Iraq: Bloodiest Day in a Year

Massive Bombings Point to Widening Violence
by Jason Ditz, April 23, 2009

Today was the deadliest day in a year in Iraq, with two massive bombings killing at least 90 people and suggesting that far from being a handful of isolated incidents, the increase in attacks over recent weeks is a trend which threatens to return the nation to the disastrous levels of violence in recent years.

There have been 33 bombings in Baghdad alone this month, including a high profile strike today against a crowd waiting for Red Crescent food parcels being handed out by the Iraqi national police. US military spokesman Lt. Col Brian Maka, however, tried to downplay the situation, saying “these attacks are an attempt to incite violence, but the Iraqi people have shown that they are rejecting this bankrupt philosophy.”

Though no group has yet taken credit for today’s attacks, both targeted Shi’ites. Shi’ites have taken the brunt of the attacks in recent weeks, an ominous sign as the Shi’ite-led government cautions the massive US-allied Sunni Awakening Council has been infilitrated by both Ba’athists and al-Qaeda. As the Shi’ite death toll rises, it seems only a matter of time before their own militant factions begin to retaliate, resuming the tit-for-tat sectarian violence that killed an enormous portion of the civilian population and made refugees out of even more.

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/04/23/iraq-bloodiest-day-in-a-year/

US tests military exit routes out of Iraq

By CHELSEA J. CARTER
BAGHDAD (AP) - The American military is shipping battlefield equipment through Jordan and Kuwait, testing possible exit routes in advance of a U.S. withdrawal in Iraq, military officials said.
The convoys—carrying armored vehicles, weapons and other items—mark the Pentagon's first steps in confronting the complex logistics of transporting the huge arsenal stockpiled in Iraq over nearly six years.

It's also part of a wider assessment, ordered by U.S. Central Command, to decide what items the military can transfer, donate, sell or toss away once a full-scale withdrawal is under way, Marine Corps and Army officials told The Associated Press.

"Because they are starting to see a potential reduction of forces, they are looking to get more stuff out," Terry Moores, the deputy assistant chief of staff for logistics for Marine Corps Central Command, said Saturday.

"We started slow," Moores said, but added "it's picked up speed" in recent months.

The Iraqi-U.S. security pact, which took effect Jan. 1, calls for American troops to withdraw from Iraq's cities by June 30 and completely pull out troops by 2012—a timeline that could speed up if President Barack Obama keeps to a campaign promise to have troops out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

In testimony before the U.S. House of Representative earlier this month, the independent Government Accountability Office said the Pentagon needed to redefine its withdrawal strategy, saying it did not take into account either the security pact deadline or Obama's possible accelerated timeframe.

The biggest obstacle is the question of how to move tens of thousands of personnel and millions of tons of equipment out of Iraq, according to testimony by a GAO managing director.

The U.S. brought most of its material in through Kuwait, one of the main staging grounds for the 2003 invasion. There are currently more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

"The capacity of facilities in Kuwait and other neighboring countries may limit the speed at which equipment and material can be moved out of Iraq," the GAO report said.

It recommended looking at multiple routes through Jordan, Kuwait and Turkey, where the U.S. has already constructed bridge overpasses for heavy tanks on the road between the Iraqi border and the Mediterranean ports of Iskenderun and Mersin.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the Pentagon has already examined exit routes through Turkey and Jordan. Both countries, longtime U.S. allies, support the withdrawal planning contingencies, said Mullen.

The Marines have made 17 shipments of vehicles and weapons—totaling 20,000 items—through Jordan's Aqaba port, using contractors to haul the items to either commercial container ships or U.S. Navy ships, Moores said in a telephone interview from Bahrain, the base of the U.S. 5th Fleet.

"Jordan and Kuwait offer a great mix of routes and great infrastructure to get our stuff out," he said.

The shipments through Jordan also has given the leaders in Amman an "understanding about what it takes to move equipment and personnel," he said.

"They have already said that if we are willing to move more through Jordan as we draw down, they are willing" to allow it, Moores said.

Though Jordan has close ties to Washington, popular sentiment has been solidly against the war in Iraq.

The route to Jordan would take the military through the desert province of Anbar, which was the hub of the Sunni insurgency and where Marines and Iraqi soldiers fought some of their bloodiest battles. An uprising by local Sunni tribes in late 2006 forced insurgents from their Anbar strongholds in one of the pivotal moments of the war.

Meanwhile, the Army has shipped hundreds of armored and non-armored vehicles to Kuwait, said Army. Col. Ed Dorman, who works on logistics and supply for Multi-National Corps Iraq.

"We're already reducing what we have on hand," he said, adding that the equipment has been returned to bases in Kuwait or the United States.

Much of the Army equipment being moved is material no longer used, such as older mine-resistant vehicles—known as MRAPs—that can be used for training.

Even if the United States sticks to the longer-range withdrawal plans, it still has less than three years to determine how to get its forces and equipment out of Iraq.

"You don't take everything out," Moores said, adding that some items, such as food, water, barricades and sandbags may be left.

Moores said the Corps has been working on a withdrawal plan with a 2010 deadline in mind for the Marines, which has been preparing to expand its presence in Afghanistan.

"If our focus is correct and our thought process is correct, we are well on our way with our planning," he said. "It won't be a mass exodus. It will be a gradual withdrawal."

www.breitbart.com

British troops to leave Iraq in March: reports

Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Essam Al-Sudani/AFP/

LONDON — Britain will start withdrawing most of its more than 4,000 troops from Iraq in March and plans to leave only 400 personnel by mid-2009, British newspapers reported on Wednesday.

The newspapers, all quoting an unnamed senior defence source, said a force of several thousand U.S. troops would replace the British troops and move into their base at the airport on the outskirts of the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Plans were now well advanced for the withdrawal of Britain's 4,100 troops even though a so-called "status of forces" agreement had yet to be reached with the Iraqi government, said the Times.

British special forces units operating from Baghdad would also be withdrawn and were expected to be transferred to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, said the newspaper.

It said the withdrawal programme was still dependent on security conditions in southern Iraq, and that there would be some anxiety about possible violence during provincial elections due to be held on Jan. 31.

No immediate comment was available from the British government on the reports.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was U.S. President George W. Bush's strongest ally over the March 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Blair sent 45,000 troops to join the U.S.-led military action but the war cost him public support.

Gordon Brown, who took over from Mr. Blair in June last year, has reduced British troop levels in Iraq and bringing most of the remaining troops home could give him a boost at the next election, due by mid-2010.

In October, Defence Secretary John Hutton said British troops were on track to complete their mission in Iraq early next year.

On Tuesday, U.S. General David Petraeus said violence in Iraq in the past few weeks had fallen to its lowest level since mid-2003 and that security gains, while still at risk of reversal, were less fragile than before.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1054320

Secret SOFA provisions exposed

An Iraqi media outlet has exposed 'secret' provisions of the US-sought security pact amid ongoing parliamentary deliberations on the deal.

The US seeks to legitimize its presence in Iraq beyond the expiration of its December 31 UN mandate in the country. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) it has pressured Iraq to finalize could provide Washington the legal backing it needs.

As far as the actual content of the pending SOFA is concerned, the White House has refused to publish the official English text of the agreement.

While US and Iraqi government officials have alleged that no part of the US agreement has been kept confidential, al-Moheet on Wednesday published what it called secret segments of the pending agreement.

The 'secret' articles posted on the Arabic-language website follows:

1. US forces are authorized to set up military bases to support Iraqi troops based on the security situation in the country.

2. This document is an agreement and not a treaty.

3. The Iraqi government and judiciary cannot prosecute US civilians or military personnel stationed in the country. All Americans are subject to immunity.

4. US forces are authorized to set up security establishments such as prison centers, which will be operated by the US military.

5. US forces have the privilege to do as they please inside their military bases and in transit. The Iraqi government has no authority to intervene.

