Of Lies and Liberation
by Eyecalone
Well we are now approximately 3 weeks into America's latest collective fiction. The magicians in the televisions, on the radios, and in the newspapers, are trying to make all the wild official claims about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and Saddam's plans for using them magically disappear, as if these claims were never used to justify the American and British lead attack on Iraq in the first place. Now the new rationale being pitched down from the highest levels of government is that the attack on Iraq was really about "liberating" the Iraqi people, and like the dutiful servants they are, the mainstream media outlets immediately change directions and begin chanting this new mantra. On issues of military conflict, America's major news and information outlets (FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, commercial radio, major newspapers, etc) are about as close as you can get to a government owned media. Once again these "official sources" have failed and misled the people in a time of need. The Pentagon has said they don't keep enemy body counts, so they don't know how many Iraqi civilians and soldiers they slaughtered and maimed in their assault, besides on television and in print, the dead soldiers were merely "degraded". Once again most of the American people will understand war as a video game and the mass killing of human beings as a percentage change in their fighting capabilities. We must never forget about the initial weapons lies and exaggerations that got the 'attack Iraq' ball rolling, but already at this early stage it is clear that the claims of "Iraqi liberation" should be thrown on the historical trash heap of lies told by the state to it's people, to gain their support for the state's military adventures.
Made you look, you a slave to a page in my propaganda book
While invasion forces were still ducking small arms fire from resisting Iraqi soldiers and militia the American mainstream press was arming its most lethal propaganda weapon, the image. Despite high-level government predictions that Iraq would surrender and Saddam Hussein's regime crumble almost immediately upon the start of an American attack, the conquest of Iraq took several weeks in spite of Iraq being at an incredible disadvantage militarily. This was after all, a relatively small, economic sanction-ravaged nation, that had neither Air Force nor Navy, nor state of the art military equipment, attempting to resist the onslaught of the most well armed and financed military machine in human history (with the assistance of Britain). Before the fall of Hussein's regime was even complete, the American military and media, dug into their bag of usual tricks looking for something to erase people's memories of Iraq's resistance. As usual they found - "the celebration footage", which was of course provided, without scope or context. In what is now a familiar technique, images of groups of Iraqis celebrating the fall of the Iraqi regime by stomping on a fallen Saddam Hussein statue were broadcast around the globe. While the landscape may have been a little different and the emotions a bit more intense this time, in essence the images were very similar to those used near the end of other recent American conquest in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
Although the images were probably a very successful, psychological warfare operation against most people, the American public especially, the opportunity to exploit them would be short-lived. Within a day or so images exposing the manipulation of the "Saddam statue stomp-out" in Iraq's Firdos Square, began surfacing on the websites of the Information Clearing House and Independent Media Center. The images show the incident from a wider view and show that only a few dozen people participated and the event was a staged and controlled affair, in a mostly empty square surrounded by "coalition" tanks. Firdos Square might have well been the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theatre on that April afternoon.
Some even went on to say that the participants were mostly members of the U.S. based, funded, and sponsored Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmed Chalabi who is wanted in Jordan for allegedly defrauding a Jordanian bank of hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Chalabi is favored by many in the Pentagon to figure prominently in Iraq's installed leadership, however officials at the State Department are less enthusiastic about his participation in post-war Iraq. Chalabi is also a favorite of some far right think-tanks, such as the JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) and the American Enterprise Institute. The U.S. recently returned Chalabi along with a few hundred of his supporters to Iraq in hope of gaining a leadership position in America's planned Iraqi, puppet regime. This is in spite of the fact that, Mr. Chalabi lacks any reasonable local support in Iraq and this is his first time in Iraq after more than 40 years of exile in the U.S.
Despite the uncertainty of the identities of the "statue stomp out" participants we can be confident is some things. Although many in Iraq, in some way, were happy to see the despised and feared Hussein go, it was clear that the overwhelming majority of Iraq was not willing to pay for his removal with a U.S./British invasion. Far more Iraqis have lost a loved one to American "smart bombs", cluster bombs, missiles, tanks and guns, or to the US-led economic sanctions that is estimated to be responsible for anywhere between 1 and 1.5 million Iraqi deaths - than have embraced American soldiers or shouted praise for George W. Bush. If sections of the Iraqi people were prepared to welcome the invading forces, after Hussein's fall, their emotions should be understood as a mixture of hatred of Hussein and his failure to defend the country from invasion, relief at the end of the bombing, hope for restoration of basic services, and even a desire to get in good with the new masters.
