Page 3 of 3 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA How Iraq won its 'freedom'
By Tom Engelhardt
guards had done anything but
respond to an attack.) The Iraqi government then
threatened to withdraw the company's license and
kick it out of the country, pending an
investigation.
As it happened, the US
State Department, which had inked contracts worth
US$678 million with Blackwater and had just
recently awarded a new one for "helicopter-related
services" to the outfit, had already "exempted the
company from US military
regulations governing other
security firms" and had allowed its estimated
1,000 or more employees in Iraq to operate without
an Interior Ministry license of any sort that
could be withdrawn. In addition, top State
Department officials had praised the company's
work to the skies. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice promptly called Maliki to express her
"condolences" and then the State Department
suspended all diplomatic movement (other than by
helicopter) out of the Green Zone and announced an
"investigation".
This was, of course, a
classic tactic to defuse such a crisis. Scores of
similar "investigations" in Iraq have been
launched, led nowhere (except in the case of
extraordinary publicity), and been forgotten,
including one set in motion by the State
Department only last May after consecutive
Blackwater shooting incidents and an armed
standoff between its guards and Interior Ministry
commandos in front of the ministry itself.
And who better to lead another such
investigation than, once again, the
second-most-interested party, the US State
Department? This, too, followed a Bush
administration pattern of freedom from
accountability in Iraq. In the same way, the
Pentagon had investigated possible war crimes
committed by its own troops (as at Haditha and Abu
Ghraib); just as Petraeus was designated the
perfect person to assess the efficacy of his own
actions in the "surge" initiative in a so-called
Progress Report to Congress.
Can anyone be
surprised that, despite Iraqi government
protestations, three days after standing down,
Blackwater mercenaries were again back on the job
protecting US diplomats - even while its employees
faced possible charges for "illegally smuggl[ing]
into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the
black market and ended up in the hands of a
US-designated terrorist organization"?
Stuff happens Of course, the
very idea of taking "freedom" abroad through what
the US president has hailed as "the greatest force
for human liberation the world has ever known -
the men and women of the United States Armed
Forces", is an absurdity, unless you realize who
is being freed. Ostensibly entering Iraq in search
of weapons of mass destruction, the US military
proved itself - what are massively armed forces
for, after all - a weapon of massive destruction.
It finished the task of breaking an already
oppressed and half-broken land. What the "greatest
force for human liberation the world has ever
known" opened the way for was a looter's paradise;
the freedom it brought was the freedom to plunder.
The Iraqi looting began almost as soon as
US troops entered Baghdad in April 2003 - and
those occupying troops, without orders to lift a
finger, did just about nothing (except, tellingly,
guard the Oil Ministry) as Baghdad burned.
Then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld signaled
just what kind of an era of liberation was indeed
dawning. At a press briefing, with the verbal
equivalent of a wink and a nod, he responded to a
question about the looting of the Iraqi capital by
saying, "Freedom's untidy, and free people are
free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad
things. They're also free to live their lives and
do wonderful things. And that's what's going to
happen here." And he offered his infamous tag line
for the ongoing disaster, "Stuff happens."
It has been happening ever since as those
liberated by the invasion - the privateers, the
freebooters, the crony capitalists, the neo-con
dreamers, the black marketeers and oil siphoneers,
the mercenaries and criminals of every sort - were
freed to do their damnedest in an atmosphere that
combined the "wild East" with a gold-rush
mentality amid spiraling chaos, mayhem and
destruction.
Stuff just happened again in
a square in the Iraqi capital on "Bloody Sunday";
it also happened in Haditha and at Abu Ghraib; it
happened in neighborhoods being ethnically
cleansed; it happens every day as roadside bombs
go off and death squads and mercenaries and US
soldiers kill, and normal Iraqis flee for their
lives. This is Bush's free world and welcome to
it.
In such a world, the looters and
plunderers are even free to cleanse the past.
Recently, British journalist Robert Fisk offered
an update on the smash of civilizations that
started with the invasion. He described an Iraq in
which even farmers had been transformed into
looters, while "heritage sites", from the dawn of
human civilization, from the literal Ur-moment of
our world, when not destroyed down to the bedrock
(to provide objects for Western art connoisseurs),
were being turned into parts of US military bases.
He reported:
Two-thousand-year-old Sumerian
cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The
very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees
cracking under the strain of massive troop
movements, the privatization of looting as
landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient
Mesopotamia to strip them of their artifacts and
wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's
historic past - the very cradle of human
civilization - has emerged as one of the most
shameful symbols of our disastrous
occupation.
Faced with such a world,
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently gave
a speech at the College of William and Mary in
which, for the first time in memory, a top
administration official didn't wholeheartedly plug
the spreading of freedom and democracy abroad in
typical Bush fashion.
In fact, at the
World Forum on the Future of Democracy, he gave a
talk titled "A Realist's View of Promoting
Democracy Abroad" in which he reminded his
audience of the value of allying with despots to
advance US interests:
Over the last century, we have
allied with tyrants to defeat other tyrants. We
have sustained diplomatic relations with
governments even as we supported those
attempting their overthrow. We have at times
made human rights the centerpiece of our
national strategy even as we did business with
some of the worst violators of human
rights.
This talk was greeted
enthusiastically by the nation's pundits. Finally,
a realist! Given the realities of our world, it's
not hard to understand why. Perhaps the rest of us
can now breathe a small sigh of relief. Whereas,
in the previous six-plus years, freedom was theft,
now, perhaps, clarity has entered the picture and
theft is simply theft itself.
Note 1. See Coalition
Provisional Authority Order Number
17 (revised).
Tom
Engelhardt is editor ofTomdispatchand the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
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