=By= Felicity Arbuthnot

Featured Image: Peshmerga deploys around Mosul al Jazeera

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.” (Albert Camus 1913-1960.)

On 1^st May 2003, George W. Bush stood in a dinky little flying suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and in a super stage managed appearance told the lie of the century: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.” (1)

The illegal occupation and decimation of Iraq continued until December 2011. In June 2014 they returned to bomb again in the guise of combating ISIS. As the thirteenth anniversary of Bush’s ridiculous appearance with a vast “Mission Accomplished” banner behind him, Iraq is largely in ruins, Iraqis have fled the murderous “liberation” and it’s aftermath in millions and there are over three million internally displaced.

The nation is pinned between a tyrannical, corrupt US puppet government, a homicidal, head chopping, raping, organ eating, history erasing, US-spawned ISIS – and a renewed, relentless US bombardment. So much for the 2008 US-Iraq State of Forces agreement, which stated that by 31^st December 2011: “all United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory.”

On the USS Abraham Lincoln Bush stated: “In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world … Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.”

In what has transpired to be monumental irony, he continued: “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaida, and cut off a source of terrorist funding.” There was of course, no al-Qaida in Iraq, no funding of fundamentalist terrorism under Saddam Hussein, it is the invasion’s conception, birth, now reached maturity from Baghdad to Brussels, Mosul to the Maghreb, Latakia to London.

In Iraq, US terrorism from the air is back in all its genocidal force.

Incredibly on 23^rd April, the Independent (2) reported another staggering piece of either disinformation or childish naivety, in a predictably familiar script : “A spokesperson for the US military said all possible precautions were taken to avoid ‘collateral damage’ “, but in approaching 7,000 airstrikes the number of confirmed civilian deaths had risen on Planet Pentagon to just – forty one.

In another past it’s sell by date mantra: ‘Colonel Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for Central Command, said the casualties were “deeply regretted” but maintained that the campaign was the “the most precise air campaign in the history of warfare.” ’

And here’s another familiar one: “In this type of armed conflict, particularly with an enemy who hides among the civilian population, there are going to be, unfortunately, civilian casualties at times.” The Geneva Convention, amongst other Treaties, Principles and Conventions, is specific on the protections of populations in conflict, Colonel Ryder should familiarize himself with the texts.

So another onslaught in a quarter of a century of bombing Iraq is underway – another mass murder with a silly name: “Operation Inherent Resolve.”

Here is reality from Dr Souad Al-Azzawi, Award winning environmental scientist who gained her Ph.D from the Colorado School of Mines.

She states of just the onslaught on Mosul, her home, the ancient university city of 1.5 million, that the stated figures from US spokespersons are: “ either misinformed about the real situation on the ground, since they are using drones and guided missiles, or airstrikes blindly, intentionally not saying the truth.

“I would like to list SOME of what the American’s airstrikes have been targeting and killing in Mosul:

* Destroyed are all state services buildings, including Municipalities in right and left sides of Mosul. When they bomb at night, all security personnel get killed or injured, also residents of close by areas, and adjacent properties are destroyed.

* Bombed and destroyed all communication centers.

• Destruction of Dairy Production Factories in both left and right sides of Mosul. Casualties of these two are one hundred deaths and two hundred injuries among civilians who gathered to receive milk and dairy products from the factories.

Dr Al-Azzawi reminds that this is reminiscent of the bombing of the baby milk factor outside Baghdad in 1991 with the claim it was a chemical weapons factory. This writer visited the factory ruins just months later, there were still charred containers of milk power – the machinery was provided and maintained by a company in Birmingham, England which specialized in infant food prodiction.

* Bombing of Mosul Pharmaceutical Industries.

* Mosul University was bombed with ninety two deaths and one hundred and thirty five injuries. Earlier estimates were higher, but many were pulled from the rubble alive. “They were students, faculty members, staff members, families of faculties, and restaurants workers.”

*Al Hadbaa and Al Khadraa Residential Apartments compounds. Fifty people killed (families) and one hundred injured.

* Hay al Dhubat residential area in the right side of Mosul, two days ago, five women women and four children killed and the whole house. The father is a respected pharmacist who has nothing to do with ISIL.

* Destruction of houses in front of the Medical College, killed twenty two civilians – eleven in one family.

* Bombing Sunni Waqif Building, twenty deaths and seventy injuries   which included those in nearby commercial and residential buildings.

* Car maintenance industrial areas in both left and right sides of Mosul destroyed with civilian’s casualties.

