Georgetown University Qatar “Closing Plenary: U.S. Foreign Policy towards the Region: the Bush Presidency and Beyond”

Here is GU-Q’s description of the video:

The Hiwaraat Conference Series at Georgetown University in Qatar
The Invasion of Iraq: Regional Reflections Conference

Day 3
Closing Plenary: U.S. Foreign Policy towards the Region: the Bush Presidency and Beyond

Edward Kolla, Chair (Georgetown University in Qatar)
Juan Cole (University of Michigan)
Flynt L. Leverett (Pennsylvania State University)
Trita Parsi (Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft)
Randa Slim (Middle East Institute)

Closing Remarks
Dean Safwan Masri (Georgetown University in Qatar)

About the conference: The 2003 invasion of Iraq marked a critical turning point in America’s relationship with Iraq and its neighboring countries, a region of strategic importance encompassing vital energy and military interests, and reshaped its diplomatic relations worldwide. This conference is convened by the Dean of Georgetown University in Qatar, Dr. Safwan Masri, in collaboration with the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS).
#hiwaraat #guq #iraq

In early April 2003, as American forces sought to wrap up their conquest of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and take strongholds to its north, the Marine Corps formed “Task Force Tripoli.” It was commanded by General John F. Kelly (who would later serve as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff). His force was charged with capturing the city of Tikrit, the birthplace of dictator Saddam Hussein. The obvious eastern approach to it was blocked because a bridge over the Tigris River had been damaged. Since the Marines assembled the Task Force in northeastern Baghdad, its personnel needed to cross the treacherous, hard-flowing Tigris twice to advance on their target. Near Tikrit, while traversing the Swash Bridge, they came under fire from military remnants of Saddam’s regime.

Still, Tikrit fell on April 15th and, historically speaking, that double-crossing of the Tigris was a small triumph for American forces. After all, that wide, deep, swift-flowing waterway had traditionally posed logistical problems for any military force. It had, in fact, done so throughout recorded history, proving a daunting barrier for the militaries of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the Achaemenid Cyrus the Great, for Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Justinian, for the Mongols and the Safavid Iranians, for imperial British forces and finally General John H. Kelly. However, just as Kelly’s stature was diminished by his later collaboration with America’s only openly autocratic president, so, too, in this century the Tigris has been diminished in every sense and all too abruptly. No longer what the Kurds once called the Ava Mezin, “the Great Water,” it is now a shadow of its former self.

Fording the Tigris

Thanks at least in part to human-caused climate change, the Tigris and its companion river, the Euphrates, on which Iraqis still so desperately depend, have seen alarmingly low water flow in recent years. As Iraqi posts on social media now regularly observe in horror, at certain places, if you stand on the banks of those once mighty bodies of water, you can see through to their riverbeds. You can even, Iraqis report, ford them on foot in some spots, a previously unheard-of phenomenon.

Those two rivers no longer pose the military obstacle they used to. They were once synonymous with Iraq. The very word Mesopotamia, the premodern way of referring to what we now call Iraq, means “between rivers” in Greek, a reference, of course, to the Tigris and the Euphrates. Climate change and the damming of those waters in neighboring upriver countries are expected to cause the flow of the Euphrates to decline by 30% and of the Tigris by a whopping 60% by 2099, which would be a death sentence for many Iraqis.

Twenty years ago, with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, two oil men and climate-change denialists, in the White House and new petroleum finds dwindling, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for them to use the 9/11 horror as an excuse to commit “regime change” in Baghdad (which had no role in taking down the World Trade Center in New York and part of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.). They could thereby, they thought, create a friendly puppet regime and lift the U.S. and U.N. sanctions then in place on the export of Iraqi petroleum, imposed as a punishment for dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

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There was a deep irony that haunted the decision to invade Iraq to (so to speak) liberate its oil exports. After all, burning gasoline in cars causes the earth to heat up, so the very black gold that both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush coveted turned out to be a Pandora’s box of the worst sort. Remember, we now know that, in Washington’s “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the U.S. military emitted at least 400 million metric tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And mind you, that fit into a great tradition. Since the eighteenth century, the U.S. has put 400 billion — yes, billion! — metric tons of CO2 into that same atmosphere, or twice as much as any other country, which means it has a double responsibility to climate victims like those in Iraq.

Climate Breakdown, Iraqi-Style

The United Nations has now declared oil-rich Iraq, the land on which the Bush administration bet the future of our own country, to be the fifth most vulnerable to climate breakdown among its 193 member states. Its future, the U.N. warns, will be one of “soaring temperatures, insufficient and diminishing rainfall, intensified droughts and water scarcity, frequent sand and dust storms, and flooding.” Sawa Lake, the “pearl of the south” in Muthanna governorate, has dried up, a victim of both the industrial overuse of aquifers and a climate-driven drought that has reduced precipitation by 30%.

Meanwhile, temperatures in that already hot land are now rising rapidly. As Adel Al-Attar, an Iraqi adviser to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on water and habitat, describes it, “I’ve lived in Basra all my life. As a boy, the summer temperature never went much beyond 40C (104° F) in summer. Today, it can surpass 50C (122° F).” The climate statistics bear him out. As early as July 22, 2017, the temperature in Basra reached 54 °C (129.2° F), among the highest ever recorded in the eastern hemisphere. The rate of Iraqi temperature rise is, in fact, two to seven times higher than the average rate of global temperature rise and that means greater dryness of soil, increased evaporation from rivers and reservoirs, decreasing rainfall, and a distinct loss of biodiversity, not to mention rising human health threats like heat stroke.

