Ex-CIA Chief Tenet Calls War a Mistake
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 03:07:44 -0700
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http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
St. Joseph-Benton Harbor, Michigan
The Herald-Palladium
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Tenet: CIA made errors
By ANNA CLARK / H-P Correspondent
BENTON TOWNSHIP -- Although he emphasized that the Central Intelligence
Agency boasts "tremendously talented men and women," former CIA Director
George Tenet said it "did not live up to our expectations as
professionals" regarding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the
search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the
community of gaps in our intelligence," Tenet said. "The extraordinary
men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable
every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the
American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong."
Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
Despite proclaiming to be "as forthcoming as I can," Tenet made light of
a question about whether or not the United States made an error in
committing intelligence to the search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq
rather than exploring terrorism elsewhere.
Tenet apologized for being rude but did not answer the question.
He did add that he doesn't think the Iraq war was wholly bad.
"When I look at the regime (Saddam Hussein) ran, and the elaborate depth
he took to deny us the ability to build our intelligence, I can't say it
was a waste," Tenet said. "I believed he had weapons of mass
destruction. He didn't. At the end of the day I have to stand up
accountable for that. In the meantime our nation needs to honor the
commitment we made in Iraq."
Tenet was faulted in April's 9/11 Commission report for not having a
strategy to battle terrorism before the terrorist attacks. He also took
responsibility for a later discredited line in President George Bush's
2003 State of the Union address, which alleged that Iraq was trying to
buy uranium from Africa. Tenet said the CIA had seen and approved the
speech in advance, and he assumed responsibility for the error.
Tenet said that while the Iraq war was "rightly being challenged," the
CIA was making important strides toward success in the greater war on
terrorism.
He said the United States is "winning the war on terror" due to the
CIA's efforts to "capture or kill" three-quarters of al-Qaida's leaders,
pinpointed before 9/11. He expects to see Osama bin Ladin captured.
Tenet highlighted places throughout the world, including Iran and North
Korea, that are potential terrorism threats, while commending the
cooperation of Pakistan and Libya with U.S. efforts.
He said the Pakistani president "came to our side" after 9/11 and
allowed for important al-Qaida captures in a nation the terrorist
organization once considered safe. Libya initiated contact with the CIA
and explicitly committed to dismantling its weapons program - the first
time any such program was self-dismantled without a shot being fired,
Tenet said.
"Demographics and distribution trends are something we also need to keep
an eye on," Tenet said. "The developed world is not reproducing at
levels to maintain its position, while developing nations who cannot
afford it, mostly Muslim ones, are exploding."
Tenet said a developing nation's low per capita income, high
unemployment among young men and high infant mortality rate strongly
increase its likelihood of becoming a "terrorist safe haven."
"In 2010, 100 million people outside of Africa will be infected with
HIV," Tenet said. "The secondary implications of this are staggering."
He said the work of public health officers, missionaries and literacy
teachers in third world nations are crucial to the war on terrorism,
because terrorists build supporters by spinning poverty as a form of
humiliation caused by wealthy nations like the United States.
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
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Correspondent:: somd_jim2002@yahoo.com (Jim)
Date: 22 Oct 2004 10:11:26 -0700
--------
± wrote in message news:<4178DBF0.BA06450E@hotmail.com>...
> http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
> Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
> 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
> Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
And the fact that this article does not "elaborate" by providing the
full quote and in its context is most telling.
Jim
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:21:24 -0700
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Jim wrote:
>
> ± wrote in message news:<4178DBF0.BA06450E@hotmail.com>...
>
> > http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
>
> > Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
> > 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
> > Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
>
> And the fact that this article does not "elaborate" by providing the
> full quote and in its context is most telling.
I see - Tenet was talking in ghetto jive, where words are cleverly
twisted to connote the opposite of the intended meaning, as in "Bad
Mother Fucker."
Tenet calling the war on Iraq "wrong" in actuality conveys that it was
the right war at the right time.
I concede to your obvious mental superiority, Jim - Dubya should put
geniuses as yourself to work on foreign policy, your talents are wasted
on UseNet.
In the meantime, see if you can do something about those damn liberal
activist judges that litter the American landscape, so we can put
abortions in the back alleys where they belong.
>
> Jim
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
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Correspondent:: somd_jim2002@yahoo.com (Jim)
Date: 25 Oct 2004 06:31:12 -0700
--------
± wrote in message news:<417A2294.6FA54529@hotmail.com>...
> Jim wrote:
> >
> > ± wrote in message news:<4178DBF0.BA06450E@hotmail.com>...
> >
> > > http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
>
> > > Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
> > > 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
> > > Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
> >
> > And the fact that this article does not "elaborate" by providing the
> > full quote and in its context is most telling.
>
> I see - Tenet was talking in ghetto jive, where words are cleverly
> twisted to connote the opposite of the intended meaning, as in "Bad
> Mother Fucker."
Apparently you don't see.
Jim
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:58:45 -0700
--------
Jim wrote:
>
> ± wrote in message news:<417A2294.6FA54529@hotmail.com>...
> > Jim wrote:
> > >
> > > ± wrote in message news:<4178DBF0.BA06450E@hotmail.com>...
> > >
> > > > http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
> >
> > > > Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
> > > > 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
> > > > Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
> > >
> > > And the fact that this article does not "elaborate" by providing the
> > > full quote and in its context is most telling.
> >
> > I see - Tenet was talking in ghetto jive, where words are cleverly
> > twisted to connote the opposite of the intended meaning, as in "Bad
> > Mother Fucker."
>
> Apparently you don't see.
I see fine enough to not reply twice to the same post, Jim.
Read this and see if you agree how *wrong* things are over at Iraq:
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
Harper's Magazine - September 2004
Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
By Naomi Klein
It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I
was looking for. I 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 I 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 I thought that I 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, I 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 jobs 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 laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the
world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational
corporations to pursue their quest for 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.
* * *
Torturers believe that when electrical shocks are applied to various
parts of the body simultaneously subjects are rendered so confused about
where the pain is coming from that they become incapable of resistance.
A declassified CIA “Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual from 1963
describes how a trauma inflicted on prisoners opens up “an
interval—which may be extremely brief—of suspended animation, a kind of
psychological shock or paralysis... [A]t this moment the source is far
more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply.” A similar theory
applies to economic shock therapy, or “shock treatment,” the ugly term
used to describe the rapid implementation of free-market reforms imposed
on Chile in the wake of General Augusto Pinochet’s coup. The theory is
that if painful economic “adjustments” are brought in rapidly and in the
aftermath of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a
government collapse, the population will be so stunned, and so
preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it too will go
into suspended animation, unable to resist. As Pinochet’s finance
minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo, declared, “The dog’s tail must be cut
off in one chop.”
