Iraqis
rise up against 16 years of 'made in the USA'
corruption
As the PM announces his resignation, Iraqis
continue to demand the withdrawal of the crony
capitalism implemented by US backed government
officials.
By Nicolas J S Davies
December
03, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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As Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner,
Iraqis were mourning
40 protesters killed
by police and soldiers on Thursday in Baghdad,
Najaf and Nasiriyah. Nearly 400 protesters have
been killed since hundreds of thousands of
people took to the streets at the beginning of
October. Human rights groups have described the
crisis in Iraq as a
“bloodbath,”
Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi has announced he will
resign, and Sweden has opened
an investigation
against Iraqi Defense Minister Najah Al-Shammari,
who is a Swedish citizen, for crimes against
humanity.
According to
Al Jazeera,
“protesters are demanding the overthrow of a
political class seen as corrupt and serving
foreign powers while many Iraqis languish in
poverty without jobs, healthcare or education.”
Only 36% of the
adult population of Iraq have jobs, and despite
the gutting of the public sector under US
occupation, its tattered remnants still employ
more people than the private sector, which fared
even worse under the violence and chaos of the
US's militarized shock doctrine.
Western reporting conveniently casts Iran as the
dominant foreign player in Iraq today. But while
Iran has gained enormous influence and is
one of the targets
of the protests, most of the people ruling Iraq
today are still the former exiles that
the US flew in
with its occupation forces in 2003, “coming to
Iraq with empty pockets to fill” as a
taxi-driver in Baghdad told a Western reporter
at the time. The real causes of Iraq’s unending
political and economic crisis are these former
exiles' betrayal of their country, their endemic
corruption and the US’s illegitimate role in
destroying Iraq's government, handing it over to
them and maintaining them in power for 16 years.
The corruption of both US and Iraqi officials
during the US occupation is
well documented.
UN Security Council resolution 1483 established
a $20 billion Development Fund for Iraq using
previously seized Iraqi assets, money left in
the UN’s “oil for food” program and new Iraqi
oil revenues. An audit by KPMG and a special
inspector general found that a huge proportion
of that money was stolen or embezzled by US and
Iraqi officials.
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Lebanese customs officials found $13 million in
cash aboard Iraqi-American interim Interior
Minister Falah Naqib’s plane. Occupation crime
boss Paul Bremer maintained a $600 million slush
fund with no paperwork. An Iraqi government
ministry with 602 employees collected salaries
for 8,206. A US Army officer doubled the price
on a contract to rebuild a hospital, and told
the hospital’s director the extra cash was his
“retirement package.” A US contractor billed $60
million on a $20 million contract to rebuild a
cement factory, and told Iraqi officials they
should just be grateful the US had saved them
from Saddam Hussein. A US pipeline contractor
charged $3.4 million for non-existent workers
and “other improper charges.” Out of 198
contracts reviewed by the inspector general,
only 44 had documentation to confirm the work
was done.
US
“paying agents” distributing money for projects
around Iraq pocketed millions of dollars in
cash. The inspector general only investigated
one area, around Hillah, but found $96.6 million
dollars unaccounted for in that area alone. One
American agent could not account for $25
million, while another could only account for
$6.3 million out of $23 million. The “Coalition
Provisional Authority” used agents like these
all over Iraq and simply “cleared” their
accounts when they left the country. One agent
who was challenged came back the next day with
$1.9 million in missing cash.
The US Congress also budgeted $18.4 billion for
reconstruction in Iraq in 2003, but apart from
$3.4 billion diverted to "security," less than
$1 billion of it was ever disbursed. Many
Americans believe US oil companies have made out
like bandits in Iraq, but that’s not true
either. The plans that Western oil companies
drew up with Vice President
Cheney in 2001
had that intent, but a law to grant Western oil
companies lucrative “production sharing
agreements” (PSAs) worth tens of billions per
year was exposed as
a smash and grab raid
and the Iraqi National Assembly refused to pass
it.
Finally, in 2009, Iraq’s leaders and their US
puppet-masters gave up on PSAs (for the time
being…) and invited foreign oil companies to bid
on “technical service agreements” (TSAs)
worth $1 to $6
per barrel for increases in production from
Iraqi oilfields. Ten years later, production has
only increased to
4.6 million
barrels per day, of which
3.8 million are
exported. From Iraqi oil exports of about $80
billion per year, foreign firms with TSAs earn
only $1.4 billion, and the largest contracts are
not held by US firms. China National Petroleum
Corporation (CNPC) is earning about $430 million
in 2019; BP earns $235 million; Malaysia’s
Petronas $120 million; Russia’s Lukoil $105
million; and Italy’s ENI $100 million. The bulk
of Iraq’s oil revenues still flow through the
Iraq National Oil Company (INOC) to the corrupt
US-backed government in Baghdad.
Another legacy of the US occupation is Iraq’s
convoluted election system and the undemocratic
horse-trading by which the executive branch of
the Iraqi government is selected. The
2018 election
was contested by 143 parties grouped into 27
coalitions or “lists,” plus 61 other independent
parties. Ironically, this is similar to the
contrived, multi-layered
political system
the British created to control Iraq and exclude
Shiites from power after the Iraqi revolt of
1920.
