[News] Let's Make Enemies < lookout by Naomi Klein

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<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040419&s=klein>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040419&s=klein 


lookout by Naomi Klein


Let's Make Enemies

[from the April 19, 2004 issue]

Baghdad

QUOT-Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier.

She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head.

"No," she replies.

We try not to notice that there are sixty room keys in pigeonholes behind 
her desk--the place is empty.

"Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"

She hesitates. "Ahh... No."

We return to our current hotel--the one we want to leave because there are 
bets on when it is going to get hit--and flick on the TV: The BBC is 
showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the September 11 
Commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether invading Iraq 
has made America safer.

They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US occupation 
has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that it now extends 
not only to US troops, occupation officials and their contractors but also 
to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators and pretty much 
anyone else associated with the Americans. Which is why we couldn't 
begrudge the hotelier her decision: If you want to survive in Iraq, it's 
wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us. (We thought about 
explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are 
sporting the maple leaf--that is, when they aren't trying to disappear 
behind their newly purchased headscarves.)

US occupation chief Paul Bremer hasn't started wearing a hijab yet, and is 
instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his usual foresight. 
Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like Baghdad Now, filled 
with fawning articles about how Americans are teaching Iraqis about press 
freedom. "I never thought before that the Coalition could do a great thing 
for the Iraqi people," one trainee is quoted saying. "Now I can see it on 
my eyes what they are doing good things for my country and the 
accomplishment they made. I wish my people can see that, the way I see it."

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press 
freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by 
supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shiite cleric has been 
preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and 
condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So far, al-Sadr 
has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed resistance, 
but many here are predicting that the closing down of the newspaper--a 
nonviolent means of resisting the occupation--was just the push he needed. 
But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty of the 
Presidential Envoy to Iraq: Bremer's first act after being tapped by Bush 
was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful 
pensions but allow them to hold on to their weapons--in case they needed 
them later.

While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office, I 
found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism, the 
Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start 
producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola. I 
figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the 
Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks 
Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer," Khamis told me, flanked by 
a line-up of thirty Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen to Iraqis. He 
doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the country and tried to 
rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos."

These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or 
Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just that 
his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US multinational in 
Iraq's new "free market." It's also that few Iraqis supported the war more 
staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam executed both of his brothers 
and Khamis was forced to resign as managing director of the bottling plant 
in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened his life. When the Americans 
overthrew Saddam, "You can't imagine how much relief we felt," he says.

After the Baathist plant manager was forced out, Khamis returned to his old 
job. "There is a risk doing business with the Americans," he says. Several 
months ago, two detonators were discovered in front of the factory gates. 
And Khamis is still shaken from an attempted assassination three weeks ago. 
He was on his way to work when he was carjacked and shot at, and there was 
no doubt that this was a targeted attack; one of the assailants was heard 
asking another, "Did you kill the manager?"

Khamis used to be happy to defend his pro-US position, even if it meant 
arguing with friends. But one year after the invasion, many of his 
neighbors in the industrial park have gone out of business. "I don't know 
what to say to my friends anymore," he says. "It's chaos."

His list of grievances against the occupation is long: corruption in the 
awarding of reconstruction contracts, the failure to stop the looting, the 
failure to secure Iraq's borders--both from foreign terrorists and from 
unregulated foreign imports. Iraqi companies, still suffering from the 
sanctions and the looting, have been unable to compete.

Most of all, Khamis is worried about how these policies have fed the 
country's unemployment crisis, creating far too many desperate people. He 
also notes that Iraqi police officers are paid less than half what he pays 
his assembly line workers, "which is not enough to survive." The normally 
soft-spoken Khamis becomes enraged when talking about the man in charge of 
"rebuilding" Iraq. "Paul Bremer has caused more damage than the war, 
because the bombs can damage a building but if you damage people there is 
no hope."

I have gone to the mosques and street demonstrations and listened to 
Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters shout "Death to America, Death to the Jews," 
and it is indeed chilling. But it is the profound sense of betrayal 
expressed by a pro-US businessman running a Pepsi plant that attests to the 
depths of the US-created disaster here. "I'm disappointed, not because I 
hate the Americans," Khamis tells me, "but because I like them. And when 
you love someone and they hurt you, it hurts even more."

