by Tom Engelhardt
You've heard the president
and vice president say it over and over in various ways: There was a
connection between the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and Iraq. Let's take
this seriously and consider some of the links between the two.
Numbers and Comparisons
- At least 3,438
Iraqis died by violent means during July
(roughly similar numbers died in June and August), significantly
more than the 2,973
people who died in the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001.
- 1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August,
according to revised figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's over
half the 9/11 casualties in one city in one increasingly typical
month. According to the
Washington Post, this figure does
not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the city's
hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.
- By the beginning of September, 2,974
U.S. military service members had died in
Iraq and in the Bush administration' s Global War on Terror, more
than died in the attacks of 9/11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers
died in Iraq in the
first nine days of September; at
least three in Afghanistan. )
- Five years later, according to Emily Gosden and
David Randall of the British newspaper the
Independent, the Bush
administration' s Global War on Terror has resulted in, at a
minimum, 20 times the deaths of 9/11; at a maximum, 60 times. It has
"directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5
million refugees, and cost the U.S. more than the sum needed to pay
off the debts of every poor nation on earth. If estimates of other,
unquantified, deaths – of insurgents, the Iraq military during the
2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and
those dying from wounds – are included, then the toll could reach
as high as 180,000." According to Australian
journalist Paul McGeough, Iraqi officials
(and others)
estimate that that country's death toll since 2003 "stands at
50,000 or more – the proportional equivalent of about 570,000
Americans."
- Last week, the U.S. Senate agreed to appropriate another
$63 billion for military operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan, where costs have been averaging $10 billion a
month so far this year. This brings the (taxpayer) cost for Bush's
wars so far to about $469 billion and climbing. That's the
equivalent of 469 Ground Zero memorials at
full cost-overrun estimates, double that
if the memorial comes in at the recently revised budget of $500
million. (Keep in mind that the estimated cost of these two wars
doesn't include various perfectly real future payouts like those for
the care of veterans and could rise into
the trillions.)
- In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the Bush
administration had about
150,000 troops in Iraq. Just under three
and a half years later, almost as long as it took to win World War
II in the Pacific, and despite much media coverage about coming
force "draw-downs, " U.S. troop levels are actually rising
– by 15,000 in the last month. They now stand at 145,000,
just 5,000 short of the initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion,
top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz took it for granted that American troop levels would be
drawn down to the 30,000 range within three months of the taking of
Baghdad.)
Reconstruction
While Americans are
planning to remember 9/11 with four
vast towers and a huge, extremely costly
memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero, Baghdadis have been
thinking a bit more practically. They are putting scarce funds
into constructing two
new branch morgues (with refrigeration
units) in the capital for what's now most plentiful in their
country: dead bodies. They plan to raise the city's morgue
capacity to 250 bodies a day. If fully used, that would be about
7,500 bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge against ever more
probable futures.
While the various New York memorial constructions
can't get off (or into) the ground, due to disputes and cost
estimate overruns, what could be thought of as the real American
memorial to Ground Zero is going up in the very heart of Baghdad;
and unlike the prospective structures in Manhattan or seemingly
just about any other construction project in Iraq, it's on
schedule. According to Paul
McGeough, the $787 million
"embassy," a 21-building, heavily fortified complex (not
reliant on the capital's hopeless electricity or water systems)
will pack significant bang for the bucks – its own built-in
surface-to-air missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and
Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a
sports center. As essentially a "suburb of Washington,"
with a predicted modest staff of 3,500, it is a project that says,
with all the hubris the Bush administration can muster: We're not
leaving. Never.
Record-Breaking Months
- Roadside bombs (or IEDs), "the leading killer
of U.S. troops," rose to record numbers this summer – 1,200
in August, quadrupling the January 2004 figures according
to the Washington Post, while bomb
and attack tips from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They plummeted
from 5,900 in April to 3,700 in July. ("It will improve once
it's not so darn lethal to go out on the street," was the
optimistic observation of retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs,
director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat
Organization. )
- According to a recently
released quarterly assessment the Pentagon
is mandated to do for Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a
record 51 percent in recent months, quadrupling in just two years.
- From the same report, monthly attacks on U.S. and
allied Iraqi forces rose to about 800, doubling since early 2004. In
Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a
"very pessimistic" secret Marine
Corps assessment indicates that "we haven't been defeated
militarily but we have been defeated politically – and that's
where wars are won and lost"), attacks averaged 30 a day.