6. US forces are authorized to arrest individuals who disrupt security and stability without Iraqi government approval.

7. The Iraqi intelligence, interior and defense ministries will remain under US supervision for 10 years.

The US-proposed SOFA has been passed by the Iraqi Cabinet and has received parliamentary approval but will be put to a referendum in 2009.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=76714&sectionid=351020201

Al-Biaaj attacker arrested

NINEWA / Aswat al-Iraq: The perpetrator of the attack that targeted U.S. soldiers in western Mosul yesterday was arrested at a checkpoint in the province, a military source said on Wednesday.
“On Tuesday, Iraqi army forces detained an Iraqi soldier who attacked U.S. servicemen while they were providing assistance for al-Biaaj district residents…,”
the source told Aswat al-Iraq. “The uniform of the soldier, who belongs to the 3rd Division stationed in western Mosul, was found inside a house,” the source explained.
“Investigations are currently underway,” the source added.

On Tuesday, an Iraqi army source said that three U.S. servicemen and three women were wounded when an Iraqi soldier opened fire on them in al-Biaaj district.
Mosul, the capital city of Ninewa, lies 405 km north of Baghdad.
The original city of Mosul stands on the west bank of the Tigris River, opposite the ancient biblical city of Nineveh on the east bank, but the metropolitan area has now grown to encompass substantial areas on both banks, with five bridges linking the two sides.
Despite having an amount of Kurdish population, it does not form part of the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).

SS (S)/SR

http://en.aswataliraq.info/?p=103742

Sunni party cuts ties with U.S. over fatal raid

BAGHDAD — Iraq's largest Sunni party said Saturday that it has suspended official contacts with American military personnel and civilians after the killing of a man near Fallujah.

The U.S. military said U.S.-backed Iraqi soldiers arrested a wanted insurgent leader suspected of training roadside bomb cells in an operation Friday that killed an armed man who opened fire on the troops.

The Iraqi Islamic Party SAIDF the raid had a "hidden political motive," an indication of rising tensions in Anbar province ahead of provincial elections due to be held by the end of January.

The IIP alleged that a senior member of the party was killed in his bed and five others were arrested during the raid in the Halabsa area on the outskirts of the former insurgent stronghold.

It accused the troops of targeting party members after its success in forging tribal alliances with other political blocs.

"The hidden political motive behind this incident is clear," the party said in a statement posted on its Web site.

The party said it "has decided to suspend all official contacts with the Americans, both military and civilians, until the party receives a reasonable explanation about what happened, along with an official apology."

It also demanded assurance those responsible would be punished, compensation for the victims and the release of the five detainees.

Supporters of the Iraqi Islamic Party rallied Saturday in Fallujah to protest the raid.

The IIP has been locked in a bitter rivalry with Sunni tribal leaders who joined forces with the United States against al-Qaida in Iraq in so-called Awakening Councils that started in Anbar and spread to other Sunni areas.
BAGHDAD — Iraq's largest Sunni party said Saturday that it has suspended official contacts with American military personnel and civilians after the killing of a man near Fallujah.

The U.S. military said U.S.-backed Iraqi soldiers arrested a wanted insurgent leader suspected of training roadside bomb cells in an operation Friday that killed an armed man who opened fire on the troops.

The Iraqi Islamic Party SAIDF the raid had a "hidden political motive," an indication of rising tensions in Anbar province ahead of provincial elections due to be held by the end of January.

The IIP alleged that a senior member of the party was killed in his bed and five others were arrested during the raid in the Halabsa area on the outskirts of the former insurgent stronghold.

It accused the troops of targeting party members after its success in forging tribal alliances with other political blocs.

"The hidden political motive behind this incident is clear," the party said in a statement posted on its Web site.

The party said it "has decided to suspend all official contacts with the Americans, both military and civilians, until the party receives a reasonable explanation about what happened, along with an official apology."

It also demanded assurance those responsible would be punished, compensation for the victims and the release of the five detainees.

Supporters of the Iraqi Islamic Party rallied Saturday in Fallujah to protest the raid.

The IIP has been locked in a bitter rivalry with Sunni tribal leaders who joined forces with the United States against al-Qaida in Iraq in so-called Awakening Councils that started in Anbar and spread to other Sunni areas.


http://www.northjersey.com/news/world/33321364.html

Military pact traps Baghdad between US, Iran

BAGHDAD - As the United States and Iraq approach a deal on the future US military presence in the country, Baghdad is trapped between Washington's demands and Tehran's fears about US influence in the region, politicians and analysts say.

Since the 2003 US-led invasion, and especially since Iraq's Shiite majority came to power three years ago, predominantly Shiite Iran has seen Iraq as a natural ally, and sought to influence it.

Iran, which shares the same Islamic beliefs and provided refuge for several senior Iraqi figures during the regime of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, is not happy with the occupation of Iraq by arch-foe the United States.

The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being negotiated between Washington and Baghdad since February will fix American troop withdrawal plan after December 31.

This week the White House said the deal was more or less done, but the Iraqi cabinet decided to seek revisions, triggering concerns among top US military and political figures about the risks of not having a deal.

The arrangement is fiercely opposed by Iran.

"The Americans have shown that they do not respect any agreement and, if their interests require it, they are ready to sacrifice their closest friends," Ahmadinejad said.

"They do not distinguish among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. They want to prevent the creation of a strong and powerful Iraq, the better to pillage the country."

For its part, the United States has sharply criticised Iran for trying to undermine and derail the agreement that it claims as crucial to Iraq.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Wednesday that "Iranian meddling in Iraq takes on all forms."

The Iranians "have made their displeasure with this agreement known" he said.

Last week General Raymond Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, told The Washington Post that Iran was working publicly and covertly to undermine the military pact, that will likely see US soldiers stay until 2011.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called the comments inappropriate.

"These kinds of remarks are likely to tarnish the good relations between Iraq and the forces of the international coalition," he said.

Science and Technology Minister Raid Jahid Fahmi said Baghdad had been walking a tightrope between Washington's demands and Iranian fears over the US.

"During the negotiations we have sought to calm the fears of our neighbours (the Iranians) and we have been very careful in discussions with the United States that the draft accord is not seen as a threat to anyone," Fahmi said.

"Iran has acted on its national interests and believes that the American presence is a threat," he said.

"It therefore wants the departure of the troops."

At a cabinet meeting an Iraqi minister suggested controlling the incoming US mail for fear it might contain equipment perceived harmful for Iran, a government official told AFP on conditition of anonymity.

Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director for the International Crisis Group, said Iran wanted to subvert US power in Iraq.

"A delay in signing the security pact in particular would be a bloody nose for the Bush administration, " Hiltermann said.

Most Iraqis are opposed to any kind of deal with Washington that would keep American forces in the country, and that would give US forces immunity from being punished when they commit war crimes against Iraqis.


http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=28467

THE SECRET OF IRAQ

The secret of our involvement in Iraq is no secret. This area has been known from 600,000 B.C. to 5,000 B.C. as a Paleolithic era country. We cowered in terror before the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass delusion, a la Harry Boudini and its threat of imminent nuclear annihilation, only to find, on inventing Iraq in a desperate attempt to stave off destruction, that its present leader, Saddam Hussein, had been a CIA asset for the past forty years, with his handlers numbering both Bush pere at fils, and that his nuclear capability had been destroyed years ago by Israeli assaults using American planes AND BOMBS, etc. Did we heave a sigh of relief upon learning this news? No, we were more terrified than ever, as we entered the defining Age of America, the Age of Terror, under which we labor today.

Now Iowa farm youths are dying in unarmored pleasure vehicles manufactured by General Motors, the infamous Hummers. They are dying in Babylon, a name unfamiliar to most Americans, because Dan Rather tells us it is Baghdad, a modern version of the notorious Whore of Babylon.

Has anyone in Washington ever heard of the Sumerian Empire? The Assyrian Empire? Certainly none of the 3800 overpaid, highly trained "investigative reporters" downing their martinis and New York strip steaks at the National Press Club ever heard of these empires. They have come and gone. Babylon-Bagdad itself veered into oblivion in 2800 B.C. after some three thousand years of prominence. Why are Americans dying in a city which reached its peak three thousand years ago? Answer anyone, anyone. It is because we are embroiled in World War III, stupid. A new crusade from the 12th century, in which Christians and Muslims rush like lemmings into mutual destruction, while the instigators wait on the sidelines, enjoying the gladiators in our modern Coliseum, the television set.

