G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Iraq Policy Floating on a Sea of Oil
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Oct 31 2007 - 9:36am
- from TomDispatch [1]
History... phooey!
Or, more mildly, Americans traditionally aren't much interested in it and
the media largely don't have time for it either. For one thing, the past is
often just so inconvenient. On Monday, for instance, there was a front-page
piece [2] in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller on Robert Blackwill,
one of the "Vulcans" [3] who helped Condoleezza Rice advise George W. Bush
on foreign policy during the 2000 election campaign, Iraq Director on the
National Security Council during the reign in Baghdad of our viceroy L. Paul
Bremer III, and the President's personal envoy [4] to the faltering
occupation (nicknamed "The Shadow" [5]), among many other things.
He is now -- here's a giant shock -- a lobbyist. And, among those he's
lobbying for (in this case to the tune of $300,000) is Ayad Allawi, former
CIA asset and head -- back in Saddam's day -- of an exile group, the Iraq
National Accord. Bumiller identifies Allawi as "the first prime minister of
the newly sovereign nation -- America's man in Baghdad." She also refers to
him as having had "close ties to the CIA" and points out that he was not
just Bremer's, but Blackwill's "choice" to be prime minister back in 2004.
Now, he's Blackwill's "choice" again. Allawi is, it seems, yet once more on
deck, with his own K-Street lobbyist, ready to step in as prime minister if
the present PM, Nouri al-Maliki, were to fall (or be shoved aside).
But there's another rather inconvenient truth about Allawi that goes
unmentioned -- and it's right off the front page of the New York Times, no
less -- a piece by Joel Brinkley [6], "Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader
Helped Agency in 90's Attacks," published in early June 2004, just at the
moment when Allawi had been "designated" prime minister. In the early 1990s,
Brinkley reported, Allawi's exile organization was, under the CIA's
direction, planting car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in
a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's
regime. Of course, that was back when car bombs weren't considered the
property of brutes like Sunni extremists, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Taliban.
(Just as, inconveniently enough, back in the 1980s the CIA bankrolled [7]
and encouraged the training of Afghan "freedom fighters" in mounting
car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks [8] in a terror campaign against Soviet
officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied Afghan cities (techniques
personally "endorsed," according to Steve Coll in his superb book Ghost Wars
[9], by then-CIA Director William Casey).
But that was back in the day -- just as, to randomly cite one more
inconvenient piece of history also off the front page of the New York Times
(Patrick Tyler [10], "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of
Gas," August 18, 2002), years before we went into Iraq to take out Saddam's
by then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, we helped him use them. The
Reagan Pentagon had a program in which 60 officers from the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency "were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian
deployments" to Saddam's forces, so that he could, among other things, wield
his chemical weapons against them more effectively. ("The Pentagon 'wasn't
so horrified by Iraq's use of gas,' said one veteran of the program. 'It was
just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it
didn't make any difference.'")
Of course, when it comes to America's oily history in Iraq, there is just
about no backstory -- not on the front page of the New York Times, not
basically in the mainstream. Even at this late date, with the price of crude
threatening to head for the $100 a barrel mark, Iraqi oil is -- well, not
exactly censored out -- just (let's face it) so darn embarrassing to write
about. In fact, now that all those other explanations for invading Iraq --
WMD, freedom, you name it -- have long since flown the coop, there really is
no explanation (except utter folly) for Bush's invasion. So, better to move
on, and quickly at that. These last months, however, Tomdispatch has
returned repeatedly to the subject [11] as a reminder [12] that history,
even when not in sight, matters. And the deeper you go, as Michael Schwartz
proves below, the more likely you are to find that gusher you're looking
for.
-- Tom
Why Did We Invade Iraq Anyway? Putting a Country in Your Tank
By Michael Schwartz
Lately, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on
why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq.
Hillary Clinton [13], for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital
national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming a "petri dish
for insurgents," in a major policy statement. Barack Obama [14], in his most
important speech on the subject, talked of "maintaining our influence" and
allowing "our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda." These arguments, like
the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially
articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with
an emphasis on the "vaguely") and also strangely inconsistent (with an
emphasis on the "inconsistent").
That these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is
hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to mention
the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface
of the Iraq "debate" -- and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi
soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech, while
Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his top officials
and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so "vital" to those
"national security interests" of ours? None of this makes sense if you don't
have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface - and into the past;
if you don't take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz [15] once put it, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; and if you
don't consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion,
Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can't understand the
incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials
have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why -- now that those dreams are clearly
so many nightmares -- even the Democrats can't give up the ghost.
The Rise of OPEC
The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before
the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to life:
When British officials [16] declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for
any power interested in world influence or domination," American officials
agreed, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the
greatest material prizes in world history."
This led to a scramble for access during which the United States established
itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an "oil for protection" agreement
with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then on,
the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the region.
American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically
elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of Iran's
oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party
dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of
leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union,
putting the country's oil in hock to the Soviet bloc).
