councilor.org
| Source | Ken Hanly |
| Date | 03/06/05/15:37 |
| Bush's can-do man puts the business into Baghdad
Paul Bremer's 'de-Ba'athification' is just downsizing in disguise Naomi Klein Thursday June 5, 2003 The Guardian (London) The streets of Baghdad are a swamp of uncollected garbage and crime. Battered local businesses are going bankrupt, unable to compete with cheap imports. Unemployment is soaring and thousands of laid-off state workers are protesting in the streets. In other words, Iraq looks like every other country that has undergone rapid-fire "structural adjustments" prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous "shock therapy" in the early 90s to Argentina's disastrous "surgery without anasthetic". Except that Iraq's so-called reconstruction makes those wrenching reforms look like spa treatments. Paul Bremer, the US-appointed governor of Iraq, has already proved something of a flop in the democracy department in his three weeks there, nixing plans for Iraqis to select their own interim government in favour of his own handpicked team of advisers. But Bremer has proved to have something of a gift when it comes to rolling out the red carpet for US multinationals. Expect broad smiles when George Bush meets Bremer in Qatar today. For two weeks, Bremer has been hacking away at Iraq's public sector like former Sunbeam executive "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap in a flak jacket. On May 12, Bremer banned up to 30,000 senior Ba'ath party officials from jobs in government. Less than a week later, he dissolved the army and the information ministry, putting 400,000 Iraqis out of work without pensions or re-employment programmes. Of course, if Saddam Hussein's henchmen and propagandists held on to power in Iraq it would be a human rights disaster. "De-Ba'athification", as the purging of party officials has come to be called, may be the only way to prevent a comeback by Saddam's crew - and hold on to the one true benefit that could come from George Bush's illegal war. But Bremer has gone far beyond purging powerful Ba'ath loyalists and moved into a full-scale assault on the state itself. It seems doctors who joined the party as children and have no love for Saddam face dismissal, while low-level civil servants with no ties to the party have been fired en masse. Nuha Najeeb, who ran a Baghdad printing house, told Reuters: "I ... had nothing to do with Saddam's media, so why am I sacked?" As the Bush administration becomes increasingly open about its plans to privatise Iraq's state industries and parts of government, Bremer's de-Ba'athification takes on new meaning. Is he working only get rid of Ba'ath party members, or is he also working to shrink the public sector as a whole so that hospitals, schools and even the army are primed for privatisation by US firms? Just as reconstruction is the guise for privatisation, de-Ba'athification looks a lot like disguised downsizing. Similar questions arise from Bremer's chainsaw job on Iraqi companies, already pummelled by 12 years of sanctions and a month and a half of looting. Bremer did not even wait to get lights back on in Baghdad, for the dinar to stabilise or for the spare parts to arrive for Iraq's hobbled factories before he declared, on May 26, that Iraq was "open for business". Duty-free imported television sets and packaged food flooded across the border, pushing many Iraqi businesses into bankruptcy, unable to compete. This is how Iraq joined the global "free market" economy: in the dark. Paul Bremer is, according to Bush, "a can-do type of person". Indeed he is. In less than a month he has readied large swathes of state activity for corporate takeover, primed the Iraqi market for foreign importers to make a killing by doing away with much of the local competition, and made sure there won't be any unpleasant Iraqi government interference - in fact, he has made sure there will be no Iraqi government at all during this crucial period when so many key decisions will be made. Bremer is Iraq's one-man International Monetary Fund. Like so many of the men who populate the Bush foreign policy landscape, Bremer sees war as a business opportunity. On October 11 2001, just one month after the terror attacks in New York and Washington, Bremer, once Ronald Reagan's ambassador at large for counterterrorism, launched a company designed to capitalise on the new atmosphere of fear in US corporate boardrooms. Crisis Consulting Practice, a division of the insurance giant Marsh and McLennan, specialises in helping multinationals to come up with "integrated and comprehensive crisis solutions" for everything from terror attacks to accounting fraud. And, thanks to a strategic alliance with Versar, a specialist in biological and chemical threats, clients of the two companies are treated to "total counter-terrorism services". In order to sell this kind of high-priced protection to US firms, Bremer had to make the sort of frank links between terrorism and the failing global economy that activists are consistently called lunatics for articulating. In a November 2001 policy paper, titled New Risks in International Business, he explains that free trade policies "require laying off workers. And opening markets to foreign trade puts enormous pressure on traditional retailers and trade monopolies". This leads to "growing income gaps and social tensions", which in turn can lead to a range of attacks on US firms, from terrorism to government attempts to reverse privatisation and trade incentives. He could be describing the backlash his own policies are provoking in Iraq. But then guys like Bremer always know how to play both sides. Like a hacker who cripples corporate websites then sells himself as a network security specialist, in a few months Bremer may well be selling terrorism insurance to the very companies he welcomed into Iraq. And why not? As Bremer told his clients back at Marsh, globalisation may have immediate negative consequences for many but it also leads to "the creation of unprecedented wealth". It has for Bremer and his cronies. On May 12, the day he arrived in Iraq, his former boss, Marsh chairman Jeffrey W Greenberg, announced that 2002 "was a great year for Marsh - operating income was up 31%, Marsh's expertise analysing risk and helping clients develop risk management programmes has been in great demand. Our prospects have never been better". Many point out that Paul Bremer is no expert on Iraqi politics. But that was never the point. He seems to be an expert at profiting from the war on terror, and at helping US multinationals make money in far off places where they are both unpopular and unwelcome. In other words, he is perfect for the job. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho