less than $1 a day.
On that theme, last week I noted that in a patented White House Friday Afternoon News Dump, where the Bush administration routinely tries to quietly bury unflattering news, a Pentagon report concluded that the US military needs to revise its tarnished brand in Iraq. “We want something we can learn from Madison Avenue or from the marketers, the best in the world, that might help us when we’re trying to deliver a message about what democracy is,” said Duane Schattle of US Joint Forces Command, which ordered the report. Apparently the whole “Democracy is: invading a country under false pretenses, killing and torturing its people, stealing its oil, and destroying everything we touch” thing isn’t quite panning out, so we need…a new way to sell the same old behavior. It’s all about marketing; pay no attention, Iraqis, to the illegal, immoral war that is destroying your country.
Anyway, once folks started reading the actual text of the report, it turned out, if possible, to be even more cynical and absurdist than it sounds. Read the grimly hilarious details (with quotes from the report itself, and a link to the report) here.
Til next week.