U.S. influence in the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to
coordinate the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC's
power was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies,
nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the
"Seven Sisters," the Western oil giants -- among them Shell, Texaco, and
Standard Oil of New Jersey -- that had previously dominated exploration,
extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much
oil would be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group
established that all members would follow collective decisions -- because
even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn
the energy "spigot" on or off -- it could use the threat of production
restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful
trading partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the
international scene that could -- in some circumstances -- exact tangible
concessions even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two
superpowers of the time.
Though the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was
first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading partners,
particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle
Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes
endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC's potential.
It was in this context that the American alliance with the Saudi royal
family first became so crucial. With the largest petroleum reserves on the
planet and the largest production capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia
was usually able to shape the cartel's policies to conform to its wishes. In
response to this simple but essential fact, successive American presidents
strengthened the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military
relationships between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally
be depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group's
actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington
gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi
regime that was chronically fragile.
Backed by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own
narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished population
to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly, then, the
"alliance" required increasing infusions of American military aid as well
political support in situations that were often uncomfortable, sometimes
untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an era of growing nationalism,
the Saudis found overt pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the
pressures and proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.
The Neocons Seize the Unipolar Moment
The key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost
their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured
into the streets. The American-backed Shah's brutal regime fell to a popular
revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student
demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs took power. The
Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to an already complex and
unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A
regime hostile to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi
pressure, had now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the
organization to challenge American economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not surprisingly, that the militarization of American
Middle Eastern policy came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy
Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- enunciated what would
become known as the "Carter Doctrine": that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to
American national interests and that the U.S. would use "any means
necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it. To assure that
"access," he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force,
a new military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel
from all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military
equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United
States Central Command (Centcom [17]), which ended up in charge of all U.S.
military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove
the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam
Hussein's occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining
control of that country's oil reserves. Though it was not emphasized at the
time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter
Doctrine [18] -- that "any means necessary, including military force,"
should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That war,
in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family -- that saw Iraqi troops reach
its border - to accept an ongoing American military presence within the
country, a development meant to facilitate future applications of the Carter
Doctrine, but which would have devastating unintended consequences.
The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment
seemed to signal that Washington now had uncontested global military
supremacy, triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to
utilize and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer
first called the "unipolar moment." Future members of the administration of
Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive use
of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but
especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy
group, The Project for a New American Century [19], to develop, and lobby
for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who would hold
important positions in the executive branch after George W. Bush took
office, wrote an open letter [20] to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to
turn his "administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing
Saddam's regime from power." They cited both the Iraqi dictator's military
belligerence and his control over "a significant portion of the world's
supply of oil."
Two years later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be
the guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America's
Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style
transformation of the Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized
to "secure and expand'' American influence globally and possibly, in the
cases of North Korea and Iraq, used "to remove these regimes from power and
conduct post-combat stability operations." (The document even commented on
the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to such an aggressive
stance, noting ominously that public approval could not be obtained without
"some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.")
Saddam's Iraq and Oil on the Brain
The second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American
influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in
the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over
OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone
suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With
fears rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain
on OPEC's resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously
for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange for
expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United States had
joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil
surged past the 50% mark.
In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of
al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and
its key target -- think of those unintended consequences -- the American
troops triumphantly stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf
War I. They seemed to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other
Saudi dissidents that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool
of American imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly
reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of
pro-American policies within OPEC.
The situation was complicated further by what was obvious to any observer:
The potential future leverage that both Iraq and Iran might wield in OPEC.
With the second and third largest oil reserves on the planet -- Iran also
had the second largest reserves of natural gas -- their influence seemed
bound to rise. Iraq's, in particular, would be amplified substantially as
soon as Saddam Hussein's regime was freed from severe limitations imposed by
post-war UN sanctions, which prevented it from either developing new oil
fields or upgrading its deteriorating energy infrastructure. Though the
leaders of the two countries were enemies, having fought a bitter war in the
1980s, they could agree, at least, on energy policies aimed at thwarting
American desires or demands -- a position only strengthened in 1998 when the
citizens of Venezuela, the most important OPEC member outside the Middle
East, elected the decidedly anti-American Hugo Chavez as president. In other
words, in January 2001, the new administration in Washington could look
forward to negotiating oil policy not only with a reluctant Saudi royal
family, but also a coterie of hostile powers in a strengthened OPEC.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the new administration, bent on
unipolarity anyway and dreaming of a global Pax Americana, wasted no time
implementing the aggressive policies advocated in the PNAC manifesto.
According to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in his memoir The
Price of Loyalty, Iraq was much on the mind of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld at the first meeting of the National Security Council on January
30, 2001, seven months before the 9/11 attacks. At that meeting, Rumsfeld
argued that the Clinton administration's Middle Eastern focus on
Israel-Palestine should be unceremoniously dumped. "[W]hat we really want to
think about," he reportedly said, "is going after Saddam." Regime change in
Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S. to enhance the situation of the
pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq toward a market economy, and guarantee a
favorable oil policy.
