Thanks!

No one has quote from a senior official in London, Canberra, or DC saying that looting was part of the planned program. Tim Judah’s piece (sadly behind a pay-wall; it was free initially) has him asking a US officer why they are doing little about the looting, and the officer takes him to a warehouse full of Iraqi weaponry that he has under US guard. He can’t spare the guys to guard everything.

We now know that in the post-war looting, 100s of thousands of tons of munitions went missing, and Iraq’s storage facility for yellowcake uranium was ransacked. Was this also a US/UK plot, or just the result of too few resources, too little planning, and general incompetence?

I certainly recall reading eyewitness reports of US troops standing aside to let looting proceed, and plausible claims that looters were encouraged, if not directed.

According to Naomi Klein (Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia) it was indeed a part of the plan. In a Le monde va changer de base sort of way.

From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq’s state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero‒apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. “I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can’t do anything, we need an order from President Bush.’” Back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

If, by “deliberate”, you mean that the US-UK-Aus failed to plan adequately and ignored warnings that looting would be a problem given the low troop levels, ok.

But if you mean the US-UK-Aus. expected and hoped for looting, and therefore were not short-handed but willingly stood aside, then you drank some Kool-Aid.

Tim Judah and Mark Danner—no war-mongers—reported in 2003 from Baghdad that the coalition was taken off-guard by the looting due to insufficient forces and that some of the looting was likely part of insurgency planning, respectively.

The “senior” officer cited in the post was putting positive spin onto a miserable situation.

None of this takes the US off the hook for the looting. If it had more forces, as many said it should have had, it would have been able to stop more of the looting. But to describe the looting as the intended results of US or coalition policy would be to falsify the record.

Taking the lowest casualty estimate available and putting the best possible face on motivation, the US invaded Iraq with no workable plan about what to do next and as a result, close to 100,000 civilians die. (In reality, probably many more than that, even if you don’t believe the Lancet II or latest ORB poll). But hey, violence levels are back to late 2005 levels.

USA, USA, USA….

It was one of the jokes of 2003 that the “decent Left” seemed so smitten with Ahmad Chalabi as the new Garibaldi/De Gaulle. I remember a hilarious screed by Hitchens in Slate where he solemnly intoned that nobody knows whether or not Chalabi was guilty of fraud in Jordan, which scrupulously avoided the fact that one could find out quite easily that Chalabi was guilty of fraud in Jordan, just as one could find out that his company had also been found guilty of fraud in Switzerland – and that “one”, here, included the vast majority of Iraqis, who just happen to live in a country that is next to Jordan. The crusade for democracy, led by a figure out of the Godfather – who could fail to laugh? Especially as the crusaders tended to call each other comrade.

Given the recent shenanigans in the U.S.’s own economy, however – for instance, the Federal Home Loan Bank’s loaning 163 billion dollars to three seedy mortgage companies, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and Hudson City Bancorp – I’d still pit our good old American corruption against Iraqi corruption anytime. We are the champions, my friends! to quote Freddie Mercury.

Even public opinion’s picking back up on Iraq:

http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=373