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By Root 2915 0

” to accept the genuineness of the new democracy objective the media also had to ignore the evidence that even before the 2000 election important members of the Bush leadership had proclaimed, in the Project for a New American Century’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (Sept. 2000), that U.S. policy should aim to establish an enhanced U.S. power position in the Middle East, irrespective of Saddam Hussein’s presence.32 There is also evidence of very early administration discussions of post-occupation rights to Iraq’s oil, including the witness of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.33 The administration also announced early in the occupation an intent to maintain military bases in Iraq. There is also the problem that the majority of Iraqis are Shiites and some of their most powerful leaders are friendly to Iran. Would the United States be in Iraq to allow Shiite domination and a closer Iraq-Iran alliance? These considerations all suggest that the invasion-occupation was intended to yield U.S. control, possibly with a democratic façade, but certainly not real democracy and free choice for Iraqis.

But it is also clear that the Bush administration aimed first for an Iraqi government that wasn’t even much of a democratic façade. It would have liked a controllable Saddam-like ruler, as the Bush I administration would have liked back in 1991,34 and that aim would have been met by their initial choice of leader: the expatriate felon and disinformationist Ahmad Chalabi. As Juan Cole pointed out, “if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-America notables.”35 Eventually, elections were held, but only after the administration had tried very hard to avoid them in favor of “U.S.-appointed Iraqi leaders” or indirect elections through pre-selected power groups.36 As the Financial Times noted, the January 2005 elections took place only because of “the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who vetoed three schemes by the U.S.-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute them.”37

The election was essentially an “ethnic census,” in which the U.S.-supported (and heavily funded) candidate Iyad Allawi got only 12 percent of the vote, and Shiite and Kurdish groups won a large majority of the seats. However, this did not make it a free election and shift of power to the Iraqis who won the election. This was still an occupied country; the budget and oil revenues were controlled by the occupying power, as was the administrative bureaucracy; the economic rules had been rewritten by the occupation authorities; and the media were controlled by the occupation and its local agents. It is interesting to see how Bush could be cited in the media explaining how an occupation in Lebanon by Syria was incompatible with a real democracy in Lebanon,38 but no such suggestion would appear in the media’s comments on the election results in Iraq. For the media, the military occupation of a foreign country is incompatible with true democracy only when the occupying power happens to be an enemy of the U.S. government. So for the media, the January 2005 Iraq election made Iraq a democratic country; Bush was the “great emancipator,”39 although the escalation of violence in 2005 and 2006 did quell somewhat media claims of a democratizing success. In 2008, with Bush negotiating with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki for a Status of Forces Agreement with a possibly long stay for the U.S.’s “enduring bases,” along with an agreement for oil partnership deals and rights for four major U.S. oil companies, both long opposed by large Iraqi majorities, imperial objectives would seem to have triumphed over democracy promotion. But the U.S. MSM did not notice the contradiction or the distance traveled from the “single question.”

The media record in covering the invasion-occupation of Iraq had many other distinguishing blots, including the complete disinterest in international law,40 the low-key treatment and normalization of massive