Iraq now

The events of the last few days in Iraq were put in context on two PBS programs Friday. TV and press coverage of the killing of American mercenaries and display of their burned and dismembered bodies to cheering crowds in Fallujah has emphasized that city as an exception, the stronghold of Saddam sympathizers. But Charlie Rose interviewed two reporters in Iraq from establishment publications, and got a different view. These attacks, said Jon Anderson of the New Yorker, indicate "less a change in Iraq than in American perception of Iraq." John Burns of the New York Times agreed, and added that while most Iraqis don't participate, this is "a war of national resistance" in intent and scope.

They agreed that Fallujah is the sanctuary of the most intense resistance and aggressive violence, and that it will take a massive effort to control it, similar to Israeli military control of Palestine. But they insisted that even that would not end the insurgencies. Burns said that American officials in Iraq may believe this is an isolated instance (we heard one on TV right after the attack attributing it to a few folks who "don't get it") but they are "in denial" if they think the situation is soluble before the hand-over of power on July 1.

Deborah Amos, who has been covering the region since the early 1980s, told Bill Moyers that at best the hand-over will be cosmetic. The occupation is already turning over government agencies, like health and education, to Iraqi control. But the occupation headquarters is going to become the American Embassy---the largest anywhere in the world---and American "advisors" and a hundred thousand American troops will remain after July.

The killing of mercenaries-though no one calls them that (they usually called "security guards" or "private sector" employees)---highlights their presence in Iraq, largely ignored by U.S. media until now. Not even the Pentagon (CBS Pentagon correspondent David Martin told Charlie Rose) knows how many are there. But it seems that the Bushie strategy was to try to reduce official U.S. troop levels after July 1, and depend more on a combination of United Nations personnel and these mercenaries. Like the men killed, they are usually ex-military. Stories have surfaced of National Guard troops returning home from Iraq, where their finances are in ruin and their government pay is slow arriving, but where they are greeted by recruiters for private companies offering them at least double the money the government paid them, to return to Iraq as mercenaries.

The killings in Fallujah may have wrecked this plan. Private companies and the UN may not be eager to jump into situations like this. So even if there is a photogenic hand-over in July, there are elections supposedly scheduled for January. There will be plenty of time for chaos between.

John Dean of Watergate fame was also interviewed on Moyers' NOW, and he maintains in his new book that Bush II has committed impeachable offenses in knowingly lying to Congress in order to invade Iraq. He said that not even Nixon was so thoroughly committed to secrecy as Bush. He sees this secrecy as the other half of the Bush refusal to listen to allies or experts or anyone outside the inner circle of true believers, and the perceived base of the party---the rich and the Rabid Right.

All this and much more that is emerging about pre-9-11, is accelerating to a point that the political issues will have to be ratcheted up in order to keep up with reality. The Democrats are going to have to start talking very soon about the phony hand-over of power in Iraq, and it's going to have to be made clear to the American public---apparently reluctant so far to dump Bush---that if Bush is re-elected, the country faces the prospect of another presidential impeachment within a year of his re-Inauguration.

Lies and body bags. The tragedies multiply and begin to interact. In the meantime the federal deficit caused by the Bush tax cut and its warfare is driving down the U.S. dollar, inspiring OPEC to cut oil production so prices will rise and they get more dollars to make up for the value lost. To weak pro forma objections from the Bushies, and their generations of alliance with the Saudi ruling family.

Ordinary citizens pay for it, naturally, at the gas pump. Highlighting also the fact that decades during which we could have been preparing for the inevitable oil and energy crisis, as well as weakening if not forestalling global heating and the climate crisis---a crisis that in its various manifestations could very well make Iraq look like a weekend getaway---have all gone by in a haze of SUV commercials.

Iraq now. Pay later.