[Mb-civic] Media culpability..."positive thinking" shields Bush from reality....and Iraq's OIl

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are 3 short articles to illuminate the darkness....

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Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-10/09pilger.cfm

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ZNet Commentary
The Media Culpability for Iraq October 11, 2004
By John Pilger 

In October 1999, I stood in a ward of dying children in Baghdad with Denis
Halliday, who the previous year had resigned as assistant secretary
general of the United Nations. He said: "We are waging a war through the
United Nations on the people of Iraq. We're targeting civilians. Worse,
we're targeting children. . . . What is this all about?"

Halliday had been 34 years with the UN. As an international civil servant
much respected in the field of "helping people, not harming them," as he
put it, he had been sent to Iraq to implement the oil-for-food program,
which he subsequently denounced as a sham. "I am resigning," he wrote,
"because the policy of economic sanctions is . . . destroying an entire
society. Five thousand children are dying every month. I don't want to
administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide."

Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck, another assistant secretary
general with more than 30 years' service, also resigned in protest. Jutta
Burghardt, the head of the World Food Program in Iraq, followed them,
saying she could no longer tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi
people. Their collective action was unprecedented; yet it received only
passing media attention. There was no serious inquiry by journalists into
their grave charges against the British and American governments, which in
effect ran the embargo. 

Von Sponeck's disclosure that the sanctions restricted Iraqis to living on
little more than $100 a year was not reported. "Deliberate strangulation,"
he called it. Neither was the fact that, up to July 2002, more than $5
billion worth of humanitarian supplies, which had been approved by the UN
sanctions committee and paid for by Iraq, were blocked by George W. Bush,
with Tony Blair's backing. They included food products, medicines and
medical equipment, as well as items vital for water and sanitation,
agriculture and education.

The cost in lives was staggering. Between 1991 and 1998, reported UNICEF,
500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died. "If you include
adults," said Halliday, "the figure is now almost certainly well over a
million." 

In 1996, in an interview on the American current affairs program 60
Minutes, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN, was asked:
"We have heard that half a million children have died . . . is the price
worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it." The
television network CBS has since refused to allow the videotape of that
interview to be shown again, and the reporter will not discuss it.

Halliday and von Sponeck have long been personae non gratae in most of the
U.S. and British media. What these whistleblowers have revealed is far too
unpalatable: not only was the embargo a great crime against humanity, it
actually reinforced Saddam Hussein's control. The reason why so many
Iraqis feel bitter about the invasion and occupation is that they remember
the Anglo-American embargo as a crippling, medieval siege that prevented
them from overthrowing their dictatorship. This is almost never reported
in Britain.

Halliday appeared on BBC2's Newsnight soon after he resigned. I watched
the presenter Jeremy Paxman allow Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office
minister, to abuse him as an "apologist for Saddam." Hain's shameful
performance was not surprising. On the eve of this year's Labor Party
conference, he dismissed Iraq as a "fringe issue."

Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, wrote in the New Statesman recently
that some journalists "consider it bad form to engage in public debate
about anything to do with ethics or standards, never mind the fundamental
purpose of journalism." It was a welcome departure from the usual
clubbable stuff that passes for media comment but which rarely addresses
"the fundamental purpose of journalism" -- and especially not its
collusive, lethal silences."When truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet
dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." 

He might have been referring to the silence over the devastating effects
of the embargo. It is a silence that casts journalists as accessories,
just as their silence contributed to an illegal and unprovoked invasion of
a defenseless country. Yes, there was plenty of media noise prior to the
invasion, but Blair's spun version dominated, and truth-tellers were
sidelined. 

Scott Ritter was the UN's senior weapons inspector in Iraq. Ritter began
his whistle-blowing more than five years ago when he said: "By 1998,
[Iraq's] chemical weapons infrastructure had been completely dismantled or
destroyed by UNSCOM. . . . The biological weapons program was gone, the
major facilities eliminated. . . . The long-range ballistic missile
program was completely eliminated. If I had to quantify Iraq's threat, I
would say [it is] zero."

Ritter's truth was barely acknowledged. Like Halliday and von Sponeck, he
was almost never mentioned on the television news, the principal source of
most people's information. The studied obfuscation of Hans Blix was far
more acceptable as the "balancing voice." That Blix, like Kofi Annan, was
playing his own political games with Washington was never questioned.

Up to the fall of Baghdad, the misinformation and lies of Bush and Blair
were channeled, amplified and legitimized by journalists, notably by the
BBC, which defines its political coverage by the pronouncements, events
and personalities of the "village" of Whitehall and Westminster. Andrew
Gilligan broke this rule in his outstanding reporting from Baghdad and
later his disclosure of Blair's most important deception. It is
instructive that the most sustained attacks on him came from his fellow
journalists.