The adjudication of Rumsfeld's recommendation was shuffled off to the
mysterious National Energy Policy Development Group that Vice President
Cheney convened as soon as Bush took occupancy of the Oval Office. This task
force quickly decided that enhanced American influence [21] over the
production and sale of Middle East oil should be "a primary focus of U.S.
international energy policy," relegating both the development of alternative
energy sources and domestic energy conservation measures to secondary, or
even tertiary, status. A central goal [22] of the administration's Middle
East focus would be to convince, or coerce, states in that region "to open
up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment"; that is, to replace
government control of the oil spigot -- the linchpin of OPEC power -- with
decision-making by multinational oil companies headquartered in the West and
responsive to U.S. policy needs. If such a program could be extended even to
a substantial minority of Middle Eastern oil fields, it would prevent
coordinated decision-making and constrain, if not break, the power of OPEC.
This was a theoretically enticing way to staunch the loss of American power
in the region and truly turn the Bush years into a new unipolar moment in
the Middle East.
Having determined its goals, the Task Force began laying out a more detailed
strategy. According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker [23], the most
significant innovation was to be a close collaboration between Cheney's
energy crew and the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC evidently
agreed "to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the
'melding' of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of
operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions
regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'"
Though all these deliberations were secret, enough of what was going on has
emerged in these last years to demonstrate that the "melding" process was
successful. By March of 2001, according to O'Neill, who was a member of both
the NSC and the task force:
"Actual plans.... were already being discussed to take over Iraq and
occupy it -- complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping forces,
and war crimes tribunals -- carrying forward an unspoken doctrine of
preemptive war."
O'Neill also reported that, by the time of the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plan for conquering Iraq had been
developed and that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld indeed urged just such an
attack at the first National Security Council meeting convened to discuss
how the U.S. should react to the disaster. After several days of discussion,
an attack on Iraq was postponed until after al-Qaeda had been wiped out and
the Taliban driven from power in Afghanistan. It took only until January
2002 -- three months of largely successful fighting in Afghanistan -- before
the "administration focus was returning to Iraq." It wasn't until November
2002, though, that O'Neill heard the President himself endorse the invasion
plans, which took place the following March 20th.
The Logic of Regime Change
With this background, it's easier to understand the recent brief, but highly
significant, flurry of controversy over a single sentence in The Age of
Turbulence, the bestselling, over-500-page memoir by longtime Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as if this were utterly
self-evident: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to
acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." As the
first major government official to make such a statement, he was asked
repeatedly to explain his thinking, particularly since his comment was
immediately repudiated by various government officials, including White
House spokesman [24] Tony Fratto, who labeled it "Georgetown ****tail party
analysis."
His subsequent comments elaborated on a brief explanation in the memoir: "It
should be obvious that as long as the United States is beholden to
potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to economic
crises over which we have little control." Since former ally Saddam Hussein
was, by then, unremittingly unfriendly, Greenspan felt that (as he told
Washington Post reporter [25] Bob Woodward) "taking Saddam out was
essential" in order to make "certain that the existing system [of oil
markets] continues to work." In an interview at Democracy Now! [26] he
elaborated on this point, explaining that his support for ousting Hussein
had "nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction," but rather with
the economic "threat he could create to the rest of the world" through his
control over key oil reserves in the Persian Gulf region.
Greenspan's argument echoes the logic expressed by the Project for a New
American Century and other advocates of aggressive military solutions to the
threat of OPEC power. He was concerned that Saddam Hussein, once an ally,
but by then a sworn enemy of U.S. interests in the Middle East, would
control key oil flows. That, in turn, might allow him to exercise economic,
and so political, leverage over the United States and its allies.
The former Fed chief then elaborated further, arguing that the threat of
Saddam could be eliminated "by one means or another" -- either by "getting
him out of office or getting him out of the control position he was in."
Replacing Saddam with a friendly, pro-American government seemed, of course,
like such a no-brainer. Why have a guy like that in a "control position"
over oil, after all? (And think of the possibility of taking those
embarrassing troops out of Saudi Arabia and stationing them at large
permanent bases in nearby, well-situated, oil-rich Iraq.) Better by far, as
the Cheney Energy Task put it, "to open up areas of [Iraq's] energy sectors
to foreign investment." Like the Task Force members, Greenspan believed that
removing oil -- not just from Saddam's control, but from the control of any
Iraqi government -- would permanently remove the threat that it or a broken
OPEC could continue to wield economic leverage over the United States.
Revealingly enough, Greenspan saw the invasion of Iraq as a generically
conservative action -- a return, if anything, to the status quo ante that
would preserve unencumbered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern
oil. With whole new energy-devouring economies coming on line in Asia,
continued American access seemed to require stripping key Middle Eastern
nations of the economic and political power that scarcity had already begun
to confer. In other words, Greenspan's conservative urge implied exactly the
revolutionary changes in the political and economic equation that the Bush
administration would begin to test out so disastrously in Iraq in March
2003. It's also worth remembering that Iraq was only considered a first pit
stop, an easy mark [27] for invasion and occupation. PNAC-nurtured eyes were
already turning to Iran by then as indicated by the classic prewar neocon
quip [28], "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
And beyond this set of radical changes in the Middle East lay another set
for the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, expanding energy
demand will, sooner or later (probably sooner), outdistance production. The
goal of unfettered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil would,
if achieved and sustained, deprive other countries of sufficient oil, or
require them to satisfy U.S. demands in order to access it. In other words,
Greenspan's conservative effort to preserve American access implied a
dramatic increase in American leverage over all countries that depended on
oil for their economic welfare; that is, a radical transformation of the
global balance of power.
