The Good News in Iraq (Don't Count on It)
by Tom Engelhardt

On March 19, 2003, as his shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq was being launched, George W. Bush addressed the nation.

 

"My fellow citizens," he began, "at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." We were entering Iraq, he insisted, "with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people."

Within weeks, of course, that "great civilization" was being looted, pillaged, and shipped abroad. Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship was no more and, soon enough, the Iraqi Army of 400,000 had been officially disbanded by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupying Coalition Provisional Authority and the President's viceroy in Baghdad. By then, ministry buildings -- except for the oil and interior ministries -- were just looted shells. Schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, just about everything that was national or meaningful, had been stripped bare. Meanwhile, in their new offices in Saddam's former palaces, America's neoconservative occupiers were already bringing in the administration's crony corporations -- Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR, Bechtel, and others -- to finish off the job of looting the country under the rubric of "reconstruction." Somehow, these "administrators" managed to "spend" $20 billion of Iraq's oil money, already in the "Development Fund for Iraq," even before the first year of occupation was over -- and to no effect whatsoever.

 

They also managed to create what Ed Harriman in the London Review of Books labeled "the least accountable and least transparent regime in the Middle East." (No small trick given the competition.) 

GR this Week

by C. L. Cook

This week on GR: farmer, author, and publisher, Brewster Kneen, making apparent Cargill Inc., "Invisible Giant;" Canadian university professor, Mahboob Khawaja on his son, Momin's search for Canadian justice; Sheila Nopper and the rising tide of opposition to endless ferry rate hikes in British Columbia; and Janine Bandcroft from somewhere in America on the Goods to Cuba Caravan.

 

Robert Mugabe, Yet Another Man the West Loves to Hate

by William Bowles 

Robert Mugabe is a bit like Osama bin Laden, if he didn’t exist they’d have to invent him; and invent him they have, with a vengeance.

Now I’m not a supporter of Zanu-PF, for me their politics have always been suspect. Back during the Apartheid years, Zanu-PF never acknowledged the ANC as the leader of the liberation struggle in South Africa, preferring instead to support the PAC (the Pan Africanist Congress). Well you win some, you lose some.

BCCLA Applauds Supreme Court of Canada Decision in Media Defamation Case 

by British Columbia Civil Liberties Association

The BCCLA is encouraged by the Supreme Court of Canada judgment in Simpson v. Mair and WIC Radio, which dismissed an action for defamation against Rafe Mair. The court ruled that the statements at issue were protected by the law as comment.

The BCCLA appeared as an intervenor in the case. Robert D. Holmes, President of the BCCLA comments:

 

• "Protection of vigorous debate on matters of public interest and importance is a key value in our democratic society. The court's ruling will go a long way in ensuring that protection."