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Chapter 6 Ordering Iraq In IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: INSIDE IRAQ’S GREEN ZONE (2006) Rajiv Chandrasekaran provides an in-depth tour of the American reconstruction and those in charge.To ensure the “right” personnel were selected for the job, close scrutiny over their political lives remained a top priority, particularly with respect to party loyalty. Chandrasekaran reports that commitment to the Bush team and Republican Party political agenda— including their views on Roe v.Wade—served as a key criterion for being hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) often by way of contacts in the Pentagon (e.g., James O’Bierne) and its liaisons with conservative think tanks. Even before the invasion took place, the Bush administration was assembling a long list of desirable candidates. For example, Frederick M. Burkle Jr. was assigned to oversee Iraq’s health care system. His credentials were impeccable: a master’s degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Berkeley; two bronze stars for military service in the navy, as well as field experience with the Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. In the first week of the formal reconstruction, Burkle was informed that he was being replaced because a senior official at US AID said the White House wanted a “loyalist” in the job. His replacement was James K. Haveman Jr. His résumé included “running a Christian adoption agency that counseled young women against abortions. He spent much of his time in Iraq preparing to privatize the state-owned drug supply firm—perhaps not the most important priority since almost every hospital in the country had been thoroughly looted in the days after Hussein was overthrown” (Goldfarb 2006a, EV2; see Kaplan 2004a, 2004b). Introduction Central to crimes of power in a post–9/11 world is the war in Iraq. Countering claims that the invasion was both justified and legal, it is important note that only the United Nations can authorize military action to disarm an aggressor, to ensure that disarmament is the real objective rather than a particular nation’s political or commercial interests (Beyani 2003; see Allen 2004; Keen 2006, 15). Upholding that interpretation, United Nations 95 Secretary General Kofi Annan said that he believed that the war was “illegal” and not valid under international law terms. “Well, I’m one of those who believe that there should have been a second resolution [because] it was up to the Security Council to approve or determine” what the “consequences should be” for Iraq’s noncompliance with earlier resolutions. “I have stated that it was not in conformity with the Security Council—with the U.N. Charter.” Reiterating his point, Annan replied, “It was illegal, if you wish. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal” (Tyler 2004b,A11; see Jehl 2005a;Welch 2006a).1 Given its historical significance to the rule of law, Kramer and Michalowski draw on the Nuremberg Charter in reminding us that wars of aggression are the most reprehensible and destabilizing of all state crimes, constituting the ‘supreme international crime’ ” (2005, 446; Kramer, Michalowski, and Rothe 2005).As evidence that the Bush administration abused its power and misled the world as to why it was going to invade Iraq is the so-called 10 Downing Street memo.The secret British document reported on July 23,2002 that Bush had decided to“remove Saddam, through military action,” which suggests that the White House was intent on war with Iraq earlier than it acknowledged (Jehl 2005a,A10).2 Recent books by Richard Clarke (2004),former terrorism advisor,and Paul H. O’Neill (see Suskind 2004), former treasury secretary indicate that Bush had decided to invade Iraq by summer of 2002. Moreover, other evidence suggests that, long before the attacks of September 11, a coterie of neocons had been planning to return to Iraq for a Desert Storm Part 2 (Armstrong 2002;seeTenet 2007).Altogether there appears that a colonial project in Iraq had been in the making for some time (Ali 2003a, 2003b; Keen 2006). A critical analysis of power embedded in the war on terror prompts us to turn attention to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, especially because those developments are laden with historical, cultural, and economic elements characteristic of late modern imperialism.To situate properly both time and space,there is much to learn from the field of human geography, most notably the book The Colonial Present. In that...

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