Two names are never mentioned in contemporary accounts of this imbroglio--Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan, yet they account for the entire story. You can throw in the ubiquitous FDR and Wilson's mentor, Colonel House, and you have it all. Why was Ronald Reagan accorded a Pharoah's funeral when he passed away recently? He was honored as the maestro of World War III, which he arranged during his Presidency. Reagan is revered for his monumental feat in ending the Communist "threat", which he did by a simple act-he cut off the flow of cash from the taxpayers of the United States, an unending stream which had been launched by Woodrow Wilson in 1917, and which ended in 1989, aided by Senator Joe McCarthy's astounding discovery that the world headquarters of Communism was not in Moscow, as we had been taught since childhood, but in Washington, D.C., the headquarters of our fake money, the Federal Reserve System. When Joe began to rattle the branches, the money tree stopped its manna, and the dreaded Soviet empire, unable to survive for a single day on its own, quickly joined the Sumerians and Assyrians on the dust heap of history.

This should be enough of a history lesson for one session, but I will go a bit further. How did the Hollywood sycophant, Ronald Reagan, arrange World War III? He was an actor, all of whose scripts were carefully written for him. And so was this one. When he was elected President in 1980, a day of despair for the doomsayers, the same ones who greeted Bush's re-election as the end of this world, which they would celebrate by moving to Canada or Australia. Reagan made his triumphant entry into Washington, accompanied by a carefully selected and trained "advisors" who had been recruited from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University...its full name is the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, I am the only historian who has ever accounted for its miraculous growth as THE think tank for all think tanks. After World War I, the Rothschilds realized that someone might actually find out how World War I made its unexplained appearance on the world scene. These clever bankers hired 400 recently discharged U.S. Army Officers to travel around Europe, carefully gathering up all documents which might reveal their complicity in the war. These papers are stored at Stanford University. The name of the think tank had no connection with J. Edgar Hoover, but with the sainted former President, who was revered in Russia as the saviour of Communism, with Russina Relief in 1921, and again in subsequent relief efforts. Because of thie revealing connection, a quickly manufactured story, which became gospel, claimed that he was a fanatical anti-Communist, which the gullible believe today.

Who is the present Bush's closest advisor? Condoleeza Rice, his newly named Secretary of State. This is the same Rice who was Provost of Stanford University. Once again appearing in Washington is Robert MacFarland, who was Reagan's National Security Advisor. It's the same cast, folks, replaying the Life and Loves of Andy Hardy. The farm boys know nothing of this. They will never know it. But they have their moment of glory, when CBS news honors them for three seconds each evening as Our Fallen Heroes.

The Hoover Institution quickly gained fame as the final resting place of our greatest Trotskyite Communist, under the aegis of Sidney Hook and his partner Seymour, heroes of the Trotskyite memory squad. They snickered for years at the manufactured reputation of the Hoover Institution as the headquarters of anti-Communism, where only real Communists were welcomed. I was never in its walls. Also revered is FDR and his protege', Alger, whom he called "son". Alger Hiss was one of FDR's personl assistants; the others were Lauchlin Currie and Harrry Dexter White. All three were named before Congressional Hearings as known KBG Agents for Stalin. Alger Hiss has now come into his full glory as the founder of the United Nations, so we operate under his aegis today. Forgotten is our outdated Federal Reserve Constitution, with its mediaeval tokens of account. In our future, money will be food stamps and coupons. None will be fed who does not bear the Mark of The Beast. But tell us, Eustace, how do we get out of Iraq? Where is the exit door? I'm sorry folks. There isn't one. We got out of Vietnam by the skin of our teeth, in waiting helicopters. Helicopter engines don't work in the sand. We have not yet found Ali Baba's cave in Iraq. The jewels vanished two thousand years ago.

Moving from fantasy to reality, we come back to the real world, where a fanatical band of conspirators, known in Washington as "the chicken hawks", younger men without military risks who did not hesitate to order American youths to the Middle East to bring the dream of world conquest to fruition. All of them are well known in political circles, where they are known as "chevaliers sans reproche", because no one dares to criticize them. The names Faith, Libby, Billy Crystal of Hollywood, or Billy Kristol, son of Irving, one of New York's most venerable Socialists, and Richard Perle, renowned in Washington for his sobriquet, "the Prince of Darkness", proceed on their chosen path, willing to risk all for Israel, and dedicated to risking all America for Israel. They may be at greater risk than they know, as the Nuremberg Trials tried, convicted and executed German leaders for "planning and waging aggressive war" after World War II. What follows Word War III? And why is Bush's cabinet hastily resigning? Not only did the conspirators attack the very foundation of civilization at the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates, then disguised their conspiracy by saying it was a quest for oil. No oil has been forthcoming.

Historians will record that at the Sixth Zionist World Congress at Basle in 1896, an impassioned speaker painted a glowing picture of three world wars, and after the third, the delivery of the world into their hands. We are now in the Third World War. Will humanity take the hint, and move for its own survival? Or is this a trivial question?

What Were The Mossad And Fake New Zealand Passports Doing In Iraq?

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Mercenaries at work

By Chalmers Johnson

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military-industrial complex" means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. "Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime," he said, "or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea ... We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions ... We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications ... We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

Although Eisenhower's reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted influence" has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.

From its origins in the early 1940s, when president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his "arsenal of democracy," down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations - often termed a "partnership" - between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.

In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role in the newly emerging relationship was played by the official governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president, FDR sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt's use of public-private "partnerships" to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. Although he was himself an implacable enemy of fascism, a few people thought that the president nonetheless was coming close to copying some of its key institutions. The leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued that it should more appropriately be called "corporatism" because it was a merger of state and corporate power. (See Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War, p. 69.)

Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the separation of powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than those of a public institution, public-private collaborative relationships afford the private sector an added measure of security from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that the war produced.

Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. (See Thomas Frank's new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, for a superb analysis of Ronald Reagan's slogan "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.") Its objectives have long been to discredit what it called "big government", while capturing for private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in national defense. It may be understood as a slow-burning reaction to what American conservatives believed to be the socialism of the New Deal.

Perhaps the country's leading theorist of democracy, Sheldon S Wolin, has written a new book, Democracy Incorporated, on what he calls "inverted totalitarianism" - the rise in the US of totalitarian institutions of conformity and regimentation shorn of the police repression of the earlier German, Italian, and Soviet forms. He warns of "the expansion of private (ie, mainly corporate) power and the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry." He also decries the degree to which the so-called privatization of governmental activities has insidiously undercut our democracy, leaving us with the widespread belief that government is no longer needed and that, in any case, it is not capable of performing the functions we have entrusted to it.

Wolin writes:
The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled. (p. 284)
Mercenaries at work
The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World War II or even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now fully ascendant. The uniformed air, land, and naval forces of the country as well as its intelligence agencies, including the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and even clandestine networks entrusted with the dangerous work of penetrating and spying on terrorist organizations are all dependent on hordes of "private contractors". In the context of governmental national security functions, a better term for these might be "mercenaries" working in private for profit-making companies.

Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and the leading authority on this subject, sums up this situation devastatingly in his new book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. The following quotes are a precis of some of his key findings:
In 2006 ... the cost of America's spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70% of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each year on foreign and domestic intelligence ... The number of contract employees now exceeds the CIA's full-time workforce of 17,500 ... Contractors make up more than half the workforce of the CIA's National Clandestine Service (formerly the Directorate of Operations), which conducts covert operations and recruits spies abroad ...

To feed the NSA's insatiable demand for data and information technology, the industrial base of contractors seeking to do business with the agency grew from 144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in 2006 ... At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in charge of launching and maintaining the nation's photo-reconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed of contract employees working for private companies ... With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC intelligence community, contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the intelligence community ...

If there's one generalization to be made about the NSA's outsourced IT information technology programs, it is this: they haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures ... In 2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting ... As a result, more than 90% of the information it was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5% was translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis.