The American war did direct harm to Iraq’s farmers, who make up 18% of the country’s labor force. And when it was over, they had to deal with staggering numbers of explosives left in the countryside, including landmines, unexploded ordnance, and improvised explosive devices, many of which have since been dangerously covered by desert sands as a climate-driven drought worsens. An article in the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences observes that when it comes to military disruptions of waterways, “Displacement, explosions, and movement of heavy equipment increase dust that then settles on rivers and accumulates in reservoirs.” Worse yet, between 2014 and 2018 when the guerrillas of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whom the American war helped bring into existence, took over parts of northern and western Iraq, they blew up dams and practiced scorched-earth tactics that did $600 million worth of damage to the country’s hydraulic infrastructure. Had the U.S. never invaded, there would have been no ISIL.

Dust and More Dust

As Al-Attar of the ICRC observed, “When there’s not enough rain or vegetation, the upper layers of earth become less compact, meaning the chance of dust or sandstorms increases. These weather events contribute to desertification. Fertile soil is turning into desert.” And that is part of Iraq’s post-invasion fate, which means ever more frequent dust- and sandstorms. In mid-June, the Iraqi government warned that particularly violent dust and thunderstorms in al-Anbar, Najaf, and Karbala provinces were uprooting ever more trees and flattening ever more farms. In late May in Kirkuk, a dust storm sent hundreds of Iraqis to the hospital. A year ago, the dust storms came so thick and fast, week after week, that visibility was often obscured in major cities and thousands were hospitalized with breathing problems. In the late twentieth century, there already were, on average, 243 days annually with high particulate matter in the air. In the past 20 years, that number has reached 272. Climate scientists predict that it will hit 300 by 2050.

A little over half of Iraq’s farmed land relies on rain-fed agriculture, mostly in the north of the country. Iraqi journalist Sanar Hasan describes the impact of increasing drought and water scarcity in the northern province of Ninewah, where yields have shrunk considerably. Ninewah produced 5 million metric tons of wheat in 2020 but only 3.37 million in 2021 before plummeting by more than 50% to 1.34 million in 2022. Such declining yields pose a special problem in a world where wheat has only grown more expensive, thanks in part to the Russian war on Ukraine. Thousands of Iraqi farming families are being forced off their lands by water shortages. For example, Hasan quotes Yashue Yohanna, a Christian who worked all his life in agriculture but now can’t make ends meet, as saying, “When I leave the farm, what do you expect me to do next? I’m an old man. How will I afford the cost of living?”

Worse yet, southern Iraq’s marshlands are turning into classic dust bowls. The Environment Director of Maysan Governorate in southern Iraq recently announced that its al-Awda Marsh was 100% dried up.

The marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have been storied for thousands of years. The world’s oldest epic, the Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, is set there as it describes a hero journeying to an enchanted garden of the gods in search of immortality. (Echoes of that epic can be found in the biblical story of the garden of Eden.)

Our addiction to fossil fuels, however, has contributed significantly to the blighting of that very source of life and legend. It was there that marsh dwellers once hauled in a majority of the fish eaten by Iraqis, but the remaining wetlands are now experiencing increasingly high rates of evaporation. The Shatt al-Arab, created where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf, has seen its water pressure drop, allowing an influx of salt water that has already destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland and some 30,000 trees.

Many of Iraq’s date palms have also died owing to war, neglect, soil salinization, and climate change. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq provided three-quarters of the world’s dates. Now, its date industry is tiny and on life support, while Marsh Arabs and southern farming families have been forced from their lands into cities where they have few of the skills needed to make a living. Journalist Ahmed Saeed and his colleagues at Reuters quote Hasan Moussa, a former fisherman who now drives a taxi, as saying, “The drought ended our future. We have no hope, other than for a [government] job, which would be enough. Other work doesn’t fulfill our needs.”

Water as Women’s Work

Although it was mostly men who planned out Iraq’s ruinous wars of the past half-century and set their sights on burning as much petroleum, coal, and natural gas as possible for profit and power, Iraq’s women have borne the brunt of the climate crisis. Few of them are in the formal job market, though many do work on farms. Because they are at home, they have often been given responsibility for providing water. Because of the present drought conditions, many women already spend at least three hours a day trying to get water from reservoirs and bring it home. Water foraging is becoming so difficult and time-consuming that some girls are dropping out of secondary school to focus on it.

At home, women are dependent on tap water, which is often contaminated. Men who work outside the home often gain access to water purified for Iraqi industry and its cities. As farms fail owing to drought, men are emigrating to those very cities for work, often leaving the women of the household in rural villages scrambling to raise enough food in arid circumstances to feed themselves and their children.

Last fall, the International Organization for Migration at the United Nations estimated that 62,000 Iraqis living in the center and the south of the country had been displaced from their homes by drought over the previous four years and anticipated that many more would follow. Just as people from Oklahoma fled to California in droves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, so now Iraqis are facing the prospect of dealing with their own dustbowl. It is, however, unlikely to be a mere episode like the American one. Instead, it looms as the long-term fate of their country.