Notice that these ambitions, and the actions taken to implement them, rested
on a vision of an imperial America that should, could, and would play a
uniquely dominant, problem-solving role in world affairs. All other
countries would, of course, continue to be "vulnerable to economic crises"
over which they would have "little control." Only the United States had the
essential right to threaten, or simply apply, overwhelming military power to
the "problem" of energy; only it had the right to subdue any country that
attempted to create -- or exploit -- an energy crisis, or that simply had
the potential and animus to do so.
None of this was lost on the unipolar-minded officials who made the decision
to invade Iraq -- and were more ready than any previous administration to
spell out, shock-and-awe style, a new stronger version of the Carter
Doctrine for the planet. According to Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Rumsfeld
offered a vision of the grandiosity of these goals at the first Bush
administration National Security Council meeting:
"Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime
that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region
and beyond."
An even more grandiose vision was offered to the New York Times [29] by
presidential speech writer David Frum a few days later:
"An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the
radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned
with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the
region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."
As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons soared, the United States was left with
three policy choices: It could try to combine alternative energy sources
with rigorous conservation to reduce or eliminate a significant portion of
energy imports; it could accept the leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy
crunch and attempt to negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon
enough become an inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an
effort to coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements
at the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S.
presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally deciding
that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it work. The other
options remain unexplored.
[Note: This commentary -- and most of the useful work on the role of oil in
Middle East and world politics -- rests on the remarkable evidential and
analytic foundation provided by Michael Klare's indispensable book, Blood
and Oil,The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on
Imported Petroleum [30]. Readers who seek a full understanding of these
issues should start with that text.]
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has
written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American
business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and
Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with
Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites,
including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in
Cities, Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His email address is
Ms42@optonline.net [31].
Copyright 2007 Michael Schwartz
_______
About author Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com
[32] ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of
the American Empire Project [33] and, most recently, the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and
Dissenters [34] (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Tom Engelhardt
Created Oct 31 2007 - 9:36am
- from TomDispatch [1]
History... phooey!
Or, more mildly, Americans traditionally aren't much interested in it and
the media largely don't have time for it either. For one thing, the past is
often just so inconvenient. On Monday, for instance, there was a front-page
piece [2] in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller on Robert Blackwill,
one of the "Vulcans" [3] who helped Condoleezza Rice advise George W. Bush
on foreign policy during the 2000 election campaign, Iraq Director on the
National Security Council during the reign in Baghdad of our viceroy L. Paul
Bremer III, and the President's personal envoy [4] to the faltering
occupation (nicknamed "The Shadow" [5]), among many other things.
He is now -- here's a giant shock -- a lobbyist. And, among those he's
lobbying for (in this case to the tune of $300,000) is Ayad Allawi, former
CIA asset and head -- back in Saddam's day -- of an exile group, the Iraq
National Accord. Bumiller identifies Allawi as "the first prime minister of
the newly sovereign nation -- America's man in Baghdad." She also refers to
him as having had "close ties to the CIA" and points out that he was not
just Bremer's, but Blackwill's "choice" to be prime minister back in 2004.
Now, he's Blackwill's "choice" again. Allawi is, it seems, yet once more on
deck, with his own K-Street lobbyist, ready to step in as prime minister if
the present PM, Nouri al-Maliki, were to fall (or be shoved aside).
But there's another rather inconvenient truth about Allawi that goes
unmentioned -- and it's right off the front page of the New York Times, no
less -- a piece by Joel Brinkley [6], "Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader
Helped Agency in 90's Attacks," published in early June 2004, just at the
moment when Allawi had been "designated" prime minister. In the early 1990s,
Brinkley reported, Allawi's exile organization was, under the CIA's
direction, planting car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in
a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's
regime. Of course, that was back when car bombs weren't considered the
property of brutes like Sunni extremists, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Taliban.
(Just as, inconveniently enough, back in the 1980s the CIA bankrolled [7]
and encouraged the training of Afghan "freedom fighters" in mounting
car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks [8] in a terror campaign against Soviet
officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied Afghan cities (techniques
personally "endorsed," according to Steve Coll in his superb book Ghost Wars
[9], by then-CIA Director William Casey).
But that was back in the day -- just as, to randomly cite one more
inconvenient piece of history also off the front page of the New York Times
(Patrick Tyler [10], "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of
Gas," August 18, 2002), years before we went into Iraq to take out Saddam's
by then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, we helped him use them. The
Reagan Pentagon had a program in which 60 officers from the U.S. Defense
Intelligence Agency "were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian
deployments" to Saddam's forces, so that he could, among other things, wield
his chemical weapons against them more effectively. ("The Pentagon 'wasn't
so horrified by Iraq's use of gas,' said one veteran of the program. 'It was
just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it
didn't make any difference.'")