Whatever the true level of joy and well wishes, for the invading forces, that the American media was promoting, the realities on the ground in Iraq quickly smashed those illusions. Within days tens of thousands of Iraqis were in the street protesting the occupation of their country, their lack of essential services such as water and electricity, and the general sense of lawlessness and anarchy that was pervading the country. In the southern city of Nasiriyah, a Shiite Muslim stronghold, at least 20,000 people marched through the city chanting "No to America, No to Saddam" only a couple of days after the start of the occupation. Since then protest similar to these with varying crowd sizes have sprung up regularly in Iraq, outside of the Northern Kurd controlled areas.
In two separate incidents a total of at least 13 people were killed when U.S. soldiers opened fire on Iraqi civilians protesting the presence of occupation forces. In the second of those incidents, at least 10 people were killed and scores wounded, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul when U.S. troops fired on a crowd angered by a speech by the new US-backed governor. According to American military officials the soldiers were returning fire, after coming under fire from a building rooftop opposite where the speech was being given. However according to witnesses, the soldiers opened fire as a crowd reacted with hostility to a newly-appointed governor of the city, Mashaan al-Juburi, who was making a speech listeners deemed was too pro-US.
Less than 2 weeks later reports emerged that at least 13 more Iraqis were killed and 75 wounded in the town of Falluja, which lies 50 kilometers (35 miles) west of Baghdad, when US forces opened fire on demonstrators. A US spokesman said soldiers started shooting after people in the crowd fired on them - but Iraqi witnesses said the protesters were unarmed and had gone to a local school occupied by US forces to ask them to leave. Witnesses quoted by the French news agency, AFP, said the demonstrators had been marking Saddam Hussein's birthday, carrying portraits of the ousted leader and Iraqi flags, when they approached a school manned by US troops when the Americans opened fire. According to local residents, several children were among the dead. The very next day two more Iraqis were killed and 14 wounded by U.S. troops at a demonstration protesting the previous days shooting and the presence of the occupation forces. Once again, the American soldiers claimed they were returning fire and Iraqi demonstrators claimed they were unarmed - perhaps we should get use to this.
The protestor shootings come in the midst of U.S. efforts to establish some form of government in Iraq that has an Iraqi face but is still under U.S. domination, in hopes of quelling the widespread resentment of occupation forces. The U.S. recently orchestrated a meeting of about 250 prominent Iraqis from various backgrounds, and agreed to hold a national conference in four weeks time to choose an interim government, although several, mainly religious, leaders from the majority Shiite Muslim community either boycotted or sent low ranking representatives to the meeting and the other one that proceeded it. At the heart of the U.S. government haste to create an interim authority in Iraq is the desire to create a recognizable government that will allow for the pumping and sale of Iraq's oil on the world market (we will return to this later).
Ironically, the unfettered sale of Iraq's oil is still being partially held up by the United Nations sanctions. Since the sanctions were tied to Iraq being declared free of "weapons of mass destruction" and NOT the removal of Saddam Hussein, some nations originally opposed to the American/British led invasion are now arguing against American request to lift the sanctions citing that Iraq has not been given a clean bill of health. Of course the U.S. government is avoiding declaring Iraq free of prohibited weapons because it would expose the original lie, about Iraq having large stockpiles of weapons, that led to the assault and it would likely mean letting U.N. inspectors back into Iraq. The Bush administration on May 9th, introduced a resolution to the Security Council calling for the elimination of international sanctions on Iraq and granting the United States broad control over the country's oil industry. The resolution would shift control of Iraq's oil from the United Nations to the United States and its military allies, with an international advisory board having oversight responsibilities but little effective power while a "transitional Iraqi government", which U.S. authorities have said they hope to establish within weeks, would be granted a consultative role.
