It was, in Bush’s words, a “preventive war”. Stating that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction, and that these represented a danger to the US, the western world and its allies in the Middle East, the former president of the world’s principal military power ordered the attack.

Unlike the operation in Afghanistan --which is still ongoing-- the attack on Iraq did not have the complicity of the United Nations Security Council (UN). Both the majority of its permanent members (China, France, and Russia) and other powers stated their opposition to the operation.Hans Blix, then chief UN weapons inspector, had declared that there was not sufficient evidence for the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that, in turn, both the US and Britain did not have the "legal" support --in other words, resolutions from the UN Security Council-- to declare war.Ana Baron, correspondent from the newspaper Clarín in Washington, maintains in her report of 20th August 2010 that Bush “was convinced that due to the oppressive nature of the Iraqi regime, the population would rise up against Saddam and that the military confrontation would not last much longer than a couple of weeks".In order to achieve this, 225 thousand US soldiers invaded Iraq by air, sea and land. This was how the fall of Baghdad and Saddam’s subsequent flight would be achieved in less than two months on 1st May 2003. Dressed as a pilot, Bush exclaimed "Mission Accomplished" from an aircraft carrier.However, it was the Iraqi insurgency which threw overboard the military plans of the Bush administration. Baron maintains that the daily suicide attacks against military and governmental posts and civilian targets made Iraq “one of the most devastating strategic fiascos in US military history.”The attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad, and a month and a half on from “Mission Accomplished”, witnessed the US’s real inability to impose its military will on the area. At least 17 people died, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the Brazilian UN Special Envoy for Iraq.Everything was in the hands of radicalised groups, explained Gustavo Sierra, Clarín journalist and author of “Under the Bombs”, the book which recounts his experience as a correspondent during the war. “Whether Shiites, Sunnis or the remainder of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, they all had the capability to carry out horrific attacks”.Meanwhile, he says, “Shiites from the Mahdi Army managed to control the south of the country and tension between factions reached its epicentre with the bombing of the Samarra sanctuary. The US debacle deepened when the Spanish decided to abandon the coalition and leave the Diwaniya base. All the other allies took the same road”.However, the revelation of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in the mass media demonstrated the opposition between the doctrine of “war on terrorism” and respect for human rights. Saddam Hussein was also tortured there.The ex dictator was found in a bunker on the outskirts of his birthplace, Tikrit. The new Iraqi Supreme Court tried and sentenced him to the gallows for ordering, among other things, a poisonous gas attack against the Kurdish population of Iraq in 1988. Videos of his death were broadcast on television on 30th December 2006.Six months later, on 4th August 2007, 400 Kurds were massacred in Al Jazeera and Kahtaniya, 120 km from the city of Mosul, in the worst attack since the invasion. On 26th October 2009, now with Barack Obama as president, five car bombs caused 155 deaths in the centre of Baghdad.One of the insurgency’s favourite targets was recruitment centres for the new Iraqi security forces. In fact, on the Tuesday prior to the conclusion of "Operation Iraqi Freedom”, a suicide attack ended the lives of 61 people and injured another 130 while they were queuing to enlist in the Iraqi army.

In turn, the division between the Iraqi political, ethnic and religious forces --that Hussein violently silenced-- is preventing Prime Minister Al Maliki from forming a unity government. Sierra maintains that for the Iraqis, however, “it takes a lot to be able to buy bread (…) or move to anywhere without fear of flying through the air”.The remaining military forces in Iraq will fall to 10,000, the number of soldiers in charge of the five permanent US bases in the country. Others will undertake ”private security” work for US businesses contracted by the Pentagon and State Department for the “reconstruction”.

Translation: Rhona Desmond

   At the U.S. Embassy, the largest in the world, an official says mildly,  "We're looking into it.  We hope that everybody resolves their differences in an amicable way."  Meanwhile, however, while the U.S. command withdraws combat troops from many areas, it is beefing up the military and private-security apparatus it maintains to protect the wave of foreign oil companies coming into Basra to exploit the wealth of Iraq's oil fields.

Is destroying Iraq's labor movement a way to ensure an environment in which giant oil corporations can operate freely, and the Iraqi government can institute further market-based reforms?  That was a logical question during the Bush administration, when its neoconservative advisors openly predicted Iraq would become a beachhead for privatizing the public sector of countries throughout the Middle East.  Their policy, however, has not ended with the change in administration.  And today Iraqi labor is paying for its devastating consequences.