That, in essence, was the working thesis in Iraq, and in keeping with
the belief that private companies are more suited than governments for
virtually every task, the White House decided to privatize the task of
privatizing Iraq’s state-dominated economy. Two months before the war
began, USAID began drafting a work order, to be handed out to a private
company, to oversee Iraq’s “transition to a sustainable market-driven
economic system.” The document states that the winning company (which
turned out to be the KPMG offshoot Bearing Point) will take “appropriate
advantage of the unique opportunity for rapid progress in this area
presented by the current configuration of political circumstances.”
Which is precisely what happened.
L. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003,
until he caught an early flight out of Baghdad on June 28, admits that
when he arrived, “Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the
airport.” But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military
onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy,
pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the
International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in
Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief
economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer’s reforms as “an even more
radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job:
he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors,
nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the
country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no
duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after
he arrived, was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before
the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200
state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to
washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan
and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting
inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is
essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state
liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Bremer’s economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to
entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of
laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations.
There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly
40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed
foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the
natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent
of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be
required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they
could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order
40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All
that remained of Saddam Hussein’s economic policies was a law
restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.
If these policies sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones
multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and
in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever
enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all
at once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in
the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market.
* * *
At first, the shock-therapy theory seemed to hold: Iraqis, reeling from
violence both military and economic, were far too busy staying alive to
mount a political response to Bremer’s campaign. Worrying about the
privatization of the sewage system was an unimaginable luxury with half
the population lacking access to clean drinking water; the debate over
the flat tax would have to wait until the lights were back on. Even in
the international press, Bremer’s new laws, though radical, were easily
upstaged by more dramatic news of political chaos and rising crime.
Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in
“rebuilding Iraq” trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman.
The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as “a capitalist dream,” and a
flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies
get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with
well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge
Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign
manager. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can
be a gold mine,” one of the company’s partners enthused. “One
well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart
could take over the country.”
Soon there were rumors that a McDonald’s would be opening up in downtown
Baghdad, funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and
General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial
side, HSBC would have branches all over the country, Citigroup was
preparing to offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of
Iraqi oil, and the bell was going to ring on a New York?style stock
exchange in Baghdad any day.
In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory
for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the
intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that
other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the
anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the
manual for what to do once the country was safely in America’s hands.
This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of
the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination
of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the
White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House
itself.
* * *
As the British historian Dilip Hiro has shown, in Secrets and Lies:
Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ and After, the Iraqi exiles pushing for the
invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. On one side were “the
pragmatists,” who favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate
entourage, securing access to oil, and slowly introducing free-market
reforms. Many of these exiles were part of the State Department’s Future
of Iraq Project, which generated a thirteen-volume report on how to
restore basic services and transition to democracy after the war. On the
other side was the “Year Zero” camp, those who believed that Iraq was so
contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch.
The prime advocate of the pragmatic approach was Iyad Allawi, a former
high-level Baathist who fell out with Saddam and started working for the
CIA. The prime advocate of the Year Zero approach was Ahmad Chalabi,
whose hatred of the Iraqi state for expropriating his family’s assets
during the 1958 revolution ran so deep he longed to see the entire
country burned to the ground—everything, that is, but the Oil Ministry,
which would be the nucleus of the new Iraq, the cluster of cells from
which an entire nation would grow. He called this process
“de-Baathification.”
A parallel battle between pragmatists and true believers was being waged
within the Bush Administration. The pragmatists were men like Secretary
of State Colin Powell and General Jay Garner, the first U.S. envoy to
postwar Iraq. General Garner’s plan was straightforward enough: fix the
infrastructure, hold quick and dirty elections, leave the shock therapy
to the International Monetary Fund, and concentrate on securing U.S.
military bases on the model of the Philippines. “I think we should look
right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East,” he told
the BBC. He also paraphrased T. E. Lawrence, saying, “It’s better for
them to do it imperfectly than for us to do it for them perfectly.” On
the other side was the usual cast of neoconservatives: Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who lauded Bremer’s
“sweeping reforms” as “some of the most enlightened and inviting tax and
investment laws in the free world”), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, and, perhaps most centrally, Undersecretary of Defense
Douglas Feith. Whereas the State Department had its Future of Iraq
report, the neocons had USAID’s contract with Bearing Point to remake
Iraq’s economy: in 108 pages, “privatization” was mentioned no fewer
than fifty-one times. To the true believers in the White House, General
Garner’s plans for postwar Iraq seemed hopelessly unambitious. Why
settle for a mere coaling station when you can have a model free market?
Why settle for the Philippines when you can have a beacon unto the
world?
The Iraqi Year Zeroists made natural allies for the White House
neoconservatives: Chalabi’s seething hatred of the Baathist state fit
nicely with the neocons’ hatred of the state in general, and the two
agendas effortlessly merged. Together, they came to imagine the invasion
of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world saw death,
they saw birth—a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire.
Iraq wasn’t being destroyed by cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos,
and looting; it was being born again. April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad
fell, was Day One of Year Zero.
While the war was being waged, it still wasn’t clear whether the
pragmatists or the Year Zeroists would be handed control over occupied
Iraq. But the speed with which the nation was conquered dramatically
increased the neocons’ political capital, since they had been predicting
a “cakewalk” all along. Eight days after George Bush landed on that
aircraft carrier under a banner that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, the
President publicly signed on to the neocons’ vision for Iraq to become a
model corporate state that would open up the entire region. On May 9,
Bush proposed the “establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area
within a decade”; three days later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to
replace Jay Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks. The
message was unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to
the believers.
A Reagan-era diplomat turned entrepreneur, Bremer had recently proven
his ability to transform rubble into gold by waiting exactly one month
after the September 11 attacks to launch Crisis Consulting Practice, a
security company selling “terrorism risk insurance” to multinationals.
Bremer had two lieutenants on the economic front: Thomas Foley and
Michael Fleischer, the heads of “private sector development” for the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Foley is a Greenwich,
Connecticut, multimillionaire, a longtime friend of the Bush family and
a Bush-Cheney campaign “pioneer” who has described Iraq as a modern
California “gold rush.” Fleischer, a venture capitalist, is the brother
of former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Neither man had any
high-level diplomatic experience and both use the term corporate
“turnaround” specialist to describe what they do. According to Foley,
this uniquely qualified them to manage Iraq’s economy because it was
“the mother of all turnarounds.”
Many of the other CPA postings were equally ideological. The Green Zone,
the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in
Saddam’s former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out
of the Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could
never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a
twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was
put in charge of launching Baghdad’s new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a
twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an email
home that “I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and
budgeting for the domestic security forces.” The college senior’s
favorite job before this one? “My time as an ice-cream truck driver.” In
those early days, the Green Zone felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for
people who think the Peace Corps is a communist plot. It was a chance to
sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry “incoming”—all while being
guarded around the clock by real soldiers.