* Bombing of flour factories in both sides of Mosul.

* Rafidain and Rasheed banks and all their branches in both sides of Mosul. Destruction of all commercial and residential areas in the vicinity of these places, with as yet unknown civilian casualties. (My emphasis.)

* Central Bank of Mosul in Ghazi Street, with nearby residential and commercial properties.

* Pepsi factory, currently producing ice cubes only. Three deaths and twelve injuries among the workers.

* The Governor’s house and close by guest house.

* Mosul’s old industrial compound destroyed, with parking area for fuel Tankers and cars. Three days ago, huge explosion of fuel tankers, one hundred and fifty deaths and injuries.

* Urban Planning Directory in Hay al Maliyah bombed.

* Engineering Planning Directory in Hay al Maliyah bombed.

* Food Storages in left side of Mosul bombed.

* Drinking water treatment plants bombed.

* All electrical generation and transformer stations in the left side of Mosul bombed.

* Domez land communications center in left side of Mosul destroyed.

*Al Hurairah Bridge – and many more.

There is a sickening familiarity to some of the targets – food, pharmaceuticals, water treatment plants, electricity generation, communications and educational facilities, bridges (the country, towns and cities are divided by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers) have been favoured targets since 1991. Every time painstakingly and imaginatively restored they have been re-bombed for a quarter of a century.

During the 1990’s a Canadian film crew captured footage of US ‘planes dropping flares on harvested wheat and barley, incinerating entire harvests in a country, which due to the strangulating embargo there were near famine conditions in parts of society.

“When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength, and kindness, and good will”, said George W Bush in his “Mission Accomplished” speech. No, they saw invaders destroying their lives, their families, their history, raping, pillaging. They saw Falluja’s destruction, Abu Ghraib’s horrors and the eleven other secret prisons and nightmares ever ongoing.

On 25^th April Dr Al-Azzawi added: “More war crimes have been committed by American Coalition, yesterday April 24, 2016. The coalition airplanes bombed Rashidiya water treatment plant left side of Mosul city and Yermouk electricity generation station in the right side of Mosul. Through targeting these populations’ life sustaining necessities, the coalition is committing genocidal action towards Mosul residents in the pretext of fighting ISIS.”

Also on 25^th April, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore, on returning from a week in Iraq wrote starkly of the government: “Iraqis are crying out for fairness, recognition, justice, appreciation and meaningful participation in shaping their future – a process that goes forward and not backwards … We all have responsibilities towards the people of Iraq. While there is an international military coalition in place, a comparably resourced international coalition of practical compassion is also needed to help with the building blocks towards a sustained peace in Iraq.” (3)

In the US military lexicon it seems “compassion” has been replaced by their missiles of choice.

Ms Gilmore also stated that Iraq was being run by a failed government and warned foreign powers not to be “complicit” in its neglect of the plight of normal Iraqis. (4)

Further: “The international community must not allow itself to be made complicit with the failed leadership of Iraq … There is political paralysis in Iraq. There is no government in Iraq”, she stated blisteringly of America and Britain’s illegal, abortive, parliamentary project.

“Our commitment to Liberty is America’s tradition … We stand for human liberty”, concluded Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Were mistruths ever bleaker? And when will George W. Bush, Charles Anthony Lynton Blair and their cohorts answer for their crimes in a Court of Law?

1. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/text-of-bush-speech-01-05-2003/
2. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/official-civilian-death-toll-from-us-air-strikes-against-isis-in-syria-and-iraq-doubles-to-41-a6997341.html
3. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=19871&LangID=E
4. http://jordantimes.com/news/region/un-envoy-says-war-goals-iraq-obscuring-humanitarian-crisis

Felicity Arbuthnot

Felicity Arbuthnot

Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist specialising in social and environmental issues with special knowledge of Iraq, a country which she has visited thirty times since the 1991 Gulf war. Iraq, she describes as: ‘sliding from the impossible, to the apocalyptic.’

