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Sharing the spoils of
war
By David Isenberg
Bombs
are still falling and bullets are flying as the US-led
invasion of Iraq enters its sixth day. But even as US
troops move closer to an assault on Baghdad itself, US
military and civilian officials as well as groups from
the private sector are preparing for action on another
front: humanitarian and relief efforts to the Iraqi
population and the future reconstruction and development
of Iraqi society. In short, it is nation building on an
ambitious scale, the likes of which has not been seen
since after World War II.
The US Agency for
International Development (USAID) has already unveiled a
blueprint for Iraq's eventual reconstruction, calling it
America's most massive rebuilding project since the
Marshall Plan. The agency contracts cover everything
from rebuilding Iraq's roads, hospitals, schools,
airports, seaports, power plants and water and sewage
systems to creating local governments, managing public
health and feeding Iraq's 24 million people.
Initially, USAID assistance will restore
economically critical infrastructure; support essential
health and education services; expand economic
opportunities; and improve the efficiency and
accountability of government.
Just last week,
the USAID announced that it would award seven contracts,
potentially worth more than US$1 billion, to American
companies for the initial stages of reconstruction in
post-war Iraq. As was widely expected, USAID had limited
the selection process for the biggest contracts to a
handful of huge US multinational firms, some of which
are well connected to the Bush administration; including
a subsidiary of Halliburton Co, the company once headed
by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The rationale for
restricting the contracts to US firms, according to
Andrew S Natsios, the USAID administrator, is the need
for the firms' personnel to have security clearances,
because "there are classified documents they have to
see".
Though Natsios and other officials, in an
effort to defuse controversy, emphasized that they
expected the long-term reconstruction effort to go well
beyond the USAID contracts and include international
organizations and aid agencies from other countries,
that would presumably award contracts to non-US firms.
Natsios said that he signed a waiver allowing the prime
contractors to subcontract work to companies from "any
country in the free world".
The aid contracts do
not include some of the most potentially costly - and
lucrative - reconstruction work: billions of dollars to
rebuild and run Iraq's oil industry, put out oil fires
and reform the Iraqi army and police. The Pentagon will
award those contracts. Other contracts will certainly
have to be awarded. The amount of aid that will be
needed for reconstruction, although still undetermined,
is certain to far exceed the sum that USAID is planning
to spend on the contracts in question, and that is one
reason that US officials say that they will welcome
involvement by international agencies and other
countries. Many experts have cited estimates ranging
from $25 billion to $100 billion for the full
reconstruction.
For now, the operation is being
launched with $304 million in the development agency's
general appropriations. The rest will be in a
multibillion-dollar supplemental spending bill for the
war and homeland security that the White House is
expected to submit to Congress this week.
The
New York Times reported that a top priority is
rebuilding Iraq's only deep-water port, the harbor at
Umm Qasr, where cargo is loaded on ships that travel
down a waterway in southern Iraq to the Persian Gulf.
Dredging work is expected to begin immediately after the
port, which was partially seized last Friday, is secure
enough. The bid terms give contractors no more than
eight weeks to prepare the port to handle the unloading
of pallets and containers from large ships.
On
the humanitarian front, both the United Nations and the
White House have increased efforts to avert a
humanitarian catastrophe for Iraq's civilian population.
Last Thursday, the Bush administration announced it
would tap an emergency food reserve for more than a
half-million tons of wheat and rice.
The same
day, US and British diplomats floated a draft resolution
among the other permanent members of the Security
Council - France, Russia and China - that would allow
continuation of the UN oil-for-food program, which
allows the use of Iraqi oil revenue to buy food and
medicine for the Iraqi population.
That program,
which has operated for the past seven years, was the
primary supplier of food to 14 million Iraqis, 60
percent of the country's population. But distribution
was suspended last Tuesday as foreign workers evacuated
the country ahead of the war. Relief officials say that
Iraqis have only enough stocks to last for a few weeks
and will begin to starve if the war lasts longer than
that and more aid does not arrive. Iraqis require about
450,000 tons of food aid per month, but only 350,000
tons have been pre-positioned in bordering countries by
the UN and the US.
