Havoc, Inc.: Running Amok with Uncle Sam

by Doug Dowd

Larry Everest, Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and The U.S. Global Agenda (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004), 391 pages, paper $19.95.

World War II is seen as the worst disaster in history. What is barely understood is that because the war left the United States as the sole nation with significant economic and military power the stage had been set for an immeasurably worse chain of disasters — of which the Iraqi war is only the latest, but neither the last nor the worst unless the We the People make this our country.

As World War II ended, there was a moment when it seemed that we might set off on a very different path; that because the “land of the free and home of the brave” could it also would initiate policies to assure that the most devastating war ever was the war that would end all wars — that we could then, finally, begin to realize the “American dream” here at home while offering a helping hand to the imperialized societies to move toward their own independence and well-being: In their own terms.

Instead, even before the war ended we began to spawn the policies that became the Cold War (and, soon after, its soulmate McCarthyism) in a U.S. dominated global economy. Lurch by lurch, the Cold War crushed the hopes for enhancing freedom and democracy and well-being at home and abroad, putting in their place repression, violence and ever more cunning spin.

Iraq is but the latest development of that sordid and tragic set of developments. Instead of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, it was the Soviet/Chinese threat that served to keep us trembling. In the key first decade of the Cold War neither the USSR nor Mao’s China was a military threat even to their neighbors — weakened as both were by many years, even decades of war; but both were seen as constituting a political threat.

The Cold War required and provided a new world of pervasive and constant deception (including self-deception) — which, true to form, came to be spun as “disinformation.” Today’s “axis of evil” has not only required the plumbing of always new depths of lies and deception, it has also made the world more dangerous: terrorism is expanding exponentially, as are new weapons’ programs, not least those of Bush program for “small nukes.”

Everest’s powerful book is concerned “only” with the Middle East, with the whys and wherefores of the past half-century’s turmoil there, with contemporary Iraq as its main focus.

Before examining his definitive and lucid treatment of Iraq’s past and present, it seems important to take a summary look back at its deep roots in the Cold War.

Not only did the Cold War not begin in response to a Soviet military threat neither did it end when the Berlin Wall came down. Its first act was made by Truman soon after the war in Europe ended. In order to assure wavering French cooperation in our postwar European programs Truman agreed to help the French maintain control over Vietnam independence. As Marilyn Young has shown in her definitive study¹, FDR made an agreement with Ho Chi Minh in 1944 assuring U.S. support for Vietnam’s postwar independence.

The agreement was signed and sealed by Ho Chi Minh and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) in North Vietnam. The OSS was there for diverse reasons, one of which was to work with the Vietnamese to rescue downed U.S. Air Force crews (efforts in which I was involved for my bomb group).

FDR died in the spring of 1945; the acts that led to the violation of his agreement took hold in the fall: First, the U.S. equipped and armed Dutch and British soldiers newly-freed from Japanese camps and sent them off in November to Haiphong in a U.S. ship (whose departure I witnessed in Manila Harbor), its aim to hold the fort until, second, thirteen U.S. Merchant Marine shiploads of French soldiers could arrive from France (in March, 1946).

When the U.S. ship arrived at Haiphong, it is poignant and sickening to learn, the walls of the streets were lined with signs saying “Welcome Abe Lincoln!” A month or so earlier, Ho Chi Minh had stood in a public square in Hanoi and proclaimed Vietnam’s independence in the words of the American declaration of national sovereignty. “All men are created equal...” (Young, p. 10)

Nine years later, the French were whipped at Dienbienphu; thirty years later Abe Lincoln’s descendants were being lifted off by helicopter from a Saigon roof.

In the interim, the Cold War had wrought its appalling and bloody (rather than “cold”) effects on dozens of societies, resulting in many millions of deaths, the corruption of their governments, and the rendering stillborn of the hopes of the entire world.

Soon after the U.S. assault into Vietnamese affairs, the roots of our Middle East and Central Asian interventions were planted. First was Truman’s Greece-Turkey doctrine of 1947 which — as would also become common elsewhere — facilitated fascist regimes in both countries. Soon after, we went on to support the Zionist uprising in Palestine (1947–48) — for what could be sold as idealism to U.S. voters, but was in fact taken as an easy first step in our displacement of British rule in the Middle East (with Iran the vital next step, in 1953; see below).

Then, during the mid-1950s Suez Crisis, we took another slap at the Brits (and, as well, the French) in taking the side of the Egyptians — sort of. That done, we subsequently began our continuing and always deepening partnership with the Israelis against the Palestinians, allowing them to count on us to veto well over 100 UN resolutions against their aggressions, financing them sufficiently to make them the fourth strongest army in the world, and looking the other way as they committed atrocities — up to and including those of 2004.