Today,
this corrupt system keeps dominant power in the
hands of a cabal of corrupt Shiite and Kurdish
politicians who spent many years in exile in the
West, working with Ahmed Chalabi’s US-based
Iraqi National Congress (INC), Ayad Allawi’s
UK-based Iraqi National Accord (INA) and various
factions of the Shiite Islamist Dawa Party.
Voter turnout has dwindled from 70% in 2005 to
44.5% in 2018.
Ayad Allawi and the INA were the instrument for
the CIA’s hopelessly
bungled military coup
in Iraq in 1996. The Iraqi government followed
every detail of the plot on a closed-circuit
radio handed over by one of the conspirators and
arrested all the CIA’s agents inside Iraq on the
eve of the coup. It executed thirty military
officers and jailed a hundred more, leaving the
CIA with no human intelligence from inside Iraq.
Ahmed Chalabi and the INC filled that vacuum
with a web of lies that warmongering US
officials fed into the echo chamber of the US
corporate media to justify the invasion of Iraq.
On June 26 2002, the INC sent a letter to the
Senate Appropriations Committee to lobby for
more US funding. It identified its “Information
Collection Program” as the primary source for
108 stories
about Iraq’s fictitious “Weapons of Mass
Destruction” and links to Al-Qaeda in US and
international newspapers and magazines.
After
the invasion, Allawi and Chalabi became leading
members of the US occupation’s Iraqi Governing
Council. Allawi was appointed Prime Minister of
Iraq’s interim government in 2004, and Chalabi
was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Oil
Minister in the transitional government in 2005.
Chalabi failed to win a seat in the 2005
National Assembly election, but was later
elected to the assembly and remained a powerful
figure until his death in 2015. Allawi and the
INA are still involved in the horse-trading for
senior positions after every election, despite
never getting more than 8% of the votes - and
only 6% in 2018.
Puppet
government
In 2003, the US and its allies unleashed
unspeakable, systematic violence against the
people of Iraq. Public health experts reliably
estimated that the first three years of war and
hostile military occupation cost about
650,000 Iraqi lives.
But the US did succeed in installing a puppet
government of formerly Western-based Shiite and
Kurdish politicians in the fortified Green Zone
in Baghdad, with control over Iraq’s oil
revenues. Many of the ministers in the
US-appointed interim government in 2004 are
still ruling Iraq today.
US forces deployed ever-escalating violence
against Iraqis who resisted the invasion and
hostile military occupation of their country. In
2004, the US began training a large force of
Iraqi police commandos
for the Interior Ministry, and unleashed
commando units recruited from SCIRI’s Badr
Brigade militia as
death squads in Baghdad
in April 2005. This
US-backed reign of terror
peaked in the summer of 2006, with the corpses
of as many as 1,800 victims brought to the
Baghdad morgue each month. An Iraqi human rights
group examined
3,498 bodies of
summary execution victims and identified 92% of
them as people arrested by Interior Ministry
forces.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency tracked
“enemy-initiated attacks”
throughout the occupation and found that over
90% were against US and allied military targets,
not "sectarian" attacks on civilians. But US
officials used a narrative of "sectarian
violence" to blame the work of US-trained
Interior Ministry death squads on independent
Shiite militias like Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army.
The government Iraqis are protesting against
today is still led by the same gang of US-backed
Iraqi exiles who wove a web of lies to stage
manage the invasion of their own country in
2003, and then hid behind the walls of the Green
Zone while US forces and death squads
slaughtered
their people to make the country “safe” for
their corrupt government.
More recently they again acted as cheerleaders
as American
bombs,
rockets and
artillery reduced most of Mosul, Iraq's second
city, to rubble, after twelve years of
occupation, corruption and savage repression
drove its people
into the arms of the Islamic State. Kurdish
intelligence reports revealed that more than
40,000 civilians
were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.
On the pretext of fighting the Islamic State,
the US has reestablished a huge military base
for over 5,000 US troops at Al-Asad airbase in
Anbar province.
The cost of rebuilding Mosul, Fallujah and other
cities and towns is conservatively estimated at
$88 billion.
But despite $80 billion per year in oil exports
and a federal budget of over $100 billion, the
Iraqi government has allocated no money at all
for reconstruction. Foreign, mostly wealthy Arab
countries, have pledged $30 billion, including
just $3 billion from the US, but very little of
that has been, or may ever be, delivered.
The history of Iraq since 2003 has been a
never-ending disaster for its people. Many of
this new generation of Iraqis who have grown up
amid the ruins and chaos the US occupation left
in its wake believe they have nothing to lose
but their blood and their lives, as they
take to the streets
to reclaim their dignity, their future and their
country's sovereignty.
The
bloody handprints of US officials and their
Iraqi puppets all over this crisis should stand
as a dire warning to Americans of the
predictably catastrophic results of an illegal
foreign policy based on sanctions, coups,
threats and the use of military force to try to
impose the will of deluded US leaders on people
all over the world.
This article was originally published by "Open
Democracy"
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