In the outskirts of the world the system reveals its true face.
—EDUARDO GALEANO
The invasion and occupation of Iraq represents the single most significant event in U.S. foreign policy since the war on Vietnam in the 1960s, and because of its scale and outcome, an event of international importance. As could be expected, the Council on Foreign Relations, as an organization and community, as well as its leaders, staff, and members, played a central role in all phases of the war on and occupation of Iraq, from 2003 to 2011. The CFR was involved in the development of an overall climate of opinion on the Middle East prior to 2003, in lobbying for the actual decision to go to war, in the development and implementation of imperialist war aims, including the brutal suppression of the Iraqi resistance movement, and in the ultimate decision to partly reverse course and withdraw American troops.
The Council’s overall grand strategy in south-central Eurasia from its beginning in the 1980s represented a new development in the recent history of imperialism. The imperialist grand strategy in the conquest of Iraq represented a major break in the norms of conduct that have governed international relations since the end of the Second World War because it aimed at global domination. The more traditional geopolitical balance of power approach long favored by the U.S. capitalist ruling class was overturned in favor of an unlimited, worldwide hegemonic goal of an American imperium through the control of the vast oil resources of the Persian Gulf. This region and surrounding areas like the Caspian Sea basin contain two-thirds of the world’s oil and has thus been a main center of world geopolitical/geoeconomic power and competition during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Iraq holds a central geopolitical position in this region. Comparing Iraq to Vietnam, the CFR’s vice president and Director of Studies James M. Lindsay expressed the Council perspective in an October 11, 2005, interview: “It was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq, it’s a very different issue. It’s a country in one of the volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil.”504
The attempt to permanently embed American military power in south-central Eurasia was a global power play, as it would assure that the United States would control access to this oil whenever it wanted, shifting the long-term world balance of power even more in favor of the world’s already dominant military, economic, and political power. This power play was carried out against not only the opposition of many of Iraq’s people but against the major powers of Europe and Asia, because they depend upon the Persian Gulf region for their vital energy needs. This was a key part of the strategic plan for the war: if you control the energy supplies that Europe, Japan, and China need, then they are outflanked in the struggle for world power.
After the successful invasion of Iraq, the attempt to make it a neo-colony, embedding the American military in major bases there, was combined with neoliberal political and economic policies in a bid to reshape Iraq’s political economy. After the invasion, exploitative neoliberal economic policies, along with a pseudo-democratic American-style political system, were imposed upon Iraq by military force. CFR policymakers, in and out of government, assumed that the supposedly superior results of such policies would successfully integrate Iraq, its resources, and people into the global international capitalist order that is largely run by the United States. In turn policymakers believed that this would strengthen the existing capitalist system at home, due to the resulting flow of profits/capital back to the United States. The imperialist policies that the war on Iraq represented were therefore ultimately aimed at creating additional global living space for the development of an expansionist capitalist system, the goal of which was to foster rapid capital accumulation, especially on behalf of an American and transnational capitalist class whose main policymaking and consensus-forming organization was, and continues to be, the CFR.
Council publications during the Cold War and immediately thereafter helped set a future agenda for defining the national class interest of the United States by establishing the central importance of oil and what it labeled the “Oil Heartland,” the Persian Gulf/Middle East part of Eurasia, to the future of the United States and the Western world. CFR books stressed that the area was a vital and crucial geopolitical interest of the consuming nations because it held approximately 70 percent of the world’s known petroleum supply, because oil was a key strategic commodity, and because the control of the area by any other hegemonic power would be a disaster for the United States and the West. In short, this part of the world was seen as a center of gravity of the evolving American empire. Excerpts from two CFR publications during this period illustrate the key points. The first comes from a 1982 book by Council member Melvin A. Conant, who was a counselor for Exxon Corporation and an administrator with the Federal Energy Administration. The book and this policy perspective developed out of a CFR study group called “The Oil Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy.” Conant was the chairman of this group, which had two co-directors, Council member and former Director of Studies John C. Campbell and CFR Assistant Director of Studies Janice L. Murray.505 Conant’s Council book on the The Oil Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy 1980–1990 discussed oil as a central strategic interest, with the future of Eurasia at stake:
No longer only a commercial commodity, oil is now vested in the highest strategic interest of nations. It is a key factor in the overall power balance between superpowers and a vital need for all industrial states and many states of the developing world. . . . In 1979 . . . the United States obtained 30 percent of its supply from the volatile Gulf region, Europe 62 percent, and Japan 72 percent, . . . Proximity to the Oil Heartland has not yet given the USSR an unusual energy advantage . . . in affecting supply to Europe, Japan, or the United States. . . . Exploiting such a position would give the USSR unprecedented leverage; it would be a critical step . . . [in the] literal immobilization of Europe and of Japan that could lead to a decisive Soviet influence over the whole of Eurasia.506
A second perspective was put forth in another book resulting from a 1980s Council study group, this one chaired by former CIA director and Defense and Energy Secretary James R. Schlesinger, a CFR member. Council Senior Fellow Paul Jabber, also a CFR member, and Council member Gary Sick wrote in the CFR book Great Power Interests in the Persian Gulf, which came out of the study group:
The interests of the West and Japan in the Persian Gulf area are both unambiguous and vital. For much of the 1980s, these interests have also been clearly at risk. They revolve mainly around the critical issue of energy security, as they have for some four decades. The region is by far the largest remaining world source of cheap hydrocarbons in a global economy that continues to be oil-based. . . . The emergence of any hegemonic power in the Gulf—whether local or external to the region—capable of substantially directing, let alone controlling outright, the oil production and pricing policies of the key producing states . . . could be disastrous for the West. . . . The interests of the United States in the Persian Gulf region have been very simple and consistent: first, to ensure access by the industrialized world to the vast oil resources of the region; and second, to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring political or military control over those resources. . . . The Reagan administration adopted the Carter Doctrine and over the following seven years succeeded in putting more substantial military power and organization behind its words . . . [organizing in 1983] a unified command known as Central Command (CENTCOM), based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, with earmarked forces totaling 230,000 military personnel from the four services.507
This stress on the strategic importance of the oil in the Persian Gulf region and the fact that whoever controls this resource has immense potential and actual power over the key industrial economies of the world, was reflected in then Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney’s 1990 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Cheney, a longtime CFR member and a director when the study group on “Great Power Interests in the Persian Gulf” was meeting, adopted the same perspective, stating to the senators that whoever controlled the flow of this oil had a “stranglehold” over the American economy and “on that of most of the other nations of the world as well.”508
During the same period, in 1991–92, immediately following the demise of the Soviet Union, a “Defense Planning Guidance” document was drafted, mainly by four of Cheney’s Pentagon subordinates, all CFR members: Paul D. Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Andrew W. Marshall.509 Their draft document was leaked to the New York Times, causing an uproar, since it clearly stated the aims of a Pax Americana: the United States should make sure that it remained the world’s only superpower, which required that “we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” To make things even clearer, the draft document further stated: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”510
During the Clinton administration and first years of the George W. Bush administration, there was a warmongering lobby constantly working to push the United States into invading Iraq in order to assure that the United States would dominate the Persian Gulf region and therefore the evolving world order of the twenty-first century. Two organizations were foremost in this lobbying effort, the hard-line imperialist Project for the New American Century (PNAC), founded in 1997, and the softer-line, more mainstream imperialism of the CFR itself, whose membership included most of the PNAC leadership.
The PNAC was a far-right neoconservative think tank that became influential in the Bush II administration before becoming inactive in 2006 after its policies in Iraq had failed and been partly discredited. Its initial stated goal was to “promote American leadership” and “greatness” through “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” This involved increasing the U.S. military budget to “retain its militarily dominant status” worldwide and using the military threat and force “to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” Twenty-five individuals were listed as signers to the 1997 founding “Statement of Principles.” These twenty-five included sixteen CFR members (64 percent of the total), among them Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad. One former Council member, Donald Rumsfeld, was also among the signatories.511
In January of 1998 the PNAC wrote an open letter to President Clinton, arguing that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, and his regime must be removed from power, something requiring “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.” Otherwise U.S. “vital interests in the Gulf,” including “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil” would be endangered. Eighteen individuals signed the letter, nine of whom had also signed the 1997 “Statement of Principles.” Of the eighteen, a total of twelve were CFR members (67 percent), who included former CIA head and Council member R. James Woolsey, CFR director Robert B. Zoellick, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, and Paula Dobriansky (who was also a vice president, Washington office director, and a Senior Fellow at the CFR).
Finally, an analysis of the sixty-eight signatories or contributors to the totality of PNAC reports and statements as of the year 2000 found that fully forty-three (63 percent) were CFR members. These included four current or former CFR directors (Richard B. Cheney, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Vin Weber, and Robert B. Zoellick). The overlap of the CFR and the PNAC personnel during this period was therefore quite substantial—as were the strategic and practical policy orientations they represented.