The key phrase in the new counterterrorism lexicon is 'public-private partnerships' ... In reality, 'partnerships' are a convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests. (pp 6, 13-14, 16, 214-15, 365)
Several inferences can be drawn from Shorrock's shocking expose. One is that if a foreign espionage service wanted to penetrate American military and governmental secrets, its easiest path would not be to gain access to any official US agencies, but simply to get its agents jobs at any of the large intelligence-oriented private companies on which the government has become remarkably dependent. These include Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with headquarters in San Diego, California, which typically pays its 42,000 employees higher salaries than if they worked at similar jobs in the government; Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation's oldest intelligence and clandestine-operations contractors, which, until January 2007, was the employer of Mike McConnell, the current director of national intelligence and the first private contractor to be named to lead the entire intelligence community; and CACI International, which, under two contracts for "information technology services," ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the Army at Iraq's already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. According to Major General Anthony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal, four of CACI's interrogators were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for torturing prisoners. (Shorrock, p. 281)

Remarkably enough, SAIC has virtually replaced the National Security Agency as the primary collector of signals intelligence for the government. It is the NSA's largest contractor, and that agency is today the company's single largest customer.

There are literally thousands of other profit-making enterprises that work to supply the government with so-called intelligence needs, sometimes even bribing Congressmen to fund projects that no one in the executive branch actually wants. This was the case with Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Republican of California's 50th District, who, in 2006, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in federal prison for soliciting bribes from defense contractors. One of the bribers, Brent Wilkes, snagged a $9.7 million contract for his company, ADCS Inc. ("Automated Document Conversion Systems") to computerize the century-old records of the Panama Canal dig!

A country drowning in euphemisms
The United States has long had a sorry record when it comes to protecting its intelligence from foreign infiltration, but the situation today seems particularly perilous. One is reminded of the case described in the 1979 book by Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman (made into a 1985 film of the same name). It tells the true story of two young Southern Californians, one with a high security clearance working for the defense contractor TRW (dubbed "RTX" in the film), and the other a drug addict and minor smuggler. The TRW employee is motivated to act by his discovery of a misrouted CIA document describing plans to overthrow the prime minister of Australia, and the other by a need for money to pay for his addiction.

They decide to get even with the government by selling secrets to the Soviet Union and are exposed by their own bungling. Both are sentenced to prison for espionage. The message of the book (and film) lies in the ease with which they betrayed their country - and how long it took before they were exposed and apprehended. Today, thanks to the staggering over-privatization of the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence, the opportunities for such breaches of security are widespread.

I applaud Shorrock for his extraordinary research into an almost impenetrable subject using only openly available sources. There is, however, one aspect of his analysis with which I differ. This is his contention that the wholesale takeover of official intelligence collection and analysis by private companies is a form of "outsourcing". This term is usually restricted to a business enterprise buying goods and services that it does not want to manufacture or supply in-house. When it is applied to a governmental agency that turns over many, if not all, of its key functions to a risk-averse company trying to make a return on its investment, "outsourcing" simply becomes a euphemism for mercenary activities.


As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature, observed in the New York Review of Books:
The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection.
Euphemisms are words intended to deceive. The United States is



already close to drowning in them, particularly new words and terms devised, or brought to bear, to justify the American invasion of Iraq - coinages Bromwich highlights like "regime change", "enhanced interrogation techniques", "the global war on terrorism", "the birth pangs of a new Middle East", a "slight uptick in violence", "bringing torture within the law", "simulated drowning", and, of course, "collateral damage", meaning the slaughter of unarmed civilians by American troops and aircraft followed - rarely - by perfunctory apologies.

It is important that the intrusion of unelected corporate officials with hidden profit motives into what are ostensibly public political activities not be confused with private businesses buying Scotch tape, paper clips, or hubcaps.

The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan's presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this: The biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had the same anti-governmental and neo-conservative motives as the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies typically involved an indifference to - perhaps even an ignorance of - what was actually being done to democratic, accountable government in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is one of the strengths of Shorrock's study that he goes into detail on Clinton's contributions to the wholesale privatization of our government, and of the intelligence agencies in particular.

Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and offer a large share of public expenditures to the private sector with the creation in 1982 of the "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control." In charge of the survey, which became known as the "Grace Commission," he named the conservative businessman, J Peter Grace, Jr, chairman of the WR Grace Corporation, one of the world's largest chemical companies - notorious for its production of asbestos and its involvement in numerous anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also had a long history of investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was deeply committed to undercutting what he saw as leftist unions, particularly because they often favored state-led economic development.

The Grace Commission's actual achievements were modest. Its biggest was undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight railroad for the northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on this front during the first Bush's administration, but Bill Clinton returned to privatization with a vengeance.

According to Shorrock:
Bill Clinton ... picked up the cudgel where the conservative Ronald Reagan left off and ... took it deep into services once considered inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By the end of Clinton's first term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred to companies in the private sector - among them thousands of jobs in intelligence ... By the end of his second term in 2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending 44% more on contractors than it had in 1993. (pp 73, 86)
These activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the Republicans had gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 43 years. One liberal journalist described "outsourcing as a virtual joint venture between House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich and Clinton". The right-wing Heritage Foundation aptly labeled Clinton's 1996 budget as the "boldest privatization agenda put forth by any president to date". (p 87)

After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters of "a neo-conservative drive to siphon US spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush administration". (pp 72-3)

The privatization and loss - of institutional memory
The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in terms of military and intelligence functions. The KBR Corporation, for example, supplies food, laundry, and other personal services to our troops in Iraq based on extremely lucrative no-bid contracts, while Blackwater Worldwide supplies security and analytical services to the CIA and the State Department in Baghdad. (Among other things, its armed mercenaries opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007, without any provocation, according to US military reports.) The costs - both financial and personal - of privatization in the armed services and the intelligence community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of the consequences for democratic governance may prove irreparable.

These consequences include: the sacrifice of professionalism within our intelligence services; the readiness of private contractors to engage in illegal activities without compunction and with impunity; the inability of Congress or citizens to carry out effective oversight of privately-managed intelligence activities because of the wall of secrecy that surrounds them; and, perhaps most serious of all, the loss of the most valuable asset any intelligence organization possesses - its institutional memory.

Most of these consequences are obvious, even if almost never commented on by our politicians or paid much attention in the mainstream media. After all, the standards of a career CIA officer are very different from those of a corporate executive who must keep his eye on the contract he is fulfilling and future contracts that will determine the viability of his firm. The essence of professionalism for a career intelligence analyst is his integrity in laying out what the US government should know about a foreign policy issue, regardless of the political interests of, or the costs to, the major players.

The loss of such professionalism within the CIA was starkly revealed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. It still seems astonishing that no senior official, beginning with secretary of state Colin Powell, saw fit to resign when the true dimensions of our intelligence failure became clear, least of all director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.

A willingness to engage in activities ranging from the dubious to the outright felonious seems even more prevalent among our intelligence contractors than among the agencies themselves, and much harder for an outsider to detect. For example, following 9/11, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, then working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense, got the bright idea that DARPA should start compiling dossiers on as many American citizens as possible in order to see whether "data-mining" procedures might reveal patterns of behavior associated with terrorist activities.

On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire entitled "You Are a Suspect" in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote, "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every website you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend - all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a 'virtual centralized grand database.'" This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.

However, Congress's action did not end the "total information awareness" program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American public - for a price. As far as we know, Admiral Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness Program" is still going strong today.

The most serious immediate consequence of the privatization of official governmental activities is the loss of institutional memory by our government's most sensitive organizations and agencies. Shorrock concludes, "So many former intelligence officers joined the private sector during the 1990s that, by the turn of the century, the institutional memory of the United States intelligence community now resides in the private sector. That's pretty much where things stood on September 11, 2001." (p 112)

This means that the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the other 13 agencies in the US intelligence community cannot easily be reformed because their staffs have largely forgotten what they are supposed to do, or how to go about it. They have not been drilled and disciplined in the techniques, unexpected outcomes, and know-how of previous projects, successful and failed.