Of course, when it comes to America's oily history in Iraq, there is just
about no backstory -- not on the front page of the New York Times, not
basically in the mainstream. Even at this late date, with the price of crude
threatening to head for the $100 a barrel mark, Iraqi oil is -- well, not
exactly censored out -- just (let's face it) so darn embarrassing to write
about. In fact, now that all those other explanations for invading Iraq --
WMD, freedom, you name it -- have long since flown the coop, there really is
no explanation (except utter folly) for Bush's invasion. So, better to move
on, and quickly at that. These last months, however, Tomdispatch has
returned repeatedly to the subject [11] as a reminder [12] that history,
even when not in sight, matters. And the deeper you go, as Michael Schwartz
proves below, the more likely you are to find that gusher you're looking
for.
-- Tom
Why Did We Invade Iraq Anyway? Putting a Country in Your Tank
By Michael Schwartz
Lately, even Democratic candidates for president have been weighing in on
why the U.S. must maintain a long-term, powerful military presence in Iraq.
Hillary Clinton [13], for example, used phrases like protecting our "vital
national security interests" and preventing Iraq from becoming a "petri dish
for insurgents," in a major policy statement. Barack Obama [14], in his most
important speech on the subject, talked of "maintaining our influence" and
allowing "our troops to strike directly at al Qaeda." These arguments, like
the constantly migrating justifications for invading Iraq, serially
articulated by the Bush administration, manage to be vaguely plausible (with
an emphasis on the "vaguely") and also strangely inconsistent (with an
emphasis on the "inconsistent").
That these justifications for invading, or remaining, are unsatisfying is
hardly surprising, given the reluctance of American politicians to mention
the approximately $10-$30 trillion of oil lurking just beneath the surface
of the Iraq "debate" -- and not much further beneath the surface of Iraqi
soil. Obama, for example, did not mention oil at all in his speech, while
Clinton mentioned it twice in passing. President Bush and his top officials
and spokespeople have been just as reticent on the subject.
Why then did the U.S. invade Iraq? Why is occupying Iraq so "vital" to those
"national security interests" of ours? None of this makes sense if you don't
have the patience to drill a little beneath the surface - and into the past;
if you don't take into account that, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz [15] once put it, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil"; and if you
don't consider the decades-long U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion,
Middle East energy reservoirs. If not, then you can't understand the
incredible tenaciousness with which George W. Bush and his top officials
have pursued their Iraqi dreams or why -- now that those dreams are clearly
so many nightmares -- even the Democrats can't give up the ghost.
The Rise of OPEC
The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long before
the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already sprung to life:
When British officials [16] declared Middle Eastern oil "a vital prize for
any power interested in world influence or domination," American officials
agreed, calling it "a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the
greatest material prizes in world history."
This led to a scramble for access during which the United States established
itself as the preeminent power of the future. Crucially, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt successfully negotiated an "oil for protection" agreement
with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. That was 1945. From then on,
the U.S. found itself actively (if often secretly) engaged in the region.
American agents were deeply involved in the overthrow of a democratically
elected Iranian government in 1953 (to reverse the nationalization of Iran's
oil fields), as well as in the fateful establishment of a Baathist Party
dictatorship in Iraq in the early 1960s (to prevent the ascendancy of
leftists who, it was feared, would align the country with the Soviet Union,
putting the country's oil in hock to the Soviet bloc).
U.S. influence in the Middle East began to wane in the 1970s, when the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was first formed to
coordinate the production and pricing of oil on a worldwide basis. OPEC's
power was consolidated as various countries created their own oil companies,
nationalized their oil holdings, and wrested decision-making away from the
"Seven Sisters," the Western oil giants -- among them Shell, Texaco, and
Standard Oil of New Jersey -- that had previously dominated exploration,
extraction, and sales of black gold.
With all the key oil exporters on board, OPEC began deciding just how much
oil would be extracted and sold onto international markets. Once the group
established that all members would follow collective decisions -- because
even a single major dissenter might fatally undermine the ability to turn
the energy "spigot" on or off -- it could use the threat of production
restrictions, or the promise of expansion, to bargain with its most powerful
trading partners. In effect, a new power bloc had emerged on the
international scene that could -- in some circumstances -- exact tangible
concessions even from the United States and the Soviet Union, the two
superpowers of the time.
Though the United States was largely self-sufficient in oil when OPEC was
first formed, the American economy was still dependent on trading partners,
particularly Japan and Europe, which themselves were dependent on Middle
Eastern oil. The oil crises of the early 1970s, including the sometimes
endless gas lines in the U.S., demonstrated OPEC's potential.