Important elements within the Council itself were also engaged in at first subtle, and later overt, lobbying for a war with Iraq, beginning with general statements in 1997–99, then more forcefully advocating for war in 2001–2002. CFR member Richard N. Haass, a Council Fellow in 1994–97 who then became vice president and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote a number of books and articles outlining what American foreign policy should be. His perspective is especially important considering that he was the head of policy planning at the Department of State from 2001 to 2003 and became president of the CFR in July 2003.
In his CFR-published book, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (1997), Haass defined the geopolitical economic basis of U.S. foreign policy, calling for
a continued orientation of U.S. national security toward the Persian Gulf, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe. The United States has a vital interest in a favorable balance of power in these three regions of great economic and military resources. . . . We must act to maintain acceptable balances through countering or offsetting any imbalance as it occurs, be it from a local state or an emerging great power.512
Writing more specifically on the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Haass stressed the “pressing vital interest of maintaining access to oil.”513
In 1999, Haass, in an article for Foreign Affairs, stated that America must shoulder “an imperial role” in the world, the key question being
how to exploit its enormous surplus of power in the world. . . . American foreign policy must project an imperial dimension . . . [and] organize the world along certain principles affecting both relations between states and conditions within them. The U.S. role should resemble that of nineteenth-century Great Britain . . . [although] coercion and the use of force would normally be a secondary option.514
In late 2001 an article in Foreign Affairs expressed the assumption that there was to be a U.S. war on Iraq. CFR member and Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami (who was to start a decade-long term of service as a Council director in 2002) wrote:
In thwarted, resentful societies there was satisfaction on September 11 that the American . . . triumphalism that had awed the world had been battered. . . . We know better now. Pax Americana is there to stay in the oil lands and in Israeli-Palestinian matters. No large-scale retreat from those zones of American primacy can be contemplated. American hegemony is sure to hold—and so, too, the resistance to it. . . .
Now there is the distant thunder of war. The first war of the twenty-first century is to be fought not so far from where the last inconclusive war of the twentieth century was waged against Iraq. The war will not be easy for America in those lands. The setting will test it in ways it has not been tested before.515
The push for war by key Council individuals became more overt in early 2002, when Foreign Affairs printed Kenneth M. Pollack’s article “Next Stop Baghdad?”516 At the time, Pollack was a member, Senior Fellow, and director of national security studies at the CFR. Before joining the staff of the Council, Pollack had, during the Clinton years, served as director for Gulf affairs at the National Security Council and as a CIA military analyst specializing in the Persian Gulf region. His article reflected the growing consensus for war at the CFR and among ruling-class leaders, and was turned into a full-length volume: The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, a CFR book published by Random House later that year.517 In the acknowledgments, Pollack offers his “deepest thanks” to CFR president Leslie Gelb and other leaders at the CFR who “made the book possible” with paid time off, a foundation grant, and the “full resources of the Council, and particularly its world-class experts.”518 Additionally, Pollack offered thanks to Gelb and eleven other CFR members and leaders who made comments and criticisms aimed at improving the work. CFR leaders Gideon Rose (then managing editor of Foreign Affairs and a former Senior Fellow) and Fareed Zakaria (formerly a managing editor of Foreign Affairs) gave lavish advance praise for the book, and in his introduction to the CFR’s 2002 Annual Report, Council chairman Peter G. Peterson expressed his pride and endorsement of both the CFR’s magazine and Pollack’s work: “Foreign Affairs has burnished its position as the world’s premier international affairs journal with trailblazing articles such as Ken Pollack’s ‘Next Stop Baghdad?’”519 In short, it was in an important sense a collective work, and the disclaimer at the beginning of the book that the CFR “is host to the widest possible range of views, but an advocate of none” was, as is usually the case, nonsense.
Pollack’s conclusion in both his article and book was that the situation was similar to Europe in 1938, and “the United States has no choice left but to invade Iraq itself and eliminate the current regime.”520 In both writings, Pollack focused on the building tactical case for invasion, discussing, as if a fact, that weapons of mass destruction were a big danger; that both containment and deterrence were inadequate; and that an invasion and defeat of Saddam’s regime had advantages; it would be an “enormous boon to U.S. foreign policy.”521 The “boon” that Pollack envisioned was that the threat of Saddam Hussein controlling “global oil supplies” would be ended, and the United States would be free to pursue other items on its foreign policy agenda, including the “opportunity to build a new Iraq.”522 In his book Pollack elaborated on this theme:
The final advantage of an invasion. . . . Imagine how different the Middle East and the world would be if a new Iraq were stable, prosperous, and a force for progress in the region. . . . Imagine if we could rebuild Iraq as a model of what a modern Arab state could be. . . . Imagine if there were a concrete symbol demonstrating that America seeks to help the Arab world rather than repress it. Invading Iraq might not be our least bad alternative, it potentially could be our best course of action. If we are willing to accept the challenge and pay the price, we could end up creating a much better future for ourselves and all of the peoples of the Middle East.523
Pollack also stressed—and turned out to be greatly mistaken—that in reconstructing Iraq, U.S. costs would be minimal because “Iraq itself, with its vast oil wealth, would pay for most of its reconstruction. . . . It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions.”524 The alternative, for Pollack, was to allow Saddam Hussein, due to Iraq’s strategic position in the “vital Persian Gulf region” and its own great oil resources to “hold the economy of the world in the palm of his cruel hand.”525 In a follow-up 2003 Foreign Affairs article, under the heading “It’s the Oil, Stupid,” Pollack elaborated on why the Persian Gulf was so vital, and why the United States and not Saddam (or Iran or any other nation than the United States for that matter) should control it:
America’s primary interest in the Persian Gulf lies in ensuring the free and stable flow of oil from the region to the world at large. . . . The reason is simply that the global economy built over the last 50 years rests on a foundation of inexpensive, plentiful oil, and if that foundation were removed, the global economy would collapse. . . . The Persian Gulf region has as much as two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves, and its oil is absurdly economical to produce. . . . But the United States is not simply concerned with keeping the oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf; it also has an interest in preventing any potentially hostile state from gaining control over the region and its resources and using such control to amass vast power or blackmail the world. And it has an interest in maintaining military access to the Persian Gulf because of the region’s geostrategically critical location, near the Middle East, Central Asia, eastern Africa and South Asia. If the United States were denied access to the Persian Gulf, its ability to influence events in many other key regions of the world would be greatly diminished.526
Although Pollack’s work was an outstanding example of the CFR’s 2002–2003 push for a war on Iraq, it was not the only one. In the same 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs that featured Pollack’s article arguing for war was an article by Sebastian Mallaby called “The Reluctant Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States and the Case for American Empire.” At the time the article appeared, Mallaby was a journalist for the Washington Post, but within a year he had been hired to join the CFR’s Center for Geoeconomic Studies as a Senior Fellow in international development. British-born, Mallaby was the son of a British diplomat and attended Eton College, first among the elite boys’ schools, later graduating from Oxford University. Mallaby took an approach characteristic of the British imperial tradition in the article he wrote for Foreign Affairs, arguing that due to terrorism and failed states the United States should more openly become an imperialist power:
The logic of neoimperialism is too compelling for the Bush administration to resist. The chaos in the world is too threatening to ignore. . . . A new imperial moment has arrived, and by virtue of its power America is bound to play the leading role. The question is not whether the United States will seek to fill the void created by the demise of European empires but whether it will acknowledge that this is what it is doing. Only if Washington acknowledges this task will the response be coherent. The first obstacle to acknowledgment is the fear that empire is infeasible.527
In the May–June 2002 Foreign Affairs two additional war-related pieces appeared, both touting the military side of the issue. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Transforming the Military” argued for the “need for preemptive offense” on the part of the U.S. military. Eliot A. Cohen, a CFR member and strategic studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote that the United States now had a “unique, world-historical role” and future “defense” requirements must “begin with the capacity to project effective military power rapidly to most locations on the planet.”528
Other CFR leaders reinforced the growing consensus. In an August 1, 2002, op-ed piece published in Newsday, Council Senior Fellow Michael Mandelbaum argued that the conclusion that Saddam Hussein must be removed from power through war “is reasonable,” adding that such an outcome might revolutionize the entire Persian Gulf region, overthrowing current regimes, and putting America in command:
While prewar American commitments to a continuing presence in Iraq, to preserving the country’s territorial integrity, to the decentralization of power and to an appropriate disposition of the country’s oil will help to broaden the anti-Hussein coalition, they will probably not suffice to win the support of three of Iraq’s neighbors. The current governments of Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia are likely to resist a war against Hussein on the unstated grounds that the removal of one brutal, unpopular and illegitimate Mideast government would set a precedent that would jeopardize the stability of other, similar regimes—specifically theirs. So it might. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein might indeed set in motion forces that would threaten the rule of the Islamic clergy in Tehran, the Assad family in Damascus and the Saudi tribe on the Arabian Peninsula. Insofar as such a scenario is plausible, it provides yet another reason for the Bush administration to move to replace the present government of Iraq.529
Yale law professor and CFR Senior Fellow for International Organizations and Law Ruth Wedgwood attempted to answer those who felt that preventative war was illegal by arguing in the National Law Journal under the heading “Strike at Saddam Now,” that Saddam Hussein
still aspires to dominate the region; he still wants a 900-kilometer missile, nuclear weapons and remote means to deliver Iraqi stockpiles of chemical and biological reagents. . . . Much has been written about the American doctrine of “pre-emptive self-defense.” The idea has broader footing than some may suppose. The UN Charter explicitly recognizes (in Article 51) the right of every nation to act in its own self-defense when it is the victim of an armed attack. . . . One need not wait until the enemy’s mobilized troops have crossed the border in order to respond.530
Other Council leaders, who clearly wanted a preemptive war on Iraq, supported these views. In a December 2002 interview, Council member Rachel Bronson, who was the CFR’s director of Middle East Studies and an Olin Senior Fellow, made the following pro-war comments in response to a question from fellow CFR staff member Bernard Gwertzman:
Q.That’s been your view all along? Not only that war is inevitable, but that we should launch it?