The teams of KPMG accountants, investment bankers, think-tank lifers,
and Young Republicans that populate the Green Zone have much in common
with the IMF missions that rearrange the economies of developing
countries from the presidential suites of Sheraton hotels the world
over. Except for one rather significant difference: in Iraq they were
not negotiating with the government to accept their “structural
adjustments” in exchange for a loan; they were the government.
Some small steps were taken, however, to bring Iraq’s U.S.-appointed
politicians inside. Yegor Gaidar, the mastermind of Russia’s
mid-nineties privatization auction that gave away the country’s assets
to the reigning oligarchs, was invited to share his wisdom at a
conference in Baghdad. Marek Belka, who as finance minister oversaw the
same process in Poland, was brought in as well. The Iraqis who proved
most gifted at mouthing the neocon lines were selected to act as what
USAID calls local “policy champions”—men like Ahmad al Mukhtar, who told
me of his countrymen, “They are lazy. The Iraqis by nature, they are
very dependent... They will have to depend on themselves, it is the only
way to survive in the world today.” Although he has no economics
background and his last job was reading the English-language news on
television, al Mukhtar was appointed director of foreign relations in
the Ministry of Trade and is leading the charge for Iraq to join the
World Trade Organization.
* * *
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 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 Iraq’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, that it would be better to wait until after
the transition. Insurance companies were so spooked that not a single
one of the big firms would insure investors for “political risk,” that
high-stakes area of insurance law that protects companies against
foreign governments turning nationalist or socialist and expropriating
their investments.
Even the U.S.-appointed Iraqi politicians, up to now so obedient, were
getting nervous about their own political futures if they went along
with the privatization plans. Communications Minister Haider al-Abadi
told me about his first meeting with Bremer. “I said, ‘Look, we don’t
have the mandate to sell any of this. Privatization is a big thing. We
have to wait until there is an Iraqi government.’” Minister of Industry
Mohamad Tofiq was even more direct: “I am not going to do something that
is not legal, so that’s it.”
Both al-Abadi and Tofiq told me about a meeting—never reported in the
press—that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the
twenty-five members of Iraq’s Governing Council as well as the
twenty-five interim ministers decided unanimously that they would not
participate in the privatization of Iraq’s state-owned companies or of
its publicly owned infrastructure.
But Bremer didn’t give up. International law prohibits occupiers from
selling state assets themselves, but it doesn’t say anything about the
puppet governments they appoint. Originally, Bremer had pledged to hand
over power to a directly elected Iraqi government, but in early November
he went to Washington for a private meeting with President Bush and came
back with a Plan B. On June 30 the occupation would officially end—but
not really. It would be replaced by an appointed government, chosen by
Washington. This government would not be bound by the international laws
preventing occupiers from selling off state assets, but it would be
bound by an “interim constitution,” a document that would protect
Bremer’s investment and privatization laws.
The plan was risky. Bremer’s June 30 deadline was awfully close, and it
was chosen for a less than ideal reason: so that President Bush could
trumpet the end of Iraq’s occupation on the campaign trail. If
everything went according to plan, Bremer would succeed in forcing a
“sovereign” Iraqi government to carry out his illegal reforms. But if
something went wrong, he would have to go ahead with the June 30
handover anyway because by then Karl Rove, and not Dick Cheney or Donald
Rumsfeld, would be calling the shots. And if it came down to a choice
between ideology in Iraq and the electability of George W. Bush,
everyone knew which would win.
* * *
At first, Plan B seemed to be right on track. Bremer persuaded the Iraqi
Governing Council to agree to everything: the new timetable, the interim
government, and the interim constitution. He even managed to slip into
the constitution a completely overlooked clause, Article 26. It stated
that for the duration of the interim government, “The laws, regulations,
orders and directives issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority...
shall remain in force” and could only be changed after general elections
are held.
Bremer had found his legal loophole: There would be a window—seven
months—when the occupation was officially over but before general
elections were scheduled to take place. Within this window, the Hague
and Geneva Conventions’ bans on privatization would no longer apply, but
Bremer’s own laws, thanks to Article 26, would stand. During these seven
months, foreign investors could come to Iraq and sign forty-year
contracts to buy up Iraqi assets. If a future elected Iraqi government
decided to change the rules, investors could sue for compensation.
But Bremer had a formidable opponent: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani,
the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq. al Sistani tried to block Bremer’s
plan at every turn, calling for immediate direct elections and for the
constitution to be written after those elections, not before. Both
demands, if met, would have closed Bremer’s privatization window. Then,
on March 2, with the Shia members of the Governing Council refusing to
sign the interim constitution, five bombs exploded in front of mosques
in Karbala and Baghdad, killing close to 200 worshipers. General John
Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, warned that the country was on
the verge of civil war. Frightened by this prospect, al Sistani backed
down and the Shia politicians signed the interim constitution. It was a
familiar story: the shock of a violent attack paved the way for more
shock therapy.
When I arrived in Iraq a week later, the economic project seemed to be
back on track. All that remained for Bremer was to get his interim
constitution ratified by a Security Council resolution, then the nervous
lawyers and insurance brokers could relax and the sell-off of Iraq could
finally begin. The CPA, meanwhile, had launched a major new P.R.
offensive designed to reassure investors that Iraq was still a safe and
exciting place to do business. The centerpiece of the campaign was
Destination Baghdad Exposition, a massive trade show for potential
investors to be held in early April at the Baghdad International
Fairgrounds. It was the first such event inside Iraq, and the organizers
had branded the trade fair “DBX,” as if it were some sort of Mountain
Dew?sponsored dirt-bike race. In keeping with the extreme-sports theme,
Thomas Foley traveled to Washington to tell a gathering of executives
that the risks in Iraq are akin “to skydiving or riding a motorcycle,
which are, to many, very acceptable risks.”
But three hours after my arrival in Baghdad, I was finding these
reassurances extremely hard to believe. I had not yet unpacked when my
hotel room was filled with debris and the windows in the lobby were
shattered. Down the street, the Mount Lebanon Hotel had just been
bombed, at that point the largest attack of its kind since the official
end of the war. The next day, another hotel was bombed in Basra, then
two Finnish businessmen were murdered on their way to a meeting in
Baghdad. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt finally admitted that there was
a pattern at work: “the extremists have started shifting away from the
hard targets... [and] are now going out of their way to specifically
target softer targets.” The next day, the State Department updated its
travel advisory: U.S. citizens were “strongly warned against travel to
Iraq.”
The physical risks of doing business in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out
of control. This, once again, was not part of the original plan. When
Bremer first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he
was able to walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During
his first four months on the job, 109 U.S. soldiers were killed and 570
were wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer’s shock therapy
had taken effect, the number of U.S. casualties almost doubled, with 195
soldiers killed and 1,633 wounded. There are many in Iraq who argue that
these events are connected—that Bremer’s reforms were the single largest
factor leading to the rise of armed resistance.
