As the town of Washington returns to business in early September, 2003, the business of sustaining the war and its concomitant profiteering continues. The administration also continues its consistent support of the top level of management in the international petroleum industry. As ever, the attacks of 9/11, still not completely investigated, are used as the pretext for every fiscal and economic policy inimical to the interests of the majority of the population. Top figures in the administration use a series of commemoration appearances to defend their handling of the war, and Rumsfeld is heckled at one of his speeches. Osama bin Laden releases a videotape and purported audio. Meanwhile, some Democrats have begun campaigning for the presidency in what is expected to be a losing year.
September 1-11, 2003:

 

Sept. 4, 2003 – A published list of the top 100 defense contractors for fiscal 2002 shows a total of $164,288,713,000--$164 billion--in contracts awarded. Heading the list are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon, with a total of $56 billion in contracts for the year.

These numbers will only grow.

 
September 2003 – Eric Edelman becomes Ambassador to Turkey and is replaced as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs, in the Office of Vice President Cheney, by David Wurmser, a former assistant to John Bolton. Wurmser was a research fellow on the Middle East at the conservative, war-supporting American Enterprise Institute. 

 

Sept. 7, 2003 – Bush gives a televised speech on the ‘war on terror’:

“And we acted in Iraq, where the former regime sponsored terror, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, and for 12 years defied the clear demands of the United Nations Security Council. Our coalition enforced these international demands in one of the swiftest and most humane military campaigns in history.

       For a generation leading up to September the 11th, 2001, terrorists and their radical allies attacked innocent people in the Middle East and beyond, without facing a sustained and serious response. The terrorists became convinced that free nations were decadent and weak. And they grew bolder, believing that history was on their side. Since America put out the fires of September the 11th, and mourned our dead, and went to war, history has taken a different turn. We have carried the fight to the enemy. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power.”

 

Sept. 8, 2003 – The Middle East Economic Survey reports that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) has been allocated work worth more than $700 million so far by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in a no-bid contract for oilfield rehabilitation work. The total contract will have a potential value of $7 billion.

 

MEES also reports that the first oil minister in post-Saddam Iraq is Dr. Ibrahim al-Ulum, who had received a doctorate at the University of New Mexico and was also a member of a ‘Free Iraqis’ committee on energy established in December 2002 by the State Department. (M.E.E.S. Sept. 8, 2003)

 
Sept. 11, 2003 – Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appears on PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer:

 
“JIM LEHRER: Sure. On Iraq, how does the situation... is the situation on the ground there now about what you expected it would be four months after the end of the Saddam Hussein regime?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, goodness. It's so hard to do that because, first of all, the situation on the ground there is not a situation that's universal across the country. It's vastly different in different parts of the country. It's different in the Kurdish area. It's different in the area between Baghdad and Tikrit which was the stronghold of the Baathists. It's different in the south near Basra. It's different in the Shia areas and our commanders have to be flexible. They have to deal with the facts on the ground as they find them.

And they're doing things very differently in different parts of that country with very good reason: Because the situations are very different. One thing that I would have to say is the... maybe we should have known it because if you go back and think of what the Soviet Union did to their infrastructure by denying it, by spending so much money on military things and palaces and so forth in the case of Iraq, they really did deny the infrastructure. The water system has not been taken care of. The oil infrastructure needs enormous investment because they haven't given it the money that it ought to have. The infrastructure is in worse shape in that country than one would have guessed, I think.

JIM LEHRER: You expected it to be in better shape, right?

DONALD RUMSFELD: We expected it to be in better shape. A Stalinist like economic approach, a centralized and spending so much money on military affairs and in the case of Saddam Hussein all these palaces and stashing billions of dollars outside the country, he was starving and robbing the Iraqi people.

JIM LEHRER: Did you expect this military resistance, these pockets of resistance, the bombings, the shootings of U.S. troops, all of that?

DONALD RUMSFELD: There was certainly a speculation that that was a possibility.

JIM LEHRER: But did you go in prepared for it? Did your folks go in prepared for this?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Prepared? I mean, we were prepared for lots of things. We were prepared for humanitarian crisis that didn't happen. We were prepared for lighting off all the oil wells and only a couple of handfuls were actually burning that we were able to stop. You expect resistance, particularly when the Baathists collapsed north of Baghdad and did not go into the fight really. And they bled into the countryside and so they're still there. So while the major combat operations ended May 1, what you've got now is a low- intensity conflict that is going to continue until more of those people are rooted out. And that's going on every day. There's probably twelve/fifteen incidents a day where our forces are engaged.”

Rumsfeld also opposes increasing troops in Iraq, saying that American commanders are against it:

“JIM LEHRER: The troops question. Sending more U.S. troops --you've made it very clear on more than one occasion you do not believe more U.S. troops are needed. Do you still feel that way?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Here's the situation. We've got commanders on the ground and they say they don't want more U.S. troops. We've got General Sanchez who is in charge of the country who says he does not want more U.S. troops. More U.S. troops from his standpoint would mean more force protection, more combat support, and he says that he's got about on a daily basis fifteen, twelve, fifteen, eighteen incidents a day. They last two or three minutes.”

 

Sept. 11, 2003 – The federal appeals court in D.C. rejects the administration claim that it should not have to release from Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, commenced in 2001. Both the environmental organization the Sierra Club and the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch are taking the administration to court on this one, seeking to find out who participated in the closed-door energy task force and how it proceeded. Cheney’s own participation also is still not fully disclosed.

 

The ruling comes appropriately on the second anniversary of the day that launched a thousand energy-company boons.

 

Sept. 11, 12 – Emails of the Office of the Vice President from these days turn out to be missing. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), as chair of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, later tries to retrieve White House and OVP documents including email correspondence on several issues. Several key dates are missing from some top administration offices, including this juncture of a Bin Laden tape, the judicial ruling on the VP’s Energy Task Force, and the anniversary of 9/11 with its embarrassing appearances by top personnel.