A.Yes. It is strategically sound and morally just. The Middle East is a strategic region for us. It is where oil does play into all this. . . . It is about stability in the region. Saddam has been very destabilizing. . . . Strategically trying to get rid of one of the most destabilizing forces in the Middle East is a good idea. But the moral aspect doesn’t get as much play as it should. . . . When Secretary Albright said it was not us causing the suffering of the Iraqi people, but Saddam, technically she was right. And everyone in the region agreed; but what they couldn’t understand was why we pursued a policy knowing that Saddam would use it to his advantage to torture his people. We were complicit. We have to get rid of this monster. He is our Frankenstein.531
Another CFR leader sanguine about the prospects for war was CFR vice president and Director of Studies Lawrence J. Korb, who pointed out that the United States actually made a profit on the last war on Iraq. In an interview with Bernard Gwertzman, Korb made the following comments:
Q.Everyone remembers the allied land invasion in 1991 to liberate Kuwait that lasted three days. What kind of military action will we have this time? Will it also be a quick one?
A.I think if there is a military action and it occurs during the winter and you get support from countries in the region it will be over in less than a month. What you will have this time is simultaneous air and ground operations.
Q.Can the United States afford this? How much will this cost?
A.If you talk about cost, you have the incremental cost of the operation. We have a $400 billion annual defense budget. You won’t have to buy much new equipment. For a one-month war, counting the buildup under way, you are talking about an incremental cost of about $50 billion. . . . The Persian Gulf campaign in today’s dollars cost $80 billion.
Q.That was essentially paid by the Saudis, right?
A.The last war was actually paid for by the Saudis, the Germans, and the Japanese. We actually made a profit on that war. Nobody likes to admit that. When you look at the incremental costs of the war and what we collected, we actually collected more than the costs of the war. What we did after the war was over was make the books come out even. . . . We actually collected more than we . . . spent.532
While many CFR leaders, members, and staff were actively promoting a war on Iraq during 2001, 2002, and early 2003, at least a few were critical, offering another point of view, a perspective that was disseminated, but not as widely or frequently as the pro-war position. One key dissenter was Council member G. John Ikenberry, professor of geopolitics and global justice at Georgetown University. Unlike Pollack, Mandelbaum, Wedgwood, Bronson, and Korb, Ikenberry was not a CFR staff member, so apparently he was not as swept up by the imperialist pro-war visions that were manifestly circulating at the Council’s New York headquarters. He offered a clear critique, one that was printed in the September–October 2002 Foreign Affairs, arguing that the Bush administration had developed a “neoimperial grand strategy” that threatened
to rend the fabric of the international community and political partnerships at a time when that community and those partnership are urgently needed. It is an approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically unsustainable but diplomatically harmful. And if history is a guide, it will trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and divided world. . . . America’s . . . imperial strategy could undermine the principled multilateral agreements, international infrastructure, and cooperative spirit needed for the long-term success of nonproliferation goals.
The specific doctrine of preemptive action poses a related problem: once the United States feels it can take such a course, nothing will stop other countries from doing the same. Does the United States want this doctrine in the hands of Pakistan, or even China or Russia? Moreover . . . overwhelming American conventional military might, combined with a policy of preemptive strikes, could lead hostile states to accelerate programs to acquire their only possible deterrent to the United States: WMD . . .
Another problem follows. The use of force to eliminate WMD capabilities or overturn dangerous regimes is never simple, whether it is pursued unilaterally or by a concert of major states. After the military intervention is over, the target country has to be put back together. . . . This is not heroic work, but it is utt erly necessary.
When these costs and obligations are added to America’s imperial military role, it becomes even more doubtful that the neoimperial strategy can be sustained at home over the long haul—the classic problem of imperial overstretch.533
Ikenberry’s critique and recommendation that the United States stay with a more cooperative multilateral approach—although his perspective turned out to be accurate—was a distinctly minority view in the higher circles of the CFR and U.S. capitalist class, and those who were in charge of setting foreign and military policy in the Bush administration rejected his perspective. A close examination of these policymakers who decided to make war on Iraq, reveals that, with only a few exceptions, they were individuals with close historical and current ties to the Council on Foreign Relations. They reflected the goals and strategic thinking of the majority of those in the highest circles of the American capitalist ruling class.
Besides the activities of its staff and members who were promoting war, the Council as an organization held no less than thirty-nine separate private meetings on Iraq and the Middle East during 2002–2003. These sessions included one on “Iraq: The War and Oil.” Others were led by former CIA director John Deutch discussing the progress of the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, pro-war senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Undersecretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, Middle East expert Bernard Lewis, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, and numerous CFR member scholars.534 All of those named above, except Rumsfeld, were current CFR members in 2002.535 During 2003–2004, Iraq and related issues continued to be a major focus at the Council. The 2004 Annual Report stated: “Homeland security, terrorism, and gripping developments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the greater Middle East have held the country’s attention this year. More than forty Council meetings were organized in these areas, and nearly half of those were devoted to the situation in Iraq.”536
The government’s decision to attack and conquer Iraq is covered in depth in two acclaimed full-length books, both published within a few years after this decision. The first to appear was America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay.537 The second was Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet by James Mann.538 All three authors were CFR members when the books came out, and Lindsay was also a Council vice president and the organization’s Director of Studies. Their close connections with the Council raise the possibility that the historiography and interpretation of this decision had been decisively and deliberately shaped by the CFR community. But the insider approach to history also ensures that behind-the-scenes events are more fully covered than would be the case for less well connected authors. Mann, for example, conducted “well over a hundred” interviews for his book, many of them with central players in the decision, and lists eighty-nine by name in his acknowledgments. Of these eighty-nine interviewees fully thirty-eight were CFR members, including six former or current CFR directors—Z. Brzezinski, J. Kirkpatrick, C. Powell, B. Scowcroft, G. Shultz, and K. Duberstein—but Mann did not mention the Council connections of these individuals. He wrote his book as “senior writer-in-residence” at the CFR-linked Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, stating that two CSIS leaders—director John Hamre and director of its International Security Program Kurt Campbell, both of them Council members—provided “extraordinary support.”539 Mann’s index and text mentions the Project for the New American Century, which had close ties to the Council, but the index does not include any references to the CFR.
The index for the Daalder-Lindsay volume also makes no mention of the Council. The acknowledgments in the latter book also leave out any mention of the Council, despite the fact that Lindsay was a top CFR leader. Instead, the focus in the acknowledgments is the support offered by the Brookings Institution, where Daalder was a senior fellow. At Brookings, president Strobe Talbott, a former CFR director, and Council member James Steinberg are listed as providing key support, and three other CFR members, Kenneth Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon, and Tod Lindberg, are also mentioned as among those who made helpful suggestions. Three Council-connected foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Carnegie Corporation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, provided financial support for the research and writing of the book.540
The focus of these two books is on the individuals behind the decision for war. They make no mention of their class and institutional connections, and how such ties might have influenced their individual and collective strategic world-view, agenda setting, and decisions. This “great man” approach to history is taken furthest in the case of Daalder and Lindsay, who assert that “George W. Bush led his own revolution” and “remade American foreign policy.”541 Both books are, however, useful in naming and discussing the key decision makers for war during the early 2001 to early 2003 period. These decision makers can be divided into three groups.
The first group was made up of the top leadership. Daalder and Lindsay call them the “War Council”; Mann calls them the “Vulcans.” Eight people are mentioned as key by all three authors: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Adviser Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, CIA head Tenet, Undersecretary of Defense Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage.542 All of the eight except Bush and Armitage had at one time in their careers been members of the CFR. Five of the eight (Cheney, Powell, Rice, Tenet, and Wolfowitz) were current, dues-paying CFR members in 2002.543 Cheney was a former Council director, Powell was a future director, and Rice had spent a year in the mid-1980s working at the CFR as an International Fellow, presided over Council meetings and served on at least one committee of the board of directors. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were also involved in the Project for the New American Century.