Take, for instance, Bremer’s first casualties. The soldiers and workers
he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn’t all disappear
quietly. Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the
backbone of the armed resistance. “Half a million people are now worse
off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going.
It’s alternative employment,” says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent
Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer’s other economic
casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the
businessmen whose companies are threatened by Bremer’s investment laws
have decided to make investments of their own—in the resistance. It is
partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
These developments present a challenge to the basic logic of shock
therapy: the neocons were convinced that if they brought in their
reforms quickly and ruthlessly, Iraqis would be too stunned to resist.
But the shock appears to have had the opposite effect; rather than the
predicted paralysis, it jolted many Iraqis into action, much of it
extreme. Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s minister of communication, puts it this
way: “We know that there are terrorists in the country, but previously
they were not successful, they were isolated. Now because the whole
country is unhappy, and a lot of people don’t have jobs... these
terrorists are finding listening ears.”
Bremer was now at odds not only with the Iraqis who opposed his plans
but with U.S military commanders charged with putting down the
insurgency his policies were feeding. Heretical questions began to be
raised: instead of laying people off, what if the CPA actually created
jobs for Iraqis? And instead of rushing to sell off Iraq’s 200
state-owned firms, how about putting them back to work?
* * *
From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain
for Iraq’s state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year
Zero?apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during
the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a
refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was
going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. “I
asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me
kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can’t
do anything, we need an order from President Bush.’” Back in Washington,
Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. “Free people are free to make mistakes and
commit crimes and do bad things.”
To see the remains of Asaad’s football-field-size warehouse is to
understand why Frank Gehry had an artistic crisis after September 11 and
was briefly unable to design structures resembling the rubble of modern
buildings. Asaad’s looted and burned factory looks remarkably like a
heavy-metal version of Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with waves
of steel, buckled by fire, lying in terrifyingly beautiful golden heaps.
Yet all was not lost. “The looters were good-hearted,” one of Asaad’s
painters told me, explaining that they left the tools and machines
behind, “so we could work again.” Because the machines are still there,
many factory managers in Iraq say that it would take little for them to
return to full production. They need emergency generators to cope with
daily blackouts, and they need capital for parts and raw materials. If
that happened, it would have tremendous implications for Iraq’s stalled
reconstruction, because it would mean that many of the key materials
needed to rebuild—cement and steel, bricks and furniture—could be
produced inside the country.
But it hasn’t happened. Immediately after the nominal end of the war,
Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq,
followed by an additional $18.4 billion in October. Yet as of July 2004,
Iraq’s state-owned factories had been pointedly excluded from the
reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to Western
companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction imported at
great expense from abroad.
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and
foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of
tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the
insurgency. And Iraqis don’t have to look far for reminders of this
injustice; it’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the
occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced
concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected—the people in
upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green
Zone—from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn’t injury enough, all
the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther
afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of
cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned
cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at
only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of
these factories has received a single contract to help with the
reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other
needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000
per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them
for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans
refuse to help get Iraq’s cement factories running again: among those
making the decisions, “no one believes in the public sector.”[1]
This kind of ideological blindness has turned Iraq’s occupiers into
prisoners of their own policies, hiding behind walls that, by their very
existence, fuel the rage at the U.S. presence, thereby feeding the need
for more walls. In Baghdad the concrete barriers have been given a
popular nickname: Bremer Walls.
As the insurgency grew, it soon became clear that if Bremer went ahead
with his plans to sell off the state companies, it could worsen the
violence. There was no question that privatization would require
layoffs: the Ministry of Industry estimates that roughly 145,000 workers
would have to be fired to make the firms desirable to investors, with
each of those workers supporting, on average, five family members. For
Iraq’s besieged occupiers the question was: Would these shock-therapy
casualties accept their fate or would they rebel?
* * *
The answer arrived, in rather dramatic fashion, at one of the largest
state-owned companies, the General Company for Vegetable Oils. The
complex of six factories in a Baghdad industrial zone produces cooking
oil, hand soap, laundry detergent, shaving cream, and shampoo. At least
that is what I was told by a receptionist who gave me glossy brochures
and calendars boasting of “modern instruments” and “the latest and most
up to date developments in the field of industry.” But when I approached
the soap factory, I discovered a group of workers sleeping outside a
darkened building. Our guide rushed ahead, shouting something to a woman
in a white lab coat, and suddenly the factory scrambled into activity:
lights switched on, motors revved up, and workers—still blinking off
sleep—began filling two-liter plastic bottles with pale blue Zahi brand
dishwashing liquid.
I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn’t
working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough
electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a
day, but when guests arrive—would-be investors, ministry officials,
journalists—they get them going. “For show,” she explained. Behind us, a
dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and
secured with duct tape.
In one dark corner of the plant, we came across an old man hunched over
a sack filled with white plastic caps. With a thin metal blade lodged in
a wedge of wax, he carefully whittled down the edges of each cap,
leaving a pile of shavings at his feet. “We don’t have the spare part
for the proper mold, so we have to cut them by hand,” his supervisor
explained apologetically. “We haven’t received any parts from Germany
since the sanctions began.” I noticed that even on the assembly lines
that were nominally working there was almost no mechanization: bottles
were held under spouts by hand because conveyor belts don’t convey, lids
once snapped on by machines were being hammered in place with wooden
mallets. Even the water for the factory was drawn from an outdoor well,
hoisted by hand, and carried inside.
The solution proposed by the U.S. occupiers was not to fix the plant but
to sell it, and so when Bremer announced the privatization auction back
in June 2003 this was among the first companies mentioned. Yet when I
visited the factory in March, nobody wanted to talk about the
privatization plan; the mere mention of the word inside the plant
inspired awkward silences and meaningful glances. This seemed an
unnatural amount of subtext for a soap factory, and I tried to get to
the bottom of it when I interviewed the assistant manager. But the
interview itself was equally odd: I had spent half a week setting it up,
submitting written questions for approval, getting a signed letter of
permission from the minister of industry, being questioned and searched
several times. But when I finally began the interview, the assistant
manager refused to tell me his name or let me record the conversation.
“Any manager mentioned in the press is attacked afterwards,” he said.
And when I asked whether the company was being sold, he gave this
oblique response: “If the decision was up to the workers, they are
against privatization; but if it’s up to the high-ranking officials and
government, then privatization is an order and orders must be followed.”
I left the plant feeling that I knew less than when I’d arrived. But on
the way out of the gates, a young security guard handed my translator a
note. He wanted us to meet him after work at a nearby restaurant, “to
find out what is really going on with privatization.” His name was
Mahmud, and he was a twenty-five-year-old with a neat beard and big
black eyes. (For his safety, I have omitted his last name.) His story
began in July, a few weeks after Bremer’s privatization announcement.
