Untitled Document
Under pressure from Washington, the Paris Club, a group of major capital exporting
nations, agreed late last year to forgive 80 percent of Iraq’s debt, in
return for Iraq yoking itself to the IMF. This was the largest debt write off
by the Paris Club since it forgave two-thirds of Yugoslavia’s debt after
the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.1US investment in Iraq had been prohibited
by Washington’s anti-Iraq sanctions regime, so relieving Iraq of its debt
obligations meant little in the way of stranded investment for the US. For France,
Germany and Russia, however, which had investments in the country under Iraq’s
previous government, the debt reduction pledge, had less appeal. All three countries
resisted Washington’s plans, arguing correctly, though with the basest of
motives, that the plan is unfair to other countries saddled with even larger debts
that, unlike Iraq, aren’t blessed with an abundant supply of natural wealth
out of which to pay down their mortgaged futures.2Iraq’s undeniable attraction
as a source of immense oil wealth lies at the heart of Washington’s debt
relief plan, and equally undeniably is a large part of the reason Iraq was chosen
as a target of US aggression. Asked why Iraq, which had no weapons of mass destruction,
was invaded, while North Korea, which does (or claims to), escaped Iraq’s
fate, Paul Wolfowitz, then US Secretary of Defense, pointed to Iraq’s oil
wealth. “Let’s look at this simply. The most important difference
between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we had no choice in Iraq. The
country swims in a sea of oil.”3 Indeed it does. But without debt relief,
the attractions of buying up Iraq’s oil wealth would be diminished, since
a large part of the country’s oil revenue would be channeled into debt repayment,
to parties outside the US, and not into dividends and interest on future US and
British investment in Iraqi oil.
The same calculus has had a hand in defining the charges the US-sponsored war
crimes tribunal will likely prefer against Saddam Hussein. “American officials
have cautioned that widening the charges against Mr. Hussein to include the
Iran-Iraq war would expose Iraq…to demands for heavy war reparations from
Iran.”5 Heavy war reparations would burden Iraq’s oil revenues,
in the same way unrelieved debt obligations to France, Germany and Russia would
have funneled money to European concerns, reducing the attractiveness of Iraq’s
prized oil wealth to American and British financiers and oil company shareholders.Worst,
Iraq’s oil wealth would be used to strengthen Iran, which jealously guards
its independence from US domination and control. Were it to be richly supplied
with capital from Iraq in the form of war reparation payments, it would be in
a stronger position to resist US designs on its independence.
Accordingly, American officials, the true powers behind the tribunal6, caution
against widening the charges against the ousted president. Even the appearance
of doing justice is to be circumscribed by the economic and financial interests
of the conquering powers.
The Paris Club’s debt reduction deal obligates the new government in
Baghdad to dismantle the largely publicly owned economy established under the
previous government, and to junk the large scale system of social supports the
former Ba’athist government put in place to furnish Iraqis with jobs and
food subsidies out of revenue earned from oil sales.7 Much as Saddam Hussein
was reviled in the West, including by those who lay claim to anti-imperialist
credentials, his government did pursue a course of independent development,
that put some measure of emphasis on the domestic population.The country, complains
the Los Angeles Times and the present collaborationist government, was “a
huge welfare state,”8 that maintained a nationalized oil industry, built
up a largely state-owned economy, and directed oil revenue to internal development,
rather than wholly to Western financiers and oil companies.But unless the insurgents
drive the Americans out, and overthrow the Quislings in power, that will soon
change. The country’s petroleum reserves are to be pressed into service
to fatten the interest payments and dividends of absentee Anglo-American investors,
not to provide Iraqis with a source of income, low cost gasoline and food staples
at affordable prices.Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Iraq’s Prime Minister,
Ibrahim Jafari, says that Baghdad is preparing to honor the IMF’s demands
to gut public spending. Subsidies for electricity and oil products will be slashed,9
and 1.6 million jobs will be chopped from the public payroll, adding to the
already Himalayan mountain of unemployed. Now at 30 percent, the jobless rate
will be driven up to over one-half of the workforce10, unless concern that the
plan amounts to throwing fuel on the fire of an already raging insurgency forces
the government to chart a more cautious course.
On top of 30 percent unemployment, nine million Iraqis, of a total population
of 26 million, live below the poverty line11 and 400,000 children under the
age of five suffer from acute malnutrition, double the rate before the arrival
of US and British occupation troops two years ago.12 This is telling evidence,
if any is needed, that the ouster of Saddam Hussein, and his replacement by
Anglo-American forces and their puppet government of collaborators, hasn’t,
as promised, procured a better life for Iraqis.
As to the IMF-directed plan to intensify Iraq’s collective misery, the
justification lies in the imperialist orthodoxy that a dependent nation’s
wealth must not be used to achieve public policy goals at home, including reducing
economic insecurity by creating jobs, but must be shipped out of the country
to embellish the bottom lines and balance sheets of the banks and transnational
corporations of the conquering powers.Saddam Hussein’s government affronted
this orthodoxy by using oil revenues to increase the public payroll and reduce
unemployment, a sin that must be atoned for, according to the priests of the
IMF, by tossing the beneficiaries onto the heap of unemployed13 and laying the
groundwork for the future diversion of Iraqi oil revenues to the proper beneficiaries,
the rentier class of the US, Britain, and their sub-imperialist satellites.For
those who say Anglo-American forces can’t leave now, for to do so would
leave Iraq in a worst mess than before, the error of their thinking should be
clear: The longer the occupation continues, the more miserable and more thoroughly
exploited become the lives of Iraqis, and the more the occupation advances toward
the achievement of its final goals.
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