Iraq War reaches critical phase

US deaths may be down and media coverage dropped, but this is when history is made, for better or worse

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Shortly after his inauguration to the US presidency in January of 1969, Richard Nixon began receiving praise in the mainstream media for following through on his main campaign promise to wind down the war in Vietnam and bring the troops home. The rate of death among US troops dropped precipitously and coverage of the war dutifully fell off the front pages.

It was only four years later amidst Watergate revelations that the public learned that Nixon’s method of reducing US casualties in Vietnam was to unleash the most destructive and murderous military terror the world had ever experienced from the bellies of B-52 bombers. Most of North Vietnam above Hanoi was completely obliterated in carpet bombing; Cambodia, a tiny and neutral country, took more tonnage of bombs than all the allied powers dropped on Germany in the Second World War; and China was threatened with nuclear annihilation.

All this happened in secret. It went unreported in Western mainstream media as most Americans turned their attention to more pressing domestic problems, assured by their free press that the war was over. It was during this “quiet” time that Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger committed some of the most egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity in world history.

It was also during this period when the most historically significant actions of the war took place. Convinced by the viciousness of American bombing that Kissinger’s peace talks in Paris were a sham, the North Vietnamese gave up all pretense to a negotiated settlement and militarily evicted American forces from the whole peninsula and crushed their South Vietnamese collaborators. Bombed into oblivion, Cambodia was shattered and soon overrun by the tiny Khmer Rouge army under the command of the insane Pol Pot, leading to the horrific holocaust of the Killing Fields.

The necessity for hiding the secret war in Cambodia required Nixon to establish a secret parallel government tucked away from public, Congressional, or bureaucratic oversight. The fear of discovery of this parallel government lead to the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex, an act that lead to the resignation of Nixon just ahead of criminal charges and certain jail time. And the failure of the might of US military power to shake the North Vietnamese and its exposure as a terribly overstretched and much diminished force lead America to seek a global Cold War truce with China and the Soviet Union.

These historical ramifications, all of them the products of a period during the war in Vietnam when the public stopped paying attention and were led to believe by the media that the war was actually winding down, are still keenly felt today, more than 30 years later.

The prize

News from Iraq since shortly after the second inauguration of Bush in January of this year has gone quiet and the number of US troops killed there has dropped off remarkably. In the nine months prior to fixed Iraqi elections at the end of January, US forces were dying at a rate of 2.75 per day in attacks that numbered around 100 per day. In the nearly three months since then, the rate of death has dropped 40% to 1.65 per day in attacks that have dropped reportedly to under 30 a day. The media has turned from war reporting on the front pages to reporting on inside pages about verbal squabbles among various political factions organizing for a constitutional drafting session. The war would appear to be pretty much over. But if history is a guide, only now has the real war got going.

What has not changed is the fact that Iraq has the capacity to pump three million barrels of high quality oil per day (and potentially six million) at a period when oil prices are reaching high above US $50 per barrel. That represents a $4.5 billion prize up for grabs every month. It’s not a fact lost on anyone in Iraq, however absent the fact is from all reporting in Western media. Elections, constitutions, assemblies, and negotiating sessions between different religious factions, tribal groups and regions, cannot be made any sense of without constant reference to this enormous prize and what can be done with it.

Iraq’s heft in the oil markets would allow it to match Saudi Arabia in establishing world oil prices (or supplant that country, which seems lately to have tapped out its excess capacity). It’s income from oil sales are what allowed Iraq in the past to repel Iran in a long war, to invade Kuwait and threaten Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to engage in expensive nuclear arms research. In short, it isn’t just the money: Iraq’s oil, especially in the age of peak oil, allow those who control it to become not just a pre-eminent regional power, but quite possibly a significant world power. No one plausibly vying for control in Iraq today is likely to give up easily when this kind of prize is at stake.

Nor is the prize escaping the attention of world powers who, despite lack of reporting on this level, are deeply involved in battles to assure themselves the best outcome in Iraq from their own point of view. China is the most significant player on this level, second to the US. China observed that Nixonian détente with the Soviet Union was only a trick allowing the US to defeat their arch rival through sustained economic warfare that followed. Access to oil has been the key to economic, and hence global, power for over a century. It will only become even more a determinant as supplies dwindle and demand grows. It would not be in China’s interest to see Iraqi oil become the sole property of the US economy. Accordingly, China has very recently established a port facility on Pakistan’s coast nearby the Straights of Hormuz through which most of Iraq’s oil, and indeed, a significant proportion of the world’s oil, flows.

A newly resurgent Russia, a growing India, and a unified Europe also have equally important stakes in what becomes of Iraqi oilfields. The lack of any reporting on their moves in and around Iraq speaks more to these powers’ long practiced arts of covert action and deception than to any lack of interest on any of their parts. Or it speaks more probably to poor reporting by mainstream media.

Canada thinks

Insofar as Canada is a major oil producing and oil exporting nation, and has forged deep and variously entangling ties to the US economy no less than the US military, it would be a good idea for Canadian economic, industrial, and foreign affairs policy makers to continue to pay close attention to events in Iraq and to constantly recalculate who is asserting what interests in the events that unfold there and to gauge who is gaining the edge. As anyone who plays any games or sports at all knows, the end-game is the most hard-fought, vicious, and significant part. It would be a shame for Canadian policy makers to find themselves caught out in the crossfire when the real shooting starts; it would be even worse to find themselves hunkered down with the losing side.

And so, with the stage set, what is the latest news from Iraq? In just one day selected at random during last week, someone took out a key aide of Moqtada al Sadr, someone else pulled over an Iraqi truck carrying 15 armed Iraqi army troops just south of Baghdad and shot them all to death, ten civilians were found shot and zipped up inside black body bags near Baquba, an Iraqi army officer was killed by three masked men in Basra, a bomb went off at a bus station in Najaf, several Turkish oil trucks were sit ablaze and one driver was killed and six others were wounded in Kirkuk, a car bomb in Mosul killed two policemen, and hundreds of thousands gathered at the site of the toppled statue of Hussein to denounce the US occupation and demand its withdrawal.

In the last sixty days, there have been 22 separate attacks on oil pipelines in Iraq. Oil production remains well below two million barrels a day because of continuing sabotage. US Marines report that lately attacks by insurgents on bases have evolved into classical mass frontal assault methods.

This is hardly the picture of a country returning to normal. It is a picture, rather, of an occupying army staying inside its bases while all around chaos erupts. Indeed, what little reporting is available seems to suggest that US control is limited to the Green Zone in Baghdad, the airport, and some of the oil pumps. The Sadr militia seems to have control of the south, the insurgent armies seem to control the middle outside of the Green Zone and the airport, and the Kurdish armies control the north.

As these factions dig in and consolidate their local power, it is increasingly unlikely the US occupation forces will ever dislodge them. If US forces try to leave, fights will erupt over control of the oil, the money the oil earns, and the power that that money buys. Besides, there are other regional and international players not keen to see US forces escape their sand traps anytime soon.

But US forces cannot stay hunkered down indefinitely on reinforced bases while there is the slow drip of death among them and the fast flow of costs to supply them. It may look and sound quiet right now. But the present situation can’t last. It’s the same as when Nixon and Kissinger sat down to look at the map in 1969. Or when Billy the Kid stood by the door of the house he was surrounded in and considered his options. They can’t stay in and the only way out is in a blaze of fire: that’s where America is at today in Iraq.

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