As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure of the American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure because the Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized military filled with incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the running of a defeated country. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates (a former director of the CIA) has repeatedly warned that the United States is turning over far too many functions to the military because of its hollowing out of the Department of State and the Agency for International Development since the end of the Cold War. Gates believes that we are witnessing a "creeping militarization" of foreign policy - and, though this generally goes unsaid, both the military and the intelligence services have turned over far too many of their tasks to private companies and mercenaries.

When even Robert Gates begins to sound like president Eisenhower, it is time for ordinary citizens to pay attention. In my 2006 book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, with an eye to bringing the imperial presidency under some modest control, I advocated that we Americans abolish the CIA altogether, along with other dangerous and redundant agencies in our alphabet soup of 16 secret intelligence agencies, and replace them with the State Department's professional staff devoted to collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence. I still hold that position.

Nonetheless, the current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the CIA's role as the president's private army, even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind.

(This essay focuses on the new book by Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.)

Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JG30Ak04.html

US Forces Breach Resistance Stronghold in Falluja

With a massive force of 4,000 troops and 700 tanks, the US forces have managed to breach the Resistance stronghold positioned in the southern part of Falluja at 3 a.m. this morning.

The US troops using massive air support have been able to completely control the ‘Nazaal’ neighborhood while at the same time occupying parts of ‘Shuhada’ and ‘Jubail’ neighborhoods.

Reports indicate that US forces have not only used mustard gas, nerve gas, and cluster bombs to pave the way for their advance, but that a small neutron bomb has also been used at ‘Kubaysaat’ street which they were unable to capture through conventional methods.

The Iraqi Resistance have lost 132 fighters in this attack including 4 commanders.

On the enemy side, the resistance has reported the destruction of over 80 vehicles as well as the killing of tens of US troops (26 of whom were initially taken as prisoner, but then executed when the Resistance had to evacuate the area). The Resistance has also reported the downing of one fighter plane using a ‘SAM-9’ as well as 3 Apache’s and 5 unmanned planes.

This battle is described as ‘life or death’ fight by one of the Resistance commanders in Falluja who stated that the US have always withdrawn at much smaller losses than what they have suffered today, indicating that this change in political will. The Resistance commander indicated that his top priority is in preserving the lives of the fighters at all costs and to take from the invaders the maximum number of casualties and prisoners achievable.
http://www.islammemo.cc/news/one_news.asp?IDNews=53707


On a side note: Jazeera TV during their afternoon broadcast today (11 a.m. GMT) have confirmed massive explosions in Falluja and were about to go live with a spokesman from Falluja when the presenter suddenly cut to a commercial. When the commercial was over they had changed the subject and Falluja was never mentioned again.

U.S. Troops in Iraq Face A Powerful New Weapon

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 10, 2008

BAGHDAD, July 9 — Suspected Shiite militiamen have begun using powerful rocket-propelled bombs to attack U.S. military outposts in recent months, broadening the array of weapons used against American troops.

U.S. military officials call the devices Improvised Rocket Assisted Munitions, or IRAMs. They are propane tanks packed with hundreds of pounds of explosives and powered by 107mm rockets. They are often fired by remote control from the backs of trucks, sometimes in close succession. Rocket-propelled bombs have killed at least 21 people, including at least three U.S. soldiers, this year.

The latest reported rocket-propelled bomb attack occurred Tuesday at Joint Security Station Ur, a base in northeastern Baghdad shared by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. One U.S. soldier and an interpreter were wounded in the attack.

U.S. military officials say IRAM attacks, unlike roadside bombings and conventional mortar or rocket attacks, have the potential to kill scores of soldiers at once. IRAMs are fired at close range, unlike most rockets, and create much larger explosions. Most such attacks have occurred in the capital, Baghdad.


The use of the rocket-propelled bombs reflects militiamen's ability to use commonly available materials and relatively low-tech weaponry to circumvent security measures that have cost the U.S. military billions of dollars. To combat roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, U.S. and Iraqi troops have set up scores of checkpoints throughout the capital, increased patrols and purchased hundreds of armored vehicles that can resist such attacks.

A June report on the Web site Long War Journal called the explosives-filled propane tanks "flying IEDs."

Militia members and insurgents have at times increased the sophistication of their weapons, but the rocket-propelled bombs are makeshift devices that also have been used in recent years by insurgents in Colombia. Propane tanks are ubiquitous in Iraq, where the fuel is widely used for cooking, making it hard for security forces to stop production of the bombs.

U.S. military officials in Baghdad have noted the use of rocket-propelled bombs in press releases in recent months. But they have not publicly discussed their use or their concerns about the weapons at length because most of the information about them is classified, U.S. military officials said.

"IRAM attacks could be very tragic against us," said Col. William B. Hickman, the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, which operates in northwestern Baghdad. "We take them very seriously."

As the number of U.S. soldiers in Baghdad has begun to drop with the end of the "surge" of additional forces, U.S. military officials are placing a higher percentage of their troops in small outposts in densely populated neighborhoods. U.S. military officials say this is crucial to ensure the continued training of Iraq's security forces, win the trust of the capital's residents and improve local governance. But deployments in small outposts — some are manned by just one platoon — also have made soldiers more vulnerable.

To counter the threat posed by rocket-propelled bombs, soldiers have stepped up patrols around outposts, fortified their buildings and offered tens of thousands of dollars for information about networks that use the weapon.

The weapon first emerged as a threat here last fall and has become a top concern in recent months following a series of deadly attacks
Most such attacks have been carried out during the day and some have been videotaped and aired on the satellite television station operated by Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia and political movement. U.S. military officials said they have found Iranian-made 107mm rockets at some of the blast sites, which they said suggests the weapons — or parts — may have come from Iran.

The deadliest reported rocket-propelled bomb attack occurred June 4 in the Shaab neighborhood of eastern Baghdad. U.S. soldiers stationed at a small base called Forward Operating Base Callahan heard a series of blasts shortly after 2 p.m.

The explosions were caused when a rocket on the back of a small flatbed truck exploded, igniting the other four to five IRAMs on the truck, the U.S. military said. The attack killed 18 Iraqis, wounded 29 and damaged 15 buildings, the military said.

"It is believed that the intended targets were U.S. soldiers at FOB Callahan and while in the final stages for the attack, for an unknown reason one rocket prematurely detonated causing the remaining rockets to explode erratically," the military said in a statement.

U.S. military officials said two suspected assailants were killed in the attack, describing them as members of "special groups" or Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

The second-deadliest attack occurred April 28 at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. The attack, which took place shortly after 1 p.m., killed three soldiers. Militiamen fired 14 rocket-propelled bombs from the back of a cargo truck.


That same day, Joint Security Station Thawra, the U.S. military's only outpost in Sadr City, in eastern Baghdad, was also attacked with rocket-propelled bombs.

A man walked into an office at the station where Iraqis can file claims for compensation, and told soldiers of a U.S. military civil affairs unit that his truck had sustained damage during recent clashes between American troops and militiamen, according to two U.S. military officials who described the attack, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the information has not been publicly released.

The soldiers told the man to drive his truck close to the station so they could inspect it. The man pulled up in a small delivery truck containing eight IRAM launch tubes. The station was attacked soon afterward. At least 15 soldiers were wounded.

Although most rocket-propelled bomb attacks have taken place in eastern Baghdad, a joint security station in northern Hurriya, western Baghdad, was targeted last month.

On June 24, at approximately 3 p.m., a man walked up to the gate of the base and told soldiers, "You have a truck over there that goes boom," according to Capt. Jeremy Ussery, a company commander with the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment.

When soldiers inspected the truck, they realized an attempt to ignite nine IRAMs, with roughly 200 pounds of explosives apiece, had been unsuccessful.

"Just think of what could have happened," Ussery said. "Eighteen hundred pounds of explosives dispersed over this JSS."

The battalion approved a $50,000 reward for information on the attack and soldiers have handed out fliers to residents seeking tips. Ussery said the battalion typically offers rewards in the $10,000 range for "high value individuals," or prominent wanted militiamen.

