- The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven
by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial
interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth
and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire
society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political
forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation
include the following (in order of importance):
-
- The most important political force was also the least
openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes
the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters
of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon
(Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the
Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart
Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of
consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials
and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists `insiders'
were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in
the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of
the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that
their top priority was to advance Israel's agenda, which, in this case,
was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country,
physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability
and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed
and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin
Netanyahu and the `Liberal' President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign
Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than
several `client regimes'.
-
- Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not
initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what,
in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design
of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state
apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their `expertise'
in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency.
Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi
religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The
Israeli `model' of colonial war and occupation the invasion of Lebanon
in 1982 and the practice of `total destruction' using sectarian,
ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the
Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli
military supervision.
-
- The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War
were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney)
who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen
its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist
backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian
militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of
Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against
China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney's
past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO
of Halliburton's giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown
and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military
base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European
and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein,
and some of the Bush's supporters in the oil industry had already engaged
in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was
not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.
-
- The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was
designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form
of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent
of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation
of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an
advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus,
extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the
growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements.
In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence
Agencies devised a `divide and rule' strategy (the so-called `El Salvador
solution' associated with the former `hot-spot' Ambassador and US Director
of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based
conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any
effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling
of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists
in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel's power in the region and
to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed
by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this
strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic
militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine
Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among
the Palestinians.
-
- The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply
a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political
gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The `war
of all against all' served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq
became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new
mercenary army. The `civil war' and `ethnic conflict' provided a pretext
for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of
soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially
if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the
basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized `war against
terror', US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror
within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the
puppet government especially among the educated and professional
classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent
secular republic.
-
- The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative
and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the
success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment
of the country) as the first `domino' in a series of war to `re-colonize'
the Middle East (in their words: "to re-draw the map"). They
disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about
`promoting democracies' in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic
policies of their `homeland' Israel over its subjugated Palestinians).
Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests,
the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic
Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation
of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported
Israel's savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault
and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of
Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale
military attack against Iran.
-
- The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous
wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash
the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured
total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi
resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions
imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate
imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence
all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing
of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands
of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out
selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.
-
- The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial
puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced
Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little
known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads
and its puppet `Iraqi' army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient
Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and
its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated
or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that
Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the
secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their
elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation
was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular
democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their
murderous net-work of `ethno-religious' collaborators as their uncontested
`partners' in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With
their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its
strategic pursuit of the other `dominoes' (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics).
-
- The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation
resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7
years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and
occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666
billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger
US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia
region. Washington's policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious
differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic
leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity
and resistance. The `divide and rule' tactics and reliance on retrograde
social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice
in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist
state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness
and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties
required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist
consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought.
-
- Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages,
mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships
and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination
of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals,
especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was
decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation.
To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers,
the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent
secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi
puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories
of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools,
cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic
social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and
external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational
institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder
of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent,
the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct
the republic was marked.
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- The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization
-
- Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural
order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein's
police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public
education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels
of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization
in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection
of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply
with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the
Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of
Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization
in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist
and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people
and regime's expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian
people under Israeli rule and occupation.
-
- A mere `regime change' could not extirpate this deeply
embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners
and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would
increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was
destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the
carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated,
the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi
society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose
its colonial puppets, with their primitive, `pre-national' loyalties, in
power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated
and nationalistic social strata.
-
- According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more
than 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of
the US occupation a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did
not dispute.
-
- Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals
and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher
education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures.
In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University 70
students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the
UNESCO to warn that Iraq's university system was on the brink of collapse.
The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled
the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors
who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned
by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation
in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon
in Iraq's second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city
streets.
-
- The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals
assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and
shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan
Daily News (<http://www.daily.pk>www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008.
This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic
elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.
-
- Assassinations
-
- The physical elimination of an individual by assassination
is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling
throughout the community from which the individual comes in this
case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative
leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered,
thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for
safer, less vulnerable activity.
-
- Baghdad was considered the `Paris' of the Arab world,
in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970's and 80's,
its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US `shock and awe'
campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial
bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe.
Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities
in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and
engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It
taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the
Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions
that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands
of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate
training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced
medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific
papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious
journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly
respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination
with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.
-
- This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation,
up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at
Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues,
students and family members were forced to flee.
-
- The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline
-
- The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily
News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned
in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known
intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the
`death squads' under US occupation.
-
- Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed
the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle
East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program
has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with
few prospects of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior
professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University,
the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of
butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University's
renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the
humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each),
education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University
spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications
and religious studies faculties.
-
- At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics
were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty
of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences
and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's August 20, 2002 pre-invasion
joke, "one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing `tiddlywinks'(a
child's game)"( justifying the bloody purge of Iraq's scientists in
physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that
followed the invasion.
-
- Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the
provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated
at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere.
The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior
faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their
Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala
(15) and Al-Anbar (11).
-
- The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out
most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or `allied' control.
The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary
drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab
civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations
were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups `set loose' or instrumentalized
by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals
and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a
modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.
-
- In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National
Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi
scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this
list became a core element in the US military's hit list for eliminating
Iraq's scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United
Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi
scientists and technicians who would have to be `contained' to prevent
their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created
a `budget' of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi `Oil
for Food' money held by the United Nations to set up `civilian re-education'
programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted
programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what
one American policy expert termed Iraq's `excess scientists, engineers
and technicians' in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April
2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli
Mossad's covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists
on an industrial scale.
-
- The US `Surge' and `Peak Assassination' Campaigns: 2006-2007
-
- The high tide of terror against academics coincides with
the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces.
Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which
a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87)
occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces
with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the
same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as
the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police
force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia
and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties
and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.
-
- The terror campaign against academics intensified in
mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight
of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their
families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become
refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon
elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary
measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with
the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected
or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although
the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars.
After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics
with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of
Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of
policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a result, Iraq's
research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support
staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated
with few prospects for future employment.
-
- The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush
and Obama have declared, is a `success' an independent nation of
23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced,
colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have
been put up for sale. All of Iraq's nationalist laws protecting its patrimony,
its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The
occupiers have imposed a `constitution' favoring the US Empire. Israel
and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama
celebrate the demise of a modern adversaryand the conversion of Iraq into
a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by
the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors
from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted
treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have `found' their way into the collections
of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now
anticipate the pillage of Iran.
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- Warning to Iran
-
- The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern,
scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude
of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military
attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations
of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among
the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO's during
their post-election `Lipstick Revolution' protests. They should bear in
mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves
with a fatally misplaced optimism that `at least we are not like Afghanistan'.
The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and
their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in
the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to
transform Iraq in the image of `our newly liberated Afghanistan' has been
fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed
the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists
should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously
ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated
Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.
-
- Conclusion
-
- What does the United States (and Britain and Israel)
gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical
socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq has become
an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and backward regime incapable
of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and
unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian
Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Thirdly, the destruction
of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent
state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational
corporations and their technical infrastructure facilitating imperial
economic penetration and exploitation.
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- In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848,
the conservative French sociologist Emil Durkheim recognized that the European
bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict and an increasing
anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical
misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to
use the myths of traditional religion to `create' social cohesion and undercut
class polarization. He called on the educated and sophisticated Parisian
capitalist class to forego its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma
in favor of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political
dominance. In the same way, US strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists,
have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious forces to destroy
the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq
in order to consolidate imperial rule even if this strategy called
for the killing off of the scientific and professional classes. Contemporary
US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and politically most
backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of
warfare.
-
- Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing
US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency
and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The
infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in
1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming
villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with
their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to
impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the
Palestinians is central to Israel's advice to the US policymakers in Iraq.
Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush
and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern
Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads
made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and
research institutions of that shattered nation.
-
- The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction
of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical
`howling wilderness' soaked in the blood of Iraq's precious scholars) is
controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as `Iraqi officers',
tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures.
They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding
`blue-prints for empire', formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard,
Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American
and European multi-national corporations.
-
- This is called `combined and uneven development': The
marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service
of the US.
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