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May
12, 2003
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May
13, 2003
Democracy Comes to Iraq
Kick Their Ass
and Take Their Gas
By JACOB LEVICH
One month after the fall of Baghdad, the US has
successfully liberated the people of Iraq from meaningful involvement
in decisions about their own future.
A designer regime, concocted behind closed
doors by Pentagon and State Department planners, is now being
imposed on Iraq with great speed and without any kind of popular
consent. Iraq's nascent "democratic transition government"
is window-dressing for a military dictatorship charged with insuring
that US policy goals -- especially the disposition of Iraq's
vast petroleum reserves -- are protected from any troublesome
outbreaks of democracy.
As journalist Naomi Klein recognized
weeks ago, the Iraqi people will not be granted authority until
fundamental and probably irrevocable features of the New Iraq
are locked in place.
The essentials of the US blueprint for
post-invasion Iraq were known to legislators by February 2003,
when Undersecretary of State Douglas Feith outlined administration
policy goals in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. Feith drew on months of planning by a White House
committee chaired by Iran-Contra perjurer Elliott Abrams, as
well as input from Establishment intellectuals and a series of
closed-door meetings sponsored by the State Department's "Future
of Iraq" program.
Further details of the blueprint were
disclosed early this year to key Iraqi expatriates like White
House favorite Ahmad Chalabi, the career dissident and convicted
felon who is Bush's man in Baghdad. The highhandedness of US
plans alarmed even Chalabi, who partially summarized them in
a February 19 Wall Street Journal op-ed:
"[T]he plan ... calls for an American
military governor to rule Iraq for up to two years. ... The occupation
authorities would appoint a 'consultative council' of handpicked
Iraqis with non-executive powers and unspecified authority, serving
at the pleasure of the American governor. The occupation authorities
would also appoint a committee to draft a constitution for Iraq.
After an unspecified period, indirect elections would be held
for a 'constituent assembly' that would vote to ratify the new
constitution without a popular referendum."
At no point in this democratic transition,
it should be noted, will the Iraqi people actually be permitted
to vote.
Events of the past month suggest that
the US is following its blueprint to the letter. Iraq is now
controlled by a military occupation government known euphemistically
as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
Its chief, former Lt. General Jay Garner, is de facto Viceroy
of Iraq. (In a decision dictated partly by public relations considerations,
Garner will soon be replaced in this role by a civilian, Kissinger
crony L. Paul Bremer III. According to The New York Times, Bremer
is being installed in order to "lessen the appearance of
a military occupation." Like Garner, however, he will be
reporting to US Central Command.)
On April 15 and 27, the US convened official
gatherings of handpicked Iraqi "delegates" in Ur and
Baghdad. The meetings took place in halls encircled by US armored
vehicles. Participation was by US invitation only; representatives
from Iraq's left-wing, fundamentalist, and nationalist parties
were systematically excluded; ordinary citizens seeking to observe
democracy in action were barred from the hall. White House envoy
Zalmay Khalilzad presided.
On May 4, Garner announced that he had
appointed the "consultative council" mentioned by Chalabi.
Although Garner implied that the council's makeup reflected the
sentiments of the Baghdad conference, the nine members turned
out to be the usual suspects: prominent Iraqi dissidents, mostly
expatriates, who have been on the US payroll for years. Despite
his evident unpopularity at all levels of Iraqi society, Chalabi
is among them.
Garner further announced that the US
is beginning the plan's next phase, the selection of a constituent
assembly. With surprising frankness, he described this puppet
body as "a government with an Iraqi face on it that [will
be] totally dealing with the coalition."
Again, no elections will be held, but
teams of Iraqi ex-dissidents close to the US are fanning out
across the country to recruit amenable local officials and leaders.
Recent disclosures suggest that their loyalty may well be secured
through blackmail and bribery.
According to the new York Times, the
US has provided Chalabi's gang with a blackmail kit in the form
of documents taken from the Ba'ath Party and Iraqi secret police
archives, described as "incendiary material in a region
where under-the-table payoffs to buy protection, loyalty or silence
are the seamy side of political life." The existence of
a bribery program is not openly acknowledged, but can be inferred
from leaks surrounding the April 10 assassination of US-sponsored
Shiite cleric Abdul Majid al Khoei in Najaf. Shortly after his
death, US intelligence sources revealed that Khoei had been provided
with $13 million to buy the loyalty of Shiite leaders.
