Arkanovci u Iraku

[crippled_avenger]

Warning of 'cowboys, criminals' ignored

By Peter Beaumont
In Baghdad

NZ Herald, 24 September 2007


Senior officials in Iraq and the United States ignored multiple warnings about the operations of some of the biggest private military corporations dating back to at least 2004, new evidence shows.
A series of congressional reports, testimony to congressional committees, lawsuits in the US, and leaked documents from the past two years have painted a picture of a lack of transparency and accountability of security firms working for the State Department and Department of Defence, including allegations of frequent shooting of civilians.

The sheer scale of the failure to rein in the private military corporations comes in the wake of last week's killing of at least eight, and possibly as many as 28, civilians by Blackwater USA, a contractor working for the State Department, in what Iraq's Interior Ministry has said was an unprovoked attack.

Ironically the need for regulation was first raised in March 2004 by the Private Security Working Group in Baghdad, representing the biggest operators in the country. The minutes of the meeting were later leaked.

What was discussed that day contained a grim prediction of the controversies that would dog the companies in the years to come.

The group warned of the need for self-regulation. Most urgently, in the light of hostile media coverage, it warned that the industry should be aware of an influx of "criminals and cowboys". The meeting's chairman, Lawrence Peter, described it as a gold rush for security guards in which he said the group's members were "creating a private army on an unprecedented scale".

Peter boasted that the companies in Iraq were the "best the industry has to offer". Those trying to muscle in, he cautioned, would be the scrapings of the barrel - "Tier Bubba".



"[We] need to ensure the cowboys and criminals are identified early on." Otherwise, he warned, Tier Bubba would reflect badly on the entire industry. Three and a half years on, it has not been Tier Bubba that has brought the operations of the private military corporations in Iraq into disgrace. It has been one of its prominent members.

Over the years Iraqis have become weary of foreigners in bandanas firing weapons to force drivers off the road as they speed by in their armoured cars.

They have questioned the signs on their vehicles warning locals they will be killed if they approach too close, wondering what laws permit them to shoot dead civilians on suspicion. And they have become angry that those who have killed in error have not been brought to justice.

One of the most damning reports, prepared by the Congressional Research Service, disclosed claims that in the year that Lawrence Peter made his warning about "cowboys and criminals" Blackwater was reported to have trained former Chilean commandos - some of whom had served during the Pinochet years.

Another, a team leader this reporter encountered several times in Baghdad, had been with the notorious Serbian war criminal Arkan in the Bosnian war.
- Observer

[Meho Krljic]

Heh... I nije neko iznenađenje... Irak je hunting ground za sve vrste oportunista... Kako reče moj kurdski poznanik & kolega iz Bagdada: 'sad ti je u Iraku isto kao kad je bio Sadam, samo gore'.

[crippled_avenger]

Was Iraq all about oil?



Look again?.
?

?
By Gwynne Dyer
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NZ Herald, 24 September 2007
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Australia's Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson, is not the sharpest tool in the box, so people were not really surprised in July when he blurted out that the real motive for invading Iraq was oil.
"Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq but the entire region, is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world. Australians and all of us need to think what would happen if there was a premature withdrawal from Iraq," he said.

Silly old Brendan, off-message again. Didn't he know that Australia invaded Iraq because of its weapons of mass destruction? No, wait a minute, it was because Saddam Hussein might help Islamist terrorists.

Hang on, forget that, we really went there to bring the blessings of democracy to the Iraqi people, dead or alive. Brendan just mis-spoke himself about the oil.

Fast forward two months, and a rather sharper tool has offered the same analysis. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve banking system for 18 years and the high priest of capitalism, puts it quite brutally in his book, The Age of Turbulence.

"Whatever their publicised angst over Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction'," Greenspan wrote, "American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in the area that harbours a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

What everyone knows? No, that is what everyone has been encouraged to believe, by the protesters and the manipulators alike. And poor old Alan fell for it, too.

In interviews after the publication of his book last week, Greenspan explained that Saddam Hussein had wanted to seize the Strait of Hormuz, and so control oil shipments through the only sea route out of the Gulf. It would have been "devastating for the West", he said, if Saddam had done that.

The Iraqi dictator could have shut off five million barrels a day and brought "the industrial world to its knees".

Actually, more than twice that amount of oil leaves Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates each day in tankers and passes through the Strait of Hormuz, so it really is a crucial waterway. But Saddam Hussein couldn't close it.

Saddam Hussein was a bad man. He probably held the record in the modern Middle East for the number of citizens his Army, secret police and torturers had killed.

But control the Strait of Hormuz? He had about as much chance of doing that as he did of controlling the?English Channel, and anybody with access to a map should have known it.

Iraq lies at the northwestern end of the Gulf, 1000km from the Strait of Hormuz. It has only 50km of coastline, and most of its naval and air assets were destroyed in the Gulf War of 1991.

It had no strategic ability to reach that far east. Even if the US Navy had not been permanently present in the Gulf in overwhelming force, the notion of an Iraqi military threat to the Strait of Hormuz was sheer nonsense.

The only country in the region with the military ability to shut the Strait of Hormuz is Iran.?

Since it depends on oil income to support its domestic economy and feed its population,?

it won't do that unless it is attacked.

It may call the United States the "Great Satan", but it has pumped oil as fast as it could and sold it at the world market price every year since the 1979 revolution. It can't afford to care where the oil ends up.

That is true of all the major oil exporters, whatever their political convictions. They have to sell their oil, so it does not really matter much to the West who rules these countries (although it obviously matters greatly to the local residents). You don't need to invade countries to get oil from them. Just send them a cheque.

There's no point in invading Iraq to control the oil price, either. The price is set by a very efficient global market, and not even all of Iraq's oil will give you enough leverage to force the price down. Besides, why would an Administration whose closest friends are in the American oil industry want to force the price of oil down?

Greenspan doubtless believed what he said, but it doesn't make sense. He just fell for the cover story that "it's all about oil", which serves to distract Western electorates from the more complex and often even less defensible motives of their Governments.

So why did they invade Iraq, in the end? One motive was certainly the desire for permanent American military bases in the Gulf from which the United States could, at need, stop oil flowing to China. The strategic community in Washington has identified China as America's new strategic rival, and it is becoming more and more vulnerable to interference with its oil imports.

Those "enduring bases" are still being built in Iraq. But that is not a big enough reason to explain what happened. I have written tens of thousands of words on the Bush Administration's motives for invading Iraq, but in the end I do not know why they did it. I suspect that they don't, either. It just seemed like a neat idea at the time.

* Gwynne Dyer's latest book, The Mess They Made: The Middle East After Iraq, is published in New Zealand by Scribe.