Iran/Iraq: Oil's Final Trickle 20 comments

4 Apr 2007 @ 09:58, by Richard Carlson The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres. ---Henry David Thoreau Do not recite sutras. Do not make portraits of me. Just bury my body in the back mountains. It is enough that you cover me with earth. ---Takuan's final wishes to his students How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on. ---Antoine de Saint-Exupery Photo by Matt Taibbi of tattoo on the foot of Sgt. Stephen Wilkerson, Baghdad 2006 I once heard a friend make a case for oil and its markets having been the fundamental cause of all the wars of the past century. I had begun the conversation, I guess, by proclaiming loudly the need for conservation of the resource. My friend replied, "The sooner the earth runs out of oil the better!" I was amazed to hear this, and it was then he launched his theory. At this hour Tony Blair continues his call for "direct" negotiation between Britain and Iran over UK sailors picked up for prowling around some ocean borderlines. [link] Yesterday he said he'd give the process another couple days before matters become "fairly critical", whatever that means. Iran has replied they're glad to talk...but at the same time we have these curious rumors floating via "Russian intelligence" that the US is ready to let fly with the missiles on Friday (or thereabouts). [link] Are we poised for another "regime change"? Halliburton has moved its headquarters to Dubai, perhaps so trade deals for oil can be accomplished with Iran whether there's peace or war. I believe the United States has not had relations with Iran in about 25 years, and Halliburton can't do deals with them from here. If oil is the deal and soldiers are needed to secure the wells for Exxon/Mobil, time is of the essence. But should we be doing better at our occupations...despite all the claims of progress by Madman McCain and the Bushie loyalists? The last few days I've been catching up with an article from last summer in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. The long piece is called Fort Apache, Iraq, and it took me some days to read it. The writing is intense and Taibbi often launches off into a kind of loony poetry that made me stop and think a lot. Last May he spent some days tooling around the bloody roads of Iraq in a Humvee with a group of National Guardsmen from Oklahoma, and followed that up with 3 days locked in a jail cell in Abu Ghraib. Out of these experiences he fashioned this article that expresses vividly for me just what it's like for us Yanks to be over there...and how we look. This isn't the first time Matt Taibbi has put himself into very radical situations for the sake of journalistic truth. Someone has put up a Wikipedia article about him that gives his history along with a ton of links. [link] For our purpose today I'll select some excerpts from Fort Apache, Iraq, and give you the online link to the whole thing. I suppose I should mention, out of courtesy, the author makes no effort to disguise how people really talk in these situations...and Rolling Stone publishes this kind of language~~~ "To understand the war in Iraq, you first have to understand the people who are fighting it. And the way to do that isn't to burst in with your head in a point, bitching about WMDs and croaking passages from Arab-history books. Jump in the truck and shut your mouth; get on board, literally and figuratively. In America, everyone has an opinion about Iraq, even me -- but if you're going to take the step of actually going there, you've got to give it a chance... "We stayed overnight at the FOB (forward operating base) in Mosul. Like all FOBs, it was an otherworldly suburban expanse of mud, gravel, white-paneled trailers and ad hoc fast-food joints carved incongruously into the ancient landscape of Iraq like giant, teeming anthills of Americana. The FOB in Iraq is often absurdly luxurious, with an array of Middle American comforts like Popeyes, Burger King and Cinnabon at the soldiers' disposal, and most of the services (from food to laundry to shuttle buses to the rec centers) maintained with peak capitalist efficiency by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, which goes so far as to leave customer-survey forms almost everywhere you go. "These preposterous Tell Us How U Like Our War!-esque survey sheets ('Please give your overall level of satisfaction for services provided by KBR....') provided a stark contrast to the idea of customer service just beyond the FOB wall, where gangs of Islamic extremists might put a bullet in your brain for buying the wrong thing -- bluejeans, cigarettes; there were parts of Baghdad, it was said, where Sunni insurgents were killing civilians for making ice, ice of course being unholy since it wasn't around in Mohammed's time. (There weren't Kalashnikovs, either, but who's counting?)