Is the US planning a coup in Iraq?

Is the US planning a coup in Iraq?

Most americans don't like american policy! Not since DUH-bya.

On August 16, an extraordinary article appeared in the New York Times providing details of a top-level private meeting on US strategy in Iraq at the Pentagon last week. President Bush, who was present along with his war cabinet and selected “outside experts”, voiced his open dissatisfaction that the new Iraqi government—and the Iraqi people—had not shown greater support for US policies. Based on what you have truly accomplished there-NOTHING, I don't blame them. Little baby can't stand not getting his way.

“More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that the Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, (You destroyed their country- for WHAT?) and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd,” the newspaper reported. The angry protest on August 4 against the US-backed Israeli war in Lebanon drew more than 100,000 people from the capital and other Iraqi cities.

The New York Times article, which had all the hallmarks of a planted story, did not of course speak openly of a coup against Maliki.

Nevertheless it constituted an unmistakable threat to the Baghdad regime that its days were numbered if it did not toe the US line. Prior to his trip to Washington last month, Maliki publicly condemned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

While his comments were just a pale reflection of popular sentiment in Iraq and throughout the Middle East, they soured the Bush administration’s plans to use the visit as a much-needed boost prior to mid-term US elections.

The New York Times followed up the report with a further article on August 17 on the latest Defence Department indices of the catastrophe in Iraq: the number of roadside bombs aimed mainly against American forces reached an all-time high of 2,625 in July as compared to 1,454 in January.

“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels. The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time,” a senior Defence Department official told the newspaper. Its called self defense, not insurgency.

Buried at the conclusion of the article, however, was the astonishing admission by one of the participants in the Pentagon meeting that Bush administration officials were already beginning to plan for a post-Maliki era. “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” an unnamed military affairs expert told the New York Times. “Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect, but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

The Bush administration’s attempts to dress up its illegal occupation of Iraq as “democratic” have always been a fraud. Ever since the 2003 invasion, US officials have had a direct hand in drawing up constitutional arrangements, steering elections and forming cabinets. Maliki was only installed as prime minister in May after a protracted White House campaign to force his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari to stand aside. To speak of “considering alternatives other than democracy” can only have one meaning—that the Bush administration is contemplating plans to ditch the constitution, remove Maliki and insert a regime more directly amenable to Washington’s orders.

This would not be the first time that US imperialism has ousted one of its own puppets. In 1963, as American strategy in Vietnam was floundering, the Kennedy administration gave the green light to army plotters to overthrow South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. While loyal to Washington, Diem’s autocratic methods had provoked popular opposition and undermined US efforts to strengthen the South Vietnamese army in its war against the National Liberation Front.

On November 1, 1963, rebel army units mutinied and marched on the presidential palace in Saigon. Diem, who had escaped, rang the US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who assured the Vietnamese president that the US had no hand in the coup and expressed concern for his safety. A few hours later, the reassured Diem surrendered, only to be shot dead along with his notorious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and replaced by a military junta.

The Bush administration has plenty of reasons to get rid of Maliki. In launching its invasion of Iraq, Washington never wanted an independent or democratic government in Baghdad. Its aims were to transform the country into a pliable client state that would function as a base of operations to further its designs throughout the region, particularly against Iran. But the White House has become increasingly dissatisfied with the political results of its military adventure. Because of its own disastrous miscalculations it has been forced to rely on a coalition government dominated by Shiite parties with longstanding connections to Tehran.

Inside Iraq, the Bush administration’s calculations that Maliki’s “government of national unity” would quell anti-American resistance and halt the descent into civil war have already proven worthless. Far from scaling back, the Pentagon has had to maintain troop levels and dispatch thousands of extra soldiers to Baghdad in a desperate effort to reconquer the capital. With Congressional elections looming, the defeat of the pro-war senator Joseph Lieberman in the Democratic Party primary on August 8 raised fears in the White House that widespread antiwar sentiment would decimate the Republican Party at the polls amid US debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East as a whole.

The removal of Maliki and the imposition of a subservient military regime would, at least in the short term, solve a few of the Bush administration’s political problems by removing any objections in Baghdad to a ruthless crackdown in the country and to US plans for new provocations against Iran and Syria.

Significantly, the New York Times’ accounts of discussions in the White House and Pentagon have been paralleled in Baghdad by persistent rumours of a coup. On July 29, the Washington Post reported the remarks of prominent Shiite politician Hadi al-Amiri, who warned that “some tongues” were talking about toppling the Maliki coalition and replacing it with a “national salvation government”. It would mean, he said, “cancelling the constitution, cancelling the results of the elections and going back to square one... and we will not accept that.”

Having pursued a policy of reckless militarism in the Middle East for the past five years, the Bush administration is more than capable of toppling an Iraqi regime that no longer suits its immediate purposes. However, far from stabilising the American occupation, a coup in Baghdad would no more extricate the White House from its political crisis than the ousting of Diem did in 1963. As in Vietnam, the US is sinking deeper and deeper into a political and military quagmire in Iraq.

Bush press conference on Iraq: "We're not leaving so long as I'm the president."