The company’s manager, on his way to work, was shot to death. Press
reports speculated that the manager was murdered because he was in favor
of privatizing the plant, but Mahmud was convinced that he was killed
because he opposed the plan. “He would never have sold the factories
like the Americans want. That’s why they killed him.”
The dead man was replaced by a new manager, Mudhfar Ja’far. Shortly
after taking over, Ja’far called a meeting with ministry officials to
discuss selling off the soap factory, which would involve laying off two
thirds of its employees. Guarding that meeting were several security
officers from the plant. They listened closely to Ja’far’s plans and
promptly reported the alarming news to their coworkers. “We were
shocked,” Mahmud recalled. “If the private sector buys our company, the
first thing they would do is reduce the staff to make more money. And we
will be forced into a very hard destiny, because the factory is our only
way of living.”
Frightened by this prospect, a group of seventeen workers, including
Mahmud, marched into Ja’far’s office to confront him on what they had
heard. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t there, only the assistant manager, the
one you met,” Mahmud told me. A fight broke out: one worker struck the
assistant manager, and a bodyguard fired three shots at the workers. The
crowd then attacked the bodyguard, took his gun, and, Mahmud said,
“stabbed him with a knife in the back three times. He spent a month in
the hospital.” In January there was even more violence. On their way to
work, Ja’far, the manager, and his son were shot and badly injured.
Mahmud told me he had no idea who was behind the attack, but I was
starting to understand why factory managers in Iraq try to keep a low
profile.
At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant
was sold despite the workers’ objections. “There are two choices,” he
said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. “Either we will set the
factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will
blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized.”
If there ever was a moment when Iraqis were too disoriented to resist
shock therapy, that moment has definitely passed. Labor relations, like
everything else in Iraq, has become a blood sport. The violence on the
streets howls at the gates of the factories, threatening to engulf them.
Workers fear job loss as a death sentence, and managers, in turn, fear
their workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly more
complicated than the neocons foresaw.[2]
* * *
As I left the meeting with Mahmud, I got word that there was a major
demonstration outside the CPA headquarters. Supporters of the radical
young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their
newspaper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of
publishing “false articles” that could “pose the real threat of
violence.” As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer “is
pursuing a policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied
with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to
demand their political and individual freedoms.” To me it sounded less
like hate literature than a concise summary of Milton Friedman’s recipe
for shock therapy.
A few days before the newspaper was shut down, I had gone to Kufa during
Friday prayers to listen to al Sadr at his mosque. He had launched into
a tirade against Bremer’s newly signed interim constitution, calling it
“an unjust, terrorist document.” The message of the sermon was clear:
Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani may have backed down on the constitution,
but al Sadr and his supporters were still determined to fight it—and if
they succeeded they would sabotage the neocons’ careful plan to saddle
Iraq’s next government with their “wish list” of laws. With the closing
of the newspaper, Bremer was giving al Sadr his response: he wasn’t
negotiating with this young upstart; he’d rather take him out with
force.
When I arrived at the demonstration, the streets were filled with men
dressed in black, the soon-to-be legendary Mahdi Army. It struck me that
if Mahmud lost his security guard job at the soap factory, he could be
one of them. That’s who al Sadr’s foot soldiers are: the young men who
have been shut out of the neocons’ grand plans for Iraq, who see no
possibilities for work, and whose neighborhoods have seen none of the
promised reconstruction. Bremer has failed these young men, and
everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to
succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers
coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations,
the centers dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines, organize
local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives,
direct traffic where the streetlights don’t work. And yes, they organize
militias too. Al Sadr took Bremer’s economic casualties, dressed them in
black, and gave them rusty Kalashnikovs. His militiamen protected the
mosques and the state factories when the occupation authorities did not,
but in some areas they also went further, zealously enforcing Islamic
law by torching liquor stores and terrorizing women without the veil.
Indeed, the astronomical rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism
that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer’s shock
therapy: if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services
to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many
of his newfound followers.
At the same time as al Sadr’s followers were shouting “Down with
America” outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part
of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary
soldiers were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies
hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a
devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they would never
recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn’t look
anything like a capitalist dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare
made real.
The day I left Baghdad was the worst yet. Fallujah was under siege and
Brig. Gen. Kimmitt was threatening to “destroy the al-Mahdi Army.” By
the end, roughly 2,000 Iraqis were killed in these twin campaigns. I was
dropped off at a security checkpoint several miles from the airport,
then loaded onto a bus jammed with contractors lugging hastily packed
bags. Although no one was calling it one, this was an evacuation: over
the next week 1,500 contractors left Iraq, and some governments began
airlifting their citizens out of the country. On the bus no one spoke;
we all just listened to the mortar fire, craning our necks to see the
red glow. A guy carrying a KPMG briefcase decided to lighten things up.
“So is there business class on this flight?” he asked the silent bus.
From the back, somebody called out, “Not yet.”
Indeed, it may be quite a while before business class truly arrives in
Iraq. When we landed in Amman, we learned that we had gotten out just in
time. That morning three Japanese civilians were kidnapped and their
captors were threatening to burn them alive. Two days later Nicholas
Berg went missing and was not seen again until the snuff film surfaced
of his beheading, an even more terrifying message for U.S. contractors
than the charred bodies in Fallujah. These were the start of a wave of
kidnappings and killings of foreigners, most of them businesspeople,
from a rainbow of nations: South Korea, Italy, China, Nepal, Pakistan,
the Philippines, Turkey. By the end of June more than ninety contractors
were reported dead in Iraq. When seven Turkish contractors were
kidnapped in June, their captors asked the “company to cancel all
contracts and pull out employees from Iraq.” Many insurance companies
stopped selling life insurance to contractors, and others began to
charge premiums as high as $10,000 a week for a single Western
executive—the same price some insurgents reportedly pay for a dead
American.
For their part, the organizers of DBX, the historic Baghdad trade fair,
decided to relocate to the lovely tourist city of Diyarbakir in Turkey,
“just 250 km from the Iraqi border.” An Iraqi landscape, only without
those frightening Iraqis. Three weeks later just fifteen people showed
up for a Commerce Department conference in Lansing, Michigan, on
investing in Iraq. Its host, Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, tried
to reassure his skeptical audience by saying that Iraq is “like a rough
neighborhood anywhere in America.” The foreign investors, the ones who
were offered every imaginable free-market enticement, are clearly not
convinced; there is still no sign of them. Keith Crane, a senior
economist at the Rand Corporation who has worked for the CPA, put it
bluntly: “I don’t believe the board of a multinational company could
approve a major investment in this environment. If people are shooting
at each other, it’s just difficult to do business.” Hamid Jassim Khamis,
the manager of the largest soft-drink bottling plant in the region, told
me he can’t find any investors, even though he landed the exclusive
rights to produce Pepsi in central Iraq. “A lot of people have
approached us to invest in the factory, but people are really hesitating
now.” Khamis said he couldn’t blame them; in five months he has survived
an attempted assassination, a carjacking, two bombs planted at the
entrance of his factory, and the kidnapping of his son.