Pillage … it's not just for ancient times
In addition to the obvious reasons for the hatred and resentment of the occupation forces, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Hussein's regime, there was widespread looting and ransacking of hospitals, infrastructure, and national treasures in Iraq. Evidence has now emerged that these acts of theft and vandalism were attributable to not only to the negligence of U.S. forces, but in fact reveal complicity on the part of occupation forces. Eyewitness accounts and a closer look at the patterns in the pillage of Baghdad revealed that the widespread looting in Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and other Iraqi cities, following the April 9th collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, and it's loss of control of Baghdad, was in some cases deliberately encouraged and fostered by the American forces on the ground.
Probably the most obscene act was the looting of Iraq's National Museum, the greatest trove of archeological and historical artifacts in the Middle East. Thieves made off with tens of thousands of irreplaceable artifacts and relics of past civilizations, some dating back 5,000 years! Meanwhile, the museum's entire card catalog was destroyed, making it difficult to identify what has been stolen. This type of plunder was not just a crime against the people of Iraq, but against the collective cultural history of humanity.
The US military stood by and permitted the ransacking of the museum, as well as allowing the looting of hospitals, universities, libraries and government social service buildings. There were two building that were protected however. The occupation forces protected the Ministry of Oil, with its detailed inventory of Iraqi oil reserves, as well as the Ministry of Interior, the headquarters of the ousted regime's secret police. As journalist Robert Fisk, wrote in the April 14th edition on the British newspaper The Independent, "After days of arson and pillage, here's a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq's history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals. The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched-and untouchable-because tanks and armored personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course-with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq-and the Ministry of Oil. The archives and files of Iraq's most valuable asset-its oilfields and, even more important, its massive reserves-are safe and sound, sealed off from the mobs and looters, and safe to be shared, as Washington almost certainly intends, with American oil companies."
Other articles featuring eyewitness accounts, one by Ole Rothenborg printed on April 11th in Sweden's largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter featured the first hand accounts of a Khaled Bayomi, who has taught and researched on Middle Eastern conflicts for ten years at the University of Lund where he is also working on his doctorate. Khaled Bayomi traveled from Europe to Baghdad to be a human shield and arrived on the same day that the war began. He recounted how he witnessed some of the early acts of the plunder while trying to visit some friends on the west bank of the Tigris river, recalling, "In the afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four American tanks took places on the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building on the other side of Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors to the building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them …The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross the road had been shot. But in the strange silence after all the shooting, people gradually became curious. After 45 minutes, the first Baghdad citizens dared to come out. Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building. …The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the plundering continued there …I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one with watched with disgust."
Closer to home the New York Times reported the accounts of an Iraqi man who was standing guard at Al Kindi hospital in Baghdad. Haider Daoud said he was angry at his encounters with American soldiers in the neighborhood, mentioning one marine who he said he had begged to guard the hospital two days ago. "He told me the same words: He can't protect the hospital," Mr. Daoud said. "A big army like the USA army can't protect the hospital?" Days later, the National Library of Iraq was also looted, and burned. The library was home to rare, centuries-old copies of the Koran and other examples of Islamic calligraphy, as well as irreplaceable historical documents from the Ottoman Empire, the building was set on fire, destroying an untold number of texts but also the full records of what was contained, once again sabotaging an accounting of what was taken.
Meanwhile back in the U.S. American leadership was trying to explain away the targeted looting as a random and unpredictable act of Iraq's "newfound freedom". At a Pentagon press conference shortly after thefts began, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denounced the media for exaggerating the extent of chaos, and argued that the looting was a natural and perhaps even healthy expression of pent-up hostility to the old regime. "It's untidy," Rumsfeld said. "And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes." This false "surprise" was also exposed as a lie, days after the looting incident when the head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum. Martin Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, said "It didn’t have to happen. In a preemptive war that’s the kind of thing you plan for”, so he wrote a letter of resignation to the White House shortly after the looting in part to make a statement but also because he says "you can't speak freely" as a special government-appointed employee. Other members of this special panel, including Gary Vikan and Richard S. Lanier, have also resigned over the looting of the museum. Antiquities experts said they had been given assurances from U.S. military planners that Iraq's historic artifacts and sites would be protected by occupying forces. In addition, U.S. archeological organizations and the U.N.'s cultural agency UNESCO said they had provided U.S. officials with information about Iraq's cultural heritage and archeological sites months before the war began.
