Iraqis Rise Up Against 16 Years of ‘Made in the USA’ Corruption
![Iraqis Rise Up Against Years of Made in the USA Corruption](https://english.hathalyoum.net/images/breakingnews.png)
As Americans sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, Iraqis were mourning more than
60 people killed by police and soldiers on Thursday in Baghdad, Najaf and Nasiriyah.
Nearly 400 protesters have been killed since hundreds of thousands of people
took to the streets at the beginning of October. Human rights groups have described
the crisis in Iraq as a "bloodbath,"
Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi has announced he will resign, and Sweden has opened
an
investigation
Swedish citizen, for crimes against humanity.
According to Al
Jazeera
seen as corrupt and serving foreign powers while many Iraqis languish in poverty
without jobs, healthcare or education." Only
36%
the public sector under U.S. occupation, its tattered remnants still employ
more people than the private sector, which fared even worse under the violence
and chaos of the U.S.’s militarized shock doctrine.
Western reporting conveniently casts Iran as the dominant foreign player in
Iraq today. But while Iran has gained enormous influence and is one
of the targets
still the former exiles that the
U.S. flew in
empty pockets to fill" as a taxi-driver in Baghdad told a Western reporter
at the time. The real causes of Iraq’s unending political and economic crisis
are these former exiles’ betrayal of their country, their endemic corruption
and the U.S.’s illegitimate role in destroying Iraq’s government, handing it
over to them and maintaining them in power for 16 years.
The corruption of both U.S. and Iraqi officials during the U.S. occupation
is well
documented
Development Fund for Iraq using previously seized Iraqi assets, money left in
the UN’s "oil for food" program and new Iraqi oil revenues. An audit
by KPMG and a special inspector general found that a huge proportion of that
money was stolen or embezzled by U.S. and Iraqi officials.
Lebanese customs officials found $13 million in cash aboard Iraqi-American
interim Interior Minister Falah Naqib’s plane. Occupation crime boss Paul Bremer
maintained a $600 million slush fund with no paperwork. An Iraqi government
ministry with 602 employees collected salaries for 8,206. A U.S. Army officer
doubled the price on a contract to rebuild a hospital, and told the hospital’s
director the extra cash was his "retirement package." A U.S. contractor
billed $60 million on a $20 million contract to rebuild a cement factory, and
told Iraqi officials they should just be grateful the U.S. had saved them from
Saddam Hussein. A U.S. pipeline contractor charged $3.4 million for non-existent
workers and "other improper charges." Out of 198 contracts reviewed
by the inspector general, only 44 had documentation to confirm the work was
done.
U.S. "paying agents" distributing money for projects around Iraq
pocketed millions of dollars in cash.The inspector general only investigated
one area, around Hillah, but found $96.6 million dollars unaccounted for in
that area alone. One American agent could not account for $25 million, while
another could only account for $6.3 million out of $23 million. The "Coalition
Provisional Authority" used agents like these all over Iraq and simply
"cleared" their accounts when they left the country. One agent who
was challenged came back the next day with $1.9 million in missing cash.
The U.S. Congress also budgeted $18.4 billion for reconstruction in Iraq in
2003, but apart from $3.4 billion diverted to “security,” less than $1 billion
of it was ever disbursed. Many Americans believe U.S. oil companies have made
out like bandits in Iraq, but that’s not true either. The plans that Western
oil companies drew up with Vice President Cheney
in 2001
"production sharing agreements" (PSAs) worth tens of billions per
year was exposed as a
smash and grab raid
Finally, in 2009, Iraq’s leaders and their U.S. puppet-masters gave up on PSAs
(for the time being…) and invited foreign oil companies to bid on "technical
service agreements" (TSAs) worth
$1 to $6
years later, production has only increased to 4.6
million
million
foreign firms with TSAs earn only $1.4 billion, and the largest contracts are
not held by U.S. firms. China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) is earning
about $430 million in 2019; BP earns $235 million; Malaysia’s Petronas $120
million; Russia’s Lukoil $105 million; and Italy’s ENI $100 million. The bulk
of Iraq’s oil revenues still flow through the Iraq National Oil Company (INOC)
to the corrupt U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.
