- It's now obvious what the Bushites have in mind for Iraq.
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- Iraq is in the process of self-destruction, pushed over
the edge by Bush and the neocons. They believe chaos is a form of freedom,
a reaction to decades of Saddam's dictatorial rule. But this explanation
is mostly for public consumption.
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- Bush and his architects will endeavor to build a new
Iraq -- a McDonaldized Iraq ruled by westernized overlords and serviced
by US corporations. This can only happen if the methodical process of destruction
is allowed to unravel centuries of Iraqi culture and decades of Saddam's
iron-fisted rule.
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- The International Committee of the Red Cross complains
about the violence and unchecked looting. It cannot distribute humanitarian
aid. It says US inaction to bring the chaos under control is a breach of
the Geneva Convention.
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- Naturally, the US does not care about the Geneva Convention.
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- This should be obvious -- from the use of cluster bombs
to the illegal detention of political prisoners at Gitmo Bay in Cuba --
Bush and the Pentagon are violating the Geneva Convention right and left
and at every turn. It is absurd, almost comical, for the International
Committee of the Red Cross to make these claims -- they should know by
now that the US has no intention of respecting international law. Not only
is the Red Cross irrelevant, but so is most of humanity. Iraq -- as Mesopotamia
and the cradle of civilization -- is the poster child or irrelevancy. Soon
it will serve as a role model for all Arabs.
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- Another incidental international organization, the United
Nations, is now carping about the engineered chaos in Iraq. "The coalition
forces seem to be completely unable to restrain looters or impose any sort
of control on the mobs that now govern the streets," Veronique Taveau,
a UN spokesman, complained to the Guardian.
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- Mr. Taveau, unfortunately, insists on playing by old,
time-tarnished rules. He seems entirely clueless about the nature and intentions
of the Bushites. It's not an inability that constrains the US forces in
Iraq. No, it is something else altogether.
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- The Bush global engineers have issued top-down orders
-- allow the Iraqis to self-destruct, do not intervene. "We saw a
similar mixture in Kosovo and Sierra Leone but initial disorder does give
way to stability," explained a Tony Blair sidekick. Rumsfeld was a
bit more succinct. "Stuff happens," he mused. "And free
people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
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- "Freedom is a gift from the Almighty God,"
added Bush.
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- Freedom to loot, murder, and rape -- that is the gift
Bush's God has bestowed upon the Iraqi people. Bush's God lives by the
balance sheet and the bottom line, not compassion or even the now irrelevant
articles of the Geneva Convention. Bush's God resides in the Old Testament.
It gathers sustenance from destruction and genocide. It eagerly fills graveyards
and coffers. It dispenses multi-billion dollar reconstruction contracts.
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- The US has awarded, without competition, a contract worth
up to $7 billion to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton,
a company run until three years ago by Dick Cheney. Commerce Secretary
Donald Evans believes the US private sector should play a major role in
rebuilding Iraq and develop its plentiful energy resources.
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- "There will be companies that have an opportunity
to bid on contracts," Evans said in an interview after a luncheon
speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. "The coalition
countries certainly should have an opportunity to be involved in whatever
rebuilding opportunities there are."
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- Fluor Corp. and Parini Corp. have received contracts
from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide up to $100 million worth of
work to the military in the region. In other words, US and British corporations
will help construct bases and military installations designed to destroy
a large number of dark-skinned people and various distinct cultures in
the Middle East.
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- Meanwhile, the State Department's Agency for International
Development is acting as a pimp for US corporations hungry to turn a buck
on the devastation of Iraq. For instance, Stevedoring Services of America
and Bechtel are in the running and stand to earn billions. Both contributed
to the Republicans and Bush. Bechtel is a refuge for former Reaganites
and members of the Defense Policy Board where until recently Richard Perle
held sway.
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- As for exploiting Iraq's oil -- "for the benefit
of the Iraqi people" -- this would "almost invariably fall to
the nation's energy capital of Houston, where President Bush has deep connections,"
writes Stewart Yerton of New Orleans' Times-Picayune. "Evans dismissed
the idea that awarding oil contracts to Texas energy firms would create
perceived conflicts of interest. 'This is an administration of total integrity,'
he said. 'That's all that needs to be said.'"
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- It also needs to be said that the closed process of selecting
corporations -- mostly kept under wraps in the name of national security
-- to rebuild a methodically destroyed Iraq will result in the squandering
of billions of dollars. Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who
has written a book on federal contracting, told the Chicago Tribune the
"cost-plus" contracts being awarded by the Bushites could result
in overstaffing and over billing. "A lot of money is going to be wasted,
and a lot of money is going to be made," Singer said.
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- Meanwhile, the coolies who will rebuild Iraq's roads,
airports, hospitals and other infrastructure -- much of it either bombed
or assiduously stripped to the bone by looters -- will come from the Philippines
where annual income is around $1,000 per year and unemployment is all too
common. "Imported Filipino laborers and engineers, many working for
less than the US minimum wage, helped build the detention center holding
al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba," reports the
Taipei Times.
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- Instead of traditional United Nations peace-keeping troops
invited to restore order where Bush and Crew have deliberately sowed chaos
and destruction, it now appears the Reston, Virginia, rent-a-cop outfit
Dyncorp will be called to "re-establish police, justice and prison
functions in post conflict Iraq," according to Insight Magazine.
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- "We know we want something a little more corporate
and more efficient with cleaner lines of authority and responsibility,"
a Pentagon official told the New York Times.
-
- As Pratap Chatterjee of GNN writes, "[a]rmed DynCorp
employees make up the core of the police force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops
protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai, while DynCorp planes and pilots
fly the defoliation missions over the coca crops in Colombia." As
for allegations that Dyncorp was involved in a sex-slavery scandal in Bosnia
-- and accused of spraying Ecuadorian peasants with deadly herbicides --
well, that's the cost of doing business in the Third World.
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- Stuff, after all, happens.
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- In fact, it would seem the Bushites "want something
a little more corporate and more efficient with cleaner lines of authority
and responsibility" across the Middle East, beginning with Iraq and
-- if threats issued by Rumsfeld last week are to be taken seriously --
moving eventually to Syria. The neocons make no bones about their pathological
desire to attack and "regime change" Syria, Iran, Libya, North
Korea, possibly Saudi Arabia, and even Cuba. That's a whole lot of infrastructure
that will need to be rebuilt in the smoldering wake of cruise missiles,
JDAMs, bunker-busters, and MOABs.
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- But it's not simply food warehouses, electrical grids,
hospitals, and hardware stores ransacked and burned to the ground. It's
history itself. "They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of
pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history," writes Robert
Fisk. "The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling
down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians,
the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them
on to the concrete."
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- Instead of history and culture, Iraq will burgeon with
strip malls and sweatshops. Its oil and minerals will go to the powerful
corporate interests represented by George Bush and Dick Cheney. In due
time Syria and Iran will be subject to the same process and the freedom
of Bush's corporate God will eventually ring out in those benighted lands
as well.
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- If not the sound of freedom, it will be the sound of
a million cash registers instead.
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-
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- Kurt Nimmo's Another Day in the Empire http://nimmo.blogspot.com/
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