The
Sunday Times International
|
||||
The
launch of a new section While we take giant strides in science and technology, solving problem after problem and even offering IT solutions to future problems, we have not succeeded in finding solutions to age-old problems such as poverty and conflicts between man and man, community and community and state and state. What do all the scientific and technological advancements mean to hundreds of millions of people who go hungry to bed today, not knowing whether they will eat tomorrow and to those people who are caught up in wars imposed on them? Hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people in economically Third World countries die of starvation while the rich countries dump their excess production in the sea. We think colonialism is a thing of the past, but millions of people live under occupation, while big powers draw up neo-colonialist plans to plunder the Third World's resources. Why is there chaos in this world and who is to be blamed? Is politics the root cause of every evil? Don't blame politics because politics is what the behaviour of humans illustrates it to be. This definition presupposes that politics is all about human behaviour, when human beings, who, according to Aristotle are political animals, rule, rob, contest, obey, persuade, compromise, promise, cooperate, bargain, coerce, represent, fight or fear. There are others who say politics is all about a struggle for power. In this power struggle in the pursuit of self, group or national interests, political actors lie, cheat, plunder, torture and even kill. Follow TV or radio news or read newspapers, and you will find plenty of examples. For political actors, violence is a means or a necessary evil to achieve power, which is their ultimate goal and which every political actor believes should be achieved, maintained, defended and enhanced. Power is not only measured by one's military capabilities but also by one's economic strength. Once puffed with power, the belief that to be just is to be strong is replaced by the belief that to be strong is to be just. As opposed to this self-serving nature of politics, peace activists insist that politics should be the art of good governance, with justice, equality and fairplay at its core. Power-hungry politics reduces political actors and human beings to the level of beasts. But politics based on moral principles can lead to global peace and national and international harmony. Like
every social concept, politics, too, is mired in a definitional
problem. But the definitional topic is rekindled here for us to
draw our own conclusions as to who stands where and who pursues
what policy and for what. Apart from this, another major problem facing us today is terrorism, which is bogged down not only in a definitional problem but also in hypocrisy and conspiracy theories. Although Saddam Hussein's Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror which first visited Afghanistan assumed "shock-and-awe" proportions to destroy Iraq. Three years after the Bush regime's invasion, Iraq, which has the world's second largest oil reserve, is on the verge of a civil war on sectarian lines. Billions of dollars are being pumped in and pumped out of Iraq apparently for rebuilding purposes. But ask any Iraqi person and he or she will say that life under Saddam was far better. The more we read about Iraq, the more answers we seek. The power games that nations play have spread far and wide and in this game you are either a beneficiary or a victim. The development in Iraq reflects in microcosm what is happening elsewhere in the world, including our own region — South Asia. The Sunday Times International does not take sides in reporting or commenting about the big power political games. Our loyalty is towards you and we are bound by the principles of objective journalism to serve you. We welcome your comments on our new section and we are also more than willing to publish your comments on international issues provided it is short and to the point. We wish you an illuminating and exciting journey through our pages. - Ameen Izzadeen "Iraq
was awash in cash. We played football with bricks of $100 bills" At
the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was
placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The
money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of
the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized
Iraqi assets, was to be used in a "transparent manner",
specified the UN, for "purposes benefiting the people of Iraq". Diwaniyah is a sprawling and neglected city with just one small state paediatric and maternity hospital to serve its one million people. Years of war, corruption under Saddam and western sanctions have reduced the hospital to penury, so when last year the Americans promised total refurbishment, the staff were elated. But the renovation has been partial and the work often shoddy, and where it really matters - funding frontline health care - there appears to have been little change at all. In the corridor, an anxious father who has been told his son may have meningitis is berating the staff. "I want a good hospital, not a terrible hospital that makes my child worse," he says. But then he calms down. "I'm not blaming you, we are the same class. I'm talking about important people. Those controlling all those millions and the oil. They didn't come here to save us from Saddam, they came here for the oil, and so now the oil is stolen and we got nothing from it." Beside him another parent, a woman, agrees: "If the people who run the country are stealing the money, what can we do?" For these ordinary Iraqis, it is clear that the country's wealth is being managed in much the same way as it ever was. How did it all go so wrong? When