If, instead of invading Iraq, the American government had swung into action in the spring of 2003 to cut carbon dioxide output, as one of our foremost climate scientists, Michael Mann, was suggesting at the time, the emission of hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 might have been avoided. Humanity would have had an extra two decades to make the transition to a zero-carbon world. In the end, after all, the stakes are as high for Americans as they are for Iraqis.

If humanity doesn’t reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, we are likely to outrun our “carbon budget,” the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2, and the climate will undoubtedly go chaotic. What has already happened in Iraq, not to speak of the dire climate impacts that have recently left Canada constantly aflame, U.S. cities smoking, and Texans broiling in a record fashion would then seem like child’s play.

At that point, in short, we would have invaded ourselves.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

While I hadn’t seen the person under investigation for years, my memories of him and of some of the things he’d done scared me. For example, when we were young teens, he threatened to bury me alive over a disagreement. He even dug a hole to demonstrate his intent. I knew that if I were to cooperate with this investigation, my testimony would not be anonymous. As a mother of two children living on an isolated farm, that left me with misgivings.

There was also another consideration. A neighbor, herself a retired police officer, suggested that perhaps the investigation could be focused not just on him, but on me, too. “Maybe it’s because of stuff you’ve written,” she suggested, mentioning my deep involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which I co-founded as a way of dealing with this country’s nightmarish wars of this century.

Indeed, the American version of the twenty-first century, marked by our government’s devastating decision to respond to the September 11, 2001, attacks with a Global War on Terror — first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then in other countries across the Middle East — has had its grim effects at home as well. It’s caused us to turn on one another in confusing ways. After all, terror isn’t a place or a people. You can’t eradicate it with your military. Instead, as we learned over the last couple of decades, you end up turning those you don’t like into enemies in the bloodiest of counterinsurgency wars.

I’ve researched for years how those wars of ours also helped deepen our domestic inequalities and political divisions, but after all this time, the dynamics still seem mysterious to me. Nonetheless, I hope I can at least share a bit of what I’ve noticed happening in the conservative, privileged community I grew up in, as well as in the military community I married into.

Around the time I co-founded the Costs of War Project in the early 2010s, I fell in love with a career military officer. Our multitrillion-dollar wars were then in full swing. At home, the names of young Blacks killed by our police forces, ever more ominously armed off the country’s battlefields, were just seeping into wider public consciousness as was a right-wing political backlash against prosecutions of the police. Anti-government extremist militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, some of whom would storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to violently block the certification of an elected president, were already seething about the supposed executive overreach of the Obama administration and that Black president’s alleged foreign birth. But back then, those guys all seemed — to me at least — very much a part of America’s fringe.

Back then, I also didn’t imagine that men in uniform would emerge as a central part of the leadership and membership of such extremist groups. Sadly, they did. As journalist Peter Maass pointed out recently, of the 897 individuals indicted so far for their involvement in the January 6th violence, 118 had backgrounds in the U.S. military and a number of them had fought in this country’s war on terror abroad. Nearly 30 police officers from a dozen different departments around the country similarly attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot and several faced criminal charges.

What also sends chills down my spine is that federal law enforcement agencies turned their backs on the warning signs of all this. Had the FBI acted on information that extremist groups were planning violence on January 6th, it might not have happened.

A Nation Rich in Fear

If one thing captured the spirit of the post-9/11 moment for me, in retrospect, it was the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has defined itself as a “whole-of-society endeavor, from every federal department and agency to every American across the nation.” Expenditures for that new department would total more than $1 trillion from 2002 through 2020, more than six times expenditures for similar activities at various government agencies during the previous 20 years.

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With its hundreds of thousands of workers, DHS often seems susceptible to overusing its authority and ignoring real threats. Case in point: of the approximately 450 politically motivated violent attacks taking place on our soil in the past decade, the majority were perpetrated by far-right, homegrown violent extremists. Yet all too tellingly, the DHS has largely remained focused on foreign terrorist groups — and homegrown jihadist groups inspired by them — as the main threats to this country.

Thanks to the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, federal authorities were also empowered to obtain the financial and Internet records of Americans, even if they weren’t part of an authorized investigation. In the process, the government violated the privacy of tens of thousands of citizens and non-citizens. Authorities at government agencies ranging from the FBI to the Pentagon secretly monitored the communications and activities of peace groups like the Quakers and Occupy Wall Street activists. Worse yet, in June 2013, Americans learned that the National Security Agency was collecting telephone records from tens of millions of us based on a secret court order.

Such practices only seemed to legitimate vigilantism on the part of Americans who took seriously the DHS’s mantra, “If you see something, say something.” Incidents of racial profiling directed towards people of Muslim and South Asian background spiked early in the post 9/11 war years and again (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn!) after Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017.

Sometime before that, a relative visiting me noticed a darker-skinned man, a tourist, taking photos of historic buildings in my community, while speaking on his phone in Arabic. To my shame, she began questioning him, based on “a feeling that something was wrong.” In other words, well before the Donald put “fake news” in the contemporary American lexicon, feelings and not facts all too often seemed to rule the day.

