Page 2 of 2 The US takes to the shadows in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz
degrading further the Iraqi road system, already in a state of disrepair, by
closing useable thoroughfares. Paradoxically, it has also allowed insurgents to
plant roadside bombs with the assurance of targeting only foreigners. Such an
incident outside Falluja illustrates what have now become Obama-era policies in
Iraq:
The Americans were driving along a road used exclusively by the
American military and reconstruction teams when a bomb, which local Iraqi
security officials described as an improvised explosive device, went off. No
Iraqi vehicles, even those of the army and the police, are allowed to use the
road where the attack occurred, according to residents. There is a checkpoint
only 200 yards from the site of the attack to prevent unauthorized vehicles,
the residents said.
It is unclear whether this road will be
handed back to the Iraqis, if
and when the base it services is shuttered. Either way, the larger policy
appears to be well established - the designation of segregated roads to
accommodate the 1,000 diplomats and tens of thousands of soldiers and
contractors who implement their policies. And this is only one aspect of a
dedicated infrastructure designed to facilitate ongoing US involvement in
developing, implementing, and administering political-economic policies in
Iraq.
Whose military is it?
One way to "free up" the American military for withdrawal would, of course, be
if the Iraqi military could manage the pacification mission alone. But don't
expect that any time soon. According to media reports, if all goes well, this
isn't likely to occur for at least a decade. One telltale sign of this is the
pervasive presence of American military advisors still embedded in Iraqi combat
units. First Lieutenant Matthew Liebal, for example, "sits every day beside
Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Hadi", the commander of the Iraqi 43rd Army Brigade
that patrols eastern Baghdad.
When it comes to the Iraqi military, this sort of supervision won't be
temporary. After all, the military the US helped create in Iraq still lacks,
among other things, significant logistical capability, heavy artillery, and an
air force. Consequently, US forces transport and re-supply Iraqi troops,
position and fire high-caliber ordnance, and supply air support when needed.
Since the US military is unwilling to allow Iraqi officers to command American
soldiers, they obviously can't make decisions about firing artillery, launching
and directing US Air Force planes, or sending US logistical personnel into war
zones. All major Iraqi missions are, then, fated to be accompanied by US
advisors and support personnel for an unknown period to come.
The Iraqi military is not expected to get a wing of modern jet fighters (or
have the trained pilots to fly them) until at least 2015. This means that,
wherever US air power might be stationed, including the massive air base at
Balad north of Baghdad, it will, in effect, be the Iraqi air force for the
foreseeable future.
Even the simplest policing functions of the military might prove problematic
without the American presence. Typically, when an Iraqi battalion commander was
asked by New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers "whether he needed American
backup for a criminal arrest, he replied simply, 'Of course'". John Snell, an
Australian advisor to the US military, was just as blunt, telling an Agence
France Presse reporter that, if the United States withdrew its troops, the
Iraqi military "would rapidly disintegrate".
In a World Policy Journal article last winter, John A Nagl, a military expert
and former advisor to General David Petraeus, expressed a commonly held opinion
that an independent Iraqi military is likely to be at least a decade away.
Whose economy is it?
Terry Barnich, a victim of the previously discussed Falluja roadside bombing,
personified the economic embeddedness of the occupation. As the US State
Department's Deputy Director of the Iraq Transition Assistance Office and the
top adviser to Iraq's Electricity Minister, when he died he was "returning from
an inspection of a wastewater treatment plant being built in Falluja".
His dual role as a high official in the policy-making process and the "top
advisor" to one of Iraq's major infrastructural ministries catches the
continuing US posture toward Iraq in the early months of the Obama era. Iraq
remains, however reluctantly, a client government; significant aspects of
ultimate decision-making power still reside with the occupation forces. Note,
by the way, that Barnich was evidently not even traveling with Iraqi officials.
The intrusive presence of the Baghdad embassy extends to the all-important oil
industry, which today provides 95% of the government's funds. When it comes to
energy, the occupation has long sought to shape policy and transfer operational
responsibility from Iraqi state-owned enterprises of the Saddam Hussein years
to major international oil companies. In one of its most successful efforts, in
2004, the US delivered an exclusive $1.2 billion contract to reconstruct Iraq's
decrepit southern oil transport facilities (which handle 80% of its oil flow)
to KBR, the notorious former subsidiary of Halliburton. Supervision of that
famously mismanaged contract, still uncompleted five years later, was allocated
to the US Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
The Iraqi government, in fact, still exerts remarkably little control over
"Iraqi" oil revenues. The Development Fund for Iraq (whose revenues are
deposited in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York) was established under United
Nations auspices just after the invasion and receives 95% of the proceeds from
Iraq's oil sales. All government withdrawals are then overseen by the
UN-sanctioned International Advisory and Monitoring Board, a US-appointed panel
of experts drawn mainly from the global oil and financial industries. The
transfer of this oversight function to an Iraqi-appointed body, which was
supposed to take place in this January, has been delayed by the Obama
administration, which claims that the Iraqi government is not yet ready to take
on such a responsibility.
