[news] Hold Bush to His Lie

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From: shniad at sfu.ca

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040223&s=klein

The Nation     February 23, 2004 issue

Hold Bush to His Lie

by Naomi Klein

If you believe the White House, Iraq's future government is being designed
in Iraq. If you believe the Iraqi people, it is being designed at the White
House. Technically, neither is true: Iraq's future government is being
engineered in an anonymous research park in suburban North Carolina.

On March 4, 2003, with the invasion just fifteen days away, the United
States Agency for International Development asked three US firms to bid for
a unique job: After Iraq was invaded and occupied, one company would be
charged with setting up 180 local and provincial town councils in the
rubble. This was newly imperial territory for firms accustomed to the
friendly NGO-speak of "public-private partnerships," and two of the three
decided not to apply. The "local governance" contract, worth $167.9 million
in the first year and up to $466 million total, went to the Research
Triangle Institute (RTI), a private nonprofit best known for its drug
research. None of its employees had been to Iraq in years.

At first, RTI's Iraq mission attracted little public attention. Next to
Bechtel's inability to turn the lights on, and Halliburton's wild
overcharging, RTI's "civil society" workshops seemed rather benign. No more.
It now turns out that the town councils RTI has been quietly setting up are
the centerpiece of Washington's plan to hand over power to appointed
regional caucuses--a plan so widely rejected in Iraq it could bring the
occupation to its knees.

In late January I visited RTI senior vice president Ronald Johnson at his
offices near Durham (down the block from IBM, around the corner from
GlaxoSmithKline). Johnson insists that his team is focused on the "nuts and
bolts" and has nothing to do with the epic battles over who will rule Iraq.
"There really is not a Sunni way to pick up the garbage versus a Shiite
way," he tells me. (Perhaps, but there is a public way and a private way,
and according to a July Coalition Provisional Authority report, RTI is
pushing the latter, establishing "new neighborhood waste collection systems"
that "will be arranged through privatized curbside collection.")

Neither are the councils RTI has been setting up uncontroversial. On January
28, the same day Johnson and I were calmly discussing the finer points of
local democracy, the US-appointed regional council in Nasiriyah, about 200
miles southeast of Baghdad, was surrounded by gunmen and angry protesters.
As many as 10,000 residents marched on the council offices demanding direct
elections and the immediate resignation of all the councilors. The
provincial governor called in bodyguards with rocket-propelled grenade
launchers and fled the building.

Poor RTI: The appetite for democracy among Iraqis keeps racing ahead of the
plodding plans for "capacity building" it drew up before the invasion. In
November the Washington Post reported that when RTI arrived in the province
of Taji, armed with flowcharts and ready to set up local councils, it
discovered that "the Iraqi people formed their own representative councils
in this region months ago, and many of those were elected, not selected, as
the occupation is proposing." The Post quoted one man telling a RTI
contractor, "We feel we are going backwards."

Johnson denies that the previous council was elected and says that, besides,
RTI is only "assisting the Iraqis," not making decisions for them. Perhaps,
but it doesn't help that Johnson compares Iraq's councils to "a New England
town meeting" and quotes another RTI consultant observing that the
challenges in Iraq are "the same thing I dealt with... in Houston." Is this
Iraqi sovereignty--conceived in Washington, outsourced to North Carolina,
modeled on Massachusetts and Houston and imposed on Basra and Baghdad?

The United Nations, now that it has agreed to go back to Iraq, must somehow
carve out a role for itself in this mess. A good start, if it decides that
direct elections are impossible before the White House's June 30 deadline,
would be to demand that the deadline be scrapped. But the UN will have to do
more than monitor elections; it will have to stop a robbery in progress--the
US attempt to rob Iraq's future democracy of the power to make key
decisions.

Washington wants a transitional body in Iraq with the full powers of
sovereign government, able to lock in decisions that an elected government
will inherit. To that end, Paul Bremer's CPA is pushing ahead with its
illegal free-market reforms, counting on these changes being ratified by an
Iraqi government it can control. For instance, on January 31 Bremer
announced the awarding of the first three licenses for foreign banks in
Iraq. A week earlier, he sent members of the Iraqi Governing Council to the
World Trade Organization to request observer status, the first step to
becoming a member. And Iraq's occupiers just negotiated an $850 million loan
from the International Monetary Fund, giving the lender its usual leverage
to extract future economic "adjustments."

In other countries that have recently made the transition to democracy--from
South Africa to the Philippines to Argentina-- this period between regimes
is precisely when the most devastating betrayals have taken place: backroom
deals to transfer illegitimate debts and to maintain "macro-economic
continuity." Again and again, newly liberated people arrive at the polls
only to discover that there is precious little left to vote for. But in
Iraq, it's not too late to block that process. The key is to confine any
transitional council's mandate to matters directly related to elections: the
census, security, protections for women and minorities.

And here's the really surprising part: It could actually happen. Why?
Because all of Washington's reasons for going to war have evaporated; the
only excuse left is Bush's deep desire to bring democracy to the Iraqi
people. Of course, this is as much a lie as the rest--but it's a lie we can
use. We can harness Bush's political weakness on Iraq to demand that the
democracy lie become a reality, that Iraq be truly sovereign: unshackled by
debt, unencumbered by inherited contracts, unscarred by US military bases
and with full control over its resources, from oil to reparations.

Washington's hold on Baghdad is growing weaker by the day, while the
pro-democracy forces inside the country grow stronger. Genuine democracy
could come to Iraq, not because Bush's war was right, but because it has
been proven so desperately wrong.