Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! had an extremely informative guest on the other day, Antonia Juhasz, who has uncovered what really is an unreported area about the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Far from innocently pushing for freedom and democracy (or is it searching for WMDs this week?) the United States has imposed an economicsystem on Iraq, one that (naturally) favors foreign multinational corporations and
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is an author who has been tracking the Bush administration’s goals in Iraq since the invasion. Antonia Juhasz has written about them in a new book. It’s called The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. The book tracks the radical neo-liberal economic program the Bush administration has tried to impose on Iraq, which threatens to leave Iraq’s economy and oil reserves largely in the hands of multinational corporations. It’s an agenda, says Antonia Juhasz, that the Bush administration is trying to bring to all corners of the globe.
Antonia Juhasz joins us in our Firehouse studio. She’s a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. For years she was Project Director at the International Forum on Globalization. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thanks for having me, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on this book.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the leadership of Iraq?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, I would argue that the most important member of the new leadership is Adel Abdel Mahdi, who has been in every U.S.-appointed Iraqi government post-the-invasion. He was the Finance Minister of the interim government, the Vice President of the transitional government and was just named Vice President of the permanent government. He was actually the man that the Bush administration wanted to be the new prime minister of Iraq. The deal that was worked out was that another member of the Dawa Party, just like Mr. Jaafari, would become prime minister, and then Mahdi, who is a member of the SCIRI Party, would be vice president.
It’s a position that allows him to continue to be the most aggressive advocate of the Bush agenda in Iraq, which I argue is opening Iraq — continuing to open Iraq to U.S. corporate invasion. Currently, 150 U.S. corporations have received $50 billion worth of contracts, as you said in the introduction, to utterly fail in reconstruction in Iraq, but the money has still been granted. And Mahdi is the person who advanced Paul Bremer’s one hundred orders in Iraq that opened up the economy. But more importantly to the Bush administration, he is the person who has most aggressively pushed their agenda for a new oil law in Iraq, which would open up Iraq’s oil sector, the vast majority of Iraq’s oil sector, to private foreign corporate investment.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Bremer orders. You spend a lot of time in the book on them. Can you talk about Paul Bremer, Bremer’s blueprint by BearingPoint, the orders themselves?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. 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.
AMY GOODMAN: BearingPoint. Why have we never heard of this company? Where does it come from?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: BearingPoint was KPMG Consulting, but had to change its name in the wake of the Arthur Andersen scandal, but BearingPoint picked up all of Arthur Andersen’s old clientele and is essentially just the reborn KPMG. And BearingPoint, you probably haven’t heard of, though, because they work in the back room. They write things like new economic policies, but are not the people seen on the ground implementing the policies.
Actually, there’s a wonderful story that I tell in the book by a member of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. occupation government in Iraq, who says, `One day these people from this place called BearingPoint came up and started telling us about these economic policies that were so unrealistic. I didn’t know who they were and what they were talking about.’ Well, what they were talking about was an economic agenda that seemed completely ridiculous for the people on the ground who are looking at sewage flowing through the streets and Iraqis saying over and over and over again, `The most important thing we need is electricity. Just electricity. Just give us our electricity back,’ and failing to do it.
But this was BearingPoint, and they are still there. Their contract was renewed. They’re still focusing in particular on privatization of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises. That’s almost the sole focus of their current contract, and that contract goes, I believe, until 2007.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a quote of Lakhdar Brahimi, who is the U.N. Special Adviser to Iraq. A few years ago, he said, “Bremer,” talking about L. Paul Bremer, “is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country.”
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Bremer became the dictator of Iraq. His orders laid out the law. Now, probably the most important thing to know is that that was completely illegal under international law. The Geneva Conventions are very specific about what an occupying power should do. It must provide basic security and services. It cannot change the laws or the political structure of the country it occupies. The Bush administration did exactly the opposite — changed all the fundamental economic and political laws and utterly failed to provide for the security and the basic needs of the Iraqi people. What you hear most often in Iraq today is people saying, “Please just put us back where we were before you came.”
To read the entire interview, go here:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1343214
FYI, here are just a few of Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders. You decide how innocent our invasion/occupation really is:
Order #12 enacted on June 7, 2003 and renewed on February 24, 2004, suspends “all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq, and all other trade restrictions that may apply to such goods.” This led to an immediate and dramatic inflow of cheap consumer products, which has essentially wiped out all local providers of the same products. This could have significant long-term implications for domestic production as well.
Order #17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq ‘s laws. Even if they do injure a third party by killing someone or causing environmental damage such as dumping toxic chemicals or poisoning drinking water, the injured third party can not turn to the Iraqi legal system, rather, the charges must be brought to U.S. courts under U.S. laws.
Order #39 allows for the following: (1) privatization of Iraq’s 200 state-owned enterprises; (2) 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses; (3) “national treatment” of foreign firms; (4) unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; and (5) 40-year ownership licenses. Thus, it allows the U.S. corporations operating in Iraq to own every business, do all of the work, and send all of their money home. Nothing needs to be reinvested locally to service the Iraqi economy, no Iraqi need be hired, no public services need be guaranteed, and workers’ rights can easily be ignored. And corporations can take out their investments at any time.
Order #40 turns the banking sector from a state-run to a market-driven system overnight by allowing foreign banks to enter the Iraqi market and to purchase up to 50 percent of Iraqi banks.
Order #49 drops the tax rate on corporations from a high of 40 percent to a flat rate of 15 percent. The income tax rate is also capped at 15 percent
