Ethnic Cleansing Stops Iraqi Violence
I have no idea how reputable this is but it seemed worth posting.
“By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left,” geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.
“Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.
Iraq Private Sector Falters; Rolls of Government Soar
Despite early attempts by the U.S. to turn Iraq into a neoliberal utopia, where government is a hollow instrument used merely to transfer wealth from the masses to corporations through taxes and subsidies, the abysmal failure of this model has led to a huge increase in government jobs, according to the New York Times.
The Times is also right to point out that the impetus behind this policy isn’t completely economic: one advantage of government-based jobs is that they don’t necessarily have an incentive to cut costs, which, in the case of private corporations, creates large swathes of unemployed who have historically been the largest economic bloc to join up with paramilitary brigades like al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The irony of course being that the so-called “free market” is perhaps the biggest instigator of insurgency in Iraq.
Iraq as Holiday Destination
The Mirror:
Having a fantastic time, scorching weather and friendly locals… wish you were here in sunny Basra? It might sound like the sort of postcard you would only find in a joke shop but holidaying in Iraq’s second largest city might not be as ridiculous as you think.
Absurd. (Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
Has the “Surge” in Iraq Worked?
Immanuel Wallerstein writing for the Monthly Review:
I could go on—about Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, the Gulf states. The fact is that the United States is decidedly weaker everywhere in the Middle East in the eighteen months since the surge began. Has it not been in part, maybe in large part, precisely because of the surge? The Middle East today is like a large geopolitical balloon. If you squeeze it at one point, the air will simply displace itself to another point. And the balloon is getting more fragile all the time. It is on the verge of bursting.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Believing is Seeing
Errol Morris in the New York Times’ photo-op:
I have asked myself how this controversy over a photograph became international news. Clearly, there are many reasons. But at the center of them all is this question: Are we on the brink of another war? I remind myself that the war in Iraq started with bellicose posturing and photographs. At the United Nations, Colin Powell displayed several photographs of Iraqi sites showing incontrovertible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, we now know that this incontrovertible visual evidence was false. We don’t need advanced digital tools to mislead, to misdirect or to confuse. All we need is a willingness to uncritically believe.
Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion
Naomi Klein writing for The Nation:
One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.
This development seems hardly surprising given U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East over the past several decades, but surely such an endeavor might make suspect the claim that we went to fight in Iraq in order to liberate them and to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction, etc. But of course that would be ludicrous.
Moreover, it strikes me as impossible to call the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq as anything other than “imperial,” but that can’t be, we hate empires! After all, the U.S. was born out of anticolonial struggle. Perhaps something to remember over fourth of July weekend.