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On his way to confirmation as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the
current U.N. envoy John Negroponte was busily twisting language like a
pretzel at a Senate hearing the other day. The new Baghdad regime, to
be installed on June 30, will have sovereignty. Well, sort of.
Negroponte explained: “That is why I use the term ‘exercise of
sovereignty.’ I think in the case of military activity, their forces
will come under the unified command of the multinational force. That
is the plan.”
In other words, the Baghdad government will be praised as the
embodiment of Iraqi sovereignty while the U.S. military continues to
do whatever Washington wants it to do in Iraq -- including order the
Iraqi military around. Negroponte talked about “real dialogue between
our military commanders, the new Iraqi government and, I think, the
United States mission as well.” But ultimately, he said, the American
military “is going to have the freedom to act in their self-defense,
and they’re going to be free to operate in Iraq as they best see fit.”
The disconnect between democracy rhetoric and imperial reality is
glaring enough to require some media acknowledgment. During an April
25 interview on NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” a former adviser to the Iraq
occupation authority discussed the Bush administration’s concept of
“limited sovereignty” for Iraqi people. “The sovereign of the country
is the power that has the last say,” law professor Noah Feldman
commented, “and you can’t really have the last say in a country unless
you command the army. So in a sense, you can’t really claim to be
sovereign if someone else runs your army.”
But the gaping holes in the U.S. stance are being largely papered
over in news coverage. Part of the process is for major American media
outlets to simultaneously acknowledge and deny fundamental
contradictions between the Bush administration’s rhetoric about
democracy and its actual policies.
In his novel “1984,” Orwell wrote about an approach that involves
“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and
accepting both of them.” Among the semi-conscious maneuvers: “to
forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it
becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so
long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and
all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all
this is indispensably necessary.”
When the New York Times published an article on April 24 about
its interview with “the top United States commander in the Middle
East,” the second sentence explained: “The commander, General John P.
Abizaid, said the security situation was liable to worsen as June 30
approached, and with it the return of self-rule to Iraq.”
Earth to New York Times! Earth to New York Times!
Lovely as it may have looked in the news story, “the return of
self-rule” is no more scheduled for Iraq on June 30 than the
splashdown of a million-pound asteroid in the Tigris River. Editors at
the New York Times did not need to be clairvoyant to adduce the
massive evidence to that effect. On the day before the story appeared
about the impending “self-rule,” all that those editors needed to do
was read their own newspaper’s front page -- where an article reported
“the Bush administration’s plans for a new caretaker government in
Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only
partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new
laws.”
For that matter, “partial command” is enough of a stretch to be
an oxymoron, since -- in effect -- the U.S. government is insisting on
the right to pretty much tell any Iraqi government what to do and not
do with its own military. “Asked whether the new Iraqi government
would have a chance to approve military operations led by American
commanders, who would be in charge of both foreign and Iraqi forces, a
senior official said Americans would have the final say,” the Times
reported in the same story. The article added that an undersecretary
of state, Marc Grossman, stated that “American commanders will ‘have
the right, and the power, and the obligation’ to decide.”
These days the White House is grasping at the U.N. flag as a
tattered fig leaf for its own insistence on trying to control Iraq.
“U.S. Shifts Policy and Taps World Body to Add Legitimacy to
Transitional Government,” said a Wall Street Journal headline last
Wednesday. The story below promptly got tangled in euphemisms about
the U.S. maneuvers: “Several unknown factors cloud the U.N.’s
planning, including the degree of power the U.S. military will reserve
to itself after June 30 and doubts over whether the violence in Iraq
will subside enough for civilian home-rule to blossom.”
Really, those factors aren’t particularly unknown. The U.S.
military will reserve to itself the degree of power necessary for
using American might to run Iraq as much as feasible. And authentic
“civilian home-rule” will not blossom in the hothouse of the U.S.
military occupation.
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Norman Solomon is co-author, with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich,
of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.”