The second group was made up of eight leading deputies and staff people, aides who took orders from the top leadership, were spokespeople, and often wrote the position papers, memos, and orders that went out after being approved and signed by the top leadership. These included Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, Cheney’s Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Trade Director Robert Zoellick, State Department Policy Planning Director Richard N. Haass, UN ambassador John Negroponte, Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the National Security Council staffer in charge of Iraq and Afghanistan policy.544 All eight of these individuals were members of the CFR in 2002.545 Zoellick was a former director of the Council, Dobriansky had been a vice president, Washington office director and a Senior Fellow at the CFR, and Haass became president of the organization in 2003. Libby, Zoellick, Dobriansky, and Khalilzad were also part of the Project for the New American Century. Haass later wrote an insider history of the 1991 and 2003 U.S. invasions of Iraq, confirming who the main and subordinate policymakers were, and stating that he was on the fence personally, “60/40 against going to war,” but did not resign over the issue since his disagreement “was not fundamental,” and it might impair the functioning of the government.546
The third or “outside” group consisted of five in-and-outer “wise men” types, former top government officials, most of them having worked for the George H. W. Bush administration during 1989–93. These well-connected and powerful individuals were, in 2002, either outside the government or part of advisory bodies with little formal power. Former secretaries of state James A. Baker and Lawrence S. Eagleburger, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, and former CIA director R. James Woolsey made up this group. All five were CFR members in 2002, and Scowcroft had been a director of the Council in the 1980s.547 Perle and Woolsey were also part of the Project for the New American Century.
Baker, Eagleburger, and Scowcroft were somewhat skeptical of war, while Perle and Woolsey pushed for it. This division within the outside group provided the only semi-serious public debate by members of the American governing class over the wisdom of an invasion.548
In sum, then, twenty-one individuals mentioned in the Daalder and Lindsay and Mann books were important in the decision to invade and conquer Iraq. Eighteen of the twenty-one, a stunning 85.7 percent, were Council members at the time the decision was made in 2002. Several (Cheney, Rice, Scowcroft, Dobriansky, Haass) had been unusually active in CFR activities as directors or Fellows. A lesser number of these key players (nine of twenty-one, or 42.9 percent) a number of them also CFR members, were leaders of the other, more public, pro-war lobbying group, Project for the New American Century. The CFR and its members had played the central role in shaping policies and making decisions that resulted in a war on Iraq.
The UN and the U.S. Congress were afterthoughts as far as these leaders were concerned. The debate over the war, such as it was, basically ended in August–September of 2002 when Bush and the top leadership, at the urging of the mild skeptics, agreed to present the case to the UN and Cheney made his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.549 When the UN refused to agree to authorize the war, the administration decided to go to war anyway. Cheney’s speech, reviewed below, was the first public statement of the neoliberal geopolitical war aims of the Bush administration. The Congress passed a resolution in October of 2002 authorizing a war on Iraq. CFR members like Christopher J. Dodd, Dianne Feinstein, John F. Kerry, Joseph I. Lieberman, John D. Rockefeller IV, and Robert G. Torricelli voted for the war resolution in the Senate, while two other Council members, Bob Graham and Jack Reed, voted no. Kerry stated in 2004 that he did not regret his vote in favor of war. 550
The 2001–2003 years of government service of Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill has been documented in great detail by Ron Suskind in his book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill. O’Neill himself read the final manuscript and verified its factual accuracy.551 Suskind recounts that in early 2001 O’Neill reviewed at top-level government meetings documents that Rumsfeld’s Defense Intelligence Agency had prepared, documents that O’Neill said mapped
oil fields and exploration areas . . . listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset. One document, headed “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” lists companies from thirty countries—including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom—their specialties, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest. An attached document maps Iraq with markings for “super-giant oilfield,” “other oilfield,” and “earmarked for production sharing,” while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine “blocks” to designate areas for future exploration. The desire to “dissuade” countries from engaging in “asymmetrical challenges” to the United States . . . matched with plans for how the world’s second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world’s contractors made for an irresistible combination.552
The desire to be in charge of dividing up Iraq’s oil wealth among favored and not favored nations and giant oil corporations was a part of the overall picture, but closely connected and even more important was the geopolitical aspect, the quest for world power. In his August 26, 2002, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Vice President Richard B. Cheney outlined the reasons for invading Iraq and taking over that country, warning that failure to do so would have grave consequences:
Armed with an arsenal of . . . weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.553
Of course, Cheney was mistaken about Saddam’s supposed arsenal, but he indirectly expressed the geopolitical economic goals of the Bush administration: it wanted to make America the dominant power in the Middle East. Instead of Saddam taking control of the “great portion of the world’s energy supplies” and subtly or overtly blackmailing any power who needed that energy, the United States would try to do so.
War aims for an imperial power especially involve forcibly determining the shape of the peace following victory. The first war aim of America in Iraq was to relocate population and resources (oil in this case) into its own sphere of interest. The second war aim was to convert Iraq into a neoliberal paradise for U.S. and other multinational corporations. In mid-2002 the Council, together with the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, established a twenty-three-member planning group to help formulate what should be American war aims and the political and economic rules for a postwar Iraq. The co-chairs were Edward P. Djerejian and Frank G. Wisner, both CFR members. One of the project directors was the Council’s director of Middle East Studies, Rachel Bronson, and members included Senior Fellows Kenneth Pollack and Richard Murphy, as well as corporate leaders (Boeing, PFC Energy), university professors (Princeton, Yale, Vermont), a Naval War College professor, a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations staffer, and representatives from Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the Brookings Institution (CFR member Martin S. Indyk), the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy (CFR member Ann Myers Jaffe), and nine other staffers from the CFR. The Council was the dominant force within the planning group. In late 2002 the CFR produced—jointly with Rice—the report titled Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq.554 Since the Baker Institute is in Texas and James A. Baker III, besides being a CFR member, was a trusted Bush family lawyer, this collaboration undoubtedly increased the report’s weight in the eyes of the Bush administration.
The report stated that the establishment of a “U.S. coordinator for Iraq” was an “urgent” task, a suggestion on which the Bush administration soon followed through.555 The body of this CFR report included a section called “The Lure of Oil: Realities and Constraints,” as well as an addendum called “Oil and Iraq: Opportunities and Challenges,” which was almost as long as the rest of the report. The report had this to say about the “lure” of Iraqi oil: “Iraq has the second largest proven oil reserves in the world (behind Saudi Arabia), estimated at 112 billion barrels, with as many as 220 billion barrels of resources deemed probable. Of Iraq’s seventy-four discovered and evaluated oil fields, only 15 have been developed. Iraq’s western desert is considered to be highly prospective but has yet to be explored.”556
In the report’s sections focusing on oil, lip service is given to Iraq’s control of its own oil, though in fact the report argues that national control of Iraqi oil must be scrapped and an economy based on “free market economics” and a “level playing field for all international players to participate” be created. The report suggests that the UN Secretary-General should “investigate ways that oil companies could be allowed to invest in Iraq.”557 In short, the CFR, both as an organization and as a community of members, had much to do with the preliminary development of U.S. war aims in Iraq, which conformed to the Council’s neoliberal geopolitical worldview, and stress on the central role of oil. This importance was, of course, downplayed, ensuring the slight public discourse on the origins and aims of the war. This led to Alan Greenspan’s later comment: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”558
The U.S. war of neoliberal conquest began in March and was over in April of 2003. At the same time an internal bureaucratic battle took place within the U.S. government over control of Iraq policy, with the Department of Defense emerging victorious. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), under Defense, assumed responsibility for postwar planning and setting war aims.
General Jay Garner, who was not a member of the CFR, was initially put in charge of running Iraq, but lasted for only a few weeks. The quick victory had resulted in delusional thinking among American policymakers in New York and Washington with regard to having absolute power in Iraq. Garner was evidently seen as someone who wanted to allow too much democracy in Iraq, and who wanted to compromise too much with Iraqis. Garner favored elections in ninety days, for example, along with a quick transition to Iraqi political and economic control. In a later interview he stated his views: “I don’t think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set up an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people. It’s their country . . . their oil.”559
In late April and early May of 2003 the U.S. press began to report on the Council- dominated Bush administration’s grand neoliberal plans for the Middle East generally and Iraq specifically. One article appeared in the May 1, 2003, Wall Street Journal:
The Bush Administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq’s economy in the U.S. image. Hoping to establish a free-market economy in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. is calling for the privatization of state-owned industries such as parts of the oil sector, forming a stock market complete with electronic trading and fundamental tax reform. Execution of the plan—which is expected to be complicated and possibly contentious—will fall largely to private American contractors working alongside a smaller team of U.S. officials. The initial plans are laid out in a confidential 100-page U.S. contracting document titled “Moving the Iraqi Economy From Recovery to Sustainable Growth.” The consulting work could be valued at as much as $70 million for the first year. . . .
