To make it clear that a post-war U.S. military operation in Iraq is not a nation-building exercise, the Bush Administration should state that the U.S. military will be deployed to Iraq to secure the vital U.S. security interests for which the campaign is undertaken in the first place.

 

Specifically, these war aims should be to:

‘Protect Iraq’s energy infrastructure against internal sabotage or foreign attack to return Iraq to global energy markets and ensure that U.S. and world energy markets have access to its resources.’ – In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building by Baker Spring and Jack Spencer.

 

Backgrounder #1589, September 25, 2002 www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/bg1589.cfm%00 (See also Independence Day by William Bowles • Sunday, 4 June, 2006 www.williambowles.info/ini/2006/0606/ini-0419.html)
But just in case you think I’m being very selective in the use of quotes,   

 

“We are not in Iraq to engage in nation-building — our mission is to help Iraqis so that they can build their own nation.” — Donald H. Rumsfeld, Washington Post, September 25 2003.

“The U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn’t part of a nation-building scheme. Ironically, beginning with the First Gulf War and ending with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. policies interrupted and eventually ended a process of nation building led by Saddam.” www.cato.org/dailys/06-20-04.html (See also ‘Fixing Fallujah – BBC Radio Orwell Reporting for Duty’, 6 November, 2004. www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0284.html)

There you have it, no plan, no intention of having or implementing a plan, at least as we would understand the meaning of the word. The objective couldn’t be more plain; destroy Iraq’s civil society, turn it into a ‘failed state’, never mind the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people or the complete obliteration of the most developed economy in the Middle East, with the highest standard of living, a sophisticated health system, and a developed educational infrastructure. That was the Plan, destroy a nation’s critical infrastructure and all you’re left with is a nation in name only, all that matters is that the oil is protected. (It took ten years and 50 billion dollars to rebuild a totally devastated (W) Germany after WWII.)

Of course it’s no coincidence that the BBC spends our hard-earned money rewriting the events of the past four-plus years for it is plain for everyone to see that a not single (stated) objective has been achieved in the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, not even the US or for that matter the UK military have been able to keep their military mouths firmly closed (no doubt for fear of being made the scapegoat let alone the damage it’s doing to what’s left of their esprit).

Thus it was necessary to do some serious damage control as the situation was getting completely out-of-hand; the real intentions, Iraq’s oil and its strategic location were being revealed even by those ‘insiders’ such as Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve,

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” — Alan Greenspan, September 16, 2007. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2461214.ece
Let’s see what the BBC was saying back in 2004 in those heady, good ol’ days. Under the headline “Fixing the Problem in Fallujah”, the BBC Radio 4’s Website (7 December 2004) told us

 

“They [the US] swept into Iraq in a short, victorious campaign, and quickly settled down to nation-building and peacekeeping.”
How blasé can the BBC get? Obviously the statement above reveals the BBC’s lies about the ‘lack of a post-invasion plan’ unless of course the BBC invented the entire story? But how could they when the BBC were aware of the first two ‘laws’ passed by the ‘Administrator’ of the newly conquered Iraq, Ober-Gruppen Fuehrer Bremer that disbanded the Iraqi Army and the Ba’ath Party? It’s a quote moreover, that doesn’t appear in Part One (and don’t hold your breath for it to pop up in Part Two).

But back for a mo’ to these two infamous ‘laws’ that ‘Bremer’ passed, the implications of which were well-known at the time. Are we to believe (as the BBC asserted in Part One) that the ‘Plan’ consisted of ‘No Plan’? Of course! Out of chaos was meant to come the oil (remember the ‘No Plan, Plan’ exempted the Oil Ministry from destruction, and predictably, it was the only part of the Iraqi state’s infrastructure that was actually protected from day one).

How can it be that the world’s most powerful nation can spend a dozen years bombing Iraq into submission and in the process exterminate perhaps 1 million people, the majority of them under twenty-five and at the end of it all, not have a Plan when Der Tag arrived?

The US Army has an entire division devoted to carrying out Plans for any country it invades, it’s called the 4th Psychological Operations Group headquartered at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Below is an excerpt from it’s ‘mission statement’:

“US Army Civil Affairs (CA) Organization “CA units are designed to provide support to both GP and SO forces at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. The vast majority of army CA forces are in the reserve component (RC). The army’s active component CA unit (96th CA BN, Ft. Bragg, NC) is capable of rapidly deploying one of its five regionally aligned CA companies to meet the initial CA support requirement, with transition to RC units beginning as soon as mobilization permits. The RC civil affairs units have functional specialties, with the unit’s soldiers being assigned to functional teams.

