Jay Garner King of Iraq—For a Day!
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003
The Reason for the War
The war is nominally about liberating Iraqis from an odious monster and to make the world safe from Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). To do so, the US has a policy of “decisive force”, a euphemism for blasting any resistance from the face of the earth—in short, using WMDs! It is a great policy for arms dealers, which many of the US leadership are, or have connexions with. With such a policy, though, it is difficult to avoid civilian casualties, described by the euphemism of “collateral damage”, and that rather defeats the central propaganda message of liberation, or saving the people from Saddam.
Of course, no one, except a few barstool intellectuals, ever thought the invasion was about anything other than war profiteering and, particularly, oil profiteering. With only ten days of the war gone, the Bush administration was not even trying to hide the greed and rapacity in its war adventure, but, even so, selected audiences cheered Bush heartily, every time he gave a patriotic speech. We also heard that two thirds of Americans supported the war, even though the true objectives were utterly in the open. Either Americans love to be fooled, or the pollsters were giving Bush what he wanted to hear.
One expects that democracy is effected by replacing an unelected tyrant with an elected government. Bush has no intention of letting any Iraqis have a say in Iraq, elected or otherwise. A former US general, and active arms manufacturer, Jay Garner, has been appointed to oversee postwar Iraq. He is president of an arms company that provides technical support to missile systems being used in the US invasion of the country. Garner is president of Virginia-based S Y Coleman. Jack Tyler, an S Y Coleman senior vice-president, confirmed that Garner still held his position at the company.
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Garner joined S Y Technologies after leaving the US army. S Y Coleman is, since 2002, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications. Garner was involved in the Patriot’s deployment in Israel. The Ministry of Defence has confirmed that a Patriot missile hit a British Tornado in a “friendly fire” incident. S Y Coleman has also worked on the Arrow missile defence system, deployed in Israel, and is involved in the US national missile defence programme.
Experts in Arab affairs and humanitarian aid are already opposed to US administration of Iraq if it comes outside UN authority. They say that appointing an American in the arms trade is the worst scenario for running the country after the war. Phil Bloomer of Oxfam said:
Iraqis should run Iraq, and in the transition the UN should be in charge, not the US. A worst case scenario would be to put in charge of Iraqi reconstruction someone from the US or UK who was linked to the arms or oil industries.
Defence analyst David Armstrong of the Washington-based National Security News Service says:
It seems inappropriate for somebody to step into a humanitarian and administrative role from a company with a role in providing equipment which, albeit defensive, is vital to the success of the US operation.
King of Iraq
General Tommy Franks will be the US military governor in Iraq, but what title would Jay Garner have. King, probably, but the 64-year-old would prefer “co-ordinator of civilian administration”. That’s the bland description of his job heading the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), the Pentagon agency already set up and preparing to govern Iraq’s 23 million people, and administer the lucrative business of reconstruction.
Garner is closely linked with the hawks centred on US Defense Secretary Donald (von) Rumsfeld, who has given him his latest job, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, who are as keen to bypass the UN after the war as they were before it. He has been involved in formulating their more controversial defence policies, including the US national missile defence system that has done much to undermine the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty. The company he now works for is a missile specialist and makes money from systems deployed in Israel and by coalition forces in Iraq.
Garner was involved in Provide Comfort, an assistance effort to northern Iraq Kurds mandated by UN Security Council resolutions. The army, he said, was the merciful instrument in shaping future humanitarian operations. As King of Iraq, Garner will not be under any such a mandate from the UN. Relations between Garner and the UN are strained, as was clear at frosty meeting earlier this month, when he explained his role before departing for Kuwait. A UN official said:
There was no coordination or consultation. That would be inappropriate from the UN’s point of view because its operations are autonomous. We do not need to consult with the US. But also from the US position, because it is common knowledge that they want to go it alone without the UN.
Powell [pro-UN Secretary of State] has already lost the battle. It is clear that Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest have the ascendancy and they think, having gone it alone in the war, they should get the benefit of being seen as liberators. Garner is their man. He is a true believer.
Beyond the strong Pentagon links of an ex-military man, Garner’s political constituency is with the Republican right. His contacts with the Vice President go back to Provide Comfort, when Cheney was defence secretary to the first Bush, while his relationship with Rumsfeld has been sealed through recent close co-operation on missile defence policy.
Companies outside the US believe that the Republicans want to carve up reconstruction contracts among themselves. In the US, contracts have been awarded for the “reconstruction” of parts of Iraq that have yet to be destroyed. A subsidiary of Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, has recently secured a deal to put out oil well fires. Halliburton, and Bechtel, another company with strong Republican links, were on a US-only shortlist for a major $900m reconstruction contract that will be overseen by Garner’s office. The war is not being fought for the Iraqis’ benefit, or for the benefit of the US generally, but for the benefit of the corporate sponsors of the US Republican party.
It is an ethical issue: if your country, or your government, was responsible for the destruction of a large part of Iraq’s infrastructure, do you have a duty to help rebuild it? If you do, should you profit out of it? Unlike the corporate rapacity of the US where all the contracts are handed to pro-Bush companies that will squeeze every cent out of war-torn Iraq, many British businesspeople think it distasteful—while people in Iraq are still being liberated by death—to think of profiting when they have all been thus liberated. Spokespeople for the UK City and for industry in the UK are keeping quiet about why and how British business should get involved in reconstructing Iraq, but they seem uncomfortable about the whole scheme being applied by the Republican cartel. The head of one of a large UK contractors and service providers said:
We feel very uncomfortable with the idea that we’re in a race to get hold of something valuable. It seems too much like ambulance-chasing. We are not desperate to get involved in reconstruction.
