from Alternet - Miriam V

AlterNet: Bush's Other Iraq Invasion

AlterNet

Bush's Other Iraq Invasion

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet
Posted on August 22, 2005, Printed on August 23, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/24307/

If Iraq's National Assembly meets its deadline, it will release a draft
constitution to be voted on by the people in two months. Since February,
vital issues
have been debated and discussed by the drafting committee: the role of
Islamic law, the rights of women, the autonomy of the Kurds and the
participation
of the minority Sunnis.

But what hasn't been on the table is at least as important to the formation
of a new Iraq: the country's economic structure. The Bush administration has
succeeded in maintaining a stranglehold on issues such as public versus
private ownership of resources, foreign access to Iraqi oil and U.S. control
of
the reconstruction effort -- all of which are still governed by
administration policies put into place immediately after the invasion. The
Bush economic
agenda favors foreign interests -- American interests -- over Iraqi
self-determination.

Over a year ago, orders were put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, then the
U.S. administrator of Iraq, that were designed to "transition [Iraq] from a
...
centrally planned economy to a market economy" virtually overnight and by
U.S. fiat. Those orders were also incorporated into the transitional
administrative
law -- Iraq's interim constitution -- and the economic restructuring they
mandate is well underway.

Laws governing banking, investment, patents, copyrights, business ownership,
taxes, the media and trade have all been changed according to U.S. goals,
with
little real participation from the Iraqi people. (The Transitional Authority
Law can be changed, but only with a two-thirds majority vote in the National
Assembly, and with the approval of the prime minister, the president and
both vice presidents.) The constitutional drafting committee has, in turn,
left
all of these laws in place.

A central component of the Bush economic agenda is foreign corporate access
to, and privatization of, Iraq's once state-run economy. Thus, an early
Bremer
order allowed foreign investment in and the privatization of all 192
government-owned industries (excluding oil extraction).

After the election of the transitional government, the Ministry of Industry
and Minerals fell right in line, announcing plans to partially privatize
most
of its 46 state-owned companies and open them to foreign investment as part
of a plan to establish a "liberal, free-market economy."

Oil is, of course, at the heart of the agenda. In 2004, U.S.-appointed
interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi submitted guidelines to Iraq's Supreme
Council
for Oil Policy suggesting that the "Iraqi government disengage from running
the oil sector ... and that the [Iraq National Oil Company] be partly
privatized
in the future" and opened to international foreign investment, according to
International Oil Daily. (U.S oil imports from Iraq increased by more than
86 percent between 2003 and 2004 alone.)

Plans for a new Iraqi oil law were made public last December at a news
conference in Washington hosted by the U.S. government. The U.S.-appointed
interim
Finance Minister Adel Abdul Mehdi explained that the new law would be "very
promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to
oil companies."

A few weeks later, Mehdi became one of Iraq's two vice presidents and Allawi
was elected to the National Assembly. Iraq's new oil law is on track for
implementation
in 2006.

Finally, consider Iraq's reconstruction, which also remains firmly under
U.S. control. One of Bremer's orders denied the Iraqi government the ability
to
give preference to Iraqis in the reconstruction effort. Instead, more than
150 U.S. companies were awarded contracts totaling more than $50 billion,
more
than twice the GDP of Iraq. Halliburton has the largest contract, worth more
than $11 billion, while 13 other U.S. companies are earning more than $1.5
billion each.

These contractors answer to the U.S. government not the Iraqi people,
several thousand of whom recently protested the failure of U.S. companies to
provide
accessible water, sanitation and electricity at pre-war levels. Iraqis argue
that they have the knowledge, skill and experience to conduct the
reconstruction
themselves; what they need is the money and decision-making control that
they are being denied.

By all accounts, the draft constitution has failed to provide Iraqis with
the means to control their economic future. As Iraq prepares for the October
15
referendum on the constitution, these crucial issues must be added to the
debate, and the influence of the Bush administration countered, so that
Iraqis
can truly determine their own economic and political fate.

Just as discussions are finally emerging for ending the U.S. military
occupation of Iraq, so too must the economic invasion be brought to an end.

Antonia Juhasz is a
Foreign Policy In Focus
scholar based in San Francisco. Her book "
The Bush Agenda:
Invading the World, One Economy at a Time" will be published by Regan Books
in 2006.