The amount offered for information on the IRAM attack "is a very large reward," he said. "It's a small price to pay."

Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report from Washington.

McCain promises to leave Iraq by 2012

By Fester:

The Politico is reporting that John McCain is promising to leave Iraq in 2012 but that is not their lede:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico.

The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term.

As James Joyner notes, the non-interest, non-Social Security and non-Medicare part of the budget is not that large. The proportion of the budget that is non-interest, non-OASDI, non-Medicare and non-defense is smaller than the projected deficit if John McCain was to get all of tax policies implemented. The only big pool of money that is left out there is the Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals and the increase in defense baseline spending. Therefore if John McCain is serious about balancing the budget in the face of a recession and does not want to lame-duck himself on Day-1 by attacking Social Security (especially as the Boomers who are about to retire lament their lost decade for their 401(K)s and the decimation of the defined pension era) and Medicare, then he is implicitly proposing to leave Iraq in a very short time frame. The only other option is that he is wishing for ponies.

What this policy actually is a sign of the fragmentation of the Republican Party that Demcrats who ran for office in 1982 can empathize with. The McCain campaign realizes that they need to placate the portion of their base that gets turned on by Gramm-Rudman so they make a speech. It does not matter that this speech directly contradicts speeches given that placate the bed wetters and the bombs for Viagra crowd.

http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2008/07/mccain-promises.html

Why Iraq won't be South Korea

By Pepe Escobar

The United States invasion of Iraq then takes on an even broader meaning. Not only does it constitute an attempt to control the global oil spigot and hence the global economy though domination over the Middle East. It also constitutes a powerful US military bridgehead on the Eurasian land mass which ... yields it a powerful geostrategic position in Eurasia with at least the potentiality to disrupt any consolidation of an Eurasian power that could indeed be the next step in that endless accumulation of political power that must always accompany the equally endless accumulation of capital.
- David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 2003

WASHINGTON - Everyone remembers the George W Bush "Mission Accomplished" victory speech on board of an aircraft carrier off the San Diego coast in the spring of 2003. Over five years - and a trillion dollars - later, Bush's last stand is to force a neo-colonial Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) under Iraqi throats by the end of July, acquire the right to go on "war on terror" mode in Iraq forever, declare victory and thus win - finally - his war, now opposed by a striking majority of Americans.

Call it "occupation forever". But there's one glitch: Iraqis are not falling for it.

I need your oil so bad
Flash back to September 2001. The neo-conservatives wanted their "new Pearl Harbor" really bad - something they had virtually implored for via the Project for a New American Century. They got it on September 11, 2001. Then the short anti-Taliban war in Afghanistan turned out to be a sort of test drive for Iraq. Echoing astute past observations by Hannah Arendt, US nationalism and imperialism was coupled with racism (towards Arabs and Islam).

And the invasion of Iraq was finally conceptualized as a "demonstration project" - the push to create in the Mesopotamian sands a US-style, wealthy consumer society, a demilitarized client state under benign US protection. Better yet, a 21st century version of the South Korean "tiger" miracle - engineered by US military-technological power.

But it all went way beyond Iraq as a new South Korea. David Harvey, the brilliant Oxford-educated American geographer who proposes, in his own words, long-term geopolitical analysis based on "historical-geographical materialism", wrote in 2003 that the invasion of Iraq offered "a vital strategic bridgehead ... on the Eurasian land mass that just happens to be the center of production of the oil that currently fuels (and will continue to fuel for at least the next 50 years) not only the global economy but also every large military machine that dares to oppose that of the United States."

An empire of military bases and control of oil fields. These two crucial "benchmarks", applied to Iraq, are what's left of that alliance between the neo-cons and the Christian Right which took over the US government with an imperial project of military rule over global oil resources. Now it's twilight time; and no wonder the Bush administration has come out with all guns blazing. Without a new, US Big Oil-friendly Iraqi oil law, and without a SOFA, US$3 trillion - according to Joseph Stiglitz's and Linda Bilmes' book - will have been spent for nothing.

However, on Thursday, the New York Times reported that Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP were in the final stages of negotiations on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization by Saddam Hussein.

They are reportedly in negotiations with the Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq's largest fields. Should the deals go through, they would lay the foundation for the first commercial work for major Western companies in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. It is expected that Iraq's output could increase to about 3 million barrels a day from its current 2.5 million.

Initially, the Bush administration wanted no less than 58 permanent US bases in Iraq. There are already 30 in place. It doesn't matter that on April 8, US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had said the US "will not establish permanent bases in Iraq and we anticipate that it will expressly foreswear them".

The Bush administration's ploy essentially amounts to turning over legal control of US bases to a client regime. Heavy pressure is the name of the game. To convince the Iraqis, the Bush administration is holding no less than $50 billion of Iraqi money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Other "subtle" forms of pressure also apply. The Iraqis wanted to sell oil in euros as well as in dollars. The Bush administration issued its fatwa - and it's a "no".

This shady deal the Bush administration wants so badly is a SOFA only in theory. In fact, it's a smokescreen. Under US law, it would have to be submitted to the senate. The Bush administration wants to totally bypass the senate.

And the deal is not about Iraq either. It's essentially about Iran - as in the neo-con 2003 mantra "real men go to Tehran". That's the meaning of the Bush administration demand, according to Iraqi lawmakers, of "the right ... to strike, from within Iraqi territory, any country it considers a threat to its national security."

The Bush administration wants to totally control Iraqi airspace. The Bush administration wants to employ US firepower without approval from the "sovereign" Iraqi government. The Bush administration wants immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for all American troops and even dozens of thousands of contractors - most of them Blackwater-style mercenaries. The US Army simply cannot function properly without these privatized warriors.

Were a deal to be reached under the current terms - the deadline remains July 31 - nothing would be easier for the Bush administration than to accuse Iran of interfering in Iraq - as it is already doing non stop - and then attack Iran under the "legal" cover of this SOFA.

The Bush administration also would have a hard time getting the US Congress to explicitly approve an attack on Iran. So why not use the Iraqi Parliament instead? No wonder scores of Iraqi parliamentarians, Sunni and Shi'ite alike, fear the deal is basically a cover to use Iraq as a base to attack Iran. Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, went to Tehran and solemnly promised that Iraq would not be used as a US base for an attack on Iran.

Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Maliki that Iraqis have to "think of a solution to free" themselves from US power. Not surprisingly, Khamenei advised Maliki not to sign the deal. Maliki, for his part, reassured the Iranians in no uncertain terms Iraq is not an arena for a deadly US-Iran Armageddon.

Get me to the deal on time
The consensus now in Baghdad seems to be that no deal will be reached before the US presidential election in November. Anyway the Bush administration will not give up without a fierce fight. The State Department's top Iraq adviser, David Satterfield, insists the deal "can be achieved, and by the end of the July deadline".

How? Well, the Bush administration has invested in a little rewriting - they are now on a fourth draft. Some "concessions" have been made in terms of immunity of contractors to Iraqi law. But the deal still has no timetable for a definitive draw down of US troops. And Defense, Interior and National Security ministries, as well as weapons contracts, are still meant to be under US control for 10 years.

Under these circumstances how can you convince people like Iman al-Asadi, a Shi'ite member of the committee on legal affairs in Baghdad? According to her, "what happens to our dignity? What happens to our sovereignty? ... If the US controls the air, the ground and the sea, this means no sovereignty."

Democratic Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign has demanded that the deal be submitted to the US Congress - and that Iraqis should be told in no uncertain terms that the US does not want permanent bases in Iraq. Republican John McCain's campaign ... has had nothing to say.

In fact, it had. McCain - with a huge help from Bush - attacked Obama because Obama said he would meet with the "evil" Iranian leadership. That's exactly what Bush's man in Baghdad, Maliki, did only a few days ago.

