| |
Free marketeers have a plan for
Iraq
By Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON
- President George W Bush's administration is
aggressively appointing a series of former private
sector executives to run the Iraqi economy, prompting
warnings that it will impose dubious free market
policies on Baghdad and open the oil-rich nation further
to US business interests.
Last week, Agriculture
Secretary Ann M Veneman appointed agricultural
industrialist Dan Amstutz "to lead the US government's
agriculture reconstruction efforts in Iraq". Amstutz,
who spent most of his professional life working for the
US agriculture industry and lobbying for its interests,
will serve as senior ministry advisor for agriculture
and will coordinate US government activities in the
sector.
The businessman also worked for Cargill,
the largest privately-owned corporation in the world and
the third largest food processor on the globe. It
controls a large portion of US grain exports and is a
leading promoter of genetically modified food and new
farming technology.
Also last week, US Treasury
Secretary John Snow appointed the two officials who will
coordinate the economic rebuilding of Iraq. Peter
McPherson, a long-time Washington insider who was deputy
US treasurer in the Ronald Reagan administration in the
late 1980s, will be financial coordinator for the Office
of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA).
McPherson was also the group executive vice president of
Bank of America. His deputy in Iraq will be George
Wolfe, a senior US Treasury Department lawyer and a
strong loyalist of the department's foreign policies.
Both men will work to reorganize the Iraqi
finance ministry, the central bank and the banking
system. "It's very much like the Bush administration
itself - a bunch of private sector alumni called upon to
perform the task in government they were performing in
the private sector," said Doug Henwood editor of the
Left Business Observer, about the list of new
administrators in Iraq. "They are going to have a whole
country to play with now," he told Inter Press Service.
The Treasury Department is known as a strong
backer of the free market policies imposed by the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund on developing
nations, and is highly likely to push for identical
policies on the occupied Arab nation. Corporations have
longed backed policies of economic liberalization as
they help ensure the free movement of their products and
investments around the globe.
It has also been
reported that the Bush administration has picked Philip
Carroll, former chief executive of the US division of
oil giant Royal Dutch-Shell, to lead the management team
of the lucrative Iraqi oil industry. The administration
is reportedly planning to remodel the industry to
function more like a US oil corporation, with a
chairperson, chief executive and a 15-member board of
international advisers.
Such appointments
complement the appointment of retired army general Jay
Garner to the post of head of the ORHA. Garner is known
for links to the international arms industry and is
controversial in the Arab world, where he is seen as a
staunch advocate of Israel's harsh military crackdown on
the Palestinians in the occupied territories. After
retiring from the army, Garner became president of SY
Coleman, a defense contractor specializing in military
defense technology.
Washington has repeatedly
denied any imperial ambitions in the Middle East region
but said that the new appointments will further its
efforts to create a "democratic, market driven economy
in Iraq", especially because many of the experts come
from the private sector.
Washington also plans
to send more officials to help rebuild the Iraqi
political system, restart key government agencies and
restore many sectors of the economy. But such
appointments have drawn fire from some critics, who say
that Washington is trying to recreate Iraq in its own
image, and warn that the administration's tactics could
backfire.
For example, the appointment of
Amstutz could commercialize the reconstruction of Iraq
and threaten the country's agriculture sector, which was
the only thread that kept some 26 million Iraqis from
falling into all-out famine under 12 years of
suffocating UN sanctions, says international charity and
development group Oxfam.
As Cargill vice
president, Amstutz drafted the original text of the
current Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture within
the World Trade Organization, considered by many
developing countries and pro-development groups as
innately unjust. The agreement allows rich countries to
dump their subsidy-backed agricultural surpluses on
world markets, depressing prices to levels at which
producers in developing nations can no longer compete.
Oxfam policy director Kevin Watkins told
Britain's Guardian newspaper on Monday that "putting Dan
Amstutz in charge of agricultural reconstruction in Iraq
is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human
rights commission".
On Carroll's appointment,
oil analyst Michael Renner of the Washington-based
Worldwatch Institute said that the move might be
intended to boost plans to privatize the Iraqi oil
industry, without consulting the Iraqi people. "There's
no shortage of Iraqis who know how to run the oil
industry, so why exactly do you need someone like
Carroll?" he asked in an interview. "It's likely that
Iraqi oil is headed toward de facto privatization - a
scheme that puts real control in the hands of the oil
multinationals." Henwood agreed. "They are very eager to
privatize the Iraqi oil industry and would like to, I am
sure, privatize the rest of the Middle Eastern oil
industry," he said.
(Inter Press
Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