It was in this context that the American alliance with the Saudi royal
family first became so crucial. With the largest petroleum reserves on the
planet and the largest production capacity among OPEC members, Saudi Arabia
was usually able to shape the cartel's policies to conform to its wishes. In
response to this simple but essential fact, successive American presidents
strengthened the Rooseveltian alliance, deepening economic and military
relationships between the two countries. The Saudis, in turn, could normally
be depended upon to use their leverage within OPEC to fit the group's
actions into the broader aims of U.S. policy. In other words, Washington
gained favorable OPEC policies mainly by arming, and propping up a Saudi
regime that was chronically fragile.
Backed by a tiny elite that used immense oil revenues to service its own
narrow interests, the Saudi royals subjected their impoverished population
to an oppressively authoritarian regime. Not surprisingly, then, the
"alliance" required increasing infusions of American military aid as well
political support in situations that were often uncomfortable, sometimes
untenable, for Washington. On its part, in an era of growing nationalism,
the Saudis found overt pro-American policies difficult to sustain, given the
pressures and proclivities of its OPEC partners and its own population.
The Neocons Seize the Unipolar Moment
The key year in the Middle East would be 1979, when Iranians, who had lost
their government to an American and British inspired coup in 1953, poured
into the streets. The American-backed Shah's brutal regime fell to a popular
revolution; American diplomats were taken hostage by Iranian student
demonstrators; and Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs took power. The
Iranian revolution added a combustible new element to an already complex and
unstable equation. It was, in a sense, the match lit near the pipeline. A
regime hostile to Washington, and not particularly amenable to Saudi
pressure, had now become an active member of OPEC, aspiring to use the
organization to challenge American economic hegemony.
It was at this moment, not surprisingly, that the militarization of American
Middle Eastern policy came out of the shadows. In 1980, President Jimmy
Carter -- before his Habitat for Humanity days -- enunciated what would
become known as the "Carter Doctrine": that Persian Gulf oil was "vital" to
American national interests and that the U.S. would use "any means
necessary, including military force" to sustain access to it. To assure that
"access," he announced the creation of a Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force,
a new military command structure that would be able to deliver personnel
from all the armed services, together with state-of-the-art military
equipment, to any location in the Middle East at top speed.
Nurtured and expanded by succeeding presidents, this evolved into the United
States Central Command (Centcom [17]), which ended up in charge of all U.S.
military activity in the Middle East and surrounding regions. It would prove
the military foundation for the Gulf War of 1990, which rolled back Saddam
Hussein's occupation of Kuwait, and therefore prevented him from gaining
control of that country's oil reserves. Though it was not emphasized at the
time, that first Gulf War was a crystalline application of the Carter
Doctrine [18] -- that "any means necessary, including military force,"
should be used to guarantee American access to Middle Eastern oil. That war,
in turn, convinced a shaky Saudi royal family -- that saw Iraqi troops reach
its border - to accept an ongoing American military presence within the
country, a development meant to facilitate future applications of the Carter
Doctrine, but which would have devastating unintended consequences.
The peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union at almost the same moment
seemed to signal that Washington now had uncontested global military
supremacy, triggering a debate within American policy circles about how to
utilize and preserve what Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer
first called the "unipolar moment." Future members of the administration of
Bush the younger were especially fierce advocates for making aggressive use
of this military superiority to enhance U.S. power everywhere, but
especially in the Middle East. They eventually formed a policy advocacy
group, The Project for a New American Century [19], to develop, and lobby
for, their views. The group, whose membership included Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and dozens of other key individuals who would hold
important positions in the executive branch after George W. Bush took
office, wrote an open letter [20] to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to
turn his "administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing
Saddam's regime from power." They cited both the Iraqi dictator's military
belligerence and his control over "a significant portion of the world's
supply of oil."
Two years later, the group issued a ringing policy statement that would be
the guiding text for the new administration. Entitled Rebuilding America's
Defenses, it advocated what would become known as a Rumsfeldian-style
transformation of the Pentagon. U.S. military preeminence was to be utilized
to "secure and expand'' American influence globally and possibly, in the
cases of North Korea and Iraq, used "to remove these regimes from power and
conduct post-combat stability operations." (The document even commented on
the problem of defusing American domestic resistance to such an aggressive
stance, noting ominously that public approval could not be obtained without
"some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.")
Saddam's Iraq and Oil on the Brain
The second Bush administration ascended to the presidency just as American
influence in the Middle East looked to be on the decline. Despite victory in
the first Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, American influence over
OPEC and oil policies seemed under threat. That sucking sound everyone
suddenly heard was a tremendous increase in the global demand for oil. With
fears rising that, in the very near future, such demand could put a strain
on OPEC's resources, member states began negotiating ever more vigorously
for a range of concessions and expanded political power in exchange for
expanded energy production. By this time, of course, the United States had
joined the ranks of the energy deficient and dependent, as imported oil
surged past the 50% mark.
In the meantime, key ally Saudi Arabia was further weakened by the rise of
al-Qaeda, which took as its main goal the overthrow of the royal family, and
its key target -- think of those unintended consequences -- the American
troops triumphantly stationed at permanent bases in the country after Gulf
War I. They seemed to confirm the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other
Saudi dissidents that the royal family had indeed become little but a tool
of American imperialism. This, in turn, made the Saudi royals increasingly
reluctant hosts for those troops and ever more hesitant supporters of
pro-American policies within OPEC.