“Is that the Russia?” or Dangers Near and Far

Terrorism was at once everywhere and nowhere for those who were supposed to be fighting that war on terror, including members of the military. In 2013, when my husband was on a months-long deployment at sea, another wife, whom I had texted about having a party for the crew on their return, texted me back a warning. I had, she claimed, jeopardized the safety of my husband and other crew members on his boat. After all, what if some foreign enemy intercepted our exchange and learned about the boat’s plans?

Four years later, in the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency, it only got worse. A stressed-out, combat-traumatized commander, who took over the vessel to which my spouse was next assigned, emailed us wives weekly warnings against sending messages just like the one I had dispatched years earlier. He also ordered us not to email our husbands anything that could be imagined as negative, even if it reflected the realities of our lives: sick children, struggles with depression, financial troubles when we had to miss workdays to single parent. According to him, to upset our spouses in uniform was to jeopardize the security and wellbeing of the boat and indeed of America. He could read our e-mails and decide which ones made it to our loved ones. It was an extreme atmosphere to find myself in and I started to wonder: was I an asset or a threat to this country? Could my harmless words endanger lives?

One summer evening toward the end of another long deployment at sea, a fellow spouse tasked with disseminating confidential information about the boat our spouses were on arrived at my home unannounced. I was feeding my older toddler at the time. She whispered to me that our husbands’ boat was returning to port soon and swore me to silence because she didn’t want anyone beyond the command to know about the vessel’s movements. It was, she said, a matter of “operational security.” Then she took a glance out the window as though a foreign spy or terrorist might be listening.

“Oh! That’s great!” I replied to her news. Later, I tried to explain to my bewildered child what “operational security,” or keeping information about daddy’s whereabouts away from our country’s enemies, meant. He promptly pointed toward that same window and said, “Is it the Russia? Does the Russia live there?” (He’d overheard too many conversations at home about nuclear geopolitics.) The next day, pointing to a mischievous-looking ceramic garden gnome in a neighbor’s yard, he asked again, “Is that the Russia?”

It was not Russia, I assured him. But six years later, in a weary and anxious country that only recently gave The Donald a true body blow, I still wonder about the dangers of our American world in a way I once didn’t.

The 2020s and the Biggest-Loser-in-Chief

Eventually, my family and I settled into what will hopefully be our final stint of military life — an office job for my spouse and a home in rural Maryland. But somehow, in those Trump years, the once-distant dangers of our world seemed ever closer at hand.

This was the time, after all, when the president felt comfortable posting a meme of himself beating up a CNN journalist, while his Homeland Security officials detained peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon. I soon began to wonder whether returning to something approximating normal civilian life was ever going to happen in this disturbed and disturbing land of ours.

Motorcyclists sporting confederate flags drove by on the rural highway in front of my house. Blue Lives Matter flags fluttered in a nearby town after the police murdered George Floyd. Even years after Trump left office, as the polls leading up to the midterm elections seemed to indicate a coming red wave, I wondered if I had been wrong to imagine that our fellow Americans would choose democracy over… well, who knew what?

As part of that election campaign, I wrote nearly 200 letters to Democratic voters in swing states urging them to get to the polls as I was planning to do. Remembering a trend my friends and I had started on social media in 2020, I considered posting a funny photograph of my sweet, excitable rooster, Windy, sitting next to piles of letters, with the caption, “Windy is vigilant about the state of our democracy! Are you?”

Then I thought twice about it, another sign of our times. It occurred to me that if I did participate in an investigation against an angry person in uniform, the one I had once known, I risked retaliation and — yes, I did think this at the time — what better target was there than our strange outdoor pet? On realizing that it was I who was now starting to think like some fear-crazed maniac, I forced myself to dismiss the thought.

Of course, that predicted red wave turned out to be, at worst, a ripple, while election denialism and voter intimidation seemed to collapse in a post-election heap. None of the most extreme MAGA candidates running for top election positions in swing states won. Was it possible that Americans had started to see the irony, not to say danger, of voting for public officials who attack the basic tenets of our democracy?

In the end, I told the guy investigating my childhood acquaintance that I couldn’t help him, feeling that I had nothing new to add for a crew with such sweeping powers of surveillance. To my relief, he simply wished me the best. The normal tenor of that conversation changed something in my thinking about the government and this moment of ours.

I found myself returning to an older (perhaps saner) view of our times, as well as the military and law enforcement. Yes, our disastrous wars of this century had brought home too many unnerved, disturbed, and damaged soldiers and small numbers of them became all too extreme, while over-armed police forces did indeed create problems for us.

However, it was also worth remembering that the military and the police are not monoliths. They aren’t “blue lives” or “the troops,” but individuals. They are part of all our lives, as fallible as they are potentially capable of helping us form a more perfect union instead of the chaos and cruelty that Donald Trump exemplifies. Were Americans — all of us from all walks of life — more willing to stand up to bigotry and extremism, we might still help change what’s happening here for the better.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Bush denounced the rigged elections that produced the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia and added, “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean, of Ukraine . . . Iraq, too. I’m 75.”

I pointed out here at Informed Comment a couple of months ago that the “US would be on firmer Ground declaring Putin a War Criminal if George W. Bush had been Tried.”