In those same years our interventions took hold elsewhere over the globe: We transported and set up Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, warred in Korea and Vietnam, defeated democratic forces in Guatemala (and, over time, the rest of Central America) and, in the Congo and Chile, were decisive in the overthrows of Lumumba and Allende, ad infinitum.

The Cold War was never a response to a military threat; anywhere; in the past as now, it was always a set of military/economic policies assuring that any and all possibilities of interference with our aim of global domination would be put down by any means necessary. The end justifies the means. n’est-ce pas?

The foregoing snapshots concern what happened abroad; here at home, beginning almost immediately as the war ended was a series of forceful attempts to level what had become an emerging culture and politics of dissent and serious inquiry; those policies were accompanied by the first steps toward the effective enfeebling of unions, beginning with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, soon to be much assisted by McCarthyism.

These developments had their path greased by the simultaneous evolution of consumerism (itself critically made possible by double-digit trillions of military expenditures from 1946 on. As the general public became always more obsessed with borrowing and buying, the utter capture of our government by big money and sociopolitical fanaticism was assured.

Which brings us to Everest’s superb analysis and reportage of the war in Iraq and, not less important, the past and present role of the USA in the turmoil and horrors of the larger Middle Eastern context.

Everest is an experienced journalist, and has spent considerable time as a reporter in the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia over the past quarter century. In this book he has gone beyond reportage to provide us, as well, with an unusually readable work of historical scholarship.

The principal and successful intent of his book is clearly to expose the arrogance, ignorance, and systematic deceit that propelled the Bush administration to invade Iraq — and which, left to itself, will go on from there to more wars. As I write (spring of 2004) the Iraqis seem likely not to leave the USA to itself; but they need the help of the likes of us if they are to be left to themselves — instead of being subjected to the mass high-tech slaughter to which this government will descend with our “WMD.”

One would like to believe that a large percentage of our own people are not as arrogant or as inclined to violence as Bush, et al. Even so, it is safe to say that as a people, even those otherwise well-informed are basically ignorant of what should be known about Iraq and its people. Everest’s book fill that gap, and much besides.

As a means of swiftly reducing one’s level of ignorance, it h it helps to begin reading the book at its Appendix. There are found about 30 pages on “Dissecting U.S. Pretexts for the War,” followed by a useful chronology that takes us back 8000 years to the beginnings of settlement in “the Fertile Crescent” and, a few thousand years later, to Mesopotamia/Iraq and the beginnings of civilization. Reading through the Chronology’s dozen or so pages will help you to see why the Iraqis have difficulty seeing the USA as the nabobs of “civilization.”

Even more valuable is the depth analysis Everest provides of the interventions of the USA into that region — that is, into the early and ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S.-provided dictatorship of the Shah and subsequent upheavals, the Iran/Iraq war, the first Gulf War and, of course, the evolution of the present war in Iraq. As is fitting in this era of pervasive — and usually justified — mistrust of almost everyone and everything, Everest has meticulously documented all of his debatable points with more than 1,000 footnotes.

Now on to key selections of what is to be found in this valuable study. We skip the thousand years or so preceding the 20th century which, however, the peoples of the Middle East have not forgotten; as, for example, when they hear the term “crusade” from Bush.

The quotations that follow are entirely from Everest, unless otherwise indicated.

Marx was right about a lot; but not quite when he said that 'history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' The USA is repeating the British conquest of Iraq; but there’s nothing funny about it.

The British landed in Mesopotamia in 1914 as part of the campaign against the Ottoman Empire [which was allied to the Germans]...When they entered Baghdad in 1917 their commanding officer told the city’s residents 'Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators...The Arab race may rise once more to greatness!’

As though to prove their point in the imperial mode, in 1921 the British held the Cairo Conference (note the location)m where they changed the name of Mesopotamia to Iraq and planned its administration. The relevant (and closed door) meeting was chaired the man who, about 25 years later, Truman at his side in Fulton, MO, would declare that an “iron curtain” had fallen in Europe: Winston Churchill. Along with two pro-British Iraqis, Churdiall and the Wolfowitzes and Perles of their time — ignoramuses all — framed Iraq’s first constitution. As the twig is bent....