Bush press conference on Iraq: "We're not leaving so long as I'm the president."

and you wonder why we HATE you. You wonder why THEY hate you- I think its almost even score.

President Bush’s press conference Monday gave a glimpse of the deepening political crisis of the US administration over the failure of its policies in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Bush was on the defensive throughout the session, struggling with questions which, if not overtly hostile, focused attention on the contradictions in his shifting rationale for the Iraq war.

Although Bush gave an opening statement on Lebanon, the press returned again and again to the Iraq war, both to the deteriorating security situation in the country and the dwindling public support for the war within the United States.

So great has been the turn in public opinion against the war that Bush himself was compelled to admit the extent of the mass opposition. He made several comments on this theme, clearly rehearsed ahead of time, acknowledging the opposition while declaring it mistaken:

“There’s a lot of people—good, decent people—saying: Withdraw now. They’re absolutely wrong. It’d be a huge mistake for this country.”

“There are a lot of good, decent people saying: Get out now; vote for me; I will do everything I can to, I guess, cut off money is what they’re trying to do to get the troops out. It’s a big mistake.”

“And there’s a fundamental difference between many of the Democrats and my party. And that is: They want to leave before the job is completed in Iraq. And again, I repeat: These are decent people. They’re just as American as I am. I just happen to strongly disagree with them”

“I will never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live.”

This evidently was one of the main talking points Bush’s handlers had rehearsed with him before the press conference. It reflects concerns that the McCarthy-style baiting of Iraq war opponents in recent statements by Vice President Cheney, chief Bush political aide Karl Rove and other Republican spokesmen has backfired, provoking even greater popular antagonism towards the administration.

At one point Bush was directly asked about the comments of Cheney, who said that Connecticut voters who denied renomination to Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman because of his support for the Iraq war were “emboldening Al Qaeda-types.”

Bush reiterated the mantra that “leaving Iraq before the mission is complete will send the wrong message to the enemy and will create a more dangerous world.” He sought to soften the slur against opponents of the war, adding, “Look, it’s an honest debate, and it’s an important debate for Americans to listen to and to be engaged in.”

This shift in public posture is purely cosmetic. Despite the conciliatory rhetoric Monday, the White House and the Republican National Committee are seeking to whip up right-wing support in the November election by suggesting that opposition to the Iraq war is treasonous.

For that reason, Bush grossly exaggerates the “antiwar” credentials of the congressional Democrats, who support the goals of the war—conquest of Iraq to obtain oil resources and strategic dominance in the Middle East—but have criticized the Bush administration’s incompetent execution of this neo-colonial exercise.

The hollowness of Bush’s statements about the necessity and legitimacy of political debate over the war is revealed in his refusal to actually engage the arguments of those opposed to the war. His version of “debate” was to repeat, in almost robotic fashion, his other main talking point of the day, the necessity to “finish the job” in Iraq.

Bush dismissed a question about whether the US invasion and occupation had made matters worse in Iraq, repeating for the thousandth time his administration’s long-discredited claim that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world and was on the brink of building weapons of mass destruction.

He refused to address seriously the growing Sunni-Shia conflict in Iraq, despite the statements by top American generals that the country may be on the brink of civil war, and that sectarian killings, not the attacks of terrorists, are the principal threat to the establishment of a stable US occupation regime.

This unwillingness to face reality has become the target of criticism in much of the mainstream press. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for instance, cited Bush’s comments about the mounting death toll among civilians and asked: “Does he believe it would be a sign of weakness to admit that the flowering of democracy in Iraq isn’t going exactly as planned? Does he believe saying everything’s just fine will make it so? Is he in denial? Or do 3,438 deaths really just roll off his back after he’s had his workout and a nice bike ride?”

At one point, asked what Iraq had to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush blithely admitted, “Nothing.” Then he added, “Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.”

In fact, virtually every top administration spokesman made that connection, including Vice President Cheney, who peddled the claim, long after it had been discredited, that alleged 9/11 plot leader Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in the Czech Republic before the attack. Condoleezza Rice warned that the next 9/11 would be “a mushroom cloud” if Saddam Hussein was not dealt with.

Bush also distorted the basis of the opposition to the war, suggesting it was simply the result of squeamishness over the bloodshed in Iraq. “You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die,” he said. “Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists.”

The opposition to the war is fueled, however, by popular revulsion to the havoc wrought by the United States, along with its allies Britain and Israel, in the region. More fundamentally, the most politically conscious elements in the popular opposition to the Iraq war reject not only the methods employed by the imperialists, but their goals, which are not to “democratize” the Middle East, but to reduce Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and other countries to the status of semi-colonies, completely subordinated to the interests of American capitalism.

While Bush repeatedly claimed that the goal of the United States in Iraq was to foster democracy, he made it clear that he felt no accountability to the democratic will of the American people. Whatever the popular sentiment in the US, he declared, “We’re not leaving so long as I’m the president.”

This contradiction was spelled out in two comments made by Bush in the course of the press conference. He declared that the “war on terror” was directed against an ideology opposed to democracy: “And the only way to defeat this ideology in the long term is to defeat it through another ideology, a competing ideology, one that—where the government responds to the will of the people.”