Another legacy of the U.S. occupation is Iraq’s convoluted election system
and the undemocratic horse-trading by which the executive branch of the Iraqi
government is selected. The 2018
election
plus 61 other independent parties. Ironically, this is similar to the contrived,
multi-layered political
system
after the Iraqi revolt of 1920.
Today, this corrupt system keeps dominant power in the hands of a cabal of
corrupt Shiite and Kurdish politicians who spent many years in exile in the
West, working with Ahmed Chalabi’s U.S.-based Iraqi National Congress (INC),
Ayad Allawi’s U.K.-based Iraqi National Accord (INA) and various factions of
the Shiite Islamist Dawa Party. Voter turnout has dwindled from 70% in 2005
to 44.5% in 2018.
Ayad Allawi and the INA were the instrument for the CIA’s hopelessly bungled
military coup
of the plot on a closed-circuit radio handed over by one of the conspirators
and arrested all the CIA’s agents inside Iraq on the eve of the coup. It executed
thirty military officers and jailed a hundred more, leaving the CIA with no
human intelligence from inside Iraq.
Ahmed Chalabi and the INC filled that vacuum with a web of lies that warmongering
U.S. officials fed into the echo chamber of the U.S. corporate media to justify
the invasion of Iraq. On June 26th 2002, the INC sent a letter to the Senate
Appropriations Committee to lobby for more U.S. funding. It identified its "Information
Collection Program" as the primary source for 108
stories
and links to Al-Qaeda in U.S. and international newspapers and magazines.
After the invasion, Allawi and Chalabi became leading members of the U.S. occupation’s
Iraqi Governing Council. Allawi was appointed Prime Minister of Iraq’s interim
government in 2004, and Chalabi was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Oil
Minister in the transitional government in 2005. Chalabi failed to win a seat
in the 2005 National Assembly election, but was later elected to the assembly
and remained a powerful figure until his death in 2015. Allawi and the INA are
still involved in the horse-trading for senior positions after every election,
despite never getting more than 8% of the votes – and only 6% in 2018.
These are the senior ministers of the new Iraqi government formed after the
2018 election, with some details of their Western backgrounds:
Adil Abdul-Mahdi – Prime Minister (France). Born in Baghdad in 1942. Father was a government
minister under the British-backed monarchy. Lived in France from 1969-2003,
earning a Ph.D in politics at Poitiers. In France, he became a follower of Ayatollah
Khomeini and a founding member of the Iran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in 1982. Was SCIRI’s representative in Iraqi Kurdistan
for a period in the 1990s. After the invasion, he became Finance Minister in
Allawi’s interim government in 2004; Vice President from 2005-11; Oil Minister
from 2014-16.
Barham Salih – President (U.K. & U.S.). Born in Sulaymaniyah in 1960. Ph.D. in Engineering
(Liverpool – 1987). Joined Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in 1976. Jailed
for 6 weeks in in 1979 and left Iraq for the U.K. PUK representative in London
from 1979-91; head of PUK office in Washington from 1991-2001. President of
Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) from 2001-4; Deputy PM in interim Iraqi government
in 2004; Planning Minister in transitional government in 2005; Deputy PM from
2006-9; Prime Minister of KRG from 2009-12.
Mohamed
Ali Alhakim
in 1952. M.Sc. (Birmingham), Ph.D. in Telecom Engineering (Southern California),
Professor at Northeastern University in Boston 1995-2003. After the invasion,
he became Deputy Secretary-General and Planning Coordinator in the Iraqi Governing
Council; Communications Minister in interim government in 2004; Planning Director
at Foreign Ministry, and Economic Adviser to VP Abdul-Mahdi from 2005-10; and
UN Ambassador from 2010-18.
Fuad Hussein – Finance Minister & Deputy PM (Netherlands & France). Born in Khanaqin
(majority Kurdish town in Diyala province) in 1946. Joined Kurdish Student Union
and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) as a student in Baghdad. Lived in Netherlands
from 1975-87; incomplete Ph.D. in International Relations; married to Dutch
Christian woman. Appointed deputy head of Kurdish Institute in Paris in 1987.