The document provides the most detailed look to date at the ways U.S. officials contemplate restructuring an economy that had been almost entirely government-run, and long mired in a slump aggravated by wars and international sanctions. It is likely to intensify already-sharp international criticism of Washington’s unilateral actions in Iraq. Treasury Department officials, who helped draft the document, maintain that the plan reflects a broader vision for Iraq’s future economy. . . .
For many conservatives, Iraq is now the test case for whether the U.S. can engender American-style free-market capitalism within the Arab world. In a February address, President Bush spoke of “a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater political participation, economic openness and free trade.” A new regime in Iraq, he said, “would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” On the economic side, the . . . plan serves as a detailed road map for achieving that end. The proposals for possible mass privatization of Iraqi industry are likely to be the most controversial. The document—first drafted in February and circulated among financial consultants—calls for liquidating some insolvent Iraqi companies, while assessing others for possible sale. Some state companies might be sold through “a broad-based mass privatization program,” which could distribute ownership vouchers to ordinary Iraqi citizens, similar to a program used in Russia in the mid-1990s.
The document says that the contractors would help support “private sector involvement in strategic sectors, including privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially in the oil and supporting industries” that dominate Iraq’s business activity. Any attempt at privatizing Iraq’s oil industry, which controls the world’s largest petroleum reserves after Saudi Arabia, would be a gargantuan business deal. It could be contentious, especially if assets wind up in the hands of foreign oil companies. In the Mideast and Europe, there is widespread belief—despite White House denials—that the U.S. invaded Iraq to get control of its oil.560
For the CFR leadership, part of U.S. war aims had to include nation-building, and in his 2003 outgoing message Council president Leslie H. Gelb both supported and offered a mild critique of the Bush administration’s approach in Iraq. Gelb stated that he approved of Bush’s “very tough minded, tough in action policies, good for him and good for us,” adding that the “obsessions” of tyrants and terrorists “can be cured almost always and only by putting them behind bars or into graves.” But Gelb also added this: “The Bush team finds the rigors of cooperating with others and nation-building to be a goal too far, an interest not worth pursuing at high cost. The costs would be excessive, however, only if we failed to pursue a policy of cooperation, compromise and nation-building alongside the cocked guns and swagger. It is in the melding of these two strains of policy that the Council can do some good.”561
L. Paul Bremer III was educated at the Kent School, Phillips Academy, Yale, and Harvard. After working in the Foreign Service and as an assistant to Henry A. Kissinger and Alexander M. Haig in the State Department, he was appointed ambassador to the Netherlands. He later resigned from the Foreign Service to become the managing director of the consulting firm of Kissinger and Associates (1989–2000). By 1990 he had applied and been accepted as a member of the CFR.562
On May 11, 2003, General Jay Garner was summarily fired and replaced by Bremer as President Bush’s special envoy and Civil Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Bremer’s mandate was to act as a dictator, issuing edicts that would implement the hard-line neoliberal economic program to remake Iraq’s economy, society, and politics in a manner that would benefit American and other multinational corporations and the various national capitalist classes, especially the U.S. capitalist class that owned the bulk of assets of these companies. He began by immediately canceling Garner’s plan for an interim Iraqi government. He followed this up with orders abolishing the Ba’ath Party, banning party members from public office, and dissolving the Iraqi Army. These orders made an estimated 450,000 Iraqis unemployed, depriving them of their jobs and income. Bremer and the U.S. occupation had, almost immediately, created millions of enemies since these men’s family members were also affected by these laws. Many of them had access to guns and knew how to use them. Bremer then turned his attention to the task of the neoliberal economic transformation of the Iraqi economy. Over the next four months (mid-May to mid-September 2003), Bremer issued a number of economic edicts establishing Iraq as a test case for rapidly turning a state planned economy to a market driven, globalized neoliberal economy. Bremer’s major orders were:
•Order 12: suspending all trade restrictions, including tariffs and customs duties, until December 31, 2003
•Order 37: establishing a 15 percent flat tax
•Order 39: rewriting foreign investment laws in favor of foreign multinational corporations, allowing 100 percent foreign ownership except in the oil sector, privatizing 200 state-owned Iraqi enterprises, and allowing unrestricted, tax-free repatriation of profits out of Iraq
•Order 40: allowing foreign banks to purchase up to 50 percent of an Iraqi bank563
Bremer’s chief economic adviser for these laws was yet another CFR member, M. Peter McPherson, who had become a Council member in 1987.564 McPherson had been head of the Agency for International Development in the Reagan administration and had also headed the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a government-supported organization that mobilizes private capital to invest in and profit from “emerging” markets. McPherson went on to become a deputy secretary of the treasury under Reagan, where he worked on the Canadian-U.S. free trade agreement. Later he was an executive vice president at Bank of America, where he worked on the North American Free Trade Agreement. When he left that position, he became president of Michigan State University. Under Bremer, McPherson was director of economic policy for the Office of Reconstruction in Iraq. He also helped establish a central bank and a new currency for the country. His attitude toward the role of the Iraqi state is illustrated by his support for theft as a way to privatize state assets, offering his view of the “shrinkage” of the state as follows: “I thought the privatization that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine.”565
As could have been predicted by anyone without the ideological and self-interest blinders imposed by a strong belief in the American imperial geopolitical project and the ideology of neoliberalism, the effects of the Bremer-McPherson free market economic program—approved by Bush, the Vulcans, and others in Washington—on the Iraqi people were catastrophic. Bremer told a special meeting of the World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan that he would “set in motion policies which will have the effect of reallocating people and resources from state enterprises to more productive private firms.” He added that these state enterprises were “inefficient” so their privatization was “essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.”566 This resulted in mass unemployment, which reached as high as 50–60 percent during the summer of 2003.567 As a result, large numbers of Iraqis came to the conclusion that this was simply another form of colonialist and imperialist pillage. Naomi Klein summed up the reality as follows:
After the toppling of Saddam Hussein, Iraq badly needed and deserved to be repaired and reunited, a process that could only have been led by Iraqis. Instead, at precisely that precarious moment, the country was transformed into a cut-throat capitalist laboratory—a system that pitted individuals and communities against each other, that eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs and livelihoods and that replaced the quest for justice with rampant impunity for foreign occupiers . . . a very capitalist disaster, a nightmare of unfettered greed in the wake of war.568
This neoliberal capitalist disaster imposed by the CFR was one that the Iraqi people could not tolerate, so they began to rebel and attack both the occupiers and those Iraqis who collaborated with them. The U.S. military and intelligence services under Bush and Rumsfeld responded, as occupiers always do, with repression, in this case including picking up tens of thousands of Iraqis and subjecting them to various levels of torture to gain information about who was part of the resistance. To defend the neoliberal free market model and attempt to salvage American hegemonic goals, during the first three and a half years of the occupation, an estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, and many were tortured.569
In article after article in 2003 and 2004 the New York Times discussed how the American military, organized to successfully fight conventional wars and lacking adequate intelligence, became frustrated with the guerrilla war that they had been forced into fighting. For example: “On the streets of Baghdad, and in the angry cities west and north of the capital . . . the United States has a hard time isolating the guerrillas who stalk its troops, plant bombs on the roads and launch mortars on its bases.” Looking for solutions, the government began consultations with at least two CFR “experts.” The first was Lawrence J. Korb, a former Reagan administration official and director of national security studies at the CFR. In November 2003 Korb was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon with other unnamed “experts” to devise solutions.570 Another Council expert brought into Iraq was CFR Senior Fellow Arthur C. Helton, who was killed in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August of 2003.571
As American military and intelligence forces faced increased opposition and casualties during 2003 and early 2004, the Bush administration doubled down, deciding on a harder line with more troops, tougher tactics, and a giant embassy.572 When Bremer left Iraq in mid-2004, he was replaced by London-born John Negroponte, the new U.S. ambassador, who had become a CFR member in 1982.573 Negroponte’s father was a Greek shipping magnate who had emigrated to the United States, and John was sent to the best schools—Buckley, Phillips Exeter, and Yale. John Negroponte went into the Foreign Service, working at the American Embassy in Saigon during the war on Vietnam, and later became U.S. ambassador to Mexico, the Philippines, and Honduras. It was in the last post during the Reagan years of 1981–85 that Negroponte became known as an enabler of human rights abuses. John MacGaffin, a CIA associate director for clandestine operations, described Negroponte as “a guy who plays hardball. He’s a man who understands the whole range of counterintelligence, intelligence and covert action.”574 Negroponte was a strong supporter of the murderous contra war against Nicaragua and played a central role in it, working closely with the CIA and the Honduran military as well as playing host to contra leaders the Reagan administration set up in Honduras, to attack Nicaragua.575 Jack Binns, a former U. S. ambassador to Honduras told the New York Times that he believed Negroponte “was complicit in abuses; I think he tried to put a lid on reporting abuses and I think he was untruthful to Congress about those activities.”576 Negroponte became known as a “veteran of dirty wars” and undoubtedly was sent to Iraq to help organize the massive violence seen as necessary to destroy the insurgency.577
A central part of the coercive structure built up to reinforce the planned American domination of Iraq was construction of the largest and most expensive embassy in world history on one bank of the Tigris River in Baghdad. Construction began in 2005 for a facility larger than Vatican City, six times the size of the United Nations compound in New York, and ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy worldwide. When completed at an estimated cost of $700 million, it was the size of a small city, with 16,000 employees, 5,500 of them security personnel. It consisted of twenty fortified structures on 104 acres (the size of about eighty football fields), including six apartment buildings, two giant office structures, a commissary, a cinema, retail and shopping areas, restaurants, water treatment facilities, electric power station, wastewater treatment facilities, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gym, and club. It held by far the largest CIA station in the world.578 Unlike other embassies, which are designed to facilitate interaction with local people, the purpose of this massive compound was not only for defense, but also to overawe and impress the Iraqis with the might of the newly dominant imperial power. It forcefully illustrated the continued strong commitment of the Bush administration and men like Negroponte to American war aims in Iraq and the larger Middle East region, with all the larger implications about neoliberalism, oil, and world power. What it actually showed to the Iraqi people, however, was who really exercised power in their country, and it succeeded only in stimulating resistance.