... "The conventional wisdom about Iraq these days is that this war was and is a colossal blunder, a classic crime of hubris that has metastasized into a disaster rapidly spinning far beyond our control. And, well, who knows, that may be true -- but only a goddamn Canadian can fail to appreciate the dream of omnipotence roaring along these Middle Eastern highways. "At home we deride every American soldier as a potential war criminal, we label them committers of massacres, we call them dumb and when we're really being nice, we say they're just dupes, field hands for the rich frat boys who got high on punch and drove us into this mess. But there's something beautiful about the way you can pluck fifteen American kids from the parking lots of the Midwest, drop them anywhere in the world, and you'll get the same thing every time: dip, dick jokes and 50,000 pounds of finely tuned convoy rumbling at top speed. Our kids may not be the best educated, they may not read many books, but in a fair fight, they will kick your ass. "Whether or not this is a fair fight is another question. But you can see why the Army is still convinced we can win this thing. The Army thinks it can do anything. The Army looks at Iraq like a drooling six-foot-six-inch bully would, staring in at home plate with an arm full of ninety-nine-mph heaters. To that kid, the game is never over. They almost all think like that over here. God forbid they should ever stop thinking like that... II. THE BIG SCORE Porkfest in the Desert "Iraq is many things -- a horrifically dangerous war zone, a crumbling nation-state, a lousy place to buy a blintz. It is also a privateer's paradise, a macro version of one of those department-store contests where the contestant gets to run up and down the aisles cramming as much shit as possible into his shopping cart. Except the time period is ten years, not ten minutes. "By the time we reached a Kurdish city called Sulimaniyah, less than a week into my trip, the euphoria I'd felt in my first days with the 158th was rapidly giving way to more predictable feelings of paranoia and self-recrimination. As a journalist in Iraq, you can't help but start to feel like what you are, which is a vermin and an outsider. In many ways, being embedded with U.S. troops in the liberal-media/Michael Moore age is sort of like being asked to march into Sunday services in a Lexington, Kentucky, megachurch wearing an assless biker-dominatrix costume: One is conscious of having been the subject of many past sermons. In the Army mind-set, the relative success and failure of the Iraq War is all a matter of perception, and if you follow that calculus far enough, which a certain unmistakable minority of soldiers will, all of the bombings are actually the media's fault. "Any journalist in Iraq who does not regularly feel the urge to puke his guts out from conscience-sickness is probably not in the right line of work, because increasingly, almost anything he does here is a gruesome betrayal of someone or other -- the soldiers and their mission if he tells too much of the truth, himself and the public if he does not. "I was already beginning to feel weighed down by that issue when we reached Sulimaniyah, having seen things that I knew would fall under the category of 'not helpful' if they appeared in print. The job in Suli was a visit/inspection by Currier of the Sulimaniyah Police Academy, a training facility built by the Americans and maintained by a pair of steely-eyed, sun-beaten Las Vegans whom I will call Bob and Ray. As the conduits to American funding of the school and, indirectly, the region, Bob and Ray clearly enjoyed the status of local emirs of the Man Who Would Be King genus, suckling languidly at the teat of the war effort and cheerfully overseeing various budget-devouring construction initiatives. When I arrived, they were in the middle of building a full-size 'mock police station,' complete with every conceivable bell and whistle for use in teaching recruits, while also training police recruits of various stripes and enthusiasms -- some had been rejected when portraits of Saddam Hussein were discovered in their shirt pockets. "The whole setup reeked of some idle Midwestern retired police officer's ultimate leisure fantasy: a tit job, a nice fat income, an endlessly replicating budget kept thousands of miles and a war zone away from any scrutiny by Washington, a huge staff of mute, mustachioed subordinates to build cabinets and sweep floors, a pool table, a satellite TV and a big yard full of rocks and desert plants to pump a few rounds into when things get slow. Yes, they lived in grim, modular trailers, but that seemed like a fair trade-off for a honey life. I could barely contain my jealousy. "Bob and Ray clearly had a plan in place for Currier's visit: to beg shamelessly for $4 million more to expand the facility. They had already gotten $4.8 million, but who knows what the final cost would end up being. Private contractors play an intimate role in almost every aspect of the Iraq War operation, performing a whole range of tasks traditionally handled by the military -- driving convoy trucks, providing security for government officials and other important personages, even 'sucking shit,' as the soldiers call cleaning out sewage. The profits can be astronomical, and there is plenty of evidence that costs to the taxpayer are ballooning due to the prevalence of cost-plus contracts, a system under which the more the contractor spends, the more he makes. In cost-plus, every company in a chain of subcontractors simply adds its own percentage profit charge to whatever moneys have been spent -- as high as thirty or forty percent in some cases -- so that a $150,000-per-year security guard may end up costing the government $600,000 or more. Henry Bunting, a former Halliburton purchasing officer, recently said that he often heard officials at Halliburton subsidiary KBR say, 'Don't worry about price. It's cost-plus.' "It's clear that there is a lot of money to be made in Iraq -- soldiers who are miserable will come back for a few years to get themselves a house or a boat or two. A lot of the contractors seem to be guys like Bob and Ray -- Southern or Western ex-cops or ex-military personnel (according to one report, thirty-two percent come from a few Southern states) who come to the Middle East with halos over their heads 'to help,' and go home a few years later with that big score tucked away. "Americans are a missionary people; we cannot resist wanting to help other nations. Of course, the Iraqis know, instinctively, that nothing on Earth is more dangerous than an American who visits your land and suddenly gets that goofy-ass Tim Allen Home Improvement-fixer-upper look in his eyes. And it's comical to see how powerful that philanthropic urge becomes when it is attached to 4 million potential dollars. Pleading their case to Currier in the air-conditioned quiet of their trailer offices (plywood furniture, beat-up couch, bookshelf full of Christian hymnals and Michael Crichton novels), the pair began their pitch by comparing their plight to that of a similar training facility the Army apparently had in Jordan, where some $12 million had apparently been spent just on a staff recreation center. "'I mean, if you're going to do that," said Bob, an older man with silver hair, 'you might as well just take the money and go light a match to it.' "'And here we ask for just $4 million!' complained Ray, a younger type with a slight potbelly stretching out from a striped artificial-fabric polo shirt. 'And the money is just very hard to get our hands on."' "Diplomatically, Currier said nothing, and the conversation shifted to a discussion of widespread problems with recruits across the province. Seeing Currier's despair at the long list of obstacles, Bob smelled an opening and pounced like an animal. "'I think the thing to do is invest another $10 to $15 million right here and do it right,' he said bluntly. "A bold move, but it fell flat. Nothing from the colonel. Bob and Ray were physically leaning forward in their chairs by this point. "Currier: 'Do we have training for NCOs, commissars, etc.?' "Bob: 'It would be wonderful to run a class for these guys. We'd do some training for them, sure.' "Bob smiled. It was the smile of a vacuum-cleaner salesman face-to-face with a housewife. Training? We can do training. Heck, this little baby cleans carpets of all types, from shag to Persian.... Let me show you what I mean, ma'am.... "Bob smiled again. It was time for him to bring out his ace in the hole, Maj. Gen. Sabah Jalal Gharib, head of local law enforcement. I would see a number of these inspection-budgetary meetings, and the playbook was almost always the same. The local official, a toothy personage with a lit cigarette, a gray suit and a mustache, was usually introduced by the American bureaucrat-privateer, propped up as the second coming of Fiorello LaGuardia or Augusto Pinochet or both, and praised to the heavens for his hatred of Saddam and his devotion to the cause. He is invited to speak briefly. When he finishes, he is applauded, called a 'good guy' and then shuffled to the side. Finally, a request for funding is made. It's the same every time. "In this case Gharib asked Currier for money to build more police stations, at a cost of just a half-million bucks or so per station. Then he sat smoking a cigarette, leaving the rest of the meeting to Bob and Ray. "'We only received 1,000 rounds of ammo in the last shipment,' said Bob. 'You yourself know what 1,000 rounds is good for.' "'Every time we ask supply for new cars,' said Ray. 