Despite having been granted the first license for a foreign bank to
operate in Iraq in forty years, HSBC still hasn’t opened any branches, a
decision that may mean losing the coveted license altogether. Procter &
Gamble has put its joint venture on hold, and so has General Motors. The
U.S. financial backers of the Starwood luxury hotel and multiplex have
gotten cold feet, and Siemens AG has pulled most staff from Iraq. The
bell hasn’t rung yet at the Baghdad Stock Exchange—in fact you can’t
even use credit cards in Iraq’s cash-only economy. New Bridge
Strategies, the company that had gushed back in October about how “a
Wal-Mart could take over the country,” is sounding distinctly humbled.
“McDonald’s is not opening anytime soon,” company partner Ed Rogers told
the Washington Post. Neither is Wal-Mart. The Financial Times has
declared Iraq “the most dangerous place in the world in which to do
business.” It’s quite an accomplishment: in trying to design the best
place in the world to do business, the neocons have managed to create
the worst, the most eloquent indictment yet of the guiding logic behind
deregulated free markets.
The violence has not just kept investors out; it also forced Bremer,
before he left, to abandon many of his central economic policies.
Privatization of the state companies is off the table; instead, several
of the state companies have been offered up for lease, but only if the
investor agrees not to lay off a single employee. Thousands of the state
workers that Bremer fired have been rehired, and significant raises have
been handed out in the public sector as a whole. Plans to do away with
the food-ration program have also been scrapped—it just doesn’t seem
like a good time to deny millions of Iraqis the only nutrition on which
they can depend.
* * *
The final blow to the neocon dream came in the weeks before the
handover. The White House and the CPA were rushing to get the U.N.
Security Council to pass a resolution endorsing their handover plan.
They had twisted arms to give the top job to former CIA agent Iyad
Allawi, a move that will ensure that Iraq becomes, at the very least,
the coaling station for U.S. troops that Jay Garner originally
envisioned. But if major corporate investors were going to come to Iraq
in the future, they would need a stronger guarantee that Bremer’s
economic laws would stick. There was only one way of doing that: the
Security Council resolution had to ratify the interim constitution,
which locked in Bremer’s laws for the duration of the interim
government. But al Sistani once again objected, this time unequivocally,
saying that the constitution has been “rejected by the majority of the
Iraqi people.” On June 8 the Security Council unanimously passed a
resolution that endorsed the handover plan but made absolutely no
reference to the constitution. In the face of this far-reaching defeat,
George W. Bush celebrated the resolution as a historic victory, one that
came just in time for an election trail photo op at the G-8 Summit in
Georgia.
With Bremer’s laws in limbo, Iraqi ministers are already talking openly
about breaking contracts signed by the CPA. Citigroup’s loan scheme has
been rejected as a misuse of Iraq’s oil revenues. Iraq’s communication
minister is threatening to renegotiate contracts with the three
communications firms providing the country with its disastrously poor
cell phone service. And the Lebanese and U.S. companies hired to run the
state television network have been informed that they could lose their
licenses because they are not Iraqi. “We will see if we can change the
contract,” Hamid al-Kifaey, spokesperson for the Governing Council, said
in May. “They have no idea about Iraq.” For most investors, this
complete lack of legal certainty simply makes Iraq too great a risk.
But while the Iraqi resistance has managed to scare off the first wave
of corporate raiders, there’s little doubt that they will return.
Whatever form the next Iraqi government takes—nationalist, Islamist, or
free market—it will inherit a shattered nation with a crushing $120
billion debt. Then, as in all poor countries around the world, men in
dark blue suits from the IMF will appear at the door, bearing loans and
promises of economic boom, provided that certain structural adjustments
are made, which will, of course, be rather painful at first but well
worth the sacrifice in the end. In fact, the process has already begun:
the IMF is poised to approve loans worth $2.5? $4.25 billion, pending
agreement on the conditions. After an endless succession of courageous
last stands and far too many lost lives, Iraq will become a poor nation
like any other, with politicians determined to introduce policies
rejected by the vast majority of the population, and all the imperfect
compromises that will entail. The free market will no doubt come to
Iraq, but the neoconservative dream of transforming the country into a
free-market utopia has already died, a casualty of a greater dream—a
second term for George W. Bush.
The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that
the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom
that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that
ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed
forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control,
from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of
unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed
Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons
envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going
to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or
beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has
retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking
development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger
than greed itself.
Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one
place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most
literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would
think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis
of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there
was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced
at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a
model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would
touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington
are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban
mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state
slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts
threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.
Which is precisely what Thomas Foley has been doing. The former head of
“private sector development” has left Iraq, a country he had described
as “the mother of all turnarounds,” and has accepted another turnaround
job, as co-chair of George Bush’s reelection committee in Connecticut.
On April 30 in Washington he addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs about
business prospects in Baghdad. It was a tough day to be giving an upbeat
speech: that morning the first photographs had appeared out of Abu
Ghraib, including one of a hooded prisoner with electrical wires
attached to his hands. This was another kind of shock therapy, far more
literal than the one Foley had helped to administer, but not entirely
unconnected. “Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not as bad as it appears,”
Foley told the crowd. “You just need to accept that on faith.”
>
> Jim
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,
Correspondent:: roger61611@yahoo.com (Roger D)
Date: 23 Oct 2004 10:54:29 -0700
--------
Uh-oh, the article's source admits it made a big fucking mistake @
http://heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/23/news/news3.txt
"Tenet story clarified
Former CIA Director George Tenet told the Economic Club of
Southwestern Michigan on Wednesday that the United States was wrong on
its pre-war intelligence in Iraq, but an article in Thursday's
Herald-Palladium may have put the comment in an incorrect context.
The story said Tenet called the war in Iraq "wrong." However, after
reviewing the reporter's notes (Tenet barred reporters from using tape
recorders), the newspaper now believes Tenet used the word "wrong" in
the context of U.S. intelligence, not on the direct question of
whether the United States should be in Iraq."
± wrote in message news:<4178DBF0.BA06450E@hotmail.com>...
> http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
>
> St. Joseph-Benton Harbor, Michigan
> The Herald-Palladium
> Thursday, October 21, 2004
> Tenet: CIA made errors
> By ANNA CLARK / H-P Correspondent
>
>
> BENTON TOWNSHIP -- Although he emphasized that the Central Intelligence
> Agency boasts "tremendously talented men and women," former CIA Director
> George Tenet said it "did not live up to our expectations as
> professionals" regarding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the
> search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
>
> "We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the
> community of gaps in our intelligence," Tenet said. "The extraordinary
> men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable
> every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the
> American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong."