The only man who can stop the deal dead in its tracks is Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. True, he fears that without critical US support the Shi'ite parties in government will be much more fragile. But Sistani also fears the street power of Muqtada al-Sadr - who called the Sadrists to demonstrate every Friday against the deal, until it is scrapped. It's fair to say the majority of Iraqis - the Kurds, Vice President Dick Cheney's "base", are the exception - want to know who they'll be dealing with, Obama or McCain, before they embark on the highly sensitive negotiation of the long-term role of the US in Iraq.

Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, talks like he's a State Department employee: he says the deal will be clinched. Grand Ayatollah Sistani forced Maliki to call for a parliament vote. And Muqtada wants a national referendum - that would be the Bush administration's bete noire.

For days this has been a top political story all over the Middle East - as well as in Western Europe. It has been broken by the London-based, Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper and by Patrick Cockburn of the London Independent. What about US public opinion? It's been kept literally in the dark. Corporate media coverage has been virtually invisible. Maybe this is what corporate newsrooms call "mission accomplished" - not to explain to the American public how Iraq cannot possibly become South Korea.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JF20Ak03.html

Iraq may give no-bid contracts to 4 oil companies

our western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalisation when Saddam Hussain rose to power, a media report said here today.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company, along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq's Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq's largest fields, the report said quoting an American diplomat and officials from the ministry and oil company.


The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations, the New York Times reported.


The no-bid contracts, the paper said, are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in India, Russia and China.

The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production, it added.
There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract, the report noted.

The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq's Oil Ministry, the Times added.

When the Nukes Start Dropping

Most men, it is generally agreed, will do anything to survive. In my favorite World War II/Holocaust movie, Lina Wertmuller's 1975 Seven Beauties, a harmless little nebbish of an Italian petty thief, Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini), finds himself in a horrible, hellish Nazi concentration camp; the camp setting is some sort of huge, enclosed, indoor hall, a setting so evil that the inmates never even see the sun.

To survive, Pasqualino agrees to make love to the camp commandant, a ghastly, sadistic, Brobdingnagian-girthed gorgon-like SS officer, played by Shirley Stoler. Pasqualino outlasts both the camp and the war, but his soul dies. He did what he had to do to survive.

Failing being placed in a circumstance where their lives are at stake, there are things that men don't want to do. One of those is to kiss another man. In 1978, on the NBC Network program Saturday Night Live, the troupe performed a skit lampooning the legends of white slaveowners forcing themselves onto their black slaves in the US ante-bellum south. The script called for comedian Bill Murray, playing a slaveowner, to attempt to force his desires on an unwilling slave; the comedy was in that the slave was not a woman, but America's favorite, cheerful, non-threatening African-American of the time, O J Simpson.

The show went out live, and you could clearly see that, as Murray pressed his lips towards Simpson's, Simpson turned his face away; not even as comedy could he kiss another man on the lips. His life was not the line, so Simpson wouldn't do it; at his trial for double murder 17 years later, Simpson, too, proved that he would do anything to survive.

But one thing that men apparently need no threats or intimidation to do is to plan, plot, scheme, even to detail and diagram, the killing of millions of their fellow men, women and children. As evidence of this, I present before the bar of humanity this item I recently came across on the Internet, a report authored by respected military analyst Anthony H Cordesman of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank, entitled "Iran, Israel and Nuclear War" 1.

I have always enjoyed Cordesman's informed, educated and enlightening commentaries on matters strategic and military, particularly his take on the military and political situation in Iraq. In no way do I think of him as a sort of Dr Strangelove-like figure, from the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name, warped in both mind and body from a lifetime of contemplating mass death. But, just as we have extensively studied and documented the effects of nuclear weapons when they detonate, perhaps this is an under-investigated line of inquiry - what happens when they don't.

Remarkable - just the presence of nuclear weapons among them turns even the best of men at least a little bit mad.

The 77-page report is formatted in the US Pentagon's current dominant lingua franca, the ubiquitous Microsoft Powerpoint - my goodness, you'd almost think that it was destined to be shown there! How foolish it was for Osama bin Laden to think he could take down the entire US military with just one plane, or even a dozen, slamming into the Pentagon; a virus or bug that disabled all the Powerpoint software the US Department of Defense runs would have brought the world's most powerful military to its knees. In slide after slide, the report catalogs the weaponry, tactics, targets, contingencies, most importantly the results, that would occur should everybody in the Middle East with a button, perhaps simultaneously, perhaps in sequence, push it.

The first and core scenario of the report involves a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, some time between 2010 and 2020. It is speculated that during this period, the Iranians would have about 50, mostly minimum-yield, nuclear weapons at their disposal. Thirty would be in the form of missile warheads to be emplaced on their Shahab 3 and 4 intermediate range ballistic missiles, 20 in the form of bombs that would be carried on the now antique F-14 Tomcats bought from the US by the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, along with a few on the old Russian SU-24s, and the more modern SU-37s, that Iran has recently purchased during shopping trips to the world's global arms swap meet.

Israel has been a nuclear-capable power since at least the mid 1960s; it is speculated in the report that by 2010 it will have over 200, higher-yielding nuclear warheads in its arsenal, deliverable by both Jericho 3 ballistic missiles and American-supplied F-16 and F-15 fighter bombers.

The differing technological capabilities of the two countries would dictate their respective strategies once the missiles and bombs started flying. Israel has access to America's super-sophisticated satellite reconnaissance and targeting technology. Besides knowing just where to point their nukes, Israel also possesses the technology that assures that its weapons will fall where desired.

Thus, if Israel decides to commence the war with a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear research and production facilities, shown in the report as lying in a northwest/southeast axis from Lashkar A'bad on the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea to Gachin, just west of the Strait of Hormuz, it could do so without inflicting the massive casualties of a nuclear strike on Teheran.

Included in the report are satellite images of the Iranian nuclear facilities at Arak and Isfahan; to me, they look a lot like what an Israeli pilot in his F-16, or maybe an American pilot in his F-22, would tape to the canopy of his cockpit in order to provide a visual verification that he was bombing the right target.

The Iranians lack the ability to precision-target their weapons in the same manner in which the Israelis can, so the report postulates that the main targets for their nukes would be the core coastal Israeli metropolis, from Haifa in the north to Ashkelon just north of the border with Gaza. Haifa, the report notes, is surrounded by hills, which means that the destructive force of any nuclear device detonated over the city would bounce off the mountains and double back onto the city, greatly amplifying its damage. Tel Aviv is on a long, flat coastal plain, but it is a very densely populated city, with an estimated 7,445 of population per square kilometer.

Of course, if the war commenced not with the "limited" Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear production facilities (this attack would be classified as "counterforce" by the nuclear cognoscenti ), but with a full-blown "countervalue" Iranian strike against Israel's cities, it is doubtful that the Israelis would feel obligated to limit their retaliatory vengeance to just Iran's military targets.

From out of their hardened silos would fly the Israeli missiles and bombers, with their primary target being Tehran, along with Iran's other population centers. With over 7 million people just within the bounds of Tehran itself, 15 million in the surrounding metropolitan area, the city contains over 20% of Iran's population and is the center of the nation's communications, production, educational and cultural infrastructure.

Casualties from this exchange would be nightmarish, horrific, incalculable - except by Cordesman and his CSIS team.

The lower yield and less accurate Iranian volley, sparing Jerusalem due to its centrality to the Moslem faith, would inflict between 200,000 to 800,000 Israeli fatalities along the coastal plain in the first 21 days. These are called "prompt" casualties; it's who dies before people start dropping from longer-term radiation exposure. Any surviving residents of the central core of urban Tel Aviv would still be exposed to 300 REM (roentgen equivalent man) of radiation 96 hours after the blasts, as opposed to an exposure during an average dental X-ray of about .010 REM.
The more accurate and bigger Israeli nukes, the report speculates, would inflict a far greater toll on Iranian cities - in between 16 million and 28 million in just "prompt" fatalities. The report says that that an Israeli recovery from its damage would be "theoretically possible in population and economic terms", whereas an Iranian recovery would be "not possible in normal terms"; in essence, the Iranian nation will be destroyed.

Thus, what the report is saying is that one day next decade you might wake up with an Iran, after almost 6,000 years as a national entity and still there at sunrise, would be wiped off the map by sunset.