Once the museum staff were able to communicate with the outside world, their accounts further illustrated the looting was not random. It was the work of people who knew what they were looking for and came specially equipped for the job. Dr. Dony George, head of the Baghdad Museum, said, "I believe they were people who knew what they wanted. They had passed by the gypsum copy of the Black Obelisk. This means that they must have been specialists. They did not touch those copies." It was almost a week after the museum was originally looted that Dr. George was able to alert archaeologists worldwide to what had been stolen but at the time no effort to prevent the objects from leaving Baghdad or to put in process an international search had been done. Apparently some of the thieves also had keys to had keys to the vaults where the most valuable items were stored. Even the U.S.'s April 17th BusinessWeek online magazine picked up on these facts, repeating the theme of premeditation and conspiracy in an article headlined "Were Baghdad's Antiquity Thieves Ready?" that carried the subtitle: "They may have known just what they were looking for because dealers ordered the most important pieces well in advance." Don't at all be surprised if these priceless artifacts turn up in the private collections of wealthy collectors in the United States, Britain, and a few other nations, or at auction houses for the wealthy somewhere outside of Iraq. As an illustration, an April 30th article in the New York Times cited that of 2,000 treasures stolen in the 1991 Gulf War, only 12 Have Been Recovered. As Ann Talbot, described so eloquently in her article, "US government implicated in planned theft of Iraqi artistic treasures" (which goes into further detail regarding the circumstances of the looting), the people who would seek to gain "ownership" of such priceless artifacts "operate on the principle that everything is defined by its 'market value'. These are quite literally people who understand the price of everything and the value of nothing".
Rebuilding in whose image?
Of course no "middle-ages" plunder, using 21st century technology would be complete without a lot of privatization, "free market" icing, and crony capitalism on top. The burning and looting of Iraq and most of its government infrastructure creates yet another profit opportunity for American companies - reconstruction. The vision for the creation of an Iraq - privatized, foreign-owned, and open for business had been dreamt up long before Tomahawk missiles, Abrams tanks, and arsonists wiped the landscape clean. Although it's definitely not a place I go to get perspective, the ultra-conservative press is often a great place to turn if you want to know what the ruling class of this country is up to ahead of time.
Last fall at a conference convened by the right-wing policy group, The Heritage Foundation a paper presented at that conference (and revised last month) by Ariel Cohen and Gerald O'Driscoll wrote: "To rehabilitate and modernize its economy, a post-Saddam government will need to move simultaneously on a number of economic policy fronts, utilizing the experience of privatization campaigns and structural reform in other countries." The authors go on to assert what they call Lesson No. 1: "Privatization Works Everywhere." Recently this call was of course, echoed by Britain's conservative Adam Smith Institute, in a policy paper title "Toward an Economic and Governance Agenda for a New Iraq." One section of the document defines privatization as the defining characteristic "for successful reform in Iraq." The authors go on to suggest that, among the sectors that should be up for grabs, are mining, chemicals and construction. In a March 27th op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Taking Iraq Private", Robert McFarlane, a national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan who now owns his own global energy development company, and Michael Bleyzer, the CEO of an international equity fund management company, laid out the plan for privatizing Iraq, suggesting privatization, particularly of Iraq's oil, and then using the revenue to pay the reconstruction contracts. The two men argued that "the U.S. and its allies would be well advised to put together a team of private sector business leaders as a 'steering committee' to supervise and monitor" economic restructuring.
The Pentagon has begun to set up this "steering committee", calling it the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. It will be run by retired Army Lt. General Jay Garner, who will report directly to Central Command Gen. Tommy R. Franks and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon (Jay Garner, by the way, is the president of defense contractor, SYColeman Corp that specializes in Patriot missiles and which was awarded over a billion-dollar contract this year to provide logistics support to US special forces. SY Coleman is a subsidiary of L-3 Communications, the ninth-largest contributor to US political parties from the defense electronics sector). Rumsfeld's "mini-me" and underling, Paul Wolfowitz is assembling the staff which is supposed to include 230 retired U.S. military officers and hard-line civilian officials. Wolfowitz announced recently that the first 25 of around 150 US-based Iraqi exiles are on their way to Iraq to take over top administrative posts and to act as advisers to Garner and his Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). The group of exiles, which is known as the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, was brought together by the Pentagon two months ago and its members are employed and paid by US defense contractor SAIC. The exiles include engineers, corporate executives and other professionals drawn from the US and European countries, all of whom have been very carefully screened. The names of ORHA officials are slowly being released but some have already sparked criticism. The British-based Oxfam aid group launched a scathing attack on the American businessman put in charge of agriculture-Dan Amstutz, a former senior executive of Cargill, the world's biggest grain exporter. Oxfam representatives stated that, "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in charge of a human rights commission," Watkins said. "This guy is uniquely well-placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market-but singularly ill-equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country." Meanwhile the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development, is deciding with the Pentagon which corporations will be selected for the early stages of the Iraq's reconstruction.