Iraq's history highlights the bitterness unions might feel over this situation.   Iraq had labor unions before any other country in the Middle East.  Workers organized themselves when the British drilled the first wells and built the first railroads after World War One. The British, however, banned unions, driving them underground.  They installed a Saudi sheikh as king, but kept enough control to ensure that the oil wealth flowed into the bank accounts of British companies (BP's predecessors), while Iraqis remained desperately poor.  The king, meanwhile, threw workers who tried to organize unions into prison.

A revolution in 1958 overthrew the king.  Unions came aboveground so fast that Baghdad's May Day march in 1959 brought out half a million people, when the country's total population was only 10 million.  That revolution didn't last long, however.  By 1963 the Baath Party had mounted a coup.  To help it into power, the CIA gave it lists of thousands of Iraqi leftists and union activists, who were imprisoned and murdered.  After a decade of more coups and counter coups, Saddam Hussein seized control. 

Despite years of repression, Iraq's nationalists were still strong and popular enough to force the nationalization of oil in 1972.  To deal them a deathblow, in 1987 Saddam Hussein issued the infamous Public Law 150.  Unions were banned in public enterprises, from oil and power plants to factories, schools and hospitals.  Again, as they had under the king, union activists went to prison, went underground or left the country.  And as they did, Donald Rumsfield, later George W. Bush's Defense Secretary and architect of the occupation, shook Saddam's hand in an infamous photograph, promising the dictator intelligence briefings and arms to fight his war with Iran.

        It's a little hard to understand why Iraqi leftists and union activists were willing to see the 2003 U.S. invasion as a step towards democracy.  But most saw the end of the Saddam Hussein regime as the precondition for any change.
  U.S. troops moved into Basra from Kuwait on the morning of April 9, 2003, and American tanks pulled up to the gate of its huge, dilapidated oil refinery.  After thirty years of Saddam Hussein, most workers there had had their fill of war and repression.  They were prepared to welcome almost any change, even foreign troops.  "We were ready to say hello," recalls Faraj Arbat, one of the plant's firemen.
    The soldiers trained guns on them, and when the head of the fire department protested, he was ordered to lie facedown on the ground.  "Abdulritha was absolutely shocked," Arbat recalls.  "But he did as he was ordered.  Then an American put his foot on his back. So we started fighting with the soldiers with our fists, because we didn't understand.  The tank turret started to turn toward us, and at that point we all sat down."  Someone easily could have died that day.  As it was, the memory of the foot on Abdulritha's back left a bitter taste. 
    The refinery's workers had already labored through the "shock and awe" bombing prior to the invasion. "Slowly we got production restored, by our own efforts," Arbat remembers.  "Electricity workers, at their own expense, brought power back to the refinery.  Meanwhile, the Americans and British began coming with tanker trucks, loading up on the gas and oil we were producing." 
      For two months, no one got paid.  Finally, Arbat and a small group began to organize a union.  "At first the word frightened people, because under Saddam, unions were banned," he explains.  Nevertheless, a few dozen of the refinery's 3000 employees came together and chose Arbat and Ibrahim Radiy to lead them. 
To force authorities to pay everyone, the small group took a crane out to the gate, and lowered it across the road.   Behind it, two dozen tanker trucks pulled up with a heavily armed military escort. "At first there were only 100 of us, but workers began coming out. Some took their shirts off and told the troops, 'Shoot us.'  Others lay down on the ground."  Ten of them even went under the tankers, brandishing cigarette lighters.  They announced that if the soldiers fired, they would set the tankers alight.

        The soldiers did not fire.  Instead, by the end of the day the workers had their pay.  Within a week, everyone at the refinery joined; and. the oil union in Basra was reborn.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music made the right bet in choosing popular Muslim super star Youssou N’Dour to open Muslim Voices: Arts & Ideas, a 10-day festival of film, dance, theater and music opening on 5 June 2009. The three festival sponsors, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Asia Society and The Center for Dialogues at New York University pulled the festival together with the aim of enhancing understanding of Muslim culture.

Opening the festival, the President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Karen Brooks Hopkins introduced several major politicians including Brooklyn Borough President, Marty Markowitz and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg praised Brooklyn’s Muslim community for maintaining its ethnic heritage, while expressing great love for New York City.  Following President Obama’s much anticipated speech aimed at changing Muslim’s perception of America, Bloomberg presented Islam as part of both America’s and New York City’s stories. Bloomberg then introduced Youssou N’Dour as the best singer alive. Dressed in a fancy floor-length African robe, the Senegalese superstar and his band “The Super Etoile” delivered an outstanding performance with his mix of old and new sounds. Electric guitars and keyboards “talked” to traditional African musical instruments to delight a joyful crowd. Youssou’s strong and elastic voice combined with a large band of accomplished musicians produced highly danceable tunes of the music brand called Mballax, an electrifying blend of Senegalese, rock and Caribbean beats. The term Mballax is the word for rhythms in N’Dour’s native language called Wolof. Between songs, Youssou called for a New Africa based upon human dignity and peace. The Senegalese superstar reminds us that the term “Assalam Alaikum” means “peace for all” –not just Muslims but for all people.

