by Greg Palast
This was war. Then our President turned to the camera and said, “I’d like to speak to the Iraqi people.”
They speak Arabic, but never mind, I was intrigued. I’d thought our Commander-in-Chief would say something like, “Dear people of Iraq, our kids are coming in to liberate you… so don’t shoot them.” But instead of telling Iraqis not to kill our troops, the President warned the people of Iraq:
Do not destroy oil wells.
Do not destroy oil wells.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair assured Britain’s Parliament, “Our actions have nothing to do with oil or any of the other conspiracy theories put forward.”
Ari Fleischer, “Operation Iraqi Liberation”
And so began what White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer called:
Operation
Iraqi
Liberation
O.I.L.
Everybody loves a joke, but this was a bit too droll even for Karl Rove’s spinmeisters, who barked out the new brand name for the war: OIF! OIF! Operation Iraqi Freedom!6
The General Toppled
But before Iraq and its oil could be liberated, there was the strongman in Baghdad to remove. On April 7, 2003, U.S. tanks broke through the walls of Saddam’s palace and two days later pulled down his statue. That was good TV, but not Rumsfeld’s real target. It wasn’t until two weeks later, on April 21, that the Defense Secretary succeeded in pulling down General Jay Garner.
Only four months earlier, in January 2003, Bush appointed Garner as viceroy of soon-to-be-occupied Iraq. Garner was certainly the man for the job, known and liked among Iraqis and beloved among the Kurds for whom he acted as protector from Saddam’s revenge in the year following the first Gulf War. In 1991, in just a few months, he’d turned Northern Iraq into an economically strong, relatively peaceful sovereign state. But there were questions about his record: He’d gotten along well with the old guard around Colin Powell and he was a registered Democrat.
The general didn’t waste time in provoking the neo-con planmeisters. Just days after Bush’s “do not destroy oil wells” speech, in Kuwait City, Garner, fresh off the plane from the USA, promised Iraqis they would have free and fair elections as soon as Saddam was toppled, preferably within 90 days. That was a problem. Garner’s 90-days-to-democracy pledge ran into that hard object, the neo-con’s Economy Plan’s “Annex D.” Disposing of a nation’s oil industry, let alone redrafting trade and tax laws, couldn’t be done in 90 days. There was no way to shorten the Norquist/neo-con schedule to transform Iraq into a Chile on the Tigris. Democracy was a problem. Even if Iraqis allowed the Pentagon to rewrite the nation’s tax laws, it was utterly inconceivable that any popularly elected government would let America flog off the nation’s crown jewels: its oil.
An insider working on the game plan for Iraq’s oil put it coldly:
They have Wolfowitz coming out saying it’s going to be a democratic country… but we’re going to do something that 99% of the people of Iraq wouldn’t vote for.
Elections would have to wait. As Norquist explained when I asked him about “Annex D”:
The right to trade, property rights, these are not to be determined by some democratic election.
The lesson of General Pinochet’s Chile was that asset sales and free markets must, Norquist said, “predate” elections.
I assumed Garner was unaware of the Pentagon plan’s timetable when he made his 90-days-to-elections commitment. Not so. When we met in his Washington office a year after the invasion, Garner told me he chose to ignore it. He said he had other things on his mind as he crossed the Kuwaiti border. “You prevent epidemics, you start the food distribution program to prevent famine, you try to get the electricity going again.”
Seizing ownership of the oil was not on Garner’s must-do list, nor was Washington’s rewrite of the tax laws and trade rules, and the rest of the elaborate free-market makeover scheme. In his mind, such radical legislation required a legitimate government. “My preference,” the general said in his understated manner, “was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can and do it in some form of elections.”
Garner didn’t just fall off a watermelon truck: He knew elections would mean the compost heap for the neo-con program. But he couldn’t care less. “I don’t think they 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. On April 21, the very night Garner arrived in Baghdad from Kuwait, the general received a call from Washington. It was Donald Rumsfeld. In so many words, Rummy told Garner, don’t unpack, you’re fired.
