The Mother of all Surprises !, page 1
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reply posted on 28-12-2006 @ 06:31 AM by rich23
If it wern't so tragic, that article would be hilarious.

I don't have to look too hard to find the giveaway line:

There's even a positive spin to be put on corruption. Money stolen from government coffers or siphoned from U.S. aid projects does not just disappear.


This whole article is an exercise in spin.

Firstly, let's be clear. The "liberation" of Iraq was always about "opening the country up to foreign investment" - an innocuous-sounding phrase that actually means asset-stripping.

Did you know that Jay Garner, the US' first "proconsul" in Iraq (how easily those Imperial terms come these days) was replaced by L. Paul Bremer because he wanted to hold elections too soon?

This extract from Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse details how Garner's genuinely democratic and liberatory impulses were squashed by Rumsfeld.

"My preference," Garner told me in his understated manner, "was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections."

But elections were not in The Plan.

The Plan was a 101-page document to guide the long-term future of the land we'd just conquered. There was nothing in it about democracy or elections or safety. There was, rather, a detailed schedule for selling off "all [Iraq's] state assets" -- and Iraq, that's just about everything -- "especially," said The Plan, "the oil and supporting industries." Especially the oil.

There was more than oil to sell off. The Plan included the sale of Iraq's banks, and weirdly, changing its copyright laws and other odd items that made the plan look less like a program for Iraq to get on its feet than a program for corporate looting of the nation's assets. (And indeed, we discovered at BBC, behind many of the odder elements -- copyright and tax code changes -- was the hand of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's associate Grover Norquist.)

But Garner didn't think much of The Plan, he told me when we met a year later in Washington. He had other things on his mind. "You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine."

Seizing title and ownership of Iraq's oil fields was not on Garner's must-do list. He let that be known to Washington. "I don't think [Iraqis] need to go by the U.S. plan, I think that what we need to do is set an Iraqi government that represents the freely elected will of the people." He added, "It's their country … their oil."

Apparently, the Secretary of Defense disagreed. So did lobbyist Norquist. And Garner incurred their fury by getting carried away with the "democracy" idea: he called for quick elections -- within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad.

But Garner's 90-days-to-elections commitment ran straight into the oil sell-off program. Annex D of the plan indicated that would take at least 270 days -- at least 9 months.

Worse, Garner was brokering a truce between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. They were about to begin what Garner called a "Big Tent" meeting to hammer out the details and set the election date. He figured he had 90 days to get it done before the factions started slitting each other's throats.


I've already gone into this in more detail in another thread.

Let's look at mobile phones. Within days of the invasion, a Bahrani company, Batelco, had managed to get mobile service restored, but they were shut down by the US very quickly. So much for the free market.

This article gives valuable insight into the reasons behind this decision. The US wanted its own system in place, to substitute for the already up-and-running infrastructure:

The result is that the world has a single standard, and enjoys economies of scale and very, very cool gadgets. The USA on the other hand decided to allow four incompatible standards to battle it out, thus blocking innovation from overseas, and allowing cellphone carriers to play atrocious bait and switch games with cellphone subscribers here. Er, that's us.


So it's no surprise that this BBC report shows that the rules devised by the US authorities heavily favour US firms:

Rules drawn up for mobile phone licences in Iraq by the US authorities in Iraq could bar many of Europe's biggest telecoms companies - and almost all those in the Middle East - from bidding.

The rules also mean that neighbouring Arab companies may well be out of the running - including Batelco, the Bahraini telecoms company which until earlier this week was running an unofficial GSM-based mobile network in Baghdad.

After a few days of operation, in which foreign journalists, businessmen and aidworkers suddenly found their home mobiles were unexpectedly working, the US authorities forced Batelco to pull the plug on its $5m operation.


Are we starting to see a pattern here?

This is one of the reasons that the Iraqis want the US out. Everything has got more expensive and they know the profits are going abroad. Specifically, to the US. And another thing. In that first mobile phone article I posted, there's some technical stuff about the two different systems being proposed. As the original system used by the Iraqis was compatible with those in neighbour states, and the new system (backed by US companies) is not, international calls are going to be much more costly.

Almost all Iraq's trading partners use GSM, and cross-network roaming - whether domestic or international - is both technologically difficult and very expensive.


Here's another doozy from your original article:

Iraq has a debt-relief deal with the IMF that requires Baghdad to end subsidies and open up its gas-import market.


Now I was doing some research into the background of some of the people in the Iraq Study group for this thread, and I came across this article that is all about the debt relief deal. The bottom line?

James Baker, consiglieri to the Bush family and the Carlyle Group, has brokered a deal with Kuwait that means if Kuwait get their debt paid by Iraq, Baker and the Carlyle group earn a cool ONE BILLION DOLLARS.

So it's not like all of Iraq's debt is written off by a generous international community.

The article you quoted is pure spin and colludes in a massive rip-off of the Iraqi people.

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