With former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Co-ordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, she was senior Iraq researcher for John Pilger’s Award winning documentary: “Paying the Price – Killing the Children of Iraq” (Carlton/ITV March 2000), which has been aired worldwide and sent shockwaves through Washington and Whitehall.  Arbuthnot has been nominated for a number of Awards for her coverage of Iraq, including the (EC) Lorenzo Natali Award for Human Rights Journalism, the Millenium Prize for Women; the Courage of Conscience Award and an Amnesty International Media Award. Arbuthnot is quoted by MP’s and academics as having unique insight into Iraq under sanctions. Her articles and broadcasts are used by MP’s in Parliamentary questions. In addition, Felicity was a moderator at the World Uranium Weapons conference in october 2003 in Hamburg with a lot of internationally renowned speakers.  (http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm).
She also was a speaker on the small World Social Forum in Canada november 2002. (http://www.islandnet.com/~bbcf/new_page_2.htm)

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A VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY SELECTION

by Edward Herman
Originally posted March 07, 2003
The reign of false democracy around the world, a reign supported and spearheaded by the AngloZionists, with HQ in Washington, permits the most horrific crimes to go unpunished.

Edward S Herman: One of the most distinguished voices of reason and truth in our tormented time. A role model for public intellectuals. The media regularly speak of the “United States” or “Bulgaria,” as in “United States not affected by protests” (Philadelphia Inquirer) or “United States says protesters strengthen Saddam” (Financial Times), or “Bulgaria joins U.S.coalition in support of Iraq war.” By United States or Bulgaria they mean U.S. and Bulgarian government officials, not the people of the country. This usage is an economizing device, but it is highly misleading, especially where the governments are out of touch with their people and may be doing things contrary to popular desires and interests. Where governments are serving special interests, or are bribed or bullied by other countries to take actions opposed by their people, using “United States” or “Bulgaria” as short-hand for their unresponsive government is deceptive and serves as government propaganda. The media should say “government,” or “government officials,” or “ruling junta” or “ruling minority government.” They should also provide some relevant context, by pointing out that, having engaged in a huge propaganda blitz using taxpayer money to engineer consent to a war,and failed to win over the public, the junta remains unwilling to bend in response to public demands. But this assumes a media that is independent and not an arm of the war party. The same word corruption applies to the treatment of “coalitions of the willing” that the United States and Britain have built in support of their drive to war and massacre. These coalitions have had two major characteristics of interest: first, they have been formed largely with vulnerable governments fearful of displeasing the Bush administration and being denied entry into NATO or suffering a funds cutoff; and second, a majority of their people is opposed to the planned war on Iraq. Instead of “coalitions of the willing” we have essentially “coalitions of the fearful, bribed, or coerced” but the latter wording is found only on the Internet and in dissident and foreign media. Similarly, the media don’t use words like “bribery” and “blackmail” or “coercion” to refer to U.S. efforts to bribe, blackmail and coerce support–no, we “lobby” and make “deals” for that support. The saddest and most disturbing part of all this is that nothing has changed. The same lies and the same impostures continue to be used shamelessly. The only restraining boundary among the ruling circles is public understanding of events, an audience that cannot be fooled, hence the need for constant totalitarian propaganda to keep the fog of Orwellian lies in the saddle.—Editor The patriotic (i.e., mainstream) media also do not feature and reflect on the fact that the coalitions of the willing are made up of governments acting contrary to the desires of their people, whose feelings are strong enough to cause large numbers to protest in the streets. Occasionally the media mention the junta’s “struggle” to overcome public sentiment, but they never suggest that this is deeply antidemocratic. The patriotic media are rooting for the home team, and if the citizenry here or abroad stand in the way we rooters can hardly look at it from their viewpoint–or from any principled standpoint. In fact, the media and politicians are hostile to local protests and get very pugnacious about foreigners who fail to support “our team” as it strides about the world assaulting its targets on distant continents. Cartoons and jokes about the Germans, French and Belgians proliferate as the pundits rant and rave about this traitorous, selfish and cowardly behavior. The pundits and cartoonists throw their verbal tantrums like a pack of badly spoiled children who can’t bear being crossed. The one thing they never do is consider the possibility that the policies the traitors won’t support are bad and should be rejected. The spoiled brats can never admit this because they are “Good Americans”–remember the sardonic references to “Good Germans”?