Last year in Hamdania, west of Baghdad, eight U.S. soldiers abducted an Iraqi man from his home, threw him in a ditch, and shot him. The soldiers placed an AK-47 and a shovel near his body. They wanted to make it seem as though he were an insurgent digging holes to plant roadside bombs.
While debate rages in the United States about the military in Iraq, an equally important decision is being made inside of Iraq–the future of Iraq’s oil. A new Iraqi law proposes to open the country’s currently nationalized oil system to foreign corporate control. But emblematic of the flawed promotion of “democracy” by the Bush administration, this new law is news to most Iraqi politicians.
Lieutenant Ehren Watada is like many other Americans; as the intentions behind invading Iraq have become more obviously spurious, he has reshaped his perceptions of the war. He originally supported the war with so much vigor that he voluntarily enlisted in the Army, but he came to conclude that the Iraq War is both illegal and immoral. Unlike millions of his fellow Americans who have changed their minds he does not have the luxury of simply swapping out bumper stickers on his car. Instead, he faces potentially ruthless consequences.
Faced with growing public opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, the Bush administration has been desperately trying to divert attention to Iran. Washington has gone so far as to make a series of dubious and unfounded charges that blame the Iranian government for the difficulties facing American forces fighting the Iraqi insurgency.
As the fables about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and clandestine ties with al-Qaida began to unravel following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the flagship of U.S. news reporting, The New York Times, took itself to task for its failure to challenge its news sources. “Information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged,” the Times wrote in May 2004. “Articles based on dire claims about Iraq trended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”
The transfer of current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad from his job as the Great Wizard of Iraq’s embattled Emerald City in Baghdad’s Green Zone, to the quieter but no less complicated halls of the United Nations, may have several rationales.
President George Bush gave his 2007 State of the Union address on January 23. While the speech covered many domestic issues, Bush also laid out his foreign policy approach to Iraq, Iran, terrorism, and democracy promotion. Excerpts from the president’s speech are in italics; my comments follow.
The scene inside the Capitol tonight for this annual occasion will be more surreal than usual. The leader who has led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in our history will stride punctually into the chamber, bathed in thunderous, ritual applause.
The new strategy of the United States in Iraq does not include an extensive overhaul of reconstruction efforts at this critical time. Very little money is now being appropriated for reconstruction. As the Iraq Study Group Report explains, of the $21 billion to date that has been appropriated for the “Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund” (IRRF), $16 billion has been spent and the remaining funds have been committed. The administration requested $750 million for 2007, and President Bush’s new proposal is to add $1.2 billion to that.