------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Tomgram: Crashing the Plane of State into Iraq*
This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=120725
The Real Link Between 9/11 and Iraq (Finally) Revealed
By Tom Engelhardt
You've heard the President and Vice President say it over and over in
various ways: There was a connection between the events of September 11,
2001 and Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some of the links
between the two.
*Numbers and comparisons*
*At least 3,438 Iraqis
<http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/15466519.htm> died by
violent means during July (roughly similar numbers died in June and
August), significantly more than the 2,973 people
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001> who died in the
attacks of September 11, 2001.
*1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August, according to revised
figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's over half the 9/11 casualties in
one city in one increasingly typical month. According to the Washington
Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090700768_pf.html>,
this figure does not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to
the city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.
*By the beginning of September, 2,974 U.S. military service members
<http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/09/03/death.toll/> had died in
Iraq and in the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, more than
died in the attacks of 9/11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers died in
Iraq in the first 9 days <http://antiwar.com/casualties/list.php> of
September; at least 3 <http://icasualties.org/oef/Afghanistan.aspx> in
Afghanistan.)
*Five years later, according to Emily Gosden and David Randall of the
British newspaper, the Independent
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091006A.shtml>, the Bush
administration's Global War on Terror has resulted in, at a minimum, 20
times the deaths of 9/11; at a maximum, 60 times. It has "directly
killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost
the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor
nation on earth. If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths -- of
insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not
recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds --
are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000." According
to Australian journalist Paul McGeough
<http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/age25.html>, Iraqi
officials (and others <http://www.iraqbodycount.net/>) estimate that
that country's death toll since 2003 "stands at 50,000 or more -- the
proportional equivalent of about 570,000 Americans."
*Last week, the U.S. Senate agreed to appropriate another $63 billion
<http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060907-1543-defensespending.html>
for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where costs have been
averaging $10 billion a month so far this year. This brings the
(taxpayer) cost for Bush's wars so far to about $469 billion and
climbing. That's the equivalent of 469 Ground Zero memorials at full
cost-overrun <http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=83814>
estimates, double that if the memorial comes in at the recently revised
budget of $500 million. (Keep in mind that the estimated cost of these
two wars doesn't include various perfectly real future payouts like
those for the care of veterans and could rise into the trillions
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=62903>.)
*In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the Bush administration had
about 150,000 troops
<http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-06-02-white-usat_x.htm> in
Iraq. Just under three and a half years later, almost as long as it took
to win World War II in the Pacific, and despite much media coverage
about coming force "draw-downs," U.S. troop levels are actually rising
-- by 15,000 in the last month. They now stand at 145,000
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060907/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq_troops>,
just 5,000 short of the initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion, top
administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
took it for granted that American troop levels would be drawn down to
the 30,000 range within three months of the taking of Baghdad.)
*Reconstruction*
While Americans are planning to remember 9/11 with four vast towers
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/design/11zero.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print>
and a huge, extremely costly memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero,
Baghdadis have been thinking a bit more practically. They are putting
scarce funds into constructing two new branch morgues
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090700768_pf.html>
(with refrigeration units) in the capital for what's now most plentiful
in their country: dead bodies. They plan to raise the city's morgue
capacity to 250 bodies a day. If fully used, that would be about 7,500
bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge against ever more probable futures.
While the various New York memorial constructions can't get off (or
into) the ground, due to disputes and cost estimate overruns, what could
be thought of as the real American memorial to Ground Zero is going up
in the very heart of Baghdad; and unlike the prospective structures in
Manhattan or seemingly just about any other construction project in
Iraq, it's on schedule. According to Paul McGeough
<http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/age25.html>, the $787
million "embassy," a 21-building, heavily fortified complex (not reliant
on the capital's hopeless electricity or water systems) will pack
significant bang for the bucks -- its own built-in surface-to-air
missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets, a
beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a sports center. As essentially a
"suburb of Washington," with a predicted modest staff of 3,500, it is a
project that says, with all the hubris the Bush administration can
muster: We're not leaving. Never.
*Record-breaking Months*
*Roadside bombs (or IEDs), "the leading killer of U.S. troops," rose to
record numbers this summer -- 1,200 in August, quadrupling the January
2004 figures according to the Washington Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701372.html>,
while bomb and attack tips from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They
plummeted from 5,900 in April to 3,700 in July. ("It will improve once
it's not so darn lethal to go out on the street," was the optimistic
observation of retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, director of the
Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.)
*According to a recently released quarterly assessment
<http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=11505> the Pentagon is
mandated to do for Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a record
51% in recent months, quadrupling in just two years.
*From the same report, monthly attacks on U.S. and allied Iraqi forces
rose to about 800, doubling since early 2004. In Anbar Province, the
heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a "very pessimistic"
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001204.html>
secret Marine Corps assessment indicates that "we haven't been defeated
militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where
wars are won and lost…"), attacks averaged 30 a day.