I’d also like to say that the Bush administration was one of the most repressive in recent history when it came to dissent. Demonstrations in New York against the war during the Republican National Convention were illegally broken up and the demonstrators were physically attacked. Bush violated the fourth amendment extensively by spying on people through their smart phones and making the telcom companies give the government back doors. His administration punished Ambassador Joe Wilson for blowing the whistle on the phony story of Iraq buying uranium for bombs from Niger by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as an undercover CIA operative and burning her anti-proliferation efforts.

At one point, someone in the White House even had the CIA very illeglly look into whether it was possible to destroy my reputation to blunt my critique of the Iraq War.

So Bush’s denunciations of Putin’s dictatorship as the reason he could single-handedly pursue a ruinous war ring a little hollow.

For a younger generation who didn’t live through it, I should explain that Bush was famous for his gaffes and malapropisms. The problem with the American economy, he once remarked, was that too many of our imports come from abroad. Or there was that time he stridently insisted on the abolition of all terriers. By which he meant, “tariff barriers.” It wasn’t very amusing.

I don’t know how to take Bush’s subvocalization after his gaffe of “Iraq, too.” Does it indicate that he finally moved away from his proud declaration that history would judge his Iraq War and his hope that it would ultimately be vindicated? Because let’s just say that as a professional historian of Iraq, I’m a little closer to that judgment than he is, and it is my estimation that the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq will always be seen by most historians as one of the largest foreign policy disasters in American history and as the worst disaster to befall Iraq since the Buddhist Mongols took Baghdad and executed the Abbasid caliph in 1258. Millions of Ukrainians have been made refugees. But the Bush invasion and occupation set in train events that displaced 4 million Iraqis. And Iraq at that time only had a population of 26 million, while Ukraine has 44 million. Most Americans, and many even in the State Department don’t know that we did that to the Iraqis.

I’m intrigued that Bush himself may have some remorse for his actions. If so, he should forthrightly come out and say so. Who knows, maybe it will take some of the wind out of the K-Street War Lobby, which learned no lessons from Bush’s Himalayan error.

I’m an eclectic thinker and wouldn’t subscribe to a Realist orthodoxy in political science. But I have to say that I am persuaded by the argument of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that a Great Power only weakens itself by launching wars of aggression against small ramshackle countries like Iraq. They think a Great Power like the US should be focused like a laser on peer powers (e.g. Russia and China) and working out ways to avoid war with them and yet at the same time to preserve American power. When all is said and done, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars will have cost the US trillions of dollars it literally did not have. Most of that money was borrowed, taking the national debt to dangerous levels for the stability of the dollar. And what economic or geopolitical benefit accrued to Americans from those wars?

If the US had been focused on diplomacy with Russia rather than distracted in the Middle East quagmire for two decades, maybe the current morass in Ukraine, where the Washington eagle is risking nuclear war with a potentially wounded Russian bear, could have been avoided or its most dangerous edges softened.

By the way, Vladimir Putin constantly invokes the Bush invasion of Iraq as proof of American hypocrisy and bad faith when Washington criticizes his own “special operation” in Ukraine.

Nineteen years ago, when the George W. Bush regime unleashed its “Shock and Awe” campaign on Iraqi cities, there was more celebration in the US press than condemnation.

John T. Correll at Air Force Magazine wrote in 2003, , “The spectacular bombardment the world watched on television the first night was part of a broader attack that sent 1,000 strike sorties against military targets in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, and elsewhere.”

I wouldn’t myself use the word “spectacular” for the destruction rained down on civilian cities in a war of aggression. Sunsets are spectacular. This was horrifying.

Knight Ritter reported on March 22, “The first day of the shock and awe air campaign included 2,000 sorties, 1,000 of them by strike aircraft that attacked 1,500 aim points. Air Force B-52 bombers and U.S. and Royal Navy ships fired a total of 1,000 air- and sea-launched cruise missiles.”

Knight Ritter reported, “The Pentagon described “shock and awe” as one of the most ferocious barrages in history . . .”

They were boasting of the most “ferocious” barrage, on the civilian cities of Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk and others. No doubt the Russian Ministry of Defense is saying that its attacks on Kharkhiv and Mariupol are ferocious.

AFP wrote of the unprovoked attack on the Iraqi capital, “For nearly an hour, thunderous explosions rocked the ancient city of five million people, sending fireballs and thick smoke billowing skyward and triggering earth-shaking shock waves. There was no immediate word on casualties. But ambulances wailed through the streets even as the ordnance fell.”

Despite the ridiculous Pentagon propaganda about “precision strikes,” there were certainly civilian casualties. That is, the strikes were no doubt very precise, but unless the target was in the middle of nowhere rather than in a city of 5 million noncombatants, there was no way to prevent shrapnel from hitting civilians.

Livestories observes, “The ‘shock and awe’ campaign killed 7,186 Iraqi civilians in two months.”

Noreen Malone, writing at Slate last summer, interviewed Iraqi engineer Jamal Ali and quoted him as saying, “I call it really a dirty war because they want to get it over fast. So they targeting either the water stations, electric station, and all the essential things for the people, which is—that’s not good. Everywhere you live, at least there is something important for the allies to hit.”

Americans find the Russian public’s cheerleading for the brutality in Ukraine baffling.