With the buildings, craters, and corpses in Iraq hardly finished smoldering and the U.S. has begun distributing contracts to American corporations, and couple of British companies. Despite the "free market" rhetoric espoused by the parties responsible for prosecuting the attack on Iraq, the bidding process for the Iraq reconstruction contracts has been for the most part closed and non-competitive - meaning that contracts have been awarded to companies based not on their ability to do the job best or at the best price - but based on favoritism and government connections. From the outset American officials made it clear there that in post-war Iraq there would be no roll for the U.N. (other than humanitarian) or for corporations from nations who didn't participate in the attack, in fact, even many British firms have found themselves on the outside looking in thus far.
As of the first week of May, reconstruction contracts pending or already awarded by U.S. government agencies have gone as follows (contracts not yet bid aren't included):
General Construction: On April 17th, Bechtel Group Inc. received their initial payment of $34.6 million on their deal for construction work which may be worth up to $680 million over 18 months. The deal puts the company in position to receive a big part of the $100 billion estimated total cost of Iraqi reconstruction. The plan involves construction all over Iraq, including dredging the port at Umm Qasr, repairing airport runways, restoring the electric grid, fixing about 1,400 miles of roads, rehabilitating as many as 100 bridges and other work. Bechtel is hiring U.K. subcontractors Olive Security to safeguard workers and equipment and ArmorGroup to advise on unexploded munitions. Chicago-based Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. is subcontracted to do dredging work on channels at Umm Qasr. Bechtel's board of directors and management includes several Regan-Era Republican luminaries. Bechtel's board includes Regan's secretary of state, George Schulz (former Bechtel CEO), and defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, (the late William Casey, Reagan's CIA director, was also a Bechtel executive). Other prominent executives linked to the administration include retired Marine corp. general Jack Sheehan, who is the company's senior vice president and also sits on the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board. Interestingly enough, in the 1980s Bechtel proposed building an oil pipeline through Iraq with Donald Rumsfeld serving as an intermediary for the company to Saddam Hussein. Since 1999 Bechtel has donated more than a million dollars total both political parties with the majority going to Republicans. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Bechtel gave Republican candidates, including Bush, about $765,000 in PAC, soft money and individual campaign contributions between 1999 and 2002. In addition to Bechtel's main construction unit, the company is engaged in privatization efforts throughout the globe. Bechtel ranks approximately 4th, behind Suez, Vivendi Universal (they don't just do media and sell records), and Britiain's RWE/Thames Water - in terms of leading corporations in water system privatization (yes that's exactly what you think it is, privatizing people's access to water). [Also FYI - a subsidiary of Bechtel was forced to abandon its operations in Cochabamba, Bolivia, after an uprising by Bolivian citizens over their attempt to privatize the water system. Bechtel is now suing Bolivia, one of Latin America's poorest countries, for somewhere between $25-40 million in lost profits and compensation through a World Bank tribunal using one of it's holding companies - are you pissed off yet?]
Other Construction: Fluor Corp., Washington Group International Inc., and Perini Corp. received the three open-ended contracts, each valued $500,000 to $100 million, call for unspecified construction and design services to the Army's Central Command, which is running the invasion/occupation of Iraq. The work can be done in any of the 25 countries covered by the Central Command, including Iraq. Fluor Corp, which recently donated close to $300,000 to the Republicans has ties to a number of intelligence and defense procurement officials, such as Kenneth J Oscar, former acting assistant secretary of the army and Bobby R. Inman a retired admiral, former NSA director and CIA deputy director.