>
> Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
> 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
> Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
>
> Despite proclaiming to be "as forthcoming as I can," Tenet made light of
> a question about whether or not the United States made an error in
> committing intelligence to the search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq
> rather than exploring terrorism elsewhere.
>
> Tenet apologized for being rude but did not answer the question.
>
> He did add that he doesn't think the Iraq war was wholly bad.
>
> "When I look at the regime (Saddam Hussein) ran, and the elaborate depth
> he took to deny us the ability to build our intelligence, I can't say it
> was a waste," Tenet said. "I believed he had weapons of mass
> destruction. He didn't. At the end of the day I have to stand up
> accountable for that. In the meantime our nation needs to honor the
> commitment we made in Iraq."
>
> Tenet was faulted in April's 9/11 Commission report for not having a
> strategy to battle terrorism before the terrorist attacks. He also took
> responsibility for a later discredited line in President George Bush's
> 2003 State of the Union address, which alleged that Iraq was trying to
> buy uranium from Africa. Tenet said the CIA had seen and approved the
> speech in advance, and he assumed responsibility for the error.
>
> Tenet said that while the Iraq war was "rightly being challenged," the
> CIA was making important strides toward success in the greater war on
> terrorism.
>
> He said the United States is "winning the war on terror" due to the
> CIA's efforts to "capture or kill" three-quarters of al-Qaida's leaders,
> pinpointed before 9/11. He expects to see Osama bin Ladin captured.
>
> Tenet highlighted places throughout the world, including Iran and North
> Korea, that are potential terrorism threats, while commending the
> cooperation of Pakistan and Libya with U.S. efforts.
>
> He said the Pakistani president "came to our side" after 9/11 and
> allowed for important al-Qaida captures in a nation the terrorist
> organization once considered safe. Libya initiated contact with the CIA
> and explicitly committed to dismantling its weapons program - the first
> time any such program was self-dismantled without a shot being fired,
> Tenet said.
>
> "Demographics and distribution trends are something we also need to keep
> an eye on," Tenet said. "The developed world is not reproducing at
> levels to maintain its position, while developing nations who cannot
> afford it, mostly Muslim ones, are exploding."
>
> Tenet said a developing nation's low per capita income, high
> unemployment among young men and high infant mortality rate strongly
> increase its likelihood of becoming a "terrorist safe haven."
>
> "In 2010, 100 million people outside of Africa will be infected with
> HIV," Tenet said. "The secondary implications of this are staggering."
>
> He said the work of public health officers, missionaries and literacy
> teachers in third world nations are crucial to the war on terrorism,
> because terrorists build supporters by spinning poverty as a form of
> humiliation caused by wealthy nations like the United States.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
>
>
>
> -------
> / \
> / \ /-----\
> | (@) | | SnuH |
> | (O) | \_ ___/
> | / | ||
> | \ /_ / //
> \ \____/ / /
> \ /
> \_____,
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 22:09:58 -0700
--------
Roger D wrote:
>
> Uh-oh, the article's source admits it made a big fucking mistake @
> http://heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/23/news/news3.txt
>
> "Tenet story clarified
>
> Former CIA Director George Tenet told the Economic Club of
> Southwestern Michigan on Wednesday that the United States was wrong on
> its pre-war intelligence in Iraq, but an article in Thursday's
> Herald-Palladium may have put the comment in an incorrect context.
>
> The story said Tenet called the war in Iraq "wrong." However, after
> reviewing the reporter's notes (Tenet barred reporters from using tape
> recorders), the newspaper now believes Tenet used the word "wrong" in
> the context of U.S. intelligence, not on the direct question of
> whether the United States should be in Iraq."
"Tenet barred reporters from using tape recorders" - jeez, I wonder why?
Imagine the pressure that came down from above on little ol' Michigan
Herald Palladium, a paper without the resources to defend itself in
court.
The Reverend Pat Robertson says the war is wrong - can Christians with
conscience vote for Dubya?:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/19/pzn.01.html
PAULA ZAHN NOW
Interview With Pat Robertson
Aired October 19, 2004 - 20:00 ET
ZAHN: If you're not a Republican, can you be a Christian?
ROBERTSON: Well, I was a Democrat for about 55 years, so I guess so. You
know, the party left us. The Democratic Party went far to the left, I
think, and left some of us stranded on the beach, so we went to the
Republican Party.
ZAHN: But there are a lot of Christians out there who take umbrage at
what you're saying. There is this magazine called "Sojourners" magazine.
ROBERTSON: Oh, yes.
ZAHN: Which, by its admission, is a liberal Christian magazine.
ROBERTSON: Semi-socialist.
ZAHN: But they're running an ad right now that rebuts your claim that
God has taken a side in this election. They say -- quote -- "We believe
that claims of divine appointment for the president, uncritical
affirmation of his policies, and assertions that all Christians must
vote for his reelection constitute bad theology and dangerous religion."
ROBERTSON: I would never say somebody had to vote for anybody. That
would be terrible. I haven't said that. I just said, I think God's
blessing him, and I think it's one of those things that, even if he
stumbles and messes up -- and he's had his share of goofs and gaffes --
I just think God's blessing is on him. And you remember, I think the
Chinese used to say, you know, it's the blessing of heaven on the
emperor. And I think the blessing of heaven is on Bush. It's just the
way it is.
ZAHN: Even you have just admitted that the president has made some
gaffes.
ROBERTSON: Yes, absolutely.
ZAHN: That he's made some blunders. But, as a Christian, aren't you
supposed to admit your mistakes, acknowledge them, and move on?
ROBERTSON: You better believe it. I admit mine all the time.
ZAHN: But the president hasn't done that.
ROBERTSON: He should.
ZAHN: He's been posed repeatedly in debates, what mistakes have you
made? He's been asked that on the campaign trail and he hasn't come up
with any.
ROBERTSON: I met with him down in Nashville before the Gulf War started.
And he was the most self-assured man I ever met in my life. You
remember, Mark Twain said, he looks like a contended Christian with four
aces. He was just sitting there, like, I'm on top of the world, and I
warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep
misgivings. And I was trying to say, Mr. President, you better prepare
the American people for casualties. Oh, no, we're not going to have any
casualties. Well, I said, it's the way it's going to be. And so, it was
messy. The lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy.
And before that, I had deep, in my spirit, I had deep misgivings about
going into Iraq.
ZAHN: You just told me...
ROBERTSON: Yes. Yes.
ZAHN: As I asked you that question that you wished the president had
admitted to the American public he's made these mistakes.
ROBERTSON: Well, sure.
ZAHN: Why don't you think he has?
ROBERTSON: I don't know this politics game. You can never say you're
wrong, because the opposition grabs on it. And, you see, he admitted he
screwed up. And so I don't know. But...
