THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

In the Bush administration, it is considered heresy to suggest postponing the planned return of sovereignty to Iraq. Turning over control by June 30, administration officials say, is crucial to assuaging Iraqi distress over living under American occupation.

Yet in recent weeks, diplomats and even some in the administration have begun to worry that the date reflects more concern for American politics than Iraqi democracy. Their fear is that an untested government taking power on June 30 may not be strong enough to withstand the pressures bearing down on it.

"When we went into Iraq, our plan was to have a government, build a structure and write a constitution that would be a source of longterm stability," said an administration official. "Now that's out the window."

Many in the administration say that while they have no proof that the urgency to install a government is politically motivated, it feels to them like part of a White House plan to permit President Bush to run for re-election while taking credit for establishing self-rule in Iraq.
...This is entirely a schedule dictated by Karl Rove," said an Arab diplomat who maintains close contacts with the administration, referring to the White House's political director. "Anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve."

"The Shiites are wary of what they see as an American attempt to install a client regime. They fear a permanent American military presence and control over Iraqi's oil. "The occupiers' two major aims are to loot all of Iraqi's national wealth and to control conflicts in the world by controlling Iraqi oil," wrote a commentator in the

Bush Plays Bait-and-Switch With 9/11 Panel

February 19, 2004

Let us finally put to rest a widely circulated and grossly inaccurate story that's been making the rounds: Rumors of President George W. Bush's cooperation with the panel probing the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are unsubstantiated.

Unlike those Internet rumors that pop to electronic life and die quickly without fingerprints, this one is traceable directly to the con artist-in-chief. The world thinks Bush is cooperating with the 9/11 commission because he says he is.

"We have given extraordinary cooperation" the president told NBC's Tim Russert in his Sunday Meet the Press chat. "I want the truth to be known."

The truth?

"I've experienced two political bait-and-switches since I've been on the commission," said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator and current president of the New School University in New York. And that's only about a month. "The bait-and-switch in politics is a technique that is intentionally designed to lead the public (to believe) that you're going to do something that you're not going to do."

The latest subterfuge involves the president's agreement to be interviewed by the 9/11 commission, as its chairmen, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, requested. The White House announced with some fanfare that well, certainly, the president would oblige. Then the backtrack began.

Administration officials said any interview would be done in private. What's more, the president would not submit to questions from the full bipartisan panel, only from selected commissioners. Which ones? Only his damage-controllers know for sure.

Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman, refused to answer "yes" or "no" when asked to state whether the president wants to limit the commissioners who would be allowed to question him. "Those details are being worked out," she said.

Ah, the details.

Negotiated "details" have constricted the commission's access to the president's daily brief - a digest of intelligence for the commander-in-chief. Previous probes of 9/11 already have revealed that, in the months before the terrorists struck, the intelligence community screamed loudly about a planned attack meant to inflict mass casualties. Bush bragged in his NBC interview about giving the commission access to these briefings.

In fact, the full commission hasn't seen them.

The White House negotiated a convoluted agreement under which a handful of panel representatives were allowed to see the briefs and take notes. Then it tried to block these few from sharing their notes with other panelists. Finally - after the commission contemplated a subpoena of its own members' notes - a 17-page summary of the briefings, edited by the White House, went to all commissioners.

The summary, according to two commission sources, raises more questions for Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser. Still more could be put to former Federal Aviation Administration chief Jane Garvey and to Sandy Berger, national security adviser to former President Bill Clinton.

"When somebody stands up and says 'well, there's nothing in those PDBs,' that's not true," Kerrey said. Well, that's just about what Rice said publicly when the existence of a key briefing from Aug. 6, 2001, came to light.

Never mind. The public won't hear from Rice because her interview with the commission was private. And the panel is running out of time to complete work before its May deadline.

In one of those heralded announcements of cooperation, the White House has said it's willing to give the panel two months more. Curiously, neither the House nor the Senate - both controlled by the president's party and heretofore happy to oblige Bush - has rushed to take the action needed to extend the panel's life.

Does the president understand the dimension of failure that 9/11 represents? It shook his presidency and changed its course. He has led the nation to two wars to avenge the attacks and, he says, prevent another.

Still he obstructs the full and fair accounting that the people are due. This must be counted as another failure of 9/11. It is an indignity to history that is, somehow, imposed without shame.

Email: [email protected]

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

Those who supported the war because of Bush and Blair's lies now cast themselves as victims. This won't help Iraq's dead and dying

Feel guilt. Then move on
[...]
In international law, countries that wage wars of aggression must pay reparations. Yet in Iraq, this logic has been turned on its head. Not only are there no penalties for an illegal war, there are prizes, with the US actively and openly rewarding itself with huge reconstruction contracts. When the reconstruction spending has attracted controversy, it has not been over what is owed to Iraqis for their tremendous losses, but over what is owed to European corporations and to American taxpayers. "This war profiteering is poison to America, poison to Americans' faith in government and poison to our allies' perception of our motives in Iraq," John Edwards said in December. True, but he somehow failed to mention that it also poisons Iraqis - not their faith, or their perceptions, but their bodies.

Every dollar wasted on an over-charging, underperforming US contractor is a dinar not spent rebuilding Iraq's bombed-out water treatment and electricity plants. And it is Iraqis, not US taxpayers, who are forced to drink typhoid- and cholera-infested water, and then to seek treatment in hospitals still flooded with raw sewage, where the drug supply is even more depleted than during the sanctions era.

There is no plan to compensate Iraqi civilians for deaths caused by the willful destruction of their infrastructure, or as a result of combat during the invasion. The occupying forces will only pay compensation for "instances where soldiers have acted negligently or wrongfully". According to the latest estimates, US troops have distributed roughly $2m in compensation for deaths, injuries and property damage. That's a third of what Halliburton admits two of its employees accepted in bribes from a Kuwaiti contractor.

To talk about the price of the Iraq war strictly in terms of military casualties and US tax dollars is an obscenity. Yes, Americans and British citizens were lied to by their politicians. Yes, they are owed answers. But the people of Iraq are owed a great deal more, and that enormous debt belongs at the very centre of any civilised debate about the war.

In the US, a good start would be for the Democratic candidates to acknowledge some collective responsibility. Bush may have been the war's initiator but in the lan guage of self-help, he had plenty of enablers. They included Kerry and Edwards, among the 27 other Democratic senators and 81 Democratic members of the House of Representatives who voted for the resolution authorising Bush to go to war.

Why does this history matter? Because so long as Bush's opponents cast themselves as the primary victims of his war, the real victims will remain invisible. The focus will be on uncovering Bush and Blair's lies - a process geared towards absolving those who believed them, not on compensating those who died because of them.

In the five stages of grieving, there is a step that comes after anger. It's guilt, when the grieving party starts to wonder whether they did enough, if the loss was somehow their fault, how they can make amends. Moving on - the final stage - is supposed to come after that reckoning.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

How about a wisehead's solution?

so long as Bush's opponents cast themselves as the primary victims of his war, the real victims will remain invisible. The focus will be on uncovering Bush and Blair's lies - a process geared towards absolving those who believed them, not on compensating those who died because of them.