- A sideline record in the War on Terror:
Afghanistan' s already sizable opium crop is projected
to increase by at least 50 percent this year and would then make up
a startling 92 percent of the global supply. According to Antonio
Maria Costa, the global executive director of the UN Office on Drugs
and Crime, those supplies would exceed global consumption by 30
percent – so other records loom. (Meanwhile, according to the Washington
Post, the investigation into the
whereabouts of Osama bin Laden has hit a record low. His trail has
gone "stone cold. … U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or
kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than
two years.")
The Iraqi Condition
Along with civil war,
the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, the still-strengthening
insurgency, and the security situation from hell, Iraqis are also
experiencing soaring
inflation, possibly reaching 70 percent
this year (which would more than double last year's 32 percent
rise); stagnant salaries (where they even exist); an
"inert" banking system; gas and electricity prices up in
a year by 270 percent; massive corruption ("An
audit sponsored by the United Nations
last week found hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq's oil
revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had gone missing
altogether") ; lack of adequate electricity or potable water
supplies; tenaciously high unemployment, ranging – depending
upon the estimate – from 15-50/60
percent (the recent Pentagon report to
Congress offers Iraqi government figures of 18 percent
unemployment and 34 percent underemployment) ; acute
shortages of gasoline, kerosene, and
cooking gas in the country with the planet's third largest oil
reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote $800 million in
scarce funds to importing refined oil products from neighboring
countries and making endless
gas lines and overnight waits the
essence of normal life ("Filling up now requires several
days' pay, monastic patience or both…"); an oil industry,
already ragged at the time of the invasion, which has since gone
steadily downhill (its three main oil refineries are now
functioning at half-capacity and processing only half the number
of barrels of oil as before the invasion, while the biggest
refinery in Baiji sometimes operates at as little as 7.5 percent
of capacity); government gas subsidies severely cut (at the urging
of the International Monetary Fund); malnutrition
on the rise and, according to that Pentagon report to Congress,
25.9 percent of Iraqi children are stunted in their growth.
In other words, economically speaking, Iraq has
essentially been deconstructed.
Diving Into Iraq
On Dec. 9, 2001, Vice
President Cheney began publicly arguing on Meet
the Press that there were Iraqi
connections to the 9/11 attacks. It was "pretty well
confirmed," he told Tim Russert, that Mohammed Atta, the lead
hijacker, had met the previous April in Prague with a "senior
official of the Iraqi intelligence service." On Sept.
8, 2002, he returned to the program and
reaffirmed this supposed fact even more strongly. ("[Atta]
did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on
at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague
with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the
attack on the World Trade Center.") All of this – and there
was much more of it from Cheney, the president, and other top
officials, always leaving Iraq and 9/11, or Saddam and al-Qaeda,
or Saddam and Zarqawi in the same rhetorical neighborhood with the
final linking usually left to the listener – was quite literally
so much Bushwa.
These were claims debunked within the intelligence
community and elsewhere before, during, and after the invasion of
Iraq. We learned only the other day from a belated partial report
by the Senate Intelligence Committee that U.S.
intelligence analysts were strongly
disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda
while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting
those links to justify invading Iraq. We learned as well that our
intelligence people knew Saddam Hussein had actually tried to
capture Zarqawi and that the claim that Zarqawi and he were
somehow in cahoots was utterly
repudiated last fall by the CIA. None of
this stopped the vice president or president – who as late as
this Aug. 21 insisted
that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi" – from
continuing to make such implicit or explicit linkages even as they
also backtracked
from the claims.
As is often the case, under such lies and
manipulations lurks a deeper truth. In this case, let's call it
the truth of wish fulfillment. The link between 9/11 and Iraq is
unfortunately all too real. The Bush administration made it so in
the heat of the post-9/11 shock.
Think of that link this way: In the immediate wake
of 9/11, our president and vice president hijacked our country,
using the low-tech rhetorical equivalents of box cutters and mace;
then, with most passengers on board and not quite enough of the
spirit of United Flight 93 to spare, after a brief Afghan
overflight, they crashed the plane of state directly into Iraq,
causing the equivalent of a Katrina that never ends and turning
that country – from Basra in the south to the border of
Kurdistan – into the global equivalent of Ground Zero.
Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt
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