ZAHN: But, as someone who has run for president, you know this game
better than just about anybody.
ROBERTSON: Oh, yes.
ZAHN: When you felt that you had the lord telling you that this was
going to be a very bad thing to go into Iraq and you warned the
president about it, he seemed to be dismissive.
ROBERTSON: Well, I warned him about casualties.
ZAHN: Of the casualties. Where do you think that came from? Do you think
he got bad advice? Do you think he was ignoring some of the advice he
had gotten? What is it?
ROBERTSON: I just think he was so sure that this man was a tyrant, he
was evil and he needed to be taken out. I mean, he just felt it. Of
course, he had advisers, the so-called neocons, around him that said,
Mr. President, go get him, and we will liberate these oppressed people.
ZAHN: There are a lot of neoconservatives...
ROBERTSON: Yes.
ZAHN: ... who believe that president hasn't edited a lot of the advice
he has been given. Four million evangelicals sat out the last election.
ROBERTSON: Yes.
ZAHN: Some are very alienated by the record deficit that this president
has run up. They're not crazy about the idea of larger government under
his presidency. And, like you, they were very concerned about this war.
Will they sit out this election?
ROBERTSON: I don't think so. I think they're very passionate. Really,
basically, in the last election, they didn't quite trust his daddy. They
thought that he wasn't really with him and they weren't sure what junior
was going to do. This time, they're solidly in his camp.
ZAHN: How can they be if they're opposed to him on those four major
issues?
ROBERTSON: Well, you know, you don't run against perfection. It's too
fallible people. So it's either the lesser of the evil or the best of
second -- the best -- whatever.
> ± wrote in message news:<4178DBF0.BA06450E@hotmail.com>...
> > http://www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2004/10/21/news/news1.txt
> >
> > St. Joseph-Benton Harbor, Michigan
> > The Herald-Palladium
> > Thursday, October 21, 2004
> > Tenet: CIA made errors
> > By ANNA CLARK / H-P Correspondent
> >
> >
> > BENTON TOWNSHIP -- Although he emphasized that the Central Intelligence
> > Agency boasts "tremendously talented men and women," former CIA Director
> > George Tenet said it "did not live up to our expectations as
> > professionals" regarding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the
> > search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
> >
> > "We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the
> > community of gaps in our intelligence," Tenet said. "The extraordinary
> > men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable
> > every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the
> > American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong."
> >
> > Tenet called the war on Iraq "wrong" in a speech Wednesday night to
> > 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake
> > Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate.
> >
> > Despite proclaiming to be "as forthcoming as I can," Tenet made light of
> > a question about whether or not the United States made an error in
> > committing intelligence to the search for nonexistent WMDs in Iraq
> > rather than exploring terrorism elsewhere.
> >
> > Tenet apologized for being rude but did not answer the question.
> >
> > He did add that he doesn't think the Iraq war was wholly bad.
> >
> > "When I look at the regime (Saddam Hussein) ran, and the elaborate depth
> > he took to deny us the ability to build our intelligence, I can't say it
> > was a waste," Tenet said. "I believed he had weapons of mass
> > destruction. He didn't. At the end of the day I have to stand up
> > accountable for that. In the meantime our nation needs to honor the
> > commitment we made in Iraq."
> >
> > Tenet was faulted in April's 9/11 Commission report for not having a
> > strategy to battle terrorism before the terrorist attacks. He also took
> > responsibility for a later discredited line in President George Bush's
> > 2003 State of the Union address, which alleged that Iraq was trying to
> > buy uranium from Africa. Tenet said the CIA had seen and approved the
> > speech in advance, and he assumed responsibility for the error.
> >
> > Tenet said that while the Iraq war was "rightly being challenged," the
> > CIA was making important strides toward success in the greater war on
> > terrorism.
> >
> > He said the United States is "winning the war on terror" due to the
> > CIA's efforts to "capture or kill" three-quarters of al-Qaida's leaders,
> > pinpointed before 9/11. He expects to see Osama bin Ladin captured.
> >
> > Tenet highlighted places throughout the world, including Iran and North
> > Korea, that are potential terrorism threats, while commending the
> > cooperation of Pakistan and Libya with U.S. efforts.
> >
> > He said the Pakistani president "came to our side" after 9/11 and
> > allowed for important al-Qaida captures in a nation the terrorist
> > organization once considered safe. Libya initiated contact with the CIA
> > and explicitly committed to dismantling its weapons program - the first
> > time any such program was self-dismantled without a shot being fired,
> > Tenet said.
> >
> > "Demographics and distribution trends are something we also need to keep
> > an eye on," Tenet said. "The developed world is not reproducing at
> > levels to maintain its position, while developing nations who cannot
> > afford it, mostly Muslim ones, are exploding."
> >
> > Tenet said a developing nation's low per capita income, high
> > unemployment among young men and high infant mortality rate strongly
> > increase its likelihood of becoming a "terrorist safe haven."
> >
> > "In 2010, 100 million people outside of Africa will be infected with
> > HIV," Tenet said. "The secondary implications of this are staggering."
> >
> > He said the work of public health officers, missionaries and literacy
> > teachers in third world nations are crucial to the war on terrorism,
> > because terrorists build supporters by spinning poverty as a form of
> > humiliation caused by wealthy nations like the United States.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
> >
> >
> >
> > -------
> > / \
> > / \ /-----\
> > | (@) | | SnuH |
> > | (O) | \_ ___/
> > | / | ||
> > | \ /_ / //
> > \ \____/ / /
> > \ /
> > \_____,
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,
Correspondent:: HellPope Huey
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 02:33:24 GMT
--------
Pat Robertson should be made to wear living wolverines as leg warmers.
Hey, look, I'm a living sig file.
--
HellPope Huey
It sure beats a kick in the slats and
a tin nickel shoved up your nose.
It is one thing to ignore the Rites;
it is quite another to expect the gods
to ignore the Penalties.
- E. Bramah
"That's nuttier than a pachyderm's stool sample."
- Dennis Miller
Correspondent:: ±
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 01:02:38 -0700
--------
HellPope Huey wrote:
>
> Pat Robertson should be made to wear living wolverines as leg warmers.
Do the nutria rats hanging from his earlobes stay?
> Hey, look, I'm a living sig file.
>
> --
>
> HellPope Huey
> It sure beats a kick in the slats and
> a tin nickel shoved up your nose.
>
> It is one thing to ignore the Rites;
> it is quite another to expect the gods
> to ignore the Penalties.
> - E. Bramah
>
> "That's nuttier than a pachyderm's stool sample."
> - Dennis Miller
--
http://www.bedoper.com/snuh
-------
/ \
/ \ /-----\
| (@) | | SnuH |
| (O) | \_ ___/
| / | ||
| \ /_ / //
\ \____/ / /
\ /
\_____,