Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation

November 3, 2003

For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long arti­cle by David Rieff, “Blue­print for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongo­ing prob­lems with the U.S. occu­pa­tion of iraq:
bq. His­tor­i­cal­ly, it is rare that a warm wel­come is extend­ed to an occu­py­ing mil­i­tary force for very long, unless, that is, the post­war goes very smooth­ly. And in iraq, the post­war occu­pa­tion has not gone smoothly.
The arti­cle looks at the ide­o­log­i­cal roots of the post-war plan of occu­pa­tion. A num­ber of key deci­sions were made in the Pen­tagon’s war room with lit­tle input from the State Depart­ment. Much of the plan­ning revolved around Ahmad Cha­l­abi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi oppo­si­tion par­ty leader dur­ing the last decade of Sad­dam Hus­sein’s reign. Cha­l­abi spent most of the 90s in Lon­don and Wash­ing­ton, where he became the dar­ling of the Repub­li­can pol­i­cy hawks who were also side­lined from polit­i­cal pow­er. Togeth­er Cha­l­abi and Wash­ing­ton fig­ures like Don­ald Rums­feld spent the 90s hatch­ing up war plans if they ever took pow­er again. Unfor­tu­nate­ly Rums­feld’s plans did­n’t have the wide­spread sup­port of the U.S. diplo­mat­ic and mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment and Cha­l­abi has had vir­tu­al­ly no sup­port inside iraq. But the con­ver­sa­tions and deci­sions between the token iraqi oppo­si­tion and the out-of-power Repub­li­can hawks has dri­ven the occupation:
bq. The lack of secu­ri­ty and order on the ground in iraq today is in large mea­sure a result of deci­sions made and not made in Wash­ing­ton before the war start­ed, and of the spe­cif­ic approach­es toward cop­ing with post­war iraq under­tak­en by Amer­i­can civil­ian offi­cials and mil­i­tary com­man­ders in the imme­di­ate after­math of the war.
Rieff is pes­simistic but he backs up his claims. The arti­cle is long but it’s a must-read. The post­war occu­pa­tions of iraq and Afghanistan will almost cer­tain­ly be the defin­ing for­eign pol­i­cy issue of this gen­er­a­tion, and paci­fists must look beyond ide­ol­o­gy and rhetoric to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing in iraq.

The Bean Defense

July 15, 2003

Read­ers might remem­ber the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occu­py­ing forces announced they had uncov­ered a cache of beans. They claimed Sad­dam Hus­sein had stock­piled a few hun­dred bags of cas­tor beans to use to make a bio­log­i­cal agent called ricin. In my postUS: Iraqis Planned Oper­a­tion Fart and Stink I point­ed out that the sup­posed weapons worked on the well-documented prin­ci­ple that beans can pro­duce gas and indi­ges­tion – ricin just works espe­cial­ly well and con­cen­trates the effect enough to kill some­one in a par­tic­u­lar­ly messy way.

What I did­n’t do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that I missed at the time. U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Col­in Pow­ell claimed an Iraq/ricin con­nec­tion before the House Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions Com­mit­tee back in ear­ly February:

“The ricin that is bounc­ing around Europe now orig­i­nat­ed in Iraq — not in the part of Iraq that is under Sad­dam Hus­sein’s con­trol, but his secu­ri­ty forces know all about it,” Pow­ell said.

Euro­pean intel­li­gence sources quick­ly dis­cred­it­ed this claim, point­ing out that it was obvi­ous the Euro­pean ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were “stunned” that Pow­ell would make such a obviously-wrong state­ment, and the British flat­ly stat­ed they were “clear” that that ricin found in Lon­don was­n’t pro­duced in Iraq.

Here we have anoth­er instance of a senior US offi­cial claim­ing an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruc­tion, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the Pres­i­den­t’s State of the Union address. Pow­ell and oth­ers in the U.S. have trot­ted out the ricin threat repeat­ed­ly yet it’s hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It’s real­ly only ever been used for a ridicu­lous James Bond-like assas­i­na­tion in 1991, when a Bul­gar­i­an agent is sup­posed to have killed a dis­si­dent in Lon­don using a ricin-filled pel­let fired from an umbrel­la tip (one is remind­ed of Austin Pow­er’s Dr. Evil: “I’m going to place him in an eas­i­ly escapable sit­u­a­tion involv­ing an over­ly elab­o­rate and exot­ic death”). As one site points out The cur­rent wis­dom among bio­log­i­cal defense experts is that ricin is more like­ly to be used as a tool in assas­si­na­tions than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pat­tern of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion delib­er­ate­ly mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are pur­pose­ful decep­tions with only the thinnest escape clause to wig­gle through when the lies are exposed. Col­in Pow­ell isn’t stu­pid enough to make this kind of repeat­ed mis­take and a year of dis­proven ricin alerts is a mark against the Admin­is­tra­tion’s integrity.