'And every time it's the same refusal. Look at us. We have old, beat-up cars!' "The memory of having just paid a monstrous tax bill burned in my skull as the sound of Ray complaining about having to drive an old car in Iraq bounced around in my ear. It dawned on me that this was how the appropriation process works in Iraq -- your Bob and your Ray just have to ask for the money, and it arrives! "I would later be told that this particular training academy had been funded out of a nonmilitary appropriation called the International Narcotics League. More than a month after that, I would visit Congress and learn from several congressional aides that there was no way for even a U.S. congressman to find a budget where these programs exist -- they're simply not in the public record. Unless you fall onto the info by parachute, there is no way to find out what is being built in Iraq, and for how much... "For those of us who still wonder why it is that we actually invaded this country in the first place -- and this is a question that even the most creative conspiracy theorist will still have trouble answering convincingly -- all it takes is a few scenes like this to understand that this isn't just about oil. "There is a certain psychologically inevitable quality to our blundering overseas, a kind of burning, insane desire to fuck with people we don't like or respect in the slightest, to cure the disease of their cultures, as it were, by drying them out in the sun of our creepy suburban enlightenment. What kind of madmen come to the ancient territory of mountainous Kurdistan and search expectantly for Rollerbladers out the window of an armored vehicle? This kind of weirdness comes far too naturally to us for this to be an accidental consequence of the invasion; it has to be part of the reason we're here, too... "Almost everything about the Iraq War is a gray area, beginning with the question of whether the soldiers are at war or not in the first place. Can they shoot or can't they? When driving through the city, is the show of force intended to intimidate, or reassure? Soldiers regaled me with stories of units that had been asked to remove their shoulder armor so as not to look 'too scary' to the population. In other units, M-4 rifles were taken away from the Humvee gunners, to prevent an excess of warning shots -- leaving soldiers with only the massive and lethal .50-caliber machine gun to defend themselves. "To the soldiers, all of these contradictory initiatives testified to a confusion up on high about what the Army is doing in Iraq. Is this mission political, or military? 'Either don't waste our time coming here, or if we are here, let us put the heat down,' one soldier told me. 'There's just too much gray area...' "As often as the soldiers get attacked, there is surprisingly little discussion among the troops about who is actually doing the shooting. Is it Al-Qaeda? The Mahdi Army? Foreign Shia fighters from Iran? Sunni extremists? There are literally hundreds of possibilities; one intelligence operative told me that each and every day, fighters came in claiming to belong to groups with new names. 'You might get five young guys in a town, just playing at being bad guys,' he said. 'They'll call themselves the Grandmother's Brigade or something. But they're basically just gangbangers.' The distinctions interest the intelligence guys, but to most soldiers, it doesn't really matter who's doing the shooting. They all go by one name -- Hajii, a name we use the same way we used Charlie a few decades ago... "There is not much I can tell about my Abu Ghraib experience, except to say that I was there for three of the very weirdest days of my entire life. The Commando dumped me in an abandoned cell block and shut the door behind me almost immediately upon arrival. Three times a day he would bring me food -- ribs and chicken and other delights from the typically well-stocked FOB cafeteria -- and then leave me alone for fifteen hours or more to devour the piles of trashy books he left for me as entertainment (how the Erica Jong novel Sappho's Leap made it to Abu Ghraib, I'll never figure out). I was to avoid all people, keep quiet and when he took me out of my cell for tours of the FOB -- once a day or so -- I was to watch my mouth and look like some mysteriously high-ranking spook. Who would know in a place like this?.. "Abu Ghraib is the symbol of American mistakes in Iraq, the place where the weird criminal perversions of bored, porn-surfing American teenagers clashed spectacularly with fastidious, sexually inviolate Islamic culture. It was also a most powerful symbol of our misguided perception of ourselves and our place in the world. "We came into this war expecting to be treated like the GIs who went into France a half-century ago -- worshipped, instantly excused for the occasional excess or foible and handed the keys to both the castle wine cellar and the nurses' dormitory. Instead we were treated like unclean monsters by the people we liberated, and around the world our every move was viciously scrutinized not only by those same Europeans we rescued ages ago, but by our own press. "The failure of Abu Ghraib was the failure to accept the role we had created for ourselves as new masters of subject peoples. We wanted to rule absolutely and also to be liked, which was why our first reaction after the scandal broke was to issue profuse apologies, call for a self-flagellating round of investigations and demand the prison's closure. A hegemonic power more comfortable with ruling would have just shot the reporter who broke the story and moved on. "But America has never been able to stomach that kind of thing, which is why, incidentally, this occupation of Iraq is probably not going to work. We are too civilized to make ourselves truly feared in public, but not civilized enough to properly restrain our power in private... "The Commando spoke much and often about the bravery of the men who were out risking their lives to bring terror suspects to this facility. He explained to me that many men like him were moved to pitch in after 9/11. They live outside the public view, their accomplishments never noted by anyone, much of what they do for a living a secret even from their own families. I never did find out exactly what he did at the facility, although I had a few ideas. But I was struck suddenly that what I was looking at here wasn't a portrait of American iniquity in Iraq, but the offensive side of our war. What is public about Iraq is the pounding our soldiers take, the day-in, day-out IED attacks against teenagers in Humvees. Most of the men our reporters know in embeds are on the defensive from sunup to sundown. "There is an impression that we are not fighting back, but we are: Here in Abu Ghraib and places like it, away from public view, we swoop down in the night and snatch people out of their homes by the half-dozen. I would imagine that rules are bent. But what rules can there be in a place like this? (The Commando's take on the Geneva Convention: 'While you're beating his ass, don't take his picture.') I asked the Commando at one point what the goal was: 'Is the idea that we'll keep capturing these guys, until there won't be any more of them?' "'Who knows?' he said. 'I guess...' VI. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE No Way Out as a Way of Life "The Iraq war, the central political event of this generation, this crazy flash point that will find a way to touch the lives of almost everyone in the world before it's over, is here to stay. We must come to grips with the reality of this monstrous, rapidly expanding thing that is fast taking on far greater dimensions and meaning than a mere foreign-policy blunder. "This is the place where two existential dead ends have come around in a circle to meet in an irreconcilable explosion of violence -- the bureaucratic ennui and intellectual confusion of modern civilized man vs. the recalcitrant, prehistoric fanaticism of Al-Qaeda's literally cave-dwelling despotic mob. Human history has traveled in two exactly opposite directions for the last thousand years, and the supreme irony is that both paths led straight here, to this insane stalemate in the Mesopotamian desert. "Beyond the walls of the FOB the chaos of Iraq is just a fresh take on the same old totalitarian double-think from the last century that sent Nazis and Communists on crazed quests for paradise by sanctioning the violence buried in their dumb hearts. All bloody revolutions rely for their success on ideologies that dehumanize the nonbeliever, and these Islamic fanatics roaming the streets of Baghdad, piously chanting 'Allahu Akbar!' as they watch the bodies of ice salesmen or infidel teenagers cook, are no different. On top of everything else, they're not even original. "Nothing like that abject savagery is evident on the American side. But there is something very unsettling in the way that the war effort has re-created the cozy isolationism of the American suburbs in its giant military outposts. It's a concentrated dose of our culture, where Mom, her tennis lesson awaiting, sends the kids off to school and Dad, the sweetest guy you'll ever meet, brings home a paycheck earned on the backs of industrial slaves from China. "Walking the peaceful streets of Anytown, you'd never guess this -- although at night the family purges unconscious guilt by watching morality plays like The O.C. and Desperate Housewives, in which Middle America ritualistically confesses to a sizzling sex life it's never come close to having. Our defining characteristic is that despite a creeping fear, we know ourselves very poorly, and have willfully turned a blind eye to the world outside our easy, cocoonlike consumer lives. "In the same way, our soldiers on the FOB may be forgiven for not understanding the discontent over the wall, because the 'Iraq' of their experience is not much different from the cable-ready communities, with the Burger King just down the street, that many of them came from in the first place. "Life is good and happy down the rabbit hole, but outside it, something is going terribly wrong. What's horrifying about Iraq is that none of our people, not even the ones running things, seem to understand why that might be. It's a terrible thing to be blind. Terrible -- and frightening..." The first of 6 online pages, with photos, starts here~~~ [link] There's also video.

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