Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Much of what went wrong was avoidable. Focused on winning the political battle to start a war, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the postwar chaos in Iraq. Administration strategy seems to have been based on a hope that Iraq’s bureaucrats and police would simply transfer their loyalty to the new authorities, and the country’s administration would continue to function. All experience in Iraq suggested that the collapse of civil authority was the most likely outcome, but there was no credible planning for this contingency. In fact, the US effort to remake Iraq never recovered from its confused start when it failed to prevent the looting of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation.

Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq. Before dealing at considerable length with what has gone wrong, I should also say what has gone right.

Iraq is free from Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. Along with Cambodia’s Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of the two most cruel and inhumane regimes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the definition of genocide specified in the 1948 Genocide Convention, Iraq’s Baath regime can be charged with planning and executing two genocides —one against the Kurdish population in the late 1980s and another against the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s. In the 1980s, the Iraqi armed forces and security services systematically destroyed more than four thousand Kurdish villages and several small cities, attacked over two hundred Kurdish villages and towns with chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and organized the deportation and execution of up to 182,000 Kurdish civilians.

In the 1990s the Saddam Hussein regime drained the marshes of southern Iraq, displacing 500,000 people, half of whom fled to Iran, and killing some 40,000. In addition to destroying the five-thousand-year-old Marsh Arab civilization, draining the marshes did vast ecological damage to one of the most important wetlands systems on the planet. Genocide is only part of Saddam Hussein’s murderous legacy. Tens of thousands perished in purges from 1979 on, and as many as 300,000 Shiites were killed in the six months following the collapse of the March 1991 Shiite uprising. One mass grave near Hilla may contain as many as 30,000 bodies.

In a more lawful world, the United Nations, or a coalition of willing states, would have removed this regime from power long before 2003. However, at precisely the time that some of the most horrendous crimes were being committed, in the late 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations strongly opposed any action to punish Iraq for its genocidal campaign against the Kurds or to deter Iraq from using chemical weapons against the Kurdish civilians.

On August 20, 1988, the Iran–Iraq War ended. Five days later, the Iraqi military initiated a series of chemical weapons attacks on at least forty-nine Kurdish villages in the Dihok Governorate (or province) near the Syrian and Turkish borders. As a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I (along with Chris Van Hollen, now a Maryland congressman) interviewed hundreds of survivors in the high mountains on the Turkish border. Our report, which established conclusively that Iraq had used nerve and mustard agents on tens of thousands of civilians, coincided with the Senate’s passage of the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, which imposed comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq for crimes against the Kurds. The Reagan administration opposed the legislation, in a position orchestrated by the then national security adviser, Colin Powell, calling such sanctions “premature.”

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BP’s chief executive delivered a serious setback to hopes of rebuilding Iraq when he said that the oil company has no future there.

John Browne, one of Tony Blair’s favourite industrialists, indicated he had given up on Iraq because the political and security situation in the country had deteriorated so much.

Yet only 18 months ago he was extremely enthusiastic about prospects, lobbying in Washington and London to ensure American rivals did not cut him out of the action.

“We need a government, we need laws and we need decisions. We have not got any of that yet. A whole range of steps need to be taken,” said the BP boss as he unveiled new record profits this week.

“It’s not obvious to me you need foreign oil companies to do that [redevelopment].” He added that private oil firms could destabilise an already sensitive situation and perhaps it should be left to local state-owned groups.

The pessimistic view about the future in Iraq was expressed hours after Lord Browne had met the prime minister at the launch of a new climate change organisation.

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President Bush yesterday tried to deflect questions about his environmental record by claiming that he supports efforts to reduce America’s fossil fuel usage¹. He said he had “introduced ideas like a hydrogen-powered automobile, put money behind it and research behind it” so that so that we will be “less dependent on foreign sources of energy” and we will “improve the environment.” But Bush’s hydrogen-automobile proposal is purposely engineered to be fossil fuel dependent, and it is paid for by taking money out of programs that are actually reducing fossil fuel use.

As Mother Jones reported, “the Bush Administration has been working quietly to ensure that the system used to produce hydrogen will be as fossil fuel-dependent - and potentially as dirty - as the one that fuels today’s SUVs. According to the administration’s National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, drafted last year in concert with the energy industry, up to 90% of all hydrogen will be refined from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels”². Such a system, experts say, would effectively eliminate most of the benefits offered by hydrogen because the Bush plan’s use of oil/coal/gas to create fuel cells would generate large amounts of pollution. Not surprisingly, such a system would insure the massive profits of the energy industry, which bankrolls Bush’s campaign³.

Bush is, in part, paying for this fossil-fuel-based program by stripping funding from programs that are actually reducing fossil fuel use in America. As AP reported, Bush moved money into his hydrogen program at the same time he “ended an eight-year program to help automakers develop high-mileage, family size cars” such as the successful hybrids now beginning to permeate the U.S. market⁴. Additionally, Bush proposed reducing “federal funding for renewable energy and efficiency research program by more than $200 million in 2002″⁵.

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here’s a deep mystery surrounding Dick Cheney’s energy task force, but it’s not about what happened back in 2001. Clearly, energy industry executives dictated the content of a report that served their interests.

The real mystery is why the Bush administration has engaged in a three-year fight

Gregory Gay was born 21 years ago at the Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital (MCP), a venerable community hospital in Philadelphia’s East Falls neighborhood. He was shot six blocks away on January 24, not long after Tenet Healthcare Corp. decided to close the hospital. Tenet, the second-largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States, was in the process of shuttering or selling a quarter of its more than 100 hospitals nationwide. As it waited for a judge’s permission to shut down MCP, the company was slowly withdrawing services, closing floors, and letting the staff fade away through attrition.

When police and paramedics arrived moments after four bullets pierced Gay’s body that icy Friday night, he was fighting for his life and lucid enough to give the names of two men who had shot him. But instead of zipping up Henry Avenue to MCP, the ambulance raced to Temple University Hospital, some 20 minutes away. MCP’s struggling emergency room was on “diversion”— temporarily closed to new patients—that night, as it had been for much of that month. Gay died less than an hour later.

Gay’s death, one of many in the violent North Philadelphia streets whose sick and wounded feed the hospital, has become part of a lawsuit seeking to keep MCP open while charging that Tenet neglected its obligations to the city. (Tenet management refused to comment for this story.) Of course, it is uncertain whether Gay would have survived even had the hospital been fully operational. But the closing of MCP, a community hospital in every sense of the word, would clearly mean more hardship for thousands of its neighbors. Symbolically, in the minds of the hospital’s defenders, Gay’s death has come to stand for the deaths to come—not only the gunshot wounds, but the asthma attacks, the strokes and embolisms and diabetic comas that are likely to be aggravated by new delays and complications.

Not that MCP’s fate is unusual. Tenet has closed three hospitals during its five years in Philadelphia; over the past decade, four other North Philadelphia hospitals have shut down their inpatient units. Nationwide, according to data compiled by the federal government and Modern Healthcare magazine, more than 560 hospitals have closed since 1990—clobbered by stagnant reimbursement rates from government and the insurance industry, rising malpractice rates, skyrocketing prices for drugs and medical equipment, and increasing numbers of uninsured patients who can’t pay their bills.

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