–who never challenge their leaders, and especially a Republican who so loyally serves the corporate community and military-industrial complex. I love the denigration of the French for “cowardice.” It is cowardly to be unwilling to join a coalition of the Godfather and assorted poodles who are preparing to assault yet another small country that has been crushed by war, sanctions and enforced disarmament and is essentially defenceless. This is the age of pitying the poor super-Goliath as he mobilizes his coalitions of the brave to help him deal with a sick David whose hands are tied behind his back. In fact, the word “war” is a gross misnomer for the forthcoming assault–we are dealing instead with a prospective “massacre” by unilateral aggression. A war implies a fight between forces that,if not equal, are at least in the same league, with the outcome not completely certain and with most of the casualties of the attacker not likely to be inflicted by “friendly fire” (as was the case during the Persian Gulf war of 1991). In this case the aggressor has it all worked out that he will bombard the defenseless target for several days before invading in a “shock and awe” strategy, and then take over the victim country, install a military government, and eventually divide up the spoils. This is all known in advance, which makes it not “war” but plain aggression and massacre. Some of the most Kafkaesque language developed in the massacre-planning has involved the UN. It is by now a longstanding U.S. official tradition to treat the UN as a propaganda cover when available, and to ignore it when not serviceable. The last thing in the world that U.S. officials would contemplate would be to meekly accept a position taken by a UN majority that ran counter to official plans. The Godfather gives orders, he does not take them from others. In the Iraq massacre case, the Bush administration was apparently persuaded by its “dove,” the Mylai massacre coverup man,Colin Powell, to try to seek a UN cover rather than go it alone (with Britain) on an openly unilateral basis. This has involved some delightful linguistic maneuvers and intellectual somersaults. The Bush-Blair view of the role of the UN has been best put by Blair’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in his classic: “We are completely committed to the United Nations route, if that is successful.” The Bushies themselves have been pretty frank about the fact that going to the UN is pro forma, and that they intend to commit aggression with or without UN approval. They have repeatedly said that the UN had better approve if it is to retain its “relevance.” Relevance here means serviceability to the Godfather, with the clear implication that doing his bidding is the criterion of UN usefulness. There is also the possible implication that a failure here would mean that the UN will not be able to function in the future because of Godfather opposition and/or defunding and sabotage. Others have argued that if the UN DOES approve the massacre that THAT will end its relevance, as it will have demonstrated not only a lack of independence and inability to stop a war (massacre) of aggression, but will have sanctioned that aggression. The Bushie push for war has run into the problem that going through the UN has required a revised format in which the Bushies allegedly aim at “disarming” the bad man rather than ending his rule and inserting a U.S. puppet. So there has been a jockeying in which the pretense is maintained that disarmament is the aim, whereas in fact the aim has long and clearly been “regime change.” Given the Bushie aim, there was no way disarmament would have satisfied them, so the entire inspections enterprise has been a charade–now exploded by the Bushie assertion once again (March 1)that only a new regime would suffice. Nevertheless, the patriotic media have kept up the pretense that all Bush wanted was disarmament and that his claims that the inspections program wasn’t “working” were not just a cover for a quasi-hidden massacre-cum- occupation agenda. Another delightful gambit has been the notion that avoiding war required everybody going along with Bush, thereby “keeping the pressure on” Saddam. If everybody agreed with the Bushies, and they were given carte blanche for war, this wouldn’t mean the start of the war Bush has been eagerly seeking, it would help avoid war! A variant of this Kafkaism is that poor Colin Powell was isolated by the failure of the French and Germans to give Bush carte blanche. This was beautifully stated in a New York Times piece by Steven R. Weisman: After stating that Powell was “abruptly on the defensive” within the administration when France and Germany refused to “clear the way for a military attack,” Weisman says that in consequence Powell “has less leverage to stop military action…and less inclination to try” (“Refusal by French and Germans to Back U.S. on Iraq Has Undercut Powell’s Position,” Jan. 24, 2003). In other words, if Powell had succeeded in getting everybody on board the war bandwagon–“clearing the ground for military attack”–this would have given him leverage to stop a war whose ground he had just successfully cleared! Another gambit has been the fright factor and growing menace of Saddam, that Powell called the “seething threat to the world” that the demon poses, which seems to enlarge as the inspectors find little or nothing and the Godfather positions more and more weapons and troops for the massacre. This is a fresh variant of Hoover’s Law (i.e. longtime FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover’s Law), which was that the Red Threat increases as the number of Reds shrink, approaching infinity as the number of Reds nears zero. In symmetry, Powell’s Law is that Saddam’s threat grows and seethes toward Armaggedon as his weaponry and military capacity approaches full disarmament. We are living in a Golden Age of Kafkaisms–preemptive self-defense; Bush the moralist about to engage in mass killing justified by serial lies that would have made Baron Munchausen envious; Bush deeply upset at Saddam’s failure to abide by Security Council Resolutions, a crime that George Bush, his comrade in arms Ariel Sharon, the Democrats, and mainstream media can’t abide. And there is more–much more! First published in Z Magazine / Znet Introduction  Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and a media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy. He also teaches at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is perhaps best known for developing the propaganda model of media criticism with Noam Chomsky. In 1967, Herman was among more than 500 writers and editors who signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay the 10% Vietnam War Tax surcharge proposed by president Johnson.