The situation was complicated further by what was obvious to any observer:
The potential future leverage that both Iraq and Iran might wield in OPEC.
With the second and third largest oil reserves on the planet -- Iran also
had the second largest reserves of natural gas -- their influence seemed
bound to rise. Iraq's, in particular, would be amplified substantially as
soon as Saddam Hussein's regime was freed from severe limitations imposed by
post-war UN sanctions, which prevented it from either developing new oil
fields or upgrading its deteriorating energy infrastructure. Though the
leaders of the two countries were enemies, having fought a bitter war in the
1980s, they could agree, at least, on energy policies aimed at thwarting
American desires or demands -- a position only strengthened in 1998 when the
citizens of Venezuela, the most important OPEC member outside the Middle
East, elected the decidedly anti-American Hugo Chavez as president. In other
words, in January 2001, the new administration in Washington could look
forward to negotiating oil policy not only with a reluctant Saudi royal
family, but also a coterie of hostile powers in a strengthened OPEC.
It is hardly surprising, then, that the new administration, bent on
unipolarity anyway and dreaming of a global Pax Americana, wasted no time
implementing the aggressive policies advocated in the PNAC manifesto.
According to then Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in his memoir The
Price of Loyalty, Iraq was much on the mind of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld at the first meeting of the National Security Council on January
30, 2001, seven months before the 9/11 attacks. At that meeting, Rumsfeld
argued that the Clinton administration's Middle Eastern focus on
Israel-Palestine should be unceremoniously dumped. "[W]hat we really want to
think about," he reportedly said, "is going after Saddam." Regime change in
Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S. to enhance the situation of the
pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq toward a market economy, and guarantee a
favorable oil policy.
The adjudication of Rumsfeld's recommendation was shuffled off to the
mysterious National Energy Policy Development Group that Vice President
Cheney convened as soon as Bush took occupancy of the Oval Office. This task
force quickly decided that enhanced American influence [21] over the
production and sale of Middle East oil should be "a primary focus of U.S.
international energy policy," relegating both the development of alternative
energy sources and domestic energy conservation measures to secondary, or
even tertiary, status. A central goal [22] of the administration's Middle
East focus would be to convince, or coerce, states in that region "to open
up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment"; that is, to replace
government control of the oil spigot -- the linchpin of OPEC power -- with
decision-making by multinational oil companies headquartered in the West and
responsive to U.S. policy needs. If such a program could be extended even to
a substantial minority of Middle Eastern oil fields, it would prevent
coordinated decision-making and constrain, if not break, the power of OPEC.
This was a theoretically enticing way to staunch the loss of American power
in the region and truly turn the Bush years into a new unipolar moment in
the Middle East.
Having determined its goals, the Task Force began laying out a more detailed
strategy. According to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker [23], the most
significant innovation was to be a close collaboration between Cheney's
energy crew and the National Security Council (NSC). The NSC evidently
agreed "to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the
'melding' of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: 'the review of
operational policies towards rogue states,' such as Iraq, and 'actions
regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.'"
Though all these deliberations were secret, enough of what was going on has
emerged in these last years to demonstrate that the "melding" process was
successful. By March of 2001, according to O'Neill, who was a member of both
the NSC and the task force:
"Actual plans.... were already being discussed to take over Iraq and
occupy it -- complete with disposition of oil fields, peacekeeping forces,
and war crimes tribunals -- carrying forward an unspoken doctrine of
preemptive war."
O'Neill also reported that, by the time of the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, the plan for conquering Iraq had been
developed and that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld indeed urged just such an
attack at the first National Security Council meeting convened to discuss
how the U.S. should react to the disaster. After several days of discussion,
an attack on Iraq was postponed until after al-Qaeda had been wiped out and
the Taliban driven from power in Afghanistan. It took only until January
2002 -- three months of largely successful fighting in Afghanistan -- before
the "administration focus was returning to Iraq." It wasn't until November
2002, though, that O'Neill heard the President himself endorse the invasion
plans, which took place the following March 20th.
The Logic of Regime Change
With this background, it's easier to understand the recent brief, but highly
significant, flurry of controversy over a single sentence in The Age of
Turbulence, the bestselling, over-500-page memoir by longtime Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as if this were utterly
self-evident: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to
acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." As the
first major government official to make such a statement, he was asked
repeatedly to explain his thinking, particularly since his comment was
immediately repudiated by various government officials, including White
House spokesman [24] Tony Fratto, who labeled it "Georgetown ****tail party
analysis."
His subsequent comments elaborated on a brief explanation in the memoir: "It
should be obvious that as long as the United States is beholden to
potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are vulnerable to economic
crises over which we have little control." Since former ally Saddam Hussein
was, by then, unremittingly unfriendly, Greenspan felt that (as he told
Washington Post reporter [25] Bob Woodward) "taking Saddam out was
essential" in order to make "certain that the existing system [of oil
markets] continues to work." In an interview at Democracy Now! [26] he
elaborated on this point, explaining that his support for ousting Hussein
had "nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction," but rather with
the economic "threat he could create to the rest of the world" through his
control over key oil reserves in the Persian Gulf region.