Returning to Iraq in June 2004, at almost the exact same time as Negroponte, was yet another Council member, General David H. Petraeus, called “the most celebrated U.S. military figure of his generation.”579 An intellectual as well as a general, Petraeus earned a PhD from Princeton in the 1980s with a dissertation called The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam. Known as an expert on counterinsurgency, he and another general oversaw the publication of an army field manual called Counterinsurgency. He became a member of the CFR and officially joined their network at about the same time he got his doctorate.580 Petraeus has been an active Council member, co-chairing an independent task force, for example.581 Petraeus was sent to Iraq to provide the military leadership needed to defeat the resistance, which could only be done, he believed, with Iraqi troops. Indicative of the power he was given, PBS’s Frontline reported on October 21, 2014, that Petraeus distributed at least $400 million in cash to persuade Iraqi resistance groups to end their armed struggle. President Bush apparently was not informed of the payment of this illegal bribe money, yet Petraeus and the others involved have not been investigated for violations of law.
Petraeus became the first commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq. As commander of this group, Petraeus supervised lower-rank officers who were training units like the Special Police Commandos of the Iraq Ministry of Interior to provide security once the American role was reduced. One of his subordinates was Colonel James Steele, who had been selected for a senior job by Undersecretary of Defense and CFR member Paul Wolfowitz.582 Steele, then an Enron executive, was a retired special forces officer and, like Negroponte, a veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America. Steele had been in charge of the U.S. Special Forces group training the front-line battalions that committed massive human rights abuses, torture, and death squad activity in El Salvador’s civil war, in which upward of 70,000 were killed, many of them kidnapped and murdered by the government forces Steele was training. Steele was thus an expert in organizing a counterinsurgency campaign involving local forces, having honed his skills training torture and murder squads in El Salvador. Newsweek later belatedly reported in January of 2005 that the United States was considering “The Salvador Option” in Iraq.583
Petraeus assigned Steele to be the main adviser training a group within the Interior Ministry called the Special Police Commandos, and stated that this key unit “would receive whatever arms, ammunition and supplies they required.”584 These commandos soon became known as the group guilty of many if not most of the mass torture and murder of Iraqi civilians that took place during the next few years. While in Iraq, reporter Peter Maass interviewed Steele and others (but apparently not Petraeus), for his article “The Way of the Commandos,” which appeared in the May 1, 2005, New York Times Magazine. At first, Steele would not allow the reporter to visit a detention center where Steele was an adviser, but eventually relented and took Maass into the prison. Once inside, Maass entered another world, a chamber of horrors. He reported that he saw about 100 detainees, hands bound behind their backs, most of them blindfolded; “to my right, outside the doors, a leather jacketed security official was slapping and kicking a detainee. . . . A detainee was led out with fresh blood around his nose. . . . One desk had bloodstains running down its side.”585 Maass wanted to interview one detainee, but while doing so, “a man began screaming in the main hall. . . . It was not an ecstatic cry; it was chilling, like the screams of a madman, or of someone being driven mad. Steele left the room” and when he “returned the shouts had ceased.” Maass heard one U.S. soldier at the center say that he had just seen a detainee “hanging from the ceiling by his arms and legs like an animal being hauled back from a hunt.”586
In a 2013 Guardian (UK) article titled “Revealed: Pentagon’s Link to Iraqi Torture Centers” reporters concluded that Petraeus and Steele were behind the commando units implicated in the large-scale torture and murder of detainees.587 This article also pointed out that the detention centers had video cameras purchased by the U.S. military, which the Iraqi commandos used to film tortured detainees for a TV program shown on the U.S.-funded al-Iraqiya national TV station. This program, called Terrorism in the Grip of Justice, showed victims of torture confessing to all manner of crimes. This was shown to terrorize both common criminals and those resisting U.S. control of Iraq, as well as illustrate to the Iraqi public the supposed depraved nature of the detainees. General Petraeus saw the TV program and called up the head of the Special Police Commandos, demanding not that the torture and murder stop, but that they stop showing the torture victims on TV.588 The Iraqi commander complied, indicating that Petraeus had command authority over those doing the torturing, just as Steele did at the detention center. Guardian reporters concluded: “The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorized the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.”589 The purpose of this carnage was to destroy the resistance leadership and their followers. Torture was used to gather intelligence about who should be captured, forced to give information, and later often murdered. As Petraeus expressed it in one of his writings on counterinsurgency: “Intelligence is the key to success.”590
Petraeus was not the only Council-connected general at the center of U.S. aggressive operations in Iraq. Stanley A. McChrystal was an Army colonel in 1999 when he was selected by the CFR’s Military Fellow Selection Board, headed by none other than Richard B. Cheney, to spend a year at the Council’s headquarters to, in the words of the CFR’s Annual Report, “broaden . . . [his] understanding of foreign affairs.”591 He was then elected to Council membership in 2001.592 After making close connections within the CFR, the colonel was soon promoted to general and commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008. JSOC carried out assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan, working its way through “kill lists” of people who were targeted, then captured or killed in night raids on their homes or kidnapped off the street. JSOC also conducted torture at a secret U.S. Army base in Iraq called Camp NAMA. Journalist Jeremy Scahill later wrote that “a lot of JSOC’s dirty business went down is a small cluster of buildings nestled in a corner of a Saddam-era military base near Baghdad International Airport . . . Camp NAMA.”593 Human Rights Watch concluded that torture at Camp NAMA was “part of a regularized process of detainee abuse.”594 McChrystal often personally directed special operations in Iraq, and was reported to have frequently visited the Camp NAMA torture site.595 After an exposé of the war crimes that occurred at Camp NAMA, dozens of lower-rank soldiers were prosecuted and convicted of torture, but the commander was promoted.596 After lobbying by Petraeus, President Obama put General McChrystal in charge as commander in Afghanistan in 2009. Scahill concludes that McChrystal was one of the key players in the transformation of the JSOC into a global hit squad.597 Stanley A. McChrystal retired from the Army after being removed from his Afghanistan command in June of 2010. He was soon hired by Yale University as a Senior Fellow, teaching a graduate-level course on “Leadership in Operation.” He was also brought onto several corporate and strategic advisory boards, including JetBlue Airways, Navistar International, Siemens Government Systems, and a licensed arms dealer called Knowledge International. With access to the high salaries, stock options, and other perks that corporate directors have, it is likely that McChrystal will soon be a member of the capitalist class himself.