In the meantime, the campaign to transfer administration of core oil operations
to the major oil companies continues. Despite the resistance of Iraqi oil
workers, the administrators of the two national oil companies, a majority bloc
in parliament, and public opinion, the US has continued to pressure the
al-Maliki administration to enact an oil law that would mandate licensing
devices called production-sharing agreements (PSAs).
If enacted, these PSAs would, without transferring permanent ownership, grant
oil companies effective control over Iraq's oil fields, giving them full
discretion to exploit the country's oil reserves from exploration to sales. US
pressure has ranged from ongoing "advice" delivered by American officials
stationed in relevant Iraqi ministries to threats to confiscate some or all of
the oil monies deposited in the Development Fund.
At the moment, the Iraqi government is attempting to take a more limited step:
auctioning management contracts to international oil companies in an effort to
increase production at eight existing oil and natural gas fields. While the
winning companies would not gain the full discretion to explore, produce, and
sell in some of the world's potentially richest fields, they would at least
gain some administrative control over upgrading equipment and extracting oil,
possibly for as long as 20 years.
If the auction proves ultimately successful (not at all a certainty, since the
first round produced only one as-yet-unsigned agreement), the Iraqi oil
industry would become more deeply embedded in the occupation apparatus, no
matter what officially happens to American forces in that country. Among other
things, the American embassy would almost certainly be responsible for
inspecting and guiding the work of the contract-winners, while the US military
and private contractors would become guarantors of their on-the-ground
security. Fayed al-Nema, the CEO of the South Oil Company, spoke for most of
the opponents of such deals when he told Reuters reporter Ahmed Rasheed that
the contracts, if approved, would "put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle
its independence for the next 20 years".
Who owns Iraq?
In 2007, Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, told Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward that "taking Saddam out was essential" - a point he
made in his book The Age of Turbulence - because the United States could
not afford to be "beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas" in
Iraq. It's exactly that sort of thinking that's still operating in US policy
circles: the 2008 National Defense Strategy, for example, calls for the use of
American military power to maintain "access to and flow of energy resources
vital to the world economy".
After only five months in office, the Obama administration has already provided
significant evidence that, like its predecessor, it remains committed to
maintaining that "access to and flow of energy resources" in Iraq, even as it
places its major military bet on winning the expanding war in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. There can be no question that Washington is now engaged in an effort
to significantly reduce its military footprint in Iraq, but without, if all
goes well for Washington, reducing its influence.
What this looks like is an attempted 21st century version of colonial
domination, possibly on the cheap, as resources are transferred to the Eastern
wing of the Greater Middle East. There is, of course, no more a guarantee that
this new strategy - perhaps best thought of as colonialism lite or the Obama
Doctrine - will succeed than there was for the many failed military-first
offensives undertaken by the Bush administration. After all, in the unsettled,
still violent atmosphere of Iraq, even the major oil companies have hesitated
to rush in and the auctioning of oil contracts has begun to look uncertain,
even as other "civilian" initiatives remain, at best, incomplete.
As the Obama administration comes face-to-face with the reality of trying
fulfill General Odierno's ambition of making Iraq into "a long-term partner
with the United States in the Middle East" while fighting a major
counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, it may also encounter a familiar dilemma
faced by 19th century colonial powers: that without the application of
overwhelming military force, the intended colony may drift away toward
sovereign independence. If so, then the dreary prediction of Pulitzer
Prize-winning military correspondent Thomas Ricks - that the United States is
only "halfway through this war" - may prove all too accurate.
A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Michael Schwartz
is the author of
War Without End: The Iraq War in Context(Haymarket Books), which
explains how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the
Iraqi state and economy while fueling a sectarian civil war. Schwartz's work on
Iraq has appeared in numerous academic and popular outlets. He is a regular at
TomDispatch.com. An audio interview with him on the situation in Iraq
is available by clicking
here.) His email address is ms42@optonline.net.
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