=By= Graeme Baker

One of the former child soldiers serving for Aegis in Iraq (Mads Ellesoe) MEE

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] British defence contractor hired mercenaries from Africa for a reported $16 a day to fight in Iraq for the US, with one of the company’s former directors saying no checks were made on whether those hired were former child soldiers.

James Ellery, who was a director of Aegis Defence Services between 2005 and 2015, said contractors recruited from countries such as Sierra Leone to reduce costs for the US presence in Iraq.

Speaking to the Guardian, the former brigadier in the British army said none of the estimated 2,500 men recruited from Sierra Leone were checked to see if they were former child soldiers who had been forced to fight in the country’s civil war.

They were cheaper options and fulfilled contracts to defend US bases in Iraq, he said.

“You probably would have a better force if you recruited entirely from the Midlands of England,” he said.

“But it can’t be afforded. So you go from the Midlands of England to Nepalese etc, Asians, and then at some point you say I’m afraid all we can afford now is Africans.”

Aegis had contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to protect US bases in Iraq from 2004. It originally employed UK, US and Nepalese mercenaries, but broadened its recruitment in 2011 to include Africans.

Ellery, who said he was speaking in a personal capacity, told the Guardian that it would be “quite wrong” to ask whether people had been child soldiers, as it would penalise them for things they had often been forced into doing.

He said they were not liable for war crimes committed under the age of 18 and, “they are, once they reach 18, in fact citizens with full rights to seek employment, which is a basic human right”.

“So we would have been completely in error if, having gone to Sierra Leone, we excluded those people.”

The recruitment of African mercenaries and, more specifically, former child soldiers, is the subject of a new documentary by Mads Ellesoe, a Danish journalist who spent two years researching the subject.

Ellesoe told Middle East Eye that he had interviewed a “good handful” of former child soldiers who had fought in Iraq for Aegis, although there could be many more.

“There is no register so it is difficult to know exactly how many there were,” he said.

“I spoke to people who were child soldiers who had done all the worst things – cut off arms, mutilated people. They told me they were living in poverty. No one wanted to take up arms again but they needed jobs, so they went to Iraq.”

He disagreed with Ellery’s contention that former child soldiers should be allowed to take up arms for money as adults.

“The worst thing you can do is give former child soldiers a gun again. It destroys all the efforts to rehabilitate them after being dehumanised as children. Experts told me it will simply roll back the process of trying to make them human again.”

Ellesoe’s documentary provided detailed evidence from former child soldiers in the employment of Aegis. Contract documents say that the soldiers from Sierra Leone were paid $16 a day.

The worst thing you can do is give former child soldiers a gun again. Experts told me it will simply roll back the process of trying to make them human again. Mads Ellesoe

One subject, Gibrilla Kuyateh, told the documentary: “Every time I hold a weapon, it keeps reminding me of about the past. It brings back many memories.”

He said rebels forced him to amputate limbs, “not always with a sharp instrument”, and trained him to fire a Kalashnikov – a weapon he struggled to carry because he was so small.

Dan Collison, the director of programming at the War Child UK charity, said: “In our experience, children who have been involved in armed groups carry the scars of that experience deep into their adult life.

“It’s true that former child soldiers should not be discriminated against when it comes to future career choices, and that they are free and independent agents.

“However, seeking out the poorest and most vulnerable to carry out this kind of work is a business model that seems to take advantage of their situation and could well spark future trauma. “

Aegis was founded in 2002 by Tim Spicer, a former Scots Guards officer who was at the centre of the 1998 “arms to Africa” scandal, in which his previous company Sandline was found to be breaching sanctions by importing 100 tonnes of weapons to Sierra Leone in support of the government.

A current serving director is Nicolas Soames, the Conservative MP and the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill.

Sierra Leone was torn apart by a a civil war which began in 1991 and last for 11 years. The UN mission spent millions on demobilising more than 75,000 fighters, including 7,000 children, after it ended.

Ellery served as chief of staff to the UN’s mission in Sierra Leone while the organisation was demobilising thousands of former child soldiers.

A request by MEE for comment from an Aegis spokesman did not gain a response.

The documentary, The Child Soldier’s New Job, is due to be broadcast tonight in Denmark and will be distributed to other countries.

The video below discusses this story in more detail.

Graeme Baker has worked as a reporter and editor at Al Jazeera English, The National, the Daily Telegraph and The Independent.