The UN World Food Program has
warned that its warehouses storing food for Iraq are
nearly empty. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and
Andrew Natsios have announced that 200,000 tons of wheat
would be released immediately from the Bill Emerson
Humanitarian Trust, a food reserve named for a late
Republican congressman from Missouri. They said that
400,000 tons more are available if needed. A portion of
the wheat will be exchanged for rice.
And last
week, President George W Bush in Presidential
Determination No. 2003-17 authorized up to $22 million
in aid for refugees fleeing Iraq. The money can go to
international, governmental and nongovernmental groups,
Bush wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Additional funding may be forthcoming. USAID
says that it will release an additional $100 million for
relief and reconstruction by March 31. Bush's
supplemental budget request to Congress is expected to
include more than $2 billion for such efforts.
A
recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations said it
would take at least $20 billion a year for several years
to deploy 75,000 US troops in Iraq to keep the peace and
to pay for initial aid and reconstruction.
According to a more recent study by PFC Energy,
a Washington-based consulting firm, reconstruction costs
could be $25 billion annually over the next 10 years.
Iraqi oil exports won't yield more than about $14
billion annually over the next several years, the report
notes, leaving a budget deficit of at least $10 billion
a year.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is
preparing an urgent appeal to UN members for more than
$1 billion to take care of Iraqis' needs for food, clean
water, shelter and refugee assistance.
More
funding is vital, as Iraq has no money. Some have
suggested that Iraqi oil will pay for rebuilding the
country. That is not likely to happen any time soon.
Iraqi oil production capacity has been falling in recent
years, not rising, and it will be expensive to turn that
around. A report earlier this month from the Council on
Foreign Relations estimated that restoring production to
its peak of 1977 - 3.5 million barrels per day, compared
with a capacity today of 2.8 million barrels per day -
would require spending $6 billion over two years.
Further complicating the relief organizations'
plans for Iraq, as reported by the Wall Street Journal,
is the question of who ultimately will coordinate the
programs and how long they will be under US government
supervision. In previous conflicts, the US military
initially managed humanitarian efforts, and then turned
over coordination of the programs to the UN.
The
delicate security position likely to follow Saddam
Hussein's removal will force Bush to have General Tommy
Franks, the commander in chief of the US Central
Command, run Iraq, but it is likely that Franks will
want to shortly return to his US Central Command
headquarters in Florida, where he will supervise forces
in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
For Iraq,
the administration has put humanitarian relief efforts
under the command of retired army Lieutenant-General Jay
M Garner, on leave from defense contractor L-3
Communications, now with the Pentagon's Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA).
Garner supervised aid to the Kurds in 1991 after the
last Gulf War. He has assembled a staff of nearly 200
former military people and diplomats to administer Iraq
and supervise a transition to local rule. He will, in
effect, be the civilian proconsul or viceroy of Iraq.
Last week Garner arrived at a Kuwaiti beachside resort
with a large team from his office.
At a
background briefing at the Pentagon, a senior official
from ORHA said that the intention was to use existing
Iraqi bureaucracies, including much of the Iraqi army,
to run and rebuild the country. The official said that
the US was also recruiting about 100 Iraqi exiles with
particular specializations to assign to each of Iraq's
two dozen ministries. Other officials say that American
civilians will be assigned as "shadow ministers" to act
as liaisons with US forces. The Pentagon has also
appointed a coordinator for the new civil
administration. He is Michael Mobbs, who is special
adviser to Douglas Feith, US Undersecretary of Defense.
What worries relief organizations is that the US
hasn't said if or when it will transfer control to an
agency of the United Nations. Some organizations say
that they don't want to report to US officials because
it conflicts with their policies to remain independent
of all parties to a conflict in order to protect the
safety of their workers in a volatile situation.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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