Seaport: Stevedoring Services of America on has already received the initial award of $4.8 million on a contract that involves rehabilitating, assessing, and managing the port of Umm Qasr, clearing the channel, hiring pilots to guide ships, managing truck access, preventing theft and other work. SSA's contract has angered the British government and army, and Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt unsuccessfully called on Washington to intervene. The British shipping giant P&O is also angered about missing out and about not being told why they lost. SSA's name may also be familiar because of their infamous union busting tactics. SSA, which has a monopoly on cargo operations in over 150 locations worldwide, was behind the infamous lockout of West Coast dockworkers last September, where it conspired with the Bush administration to use the Taft-Hartley law to try and break the International Longshore and Ware house Union.
Health Care: Abt Associates Inc. was awarded this contract on April 30. The initial payment is $10 million and the contract could grow to $43.8 million over a year. The contractor will provide medicine, equipment and training to Iraqi health care officials and will work with relief organizations such as the International Red Cross. According to the companies website, Abt Associates has been a major contributor to worldwide economic reforms that transfer major economic sectors to private investment and control. The website goes on to state that "as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID's) five-year worldwide Privatization and Development Project, we worked on numerous initiatives to help governments develop privatization programs. This work included preparing state-owned enterprises and improving the environment for privatization. We also played an active role in performing the transactions themselves". In other words Iraq's health care system may be privatized and if America's health care system is any example it will certainly not be accessible to everybody.
Policing: DynCorp International, which in March became a unit of Computer Sciences Corp., on April 18 received a contract worth up to $50 million in the first year. After an initial team of law enforcement officials assesses the situation, DynCorp will send up to 1,000 advisers to help Iraq rebuild police and judicial institutions. DynCorp often provides security in world trouble spots where America acts as policeman. Armed DynCorp employees make up the core of the police force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai, while DynCorp planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions over coca crops in Colombia. In a November 2002 report on trafficking in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Human Rights Watch found that DynCorp's personnel had participated in human rights violations. Kathryn Bolkovac, a U.N. International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were participating in sex trafficking. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia. In addition, DynCorp has been sued for their chemical herbicide spraying in Columbia. Groups of peasants have sued alleging the spraying has been destroying legitimate crops, causing human and livestock illness, and, in several cases, killing children. DynCorp is also under investigation for fraud in the U.S. over its questionable billing practices, which may have allowed it to bilk the U.S. government, out of millions of dollars.
Oil Fires: Halliburton Co.'s KBR unit, known as Kellogg Brown & Root, was awarded a contract. KBR carried out the initial phase of a $7 billion, two-year plan that envisioned a "worst case'' scenario if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime set fire to the country's oil fields. So far, the damage is minimal and the contract value may be closer to $650 million. However, the contract quietly also lets the company operate the oil fields for a time and distribute the petroleum, and has lead Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), to call for a full disclosure. As everyone should already know, Dick Cheney, is a former CEO of Halliburton and he is still receiving the deferred compensation from the company that he began getting when he left the company to run for vice president. Since 1999, Halliburton has given just under $700,000, in political donations to the Republican party. KBR has subcontracted some of the work to two Houston firms -- Wild Wells, and Boots and Coots, which is close to bankruptcy. Along with Bechtel, KBR will profit from the biggest construction projects because of the large-scale destruction of Iraq's infrastructure. Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, was the first company to be awarded an Iraqi reconstruction contract by the Pentagon to cap burning oil wells. The contract was awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers without any open competitive bidding process thanks to federal laws allowing the negotiations to take place in secret in the interests of national security. KBR has won a string of lucrative contracts despite failing to control the cost of work in the Balkans and being fined $2 million following claims of fraud at a military base.
Personnel: International Resources Group Ltd. on March 13 received their initial award of $7.1 million for 90 days; there's an option for two one-year extensions. The contract calls for the company to provide technical expertise for reconstruction.
Local Government: The non-profit Research Triangle Institute has received the initial payment of $7.9 million, on a contract that may be worth up to $167.9 million over a year. The contract calls for the Institute to identify local leaders, determine salaries for local administrators, enhance the roles of women and youth and promote the best governing practices. It can make grants to both foreign and Iraqi organizations to help improve municipal infrastructure and train leaders.