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=By= Patrick Cockburn

Mossack Fonseca. Screen capture from Carta TV

Who shall doubt ‘the secret hid

Under Cheops‘ pyramid‘

Was that the contractor did

Cheops out of several millions?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions – and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.

Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.

Anybody discussing the Panama Papers and the practices of the law firm Mossack Fonseca should think about the ultimate destination of the $7bn not spent on the Baghdad drainage system. There will be many go-betweens and middle men protecting anyone who profited from this huge sum, but the suspicion must be that a proportion of it will have ended up in offshore financial centres where money is hidden and can be turned into legally held assets.

There is no obvious link between the revelations in the Panama Papers, the rise of Islamic State and the wars tearing apart at least nine countries in the Middle East and North Africa. But these three developments are intimately connected as ruling elites, who syphon off wealth into tax havens and foreign property, lose political credibility. No ordinary Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians will fight and die for rulers they detest as swindlers. Crucial to the rise of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan is not their own strength and popularity, but the weakness and unpopularity of the governments to which they are opposed.

Kipling was right in believing that there has always been corruption, but since the early 1990s corrupt states have often mutated into kleptocracies. Ruling families and the narrow coteries around them have taken a larger and larger share of the economic cake.

In Syria since the turn of the century, for instance, the rural population and the urban poor no longer enjoyed the limited benefits they had previously received under an equally harsh but more egalitarian regime. By 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s first cousin Rami Makhlouf was reported to be a dominant player in 60 per cent of the Syrian economy and to have a personal worth of $5 billion.

In Iraq earlier this year, a financial specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the government of prime minister Haider al-Abadi held files on corrupt individuals, including “one politician who has amassed a fortune of $6 billion through corrupt dealings.”

The danger of citing extreme examples of corruption from exotic and war-ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria is that these may sound like events happening on another planet. But the political and economic systems in Iraq and Afghanistan were devised under the tutelage of the US and allies like Britain. They were proponents of free market economics which in the West may increase inequality and benefit the wealthy, but in Kabul and Baghdad were a license to steal by anybody with power.

Neo-liberal economists have a lot to answer for. A few days after Isis had captured Mosul in June 2014, I was in Baghdad and asked a recently retired four-star Iraqi general why the much larger and better-equipped Iraqi army had been defeated so swiftly and humiliatingly. He replied that the explanation was: “Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!”

He added that this was pervasive and had begun when the US was building a new Iraqi military after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, when the American commanders had insisted on out-sourcing food and other supplies to private contractors. These businessmen and the army officers soon determined that, if the Iraqi government was paying money to feed and equip a battalion of 600 men, but its real strength was only 150, they could pocket the difference. So profitable was this arrangement that by 2014 all officers’ jobs were for sale and it cost $200,000 to become a colonel and up to $2m a general in charge of a division.

Blatant corruption at the top in Kabul and Baghdad has been frequently reported over the years, though nothing much seems to change. But it is a mistake to imagine that this was simply the outcome of a culture of corruption specific to Afghanistan and Iraq. The most corrupt ministers were appointed and the most crooked contracts signed at a time when US officials were the real decision-makers in Baghdad.

For example, the entire military procurement budget of $1.2 billion was effectively stolen in 2004/5 when the Defence Ministry was substantially under US control, raising questions of the competence, or even collusion, of the US authorities.

The situation has got worse, not better. “I feared seven or eight years ago that Iraq would become like Nigeria,” said one former minister in 2013, “but in fact it is far worse.”

He cited as evidence a $1.3bn contract signed by a minister with one foreign company that had only a nominal existence – and a second company that was bankrupt. This took place in a country in which one third of the labour force is unemployed, and, if the underemployed are taken into account, the figure rises to over half.

The use of offshore financial centres by the moneyed elite in the oil states and much of the rest of the world is not always to avoid taxes which they would not pay if they kept the money at home, but in some cases to conceal what they have stolen and later to legally launder it.

Some of this can be done by buying property in places like Baghdad, which explains why property prices in that dangerous city are as high as London. But it is safer and better to buy property in London itself, something that will ultimately require the services of a company like Mossack Fonseca – though these services will be far removed from the original toxic source of the investment.

The Panama Papers give insight into the names and mechanisms through which globalised elites hide their wealth and avoid paying tax on it. Commentators now predict that popular disgust with political establishments will benefit radical leaders like Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

What they do not see is that the way in which the detachment of interests of elites from the countries they rule has already produced states that have failed or are failing, or are wracked by conflict and war.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of  The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?