2005 November | ecstaticist

I’ll be the first to give the US credit for favourable accomplishements in Iraq. They simply are not happening. This is now confirmed by Ayad Allawi, the formerly supportive former Iraqi Prime Minister. He says things are worse, and he isn’t just talking about basic conditions of life, like heat, light and water. He’s talking about human rights.

‘People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse,’ Ayad Allawi told The Observer. ‘It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.’

Allawi continues:

‘We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,’ he added. ‘A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.’

It would seem that “freedom” was not on the agenda. That agenda was a lie. The lie is well documented by Frank Rich of the NY Times today.

What was on the agenda? Well, it appears it was what we feared all along:

According to the report, from groups including War on Want and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), the new Iraqi constitution opened the way for greater foreign investment. Negotiations with oil companies are already under way ahead of next month’s election and before legislation is passed, it said.

The groups said they had amassed details of high-level pressure from the US and UK governments on Iraq to look to foreign companies to rebuild its oil industry. It said a Foreign Office code of practice issued in summer last year said at least $4bn would be needed to restore production to the levels before the 1990-91 Gulf War. “Given Iraq’s needs it is not realistic to cut government spending in other areas and Iraq would need to engage with the international oil companies to provide appropriate levels of foreign direct investment to do this,” it said.

Yesterday’s report said the use of production sharing agreements (PSAs) was proposed by the US State Department before the invasion and adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority. “The current government is fast-tracking the process. It is already negotiating contracts with oil companies in parallel with the constitutional process, elections and passage of a Petroleum Law,” the report, Crude Designs, said.

Earlier this year a BBC Newsnight report claimed to have uncovered documents showing the Bush administration made plans to secure Iraqi oil even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Based on its analysis of PSAs in seven countries, it said multinationals would seek rates of return on their investment from 42 to 162 per cent, far in excess of typical 12 per cent rates.

So the legacy of the Bush family continues. From his father’s role as CIA head and President during the heyday of latin american conquest, followed by Dubyas conquest of the Middle East, the Bush dynasty has had a very overt theme: neoimerialism and the export of raw torture and late-modern capitalist exploitation.

Note there is little in this that resembles “freedom” and “democracy.” Sham elections and constitutions designed in Washington are not acceptable in western industrialized countries, so why pretend?

The UN has announced that the depletion of ozone in the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere has stopped. This is huge news. It is huge because it shows that we have the capacity to identify a global environmental problem and take effective action to solve it. The Montreal Protocol is a success.

We should be trumpeting this success at every turn because it shows we can use the same international cooperation to confront the bigger threat of Global Warming. Success breeds succcess. Every available avenue should be pursued in the reduction of greenhouse gas emmissions and the scrubbing of CO2 from the atmosphere. This needs to begin in earnest now, because the problem of global warming is more complex than that of ozone depletion.

The debate today seems to be one between the proponents of market-driven technological solutions to the problem versus one of International Accords. I say get busy on both, and do it fast. There is a tipping point approaching where significant climatological change will occur at a more rapid rate. We need to avoid that point if we are to preserve our costal human habitats.

One of the main issues confronting us is that our political institutions are out of sync with the problems we face. So much of politics has historically been about space. The protection and control of space and the activities that happen inside borders. Space now matters less. The things that now matter more are time and scale. Our political institutions don’t match the problems. We need reform.