In the crucial 18 months before Iraq was attacked, when Bush and Blair
were secretly planning the invasion, famous, well-paid journalists became
little more than channels, debriefers of the debriefers -- what the French
call fonctionnaires. The paramount role of real journalists is not to
channel, but to challenge, not to fall silent, but to expose. There were
honorable exceptions, notably Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian and
the irrepressible Robert Fisk in the Independent. 

Two newspapers, the Mirror and the Independent, broke ranks. Apart from
Gilligan and one or two others, broadcasters failed to reflect the
public's own rising awareness of the truth. In commercial radio, a leading
journalist who raised too many questions was instructed to "tone down the
antiwar stuff because the advertisers won't like it."

In the United States, in the so-called mainstream of what is
constitutionally the freest press in the world, the line held, with the
result that Bush's lies were believed by the majority of the population.
American journalists are now apologizing, but it is too late. The U.S.
military is out of control in Iraq, bombarding densely populated areas
with impunity. How many Iraqi families like Kenneth Bigley's are grieving?
We do not experience their anguish, or hear their appeals for mercy.
According to a recent estimate, roughly 37,000 Iraqis have died in this
grotesque folly.

Charles Lewis, the former star CBS reporter who now runs the Center for
Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., told me he was in no doubt that, had
his colleagues done their job rather than acted as ciphers, the invasion
would not have taken place. Such is the power of the modern media; it is a
power we should reclaim from those subverting it.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0923-03.htm

The Guardian

The hollow world of George Bush

The power of positive thinking is the president's shield from reality

by Sidney Blumethal

The news is grim, but the president is "optimistic." The intelligence is
sobering, but he tosses aside "pessimistic predictions." His opponent says
he has "no credibility," but the president replies that it is his rival
who is "twisting in the wind." The UN secretary general speaks of the
"rule of law," but he talks before a mute general assembly of "a new
definition of security." Between the rhetoric and the reality lies the
campaign.

In Iraq US commanders have plans for this week and the next, but there is
"no overarching strategy," I was told by a reliable source who has just
returned after assessing the facts on the ground for US intelligence
services. The New York Times reports that an offensive is in the works to
capture the insurgent stronghold of Falluja ? after the election. In the
meantime Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists linked to al-Qaida
operate from there at will, as they have for more than a year. The
president speaks of new Iraqi security forces, but not even half the US
personnel have been assigned to the headquarters of the Multinational
Security Transition Command.

George Bush's vision of the liberation of Iraq has melted before harsh
facts. But reality cannot be allowed to obscure the image. The liberation
is "succeeding," he insists, and only pessimists cannot see it.

In July the CIA delivered to the president a new national intelligence
estimate that detailed three gloomy scenarios for Iraq's future, ranging
up to civil war. At the UN last week, Bush held a press conference where
he rebuffed the latest intelligence.

Bush explained that, for him, intelligence is not to inform
decision-making, but to be used or rejected to advance an ideological and
political agenda. His dismissal is an affirmation of the politicisation
and corrupÇtion of intelligence that rationalised the war.

In his stump speech, which he repeats word for word across the US, Bush
explains that he invaded Iraq because of "the lesson of September the
11th." WMD goes unmentioned; the only reason Bush offers is Saddam Hussein
as an agent of terrorism. "He was a sworn enemy of the United States of
America; he had ties to terrorist networks. Do you remember Abu Nidal?
He's the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered
because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his
organisation."

The period of Leon Klinghoffer's murder in 1985 on the liner Achille Lauro
(by Abu Abbas, in fact) coincided with the US courtship of Saddam, marked
by the celebrated visits of then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld. The US
collaborated in intelligence exchanges and materially supported Saddam in
his war with Iran, authorising the sale of biological agents for Saddam's
laboratories. The reason was not born of idealism, but necessity: the
threat of an expansive, Iran-controlled Shia fundamentalism to the entire
Gulf.

The policy of courting Saddam continued until he invaded Kuwait. But
realpolitik prevailed when US forces held back from capturing Baghdad for
larger, geostrategic reasons. The first Bush grasped that, in wars to
come, the US would need ad hoc coalitions to share the military burden and
financial cost. Taking Baghdad would have violated the UN resolution that
gave legitimacy to the first Gulf war, as well as creating a nightmare of
"Lebanonisation." Realism prevailed; Saddam's power was subdued and
drastically reduced. It was the greatest accomplishment of the first
President Bush.

When he honoured the UN resolution, the credibility of the US in the
region was enormously enhanced, enabling serious movement on the Middle
East peace process. Now this President Bush has undone the foundation of
his father's work, which was built upon by President Clinton.

Bush's campaign depends on the containment of any contrary perception of
reality. He must evade, deny and suppress it. His true opponent is not his
Democratic foe but events. Bush's latest vision is his shield against
them. He invokes the power of positive thinking, as taught by Emile Coue,
guru of autosuggestion in the giddy 1920s, who urged mental improvement
through constant repetition: "Every day in every way I am getting better
and better."