the coalition troops arrived in Iraq, they were received with remarkable
goodwill by significant sections of the population. The coalition
had control up to a point and, perhaps more importantly, it had
the money to consolidate that goodwill by rebuilding Iraq, or at
least make a significant start. Best of all for the US and its allies,
the money came from the Iraqis themselves. "Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money," says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. "We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced." The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. "American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone," says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. "In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did." A good example was the the Iraqi currency exchange programme (Ice). An early priority was to devote enormous resources to replacing every single Iraqi dinar showing Saddam's face with new ones that didn't. The contract to help distribute the new currency was won by Custer Battles, a small American security company set up by Scott Custer and former Republican Congressional candidate Mike Battles. Under the terms of the contract, they would invoice the coalition for their costs and charge 25% on top as profit. But Custer Battles also set up fake companies to produce inflated invoices, which were then passed on to the Americans. They might have got away with it, had they not left a copy of an internal spreadsheet behind after a meeting with coalition officials. The spreadsheet showed the company's actual costs in one column and their invoiced costs in another; it revealed, in one instance, that it had charged $176,000 to build a helipad that actually cost $96,000. In fact, there was no end to Custer Battles' ingenuity. For example, when the firm found abandoned Iraqi Airways fork-lifts sitting in Baghdad airport, it resprayed them and rented them to the coalition for thousands of dollars. In total, in return for $3m of actual expenditure, Custer Battles invoiced for $10m. Perhaps more remarkable is that the US government, once it knew about the scam, took no legal action to recover the money. It has been left to private individuals to pursue the case, the first stage of which concluded two weeks ago when Custer Battles was ordered to pay more than $10m in damages and penalties. But this is just one story among many. From one US controlled vault in a former Saddam palace, $750,000 was stolen. In another, a safe was left open. In one case, two American agents left Iraq without accounting for nearly $1.5m. Perhaps most puzzling of all is what happened as the day approached for the handover of power (and the remaining funds) to the incoming Iraqi interim government. Instead of carefully conserving the Iraqi money for the new government, the Coalition Provisional Authority went on an extraordinary spending spree. Some $5bn was committed or spent in the last month alone, very little of it adequately accounted for. One CPA official was given nearly $7m and told to spend it in seven days. "He told our auditors that he felt that there was more emphasis on the speed of spending the money than on the accountability for that money," says Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction. Not all coalition officials were so honest. Last month Robert Stein Jr, employed as a CPA comptroller in south central Iraq, despite a previous conviction for fraud, pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal more than $2m and taking kickbacks in the form of cars, jewellery, cash and sexual favours. It seems certain he is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a further 50 criminal investigations under way. Back in Diwaniyah it is a story about failure and incompetence, rather than fraud and corruption. Zahara and Abbas, born one and a half months premature, are suffering from respiratory distress syndrome and are desperately ill. The hospital has just 14 ancient incubators, held together by tape and wire. Zahara is in a particularly bad way. She needs a ventilator and drugs to help her breathe, but the hospital has virtually nothing. Her father has gone into town to buy vitamin K on the black market, which he has been told his children will need. Zahara starts to deteriorate and in desperation the doctor holds a tube pumping unregulated oxygen against the child's nostrils. "This treatment is worse than primitive," he says. "It's not even medicine." Despite his efforts, the little girl dies; the next day her brother also dies. Yet with the right equipment and the right drugs, they could have survived. How is it possible that after three years of occupation and billions of dollars of spending, hospitals are still short of basic supplies? Part of the cause is ideological tunnel-vision. For months before the war the US state department had been drawing up plans for the postwar reconstruction, but those plans were junked when the Pentagon took over. To supervise the reconstruction of the Iraqi health service, the Pentagon appointed James Haveman, a former health administrator from Michigan. He was also a loyal Bush supporter, who had campaigned for Jeb Bush, and a committed evangelical Christian. But he had virtually no experience in international health work. The coalition's health programme was by any standards a failure. Basic equipment and drugs should have