James Petras

James Petras doesn’t mince words in the concluding paragraphs of his chilling article entitled “The Destruction of a Civilization”:

The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations.

This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.

Just as I come to believe I have sunk to a denial-less cynicism of my country’s capacity for military amorality/immorality, there is another level of shock and awe. An even more frightening and embittering revelation of this nation’s capacity and willingness to commit both overt and covert war crimes whether by bribed proxy or first hand, with an ends-justifies-the-means, might-makes-right arrogant ruthlessness.

The destruction of Iraq as a society and functional infrastructure (probably with a saner health care system than ours even under a repressive Saddam Hussein, who, incidentally, was enabled by us at one point, with Donald Rumsfeld as prime liaison, not all that long ago) … to repeat: the thorough destruction of Iraq as a society was not due to the insane bull-in-a-China-shop militarism of the US led by a Bushco regime renowned for its incompetence, routing out “terrorists” and non-existent weapons of mass destruction and faux-terrorists it was manufacturing by inspiring resisters (and labeling them as terrorists) from its own terrorism.

It was a planned, deliberate and diabolical strategy putting our committed soldiers’ lives at stake to destroy an entire society, a civilization, Petras asserts, and this included the little publicized (at this end) assassination and terrorizing of any potential dissidents … not terrorists … so Iraq as an independent nation would be so devastated beyond recovery of national identity and political will it’s failed state existence would be of long-term, sustainable use to the imperialist transnational corporate exploitive agenda of the United States and the military offensive-defensive agenda of Israel in the Middle East.

Petras writes:

A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

[snip]

The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a ‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary…and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.

[snip]

The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.

Petras points out that Baghdad before the U.S. shock and awe War on (really of) Terrorism was considered the “Paris of the Middle East.”

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.

Petras offers a warning to Iran’s secular, professional and academic classes:

They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.

Petras sees Iraq and its demise as a culture as the first in a series of dominoes for U.S./Israel imperialism. Iran, Syria, next on the colossally hubristic and dictatorial agenda? Remember the attribution to Russia’s Communistic domino-tipping agenda decades ago? Who are the monstrous and evil “nation topplers” now?

And this speculation of a long-term agenda makes one mighty cynical about the “closure” end-of-the-tunnel talk of withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan. With an embassy in Baghdad 80 football fields large, bigger than Vatican City, and a $1 billion embassy going up in Islamabad, we, as invader and occupier, are not there for international justice, for human rights, for defense of America, or nation building. We are there for murder-condoning exploitation and colonization.

Petras writes that US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads in Iraq were very effective in destabilizing a functioning and secular society by assassinating those educated and resilient enough to reconstruct Iraq back to independent nation status:

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Petras reminds of one more infuriating, misleading and minimizing remark from Donald Rumsfeld, renowned prevaricator, in regard to the deaths of Iraqi university professors:

At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, “…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’ (a child’s game)” (justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.

Rumsfeld certainly had a gift for bald-faced denial discounting a discovered tip of an iceberg of horrors. It deflected from the truth well. Who would possess such a heart of darkness to minimize such horror so cavalierly, implying the professors were a direct threat to the welfare of the US rather than human beings capable of critical thinking and a healthy sense of nationalism and justice? Just as Rumsfeld blamed the Abu Ghraib horrors on a few "rogue" end-of-the-chain-of-command bad apples. Remember how he dismissed accusations of out of control looting in Iraq and the alleged apathy from the US military toward it (except for U.S. protection of the Oil Ministry)? He implied it was much ado about one lone looter, one vase being stolen, and probably one video clip being repeated by the propagandizing media.

And Petras contends it may have been Colin Powell who supplied the death squads with the hit list of academics:

In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.

I remember attributing obtuseness to Paul Bremer for dismantling the secular-Sunni-Christian-dominated functional administrative and societal infrastructure. But it was not obtuseness, it was a deliberate US administration, diabolical plan of massive sabotage to promote societal chaos and disintegration. To radicalize the society and to wrest its control from its more rational and cohesive non-puppet-malleable leadership.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

[snip]

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.

So, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive aggression, the scope of its destruction, needs to be acknowledged and understood. And any declaration of “success” in Iraq and promotion of escalation in Afghanistan and Iraq, and imminent-seeming, thanks to Israel, aggression toward Iran, will be recognized for the perpetration of war crimes that they really are. We as citizens and potentially (God forbid) endangered “dissidents” to be labeled enemies of a corporate-ruled-ever-militarizing-nation need to protest long and hard for accountability for the horrors that have happened and to prevent further horrors against human rights still being planned.

If I weren’t already wearing a black arm band over the minimization and lack of accountability of the rendition and torture travesties, I would have put one on after reading Mr. Petras’ article.

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Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23342.htm
Via: http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/12989
Illustration: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/12/26/bookstreet21_3.jpg