....LMB: "Reconfigured"....

February 25, 2004

Excellent interview in the LA Weekly with Karen Kwiatowski, former Lieutenant Colonel in the US military and desk officer in the Defense Department's office for Near East South Asia (NESA). Basically, she was an intelligence office at the Pentagon working on Middle East issues at the time of the run up to the Iraq war, and dealt frequently with the notorious Office of Special Plans (OSP).

She was appalled by the way that the neoconservatives in the OSP were manipulating intelligence and propagandizing the Pentagon itself in order to get their war. She began to write anonymous columns about the situation which were posted on several internet sites, and then she finally quit the Pentagon altogether to speak out about this "neoconservative coup" back in March of 2003.

Read the whole interview, it's good stuff. But I'm going to highlight Kwiatowski's explanation for the Iraq war, the reasons that the neocons wanted to invade the country, as they differ somewhat from my own interpretation:

There were three reasons why [the neoconservatives] felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq.

One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.

The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia, particularly the restrictions on our basing. And also there was dissatisfaction from the people of Saudi Arabia. So we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar, to secure something we had been searching for since the days of Carter — to secure the energy lines of communication in the region. Bases in Iraq, then, were very important — that is, if you hold that is America’s role in the world. Saddam Hussein was not about to invite us in.

The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 — selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro.

The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar.

To sum up, Kwiatowski claims that the Iraq war was about contracts, military bases, and protecting the dollar against the euro.

For months now, I've been arguing that the invasion of Iraq was step one in a neocon plan to achieve a revamped Middle East, with all governments obedient to (or at least friendly towards) the US government. Kwiatowski's version varies from mine, and seems more based upon shorter term, more concrete goals. I'll have to look into the matter some more and see if maybe I need to reconfigure my understanding of the neocons and the conflict.