[News] Shameless in Iraq < by Naomi Klein

[News at freedomarchives.org]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040712&s=klein

lookout by Naomi Klein


Shameless in Iraq

[from the July 12, 2004 issue]

Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the 
$18.4 billion in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can 
meet. Sure, electricity is below prewar levels, streets are rivers of 
sewage and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has 
contracted with British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from 
"assassination, kidnapping, injury and"--get this--"embarrassment." I don't 
know if Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent attack, 
but embarrassment? I'd say mission already accomplished. The people in 
charge of rebuilding Iraq can't be embarrassed, because clearly they have 
no shame.

In the run-up to the June 30 underhand (sorry, I can't bring myself to call 
it a "handover"), US occupation powers have been unabashed in their efforts 
to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people. The State 
Department has taken $184 million earmarked for drinking water projects and 
moved it to the budget for the lavish new US Embassy in Saddam's former 
palace. Short $1 billion for the embassy, Deputy Secretary of State Richard 
Armitage said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul." 
In fact, he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent study by 
Public Citizen, are facing "massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhea, nausea 
and kidney stones" from drinking contaminated water.

If occupation chief Paul Bremer and his staff were capable of 
embarrassment, they might be a little sheepish about having spent only $3.2 
billion of the $18.4 billion Congress allotted--the reason the 
reconstruction is so disastrously behind schedule. At first, Bremer said 
the money would be spent by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently 
someone had a better idea: Parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John 
Negroponte can use it as leverage. With $15 billion outstanding, how likely 
will Iraq's politicians be to refuse US demands for military bases and 
economic "reforms"?

Unwilling to let go of their own money, the shameless ones have had no 
qualms about dipping into funds belonging to Iraqis. After losing the fight 
to keep control of Iraq's oil money after the underhand, occupation 
authorities grabbed $2.5 billion of those revenues and are now spending the 
money on projects that are supposedly already covered by US tax dollars.

But then, if financial scandals made you blush, the entire reconstruction 
of Iraq would be pretty mortifying. From the start, its architects rejected 
the idea that it should be a New Deal-style public works project for Iraqis 
to reclaim their country. Instead, it was treated as an ideological 
experiment in privatization. The dream was for multinational firms, mostly 
from the United States, to swoop in and dazzle the Iraqis with their speed 
and efficiency.

Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans, 
Europeans and South Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies 
produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied 
with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as 
a recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign 
invasion of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the 
reconstruction itself became a prime target.

The contractors have responded by behaving even more like an invading army, 
building elaborate fortresses in the Green Zone and surrounding themselves 
with mercenaries. And being hated is expensive. According to the latest 
estimates, security costs are eating up 25 percent of reconstruction 
contracts--money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or 
telephone exchanges.

Meanwhile, insurance brokers selling sudden-death policies to contractors 
in Iraq have doubled their premiums, with insurance costs reaching 30 
percent of payroll. That means many companies are spending half their 
budgets arming and insuring themselves against the people they are 
supposedly in Iraq to help. And according to an estimate by Charles Adwan 
of Transparency International, quoted on NPR's Marketplace, "At least 20 
percent of US spending in Iraq is lost to corruption." How much is actually 
left over for reconstruction? Don't do the math.

Rather than models of speed and efficiency, the contractors look more like 
overbilling, underperforming, lumbering beasts, barely able to move for 
fear of the hatred they have helped generate. The problem goes well beyond 
the latest reports of Halliburton drivers abandoning $85,000 trucks on the 
road because they don't carry spare tires. Private contractors are also 
accused of playing leadership roles in the torture of prisoners at Abu 
Ghraib. A landmark class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for 
Constitutional Rights alleges that the Titan Corporation and CACI 
International conspired with US officials to "humiliate, torture and abuse 
persons" to increase demand for their "interrogation services."

And then there's Aegis, the company being paid $293 million to save the PMO 
from embarrassment. It turns out that Aegis's CEO, Tim Spicer, has a bit of 
an embarrassing past himself. In the 1990s, he helped put down rebels and 
stage a military coup in Papua New Guinea and hatched a plan to break an 
arms embargo in Sierra Leone.

If Iraq's occupiers were capable of feeling shame, they might have 
responded by imposing tough new regulations. Instead, Senate Republicans 
just defeated an attempt to bar private contractors from interrogating 
prisoners and also voted down a proposal to impose stiffer penalties on 
contractors who overbill. Meanwhile, the White House is also trying to get 
immunity from prosecution for US contractors in Iraq and has requested the 
exemption from the new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi.

It seems likely that Allawi will agree, since he is, after all, a kind of 
US contractor himself: A former CIA spy, he is already threatening to 
declare martial law, while his Defense Minister says of resistance 
fighters, "We will cut off their hands, and we will behead them." In a 
final feat of outsourcing, Iraqi governance has been subcontracted to even 
more brutal surrogates. Is this embarrassing, after an invasion to 
overthrow a dictatorship? Not at all--this is what the occupiers call 
"sovereignty." The Aegis guys can relax: Embarrassment is not going to be 
an issue.




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