A UK stockbroker added:
If you were against the war in the first place, then maybe the right view to take is that you stay out of the reconstruction as well.
A spokeperson for the UK DTI, which has failed to get any response from the US ORHA, said:
We have worries about this. There is a huge row going on behind the scenes about Halliburton and Bechtel winning deals, and we can’t talk to the people on the ground.
The US military-industrial complex has control over which contracts are handed to whom. Moreover, how can Iraq afford to pay? The country is already bankrupt. The answer for the US is that it will grab oil. The Texan cowboil gang were only ever interested in this one thing. They have decided, contrary to Lincoln’s dictum, that not only can you fool all of the people all of the time, but their US constituents want to be fooled. Give them a suitable patriotic cover, and you can admit the truth anyway. They’ll ignore it! Yippee!
Garner’s Love of Israel
There are wider concerns, particularly Garner’s work with Rumsfeld, his commercial activities and views on Israel. He shares the strong pro-Israeli views of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle and the Republican hawks. Rumsfeld headed the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which reported to the US Congress in 1998. The Rumsfeld Commission singled out three countries threatening the US with ballistic missile development—North Korea, Iran and Iraq—the latter day axis of evil that underpins the US’s premptive strategy.
Garner served on Rumsfeld II, which effectively extended missile defence into space. He was involved in the deployment of Patriot missiles in Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, and was commander of the US Army Space and Strategic Defense Command from 1994 to 1996.
When Patriot’s effectiveness was questioned at a 1992 congressional hearing, Garner dismissed critics, saying 40 per cent of engagements in Israel and 70 per cent in Saudi Arabia were successful. But, Ted Postol of MIT who gave evidence at the hearing, said:
We believe that these figures are too high and that it may be the case that zero engagements in Israel were effective. Garner may have been involved in covering up the deficiencies of the system.
Garner is now commercially involved in the latest version of Patriot, currently deployed in Iraq.
Garner’s links with Israel are not limited to missile programmes. In October 2000, he put his name to a statement that said:
Israel had exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority.
The organisation behind the statement was the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which includes Cheney and Richard Perle, another arch-hawk, among its advisers past and present. Only last week Perle resigned from the chairmanship of a key Pentagon committee advising Rumsfeld, after it emerged that he had struck a deal with bankrupt telecoms company Global Crossing under which he stood to receive up to $725,000. The deal is being reviewed by a government group that includes Defense Department officials.
Washington will decide whether the King of Baghdad wears a US or a UN crown. US seems the only possibility.
First Days of the King
American efforts to foist new rulers on the people of Iraq are immediately grotesque.
- In some cities, US troops have sparked demonstrations by imposing officials from the old Saddam Hussein regime.
- In others, they have evicted new anti-Saddam administrators who have local backing.
- They have antagonized religious leaders as well as politicians.
In the Shia suburbs of Baghdad, they arrested a powerful cleric, Mohammed Fartousi al-Sadr, who had criticised the US presence. In Falluja, an overwhelmingly Sunni town, they detained two popular imams. All three men were released within days, but local people saw the detentions as deliberate warnings that Iraqis should do as Uncle Sam Garner tells them.
Donald Rumsfeld smugly explained democracy as a competition in which rival politicians try to “garner” support. In Iraq, it means support Garner, or you are out. Garner has hardly been impartial in his plans for Iraq’s government. He held a conference of 300 Iraqis in Baghdad but excluded almost every group with an organised following. US failure to hold broad-based consultations at central and local levels is provoking resistance, sometimes armed. In response, US troops have used excessive force, raising tension. Ten people died in Mosul when soldiers flred at crowds of protesters on successive days in mid-April just after the war. A few weeks later, in Falluja, the death toll from American shootings was at least 16.
The massacre in Falluja was illustrative. The town was quiet for two weeks after Iraqi troops and local Ba’ath pariy leaders fled at the end of the invasion. The local imams halted the looting and got much of the stolen property returned. A new mayor arranged for schools to reopen and persuaded police to return to work. All of this was before the US military arrived. Then they did—arrested imams, put up roadblocks and occupied a school—completely ignoring what the local leaders had done already.
In Baghdad, which had obvious security problems after Saddam’s forces vanished, and plenty of US battalions to provide it, residents asked why US forces did so little to halt the looting. The US army failed when it was needed and over-reacted when it was not. The US seems only happy when applying “overwhelming force”.
The contrast with Afghanistan is sharp. For months Afghans pleaded for the US to deploy international peacekeepers beyond Kabul to cities where warlords held sway or were fighting for power. The US refused. In Iraq, with no warlords and where people feel they have the expertise to run the country themselves, the US insists on moving in and staying irrespective of local desires and abilities. It has excluded Iraq’s best known groups from consultations on forming a central government. The Islamic Da’wa party, founded in 1957, and repressed by Saddam in the early 1980s, was not invited. Nor was the Iraqi Communist party, which also lost thousands of its activists in Saddam’s prisons. Both opposed the US attack. This is democracy for wogs—US style!
Washington’s biggest omission is its refusal to make overtures to Iraq’s clergy. The Shia Muslims in particular are enjoving a strong revival and cannot be pushed aside. It is not too late for the UN to play a role. There is no need for foreign troops. Iraqis have shown a high degree of post war unity and can provide their own security. The much predicted clashes of Sunnis and Shi’ites, or Kurds and Arabs have not happened. But the UN should come in, with a short-term mandate, to convene a genuinely representative conference of Iraqis which would choose an interim government and an assembly to draft a constitution. Only the UN can give legitimacy and impartiality to this process.
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