A final piece of evidence illustrating that those highest in the U.S. chain of command had a significant measure of responsibility for the horror in Iraq during those years was what happened when regular U.S. troops or National Guard stumbled onto one of the torture/detention centers, which happened a number of times during the years of civil war in Iraq. The first documented instance took place on June 29, 2004. Oregon Army National Guard troops were startled to observe men in plainclothes beating blindfolded and bound prisoners in the enclosed grounds of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They swept into the yard and found dozens of detainees who stated that they had been beaten, starved, and deprived of water for three days. The Seattle Times reported what happened next:
In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices: metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals. Many of the Iraqis, including one identified as a 14-year-old boy, had fresh welts and bruises across their backs and legs. The soldiers disarmed the Iraqi jailers, moved the prisoners into the shade, released their handcuffs and administered first aid. Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson of Albany, Ore., the highest-ranking American at the scene, radioed for instructions. But in a move that frustrated and infuriated the guardsmen, Hendrickson’s superior officers told him to return the prisoners to their abusers and immediately withdraw. It was June 29—Iraq’s first day as a sovereign country since the U.S.-led invasion. . . . The U.S. Embassy in Iraq confirmed the incident occurred and disclosed for the first time that the United States raised questions about the June 29 “brutality” with Iraq’s interior minister. It said it would be “inappropriate” to discuss “details of those diplomatic and confidential conversations.”598
John Negroponte was then, as U.S. ambassador, at the top of the chain of command in Iraq, and David Petraeus was near the top of the military command structure. Evidently neither ever did anything to save these and thousands of other prisoners from abuse, apparently believing, as so many in the U.S. power structure did, that American interests were served by torture and murder. Both men soon went on to higher office, Negroponte as the first director of National Intelligence and Petraeus as chief of Central Command and later as CIA director. Petraeus resigned from this last post in November 2012 after his extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula D. Broadwell, surfaced. Petraeus had also shared confidential official data with Broadwell. It turns out that Broadwell is also a fellow CFR member, having been elected as a term member in 2008, likely with Petraeus’s support. Following his resignation from both the CIA and the U.S. Army, Petraeus was hired by the CFR-connected Wall Street private equity firm KKR to head up their Global Institute. KKR’s co-CEO, Henry R. Kravis, was a director of the Council from 2006 to 2012.599 Petraeus’s new job illustrates how important the Council network can be for individuals; his connections allowed him to transition into an interesting and lucrative position on Wall Street.
Throughout 2005 it was increasingly clear that the Bush administration’s Iraq policy was failing, and the number and strength of critics was growing. Those who had promoted and made the decision for war began to leave their government positions in early 2005. It was Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, who left first, in early 2005. Within the inner circle of decision makers, Powell had been the most skeptical about the war on a realistic, pragmatic basis, but ended up strongly supporting it.600 It was therefore ironic that he and Armitage were the first to desert the sinking ship. Stronger war hawks Wolfowitz, Feith, and Libby all left the administration between June and October of 2005. Rumsfeld and Rice, with Cheney and Bush himself, were still holding on as 2006 began.
With a November 2006 midterm election looming, Republicans in Congress and the Bush policy team began a consultation process early that year aimed at reaffirming existing policies while quieting dissent, trying to disarm critics enough to win the election. The means used to accomplish both goals was to set up a “fresh eyes,” “bipartisan blue ribbon” task force that would meet, call upon capitalist-class “wise men” and experts for advice, try to develop consensus within this group, then issue a report that offered possible “new” but likely not significantly different policies. The ten-member Iraq Study Group (ISG) fulfilled this mandate from the time it was appointed in March 2006 to when its report was issued in December of that year.
More often than not, “blue ribbon” task forces are dominated by Council-connected individuals, illustrating the power and reach of the CFR network. The ISG was no different. The ten members were evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, co-chaired by former secretary of state and secretary of treasury James A. Baker III (Republican) and former congressman Lee Hamilton (Democrat). The eight other original members were four Republicans: former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Conner, former CIA director Robert M. Gates, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former senator Alan K. Simpson. In addition to Hamilton, the four other Democrats were Lazard Freres managing director and Clinton adviser Vernon E. Jordan Jr., former congressman Leon E. Panetta, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, and former senator Charles S. Robb. In 2006, four of the five Democrats (all except Panetta) and two of the Republicans (Baker and Gates) were current CFR members, and O’Connor was a former member.601 Therefore seven of the ten original members of the ISG were current or former members of the Council. Two of the original ten members—Giuliani and Gates—dropped out before the report was complete. In May Giuliani resigned, and was replaced by former attorney general Edward Meese III. In November, right after the Republican defeat in the election, Gates became secretary of defense, replacing Donald Rumsfeld. CFR member and former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger replaced Gates on the ISG.
Besides having a total of eight Council members on the ISG, more than a majority (twenty-three, or 53.5 percent) of the forty-three “former officials and experts” interviewed to solicit their opinions on what to do about Iraq were CFR members. Nine of the twenty-three Council members interviewed were current or former directors of the CFR, including former former CFR president Gelb, former secretaries of state Albright, Christopher, Kissinger, Shultz, and Powell, as well as former national security advisers Brzezinski and Scowcroft.602 Many of the experts on the working group panels were also Council members. In sum, the ISG members of the CFR dominated the ISG, and their conclusions reflected what leading members of the Council and the larger capitalist ruling class were thinking about U.S. policy in Iraq and the way forward as of late 2006.
The work of the Iraq Study Group was facilitated especially by the U.S. Peace Institute, which had been proposed under the Carter administration but not implemented until 1984, when Ronald Reagan decided that it was the right year to sign a law creating this organization. The president of the Peace Institute in 2006 was CFR member Richard H. Solomon, who was a former Department of State official (Director of Policy Planning, Assistant Secretary of State, ambassador to the Philippines). The idea behind the Institute was to resolve conflicts without violence, but it became involved in Iraq only as an afterthought, when the situation was already characterized by mass violence. Three other organizations also collaborated in the work of the ISG. These were the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The leaders of each of these three other organizations, who signed on to the ISG Report, were Edward P. Djerejian (Baker Institute), David M. Abshire (CSP), and John J. Hamre (CSIS). All three were members of the CFR in 2006.603
The ISG Report of December 6, 2006, representing a consensus of CFR and capitalist-class opinion, was a milestone in the evolution of U.S. policy. It reaffirmed the long-standing belief in the importance of Iraq and its oil reserves, seen as “critical” to U.S. national interests:
Iraq is vital to regional and even global stability, and is critical to U.S. interests. It runs along the sectarian fault lines of Shia and Sunni Islam, and of Kurdish and Arab populations. It has the world’s second-largest known oil reserves. It is now a base of operations for international terrorism, including al Qaeda. Iraq is a centerpiece of American foreign policy, influencing how the United States is viewed in the region and around the world.604
In terms of recommendations, the ISG’s Recommendations 62 and 63 focused on privatizing the all-important oil sector:
Since the success of the oil sector is critical to the success of the Iraqi economy, the United States must do what it can to help Iraq maximize its capability. . . . As soon as possible, the U.S. government should provide technical assistance to the Iraqi government to prepare a draft oil law that . . . creates a fiscal and legal framework for investment. Legal clarity is essential to attract investment. . . . Expanding oil production in Iraq over the long term will require creating corporate structures. . . . The United States should encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international oil companies. The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise. . . . There is no substitute for private-sector job generation.605
The illegal imposition of neoliberal policies in all aspects of Iraq’s economy, something that had been a central aspect of U.S. policy since the beginning of the war and occupation, was thus reaffirmed by the CFR-dominated ISG at the end of 2006. But they stepped back from a longer-term goal of making Iraq a military colony and a central base in a U.S.-dominated Middle East. Diplomatic and “national reconciliation” efforts to bridge the Sunni-Shia divide were stressed, along with a takeover of the war by the new Iraqi Army. Other U.S. military bases in the region were to be used to patrol the Persian Gulf region, although a short term “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq might be needed if it helped the process of forcing the Iraqi Army taking over primary responsibility for security:
As additional Iraqi brigades are being deployed, U.S. combat brigades could begin to move out of Iraq. By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades could be out of Iraq. At that time, U.S. combat forces in Iraq could be deployed only in units embedded with Iraqi forces. . . . Even after the United States has moved all combat brigades out of Iraq, we would maintain a considerable military presence in the region, with our still significant force in Iraq and our powerful air, ground, and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, as well as an increased presence in Afghanistan. . . . Because of the importance of Iraq to our regional security goals . . . we considered proposals to make a substantial increase (100,000 to 200,000) in the number of troops in Iraq. We rejected this course . . . adding more American troops could conceivably worsen those aspects of the security problem that are fed by the view that the U.S. presence is intended to be a long-term “occupation.” We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad, or to speed up the training and equipping mission. . . . We believe that our recommended actions will give the Iraqi Army the support it needs. . . . The United States should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq.606
Although no timetable was set for withdrawal, and the possibility of a troop surge was supported, the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group nevertheless represented a move back toward the political center, toward a less doctrinaire, less hegemonist, and more realist balance of power approach to the Middle East and the world. The fact that their suggestions were implemented testified to the continuing influence of the Council on U.S. Iraq policy. Once the midterm election resulted in a serious defeat for the Republicans, Rumsfeld resigned (December 18, 2006). Robert M. Gates, a longtime active member of the CFR and part of the Iraq Study Group, took his place. With the neocons in retreat, Gates was influential in implementing the new realist ruling-class consensus on Iraq policy: the attempt to achieve victory through a lower-profile war and occupation.
As late as the fall of 2011, U.S. officials were quoted as still planning a major increase in diplomatic and cultural programs in Iraq, the building blocks of “soft power,” by establishing branch consular-type offices across that nation, as part of “the largest diplomatic mission since the Marshall Plan.”607 In 2011 the State Department estimated that it would spend “$3 billion over the next five years on its private security contracts to protect its massive embassy complex in Baghdad alone.”608 The main event of 2011, however, was the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq. This happened after many months of trying and failing to negotiate an agreement with the Iraqis that would override the one signed by Bush to withdraw all U.S. troops by December 31, 2011. Resistance to continued U.S. occupation was strong in both Iraq and the United States. Iraqi political leaders had to push the Americans out because of the strong nationalist popular sentiment in Iraq that wanted the occupiers gone. Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki wanted to agree to all the conditions needed to keep U.S. troops in Iraq, but his government would have fallen had he done so. Almost all uniformed U.S. troops left the country. Private security guards and Marines were left to guard the giant U.S. embassy.