I should note that Garner tried to explain to me that he wasn’t “fired,” just “replaced.” Maybe “fired” is the wrong word. Garner was not merely sacked, he was savaged with terms like “incompetent” and “hapless” by whispering sources from within the President’s inner circle. The White House needed to do more than remove Garner, they needed to discredit him and his talk of Iraq for Iraqis.
“BUSH CALLS ON MIDDLE EAST TO OPEN ARMS TO DEMOCRACY,” ran the headline in The San Francisco Chronicle… but not until the oil fields change ownership.
Garner, until he agreed to appear for my British TV audience, hadn’t spoken out about the problems he caused himself by confusing Bush’s call for democracy with holding elections. Throughout our talk, he remained gracious toward the President and Rumsfeld; first, because the guy has class, and second, because, as Douglas MacArthur said, old soldiers never die; nowadays, they become executives of defense contractors. Garner is CEO of SYColeman, subsidiary of L-3 Communications, the hot rising defense and spyware firm. George Bush’s wars (in Iraq and on terror) have juiced L-3’s bottom line big time, with sales up 167% in the first four years of war.
Let’s not confuse Garner with Thomas Jefferson. Like the gang at the State and Defense Departments, he had his own ideas and uses for Iraq. The military man dreamed of turning Iraq into another Philippines, the U.S. colony so useful a century ago when coal was king. He explained:
The Philippines was in essence a coaling station for the Navy. And it allowed the U.S. navy to maintain a presence in the Pacific. It’s a bad analogy, but I think we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East… and it gives us a strategic advantage there and we ought to just accept that.
“But the privatizations,” he added, “that’s just one fight you don’t want to take on right now.”
Kissinger’s Man in the Dream Palace
But that’s just the fight the neo-cons wanted, and in Rumsfeld’s replacement for Garner, they had just the man for the fight. Unlike Garner, Paul Bremer III had no experience on the ground in Iraq, no training to fight a guerrilla insurgency, and no background in nation-building. But he had one unbeatable credential that Garner lacked: Bremer had served as Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates.
Thirty years ago, in greenlighting the assassination of Chile’s elected president, Henry Kissinger said, “The issues are too important to be left for the voters.” It was a lesson in Realpolitik Garner missed, but it was not lost on Kissinger’s protégé Bremer.
In his rush to democracy, Garner had planned what he called a “big tent” meeting of Iraq’s tribal leaders to plan national elections. Garner knew these characters well and figured he had only those 90 days to keep the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions under the tent from slitting each other’s throats. The general planned to seal a deal before a slighted group would launch an “insurgency.”
Bremer knew better. In April 2003, pausing only to install himself in Saddam’s old palace—and adding an extra ring of barbed wire—“Jerry” Bremer cancelled Garner’s “big tent” meeting. Instead, Bremer appointed the entire government himself.
National elections, Bremer pronounced, would have to wait until 2005. The delay, incidentally, would be long enough to lock in the laws, regulations a
nd irreversible sales of assets in accordance with the Economy Plan’s timeline.
After just a month in the palace, in June 2003, Bremer ordered a halt to all municipal elections including the crucial vote about to take place for mayor of the city of Najaf. The front-runner in Najaf, moderate Asad Sultan Abu Gilal, warned, “If they don’t give us freedom, what will we do? We have patience, but not for long.”
Back in Washington, Garner fretted that holding off elections to promote neo-con schemes would come to no good. This was not ideological: The general’s a tough old dog trained as a historian, well read in the grim story of Britain’s decades-past occupation of Iraq. You don’t have to give Iraq to the Iraqis but, then, as the British learned, you’d better expect them to shoot at you. Garner told me, “I’m a believer that you don’t want to end the day with more enemies than you started with.”
But then, what’s a War President without a war? And what’s a war without enemies, lots of them?
