Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 13:11:17 +0000
From: HelenBoadenComplaints@bbc.co.uk
Dear Mr (...)
Thank you for your email and I have discussed it with the editor of Newsnight. We don't agree with the point you make because it is simply a fact that Bush has tried to export democracy and that this has been troublesome. It's also true there were various motives for the Iraq war - regime change, WMD, oil - and we have questioned and debated these more than any other issue over the last five years.
Yours sincerely
pp Helen Boaden
Director, BBC News
To: Helen Boaden
I was much perturbed by your recent email response to a media lens
contributor which contained the phrase that "it is simply a fact
that Bush has tried to export democracy" to Iraq.
For the BBC to support such an unevidenced claim by the Bush
administrations in terms of its justifications for invading, or remaining in Iraq is
both unsatisfying and deeply worrying.
On the basis of available evidence it would be perhaps more balanced
(and more in keeping with historical American foreign policy in the
region) for the BBC to take the editorial position that the
United States fears a sovereign and more or less democratic Iraq. The
real reason for the invasion, surely, is that Iraq has the second
largest oil reserves in the world, very cheap to exploit, and is at
the heart of the world's major hydrocarbon resources. The issue is not
access to those resources but control of them (and for the energy
corporations, profit). As Vice President Dick Cheney observed in May
2006, control over energy resources provides "tools of intimidation or
blackmail"—in the hands of others, that is. Authentic Iraqi
sovereignty will not easily be tolerated by the occupying power, nor
can it or neighbouring states tolerate Iraq's deterioration, or a
potential regional war in the aftermath.
An analysis of the available evidence points to the fact that
Washington's goal in Iraq is complete control of that territory either
directly or via some kind of pliable government. It is important that
the BBC news teams should not accept at ahistorical face value that
Bush administration ever aimed to make Iraq a free and sovereign
state.
Your position only makes sense if you don't take into account that, as
former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz once put it, Iraq
"floats on a sea of oil"; and if you don't consider the decades-long
U.S. campaign to control, in some fashion, Middle East energy
reservoirs.
The United States viewed Middle Eastern oil as a precious prize long
before the Iraq war. During World War II, that interest had already
sprung to life: When British officials declared Middle Eastern oil "a
vital prize for any power interested in world influence or
domination," American officials agreed, calling it "a stupendous
source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in
world history."
In The Age of Turbulence, the bestselling, over-500-page memoir by
longtime Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He wrote simply, as
if this were utterly self-evident: "I am saddened that it is
politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq
war is largely about oil." As the first major government official to
make such a statement, he was asked repeatedly to explain his
thinking, particularly since his comment was immediately repudiated by
various government officials, including White House spokesman Tony
Fratto, who labeled it "Georgetown cocktail party analysis."
His subsequent comments elaborated on a brief explanation in the
memoir: "It should be obvious that as long as the United States is
beholden to potentially unfriendly sources of oil and gas, we are
vulnerable to economic crises over which we have little control."
Since former ally Saddam Hussein was, by then, unremittingly
unfriendly, Greenspan felt that (as he told Washington Post reporter
Bob Woodward) "taking Saddam out was essential" in order to make
"certain that the existing system [of oil markets] continues to work."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the first meeting of the National
Security Council on January 30, 2001, seven months before the 9/11
attacks argued that the Clinton administration's Middle Eastern focus
on Israel-Palestine should be unceremoniously dumped. "[W]hat we
really want to think about," he reportedly said, "is going after
Saddam." Regime change in Iraq, he argued, would allow the U.S. to
enhance the situation of the pro-American Kurds, redirect Iraq toward
a market economy, and guarantee a favorable oil policy
A Republican moved motion on September 26, 2007 in the US Senate
called for the division of Iraq into semi-autonomous regions that
would be decided by the US client government inside Baghdad's Green
Zone.
BBC news editors should remember that the US has now, in effect,
created a new Sunni tribal militia which takes orders from the US
military and is well paid by it and does not owe allegiance to the
Shia-Kurdish government in Baghdad. This is despite the fact that the
US has denounced militias in Iraq and demanded they be dissolved.
Furthermore, many of the air wars targets were primarily civilian in
nature and destroyed in order to prevent a country's ability to
maintain basic services. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this
strategy can be found in the US destruction of Iraq's water
purification and electrical systems. As most BBC news editors will be
aware Iraqis continue to suffer from this destruction unless they live
in the fully serviced Green Zone.
We should also take account of other information from Iraqis
themselves about their experience of living under so-called exported
American democracy - a poll in Baghdad, Anbar, and Najaf on the
invasion and its consequences. "About 90 percent of Iraqis feel the
situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than
it is today," United Press International reported on the survey, which
was conducted in November 2006 by the Baghdad-based Iraq Center for
Research and Strategic Studies. "Nearly half of the respondents
favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S.-led troops," reported the
Daily Star in Beirut, Lebanon. Another 20 percent favored a phased
withdrawal starting right away. (A U.S. State Department poll, also
ignored, found that two-thirds of Baghdadis want immediate
withdrawal.)
At the very least the BBC policy of unchallenged face value acceptance
of aspects of the Bush doctrine as 'fact' needs to be seriously
reviewed. A more accurate and balanced statement would have been for
the BBC to have re-contextualised your phrase e.g. " a claimed but openly contested motive for the war in Iraq is that Bush has tried to export democracy".
I look forward to your response.
Regards,
leftpost
No comments:
Post a Comment