Later, “In 1925, the British forced then King Faisal to sign a 75-year concession to the foreign-owned Iraq Petroleum Company.” It was soon pumping oil from the major fields at Kirkuk — in what should be part of Kurdistan became part of Iraq. The Kurds had long had their freedom and lands usurped as well by Syrians, Persians, and Turks; with the discovery of oil they had come to the attention of the “western democracies” — as had happened earlier to Persia (now Iran) when oil was discovered there in 1901. That came to be controlled and profited from by what began as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which over time mutated to become BP (British Petroleum).

Given the 20th century conjunction of oil, autos, modern industry, and imperialism, the peoples of the Middle East were doomed to be exploited economically, repressed politically, and tormented culturally. As indeed they were up through World War II — during which, the Shah of Persia, pissed off with Britain, became sympathetic to the Nazis, and changed Persia’s name to Iran (read: “Aryan”).

As noted above, just after the war the USA began its serious involvements in the Middle East. But even before the war had ended, we had made a major move regarding oil: It had to do with oil strategy for the entire Persian Gulf (Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia). It was made by FDR, in a 1944 meeting with Lord Halifax. There, Everest quotes Daniel Yergin (renowned mainstream oil expert) to the effect that “FDR informed Halifax ‘Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.’”

For about half a century the deal worked for the Saudi dynasty: lots of oil for us, the opposite of freedom and democracy for the Saudi people. One consequence was Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia. You get what you pay for; or, in this case, you pay for what you get.

A decade or so later, after Iran’s first approximation to a free election, Prime Minister Mossadegh attempted to nationalize Anglo-Persian oil. In response, the CIA organized a coup overthrowing his government and restor[ing] the Shah Mohammad Pahlevi to the throne. The Shah [he who had been a Nazi sympathizer] would rule Iran for the next 25 years as an absolute monarch, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering many of his opponents, while loyally working for U.S. interests in the region. (p. 60)

That U.S. action also voided the Halifax/FDR agreement, and allowed the U.S. to go from getting zero to 40 percent of Iran’s oil, with the other 60 percent shared by the British, French and Dutch.

More pertinent to our focus on Iraq, the Shah’s rule led to the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution of 1979 — a major step among the processes creating today’s widespread jihad). Not long after the USSR-Afghan and the Iran-Iraq wars erupted.

In one arrogant/stupid/covert/overt step after another, the USA involved itself in all of that; the always deepening consequences took us to contemporary U.S. policy in the Middle East and Central Asia.

In the United States little attention was paid to what we were doing in that enormous region from the 1950s on; we were riveted on our wars in Korea and Vietnam. As those wars thundered on — killing a total of 3-4 million in Korea and another 3 million in Indochina — we were also getting up to our ankles in the Middle East; then we began to get up to our neck as the 1970s and the 1980s began. Everest sets the stage:

[The 1980s were] ushered in by three seismic jolts to U.S. power which occurred in rapid succession in 1979: the February revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. Shah of Iran; the November seizure of the American Embassy [and staff] in Teheran, and the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in December. (p. 87)

We begin with Afghanistan; it is in Central Asia rather than the Middle East; however, given that 9/11 was the official basis for sending our troops into Afghanistan and, even more, allowed 'terrorism' to become the hot center of our foreign policy and the domestic politics that greased us into Iraq, it is apt to begin there. That is where Carter’s National Security Adviser 'Zbig' Brzezinski began:

In July, 1979, some five months before the Soviet invasion [of Afghanistan], the U.S. had initiated a covert campaign to destabilize Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet government by arming and funing the Islamist opposition. The goal, according to Brzezinski, was 'to induce a Soviet military intervention.' When the Soviets did intervene in December, [he] wrote Carter: 'We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam war.' (p. 92)

He was right; but our grand success also birthed those whom we had armed, the Taliban, the main force that fought against the USSR. Almost 20 years later (January 15–21, 1998), “Zbig” was interviewed by Le Nouvel Observateur. When asked if he regretted “having supported Islamic fundamentalism..., and given arms and advice to future terrorists” his reply was, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?” For Cold War freaks like Zbig, the answer is very different from that one would get from others.

Item:

When the Soviets finally pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, more than a million Afghans [and 15,000 Soviet soldiers] had been killed and one-third of the population driven into refugee camps.” (p. 90)

And Osama bin Laden was off and running.

Fiddlesticks, said the Nobel Committee that awarded Carter a peace prize. (As they had also to Kissinger. Maybe they need a dictionary?)