And he got them. Immediately after Najaf was denied the ballot, Garner’s grim warning became reality when Najaf’s patience did, as predicted, run out. Local Shias formed the “Mahdi Army” and voted with bullets. Religious leaders calmed this first insurgency, but George Bush preferred to taunt the locals. “Bring ’em on,” he said.
And Iraqis responded to his call. It blew in Najaf again, when, in March 2004, a local paper, printed by the big-time sheik Moqtada al-Sadr, criticized Bremer, the sensitive CPA chief shut down its printing presses. The sheik’s militia responded to this journalism faux pas by killing 21 U.S. soldiers and seizing control of the holy city for five months.
The War President had the war he wanted—just in time for the reelection battle back home.
Round-up at the Not-OK Corral
What happened to that group of Ba’athist generals and collaborators Pam Quanrud’s State Department group had successfully nurtured under Saddam’s nose? The Ba’athist officers had done their duty, keeping almost all of Iraq’s army from resisting the U.S. invasion. When the cooperative Iraqis arrived for their reward, the Pentagon’s crew had them arrested. “U.S. forces imprisoned all those we named as political leaders,” said a bitter Aljibury. That raises the question: Was their crime supporting Saddam’s regime or supporting the U.S. State Department team over the Pentagon?
Aljibury’s main concern was that busting State Department collaborators and Ba’athist big shots was a gift to the insurgency, which thereby gained experienced military commanders, mostly Sunnis, who then had no choice but to fight the U.S.-installed regime or face arrest, ruin and maybe death.
And Bremer would make sure the insurgency would not lack for weapons or personnel. Bremer’s Order Number One, “De-Ba’athification,” disbanded the army, throwing nearly half a million armed men out of work, leaving the Shia and Kurdish militias as the only local military forces.
The Pentagon neo-cons wanted total war and they were going to make sure they got it.
New World Orders 12, 37, 39 and 40
But before the blowback blew in Iraq, on September 19, 2003, Bremer, having transformed his post from occupation administrator to Pasha Omnipotent, signed orders 12, 37, 39, 40 and a blizzard of others that imposed the terms and conditions laid out in the neo-con Economy Plan.
While we often hear of the tragedy of war, or the horror of war, Bremer began each proclamation by citing, “my authority under the usages of war.” “Usages”? It is worth a closer look at these new world orders to find out what makes war so useful.
Consider Order Number 37, “Tax Strategy for 2003.” Here is Grover Norquist’s dream come true, a flat tax on corporate and individual income capped at 15%. The U.S. Congress rejected a similar Norquist plan for America, but in Iraq, with an electorate of one—Jerry Bremer—the public’s will was not an issue.
Most important was that Bremer’s Order 37 would apply “for 2004 and all subsequent years.” A future government elected by Iraqis could not undo what the occupiers had commanded, not even their own nation’s tax rates. The tax order, like every order, was designed so that future puppet governments would remain tangled in Bremer’s strings long after his official departure.
Order Number 40, “the Bank Law,” sold off Iraqi banks to three foreign financiers. This implements pages 30 to 42 of the Economy Plan. Notably, Bremer chose to announce his fiat, not in Iraq, but in Dubai, at a meeting of multinational bankers.
Bremer lauded the “extra element of competition” that would result from his piecing off Iraqi banks; but competition was ruled out of the lucrative bidding itself. The fire sale was limited to Bremer’s handpicked lucky few: Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, National Bank of Kuwait and Standard Chartered Bank of London, the junior partners of JP Morgan Chase of New York. Everybody got a piece of the Iraqi bank pie—except the Iraqis.
Simultaneous to parceling out Iraq’s banks, Bremer eliminated the prohibition on their charging high—“usurious”—interest rates, a sensitive issue in a Muslim nation. “This means,” said Bremer, without a hint of humor, “Iraqis can enjoy modern banking and earn market rates of interest on their money.”
