Irak 77

Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo).
In TomDispatch schrijft hij: 'How the Bush Administration Deconstructed Iraq. Media coverage of the Iraq War has generally portrayed the current quagmire as the result of an American failure to achieve a set of otherwise admirable goals: suppressing the insurgency that is intimidating the Iraqi people and sabotaging the economy; stopping the destructive ethno-religious violence that has become a major source of civilian casualties; building an Iraqi army that can establish and sustain law and order; rebuilding electrical and sewage systems and the rest of the country's damaged infrastructure; ramping up oil production to place Iraq on a positive economic trajectory; eliminating the element that has made crime in the streets a prevalent and profitable occupation; and nurturing an elected parliament that can effectively rule. U.S. failure, then, resides in its inability to halt and reverse the destructive forces within Iraqi society. This rather comfortable portrait of the U.S. as a bumbling, even thoroughly incompetent giant overwhelmed by unexpected forces tearing Iraqi society apart is strikingly inaccurate: Most of the death, destruction, and disorganization in the country has, at least in its origins, been a direct consequence of U.S. efforts to forcibly institute an economic and social revolution, while using overwhelming force to suppress resistance to this project. Certainly, the insurgency, the ethno-religious jihadists, and the criminal gangs have all contributed to the descent of Iraqi cities and towns into chaos, but their roles have been secondary and in many cases reactive. The engine of deconstruction was - and remains - the U.S.-led occupation.
Repairing the Oil Pipeline at Al Fatah
Once in a while, we get a glimpse of this unreported reality. On April 25, James Glanz of the New York Times offered a neat window into the ugliness of U.S. culpability. He told the story of an American effort to repair an inoperative oil pipeline in Al Fatah, a village about 130 miles north of Baghdad. The pipeline had been damaged early in the war by an American air attack on a bridge across the Tigris River over which it traveled. Immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003, plans were activated to repair the bridge and reestablish the pipeline. Original estimates indicated that "it would cost some $5 million and take less than five months to string the pipelines across the bridge once it was repaired." Initially, $75.7 million was allocated for the repair job. Work began almost immediately, because the American occupation authorities were anxious to acquire the $5 million a day in oil revenues that a reconnected pipeline promised. Just as immediately, problems began to arise - first and foremost from the decision of occupation officials not to repair the bridge. As a result, KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary in charge of the project, was forced to seek a new pipeline route across the Tigris. To handle this unexpected problem, the entire $75 million budget - originally designated for both bridge and pipeline repair - was reallocated to the pipeline project alone. Nevertheless, when Robert Sanders of the Army Corps of Engineers arrived to inspect the work eight months later in July of 2004, it was already two months past its projected completion date. What Sanders found that day, according to Glanz, "looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along[side] a giant drill bit in a desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed." A supervisor later told Sanders that they knew this was impossible, but "had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway." The denouement came soon enough: "After the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt." Sanders issued a scathing report detailing what he called "culpable negligence" on the part of KBR. But his report had only the most modest impact. Though KBR was deprived of its bonus fees for the project by the Army Corps of Engineers, nothing was done to recover the wasted millions, or to force the company to complete the project.
Four important points emerge from this story:
First, the oil pipeline was damaged and the bridge destroyed by U.S. forces. The attack was ordered on April 3, 2003 by General T. Michael Moseley "to stop the enemy from crossing the bridge." This was typical of the infrastructural damage caused by the U.S. in Iraq. During the initial battles of the invasion, and then during sweeps against the Iraqi resistance after the occupation had begun, American forces destroyed or damaged roads, bridges, electrical transmission and oil facilities, sewage lines and water treatment plants, commercial and industrial structures, even mosques and hospitals. While the resistance also targets such structures, particularly oil pipelines and electrical transmission lines, its destructive powers have been relatively modest compared to what American airpower can accomplish with 500 and 2000 pound bombs.' Lees verder:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=84463 Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051806K.shtml