*A sideline record in the War on Terror: Afghanistan's already sizeable
opium crop is projected
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060902/wl_asia_afp/afghanistandrugscrimeun>
to increase by at least 50% this year and would then make up a startling
92% of the global supply. According to Antonio Maria Costa, the global
executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, those supplies
would exceed global consumption by 30% -- so other records loom.
(Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/09/AR2006090901105_pf.html>,
the investigation into the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden has hit a
record low. His trail has gone "stone cold… U.S. commandos whose job is
to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in
more than two years.")
*The Iraqi Condition*
Along with civil war, the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, the
still-strengthening insurgency, and the security situation from hell,
Iraqis are also experiencing soaring inflation
<http://uruknet.info/?p=m26150>, possibly reaching 70% this year (which
would more than double last year's 32% rise); stagnant salaries (where
they even exist); an "inert" banking system; gas and electricity prices
up in a year by 270%; massive corruption ("An audit
<http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=0ccb57a1-0dd9-4d8d-a90c-b418650c450b&k=41440>
sponsored by the United Nations last week found hundreds of millions of
dollars of Iraq's oil revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had
gone missing altogether"); lack of adequate electricity or potable water
supplies; tenaciously high unemployment, ranging -- depending upon the
estimate -- from 15-50/60%
<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/08/iraqs_reality_sinks_in.php>
(the recent Pentagon report to Congress offers Iraqi government figures
of 18% unemployment and 34% underemployment); acute shortages
<http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2006/09/05/1803957-ap.html> of
gasoline, kerosene, and cooking gas in the country with the planet's
third largest oil reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote $800
million in scarce funds to importing refined oil products from
neighboring countries and making endless gas lines
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/055fe3e8901e65fe36ce0f1a211f56ca.htm>
and overnight waits the essence of normal life ("Filling up now requires
several days' pay, monastic patience or both…"); an oil industry,
already ragged at the time of the invasion, which has since gone
steadily downhill (its three main oil refineries are now functioning at
half-capacity and processing only half the number of barrels of oil as
before the invasion, while the biggest refinery in Baiji sometimes
operates at as little as 7.5% of capacity); government gas subsidies
severely cut (at the urging of the International Monetary Fund);
malnutrition <http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200605/s1639071.htm>
on the rise and, according to that Pentagon report to Congress, 25.9% of
Iraqi children are stunted in their growth.
In other words, economically speaking, Iraq has essentially been
deconstructed <http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=84463>.
*Diving into Iraq*
On December 9, 2001, Vice President Cheney began publicly arguing on
Meet the Press
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20011209.html>
that there were Iraqi connections to the 9/11 attacks. It was "pretty
well confirmed," he told Tim Russert, that Mohamed Atta, the lead
hijacker, had met the previous April in Prague with a "senior official
of the Iraqi intelligence service." On September 8, 2002
<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/meet.htm>, he returned to the
program and reaffirmed this supposed fact even more strongly. ("[Atta]
did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at
least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a
senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the
World Trade Center.") All of this -- and there was much more of it from
Cheney, the President, and other top officials, always leaving Iraq and
9/11, or Saddam and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and Zarqawi in the same
rhetorical neighborhood with the final linking usually left to the
listener -- was quite literally so much Bushwa.
These were claims debunked within the intelligence community and
elsewhere before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq. We learned
only the other day from a belated partial report by the Senate
Intelligence Committee that U.S. intelligence analysts
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/08/AR2006090800777.html>
were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly
asserting those links to justify invading Iraq. We learned as well that
our intelligence people knew Saddam Hussein had actually tried to
capture Zarqawi and that the claim that Zarqawi and he were somehow in
cahoots was utterly repudiated <http://www.religionnewsblog.com/15858>
last fall by the CIA. None of this stopped the Vice President or
President -- who as late as this August 21 insisted
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060821.html> that
Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi" -- from continuing to make such
implicit or explicit linkages even as they also backtracked
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14720480/> from the claims.
As is often the case, under such lies and manipulations lurks a deeper
truth. In this case, let's call it the truth of wish fulfillment. The
link between 9/11 and Iraq is unfortunately all too real. The Bush
administration made it so in the heat of the post-9/11 shock.
Think of that link this way: In the immediate wake of 9/11, our
President and Vice President hijacked our country, using the low-tech
rhetorical equivalents of box cutters and mace; then, with most
passengers on board and not quite enough of the spirit of United Flight
93 to spare, after a brief Afghan overflight, they crashed the plane of
state directly into Iraq, causing the equivalent of a Katrina that never
ends and turning that country -- from Basra in the south to the border
of Kurdistan -- into the global equivalent of Ground Zero.
/Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project <http://www.americanempireproject.com/> and the
author of The End of Victory Culture
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558491333/nationbooks08>, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of
Publishing
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558495061/nationbooks08>, a
novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259388/nationbooks08>
(Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews./
Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt
E-mail to a Friend <javascript:email_article_popup(120725)>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
posted September 12, 2006 at 4:03 pm
-
Click here to read more Tom Dispatch
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml>