Yet any US journalist who dared say in public that what the US had done to Iraq was a war crime would have been fired on the spot. In fact, Phil Donohue had his show on MSNBC canceled in the build-up to the war because the network executives knew he would be critical, and did not want grief from the savage US public. When NBC’s rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, dared say in a speech that the US press should not cover the war in a jingoistic way, she was summarily fired.

DALLAS, TEXAS – “Russia’s attack on Ukraine constitutes the gravest security crisis on the European continent since World War II. I join the international community in condemning Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine. The American government and people must stand in solidarity with Ukraine and the Ukrainian people as they seek freedom and the right to choose their own future. We cannot tolerate the authoritarian bullying and danger that Putin poses. Ukraine is our friend and democratic ally and deserves our full support during this most difficult time.”

George W. Bush actually came out and condemned “”unprovoked and unjustified invasion”!

The point isn’t just to decry his hypocrisy. Bush’s willful act of aggression, his invasion and eight-and-a-half-year military occupation of Iraq, has deeply hindered effective policy-making by the U.S. regarding Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Here are some of the ways it matters:

Bush filled the U.S. air waves with false assertions that Iraq had an active nuclear weapon program. His vice president, Dick Cheney, repeatedly said things like “We know he’s got chemicals and biological and we know he’s working on nuclear.” (May 19, 2002, NBC Meet the Press) and `But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons . . . Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”( August 26, 2002, Speech of Vice President Cheney at VFW 103rd National Convention.)

This, despite severe doubts expressed to him by seasoned CIA analysts, whom he pressured to give him the statements he wanted. When he couldn’t get them, he went to raw intelligence, i.e. any old garbage anyone ever said.

Bush himself could not get the CIA to agree that a phony document alleging Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger was legitimate, so he sourced it to British intelligence. The document was a fraud.

Bush and company were lying to get the war they wanted.

The problem with lying for policy reasons is that people come to view you as a liar. When it became apparent that Iraq did not have any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or even programs, the United States was humiliated before the world. But it was too late– America had 120,000 troops in Iraq, a society that was collapsing around them. The wounded society would be a maelstrom of instability in the Middle East for decades.

So when U.S. intelligence analysts began reporting this winter that they had excellent reason to believe that Vladimir Putin intended to invade the Ukraine, President Biden’s team could not get people to take this prospect seriously. The Ukrainian government castigated Washington for hyping the threat and engaging in hyperbole.

President Volodomyr Zelensky told Biden to cut it out, and that he was endangering the Ukraine economy with that wild talk.

Administration officials and spokespeople went blue in the face saying Putin was about to invade, and many in the US press replied, “You said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”

Maybe it would have made a difference at the margins if Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky had trusted the US intelligence and had swung into action to harden his military defenses.

George W. Bush laid the foundations for the disaster in the Ukraine by destroying American credibility on enemy intentions and capabilities.

Bush also vocally tried to spread around fascist ideas at odds with the United Nations charter such as “preemptive war” — i.e., launching an all-out war on another country in case they may at some point in the future come into conflict with you. Putin would say his Ukraine war is preemptive.

W. also issued the “Bush doctrine” making harboring “terrorists” a basis for war, which India and Pakistan immediately deployed against one another. Putin sees the democratically elected Zelensky government as hand in glove with the small Ukrainian far-right nationalist movement, which he categorizes as terrorists.

Putin did not need Bush’s example, of launching an aggressive war on a country that hadn’t attacked you, in order to plot against Ukraine. But the American ability to counter him and have it received with a straight face by the rest of the world was completely undermined by W.’s mendacious warmongering.

The elder Cheney was quoted as saying of the Republican House leadership, “It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years.” He released a statement saying, “I am deeply disappointed at the failure of many members of my party to recognize the grave nature of the January 6 attacks and the ongoing threat to our nation.”

I don’t want to be churlish. I don’t agree with the Cheneys about virtually anything in politics. But I do give credit to Rep. Liz Cheney for making a stand against the Trump-provoked 1/6 insurrection, and against the dishonesty and authoritarianism of Trump in general. You can relate to people as human beings, and on that level, you have to admire her courage. I wonder whether a Trump state like Wyoming will reelect her. There are lots of Republican representatives in Congress who agree with her, but who will not say so publicly because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Liz Cheney has more moral courage than they do, and she should be applauded for standing up and doing the right thing.

Her father, Dick Cheney, was there to give support to his daughter and to slap minority leader Kevin McCarthy around for his ass-kissing of Donald Trump. People keep saying McCarthy kissed the ring, but Trump is not the Pope and we know what McCarthy is really kissing. Dick Cheney was seen talking to Nancy Pelosi and other representatives. Except for Liz, all the others at the ceremony were Democrats. That’s how pusillanimous the Republicans are.

But when I saw Dick Cheney’s remark that “It’s not leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for 10 years,” I knew that I would have to be churlish after all.

The remark reminded me of what Jeffrey Goldberg wrote for the New Yorker in 2005 about former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who served in the Bush senior administration with Cheney, and who had advised against launching a war on Iraq. Scowcroft feared that Cheney had gotten himself surrounded by blinkered hawks like the Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis:

“Bernard Lewis says, ‘I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.’ ” Cheney, in particular, Scowcroft thinks, accepted Lewis’s view of Middle East politics. “The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney,” Scowcroft said. “I consider Cheney a good friend—I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

“Dick Cheney I don’t know any more.” That was 2005.

