[lbo-talk] the looting was official

[joanna bujes]

>WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq
>How and why the US encouraged looting in Iraq
>By Patrick Martin
>15 April 2003
>
>The widespread looting in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and other
>Iraqi cities, following the collapse of the Ba'athist regime of
>President Saddam Hussein, was not merely an incidental byproduct of
>the US military conquest of Iraq. It was deliberately encouraged and
>fostered by the Bush administration and the Pentagon for definite
>political and economic reasons.
>
>Thousands took part in the looting in Baghdad which began April 9,
>the day the Hussein government ceased to function in the capital
>city. Not only were government ministries targeted, and the homes of
>the Ba'athist elite, but public institutions vital to Iraqi society,
>including hospitals, schools and food distribution centers. Equipment
>and parts were stripped from power plants, thus delaying the
>restoration of electricity to the city of 5 million people.
>
>Perhaps the most devastating loss for the Iraqi people is the
>ransacking of the National Museum, the greatest trove of
>archeological and historical artifacts in the Middle East. The 28
>galleries of the huge museum were picked clean by looters who made
>off with more than 50,000 irreplaceable artifacts, relics of past
>civilizations dating back 5,000 years. The museum's entire card
>catalog was destroyed, making it impossible even to identify what has
>been lost.
>
>The US military stood by and permitted the ransacking of the museum,
>an incalculable blow to Iraqi and world culture, just as they allowed
>and even encouraged the looting of hospitals, universities, libraries
>and government social service buildings. The occupation forces
>protected only the Ministry of Oil, with its detailed inventory of
>Iraqi oil reserves, as well as the Ministry of Interior, the
>headquarters of the ousted regime's secret police.
>
>The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a
>statement in Geneva declaring that the relief agency was "profoundly
>alarmed by the chaos currently prevailing in Baghdad and other parts
>of Iraq." The medical system in Baghdad "has virtually collapsed,"
>the ICRC warned, and it reminded the US and Britain that they were
>obliged under international law to guarantee the basic security of
>the Iraqi population.
>
>General Tommy Franks, the overall commander of all US and British
>forces in Iraq, issued an order to unit commanders that specifically
>prohibited the use of force to prevent looting. This instruction was
>only modified after several days because of mounting protests by
>Iraqi citizens over the destruction of their social infrastructure.
>
>The New York Times reported one such protest by an Iraqi man who was
>standing guard at Al Kindi hospital in Baghdad. Haider Daoud "said he
>was angry at his encounters with American soldiers in the
>neighborhood, mentioning one marine who he said he had begged to
>guard the hospital two days ago. 'He told me the same words: He can't
>protect the hospital,' Mr. Daoud said. 'A big army like the USA army
>can't protect the hospital?'"
>
>The role of the US military went beyond simply standing by, and
>extended to actually encouraging and facilitating looting. According
>to a report in the Washington Post, after the US military reopened
>two bridges across the Tigris River to civilian traffic, "the
>immediate result was that looters raced across and extended their
>plundering to the Planning Ministry and other buildings that had been
>spared."
>
>Sweden's largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an interview
>April 11 with a Swedish researcher of Middle Eastern ancestry who had
>gone to Iraq to serve as a human shield. Khaled Bayoumi told the
>newspaper, "I happened to be right there just as the American troops
>encouraged people to begin the plundering."
>
>He described how US soldiers shot security guards at a local
>government building on Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris,
>and then "blasted apart the doors to the building." Next, according
>to Bayoumi, "from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging
>people to come close to them."
>
>At first, he said, residents were hesitant to come out of their homes
>because anyone who had tried to cross the street in the morning had
>been shot. "Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and
>take what they wanted in the building," Bayoumi continued. "The word
>spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only
>300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the
>tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a
>neighboring building, and the plundering continued there.
>
>"I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They
>did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many
>had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering
>spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north.
>There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one that
>watched with disgust."
>
>Kirkuk and Mosul
>
>Similar scenes were reported in Kirkuk and Mosul, the two large
>northern cities with ethnically mixed populations. There the looting
>of public buildings has direct political overtones, since the
>destruction of property deeds and other government records will make
>it easier to conduct ethnic cleansing of Arab or Turkmen populations
>by the Kurdish forces that now dominate the region, in alliance with
>US Special Forces.
>
>In Kirkuk, the site of Iraq's richest oilfield, the Patriotic Union
>of Kurdistan has already installed its officials in the homes of
>former Ba'ath Party leaders. US soldiers of the 173rd Airborne
>Brigade seized control of an Iraqi air base but permitted looters to
>leave the base with their stolen goods, even opening the gates to
>allow them to pass.