Unfortunately, there are not many Iraqis with money to put into their new modern banks, especially after Bremer signed Order 12, “Trade Liberalization Policy.” Here the free-market fanatics’ dream came true, turning Iraq into the world’s first large economy with no tariff protection whatsoever. No nation on the planet, except occupied Iraq, operates without tariffs (taxes on imports) or quotas (limits on imports). Free-market America wouldn’t do this nor free-market Britain nor free-market Chile—for a good reason. A nation without protection is subject to “dumping” of surplus subsidized products, which would completely demolish local producers.
And that’s exactly what happened in Iraq. Iraqi industry, having gone without new equipment for a decade due to sanctions, crawling back to life after the invasion, was shattered by Order 12. From candy kitchens to washing machine makers, Iraqi businesses went bankrupt.
The U.S. “shock and awe” bombing campaign left manufacturing intact, but the bombardment of foreign goods without control flattened industry. This is free trade with a bullet, and it was devastating. Kevin Danaher runs Global Exchange, a not-for-profit group trying to help Iraqis rebuild. He told me, “They were just wiped out. Iraqis can’t compete against cheap Chinese junk dumped into Baghdad.” The result, a year after “liberation,” was a shocking, awful unemployment rate of 60%.
And they were hungry.
General Garner had a solution to starvation: Buy up Iraq’s own harvest. This would feed the people and, just as important, keep Iraq’s farmers in business and planting. But Bremer had a better idea. In Order 12, he stripped tariff protection for the nation’s growers and eliminated taxes on foreign-grown food.
This was not a method for feeding the hungry; it was, rather, shock-and-awe economic therapy prescribed by the Pentagon’s fanatical free-marketeers in their Economy Plan. Iraq did not need a flood of cheap imported grain. Before the wars, Iraq fed itself and was a big exporter of vegetables and fruit. Saddam-era sanctions prevented repair of irrigation pumps; cattle herds died from lack of vaccines. Instead of giving local farmers and ranchers help to repair the nation’s feeding machinery per Garner’s plan, Bremer crushed them with Order 12.
Not everyone felt the pain of this reckless rush to a free market. Cargill of Minneapolis, the world’s largest grain merchant, flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat from both its U.S. and Australian units.
The invitation to tax-free dumping of Cargill grains into Iraq was organized by the occupation’s agriculture chief, Dan Amstutz, himself an import from the USA. He was well qualified, a kind of Grover Norquist of wheat, as CEO of the North American Grain Association. Just prior to George Bush taking office, Amstutz chaired a company founded by… Cargill.
In May 2004, in the final days before Bremer escaped out Baghdad’s back door, he took time from the burgeoning insurrection to sign a
score of new orders, including numbers 81, “Patents,” and 83, “Copyrights.” Here, Grover Norquist’s hard work once again paid off. Fifty years of royalties would now be conferred on music recordings and twenty years on Windows code.
Not all of Iraq’s laws were “de-Saddamized.” The dictator’s prohibition on public-sector labor union activity remains with a vengeance. In December 2003, Bremer’s troops arrested the entire board of the Iraqi Workers Federation of Trade Unions, then released them, though not until U.S. soldiers painted the union’s building marquee black.
I called Falah Aljibury for his take on what was happening in his home country under the Bremer regime. Even if it was not his or Powell’s “disguised coup,” this new political-economic order was Aljibury’s long-dreamed-of “liberation” come to life. He was the last person I expected to say, a year after the invasion, “The people are worse off today than they were before we went in.” Oilman, Reagan man, maybe, but first and foremost, he is scion of the Aljibury tribe, the largest in a nation of tribes; and his million-strong “family” was reporting to him daily. They weren’t sending congratulations.
You could say that Saddam was killing them, murdering them. He was awful, he was terrible, but at least the people were living. People don’t have livelihood today. You’ve got 15 million people without food. Does anybody care? Does anybody think if you are hungry and your children “hungry you don’t care if you die? And all they tell you is “Saddam is gone.” Well, thank you very much—the second day you need to eat.
