Tonight, Pres­i­dent Bush addressed the nation and the world. CNN’s music was mil­i­tant, the graph­ics pre­pared and by all stan­dards avail­able to the Pro­con­sul on the Potomac, the nation was girded for war. He gave Iraqi pres­i­dent Sad­dam Hus­sein 48 hours — Thurs­day morn­ing local Bagh­dad time — to quit his coun­try and avoid war. No doubt Sad­dam will ungal­lantly refuse, and one can hear the echo of Bush’s father’s famous phrase: “The lib­er­a­tion of Kuwait has begun.“
“The day of your lib­er­a­tion is here.” Well, not so fast, Tex. In 15 min­utes of earnest, non-sedated ver­biage, not once did Bush utter the word “democ­racy.” Oh, he feinted at it, with near-misses like “lib­erty,” “free­dom” and “self-governing,” Self-governing means noth­ing; almost every nation-state is self-governing. Lib­erty and Free­dom, while nice, mean quite dif­fer­ent things in dif­fer­ent parts of the world. Chi­nese patri­ots are free to buy what they choose, but crit­i­ciz­ing the gov­ern­ment is ask­ing for trou­ble. Are they free? Are they lib­er­ated? Not by West­ern stan­dards. But most impor­tant was “peace­ful,” often stressed, indi­cat­ing a paci­fied Iraqi nation was more impor­tant than a demo­c­ra­tic one.
Basra in the south will be an early test of lib­er­a­tion, that’s for sure, because video of cheer­ing Iraqis hug­ging Dough­boys and GIs, toss­ing rice (a tra­di­tional Arab ges­ture of wel­come) and roses, will be beamed to a world in an attempt show the world the Amer­i­can eagle’s embrace is warm and lov­ing, never mind the talons.
I’m not say­ing Iraq won’t be bet­ter off with­out Sad­dam. It very well might, as long as it doesn’t col­lapse into civil war and thug­gery the moment the U.S. gets dis­tracted by some­thing else shiny.
But while lib­er­a­tion has not yet begun, the fall­out already has. Moscow has hinted it might retal­i­ate against the United States by not rat­i­fy­ing the arms reduc­tion treaty recently signed. You know, the one that would reduce the num­ber of nuclear weapons in the world?
And the busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties are already in the air! Instead of a Mar­shall Plan, which rebuilt Europe at the end of World War II with a com­bi­na­tion of direct grants and loans to the amount of $13 bil­lion (in 1948 dol­lars,) The Wall Street Jour­nal reported that instead of a long-term recon­struc­tion effort, the Bush White House envi­sions a one-year occu­pa­tion with recon­struc­tion con­tracted out to pri­vate com­pa­nies (Paid reg. required.) Left out of the effort are most of the U.N. devel­op­ment agen­cies and Non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions. With $1.5 bil­lion (in 2003 dol­lars) being offered to pri­vate com­pa­nies, only $50 mil­lion is set aside for groups such as CARE and Save the Chil­dren.
The Mar­shall Plan was an amaz­ing exam­ple of enlight­ened self-interest. Direct grants (mostly) and loans admin­is­tered by the Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion, a spe­cially cre­ated bureau of the U.S. gov­ern­ment, helped restore agri­cul­tural and indus­trial pro­duc­tion, estab­lish finan­cial sta­bil­ity and expand trade (since much of the money went to buy Amer­i­can prod­ucts and food.) Europe, led by the U.K. and France, coor­di­nated all this through the Com­mit­tee of Euro­pean Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion — later the Organ­i­sa­tion for Euro­pean Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion. A lot of Amer­i­can busi­ness­men got rich sell­ing their prod­ucts to the des­per­ate Euro­peans. In the process, west­ern Europe was aligned more closely with the United States, Com­mu­nism was con­tained and the major mil­i­tary alliances — recently smashed by you-know-who — crafted.