>
>There was no effort to halt arson at the city's cotton plant, or at
>office buildings, but US troops quickly occupied facilities of the
>North Oil Company, the state-owned firm that manages the huge
>northern oilfields. Colonel William Mayville, commander of the
>brigade, dispatched troops to three key oil facilities, while US
>Special Forces stood watch over four gas-oil separation plants.
>Mayville told the American media that he wanted to send the message,
>"Hey, don't screw with the oil."
>
>In Mosul, northern Iraq's largest city, hospitals, universities,
>laboratories, hotels, clinics and factories were all sacked and
>stripped of their goods. The 700 US troops sent to Mosul remained
>outside the city for more than a day while the theft and vandalism
>continued, leading to widespread complaints from city
>residents-reported even in the American press-that the US was
>permitting the pillaging.
>
>Save the oil-and nothing else
>
>Robert Fisk, writing in the British newspaper the Independent April
>14, noted a pattern in the response of American forces to looting in
>Baghdad, which, he said, "shows clearly what the US intends to
>protect." He continued: "After days of arson and pillage, here's a
>short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed
>mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of
>Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the
>Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry
>of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to
>prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq's history
>in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the
>northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.
>
>"The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi
>ministries that remain untouched-and untouchable-because tanks and
>armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and
>outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so
>important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of
>course-with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq-and
>the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraq's most valuable
>asset-its oilfields and, even more important, its massive
>reserves-are safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters,
>and safe to be shared, as Washington almost certainly intends, with
>American oil companies."
>
>Such concerns were already apparent in the actions of the US military
>at the very beginning of the war. The same General Franks who
>instructed US troops to take no action against looting in Baghdad or
>other cities gave the order March 20 for the First Marine
>Expeditional Force to invade Iraq a day early, because of reports,
>later proven largely false, that Iraqi troops were setting fire to
>the country's southern oilfields at Rumaila.
>
>The Centcom chief discarded previous operational plans and
>potentially put many soldiers' lives at risk by acting before the air
>bombardment had begun in order to safeguard the real objective of the
>US war, Iraq's huge oil reserves.
>
>The politics of plunder
>
>The most striking aspect of the outbreak of looting was the
>nonchalant attitude of US government officials in Washington. At a
>Pentagon press conference Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald
>Rumsfeld denounced the media for exaggerating the extent of chaos,
>and argued that the looting was a natural and perhaps even healthy
>expression of pent-up hostility to the old regime. "It's untidy,"
>Rumsfeld said. "And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to
>make mistakes and commit crimes."
>
>There is no doubt the Bush administration would take a less
>charitable view of the "freedom" to loot if mobs were breaking into
>corporate offices in downtown Houston, Washington or New York City.
>
>As in every action of the Bush administration, personal greed and
>profit-gouging are an important aspect. The ransacking of Iraqi
>government facilities, added to the devastation caused by American
>bombing, is part of the process of demolishing the large state-run
>sector of Iraq's economy, to the benefit of American companies.
>Already contracts have been awarded to private American firms to
>provide new school books, replace looted medical equipment, even
>train a new Iraqi police force.
>
>In the Orwellian language of New York Times columnist William Safire,
>the US aim is to "introduce free enterprise and the rule of law"-by
>means of a criminal invasion, followed by widespread looting. This
>will set the stage for a much bigger theft: the privatization of
>Iraq's vast oil resources and their exploitation, directly or
>indirectly, by US and British oil companies.
>
>There is more at stake, however, than rank hypocrisy or an appetite
>for Iraq's oil wealth. The looting in Iraq directly serves the
>political interests of American imperialism in cementing its
>domination of the conquered country.
>
>The Bush administration is seeking to encourage the emergence of a
>new ruling elite in Iraq, formed from the most rapacious, reactionary
>and selfish elements, which will serve as a semi-criminal comprador
>force entirely subservient to the United States. The acquisition of
>property through the theft of Iraqi state assets serves to bind these
>elements to the US occupation forces by their own economic
>self-interest. As one Army officer told the Times, as he watched the
>looting approvingly, "This is the new income redistribution program."
>
>There is recent precedent for such an operation. The first Bush
>administration proceeded in the same fashion when it encouraged the
>formation of a new capitalist elite in Russia out of layers of the
>Soviet-era mafia and former Stalinist bureaucrats who acquired state
>assets by wholesale theft. What US imperialism promoted in the 1990s
>in eastern Europe and the former USSR under the label "shock
>therapy", it is now applying in the aftermath of its "shock and awe"
>devastation of Iraq.
>
>See Also:
>The stage-managed events in Baghdad's Firdos Square: image-making,
>lies and the "liberation" of Iraq
>[12 April 2003]
>US barbarism in Iraq
>The way forward in the struggle against imperialist war
>[11 April 2003]
>Liberation by murder: Baghdad falls to American invasion
>[10 April 2003]
>Archaeologists warn of Iraq war's devastating consequences
>[8 March 2003]