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3 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA How Iraq won its 'freedom'
By Tom Engelhardt
Let's take a trip down memory lane.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the
United States' highest civilian award, ranking
second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor.
According to its official website, the medal "is
reserved for individuals the president deems to
have made especially meritorious contributions to
the security or national interests of the United
States, to world peace, or to cultural or other
significant public or private
endeavors".
In 2004, George W Bush had
already awarded the medal to cosmetics queen Estee
Lauder, golfer Arnold Palmer, columnist and
political scientist Norman Podhoretz and singer
and actress Doris Day, among others, when, on
December 14 in a ceremony at the White House, he
hit the trifecta.
Only the previous month,
in a close race to the finish line - not so much
against opposing presidential candidate John Kerry
as against a ragtag fundamentalist insurgency in
Iraq - he had just slipped under the re-election
wire and, in a press conference, promptly talked
about how "free" he was. ("You asked, do I feel
free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned
capital in the campaign, political capital, and
now I intend to spend it.")
The next month
he would launch his second term with an inaugural
address that put "freedom" as a global mission at
the very center of his presidency. He would
grandiloquently promise nothing less than a
crusade to end tyranny globally and bring liberty
to the world. (He would, in fact, use the word
"freedom" 27 times, and "liberty" 15 times, in
that address.) He also had a few debts to pay and,
having already brought "freedom" to Iraq at the
point of a cruise missile, he now paid those debts
in the coin of "freedom" as well. He slipped
medals around the necks of three men - each
recently retired from the field of action - who
had been crucial to his first-term "freedom"
policies.
I'm talking about the former
commander of his Afghan war and Iraq invasion,
General Tommy ("we don't do body counts") Franks;
the former director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and proprietor of a global secret
prison and torture network, as well as the man who
oversaw the intelligence process that led to the
Iraq invasion, George ("slam dunk") Tenet; and his
former viceroy in Baghdad, the head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, L Paul ("I didn't
dismantle the Iraqi Army") Bremer III.
Of
Franks, Bush said the general had "led the forces
that fought and won two wars in the defense of the
world's security and helped liberate more than 50
million people from two of the worst tyrannies in
the world".
Of Tenet, the president
claimed that he had been "one of the first to
recognize and address the threat to America from
radical networks" and, after September 11, 2001,
was "ready with a plan to strike back at al-Qaeda
and to topple the Taliban".
Of Bremer, he
offered this encomium: "For 14 months, Jerry
Bremer worked day and night in difficult and
dangerous conditions to stabilize the country, to
help its people rebuild and to establish a
political process that would lead to justice and
liberty." And the president added: "Every
benchmark ... was achieved on time or ahead of
schedule, including the transfer of sovereignty
that ended his tenure." ("He did not add," the
Washington Post pointed out at the time, "that the
transfer was hurriedly arranged two days early
because of fears insurgents would attack the
ceremonies.")
Looking back, it's clearer
just what kinds of "benchmarks" were achieved,
what kinds of freedoms each of these men helped
bring to the rest of the world.
Franks
helped to deliver to southern Afghanistan's
desperate, beleaguered peasants the freedom to be
caught, years later, in a deathlike vise between a
resurgent Taliban and regular US air strikes. He
also brought them the freedom to grow just about
the total opium crop needed to provide for the
globe's heroin addicts - 8,200 tons of opium in
2007, representing 93% of the global opiates
market. This was a 34% jump from the previous year
and represented opium production on what is
undoubtedly a historic scale. Afghanistan's
peasants, surviving as best they can in a land of
narco-warlords, narco-guerrillas and deadly air
attacks have, once again, set a record when it
comes to this unique freedom.
Tenet,
though a holdover from the Bill Clinton years,
wholeheartedly agreed with one of the earliest
post-September 11 liberatory impulses of top Bush
administration officials - the desire, as defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld liked to say, to take
off "the gloves", or, as Tenet himself put it when
it came to the CIA (so Ron Suskind tell us in his
book The One Percent Doctrine), "the
shackles". Those were the "shackles" that Vice
President Dick Cheney and others believed had been
placed by Congress on the imperial presidency
after Richard Nixon came so close to committing
the constitutional coup that we have come to call
Watergate, but that involved an illegal war in
Cambodia, illegal wiretapping, illegal break-ins,
robberies, black-bag jobs and so many other
crossing-the-line activities.
As CIA
director, Tenet then delivered to agency
operatives the freedom to target just about anyone
on the planet who might qualify (however
mistakenly) as a "terror suspect", kidnap him, and
"render" him in extraordinary fashion either to a
foreign prison where torture was regularly
practiced or to a CIA secret prison in
Afghanistan, eastern Europe or who knows where
else. He also freed the agency to "disappear"
human beings (a term normally used in our world
only when Americans aren't the ones doing it) and
freed the agency's interrogators to use techniques
like waterboarding, known in less civilized times
as "the water torture" (and only recently banned
by the agency) as well as various other, more
sophisticated forms of torture.
At the
2004 Medal of Freedom ceremony, the president
spoke of 50 million people being liberated in his
first term, but he probably should have used the
figure 50,000,002. After all, Tenet, like Franks,
had offered a necessary helping hand in the
liberation of Bush - and Cheney as well. Both men
took part in loosing a "wartime"
commander-in-chief presidency (and
vice-presidency) to which just about no
traditional US check-and-balance restraints or
oversight of any sort were said to apply.
Bremer may, however, be the most
interesting of the three freedom-givers, in part
because, thanks to Blackwater USA, the private
security firm whose mercenaries continue to run
wild in Iraq, his handiwork is in the news and in
plain sight right now.
In December 2004,
less than six months had passed since Bremer, in
his role as head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority in occupied Baghdad, had turned over
"sovereignty" to a designated group of Iraqis and,
in essence, fled that already chaotic country. A
day before he left, however, he established a
unique kind of freedom in Iraq, not seen since the
heyday of European and Japanese colonialism. By
putting his signature on a single document, he
managed officially to establish an "international
zone" that would be the fortified equivalent of
the old European treaty ports on the China coast
and, at the same time, in essence granted to all
occupying forces and allied companies what, in
those bad old colonial days, used to be called
"extraterritoriality" - the freedom not to be in
any way under Iraqi law or jurisdiction, ever.
Creating the free world anew
General David Petraeus, the president's
"surge" commander in Iraq, has often spoken about
a "Washington clock" and a "Baghdad clock" being
out of sync and of the need to reset the
Washington one. Bremer, who arrived in Baghdad in
May 2003, quickly went to work setting back that
Baghdad clock. When it came, for instance, to
Iraqi oil, he ensured that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum,
who had been involved in the US State
Department's
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