Bearing Point still at work
It’s been a blockbuster couple of days on Democracy Now! More on today’s Daniel Ellsberg interview later…
For now, I want to point out a Democracy Now! interview important for anyone caring to understand what is really going on in Iraq. Surprise! The operation is very, very far from a “failure”, if we consider measures of “success” from the point of view of Bush-connected elites.
Of course the invasion and failure of reconstruction of basic services have been a disaster for the Iraqi people. But the chokehold the American invaders have put on Iraq’s economy and oil is exactly what these vultures have wanted all along. The Iraqi people have been damned by their overlord, President Bush, for the valuable commidity over which they live.
According to Antonia Juhasz, visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of the recent book, “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time,” the radical neo-liberal economic program the Bush administration has tried to impose on Iraq threatens to leave Iraq’s economy and oil reserves largely in the hands of multinational corporations.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: You know, in the report that you were quoting in the beginning of the hour, which said that the reconstruction failed because of poor planning, it’s a myth that there was not a post-war planning done by the Bush administration. The reason why it failed was because the interests it was serving were U.S. multinationals, not reconstruction in Iraq.
That plan was ready two months before the invasion. It was written by BearingPoint, Inc., a company based in Virginia that received a $250 million contract to rewrite the entire economy of Iraq. It drafted that new economy. That new economy was put into place systematically by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupation government of Iraq for 14 months, who implemented exactly one hundred orders, basically all of which are still in place today. And everyone who is watching who is familiar with the policies of the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Bank, the I.M.F., will understand the orders.
They implement some of the most radical corporate globalization ideas, such as free investment rules for multinational corporations. That means corporations can enter Iraq, and they essentially don’t have to contribute at all to the economy of Iraq. The most harmful provision thus far has been the national treatment provision, which meant that the Iraqis could not give preference to Iraqi companies or workers in the reconstruction, and therefore, U.S. companies received preference in the reconstruction. They hired workers who weren’t even from Iraq, in most cases, and utterly bungled the reconstruction.
And the most important company, in my mind, to receive blame is the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco. They have received $2.8 billion to rebuild water, electricity and sewage systems, the most important systems in the life of an Iraqi. After the first Gulf War, the Iraqis rebuilt these systems in three months’ time. It’s been three years, and, as you said, those services are still below pre-war levels.
Long-time readers of Deep Blade Journal will recognize the name BearingPoint. Extensive material on the planned neoliberal transformation of Iraq is available here, and in the Reference document I produced 2 1/2 years ago when we were setting up opposition to the U Maine “Doing Business in Iraq” conference.
See more recent posts here and here for more information on the plan for US multinationals to control and dominate Iraq’s oil–a fight that they are pretty much winning, according to Antonia Juhasz.
