| Old Articles | | Wednesday, October 11 | | · | The High Cost of Order Out of Chaos in Iraq |
| Wednesday, October 04 | | · | One Policy, Two Parties |
| Tuesday, July 04 | | · | Home Free: American Power in Mahmudiyah |
| Wednesday, June 14 | | · | Keeping Iraq's oil in the ground |
| Thursday, June 08 | | · | The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi |
| · | Killing al-Zarqawi: End of a Pentagon-Dairat al-Mukhabarat Collaboration? |
| Tuesday, June 06 | | · | Kristol: Response to Haditha 'Handwringing Liberalism' |
| Wednesday, May 31 | | · | Spreading Democracy in Haditha |
| Saturday, April 15 | | · | Mission Accomplished: Al-CIA-duh Leaves Iraq |
| Monday, April 03 | | · | US and UK Forces Establish 'Enduring Bases' in Iraq |
| Wednesday, March 22 | | · | Bush Didn't Bungle Iraq, You Fools |
| Thursday, March 02 | | · | Negroponte: Iraqi Balkanization on Schedule |
| Wednesday, February 22 | | · | Askariya Shrine Bombing: Black Op? |
| Friday, January 06 | | · | IMF Occupies Iraq, Riots Follow |
| Wednesday, December 07 | | · | Damaging Disclosures and the Plot to Bomb al-Jazeera |
| Monday, December 05 | | · | Towards a Greater Air War on Iraq? |
| Thursday, December 01 | | · | Death Mask: The Deliberate Disintegration of Iraq |
| Monday, October 17 | | · | Al-Qaeda's Barber of Baghdad |
| Wednesday, September 28 | | · | German court declares Iraq war violated international law |
| Wednesday, July 20 | | · | The Old Bait-and-Switch in Iraqi Jurisprudence |
Older Articles
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War and Terror: Iraq - The biggest oil heist in history?
Tuesday, May 27 @ 01:57:35 UTC |  By Mike Whitney
May 27, 2014 - counterpunch.org
“Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq’s oil market. But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973.”
– Antonia Juhasz, oil industry analyst, Al Jazeera.
These are the ‘best of times’ for the oil giants in Iraq. Production is up, profits are soaring, and big oil is rolling in dough. Here’s the story from the Wall Street Journal:
“Iraq’s oil production surged to its highest level in over 30 years last month, surprising skeptics of the country’s efforts to restore its oil industry after decades of war and neglect.” (Wall Street Journal)
Mission accomplished?
You bet. But for those who still cling to the idea that the US was serious about promoting democracy or removing a vicious dictator or eliminating WMD or any of the other kooky excuses, consider what we’ve learned in the last couple weeks. Here’s the story from Aljazeera:
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Invasion of Iraq: Oil & Politics - The Real Situation in Iraq
Wednesday, May 30 @ 16:15:05 UTC |
By Daniel J. Graeber
May 30, 2012
A delegation from the International Energy Agency spent two days in Baghdad speaking with high-ranking officials in preparation for an end-of-year report on the country's oil sector. By some estimates, Iraq could hold some of the largest oil reserves in the world and an international auction for oil and natural gas blocks is planned for May. Without a hydrocarbon law, and considering the fractured political system, the IEA's report may be more about political obstacles than oil potential, however.
Baghdad announced triumphantly this week that oil production increased to more than 3 million barrels per day for the first time in more than 30 years. Exports, the government said, should increase substantially once a new floating oil terminal starts operations later this week. The IEA in December said crude oil production in Iraq could reach an average of 4.36 million bpd by 2016, about half of what Riyadh produces. The agency warned, however, that Iraq's fractured political system might be as much of an obstacle as anything.
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Invasion of Iraq: Hope in 2011: Peoples, Civil Society Stand Tall
Thursday, December 30 @ 18:54:19 UTC | By Ramzy Baroud
December 30, 2010
When the Iraqi army fell before invading US and British troops in 2003, the latter’s mission seemed to be accomplished. But nearly eight years after the start of a war intended to shock and awe a whole population into submission, the Iraqi people continue to stand tall. They have confronted and rejected foreign occupations, held their own against sectarianism, and challenged random militancy and senseless acts of terrorism.
For most of us, the Iraqi people’s resolve cannot be witnessed, but rather deduced. Eight years of military strikes, raids, imprisonments, torture, humiliation and unimaginable suffering were still not enough to force the Iraqis into accepting injustice as a status quo.
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Invasion of Iraq: Who cares how many 'camel drivers' are being massacred in Iraq...?
