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Green Left Weekly: Iraq Globalisation At Gun Point
Thursday, 11 September 2003, 9:32 am
Article: Green Left Weekly - Australia
Iraq: Globalisation At Gun Point
By Doug Lorimer
From The Green Left Weekly
On August 31, Peter McPherson, a former Bank of America executive, close
friend of US Vice-President Dick Cheney and, today, the top US economic
"adviser" in Iraq, announced that the US-dominated Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) had selected JP Morgan Chase to head a consortium of Western
banks to operate the new Trade Bank of Iraq.
"Operating the Trade Bank of Iraq will give banks access to the financial
system of Iraq, the world's second-largest holder of oil reserves, where
foreign bank companies haven't operated since a policy of nationalisation in
the 1950s and 1960s", the Bloomberg financial news agency reported.
JP Morgan Chase, the second-largest US bank holding company, is the
product of a formal merger in 2000 of the Morgan and Rockefeller family
business empires, with controlling interests in the world's largest
corporations - ExxonMobil, General Electric and, in collaboration with the
DuPont family, General Motors.
That same day, the London Observer reported that the US legal firm Squire,
Sanders & Dempsey had been hired to advise the CPA on privatising
government-held industries in Iraq, the largest and most potentially
lucrative of which is the oil industry. According to the Observer, "earlier
this year a Sanders partner, Ronald James, was made personnel chief of the
new Department of Homeland Security. James used to work for Donald Rumsfeld,
now defence secretary, when Rumsfeld was a member of Congress, and during
the Nixon administration he shared a White House office with Dick Cheney".
In a speech in October 1999, Henry Kissinger, a long-time crony of the
Rockefeller family and secretary of state under US presidents Richard Nixon
and Gerald Ford, candidly remarked that "what is called `globalisation' is
really another name for the dominant role of the United States" through the
export of the model of corporate-dominated "free market" capitalism, which,
as Kissinger noted in his speech, became established in the "United States
at the turn of the 20th century".
Fist for corporate interests
Five months earlier, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas
Friedman explained to his readers that the "globalisation" of US
corporate-dominated markets required the "hidden fist" of the US military:
"For globalisation to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty
superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without
a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the
designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force,
Navy and Marine Corps."
The fact that the US military serves as the fist to keep the "world safe"
for the profit-making interests of US corporations is only hidden from the
general public because the corporate-owned media and the pro-capitalist
politicians rarely admit the connection.
US Major-General Smedley Butler recognised the connection. In his 1933
book War is a Racket, Butler wrote: "I spent 33 years and four months in
active military service as a member of this country's most agile military
force, the Marine Corps... And during that period, I spent most of my time
being a high-class muscleman for big business, for Wall Street and for the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism...
"I helped make Mexico ... safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to
collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American
republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is
long."
While not so honestly stated, US President George Bush's administration
has also acknowledged the connection. While beating the drums for the US
military to invade and occupy Iraq, in September 2002 the Bush
administration produced a 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS) document
which declared: "Free markets and free trade are key priorities of our
national security strategy."
Using the spectre of terrorism and of the need for a global war against
it, the document justifies the use of US military force to impose "free
markets" and "free trade" upon countries that deny or restrict US
corporations' access to exploit their human and natural resources -
so-called "rogue states".
As Smedley Butler's remarks prove, imperialist America has always used its
military muscle to force open countries within its Central American and
Caribbean "backyard" to be exploited by US corporations. The new departure
in the NSS was that - with post-capitalist Soviet Union, the long-standing
obstacle to US global domination, having collapsed - the US rulers felt
confident of being able to realise this goal throughout the world.
"We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free
markets and free trade to every corner of the world", the NSS declared.
`War on terror'
The "war on terror" is only a political cover to secure the support of US
working people for the goal of imposing US corporate-dominated "free market"
globalisation at gun point. This goal is repeatedly stated throughout the
NSS document.