Now Dick Cheney says he doesn’t know the House Republican Party any more. Where will this ratcheting of unrecognizability end up? The Republicans are going farther right every decade, such that the previous decade’s leaders no longer know them. At this rate they’ll be Attila the Hun sacking what’s left of civilization by 2030.

So here comes the churlish part: Dick Cheney paved the way for Trump and the Capitol Insurrection.

I wrote for Salon about some of Cheney’s antics even once he left office. Cheney championed the use of torture by the U.S. government, and never recanted. Deliberate, in-your-face disregard for international human rights laws and norms has become a signature of the GOP. Cheney honed it to a fine art.

Cheney attacked Colin Powell, questioning his credentials as a Republican, and promoted Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the party (yes).

Then Rush Limbaugh turned into the tip of the spear for the presidency of Donald Trump. Limbaugh compared the Capitol Insurrection to the American Revolution. Cheney promoted Rush. This is what happens when you push the country into the arms of far right dittoheads.

As for Cheney’s view of Powell, that black and white view of the world, so that the first Black Republican Secretary of State is excommunicated for not being right-wing enough, is very Trumpian.

Colin Powell got tired of being kicked out, so during the Trump years he declared himself no longer a Republican.

Now it is Liz Cheney whose party credentials the other Republicans are questioning. Can Dick Cheney see how he personally paved the way for this situation?

Today’s Big Lie is that Trump won the 2020 election. The Big Lie in 2002 was that Iraq was “fairly close” to having a nuclear weapon. The author of that Big Lie? Dick Cheney.

When you get a party used to swallowing blatant falsehoods, eventually it will lose its grip on reality. Dick Cheney started the GOP down that road.

So, good for him that he stood with his daughter and with Nancy Pelosi to condemn the Trump conspiracy against America. But he is part of a longer-running such conspiracy that he had never renounced or apologized for, which makes his stand on Thursday ring a little hollow.

The difference between Rumsfeld and Powell was that Rumsfeld was not made the point man for the lies that the Bush administration told about Iraq’s so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” On February 5, 2003, Powell was sent by Bush and his Neocons to present the case for war to the United Nations. His litany of untruths and fantasies provoked, according to an eyewitness to whom I spoke shortly thereafter, laughter in the room. Laughter. This UN official told me he thought that the push for war must be over after that humiliation. I told him he did not know the Bushies, who were completely shameless.

Among the assertions Powell made that provoked such mirth was, “One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.”

Biological weapons labs require a clean room that interfaces with the outside world, where microbes are killed so that they don’t escape. You can’t put a biological weapons lab on a winnebago and drive around Iraq’s pot-holed streets, throwing the viruses and bacteria up onto the hazmat suits of the scientists who, without a clean room, would track them out into the world.

Powell also accused the secular, socialist one-party Baath state of Iraq, a notorious crusher of Muslim fundamentalist movements, of “harboring” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom he incorrectly called “al-Qaeda.” In fact, Saddam’s secret police had been instructed to track down and neutralize al-Zarqawi, whom they characterized as an associate of the “Saudi terrorist” Usama Bin Laden, of both of whom Saddam was afraid.

Such tissues of lies and transparent falsehoods were woven throughout the speech that the Neoconservatives in the Bush administration ordered Powell to read out to the world, provoking the laughter and humiliation. Ironically, it was precisely because Iraqis were not white that they could so easily be railroaded by Bush and the Neoconservatives. Britain could never have plausibly been set up that way. Powell should have resigned at that point, but did not.

This shitty task given to Powell, who was of Jamaican-American heritage, by his white colleagues recalls what James Baldwin wrote about African-American soldiers in World War II:

“The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them. You must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is called a “nigger” by his comrades-in-arms and his officers; who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he is subhuman (so much for the American male’s sexual security); who does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there, and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than he has ever been at home.”

In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, educated African-Americans had sometimes gravitated to the Republican Party, associating it with Lincoln and emancipation. That was back before the 1970s “Nixon strategy” of inducting into it the racist whites of the Deep South, who were bruised and sore at the federal legislation in the mid-1960s that ended their Jim Crow Apartheid. Of course, there was a lot of racism in the party (and in its Democratic rival) before the 1970s, too, but at that time it was spread around more rather than being concentrated in the GOP.

But the administration in which Powell served as secretary of state was already deeply entangled in systemic white supremacy. George W. Bush had won the South Carolina primaries when one of his PACs arranged for robocalls asking people if they would vote for Bush’s rival, John McCain, if they knew he had fathered an out-of-wedlock African-American child. The McCains had adopted a daughter from Bangladesh who appeared in family portraits and the racist PAC played on those images.

Bush cynically used Powell and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, for the purposes of tokenism. I remember seeing Bush challenged by a journalist on the lack of diversity in the GOP. Have you ever watched one of their national conventions? You need sunglasses for the glare. Bush replied that when he looked around the table at cabinet meetings he saw Powell and Rice.

