Keeping America’s Baghdad Swimming Pools Safe From Fanatics

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Keeping America’s Baghdad Swimming Pools Safe From Fanatics

Posted on Jun 17, 2014
By William Pfaff


The Marines—250 of them, together with carrier air support and Marine Corps Osprey support craft—have been dispatched to save the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the “biggest in the world,” “the size of the Vatican City,” with its swimming pools and skating rinks, from the menace of the offensive directed at Baghdad by the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—the new Islamic Caliphate sought by the religiously rigorous Sunni counter-crusade.

ISIS already has taken Mosul and a large chunk of northeastern Iraq, and is aimed now at the Shia shrine city of Samarra and Baghdad itself. Some of us who witnessed the announcement and ambitions of that embassy when it was built had the premonitory thought that it might eventually end as the capitol of that Muslim Caliphate which the ISIS fanatics now have proclaimed, and which, in Washington, only the paranoid imagined.

The Baghdad Embassy was intended to become the proconsular headquarters of an American-Israeli-conceived new western empire that was announced in Israel in June 2006 jointly by the American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Its announcement coincided with an Israeli attack on Lebanon, foreseen as becoming the western Mediterranean access to what the two officials announced would become a “New Middle East” extending from Mediterranean Lebanon and Syria, through a federal Iraq of Sunni, Shia and Kurdish statelets, proceeding through a conquered Iran in Central Asia, to a “Free Baluchistan,” a NATO-ized Afghanistan, and an allied Pakistan, to the approaches of the Himalayas, and beyond them, to the rising counter-empire of the Chinese. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/keeping_americas_baghdad_swimming_pools_safe_from_fanatics_20140617

[Orsino]

1. Let's look forward to the photo of the last chopper leaving.

I think we have to abandon our imperial palace and sulk for a while before any real diplomacy can begin.

[Octafish]

2. Ask: Who profited from this ghastly Iraq war?

From 2003:

Study finds cronyism in Iraq, Afghanistan contracts

By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent | October 31, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Many of the companies that have received government contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have collectively contributed more money to President Bush's election campaigns than to any other candidate in more than a decade, according to a study released yesterday.

In one of the most detailed studies of postwar contracts, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit government watchdog, found that at least 70 companies have been awarded a total of $8 billion in contracts in the past two years.

While some of the contractors were previously known to have ties to White House officials -- such as Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney -- the group found several lesser-known firms that also are linked to senior government officials. One small company's sole employee is married to a deputy assistant secretary of defense, the study found.

Allegations of cronyism were quickly denied yesterday by government officials and company spokesmen. But the report raised new questions about whether political allies of the White House or Congress are being repaid for their support with lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. Most of the 70 contracts -- for tasks ranging from restoring electricity to rebuilding ports and schools -- were put out to bid, but some were not.

"Most of the companies that won contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were political players," said Charles Lewis, the center's executive director. "Those companies contributed more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush -- more than $500,000 -- than to any other politician over the last dozen years. These two wars in two years and their aftermaths have brought out the Beltway Bandit companies in full force, and there is a stench of political favoritism and cronyism surrounding the contracting process in both Iraq and Afghanistan."

The report, entitled "Windfalls of War," is the result of a six-month review of information collected through 73 requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act and through appeals to the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, and the State Department.

CONTINUED...

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/10/31/study_finds_cronyism_in_iraq_afghanistan_contracts/?page=full