Education: Creative Associates International Inc. is scheduled to receive the initial payment of $1 million, on a contract that may be worth up to $62.6 million over a year. The company will work with Iraq's Ministry of Education to train teachers and provide school supplies, from protractors to chalk boards.
Logistics: The Air Force holds this contract. The initial payment is $4 million; the deal could be worth up to $26 million over 12 months. The contract is for logistical services such as customs clearance, warehousing and trucking. It will also supply bottled water to Iraqis.
Airports: SkyLink Air and Logistical Support Inc. awarded a contract on May 5. Initial payment is $2.5 million and the contract may be worth $10.2 million over 18 months. Contract calls for rehabilitation at international airports in Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. SkyLink will assess the facilities, including air control, safety and security, create improvement plans and take over airport operations if needed.
In another example of the profiteering going on in Iraq, Republican congressman Darrel Issa has introduced a bill that would require the defense department to build a CDMA cellular phone system in postwar Iraq in order to benefit "US patent holders". As Farhad Manjoo noted in the internet magazine Salon, CDMA is the system used in the US, not in Europe, and was developed by Qualcomm, one of Issa's most generous donors.
Then there is of course, the biggest prize of all - OIL. It's clear that foreign companies (American and British) will be called in to operate Iraq's petroleum system the only things that remain to be agreed upon is the who and how, of manipulating the situation the best in terms of appearance. Even though it will be little more than an American puppet regime in reality, Iraq will likely have to have an internationally recognized government in place in order for U.N. sanctions to be lifted so it can begin selling it's oil. The Bush Administration has tended to speak in platitudes about "using oil revenues to benefit the Iraqi people", but it is significant that the person reported to have been chosen to oversee postwar oil production is a former chief executive officer of Shell Oil Company (Philip Carroll also worked as chief executive for Fluor Corp., one of the big engineering companies awarded reconstruction contracts). The Bush administration knows it can't talk openly about selling Iraq's oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell so it leaves that to people like Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraqi petroleum minister and executive director of the Center for Global Energy Studies, who is also the cousin of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi. According to Fadhil Chalabi, "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country. The only way is to partially privatize the industry". There is already open discussion that Iraq should quit the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and dramatically increase its oil exports. Chalabi recently stated that, "Iraq must maximize revenue from its oil. I would choose maximizing the revenue through oil, with or without OPEC. If it is within OPEC it would be better, but it may not be possible." He estimated that Iraq would need to pump and sell seven million barrels of oil a day-more than twice its pre-sanctions OPEC quota and almost three times its present output capacity. This could of course sabotage if not destroy OPEC, and lead to a crash in oil prices and major economic hardships in the petroleum exporting countries.
"Liberation" Vs Freedom
Lost in all this plunder is the very simple fact that Iraq's people will have no say in this. Of course America's unilateralism is horrendous, but we shouldn't be fooled, and must move beyond arguing which transnational corporation gets the best deals in Iraq's forced yard sale? It would be no better if privatizing Iraq was done multilaterally by the US, Europe, Russia, and China? Maybe, in fact quite probably, the Iraqi people would like to hold on their assets. Iraq has had much of its infrastructure destroyed by a war, followed by more than a decade of meat tenderizer like sanctions and regular bombings, and finally an invasion. Now the Iraqi people are being forced, without representation, to foot the bill for the carnage, and likely being locked into a number of contracts, and financial and political relationships that they will find near impossible to break whether or not the American and British forces ever do leave (American officials have also made clear that U.S. is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, that would grant the Pentagon access to possibly four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future, and allow for the projection of American hegemony into the heart of the region).
And this comrades, is what is meant when you hear on the news, that Iraq has been "liberated" - plunder, pillage, and privatization spoken of as charity and altruism. With friends like these…..
Released: May 1st, 2003
Suggested Reading:
Against Empire by Michael Parenti
War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know Wlliam Rivers Pitt w/ Scott Ritter
Killing Hope by William Blum
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profits by Vandana Shiva
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
(know your enemy)
Suggested Websites and Links:
International Forum on Globalization
The views and opinions expressed herein by the author do not necessarily represent the opinions or position of Playahata.com.