Rumsfeld denied that there was a guerrilla war brewing in Iraq in 2003, comparing the situation there to race protests in Benton Harbor, Michigan. In other words, Iraqis were Black and like all Blacks, he implied, were given to a little mayhem, but it was nothing to worry about; their cities burned sometimes, but the white people would be all right.

Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney sold a house back in the 1960s with a covenant attached that it could not in turn be sold to an African-American. Cheney, when he was in Congress, had voted against Martin Luther King Day.

Having used up Powell and spit him out, the Republican party for the rest of his life lurched further and further to the right, meeting up with the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan in the end under Trump. Powell began abandoning the party in 2008, when he voted for Barack Obama because he did not feel that McCain was full-throated enough in combating the racist stereotyping of his rival, as a Muslim and as a radical. That McCain brought on Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who routinely sent out dog whistles to the “patriots” (i.e. white nationalists), must also have hurt.

And then the Republican Party swooned over Donald Trump, perhaps the most virulently racist president since Andrew Jackson, and that is saying something, since Andrew Johnson came after Jackson.

After the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Powell called for Trump to resign “like Nixon.” A couple of weeks later, as he fought the blood cancer that would kill him by leaving him unable to fight COVID even with a vaccination, Powell announced that he had left the Republican Party.

What he had not realized as a young man was that the party had left him long ago, as soon as Tricky Dick Nixon plotted to induct the white nationalists into the party, which they then gradually took over.

——

Bonus Video:

CNN: “Colin Powell: Trump Should ‘Just Do What Nixon Did And Step Down’ | TODAY”

Ali Jawad at the Anadolu Agency reports that the Baghdad government is seeking to generate 10 gigawatts of solar power for electricity by 2030, though it already has several projects in train that will come online much sooner.

I am struck by the irony that if only the US had invested massively in renewable energy and electric vehicles right from the 1970s when the climate crisis had become clear to scientists, Washington may not have felt the need to invade Iraq to unleash its hydrocarbon resources. When Ronald Reagan took back down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House, he was symbolically committing this country to generations of energy wars.

Iraq has signed an agreement with Masdar, the green energy company based in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, for a total of 2 gigawatts of solar power. The French energy giant Total will build another 1 gigawatt in solar capacity for Iraq (though most of its investments will be in the hydrocarbon sector), and PowerChina is committed to putting in 2 gigawatts of solar in Iraq.

Most recently, Iraq just inked a deal with a consortium spearheaded by Norwegian firm Scatec Solar to construct two solar power farms with a total capacity of about half a gigawatt.

Petroleum Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar announced the Scatec deal on Friday, tweeting, “We are proud of accomplishing this achievement, given the short tenure of the government, of signing the third solar power deal with Scatec, after Total and Masdar.”

Iraq has a power generation capacity of 19 gigawatts, but has an estimated need for 30 gigawatts. The shortfall has produced electricity blackouts and brownouts, especially in the summer, when it can be 122 degrees F. (50C). Iraqis left without electricity to run air conditioning in that kind of weather have been very unhappy, and the electricity shortages have been among the government failings that have provoked large youth demonstrations in the past couple of years, leading to the resignation of one prime minister and to a call by the present PM, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, for early elections, on Sunday, October 10.

Although Iraq is an oil giant, exporting about 3 million barrels a day, it does not have much natural gas. Petroleum is not typically used to power electricity plants but is rather mostly used for transportation, though it has other uses such petrochemicals, including fertilizer and plastics. Iraq is only 33rd in the world for natural gas production, and imports 4 billion cubic meters of gas from Iran every year.

The United States has exerted enormous pressure on Iraq to cease buying Iranian natural gas. Iraq’s Sunnis and the nativist Sadrist movement of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are unhappy about this dependence on Iran, as well, as are relatively secular-minded Iraqi nationalists like the current prime minister.

Saudi Arabia recently brought a 300 megawatt solar plant online in that country in just two years, and if Iraq wants to throw money at this problem it can certainly build a lot of solar farms quickly. In recent years Iraq’s oil revenues have been on the order of $60 billion a year, so the government has the money. The country is relatively thinly populated with a lot of desert and marginal land where the solar farms could be sited. Only about 32 acres are required for a 1 gigawatt solar farm.

Iraq could become a solar energy giant and could finally solve its electricity crisis, which originated when the Saddam Hussein Baathist government diverted money to the ruinous Iran-Iraq War and then the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, after which Iraq was under severe UN and US sanctions. During the American military occupation of Iraq, 2003-2011, US engineers and officials attempted to expand Iraq’s electricity production but often used American methods to repair electricity plants with which Iraqi technicians were unfamiliar. Iraqi guerrillas opposed to the US occupation also engaged in sabotage of public infrastructure.

Iraq still faces terrorist actions by ISIL, but solar farms are less vulnerable to sabotage than gas pipelines.

Then Vice President Dick Cheney spent the build-up to the Iraq War meeting with the CEOs of Big Oil, and BP was lobbying British PM Tony Blair not to allow it to get left out of the bonanza when the US opened Iraq’s oil fields (which had been under sanctions in the 1990s).

If even Iraq is turning to solar power, we can perhaps glimpse a future in which hydrocarbons will no longer be something the world goes to war over.

——

Bonus Video:

ANC: “Iraq and Total sign $27 billion energy projects deal | ANC”