But towards the end of the press conference, asked whether he still hoped to convince the American people, or whether “this is the kind of thing you’re doing because you think it’s right and you don’t care if you ever gain public support for it,” Bush replied bluntly: “Look, I’m going to do what I think is right and if, you know, if people don’t like me for it, that’s just the way it is.”

Nor is Bush’s policy accountable to the “will of the people” of Iraq, since he has declared the US troops will remain, no matter what, until he leaves office.

Such assertions inevitably beg the question, what will Bush do if the majority of the Iraqi people or the majority of the American people seek to bring an end to the bloodbath prior to January 20, 2009?

Bush’s categorical statements imply that his administration recognizes no limits on its war powers, and would be prepared to defy Congress in the unlikely event that it imposed a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops. As for the political situation in Iraq itself, if the supposedly democratically elected and sovereign regime attempted to cut its strings and respond to popular sentiments by demanding the removal of American forces, the US would have no compunction in organizing a coup and installing a new government.

Truthdig - Reports - Robert Scheer—Afghanistan: High on Opium, Not Democracy

Truthdig - Reports - Robert Scheer—Afghanistan: High on Opium, Not Democracy

Good since its become a daily staple in my own daily medicine regime for several disabling health issues.
Don't even tell me that the US is not going to find a way to make a profit, or utilize this particular natural resource of Afghanistan for our own use.

The good news, for drug fiends, is that Afghanistan has just harvested its biggest opium crop ever, up a whopping 59% from last year and big enough to cover 130% of the entire world market. The street price for illegal heroin, 92% of which now comes from Afghanistan, should be way down from Bangkok to London, and for those shooting up in the back alleys of Chicago. The bad news, for the rest of us, is that in Bush-liberated Afghanistan, billions in drug profits are financing the Taliban. As I suspected.

Remember them, the guys who harbored the Al Qaeda terrorists, who gifted us with the 9/11 attacks five years ago, that President Bush promised to eliminate? Well, it turns out that while he was distracted with Iraq, the patrons of terrorism were very much in business back where the 9/11 attack was hatched, turning Afghanistan into a narco-state that provides a lucrative source of cash for the “evildoers” Bush forgot about.

The Bush administration has, for half a decade, celebrated its overthrow of the Taliban and subsequent national elections in Afghanistan, but if this is democratic nation-building then the model must be Colombia, the narco-state where the political process masks the real power held by drug lords and radical insurgents. Afghanistan is dominated not by the government in Kabul but by a patchwork of warlords, terrorist groups and drug traffickers completely addicted to the annual poppy harvest’s profits.

Or perhaps the model is post-invasion Iraq, because Afghanistan is now statistically as deadly for American soldiers, according to The New York Times, while in both countries suicide bombings and roadside bombings are on the rise and women are retreating to the burka to avoid persecution by armed zealots. In any case, reported the United Nations this week, “opium cultivation in Afghanistan is out of control” despite the expenditure of billions by the West to fight it. Intelligence estimates of the Taliban’s cut of this lucrative trade, which represents over a third of the entire Afghan economy, range up to 70%, according to ABC News.

“The political, military and economic investments by coalition countries are not having much visible impact on drug cultivation,” reported the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in its authoritative annual survey. “As a result, Afghan opium is fueling insurgency in Western Asia, feeding international mafias and causing 100,000 deaths from overdoses every year.” “The southern part of Afghanistan [is] displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption,” added Antonio Maria Costa, the agency’s director.

Yet on Tuesday, the White House was once again trumpeting that “we have deprived Al Qaeda of safe haven in Afghanistan and helped a democratic government rise in its place.” Considering that Osama bin Laden himself is still reputed to be hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and Afghan President Hamid Karzai is desperately dependent on the support of drug lords and warlords to prevent renewed civil war, such claims are a blatant fraud. The senior British military commander in Afghanistan recently described the situation in the country as “close to anarchy” and said NATO forces were “running out of time” to salvage the situation. “The narcotics industry accounts for over one-third of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product and poses a threat to that country’s stability and emerging democracy,” carefully admits a recent U.S. State Department fact sheet.

What the Bush administration will not confront in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, is that its ill-conceived and disastrously executed nation-building schemes are sinking into the swamp of local and historical realities. Enamored of American military might but having little understanding of the world beyond, Bush and his team have ignored Gen. Colin Powell’s reported “you break it, you own it” warnings, floundering after initial military victories and ultimately strengthening the hand of local and international terrorists. Rather than take care of business in Afghanistan after 9/11, Bush and clueless U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed bin Laden to slip out of the Tora Bora caves to plan more attacks and the Taliban to regroup. Instead, Bush and Co. threw the bulk of our military and aid resources into a disastrous attempt to remake oil-rich Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, into an American puppet state.

With U.S. midterm elections around the corner, embattled Republicans are now desperately claiming to be the only thing standing between us and a bogeyman they are calling “Islamo-fascism,” and ridiculously comparing the “war on terror” to the fight against the Nazis. Fortunately, if belatedly, two-thirds of the American electorate now recognize that our president is all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas, a leader much better at starting wars than winning them.

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