Carter got his comeuppance when he lost the election of 1980 to Reagan, who proved to be even trickier than either Tricky Dick (on everything) or Carter (on Afghanistan). Everest:

During the summer of 1980...Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter was about to pull of an “October surprise” release of the hostages...; so Reagan’s advisors made a secret agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran: if Iran continued to hold hostages through November’s election and Reagan won, he [Reagan] would lift the economic sanctions imposed by Carter and allow Israel [!] to ship arms to Iran... (p. 99)

And that’s what happened: The U.S. hostages were kept, Israel sent (doubtless U.S.-financed) arms to Iran, Reagan won the election and became our most popular president ever. Perhaps seeking also to become its most devious, the decade of the 1980s saw the USA seesawing back and forth — hating Iran because of the hostages, then arming them, then shunning them and arming Iraq, thence to war against them over Kuwait and, having defeated them in a trice, sanctioning the country and starving its children, and so on up to invading them again.

 Perhaps the most vivid combination of deviousness and stupidity was what became “Iran/Contra”: It was revealed in 1986 that we had been selling arms to Iran and “using the proceeds from weapon sales to Iran to illegally fund the counter-revolutionary [U.S.-trained] Contras...” to aid our attempts to overthrow the elected Nicaraguan government. Thus was President Reagan inspired to make his classic statement, which only Bush II could surpass:

I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intention still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

So it went, financing and arming Israel against Palestine, to arming what became the Taliban in Afghanistan and both sides of the Iran-Iraq war, all four of which were with their different but overlapping motivations and in their different ways making life shorter or harder for the peoples of their areas. Taking 1979 as the starting-point, the processes we thus aided and abetted had as their consequence millions of deaths and destruction that defies description.

All of that might have led to much self-congratulation in the White House; it should cause a riot among our own armed forces and a revolt by our taxpayers — if they were to know what they have really been fighting and paying for.

And just what was that? Oil? Yes and No. Everest puts it well:

The 'real' reason for the U.S. war on Iraq includ[ed] grabbing Iraq’s oil, preventing the Hussein regime from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, stabilizing the dollar, strengthening Israel, or retaliating for Sept. ll. If understood as threads in the fabric of global empire, all these objectives and more are part of the U.S. agenda, although none by itself accounts for this war. Instead, it is the convergence of such necessities and ambitions of empire — in the Middle East and globally. (p. 29)

Everest examines all of these elements in great — and disgusting — detail. We learn, or relearn, that Hussein indeed did have weapons of mass destruction, almost entirely provided by the USA for use against Iran — which, as reported by the UN inspection teams, were either destroyed or rendered useless during and after the Gulf War — which, having ended, led to processes that meant malnutrition and premature death for at least 500,000 Iraqi children. And we learn of the double-dealing of the USA as regards the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, during and after the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars.

What we learn most about, however, is what led up to our second war against Iraq; of the book’s eleven chapters, seven are devoted to unearthing the early planning to create that war, with any rationale that might seem to turn the trick: WMD, Al Qaeda. freedom and democracy, whatever. The only thing that has held up has been “whatever”: WMD? In over a year, we have found one deteriorating shell with — perhaps — sarin in it; Al Qaeda? They and Hussein have been known to hate each other, known to all in the Middle East, all except ourselves; freedom and democracy? Who’s kidding whom?

It is worth it — and infuriating — to provide a few quotations illustrating the foregoing; even more worthwhile is to read the entirety of the book, to gain the courage of one’s convictions, and to immunize one from ever being taken in again.

WMD. Quoting UN inspector Scott Ritter: '[T]he UN never once found evidence that Iraq had either retained biological weapons or associated production equipment, or was continuing work in the field.' (p. 191)

Al Qaeda/bin Laden. After much discussion throughout, the conclusion is 'there was no Al Qaeda connection — except possibly the one created in the wake of the U.S. overthrow of Iraq’s government — and no proof has emerged that Hussein was connected to Sept. ll.' (p. 187)

 Freedom and democracy for the Iraqis? The White House group running this war, from Bush II on down (or up?) has, none of them, ever, shown any interest in either freedom or democracy, unless that means 'free markets' and 'plutocracy.' Just as 'Zbig' saw the rise of the Taliban as 'worth it' and Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright saw the loss of all those children similarly — When asked on CBS 60 Minutes, 'We have heard that half a million Iraqi children have died, I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima — And — and you know, is that price worth it?' The Secretary of State replied,  'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.' (p. 185)

A book such as this us much that we need to know; it also tells us that there is much more that we should seek out, if only to show us in painful detail why it is that if we don’t do everything we can to make this country ours — instead of “theirs” — we too have a lot to answer for.

1The Wars in Vietnam, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins) return to text

May 26, 2004