—
www.civilaffairsassoc.org/USACAPOC.htm
As I’ve pointed out
several times before, the DoD has an entire department dedicated to the
administration of any country the US invades. It’s called the 4th
Psychological Operations Group headquartered at Fort Bragg in North
Carolina.[1]
It’s major mission is to:
“…support planning
and coordination of CA [Civil Affairs] and foreign nation support
operations. The unit provides Civil Affairs functional area specialists
in the following areas:
• Public Administration
• Dislocated Civilians
• Civilian Supply
• Public Communications
• Public Health
• Public Work and Utilitiesâ€
Now
we know that Psy-Ops units were deployed to Iraq as the following quote
reveals (made at the same time as the Abu Graib revelations),
— Maj. Gen. Herbert
L. Altshuler, Commander U.S. Army Civil Affairs and Psychological
Operations Command (Airborne)
— “Fixing the Problem in Fallujahâ€, BBC Radio 4’s
Website, 7 December 2004.
And it’s not as if the US doesn’t have
an awful lot of experience of invading and occupying foreign lands,
they’ve been at it for centuries.
Thus to say that the US ‘miscalculated’ or ‘didn’t think it through’ is not only laughable but an insult to our intelligence.
We
can only conclude that following the occupation, the US had no
intention of rebuilding Iraq and indeed as I’ve pointed out, the US is
on record as saying that it’s not in the business of ‘nation-building’,
so, what is the ‘Plan’?
Iraq is unlike earlier wars of
aggression waged by the West. The intention is not to acquire land or
even markets (in the accepted sense of the word), nor is it a strategic
acquisition designed to block an enemy state. Even the oil is not in
and of itself an objective, for as events have shown, the oil is worth
even more underground than it is by having it in circulation. Moreover,
denying access to the oil by the US’s major competitors, gains a
strategic economic advantage for US capital.
But perhaps even
more importantly, the creation of a ‘failed state’ destabilises the
region which weakens opposition to imperial plans and as we have
witnessed, it also creates the pre-conditions for extending the ‘area
of instability’ Eastward.
It is within this context that we see
that the never-ending ‘rumours of war with Iran’ spread by the US and
its faithful minions in the media make sense. This is classic
psychological warfare waged not only by the Fort Bragg posse but also
by a complicit media.
It’s no accident therefore that the
‘rumours of war’ have appeared with monotonous regularity for the past
three years and, an even more timely reminder of the tactics being
used, we need only look at the current events in Tibet, impeccably
timed to occur in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Destabilisation
is the name of the game.[2]
Again, the media has played a major
role in the process with an endless litany of ‘China-bashing’ stories
appearing. The precedent here is the role of Western agencies in
countries like the Ukraine and Georgia, funded by the US government,
the money going to various ‘NGOs’ and PR outfits, who operate as proxy
arms of the US state (much as they did back during the Cold War days in
countries like Angola and Mozambique via such outfits as UNITA and
Renamo) as well as the official organs like USAID.
The objective
here is to foment dissent and create instability in the country or
region and as with Iran, actually strengthen the hand of reactionary
forces within the country. We’ve seen it in Cuba for decades, for how
can a country which has been blockaded and under constant threat of
invasion and subversion develop normally? But then this is the entire
point, countries like Cuba and Venezuela have to be shown to the rest
of the world to be failures, there can be no successful alternative to
capitalism.
I think it’s true to say that the last time we saw a
situation akin to today’s is in the late 19th century, where Capital,
untrammelled by any kind of coherent opposition ran roughshod across
the planet, but this is where the similarities end. This is not the
1890s, there is no Berlin Conference divvying up the spoils of colonial
conquest. Instead, we have a capitalism in crisis and one unable to
foment general world war such as we saw twice in the 20th century, due
in part to the existence of nuclear weapons which even the psychopaths
in Washington, DC are reluctant to unleash on the world, fearing of
course that what they deliver, might in turn, be ‘returned to sender’.
Thus
to say that the invasion of Iraq, or indeed Afghanistan have been
failures is to entirely miss the point once you discount all the BS
about ‘nation-building’ and ‘democracy’, for they have achieved their
objective, namely to spread confusion, chaos and weaken and divide the
opposition.
The question however is whether even with unlimited
military force they can achieve their objectives under these new
conditions given the parlous state of the US economy, for this is the
bottom line, this is what it’s all about, the economics of capitalism.
It seems to be a common—but in my view, mistaken—assumption by the army of analysts and commentators on both the left and the right, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster for the US (never mind what it’s done to Iraq and its people). 
