STILL ON IRAQ

I fear that I am too focused on Iraq. However, there is so much wrong what we’re doing there and it negatively impacts on us so much here at home.

Here at home, we’re abandoning pre- and after-school programs for hundreds of thousands of young, disadvantaged children. At the same time, we spend, directly and indirectly, hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq, Afghanistan and so-called Homeland Security.

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote “I realize that we have enemies and they need to be confronted. But I do not want this to be all that America is about in the world anymore, and that is what has happened under this administration. I don’t want the rest of my career to be about an America that exports fear, not hope, and ends up importing everyone else’s fear as a result. I don’t want it to be about explaining to young Chinese why my government can’t give them student visas anymore. I don’t want it to be about visiting U.S. Embassies around the world and finding them so isolated behind barbed wire, that they might as well not be there at all.”

A few months ago, I wrote a column recalling FDR’s words, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Fear has driven us to a $40 billion annual Homeland Security Department with its various limitations on our freedom, along with an alleged “Patriot Act”. No monies for school kids, but trillions for alleged security at home and abroad.

Little over a week ago, amid much debate, the U.S. State Department issued its annual terrorism report for 2003. It was reported that, world-wide for 2003, 625 people died in terrorist attacks. 35 of these people were Americans, all dying overseas. Apart from 2001, this was more terrorist deaths than in any of the last several years. For 35 Americans dying overseas, we spend hundreds of annual U.S. military deaths and thousands of U.S. military wounded and maimed, plus tens of thousands of foreign deaths and wounded. We cut domestic health, education and environmental programs. Am I just too insane and perverted if I see something horribly wrong in this cost/benefit ratio?

As you read this column, we will have supposedly restored democratic sovereignty to Iraq a few days ago. This so-called sovereignty is under the leadership of a Prime Minister appointed by us and formerly employed by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. This Prime Minister will be working with a national Iraqi security advisor and an Iraqi national intelligence chief who’ve been given 5-year terms of office by Paul Bremer. This Prime Minister is governed by 97 “legal” orders or edicts of Paul Bremer that we have declared to be “binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people” and to remain in full force even after the so-called transfer of political authority. Among these 97 orders and edicts is Order # 17. Just what is Order # 17? As those of you who saw my last column may recall, one of the major issues in the alleged transfer of sovereignty is the issue of military immunity from Iraqi criminal/civil liability. Last November, Bremer and the U.S. had supposedly negotiated a 1-page agreement with the Iraqis that there’d be a Status of forces Agreement by 3/31/04. That has never happened. Next, as I reported in my last column, the U.S. was going to the U.N. Security Council to get some sort of immunity recognition from that body. The Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan refused.

Thus, as I write this column, Paul Bremer has declared that he extended Order # 17 for at least another 6 or 7 months. Order # 17 gives all foreign personnel in the U.S. led “Coalition Provisional Authority” immunity from “local criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their parent states.” The questionable legality of the extension of Order # 17 supposedly derives from the Iraqi Transitional Administrative Law although no supportive language therein is cited. Of further question is whether or not such immunity would apply to American civilians working for private contractors, e.g. interrogators of prisoners and guards for American politicians and diplomats. Without immunity, would they have to add more exorbitant profits for their no-bid contracts or would they just pack up and leave and, in the immortal words of V-P Dick Cheney, tell the Iraqis to “F*** off”.

Finally, as the alleged return of sovereignty to Iraq has now supposedly occurred (with 140,000 American troops in their land), let me direct your attention to a series of articles by Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandraseksan. One of the most recent bore the caption, “Mistakes Loom Large”. 62,000 of Iraq’s alleged 90,000 police have received no training at all. The Iraq army is 1/3d its promised size. Neither the Iraq army nor the police have been properly equipped and many refuse assigned duties. Despite U.S. promises to employ 250,000 Iraqis in reconstruction, only 15,000 have been so employed. Production of electric power is 2/3s or less of what had been promised. Adequate sanitation and uncontaminated drinking water have not been provided, thus threatening epidemics. See also www.ifg.org/analysis/globalization/IraqTestimony.

The person GWB has placed in charge of reviving the Iraq economy is Michael Fleischer, who just happens to be the brother of GWB’s former press secretary, Ari Fleischer. Michael is on leave from the presidency of Bogen Communications, a company which was delisted from the NASDAQ stock market and which lost money in 2 of the last 6 years.

Ah well, the GWB team can at least point to Afghanistan which now leads the world as producer of 2/3s of all heroin, probably killing more people than all the terrorist attacks combined.