When we leave the bottling plant in late afternoon, the streets of 
US-occupied Baghdad are filled with al-Sadr supporters vowing bloody 
revenge for the attack on their newspaper. A spokesperson for Bremer is 
defending the decision on the grounds that the paper "was making people 
think we were out to get them."

A growing number of Iraqis are certainly under that impression, but it has 
far less to do with an inflammatory newspaper than with the inflammatory 
actions of the US occupation authority. As the June 30 "handover" 
approaches, Paul Bremer has unveiled a slew of new tricks to hold on to 
power long after "sovereignty" has been declared.

Some recent highlights: At the end of March, building on his Order 39 of 
last September, Bremer passed yet another law further opening up Iraq's 
economy to foreign ownership, a law that Iraq's next government is 
prohibited from changing under the terms of the interim constitution. 
Bremer also announced the establishment of several independent regulators, 
which will drastically reduce the power of Iraqi government ministries. For 
instance, the Financial Times reports that "officials of the Coalition 
Provisional Authority said the regulator would prevent communications 
minister Haider al-Abadi, a thorn in the side of the coalition, from 
carrying out his threat to cancel licenses the coalition awarded to 
foreign-managed consortia to operate three mobile networks and the national 
broadcaster."

The CPA has also confirmed that after June 30, the $18.4 billion the US 
government is spending on reconstruction will be administered by the US 
Embassy in Iraq. The money will be spent over five years and will 
fundamentally redesign Iraq's most basic infrastructure, including its 
electricity, water, oil and communications sectors, as well as its courts 
and police. Iraq's future governments will have no say in the construction 
of these core sectors of Iraqi society. Retired Rear Adm. David Nash, who 
heads the Project Management Office, which administers the funds, describes 
the $18.4 billion as "a gift from the American people to the people of 
Iraq." He appears to have forgotten the part about gifts being something 
you actually give up. And in the same eventful week, US engineers began 
construction on fourteen "enduring bases" in Iraq, capable of housing the 
110,000 soldiers who will be posted here for at least two more years. Even 
though the bases are being built with no mandate from an Iraqi government, 
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations in Iraq, called them "a 
blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East."

The US occupation authority has also found a sneaky way to maintain control 
over Iraq's armed forces. Bremer has issued an executive order stating that 
even after the interim Iraqi government has been established, the Iraqi 
army will answer to US commander Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. In order to 
pull this off, Washington is relying on a legalistic reading of a clause in 
UN Security Council Resolution 1511, which puts US forces in charge of 
Iraq's security until "the completion of the political process" in Iraq. 
Since the "political process" in Iraq is never-ending, so, it seems, is US 
military control.

In the same flurry of activity, the CPA announced that it would put further 
constraints on the Iraqi military by appointing a national security adviser 
for Iraq. This US appointee would have powers equivalent to those held by 
Condoleezza Rice and will stay in office for a five-year term, long after 
Iraq is scheduled to have made the transition to a democratically elected 
government.

There is one piece of this country, though, that the US government is happy 
to cede to the people of Iraq: the hospitals. On March 27 Bremer announced 
that he had withdrawn the senior US advisers from Iraq's Health Ministry, 
making it the first sector to achieve "full authority" in the US occupation.

Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what a 
"free Iraq" will look like: The United States will maintain its military 
and corporate presence through fourteen enduring military bases and the 
largest US Embassy in the world. It will hold on to authority over Iraq's 
armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design of its core 
infrastructure--but the Iraqis can deal with their decrepit hospitals all 
by themselves, complete with their chronic drug shortages and lack of the 
most basic sanitation capacity. (US Health and Human Services Secretary 
Tommy Thompson revealed just how low a priority this was when he commented 
that Iraq's hospitals would be fixed if the Iraqis "just washed their hands 
and cleaned the crap off the walls.")

On nights when there are no nearby explosions, we hang out at the hotel, 
jumping at the sound of car doors slamming. Sometimes we flick on the news 
and eavesdrop on a faraway debate about whether invading Iraq has made 
Americans safer. Few seem interested in the question of whether the 
invasion has made Iraqis feel safer, which is too bad because the questions 
are intimately related. As Khamis says, "It's not the war that caused the 
hatred. It's what they did after. What they are doing now."





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