The failure in Iraq marked the end of the brief, post–Cold War U.S. unipolar moment. In Iraq the limits of American military and geopolitical power were pitilessly revealed. The biggest long-term impact of the invasion was not to implant U.S. power in the center of the Middle East, but to upend the balance of power in one of the most combustible regions in the world, catapulting the Shia majority into power in Iraq, and reigniting the simmering inter-Muslim conflict between Sunni and Shia in the Arab heartland. That conflict is still being played out in Iraq, as well as other nearby nations. These developments can be seen, at least partly, as the unintended consequences of the distruction of the regional balance of power created by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria, Iraq, Libya and other countries is but one example. The strength of this military and political organization is symptomatic of a larger disorder, loose in many parts of world due to neoliberal geopolitical policies, but especially in the Middle East. This is the chaos and alienation created by U.S. intervention and attempted domination that has seriously corrupted and weakened the social and political fabric of a number of nations. As usual, CFR leaders are pushing their type of “solutions” to the situation created by the rise of ISIL and the Syrian civil war. Their people, Council members like John F. Kerry, Ashton Carter, and General John R. Allen—Allen was appointed in September 2014 by President Obama in to oversee the war on ISIL—are still crafting and executing U.S. policy there.609
The U.S. intervention and occupation has also left a legacy of ecological destruction. The Iraqis have been left with a natural landscape devastated by war and the use of extremely toxic munitions, the long-term consequences of which are only beginning to be assessed. Immediately after the March–April 2003 invasion of Iraq, experts at the Pentagon and the United Nations estimated that 1,100 to 2,200 tons of depleted uranium munitions were used during the initial attack on Iraq.610 These munitions are extremely effective in their destructive power but leave a dangerous residue. To cite but one example of reports on the effects of such weapons, the German newspaper Der Spiegel had a long investigative article on the massive level of birth defects and infant deaths found in Basra, where the United States and British had used depleted uranium. Cause and effect is often difficult to prove in such cases, but many well-informed observers believe that there is a causal relationship between the poor health and frequent deaths of infants and the use of these weapons.611
The politics of Iraq ten years after the U.S. invasion were reviewed in a lengthy Financial Times article in March 2013, which noted that the Green Zone was still the
heart of political power, of plotting and intrigue, and is the home to the prime minister’s office and parliament. Still surrounded by blast walls, but its entry points now controlled by Iraqi forces, the Green Zone is a world apart from the chaos of the city. The US embassy, the largest US mission in the world, is here . . . with its apartment blocks for staff, sports facilities including tennis and basketball courts, and even a power station. In a fitting image of the US’s declining influence . . . the 10,000 staff—mostly contractors—who work here and across the other missions in Iraq—are being slashed to 5,000–6,000 by the end of the year.612
The Iraqi government is reportedly made up of “greedy politicians struggling for control of the state. For this political class, sectarianism and patronage are the only means of survival.” One Iraqi woman indicated that life in 2013 was no better than under Saddam: “They’re keeping people busy with cars, electronics and mobiles and they give us no services, no security or jobs and no housing. . . . We had one oppressive regime but now we have 100 political parties that are oppressive. We can express ourselves but so what? No one is listening.”613
If the American power grab for world hegemony has largely failed in Iraq, the second U.S. war aim, imposing on Baghdad a neoliberal capitalist regime, including new rights for the oil majors, was more of a “success.” Speaking of the surreal situation of checkpoints and explosions alongside increased shopping opportunities, the Financial Times commented:
The banality of violence is part of a strange combination of simultaneous progression and regression. Baghdad’s potholed streets are crumbling, with only rare signs of the new infrastructure. Residents still receive only a few hours of electricity a day. Many young people are unemployed, while others take up three jobs to make ends meet. But the facades of old shops have been covered with shiny hoardings advertising the glut of consumer goods now available, from mobile telephones to flat-screen televisions. Iraq’s factories are still idle but there are several new malls under construction, as well as fancy car dealerships and private banks.614
Two of the newest private banks that expanded into Iraq beginning in 2009 are JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, both corporate members of and closely interlocked with the CFR.615 In June of 2013 the Financial Times reported on Citigroup’s activities in Iraq:
In the past decade, the bank has already been catering to investors and large companies operating in Iraq, offering products such as trade finance, cash management and investment banking services through its regional hub in Dubai, its Iraq desk in Amman and via London. Citi’s move to establish a physical foothold in the market comes as major international oil groups as well as industrial and construction companies are looking to invest in Iraq. This oil-driven growth will turn the country into one of the largest oil exporters globally within the next decade and into a $2tn. economy by 2050, Citigroup’s economists estimate.616
The emerging neoliberal economic structure also offers speculative financial opportunities for individuals who have wealth and expect to get much wealthier. As the author of the article pointed out: “An old Iraqi friend who lives in London but visits Baghdad almost every month, is starting an investment fund to buy stocks on the Iraqi exchange. She says Iraq needs so much reconstruction and infrastructure that an economic boom is inevitable.”617
Meanwhile, the persistence of both the U.S. government and the major multinational oil companies has begun to result in some successes for these corporations in Iraq. The resistance of the Iraqi people to privatization of the country’s oil and gas wealth prevented the national parliament from passing a hydrocarbon law that would allow foreign control. But both the Iraqi central government under al-Malaki and the Kurdistan regional government did not let this legal shortcoming stop them. Beginning in 2008, both governments began to negotiate and sign contracts with major and some smaller oil corporations. The contracts with the central government were designed to circumvent the legislative stalemate and allow big oil to get an initial foothold in Iraq. The first step was memorandums of agreement, reportedly signed by forty-six different companies although only a few got actual contracts. Among these are the very biggest majors and some smaller state-owned firms: ExxonMobil and Occidental (U.S.), Royal Dutch Shell (British-Dutch), Total SA (French), Eni (Italian), China National Petroleum/ PetroChina, BP (Britain), Petronas (Malaysia), Lukoil (Russia), Statoil (Norway), Gazprom (Russia), TPAO (Turkey), and Korea Gas.618 Some of those thus far shut out of the main Iraqi oil fields, including Chevron, Hess, and Hunt Oil, have signed oil contracts to work in Iraqi Kurdistan. Of these above-mentioned oil corporations now benefiting from the murderous conquest of Iraq, eight are corporate members of the CFR: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Hess, BP, Eni, Shell, Total SA, and Occidental.619
Many others who favored war are also benefiting today. Zalmay Khalilzad for example, a CFR member and Project for the New American Century activist who pushed for war as head of the National Security Council’s staff of experts on Iraq in 2002, later became U.S. ambassador to Iraq (2005–2007). After he left the government, Khalilzad founded an investment advisory and consulting firm called Gryphon Partners that focuses on assisting clients “in markets throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.” Khalilzad is the president of the company and states on the company’s website that he “maintains close ties with high-level leadership throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, and is regularly called upon to provide strategic advice to numerous heads of state.”620
Many in the CFR and the capitalist think tank world have an attitude toward the Iraq War, money, and oil that is exemplified by Council member Stephanie Sanok who works at the CFR-connected Center for Strategic and International Studies: “We are still sinking a lot of money into this and we are still trying to get our oil dividend.”621 These capitalists certainly do not want to give up their “oil dividend,” built on the lives and treasure of rank-and-file Iraqi and American people. They ignore the immorality and lack of elemental ethics and humanity imposed by a catastrophic and criminal war, with the massive destruction, displacement, kidnapping, torture and murder visited upon the Iraqi people. Though estimates vary, the respected British medical journal The Lancet conducted a study and estimated that about 650,000 Iraqis were killed; an unknown, but vast number wounded; and millions displaced from their homes. Almost 8,000 U.S. citizens were killed (almost 4,500 service personnel and at least 3,400 contractors) and over 100,000 wounded.622 To speak of the lack of an “oil dividend” in light of such an ocean of human suffering is telling.
Also illustrative is the refusal of the Obama administration, dominated by members of the CFR, to uphold the rule of law in regard to the actions of many Bush administration personnel in kidnapping and torture in Iraq and elsewhere during this period. The UN’s special rapporteur for human rights stated in April of 2009 that since the United States had committed itself to the UN Convention Against Torture, it was obliged to investigate and prosecute any violations. Otherwise, he pointed out, the Nazi principle of “I was only following orders” would be endorsed. President Obama, stating “nothing would be gained” from such investigations, exempted Bush, Cheney, their lawyers and other officials from any liability, reaffirming in effect the Nazi principle.623