It was during this era of illusion that T S Eliot wrote The Hollow Men:
Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls
the Shadow."

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www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6359%20

ZNet | Iraq

Iraq's Oil

by Youssef Ibrahim; October 06, 2004

Dubai, United Arab Emirates — The costs and benefits of America's
occupation of Iraq vary, according to proponents and opponents, except
when it comes to oil exports. The U.S.-led invasion has resulted in the
loss of an average of 2 million barrels a day of Iraqi oil from world
markets. That is a significant number with huge consequences for economies
around the globe.  Instead of rosy promises by the neoconservatives of the
Bush administration who pushed for the invasion — partly on the premise
that they would turn it into America's private gasoline-pumping station —
the contrary has occurred.


The world has lost Iraq's oil.

The impact is slowly taking its toll as the price of everything related to
petroleum rises (from the food on the supermarket shelves to the gasoline
in your car to the plastic chairs on your lawn).

The consequences have been evident in the past few months. Oil prices
stand at 20-year-high records with no relief in sight. Indeed, should the
ongoing disruption of Iraqi oil exports be compounded with an interruption
of production elsewhere — Russia, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or any
member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries — we could be
looking at prices far above $50 a barrel, perhaps $60 or more. Indeed, the
sky is the limit.

Production under Saddam

Iraq used to produce close to 3.5 million barrels of oil per day under the
rule of Saddam Hussein. It exported about 2.5 million barrels daily within
the now-defunct, United Nations-guided oil-for-food program. It produced
another half a million barrels for its own internal consumption to feed
its now-looted and destroyed refineries. And it managed to "smuggle" about
300,000-500,000 barrels a day to Iran, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, with the
money going into Saddam's treasury.

The reason oil prices have been hovering around $50 a barrel now is that
most of these Iraqi exports disappeared just as oil consumption began to
skyrocket around the world.

The International Energy Agency reported that the global use of oil —
about 81 million barrels every 24 hours — rose at least 1.3% and perhaps
as much as 3% in the past year. Consumption is being driven by new,
voracious appetites in the huge industrial machineries of China and India
as well as in various other economies on a fast-growth track.

Meanwhile, two huge Western oil lakes — the North Sea shared by the
United Kingdom and Norway, and Alaska's oil fields — are beginning to run
dry. And unrest in Nigeria has threatened the considerable output there.
Hence, the decline in Iraqi oil production could not have come at a worse
time

For Iraqis, the consequences are economically tragic and emotionally
humiliating. The U.S. has openly admitted that its 140,000 troops have
lost control of major chunks of Iraq. In his most recent comments,
Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged that the insurgency in Iraq
is "getting worse."

The most immediate impact is on Iraq's oil industry, which insurgents have
targeted as a way of opposing the U.S.-led occupation and hobbling the
interim government ahead of planned elections.

Rightly or wrongly, the tactic is working.

Pipelines and oil terminals from the northern fields near Kirkuk to the
southern export terminals near Basra are being blown up daily by various
groups of insurgents. At last count, the northern pipeline that carries
oil to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has been blown up 37 times
in 12 months. Terminals in the south have been attacked at least 10 times,
in effect shutting down all exports of crude oil.

Damage to Iraq's psyche

Iraq, a country that sits on the world's second-largest oil reserves after
Saudi Arabia, finds itself in the humiliating position of importing oil
products such as gasoline, diesel and fuel oil. It is only able to export
an average of about 1 million to 1.3 million barrels of crude oil per day.
And that is on good days, when something is not ablaze.

What's worse is that a large chunk of the oil revenues is not accounted
for because of graft, theft, mayhem and the near-total absence of
transparency within the transitional government of Prime Minister Ayad
Allawi, according to aid agencies, which say they cannot see where the
money is going. Oil traders go further. They say large amounts of oil are
being stolen and smuggled onto ships, with Iraqi officials and traders
splitting the returns. The Iraqi people and economy see no "trickle down"
effect.

As for the country's oil industry, once a proud mighty machinery of some
55,000 well-trained and highly disciplined technocrats, the situation is
catastrophic. Oil fields are deteriorating for lack of maintenance, fires,
accidents and lack of funds. Oil refineries that were looted in the first
week of the war have yet to be repaired.

To date, of the $18 billion in so-called reconstruction money allocated
for Iraq by the U.S. Congress, less than $1 billion has been disbursed for
that exact purpose, according to congressional-oversight reports and the
United Nations.

Oil and politics are a flammable cocktail. That is exactly where we are in
Iraq. The real worry is that the virus may very well be moving next door
to other oil-producing countries at a time when, basically, the world is
running on empty .


Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former senior Middle East correspondent for The New
York Times and energy editor of The Wall Street Journal, is managing
director of a political risk-assessment group.

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