“The functional specialties are:

Government Section
Legal
Public administration
Public Education
Public Health
Public Safety
Economic/Commerce Section
Economic Development
Civilian Suppl
Food and Agriculture
Public Facilities Section
Public Communications
Transportation
Public Works and Utilities
Special Functions Section
Cultural Relations
Civil Information
Dislocated Civilians
Emergency Services
Environmental Management
It’s critical mission runs as follows:
It supports planning and coordination of CA and foreign nation support operations. The unit provides Civil Affairs functional area specialists in the following areas:

Public Administration
Dislocated Civilians
Civilian Supply
Public Communications
Public Health
Public Work and Utilities” [1]

 

Duh? Wha’ happened to the fucking Plan man?!

 

There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of documents detailing every aspect of occupying a foreign country, each aspect handled by specialised sections of the 59th Civil Affairs Battalion, headquartered in Fort Bragg but it has five divisions nationwide. Here’s what it says in part, on the official website of the Civil Affairs Association under the heading of U. S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command we read that,

‘Civil Affairs soldiers are the commander’s link to the civilian population and authorities in an area of operations. In addition to their military training, Civil Affairs soldiers possess skills and experience based on their civilian education and employment in fields such as finance, public safety, public health, and public utilities. With their unique skills they support the commander during combat operations by eliminating burdens or liabilities caused by a local civilian population. Immediately following hostilities Civil Affairs soldiers reconstitute civil authority, and in the longer term help rebuild a viable civilian infrastructure and economy. Civil Affairs supports U. S. national objectives by assisting the government of a host or occupied area to meet its peoples’ needs and maintain a stable and democratic civil administration.’ http://www.civilaffairsassoc.org/USACAPOC.htm

 

But clearly the invasion of Iraq was no ordinary type of invasion, for example like in WWII, thus there was no need to call in the 59th (except for their Psywar operations, not exactly conducive to nation-building). The invasion of Iraq resembles the Vietnamese Invasion insofar as there was no intention of ‘nation-building’, in fact the exact opposite, for in order to defeat the ‘enemy’ it was necessary to destroy Vietnam (but not to bother rebuilding it afterwards. Remember the concept of ‘nation-building’ hadn’t yet been invented as a rationale for destroying a nation, such pretenses were not deemed necessary).

Likewise, there never was any intention of rebuilding Iraq, the contracts for reconstruction worth billions were only for the thieves to divide up between them (courtesy the US and UK taxpayers) with the crumbs that fell off the table distributed between their quislings and cronies in the Iraqi ‘government’.

So why all of a sudden the backpeddling by the media and the rest of the rats deserting what appears to be a sinking ship? I think part of the reason is all the war talk concerning Iran has some of the USUK’s allies and fellow travellers scared shitless that the Armani-suited psychopaths might actually do it! Thus all kinds of ploys are being used to put some distance between themselves and the psychos running things, just in case it all goes completely pear-shaped.

The second reason has to do with the simple fact that the reality that is the war crime called Iraq is blatantly out of sync with all the propaganda that’s been dished out for the past sixteen years, as to the alleged reasons, objectives and results, or lack of in the case of Iraq. So, just as with the dirty ‘dodgy dossier’ deed, the crime had to be massaged into a more acceptable form of fuckup, after all mistakes we can live with but deliberately wiping a country off the face of the map, with or without a ‘Plan’?

Thirdly the allure of the so-called neo-cons seems to be wearing thin, it's all well and good making a big show invading a country already bombed into submission for a dozen years but quite another to take on one that it's in reasonable working order and without having first softened up our domestic populations, and herein lies the rub, for using the same pretext to invade Iran, namely WMDs, is a total PR disaster, even after they threw in all the rubbish about Iranian involvement in bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So it’s ‘Photoshop’ time folks, time to airbrush out all those inconvenient stories about ‘nation-building’ and to recognise all the ‘mistakes’ (like the ‘mistakes’ that were Saddam’s WMDs) that have been made and while we’re at it, conveniently cough up a couple of scapegoats eg, the aforementioned former OGF Bremer. And who better than the BBC to do the airbrushing, they’ve been at it for decades.

 

 

Notes

1. ‘The Plot Thickens’ William Bowles 30/04/03 www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-011.html

For more on the PsyOps/PsyWar posse see the following:

U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations www.psywarrior.com/psyop.html

U. S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command www.globalspecialoperations.com/capoc.html

If you want to sign up, visit this site: USACAPOC (A) Retention www.usacapoc.army.mil/retention.aspx or take a look around, it’s all there, how to successfully occupy a foreign country and it includes a handy ‘Terror Threat Alert’ button, currently stuck on “Elevated”.

This essay is archived at:

http://williambowles.info/ini/2007/1007/ini-0511.html and http://www.creative-i.info/?p=131