Thursday, August 12 @ 16:46:39 UTC | Capitalist Education for Barbarism vs Human Emancipation in the Epoch of Globalization
By Franz J. T. Lee
August 12, 2010
Over the last decades, here in
Venezuela and elsewhere, we have learned the hard way that nothing that
capitalists and their loyal followers do or say is innocent or naive.
Somewhere there is always hidden a quid pro quo. Education in global
imperialism is not to liberate or to inform anybody about anything
human, humane or humanist, especially it is not to emancipate the
billions of 'speaking tools' (Aristotle), that is, not to enlighten the
modern, already by and large, docile, ignorant wage-slaves. Global
'correct', ruling class education, generated and controlled by the
'Hitlerite' think tanks, by the State, by the 'Ministry of Education'
that is, by the Orwellian 'Ministry of Love', massively aids in the
capitalist production, distribution, consumption and destruction of
wares; it helps to realize capital and super profits, but it also
serves ideologically to destroy natural and social resources in times
of social crisis or economic collapse, of open fascism.
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Invasion of Iraq: The Story of My Shoe
Tuesday, September 15 @ 16:31:15 UTC | My Flower to Bush, the Occupier
By Mutadhar al-Zaidi
September 15, 2009 - counterpunch.org
Mutadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi who threw his shoe at George Bush gave this speech on his recent release.
In the name of God, the most gracious and most merciful.
Here I am, free. But my country is still a prisoner of war.
Firstly, I give my thanks and my regards to everyone who stood beside me, whether inside my country, in the Islamic world, in the free world. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act.
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Invasion of Iraq: Iraq: New US plan for total control
Sunday, June 08 @ 17:31:33 UTC | June 03, 2008
socialistworker.co.uk
Revealed: George Bush’s plan to impose ‘security accords’ that will mean 400 permanent military bases and US personnel given green light to kill George Bush is ending the pretence that Iraq is a “democratic state”. He is imposing new “security accords” that will strip the country of its sovereignty and allow it to be used as a platform to launch more wars.
This is the thrust of a secret treaty – known as the Status of Forces Agreement – that is being imposed on the country.
Even the puppet Iraqi parliament and its pro-occupation allies have found it difficult to stomach.
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Invasion of Iraq: Greenspan, Kissinger: Oil Drives U.S. in Iraq, Iran
Tuesday, September 18 @ 04:17:35 UTC | by Robert Weissman
September 17, 2007
CommonDreams.org
Alan Greenspan had acknowledged what is blindingly obvious to those who live in the reality-based world: The Iraq War was largely about oil.
Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger says in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post that control over oil is the key issue that should determine whether the U.S. undertakes military action against Iran.
These statements would not be remarkable, but for the effort of a broad swath of the U.S. political establishment to deny the central role of oil in U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
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Invasion of Iraq: Iraq: Divide et Impera
Thursday, August 23 @ 02:18:52 UTC | The US is using a hoary imperial tactic dating back to the Romans to dominate Iraq and to justify a long-term military presence in the country
By Stephen Gowans
August 22, 2007
A US-financed program to build a Sunni paramilitary Guardian organization in Iraq, and US proposals for a soft partition of the country, are the latest steps in a divide and rule strategy the US is pursuing to keep Iraqis fighting among themselves so they won't fight the occupation. Sectarian strife also provides the US with the pretext it needs to establish a long-term military presence in the country.
The US occupation authority has made ethnicity and religion salient in Iraq, where once it was a matter of little moment in the daily political lives of Iraqis. The US organized elections and the army along sectarian lines. It decided which parties could run in elections, favoring those that emphasized religious affiliations (Sunni vs. Shia) and ethnicity (Arab vs. Kurd), while banning the largest non-sectarian party, the Baath party. Key government positions were doled out along sectarian lines. The interior ministry was turned over to the Badr Brigade, a sectarian Shia paramilitary organization. From head to toe, Iraq has been transformed from a secular society into one in which religious and ethnic identity matter. Imagine the Department of Homeland Security being turned over to the KKK, the Pentagon to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, while the Democrat and Republican parties are banned and replaced by religious and ethnic parties. If ever there was a recipe to get people fighting among themselves, this is it.
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Invasion of Iraq: Resisting the plans to control Iraq's oil
Friday, July 20 @ 13:09:33 UTC | By Simon Assaf
socialistworker.co.uk
July 20, 2007
Iraqi uni0n leader Hassan Jumaa Awad recently visited Britain to raise awareness of the US's attempts to grab hold of his country's oil resources
The US wants to get it hands on Iraq's oil wealth and is pressuring the Iraqi government to pass a law that will mortgage the country's future, says Hassan Jumaa Awad, the leader of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Uni0ns.