The rest of the report speculates on various other assorted scenarios for Mid-East Armageddon. Syria, generally assumed to be many years away from possessing a nuclear capacity, might, for some reason, decide to launch a CBW (chemical, biological weapon) missile strike on Israeli population centers.

Israeli dead under this scenario would once again be between 200,000 and 800,000. Recovery, however, would be quicker, since this type attack spares civilian buildings and infrastructure. Syria, with 80% of its population concentrated in just 11 cities, would suffer between 6 million and 18 million dead in a counterattack; the higher number would represent about 95% of its estimated 2007 population. Not since the Roman destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BC would one nation have made another suffer so dearly as punishment for losing a war.

The report does not speculate as to why this might happen, but if Egypt got drawn into all this the results would be pretty dammed bad for the Western world's cradle of civilization on the Nile as well. From Alexandria in the north to Luxor in the south, with Cairo in between, just a few rounds from Israel's nuclear clip could devastate Egypt's Nile River-based population centers; over 12 millennia of human civilization in the Nile Delta would end.

Once again, not speculating as to why this would happen, the report games out the results of a possible Iranian nuclear strike against the six Arab nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Iranian strike could maybe kill 2 million to 8 million of the 40 million population of the GCC; once again, Iran would suffer many times what it wrought from the inevitable US nuclear retaliation.

Herman Kahn, the physicist turned Cold War nuclear strategist, had a name for these musings of mass murder, these cerebrations of ultimate catastrophe; he called it "thinking the unthinkable".

I was once invited to give an economics guest lecture to a class studying this discipline, the possible scenarios and wargames that were popular intellectual parlor games during the Cold War. Of the 35 students in class, none but one was a young woman. Yes, studying this was OK for men; it wasn't something horrible like kissing another man. As I left the class, the professor gave out the week's homework, to investigate who would be the "winner" of a US/USSR nuclear "exchange" where one country suffered 20 million dead, but whose industrial infrastructure was degraded by a mere 20%, the other lost "only" 7 million dead, but 50% of its industry.

Good question
The extent of these investigations, both the Cordesman study and the reams of similar studies that came out during the Cold War, may be a lot more detailed than necessary or seemly, but they do serve an important purpose. The fear can be controlled, made to serve an important purpose.

In an October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, President George W Bush, whipping an America shellshocked by September 11, 2001 into a frenzy against his Oedipal nemesis, Saddam Hussein, warned, "America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." In this, he turned away from the strategy that won the Cold War, the strategy that allowed the people of the US and USSR a half century of albeit uneasy peace.

Early on in the nuclear age, it was seen, first by America, eventually by the Soviets, that there was no real defense against the new weapons. If you shot down 95% of the conventional bombers of World War II, you were doing very well, yet letting 5% of bombers carrying nuclear weapons past your defenses would devastate your society, and that was before the advent of the infinitively harder to shoot down nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

If you could not defend against the threat, was all hope lost? No, even if you couldn't defend against the threat, you could deter it. If your nuclear force could be deployed in such a way that it would be assured of surviving an opponent's first strike, by being in hardened silos or on hidden submarines, any possible aggressor would know that any potential attack would be pointless, since the surviving retaliatory volley, which also could not be defended against, would then devastate the attacker's society.

Called "mutual assured destruction", and then given the pejorative acronym MAD, the strategy worked; its horrific implications made sure that, when the US and the Soviets came closest to the nuclear brink during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, president John F Kennedy and premier Nikita Khrushchev found a compromise that very quickly pulled their countries away from the precipice.

But the strategy did not guarantee total security, for its operation depended on the existence of those tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. The United States maintained its deployment of Nike anti-aircraft missiles along the nation's periphery into the late 1960s; during that time, it also started to deploy, but then bargained away, a limited, rudimentary anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system.

In 1983, president Ronald Reagan proposed the development of the futuristic, space-based "Star Wars" satellite missile defense system. Popular with the public, and effective as a campaign issue, the concept was unpopular with most US military officers, who thought it unnecessary, expensive and ultimately impossible. Quietly, president George H W Bush slashed funding for "Star Wars" during his term following Reagan's.

But after a decade of enjoying the "peace dividend" in the 1990s, America returned its gaze to the world it had been ignoring after 9/11. There it saw a frightening place, filled with mad, irrational terrifying enemies. Like a child wanting the security of a warm blanket during a dark night's thunderstorm, America yearned once again for the its traditional, comfortable security of inviolability.

Even before 9/11, George W Bush saw the political power of this desire - the attacks of that day forced then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice to cancel an address she was planning to give that very day in advocacy of missile defense. After 9/11, Bush proposed billions of dollars in new ABM funding, even withdrawing from the 1972 US/USSR ABM treaty to build a small ABM missile station at Fort Greely, Alaska.

Then came the problem with Iraq
As Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton has learned to her regret, after 9/11, no American politician could deny, or even attempt to rationalize away, the seemingly obvious, boiling, eviscerating hatred the Arab and Muslim worlds (few Americans know the difference) held for America. "Why do they hate us?" Americans, whose maximal extent of contact with Arab culture was often just a box of microwaveable couscous mix, asked in fear and trepidation.

Deterrence was never all that popular when applied to the Russians; the American public was told that it was obvious that there was no way it would work against the mad Saddam Hussein and the crazy Arabs. Not willing to entertain the mere possibility that the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden were anything but identical hatebots rolling off the same terrible anti-American assembly line, the country was fertile ground for Bush's fearmongering. Saddam was just too mad, insane, suicidal, psychopathic, irrational and megalomaniac to deter - exactly how current Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is described now.

Many observers have noted the similarities between the anti-Saddam public relations campaign of 2002-03 and the anti-Ahmadinejad campaign of the present; it too is said to be sowing the seeds for another attack, this one against Iran.

Can Ahmadinejad be deterred? I have no idea; I'm not an expert on the man, as, of course, are not all those who warn of his status as an implacable and eternal foe of the West. I do know that deterrence did work against Joseph Stalin in the 1950s, who was irrational enough to sacrifice about 50 million of his fellow citizens in the Soviet Union's agricultural collectivizations and political purges of the 1930s.

It worked against Mao Zedong, responsible for about 100 million of his fellow citizens' deaths in the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Neither of these leaders, who possessed both the ideology and capacity to launch a nuclear strike against America, did so. Evidently, they were deterred by America's massive nuclear retaliatory power. Are we really saying that Ahmadinejad is more bloodthirsty and irrational than Stalin or Mao?

The success of deterrence is intimately related to the nature of politics and politicians. From their days in short pants, the world's leaders have dreamt of possessing power and dominion over millions of their fellow citizens; whether they do so through democratic or other means is only a question related to the random chance of what nation they were born in.

After they assume ultimate national power, after a lifetime of political striving and ambition, those who say that deterrence does not work are, in essence, saying that these leaders will put some abstract hatred or ideology above the lives and interests of their fellow citizens who put them into power. The countering argument to this is that you can't rule a country if there's no country to rule.

This is the value of studies such as Cordesman's and their ultra-meticulous details of death. At the end of the study, Cordesman repeats the philosophy expounded by "Joshua", the inquisitive nuclear war-fighting computer of the 1983 movie War Games; "The only way to win is not to play." (The actual line from the movie is. "A strange game - the only way to win is not to play.")

By actually showing how devastating a retaliatory strike against Iran or Syria would be, by showing how the US and/or Israel does not need to launch a pre-emptive attack to be secure, perhaps Cordesman's opus will help the world turn away from the frightful momentum now building for an Iran strike.

There will be 77 days from the November 4 presidential election to the inauguration of a new American president on January 20, 2009. In my mind, that's when Bush has penciled in his final, glorious Gotterdammerung.

Besides not wanting to risk the slaughter of those who put the leader in power, perhaps deterrence works for another reason. In 1985, Sting, in his song, "Russians", sang of an additional factor keeping world leaders fingers off the nuclear button.

There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie we don't believe anymore
Mr Reagan says we will protect you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us me and you
Is if the Russians love their children too