The book is comprised of four essays/articles, by four different writers for Harper's:
 |
| Naomi Klein |
Bryan Mealer ""Dying for Dollars";
Susan Watkins "A Puppet for All Seasons";
Walter Laqueur "The Terrorism to Come".
No War: America's Real Business in Iraq. London, GB: Gibson Square Books Ltd., 2005. ISBN 1903933579.
I give it ☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.
 |
| Bryan Mealer |
 |
| Walter Laqueur |
So why didn't it get 5 stars from me? I would have liked to have seen a bibliography with supporting documents. And yes, I know, that would kind of contradict what this short book was doing, but when making some of the strong criticism they make in the face of the media blitzkrieg of American and UN good intentions, some supporting evidence would have been appreciated. Even a facsimile of one of the glossy brochures from the Vegas hard sell would have been interesting.
As an example of what I mean, here is a mildly provocative assertion:
On the ideological front there is little more light. Under rules endorsed by U.N. Resolution 1546, the January 2005 election allows Iraqis to choose candidates selected by the U.S. embassy for a "transitional" administration with strictly limited powers, charged with drafting a constitution for a further, equally restricted ballot by January 2006. The hand-picked, thousand-member consultative conference convened in August proved a complete fiasco, with Allawi's thugs ejecting all critics.I think that this is probably correct, but the comment about the food from the U.N. being 'often rotted' and medicines 'diluted:' where is the supporting evidence? Also, where is the documented evidence about Kofi Annan's son? Or the estimate of 300,000 children who unnecessarily died in Iraq because of the economic sanctions raises the question of who did the estimate and how?
Internationally, the regime and its masters look forward to strengthening their position by planting the U.N. flag once again in Iraqj soil, but so far the Secretariat has not dared to return to Baghdad, with good reason. On conservative estimates, some 300,000 children under five died from disease and malnutrition under the U.N. sanctions regime of the 1990s, while the Secretariat skimmed administration fees of over $1 billion. In 1998 the U.N. contracts committee awarded the Oil for Food Programme contract for monitoring Iraqi imports (of often rotted food and diluted medicines) to Cotecna Inspection, a company that employed Kofi Annan's son Kojo as a consultant throughout the bidding process. In |une, U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a leading member of the junta that canceled elections in Algeria in 1992 and broker of the Karzai regime in Afghanistan, rubber-stamped [Paul] Bremer's selection of members of the Governing Council for reincarnation as ministers of the Interim Government; but, duty performed, could not wait to get out. When they do return, U.N. functionaries will need a large private army of their own to protect them (77-8).
It is a significant failure of this publication to accuse the hawks of citing false facts to achieve their ends, but that means it is even more necessary to be careful to provide proper evidence when making counter arguments and/or accusations.
Before I leave, I would like to include a couple more citations, both from Klein, whose descriptions of her experiences in Iraq shortly after America's 'victory' I enjoyed thoroughly:
Before I leave, I would like to include a couple more citations, both from Klein, whose descriptions of her experiences in Iraq shortly after America's 'victory' I enjoyed thoroughly:
It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I was looking for. 1 had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then 1 saw it: a construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a busy shopping district 1 thought that 1 was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything—not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULAH:
HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.
Seeing the sign, I couldn't help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is "a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies." The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq's famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Looking at the honey billboard, 1 was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have "a postwar plan." The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates )obs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissezfaire economics, a Utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their Quest tor profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq, would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based (5-7).
...
I had been following the economic front of the war for almost a year before I decided to go to Iraq. I attended the "Rebuilding Iraq" trade shows, studied Bremer's tax and investment laws, met with contractors at their home offices in the United States, interviewed the government officials in Washington who are making the policies. But as I prepared to travel to Iraq in March to see this experiment in free-market utopianism up close, it was becoming increasingly clear that all was not going according to plan. Bremer had been working on the theory that if you build a corporate Utopia the corporations will come—but where were they? American multinationals were happy to accept U.S. taxpayer dollars to reconstruct the phone or electricity systems, but they weren't sinking their own money into Iraq. There was, as yet, no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in Baghdad, and even the sales of state factories, announced so confidently nine months earlier, had not materialized.
Some of the holdup had to do with the physical risks of doing business in Iraq. But there were other more significant risks as well. When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq's Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as "the wish list of foreign investors," there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely illegal. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq's legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must "comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907." Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country's existing laws unless "absolutely prevented" from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the "public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural assets" of the country it is occupying but is rather their "administrator" and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since America didn't own lraq's assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made under Bremer's rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse because their investments had violated international law from the outset.
By November, trade lawyers started to advise their corporate clients not to go into Iraq just yet, it would be better to wait... (17-18).
No comments:
Post a Comment