But this plan, shock­ing in its opti­mism and, yes, naiveté, farms out the recon­struc­tion to major U.S. com­pa­nies directly answer­able — and often fund­ing — Wash­ing­ton. Within weeks of the end of the war, the plan envi­sions the admin­is­tra­tion repair­ing schools, roads and hos­pi­tals, revamp­ing the country’s finan­cial rules and han­dling the gov­ern­ment pay­roll (Ooh, bet you some embar­rass­ing skele­tons will come out of that last one.) The Trea­sury Depart­ment will be “deeply involved” in over­haul­ing Iraq’s cen­tral bank and some U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials will serve as “shadow min­is­ters.“
The cost? Well, the White House will ask Con­gress for $100 bil­lion to wage the war and pay for its after­math. Included in this is $1.8 bil­lion for a year of recon­struc­tion and $800 mil­lion for relief assess­ment. Doesn’t sound like much does it?
Don’t worry, the Iraqis will pay for the rest!
The paper reports that Euro­peans, of course, and Iraqi dis­si­dents have reacted with dis­be­lief. Keep­ing the U.N. and NGO play­ers out of the game will delay recon­struc­tion and fos­ter more ill-will in a part of the world that suf­fered from colo­nial­ism.
The best quote goes to Chris Pat­ton, head of the EU’s exter­nal rela­tions, who slammed the Bush plan as “mal­adroit.” He also sug­gested last week that if the United States was so keen on mak­ing a mess in Iraq, then it could bloody well clean it up itself.
Bush admin­is­tra­tion fig­ures, leery of any kind of working-togetherness, say delays in recon­struc­tion in Afghanistan prove that mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism doesn’t work. Hey, Bush, here’s a sug­ges­tion: Instead of blam­ing coop­er­a­tion, why don’t you _fund_ the recon­struc­tion effort and not _forget_ to put Afghanistan in your 2004 bud­get?
The Jour­nal also says the U.S. offi­cials want “credit” for recon­struc­tion, indi­cat­ing the whole thing is seen more as a PR plan than a real pol­icy (Shades of Gen. Rove! How will happy, loyal Iraqis play in Iowa?)
“The administration’s goal is to pro­vide tan­gi­ble evi­dence to the peo­ple of Iraq that the U.S. will sup­port efforts to bring the coun­try to polit­i­cal secu­rity and eco­nomic pros­per­ity,” says a U.S. con­tract doc­u­ment for up to $900 mil­lion in recon­struc­tion work.
Not sur­pris­ingly, Kel­logg Brown & Root, a sub­sidiary of Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney’s com­pany Hal­libur­ton Co., is part of a bid­ding con­sor­tium. All com­pa­nies men­tioned — Bech­tel Group Inc., Par­sons Corp., Louis Berger Group and Fluor Corp. — made a com­bined $2.8 mil­lion in polit­i­cal dona­tions between 1999 and 2002, with more than two-thirds going to Repub­li­cans.
(I’m shocked — shocked!)
What’s FUBAR about this is that while the Mar­shall Plan made many Amer­i­can busi­ness­men rich, it also made a fair num­ber of Euro­pean busi­ness­men rich, too, as well as allowed the reha­bil­i­ta­tion of Europe’s indus­trial sec­tor thanks to access to cap­i­tal and invest­ment from the national gov­ern­ments. In Iraq, a state-run econ­omy at the moment, the money will flow back to Amer­i­can com­pa­nies rather than stay­ing in the coun­try. Once the recon­struc­tion is done, where will the Iraqi indus­trial sec­tor be? The roads might be laid and the schools might be run­ning, but with Bush’s mealy-mouthed danc­ing about “democ­racy” and a plan straight out of Cor­po­rate Exploita­tion of Cheap Labor 101, it points to Iraq as a depen­dent colony of the United States, requir­ing heavy Amer­i­can invest­ment (hmm), for­eign aid with a tapes­try of strings attached (hmm) and an inabil­ity to say “no” to Amer­i­can offers of “pro­tec­tion.” (Ah hah!)
South­west Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, anyone?