Another major highlight of the festival has been the New York premiere of “I bring what I love”, a documentary about Youssou N’dour’s life and the production of “Egypt”, his Grammy Award winning album realized jointly with Egyptian composer and producer Fathy Salama. In this album, Youssou N’Dour focused on his faith in Islam. His praise songs exalted Senegal’s long Islamic history and Sufi saints. In particular, Youssou exalted Muslim icon Cheick Amadou Bamba for preferring the road of peace and exile to the path of violence imposed upon him by the colonizers of Senegal. In an interview with NYIHA MEDIA, filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi stated that mainstream media promotes images of Islam as violent and fundamentalist. In this movie, Muslims are portrays in a different way- fighting for freedom and democratic values. The movie, I Bring What I love, offers an alternative vision, the West African Sufi brand of Islam, which is a non dogmatic and sophisticated way of living the Muslim faith.

“We make the mistake of thinking this is something new,” says Harden. She adds that the historic treatment of these communities, as well as the lack of recovery that New Orleanians have seen since Katrina, makes her doubt the federal government will do what is necessary for Gulf recovery. “Since Obama got into office,” she says, “I have yet to see any action that reverses what Bush did after Katrina.”

Harden says Louisiana and the US must fundamentally transform our government’s relationships with corporations. “We’ve got to change the way we allow businesses to be in charge of our health and safety in this country,” she adds. As an example, Harden points to more stringent regulations in other countries, such as Norway, which requires companies to drill relief wells at the same time as any deepwater well.

Pointe-au-Chien

Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe is a small band of French speaking Native Americans along Bayou Pointe-au-Chien, south of Houma, on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Their ancestors settled here three hundred years ago, and current residents describe the ongoing oil geyser as just the latest step in a long history of displacement and disenfranchisement. “The oil companies never respected our elders,” explains community leader Theresa Dardar. “And they never did respect our land.”

In the early part of this century, the oil companies took advantage of the fact that people living on the coast were isolated by language and distance, and laid claim to their land. Over the past several decades, these companies have devastated these idyllic communities, creating about 10,000 miles of canals through forests, marshes, and homes. “They come in, they cut a little, and it keeps getting wider and wider,” says Donald Dardar, Theresa’s husband and part of the tribe’s leadership. “They didn’t care where they cut.”

The canals have brought salt water, killing trees and plants and speeding erosion. According to Gulf Restoration Network, Louisiana loses about a football field of land every 45 minutes, and almost half of that land loss is as a result of these canals. Meanwhile, Pointe-au-Chien and other tribes have found they have little legal recourse. At least partly as a result of lobbying by oil companies, the state and federal government have refused to officially recognize them as a tribe, which would offer some protection of their land rights.

So late last month, when oil started washing up on the shores of nearby Lake Chien and fishing season was cancelled before it had even begun, members of Pointe-au-Chien took the news as another nail in the coffin of the lifestyle they had been living for generations. On a recent Sunday, a few residents gathered at the Live Oak Baptist Church, on the main road that runs through their community. They described feeling abandoned and abused by the government and corporations. They spoke of losing their language and traditions in addition to their homes.

Sitting on a church pew, Theresa said they had met with indigenous natives from Alaska who discussed their experience in the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. “We don’t know how long we’ll be without fishing,” said Theresa. “It was 17 years before they could get shrimp.” And, she noted bitterly, this disaster is already much larger than the Valdez, with no end in sight.

BP has promised payouts to those who lose work from the oil, but few trust the company to make good on their promise, and even if they did, they doubt any settlement could make up for what will be lost. “It doesn’t matter how much money they give you,” says Theresa. “If we don’t have our shrimp, fish, crabs and oysters.”

“It’s not just a way of life, its our food,” she added. “It’s the loss of our livelihood and culture.”

The anxiety that Theresa expresses is also increasingly common in New Orleans, a city whose culture is inextricably linked to the Gulf. “How do you deal with this hemorrhaging in the bottom of the Gulf that seems endless?” asks Monique Harden of AEHR. “That is just scary as hell. I’ve been having nightmares about it.”

As the oil continues to flow, people feel both helpless and apocalyptic; depressed and angered. Residents who have just rebuilt from the 2005 hurricanes watch the oil wash up on shore with a building dread. “I never thought I’d be in a situation where I wanted another Katrina,” says Harden. “But I’d rather Katrina than this.”