Rohan Pearce
US troops shot Farqad Mohammed Khinaisar at 8am on May 29. She was 15 minutes away from the Baghdad high school she taught at when a convoy of soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division opened fire on her car. Her death was the end result of a decision by the US, British and Australian governments to pursue their imperial interests, at the expense perhaps more than 100,000 Iraqi lives.
With the publication of the "Downing Street memo" in Britain's Sunday Times on May 1, the motives behind the Iraq invasion are once more under scrutiny. The top-secret document records the minutes of a July 2002 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair, some of Blair's closest advisors, top cabinet members and senior members of Britain's intelligence community, including Richard Dearlove, head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
While the US media did not extensively cover the issue at first, 88 members of Congress signed a letter sent to US President George Bush on May 5 by Democrat Congress member John Conyers that calls for the White House to respond to the issues raised by the memo. A petition in support of Conyers' letter has garnered more than 500,000 signatures.
The Downing Street minutes show that the White House was intent on invading Iraq regardless of the outcome of UN weapons inspections (weapons inspectors entered Iraq around three months after the meeting), and that supposed intelligence information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin was being manipulated to fit the needs of the Bush administration. As has become amply clear since the invasion, both the WMD and the Hussein-al Qaeda alliance were fiction.
The minutes record Dearlove's report on his visit to Washington: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."
The memo continues: "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [the US National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." (The full memo is available at <http://www.downingstreetmemo.com>.)
There is an abundance of evidence that the case for war with Iraq was indeed "fixed" by Bush, Blair and Australian PM John Howard. Strangely enough, they didn't think that imperial hegemony and control of oil resources would "sell" as good reasons to send soldiers off to die.
In November 2002, writing for the New York City-based Village Voice, Roger Trilling explained some of the real reasons for the invasion: "by getting rid of Saddam, the US not only puts Iraqi oil in play but gains leverage over Iran. We could stop bombing Saddam from the bases in Saudi Arabia, and thus lighten if not erase our military presence in the kingdom."
A September 2002 report by published the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, noted that the US "presence in the Gulf is primarily intended to maintain the flow of oil by preventing a hostile power from establishing hegemony over the region".
Australians were also subjected to a hysterical corporate-media-fuelled campaign of lies, spearheaded by Howard and his government. In the February 4, 2003, parliamentary debate on Iraq, Howard declared: "If Iraq emerges from its current confrontation with world opinion with its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons intact, the potential for Saddam Hussein's aggression against his neighbours to be renewed will be greatly enhanced. Iraq will again feel free to coerce and intimidate countries in the region."
Iraq, a country crippled by genocidal UN economic sanctions for more than a decade and devastated by years of vicious US and British bombing, was never in a position to threaten anyone. This did not stop the spectacle of parliamentary "debate" over how best to end the "threat" posed by Iraq and whether or not to invade under a United Nations flag of convenience.
But the exposure of the lies that justified the invasion has not stopped many of these talking heads defending the ongoing war that US-led occupation forces are waging against a primarily indigenous resistance movement.
Lately the Pentagon has been developing a morbid obsession with the number of Iraqi guerrillas they allegedly kill, using the figures to "prove" that victory is just around the corner. This is a similar to the Pentagon's Vietnam War propaganda strategy — and merely draws attention to the commitment of those willing to take arms against a militarily more powerful foe.
A June 11 Salon.com article by Mark Benjamin described the Pentagon's propaganda campaign: "'Marines Kill 100 Fighters in Sanctuary Near Syria' was a front page headline in the Washington Post last month. The body count, coming from a Marine spokesman, was carried in other major papers that day. What was striking about the factoid, besides the elegantly even number, was that it showed how the US military has increasingly released body counts in reports depicting successful operations in Iraq ...
"As the bloody insurgency continues in Iraq, the US-led counterinsurgency campaign is yielding frustratingly few tangible ways to show progress to the American people. If anything, the insurgency seems firmly entrenched ... Counting enemy bodies at least offers a number to grab on to, some sense of incremental victory.
"'It may be that they regard it as being part of the good news story: that we are winning the war,' John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said about the military's stepped-up use of body counts in Iraq."
However the June 27 Newsweek explained that "New insurgents seem to spring up faster than the allied forces can cut them down. The Coalition has announced the killing of some 15,000 insurgents over the past year. Nevertheless, official briefers have recently estimated that between 12,000 and 20,000 insurgents remain active." This is despite the US's January 2004 estimate that the occupation forces faced between 3000-5000 Iraqi guerrillas.
However, the Pentagon's rediscovered infatuation with enemy body counts to prove that the "good guys" are winning has failed to stem the slide in popularity of the Iraq deployment among the US majority.
Within Iraq, support for the occupation remains confined to a narrow layer of collaborators — meaning the anti-occupation guerrillas have a large constituency to recruit new fighters from.
A Zogby International poll conducted in January found that 69% of Shiite Iraqis and 82% of Sunnis "favor US forces withdrawing either immediately or after an elected government is in place". The poll's results are despite attempts to intimidate Iraqis: anything construed as "inciting violence" against the occupiers — which has included simply expressing opposition to the occupation — is a criminal offence.
Nevertheless, a letter calling for the occupation's end was recently signed by 82 Iraqi legislators. A June 19 report by Islam Online described the signatories as "Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni Arab, Christian and communist" members of the 275-strong parliament. The letter was delivered to the parliament's speaker by Falah Hassan Shanshal, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the lion's share of the vote in the January elections (over 48%).
The letter opposed the United Nations Security Council's extension of Washington's occupation mandate (it was extended on May 31 after a request by Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari) and called for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops.
Iraq is now supposed to be a nation with a sovereign government "requesting" help from the US and its allies — as if a country occupied by some 160,000 foreign troops, threatened with an end to reconstruction funds (most of which are poured into the bank accounts of rapacious multinationals anyway) is independent in any meaningful sense.
The imperialist politicians insistence that "we" can't "cut and run" flies in the face of the wishes of most Iraqis. The same warmongers who assured us that an invasion was necessary to "disarm" Iraq and smash an alliance between Hussein and al Qaeda now maintain that the occupation must continue until "we" win. They are lying.
From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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