been distributed within months - the coalition wouldn't even have had to pay for it. But they missed that chance, not just in health, but in every other area of life in Iraq. As disgruntled Iraqis will often point out, despite far greater devastation and crushing sanctions, Saddam did more to rebuild Iraq in six months after the first Gulf war than the coalition has managed in three years. Kees Reitfield, a health professional with 20 years' experience in post-conflict health care from Kosovo to Somalia, was in Iraq from the very beginning of the war and looked on in astonishment at the US management in its aftermath. "Everybody in Iraq was ready for three months' chaos," he says. "They had water for three months, they had food for three months, they were ready to wait for three months. I said, we've got until early August to show an improvement, some drugs in the health centres, some improvement of electricity in the grid, some fuel prices going down. Failure to deliver will mean civil unrest." He was right. Of course, no one can say that if the Americans had got the reconstruction right it would have been enough. There were too many other mistakes as well, such as a policy of crude "deBa'athification" that saw Iraqi expertise marginalised, the creation of a sectarian government and the Americans attempting to foster friendship with Iraqis who themselves had no friends among other Iraqis. Another
experienced health worker, Mary Patterson - who was eventually asked
to leave Iraq by James Haveman - characterises the Coalition's approach
thus: "I believe it had a lot to do with showing that the US
was in control," she says. "I believe that it had to do
with rewarding people that were politically loyal. So rather than
being a technical agenda, I believe it was largely a politically
motivated reward-and-punishment kind of agenda." - Courtesy The Guardian, UK
On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished. But
don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney,
accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten
what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman
Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching
of what he called, O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's OIF. "It's
about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the
CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month
before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's
former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating"
Iraq's oil industry. In London, Bush's emissary Ebel also instructed
Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the man the Pentagon would choose as post-OIF
oil minister for Iraq, on the correct method of disposing Iraq's
crude. The answer will surprise many of you: and it is uglier, more twisted, devilish and devious than anything imagined by the most conspiracy-addicted blogger. The answer can be found in a 323-page plan for Iraq's oil secretly drafted by the State Department. Our team got a hold of a copy; how, doesn't matter. The key thing is what's inside this thick Bush diktat: a directive to Iraqis to maintain a state oil company that will "enhance its relationship with OPEC." Enhance its relationship with OPEC??? How strange: the government of the United States ordering Iraq to support the very OPEC oil cartel which is strangling our nation with outrageously high prices for crude. Specifically, the system ordered up by the Bush cabal would keep a lid on Iraq's oil production -- limiting Iraq's oil pumping to the tight quota set by Saudi Arabia and the OPEC cartel. There you have it. Yes, Bush went in for the oil -- not to get MORE of Iraq's oil, but to prevent Iraq producing TOO MUCH of it. You must keep in mind who paid for George's ranch and Dick's bunker: Big Oil. And Big Oil -- and their buck-buddies, the Saudis -- don't make money from pumping more oil, but from pumping LESS of it. The lower the supply, the higher the price. It's Economics 101. The oil industry is run by a cartel, OPEC, and what economists call an "oligopoly" -- a tiny handful of operators who make more money when there's less oil, not more of it. So, every time the "insurgents" blow up a pipeline in Basra, every time Mahmoud in Tehran threatens to cut supply, the price of oil leaps. And Dick and George just LOVE it. Dick and George didn't want more oil from Iraq, they wanted less. I know some of you, no matter what I write, insist that our President and his Veep are on the hunt for more crude so you can cheaply fill your family Hummer; that somehow, these two oil-patch babies are concerned that the price of gas in the USA is bumping up to $3 a gallon. No so, gentle souls. Three bucks a gallon in the States (and a quid a litre in Britain) means colossal profits for Big Oil, and that makes Dick's ticker go pitty-pat with joy. The top oily-gopolists, the five largest oil companies, pulled in $113 billion in profit in 2005 -- compared to a piddly $34 billion in 2002 before Operation Iraqi Liberation. In other words, it's been a good war for Big Oil. As per Plan Bush, Bahr Al-Ulum became Iraq's occupation oil minister; the conquered nation "enhanced its relationship with OPEC;" and the price of oil, from Clinton peace-time to Bush war-time, shot up 317%. In other words, on the third anniversary of invasion, we can say the attack and occupation is, indeed, a Mission Accomplished. However, it wasn't America's mission, nor the Iraqis'. It was a Mission Accomplished for OPEC and Big Oil. Courtesy The Guardian, UK |
||||
Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