Indeed, while the document mentions "terrorism", "terror", "enemy" and
"defence" 76 times, it mentions "free trade", "free markets", "free
enterprise", "private property", "economic openness", "economic freedom",
"economic liberty" and US "interests" just as many times. And while it
mentions progressive income tax as an evil to be excoriated, the NSS
document did not contain one mention of al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden!
Stripped of its neoliberal economic verbiage about "economic freedom" and
"economic liberty", the Bush strategic doctrine means using the US military
to make the world, in Butler's words, "a decent place for the National City
Bank boys to collect revenues in", a place "safe for American oil interests"
and for "big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers".
Long before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York's World
Trade Center, the US rulers had considered plans to use the US military to
enable US oil corporations to seize control of Iraq's oil resources.
Kissinger plan
"It's the Kissinger plan", James Akins, the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia
in the mid-1970s, told Mother Jones magazine contributing writer Robert
Dreyfuss earlier this year.
In 1975, an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's
Magazine, which, as Akins told Dreyfus, outlined how the US "could solve our
economic and political problems over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in
Texans and Oklahomans to operate them".
"I said on television", Akins told Dreyfuss, "that anyone who would
propose that is either a madman, a criminal or an agent of the Soviet Union"
. A short time later, Akins learned that the "madman" was his own boss,
Kissinger, who was at that time secretary of state in the Ford
administration. Akins was fired later that year.
"I thought [the `Kissinger plan'] had been killed, but it's back", Akins
told Dreyfuss.
It's not surprising that Kissinger's proposal has been revived and acted
upon by the Bush administration. After all, two of Kissinger's closest
associates in the Ford administration - Cheney, who was Ford's chief of
staff, and Rumsfeld, Ford's defence secretary - are now leading Bush
administration figures, as vice-president and defence secretary
respectively. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld have been campaigning for a US push
to take over the Persian Gulf oilfields for the last 10 years.
In 1997, Cheney and Rumsfeld helped initiate the Project for a New
American Century lobby group, and a year later another lobby group, the US
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. In 1998, they wrote to President Bill
Clinton urging him to step up US efforts to topple Saddam Hussein's regime
because it was a "hazard" to "a significant portion of the world's supply of
oil".
September 12
On the morning after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld urged Bush to
authorise an immediate US attack on Iraq. However, Secretary of State Colin
Powell succeeded in persuading the Bush that "public opinion has to be
prepared before a move against Iraq is possible".
Instead, it was agreed to first authorise a war against the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan, plans for which had already been drawn up by the Clinton
administration.
According to the January 3 Washington Post: "On September 17, 2001, six
days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President
Bush signed a 2½-page document marked `Top Secret' that outlined the plan
for going to war in Afghanistan as part of a global campaign against
terrorism. Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to
begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior
administration officials said."
While the Bush administration has publicly denied that its invasion of
Iraq has anything to do with oil, the orders given to the invading US troops
clearly contradicted these denials.
From the very beginning of the invasion on March 19, US troops were
ordered to seize control of Iraq's oilfields. When they entered Baghdad on
April 9, the US occupiers allowed the looting and burning of nearly all
Iraqi public buildings - except the Iraqi oil ministry building, which they
immediately ringed with troops and armoured personnel carriers.
In a May 27 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Rumsfeld declared
that the Bush administration is committed to creating a post-Saddam regime
in Iraq that is headed by personnel who "favour market systems" and
"encourage moves to privatise state-owned enterprises".
According to an article in the June 3 US weekly Nation, Rumsfeld and other
Bush administration officials are being briefed on ideas for the rapid
privatisation of Iraq's state-run industries by Michael Bleyzer, a former
Exxon executive and CEO of the SigmaBleyzer investment banking company.
"What I'd like to see over the next 10 years is to really rebuild Iraq,
and that means a market economy", said Bleyzer, adding that Iraq would have
a "much better business environment if BP or ExxonMobil or Shell could
invest. We want to set up a business environment where global companies like
Coca-Cola and McDonald's could come in and create a diversified economy not
dependent on oil."
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