Attended Iraqi exile political conferences in Beirut (1991), New York (1999)
& London (2002). After the invasion, he became an adviser at the Education
Ministry from 2003-5; and Chief of Staff to Masoud Barzani, President of the
KRG, from 2005-17.
Thamir Ghadhban – Oil Minister & Deputy PM (U.K.). Born in Karbala in 1945. B.Sc. (UCL)
& M.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering (Imperial College, London). Joined Basra
Petroleum Co. in 1973. Director General of Engineering and then Planning at
Iraqi Oil Ministry from 1989-92. Imprisoned for 3 months and demoted in 1992,
but did not leave Iraq, and was reappointed Director General of Planning in
2001. After the invasion, he was promoted to CEO of Oil Ministry; Oil Minister
in the interim government in 2004; elected to National Assembly in 2005 and
served on 3-man committee that drafted the failed
oil law
Major
General (Retd) Najah Al-Shammari
in Baghdad in 1967. The only Sunni Arab among senior ministers. Military officer
since 1987. Has lived in Sweden and may have been member of Allawi’s INA before
2003. Senior officer in U.S.-backed Iraqi special forces recruited from INC,
INA and Kurdish Peshmerga from 2003-7. Deputy commander of "counterterrorism"
forces 2007-9. Residency in Sweden 2009-15. Swedish citizen since 2015. Reportedly
under investigation for benefits fraud in Sweden, and now for crimes
against humanity
In 2003, the U.S. and its allies unleashed unspeakable, systematic violence
against the people of Iraq. Public health experts reliably estimated that the
first three years of war and hostile military occupation cost about 650,000
Iraqi lives
of formerly Western-based Shiite and Kurdish politicians in the fortified Green
Zone in Baghdad, with control over Iraq’s oil revenues. As we can see, many
of the ministers in the U.S.-appointed interim government in 2004 are still
ruling Iraq today.
U.S. forces deployed ever-escalating violence against Iraqis who resisted the
invasion and hostile military occupation of their country. In 2004, the U.S.
began training a large force of Iraqi
police commandos
recruited from SCIRI’s Badr Brigade militia as death
squads in Baghdad
reign of terror
as 1,800 victims brought to the Baghdad morgue each month. An Iraqi human rights
group examined
3,498 bodies
people arrested by Interior Ministry forces.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency tracked "enemy-initiated
attacks"
U.S. and allied military targets, not “sectarian” attacks on civilians. But
the U.S. officials used a narrative of “sectarian violence” to blame the work
of U.S.-trained Interior Ministry death squads on independent Shiite militias
like Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi
Army
The government Iraqis are protesting against today is still led by the same
gang of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles who wove a web of lies to stage manage the
invasion of their own country in 2003, and then hid behind the walls of the
Green Zone while U.S. forces and death squads slaughtered
their people to make the country "safe" for their corrupt government.
More recently they again acted as cheerleaders as American bombs,
rockets
and artillery reduced most of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, to rubble, after twelve
years of occupation, corruption and savage repression drove
its people
revealed that more than 40,000
civilians
of fighting the Islamic State, the U.S. has reestablished a huge military base
for over 5,000 U.S. troops at Al-Asad airbase in Anbar province.
The cost of rebuilding Mosul, Fallujah and other cities and towns is conservatively
estimated at $88
billion
of over $100 billion, the Iraqi government has allocated no money at all for
reconstruction. Foreign, mostly wealthy Arab countries, have pledged $30 billion,
including just $3 billion from the U.S., but very little of that has been, or
may ever be, delivered.
The history of Iraq since 2003 has been a never-ending disaster for its people.
Many of this new generation of Iraqis who have grown up amid the ruins and chaos
the U.S. occupation left in its wake believe they have nothing to lose but their
blood and their lives, as they take
to the streets
sovereignty.
The bloody handprints of U.S. officials and their Iraqi puppets all over this
crisis should stand as a dire warning to Americans of the predictably catastrophic
results of an illegal foreign policy based on sanctions, coups, threats and
the use of military force to try to impose the will of deluded U.S. leaders
on people all over the world.
Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood
On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
independent journalist and a researcher for CODEPINK.