Labour Against The War AGM
Saturday 5 February 2005, University Of London Union.
Do the elections justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq? At least we are now beginning to strip away the lies. Gone are the claims that the war was about eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or intervention to remove a sadistic dictator guilty of genocide. In the end, as President Bush has repeatedly proclaimed, it all comes down to the establishment of democracy. As he does not say, however, what that actually means, it might be worth exploring Bush’s definition of Iraqi democracy a little further.
This election was not a democratic exercise designed to offer Iraqis genuine self determination. It was a process to anoint the occupiers, to give a veneer or respectability to continued political control and economic exploitation of Iraq by the US. Nor was it a fair and reliable election by any acceptable international standards. Indeed, if it had been held in Iran, Syria or Zimbabwe, the US and UK would have been the first to denounce it. Draconian security measures left Iraq’s cities looking like ghost towns. Ballot papers were so complicated that the Kurdish leader Jabal Talabani needed a brief on how to use one. Most candidates were afraid to be seen in public, let alone discuss their policies.
Economic democracy has been circumscribed as well. Before the US Proconsul Paul Bremer left Baghdad, he enacted 100 orders as chief of the occupation authority in Iraq. Perhaps the most infamous was Order 39, which decreed that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatised, that foreign companies could have complete control of Iraqi banks, factories and mines and that these companies could transfer all their profits out of Iraq. The so called ‘reconstruction’ of the country amounts in effect to wholesale privatisation of the economy and is little short of economic colonisation.
Whatever the result of the 30 January elections, these laws will not be reversed while 140,000 troops remain in the country or a network of US military bases which is planned to be retained in Iraq for a much longer period. Aid for rebuilding the electricity and water services, the oil industry and the legal and security systems will reside with the US embassy for many years to come.
If all the 100 Orders are taken together, they set the overall legal framework for overriding foreign exploitation of Iraq’s domestic market. They cover almost all facets of the economy, including Iraq’s trading regime, the mandate of the Central Bank and regulations governing trade union activities. Collectively, they lay down the foundations for the real US objective in Iraq, apart from keeping control of the oil supply, namely the imposition of a neo-liberal capitalist market economy controlled and run by US transnational corporations.
But what is remarkable about these laws is not only their overall degree of control, but their far reaching application. Order 81, for example, has the status of binding law over ‘patent industrial design, undisclosed information, integrated circuits and plant variety’ – a degree of detailed supervision normally associated with a Soviet command and control economy. While historically the Iraqi constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, the new US-imposed patent law introduces a system of monopoly rights over seeds. This is virtually a takeover of Iraqi agriculture.
The rights granted to US plant breeding companies under this Order include the exclusive right to produce, reproduce, sell, export, import and store the plant varieties covered by intellectual property right for 20-25 years. During this extended period, nobody can plant or otherwise use these plants trees or vines without compensating the breeder. In the name of agricultural reconstruction, this new law deprives Iraqi farmers of the inherent right, exercised for the last ten thousand years in the fertile Mesopotamian arc, to save and replant seeds. It enables the penetration of Iraqi agriculture by Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow Chemical and other corporate giants that control the global seed trade. Food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has therefore already been made near impossible by these new regulations.
This is merely one example of the pervasiveness of the Orders left behind by Bremer, but their impact is largely concentrated in the near-monopolisation by US corporations of the economic contracts awarded by the US dominated Coalition Provisional Authority. Overwhelmingly, they have been allocated to big US companies, notably Bechtel and Halliburton, which just happens to be Cheney’s former company, sometimes on a secret no-bid basis, such as the contract to repair and operate the oil wells, awarded to the Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root. Almost no contracts have gone to UK companies, apart from one to repair and rebuild the Baghdad sewage system. For oilfield repairs over a two-year period, the contracts have been worth some $7bn. For the little known and disarmingly titled logistical Civil Augmentation Programme, the contracts value is far greater.
So how are these contracts funded? Largely from Iraqi oil revenues. The oil money is held in the US Federal Reserve and the US government is determined to keep control of it under an international board. The US has already spent half the revenue, mainly on these long term contracts with their construction companies.
Whether this enforced takeover of the economy and imposed privatisation across the board of all the main economic sectors is in accordance with international law is now much disputed. But whether is can be reversed when America holds all the military, political and economic cards is another matter. So how are the Americans dealing with this? The only way for the US to sidestep the potential conflict is to ensure that the Iraqi government, whoever is finally elected, is pliant enough not to press for full sovereignty. The Americans have been working on it. Time magazine has just exposed a secret report which proposed a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favoured by Washington. One quoted source described it as a plan for “the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections”.
If democracy is now supposed to be the real goal of the whole Iraq venture, not much is being left to chance by the conquerors economically, militarily or politically. As Madame Pompadour might have remarked, ‘O Democracy, what crimes are committed in thy name’.
The election will not resolve the rampant insecurity resulting from war and occupation. Iraq is still a place of fear for its people. The supposed democratic system for which they have voted bravely doesn’t have the power to bring them peace, security and or the rule of law. Western occupying forces have that power, but cannot exercise it fully without destroying the legitimacy of the Iraqi state they purport to be creating.
Of course, it is not only Iraqis who are full of fears, the Western occupiers and their political masters are too. Fear that the insurgency will increase its intensity. Fear that Shi’ite Iran will extend its influence in Iraq. Fear that Shia domination of the Iraqi Government will lead to civil conflict. Fear that troops will be there, in massive numbers, for years to come.
There is only one way to remove these fears and that is to accept that the continued occupation of Iraq is not the solution, but the aggravation of the problem. The only way to stop the destruction of Iraq and the relentless haemorrhage of violence is to set a clear and early timetable for the withdrawal of US and British forces. Even if the Americans were ever seen, however briefly, as liberators, that image was utterly shattered by the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, Najaf and Falluja.
A genuinely democratic and sovereign Iraq is wholly incompatible with the strategic goals that caused Bush to launch a war in the first place. Sovereignty over oil fields and their own resources is to be denied to the Iraqis. Democratic control over their own state will be strictly limited through the establishment of military bases to secure permanent US political and military domination of the Middle East Region. Horribly, further military adventures then become more viable and more likely.
Iran has been placed squarely in the US administration’s sights. Whatever emollient words on diplomacy offered by Condoleeza Rice on her recent European tour, the worry is that exactly the same process has started. Suspicions of plans for militarily action arise and are denied. Met with an understandably high degree of scepticism, the denials shift subtly: we are told that it is the job of governments and strategists to formulate plans but we should be reassured because no decisions have been taken. In fact, all that has happened is that no decisions have been revealed. Public scrutiny and accountability would hamper the planners. All of a sudden, the ‘evidence’ becomes overwhelming, the countdown to war begins and the situation becomes unstoppable.
We must not let this happen again. Where British people want peace and justice and the rule of law, no UK prime minister should ever again be allowed to take us to war.
Perhaps we should not be surprised at what democracy in Iraq looks like from a White House perspective. After all, if then White House counsel and now Attorney General of the US Alberto Gonzales can offer a memo redefining torture so as to keep brutal treatment of Iraqi prisoners ‘legal’ what could they do to definitions of democracy? What we must now be demanding is that the sham democratic arrangements described here are replaced as rapidly as possible by real Iraqi self determination – built on the withdrawal of all foreign occupying forces.