Greenspan's argument echoes the logic expressed by the Project for a New
American Century and other advocates of aggressive military solutions to the
threat of OPEC power. He was concerned that Saddam Hussein, once an ally,
but by then a sworn enemy of U.S. interests in the Middle East, would
control key oil flows. That, in turn, might allow him to exercise economic,
and so political, leverage over the United States and its allies.
The former Fed chief then elaborated further, arguing that the threat of
Saddam could be eliminated "by one means or another" -- either by "getting
him out of office or getting him out of the control position he was in."
Replacing Saddam with a friendly, pro-American government seemed, of course,
like such a no-brainer. Why have a guy like that in a "control position"
over oil, after all? (And think of the possibility of taking those
embarrassing troops out of Saudi Arabia and stationing them at large
permanent bases in nearby, well-situated, oil-rich Iraq.) Better by far, as
the Cheney Energy Task put it, "to open up areas of [Iraq's] energy sectors
to foreign investment." Like the Task Force members, Greenspan believed that
removing oil -- not just from Saddam's control, but from the control of any
Iraqi government -- would permanently remove the threat that it or a broken
OPEC could continue to wield economic leverage over the United States.
Revealingly enough, Greenspan saw the invasion of Iraq as a generically
conservative action -- a return, if anything, to the status quo ante that
would preserve unencumbered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern
oil. With whole new energy-devouring economies coming on line in Asia,
continued American access seemed to require stripping key Middle Eastern
nations of the economic and political power that scarcity had already begun
to confer. In other words, Greenspan's conservative urge implied exactly the
revolutionary changes in the political and economic equation that the Bush
administration would begin to test out so disastrously in Iraq in March
2003. It's also worth remembering that Iraq was only considered a first pit
stop, an easy mark [27] for invasion and occupation. PNAC-nurtured eyes were
already turning to Iran by then as indicated by the classic prewar neocon
quip [28], "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
And beyond this set of radical changes in the Middle East lay another set
for the rest of the world. In the twenty-first century, expanding energy
demand will, sooner or later (probably sooner), outdistance production. The
goal of unfettered American access to sufficient Middle Eastern oil would,
if achieved and sustained, deprive other countries of sufficient oil, or
require them to satisfy U.S. demands in order to access it. In other words,
Greenspan's conservative effort to preserve American access implied a
dramatic increase in American leverage over all countries that depended on
oil for their economic welfare; that is, a radical transformation of the
global balance of power.
Notice that these ambitions, and the actions taken to implement them, rested
on a vision of an imperial America that should, could, and would play a
uniquely dominant, problem-solving role in world affairs. All other
countries would, of course, continue to be "vulnerable to economic crises"
over which they would have "little control." Only the United States had the
essential right to threaten, or simply apply, overwhelming military power to
the "problem" of energy; only it had the right to subdue any country that
attempted to create -- or exploit -- an energy crisis, or that simply had
the potential and animus to do so.
None of this was lost on the unipolar-minded officials who made the decision
to invade Iraq -- and were more ready than any previous administration to
spell out, shock-and-awe style, a new stronger version of the Carter
Doctrine for the planet. According to Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Rumsfeld
offered a vision of the grandiosity of these goals at the first Bush
administration National Security Council meeting:
"Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime
that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region
and beyond."
An even more grandiose vision was offered to the New York Times [29] by
presidential speech writer David Frum a few days later:
"An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the
radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned
with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the
region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."
As worldwide demand for hydrocarbons soared, the United States was left with
three policy choices: It could try to combine alternative energy sources
with rigorous conservation to reduce or eliminate a significant portion of
energy imports; it could accept the leverage conferred on OPEC by the energy
crunch and attempt to negotiate for an adequate share of what might soon
enough become an inadequate supply; or it could use its military power in an
effort to coerce Middle East suppliers into satisfying American requirements
at the expense of everyone else. Beginning with Jimmy Carter, five U.S.
presidents chose the coercive strategy, with George W. Bush finally deciding
that violent, preemptive regime change was needed to make it work. The other
options remain unexplored.
[Note: This commentary -- and most of the useful work on the role of oil in
Middle East and world politics -- rests on the remarkable evidential and
analytic foundation provided by Michael Klare's indispensable book, Blood
and Oil,The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on
Imported Petroleum [30]. Readers who seek a full understanding of these
issues should start with that text.]
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has
written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American
business and government dynamics. His books include Radical Protest and
Social Structure and Social Policy and The Conservative Agenda (edited, with
Clarence Lo). His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites,
including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET; and in print in
Cities, Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His email address is
Ms42@optonline.net [31].
Copyright 2007 Michael Schwartz
_______
About author Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com
[32] ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of
the American Empire Project [33] and, most recently, the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and
Dissenters [34] (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch
interviews.
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson