DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The real link between 9/11 and
Iraq By Tom Engelhardt
You've heard US President George W Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney say it over and
over in various ways: there was a connection
between the events of September 11, 2001, and
Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some
of the links between the two.
Numbers
and comparisons
At least 3,438 Iraqis died by violent means
during July (roughly
similar numbers died in June and August),
significantly more than the 2,973 people who died
in the attacks of September 11.
A total of 1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone
in August, according to revised figures from the
Baghdad morgue. That's more than half the
September 11 casualties in one city in one
increasingly typical month. According to the
Washington Post, this figure does not include
suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the
city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in
towns near the capital.
By the beginning of this month, 2,974 US
military service members had died in Iraq and in
the Bush administration's "global war on terror",
more than died on September 11. (Twenty-two more
American soldiers died in Iraq in the first nine
days of September, and at least three in
Afghanistan.)
Five years after the attacks on New York and
the Pentagon, according to Emily Gosden and David
Randall of the British newspaper The Independent,
the Bush administration's "global war on terror"
has resulted in, at a minimum, 20 times the deaths
of September 11; at a maximum, 60 times. It has
"directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people,
created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more
than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every
poor nation on Earth. If estimates of other,
unquantified, deaths - of insurgents, the Iraqi
military during the 2003 invasion, those not
recorded individually by Western media, and those
dying from wounds - are included, the toll could
reach as high as 180,000."
According to
Australian journalist Paul McGeough, Iraqi
officials (and others) estimate that that
country's death toll since 2003 "stands at 50,000
or more - the proportional equivalent of about
570,000 Americans".
Last week, the US Senate agreed to appropriate
another US$63 billion for military operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan, whose costs have been
averaging $10 billion a month so far this year.
This brings the (taxpayer) cost for Bush's wars so
far to about $469 billion and climbing. That's the
equivalent of 469 Ground Zero (as the site of the
destroyed World Trade Center is called) memorials
at full cost-overrun estimates, double that if the
memorial comes in at the recently revised budget
of $500 million. (Keep in mind that the estimated
cost of these two wars doesn't include various
perfectly real future payouts such as those for
the care of veterans and could rise into the
trillions.)
In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the
Bush administration had about 150,000 troops in
Iraq. Just under three and a half years later,
almost as long as it took to win World War II in
the Pacific, and despite much media coverage about
coming force "drawdowns", troop levels are
actually rising - by 15,000 in the past month.
They now stand at 145,000, just 5,000 short of the
initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion, top
administration officials such as deputy secretary
of defense Paul Wolfowitz took it for granted that
US troop levels would be drawn down to the 30,000
range within three months of the taking of
Baghdad.)
Reconstruction While
Americans are planning to remember the attack with
four vast towers and a huge, extremely costly
memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero,
Baghdadis have been thinking a bit more
practically. They are putting scarce funds into
constructing two new branch morgues (with
refrigeration units) in the capital for what's now
most plentiful in their country: dead bodies. They
plan to raise the city's morgue capacity to 250
bodies a day. If fully used, that would be about
7,500 bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge
against ever more probable futures.
While
the various New York memorial constructions can't
get off (or into) the ground, because of disputes
and cost-estimate overruns, what could be thought
of as the real US memorial to Ground Zero is going
up in the very heart of Baghdad. Unlike the
prospective structures in Manhattan or seemingly
just about any other construction project in Iraq,
it's on schedule.
According to Paul
McGeough, the $787 million "embassy", a
21-building, heavily fortified complex
(independent of the capital's hopeless electricity
or water systems), will pack significant bang for
the bucks - its own built-in surface-to-air
missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and
Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming
pool, and a sports center. As in essence a "suburb
of Washington", with a predicted modest staff of
3,500, it is a project that says, with all the
hubris the Bush administration can muster: We're
not leaving. Never.
Record-breaking
months
Roadside bombs (or IEDs - improvised explosive
devices), "the leading killer of US troops", rose
to record numbers this summer - 1,200 in August,
quadrupling the January 2004 figures according to
the Washington Post - while bomb and attack tips
from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They
plummeted from 5,900 in April to 3,700 in July.
("It will improve once it's not so darn lethal to
go out on the street," was the optimistic
observation of retired US Army General Montgomery
C Meigs, director of the Joint Improvised
Explosive Device Defeat Organization.)
According to a recently released quarterly
assessment the Pentagon is mandated to do for
Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a record
51% in recent months, quadrupling in just two
years.
From the same report, monthly attacks on US
and allied Iraqi forces rose to about 800,
doubling since early 2004. In Anbar province, the
heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a "very
pessimistic" secret US Marine Corps assessment
indicates that "we haven't been defeated
militarily but we have been defeated politically -
and that's where wars are won and lost"), attacks
averaged 30 a day.
A sideline record in the "war on terror":
Afghanistan's already sizable opium crop is
projected to increase by at least 50% this year
and would then make up a startling 92% of the
global supply. According to Antonio Maria Costa,
the global executive director of the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, those supplies
would exceed global consumption by 30% - so other
records loom. (Meanwhile, according to the
Washington Post, the investigation into the
whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is going nowhere.
His trail has gone "stone cold ... US commandos
whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden
have not received a credible lead in more than two
years.")
The Iraqi condition
Along with civil war, the ethnic cleansing
of neighborhoods, the still-strengthening
insurgency, and the security situation from hell,
Iraqis are also experiencing soaring inflation,
possibly reaching 70% this year (which would more
than double last year's 32% rise), stagnant
salaries (where they even exist), an "inert"
banking system, gas and electricity prices up in a
year by 270%, massive corruption ("An audit
sponsored by the United Nations last week found
hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq's oil
revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had
gone missing altogether").
Iraqis also
face a lack of adequate electricity or potable
water supplies, tenaciously high unemployment,
ranging - depending upon the estimate - from
15-50/60% (the recent Pentagon report to Congress
offers Iraqi government figures of 18%
unemployment and 34% underemployment), acute
shortages of gasoline, kerosene and cooking gas in
the country with the planet's third-largest oil
reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote
$800 million in scarce funds to importing refined
oil products from neighboring countries and making
endless gasoline lines and overnight waits the
essence of normal life ("Filling up now requires
several days' pay, monastic patience or both").
If that weren't enough, Iraq has an oil
industry, already ragged at the time of the
invasion, that has since gone steadily downhill
(its three main refineries are now functioning at
half-capacity and processing only half the number
of barrels of oil as before the invasion, while
the biggest refinery in Baiji sometimes operates
at as little as 7.5% of capacity), government gas
subsidies severely cut (at the urging of the
International Monetary Fund), malnutrition on the
rise and, according to that Pentagon report to
Congress, 25.9% of Iraqi children stunted in their
growth.
In other words, economically
speaking, Iraq has in essence been deconstructed.
Diving into Iraq On December 9,
2001, Cheney began publicly arguing on the
television program Meet the Press that
there were Iraqi connections to the September 11
attacks. It was "pretty well confirmed", he told
the program's host Tim Russert, that Mohamed Atta,
the lead hijacker, had met the previous April in
Prague with a "senior official of the Iraqi
intelligence service". On September 8, 2002, he
returned to the program and reaffirmed this
supposed fact even more strongly. (Atta "did
apparently travel to Prague on a number of
occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have
reporting that places him in Prague with a senior
Iraqi intelligence official a few months before
the attack on the World Trade Center.")
All of this - and there was much more of
it from Cheney, Bush and other top officials,
always leaving Iraq and September 11, or Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi in the same rhetorical neighborhood
with the final linking usually left to the
listener - was quite literally so much Bushwa.
These were claims debunked within the
intelligence community and elsewhere before,
during and after the invasion of Iraq. We learned
only the other day from a belated partial report
by the Senate Intelligence Committee that
intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the
alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda
while senior Bush administration officials were
publicly asserting those links to justify invading
Iraq.
We learned as well that US
intelligence people knew Saddam Hussein had
actually tried to capture Zarqawi and that the
claim that Zarqawi and he were somehow in cahoots
was utterly repudiated last fall by the Central
Intelligence Agency. None of this stopped the vice
president or president - who as late as this
August 21 insisted that Saddam "had relations with
Zarqawi" - from continuing to make such implicit
or explicit linkages even as they also backtracked
from the claims.
As is often the case,
under such lies and manipulations lurks a deeper
truth. In this case, let's call it the truth of
wish fulfillment. The link between September 11
and Iraq is unfortunately all too real. The Bush
administration made it so in the heat of the
post-attack shock.
Think of that link this
way: immediately after September 11, 2001, the US
president and vice president hijacked the United
States, using the rhetorical equivalents of
box-cutters and Mace; then, with most passengers
on board and not quite enough of the spirit of
United Flight 93 to spare, after a brief Afghan
overflight, they crashed the plane-of-state
directly into Iraq, causing the equivalent of a
Hurricane Katrina that never ends and turning that
country - from Basra in the south to the border of
Kurdistan - into the global equivalent of Ground
Zero.
Tom Engelhardt is editor
of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback.