These, then, are the sordid realities
behind President Bush's recent declaration that the "we
will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government
of, by, and for the Iraqi people." And while the White House
issues platitudes about democracy, anti-US street demonstrations,
which arguably represent democracy in its purest form, are being
put down by lethal force.
On April 15, soldiers opened fire on
a crowd hostile to the US-imposed governor in Mosul, killing
at least 10 people and injuring as many as 100. On April 29 and
again on April 30, US troops machine-gunned protestors in the
town of Fallujah, killing at least 15 Iraqis and wounding more
than 75 in massacres reminiscent of the British firings in colonial
India. An unmistakable message is being sent.
What's at stake? In a word, oil. Indeed,
a swift and sweeping restructuring of Iraq's petroleum-fueled
economy is already well underway.
Acting unilaterally, the U.S. has moved
to radically restructure Iraq's oil industry on the model of
a Western private corporation, with a chief executive and a management
team, vetted by American officials, who would answer to a "multinational"
board of advisers. Oil production is now under the control of
former ExxonMobil executive Gary Vogler, who has publicly warned
Iraq's indigenous oil ministers not to make any decisions without
the approval of allied forces.
All this is a prelude to the privatization
of Iraqi petroleum. Speaking for the State Department-sponsored
Oil and Energy Working Group, Kurdish oil consultant Dara Attar
says openly that Iraq is "going to 'demonopolize' the oil,
inviting foreign companies to invest directly in development
of new oil fields." According to another working group member,
former Iraqi oil minister Fadhil Chalabi, the US will then pull
Iraq out of OPEC. The defection from OPEC of the nation with
the world's second-largest oil reserves could effectively destroy
the organization, eliminating once for all the threat that oil-producing
states may set the agenda for their own future.
Meanwhile, a careful reading of mainstream
news stories suggests that the US is quietly foisting upon the
people of Iraq a regimen of economic "shock therapy"
reminiscent of the neo-liberal reforms that devastated Central
European economies during the 1990s.
Acting on the advice of the US Treasury
Department, CENTCOM has replaced the Iraqi dinar with the US
dollar -- wiping out the savings and pensions of the Iraqi people
at one blow. Simultaneously, the system of price controls by
which Saddam's government kept food, electricity, and other necessities
affordable has been abolished. Eventually a new dinar will be
issued, but only after the US has set up a new central bank and
"stabilized" the economy under Treasury Department
supervision.
This stabilization will likely take the
form of a wholesale, institutionalized looting of national wealth.
The US has determined that the Iraqi people themselves, through
the sale of their petroleum, will be made to finance repair of
the immense infrastructural and social damage caused by two wars
and a decade of punitive sanctions. This money will flow to well-connected
US corporate giants like Halliburton and Bechtel, which have
already been awarded no-bid contracts totaling nearly $2 billion.
Ironically, the same defense-related firms that reaped huge profits
from the destruction of Iraq will now benefit from its reconstruction.
Additionally, the Iraqi people will be
expected to honor nearly $300 billion in foreign debt left over
from the Saddam years -- or at least, that portion of the debt
owed to the US, UK, and other supporters of the war. Servicing
of these debts will likely require further privatization of assets
-- in practice, a firesale of commonly held national assets to
foreign private investors.
By the time Iraqis are granted some semblance
of self-government, their country will already have been reduced
to the status of a Third World debtor nation -- incapacitated,
brutalized, beggared, and therefore pliable enough to accommodate
both international corporate interests and a massive, permanent
US military presence.
Yet if history is any guide, the people
of Iraq will not submit meekly to this latest form of tyranny.
Resistance will escalate, and so will repression.
Bremer, arriving in Baghdad with a mandate
to restore order and security, is a counterterrorism specialist
who favors hardline measures, including "targeted killings."
So the near future isn't hard to guess: dissenters will be jailed,
"disappeared," assassinated, or simply mowed down with
automatic weapons.
They will of course be branded as recalcitrant
Saddamists, Iranian spies, and al-Qaeda terrorists. Given what
we know about the goals and nature of the occupation government,
it might be more accurate to call them freedom fighters.
Jacob Levich
assisted the Research Unit for Political Economy in the preparation
of Behind the Invasion of Iraq (Monthly Review Press 2003). He
is a writer, editor, and activist based in Queens, New York.
He can be reached at: jlevich@earthlink.net
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