The US War against Iraq

Introduction

The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power
Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish
supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and
Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the
Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of
consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the
State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time
Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President
of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority
was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam
Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and
impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated
by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus
of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than
several ‘client regimes’.

Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of
systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and
design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and
recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of
civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the
intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of
colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total
destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the
Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald
Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf
and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American
military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil

reserves as a pressure point
against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President
Cheney’s past ties with the
oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor
subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide
military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian
competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in
the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil
industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.

The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term
colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained
contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an
independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a
sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy
naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In
response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and
rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador
and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based
conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist
anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was
designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to
encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist
regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and
financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine
Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.

The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts
as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated.
The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of
armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and
‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of
thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were
from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under
the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads
spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet
government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most
capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.

The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal
ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant
the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the
Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a
thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the
un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli
regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President
Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously
supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre
of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from
Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.

The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South
Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they
had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would
collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and
United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to
permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to
the financing of Shia
clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among
the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society
movements.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost
entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or
Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death
squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian
population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals,
academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well
aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist,
anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first
years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most
secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work
of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US
colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for
its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million
Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the
invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This
enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle
East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethnoreligious
differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in
mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and
reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice
in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the
national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal
and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist
consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds
destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal
friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of
academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians,
engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the
entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was
physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census
bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools,
cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social
scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members
were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and
educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of
academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone
with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world,
despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national
health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented
levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th
century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians,
Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its
destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam
Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work
went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in
the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under
Israeli rule and occupation.

A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular
republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that
colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was
destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist
consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most
secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to
impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally
purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were
eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education
ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005
and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the
pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70
students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that
Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and
professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university
professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by
October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra,
whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and
allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list
published by the Pakistan Daily News on November 26, 2008. This list makes for
very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the
meat-grinder of US occupation.

Assassinations

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism,
which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes –
in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts
and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or
abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science
and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US
‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial
bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University
was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its
academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious
institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East.
Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the
13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals
came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received
advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at
major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad
University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian
discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eightythree
academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several
thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.

The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline

The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of
154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total
of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the ‘death
squads’ under US occupation.

Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching
medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training.
That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects
of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the
medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University’s
renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical
and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered
at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education,
communications and religious studies faculties.

At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in
the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical
sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke,
“…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’ (a child’s
game)”( justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal
of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.

Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior
academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul,
Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered
senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary
allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).

The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the
cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, crossdisciplinary
drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization.
The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethnoreligious
groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically
conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a
modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.

In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a
list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little
doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific
elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell
cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent
their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds
of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set
up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted
programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy
expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper
(RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the
Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.

The US ‘Surge’ and ‘Peak Assassination’ Campaigns: 2006-2007

The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military
offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based
academics for which a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87)
occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84
scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of
academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a
means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.

The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-
2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and
their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and
elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq
have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with the
US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate
with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined
to accept Iraqi scholars. After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics –
with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad
or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a
result, Iraq’s research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff,
including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future
employment.

The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a
‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime
is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up
for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national
resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire.
Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of
a modern adversary…and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an
alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors
from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient
Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and
elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.

Warning to Iran

The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization,
such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli
military attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation
has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their USfunded
NGO’s during their post-election ’Lipstick Revolution’ protests. They should bear in mind
that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced
optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee
camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else
in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the
image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US
Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian
scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson
of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-
2007.

Conclusion

What does the United States (and Britain and Israel) gain from establishing a retrograde client
regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq
has become an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and backward regime incapable of
challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the
ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent
state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their
technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.

In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848, the conservative French sociologist
Emil Durkheim recognized that the European bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict
and an increasing anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical
misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to use the myths of traditional
religion to ‘create’ social cohesion and undercut class polarization. He called on the educated and
sophisticated Parisian capitalist class to forego its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma in favor
of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political dominance. In the same way, US
strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists, have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious
forces to destroy the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq in order to
consolidate imperial rule – even if this strategy called for the killing off of the scientific and
professional classes. Contemporary US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and
politically most backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of warfare.

Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the
practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of
experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was
emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled
for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in
order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is
central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their
Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire
modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds
and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.

The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic.
The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s
precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal
and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and
direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of
Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and
European multi-national corporations.

This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs
with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.