The uni0n, which represents 26,000 oil workers in southern Iraq, recently staged a series of strikes in protest at the proposed oil law.
The US has made passing the law one of its "benchmarks" to judge the success of its "surge" strategy to regain control of the country.
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Invasion of Iraq: George Galloway: 'The Iraq war has scarred the world'
Sunday, February 25 @ 12:00:21 UTC | Hundreds of people attended a Stop the War rally in central London on Thursday of last week. Respect MP George Galloway spoke at the meeting about the disaster of the war on Iraq
socialistworker.co.uk
'Not only have 655,000 Iraqis died, there are also hundreds of thousands of maimed Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of homeless Iraqis, millions of Iraqis with no electricity and no water.
According to the United Nations, four million Iraqis have fled the country or fled their homes to live elsewhere in Iraq.
That's the scale of the disaster that these criminals, George Bush and Tony Blair, have taken us into. This is a disaster that has scarred the face of the world forever. It has disfigured the entire legal, diplomatic, economic face of the world.
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Invasion of Iraq: UK Telegraph Reveals Brit Terrorist Ops in Iraq
Wednesday, February 07 @ 04:04:33 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
February 04th 2007
It is interesting the Telegraph.co.uk, "Lord" Conrad Black's online version of a neocon newspaper, would publish a story admitting that the Joint Support Group, described as "a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit," manages "covert human intelligence sources or agents," including double agents, that is to say the Brits are engaged in terrorist operations, as long suspected.
"During the [Irish] Troubles, the JSG operated under the cover name of the Force Research Unit (FRU), which between the early 1980s and the late 1990s managed to penetrate the very heart of the IRA. By targeting and then 'turning' members of the paramilitary organization with a variety of 'inducements'" ranging from blackmail to bribes, the FRU operators developed agents at virtually every command level within the IRA," explains Sean Rayment.
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Invasion of Iraq: They lied their way into Iraq. Now they are trying to lie their way out
Monday, November 27 @ 14:38:11 UTC | Bush and Blair will blame anyone but themselves for the consequences of their disastrous war - even its victims
by Gary Younge, The Guardian UK
November 27, 2006
'In the endgame," said one of the world's best-ever chess players, José Raúl Capablanca, "don't think in terms of moves but in terms of plans." The situation in Iraq is now unravelling into the bloodiest endgame imaginable. Both popular and official support for the war in those countries that ordered the invasion is already at a low and will only get lower. Whatever mandate the occupiers may have once had from their own electorates - in Britain it was none, in the US it was precarious - has now eroded. They can no longer conduct this war as they have been doing.
Simultaneously, the Iraqis are no longer able to live under occupation as they have been doing. According to a UN report released last week, 3,709 Iraqi civilians died in October - the highest number since the invasion began. And the cycle of religious and ethnic violence has escalated over the past week.
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Invasion of Iraq: Would Jesus Get Out of Iraq?
Monday, November 27 @ 09:38:17 UTC | By William Blum, aol.com
The good news is that the Republicans lost.
The bad news is that the Democrats won.
The burning issue -- US withdrawal from Iraq -- remains as far from resolution as before.
A clear majority of Americans are opposed to the war and almost all of them would be very happy if the US military began the process of leaving Iraq tomorrow, if not today. The rest of the world would breathe a great sigh of relief and their long-running love affair with the storybook place called "America" could begin to come back to life.
A State Department poll conducted in Iraq this past summer dealt with the population's attitude toward the American occupation. Apart from the Kurds -- who assisted the US military before, during, and after the invasion and occupation, and don't think of themselves as Iraqis -- most people favored an immediate withdrawal, ranging from 56% to 80% depending on the area.
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Invasion of Iraq: The Killing Fields of Iraq
Wednesday, October 18 @ 18:28:05 UTC | by Robert Scheer, truthdig.com
Martin Luther King Jr., shortly before his assassination, grieved that his own nation was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." He was referring to the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam, but were he alive today, his prophetic voice would no doubt similarly question the bloodbath in Iraq. In response to the 9/11 killing of 3,000 Americans by a gang of mostly Saudi Arabian terrorists with no links to Iraq, the president has rendered that country a veritable killing field. An occupation initially advertised as a "cakewalk" war to disarm a tyrant is now, according to our politically desperate president, a fight for the soul of the world—good versus evil, democracy versus tyranny.
But the carnage we have visited upon Iraq represents nothing of the sort. We are not building democracy, we are creating mayhem.
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