Where's the apology?

The wave of destruction unleashed by US and British forces in Iraq was a mistake, everyone now agrees. Perhaps being in love with oil means never having to say you're sorry

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

We are asked to believe that none but the "bitter enders" continue to oppose US-led coalition forces occupying Iraq, and that for the most part, Iraqis welcomed the ouster of Saddam Hussein's Bath'ist regime.

But suppose for a moment that, as Robert McNamara flippantly said after the catastrophic debacle of the Vietnam War, "We got it wrong." Suppose that, until US forces breached the UN Demilitarized Zone between Kuwait and Iraq, life in Iraq was fairly normal, prosperous, and happy, and that afterward, it became chaotic, impoverished, and terrifyingly insecure.

Suppose that is what the US-led war on Iraq meant for you. Then what would you make of the scandals now brewing in both the United Kingdom and the United States regarding what appears to all the world to be stunningly trumped up justifications for their launching of a pre-emptive, and apparently, pre-meditated war upon your country?

Granted, Hussein was a brutal leader. But as is the case everywhere in the world, if you don't stick your nose into a gang's business, you aren't likely to get hurt.

In addition to mass graves, Hussein's Iraq was also home to the largest, most stable and prosperous, and contented, middle class in the entire Arab world. Health care and education, universal benchmarks for quality of government, in addition to democracy, were the best funded and operated in the entire Arab world. There had developed in Bath'ist Iraq a quality university system, a well-evolved, first-world industrial economy, and vibrant, cosmopolitan cities with strong entrepreneurial classes and low unemployment.

If one joined a movement to violently overthrow the government, as did some Shias in the south around Basra in 1991, one would be dealt with most harshly. But if one were interested in schooling, in business, or any other walk of life, Iraq under Hussein was not anywhere near as depressing as life under any other regime in the entire region.

The US invasion and violent overthrow of Hussein has changed quite a bit concerning life in Iraq, especially for the once-dominant and prosperous middle class. In addition to a bombing campaign that was far more destructive than generally reported, there has been on-going sabotage by rebels attacking essential electricity, oil, and water services. Potentially more damaging has been the rapid and deep privatization of the entire Iraqi economy, coupled with its wholesaling to foreign investors. Entire industries, like the mobile phone industry and the electricity industry, have been parceled off to foreign contractors who, thanks to special relationships with persons in the US White House administration, won contracts outside normal open-bidding processes. War and sabotage damage can be rebuilt, but signed contracts with large multinational companies are nearly impossible to escape, and the effects of the US occupation on the quality of the Iraqi economy will be felt for decades to come.

Those effects are chiefly these: all profits from most of the Iraqi economy will be removed to corporate headquarters in America, and to Canada, insofar as Prime Minister Paul Martin has arranged that Canadian companies can now bid on Iraqi contracts; all major decisions about industrial development will be made in foreign, not local, head offices, ensuring Iraq a subservient and neo-colonial economy; all offices for top engineering and executive staff will be occupied by foreigners, ensuring there is no indigenous evolution of an Iraqi elite of the meritorious; and the national government will remain perpetually hobbled by its inability to collect corporate taxes from mostly offshore-controlled industries, ensuring that education and health care will remain under-funded.

All of this is the result of what appears to be a mistake at best, and a malicious lie more likely. It appears as though there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq-the main justification for the devastating joint US and UK pre-emptive attack on that country. "It turns out we were all wrong," said David A Kay last Wednesday, the resigned head of US weapons inspectors in Iraq. "That is most disturbing," he added, as though it needed to be said.

Kay's conclusions, delivered in testimony last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not differ in any substantial way from that offered by chief UN weapons inspector, prior to the war, Hans Blix.

Senator Edward Kennedy replied to Kay's testimony to say that the US attack on Iraq seemed to him to be "the result of manipulation of the intelligence to justify a decision to go to war." Senator Carl Levin agreed with this assessment: "The administration, in order to support its decision to go war, made numerous vivid, unqualified statements about Iraq having in its possession weapons of mass destruction." An unnamed senior US government official was quoted in the New York Times saying, "Either the intelligence analysts just created their own inertia and couldn't get out of it, or the inertia was created from the top down by [CIA head George] Tenet and his crowd."

A similar story is emerging across the sea in London, England, where Prime Minister Tony Blair was thinly exonerated for the charge of creating false intelligence about Iraq. Lord Hutton, who had overseen an inquiry into the false British evidence of Iraqi weapons systems, said that it was possible that intelligence chiefs got their claims wrong because they were "subconsciously" influenced by the Prime Minister's desire to have a strongly worded report to back the case for war.

Presumably, ordinary Iraqis-doctors, nurses, teachers, city workers, and so on-are watching these developments closely. And they are able, unlike us, to look out their windows on the burned-out national gallery, the looted national museum, the destroyed public buildings, and the collapsed infrastructure all around them, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed, the over-filled morgues, the children with missing limbs and patched eye sockets, and always the rumbling US tanks and Humvees, occasionally blowing up in the middle of busy streets, and they must be shaking their heads to learn that the British and Americans who brought this to Iraq can be so callous and flippant about "subconscious" desires and "most disturbing" mistakes.

Not one candidate for US president from either party, nor any concerned Senator or Congress member, nor any British parliamentarian from the governing or opposition side of the House, has yet to suggest that perhaps an apology to Iraq and her people might be in order.

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