Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: In Iraq, senza vergogna

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040712&s=klein
LOOKOUT by Naomi Klein
Shameless in Iraq
Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the
$18.4 billion in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can
meet. Sure, electricity is below prewar levels, streets are rivers of sewage
and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has contracted
with British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from
"assassination, kidnapping, injury and"--get this--"embarrassment." I don't
know if Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent attack,
but embarrassment? I'd say mission already accomplished. The people in
charge of rebuilding Iraq can't be embarrassed, because clearly they have no
shame.
In the run-up to the June 30 underhand (sorry, I can't bring myself to call
it a "handover"), US occupation powers have been unabashed in their efforts
to steal money that is supposed to aid a war-ravaged people. The State
Department has taken $184 million earmarked for drinking water projects and
moved it to the budget for the lavish new US Embassy in Saddam's former
palace. Short $1 billion for the embassy, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage said he might have to "rob from Peter in my fiefdom to pay Paul."
In fact, he is robbing Iraq's people, who, according to a recent study by
Public Citizen, are facing "massive outbreaks of cholera, diarrhea, nausea
and kidney stones" from drinking contaminated water.
If occupation chief Paul Bremer and his staff were capable of embarrassment,
they might be a little sheepish about having spent only $3.2 billion of the
$18.4 billion Congress allotted--the reason the reconstruction is so
disastrously behind schedule. At first, Bremer said the money would be spent
by the time Iraq was sovereign, but apparently someone had a better idea:
Parcel it out over five years so Ambassador John Negroponte can use it as
leverage. With $15 billion outstanding, how likely will Iraq's politicians
be to refuse US demands for military bases and economic "reforms"?
Unwilling to let go of their own money, the shameless ones have had no
qualms about dipping into funds belonging to Iraqis. After losing the fight
to keep control of Iraq's oil money after the underhand, occupation
authorities grabbed $2.5 billion of those revenues and are now spending the
money on projects that are supposedly already covered by US tax dollars.
But then, if financial scandals made you blush, the entire reconstruction of
Iraq would be pretty mortifying. From the start, its architects rejected the
idea that it should be a New Deal-style public works project for Iraqis to
reclaim their country. Instead, it was treated as an ideological experiment
in privatization. The dream was for multinational firms, mostly from the
United States, to swoop in and dazzle the Iraqis with their speed and
efficiency.
Iraqis saw something else: desperately needed jobs going to Americans,
Europeans and South Asians; roads crowded with trucks shipping in supplies
produced in foreign plants, while Iraqi factories were not even supplied
with emergency generators. As a result, the reconstruction was seen not as a
recovery from war but as an extension of the occupation, a foreign invasion
of a different sort. And so, as the resistance grew, the reconstruction
itself became a prime target.
The contractors have responded by behaving even more like an invading army,
building elaborate fortresses in the Green Zone and surrounding themselves
with mercenaries. And being hated is expensive. According to the latest
estimates, security costs are eating up 25 percent of reconstruction
contracts--money not being spent on hospitals, water-treatment plants or
telephone exchanges.
Meanwhile, insurance brokers selling sudden-death policies to contractors in
Iraq have doubled their premiums, with insurance costs reaching 30 percent
of payroll. That means many companies are spending half their budgets arming
and insuring themselves against the people they are supposedly in Iraq to
help. And according to an estimate by Charles Adwan of Transparency
International, quoted on NPR's Marketplace, "At least 20 percent of US
spending in Iraq is lost to corruption." How much is actually left over for
reconstruction? Don't do the math.
Rather than models of speed and efficiency, the contractors look more like
overbilling, underperforming, lumbering beasts, barely able to move for fear
of the hatred they have helped generate. The problem goes well beyond the
latest reports of Halliburton drivers abandoning $85,000 trucks on the road
because they don't carry spare tires. Private contractors are also accused
of playing leadership roles in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A
landmark class-action lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights
alleges that the Titan Corporation and CACI International conspired with US
officials to "humiliate, torture and abuse persons" to increase demand for
their "interrogation services."
And then there's Aegis, the company being paid $293 million to save the PMO
from embarrassment. It turns out that Aegis's CEO, Tim Spicer, has a bit of
an embarrassing past himself. In the 1990s, he was secretly employed by the
government of Papua New Guinea to put down rebels and hatched a plan to
break an arms embargo in Sierra Leone.
If Iraq's occupiers were capable of feeling shame, they might have responded
by imposing tough new regulations. Instead, Senate Republicans just defeated
an attempt to bar private contractors from interrogating prisoners and also
voted down a proposal to impose stiffer penalties on contractors who
overbill. Meanwhile, the White House is also trying to get immunity from
prosecution for US contractors in Iraq and has requested the exemption from
the new Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi.
It seems likely that Allawi will agree, since he is, after all, a kind of US
contractor himself: A former CIA spy, he is already threatening to declare
martial law, while his Defense Minister says of resistance fighters, "We
will cut off their hands, and we will behead them." In a final feat of
outsourcing, Iraqi governance has been subcontracted to even more brutal
surrogates. Is this embarrassing, after an invasion to overthrow a
dictatorship? Not at all--this is what the occupiers call "sovereignty." The
Aegis guys can relax: Embarrassment is not going to be an issue.

covered by US tax dollars.
Altra affermazione da credere sulla fiducia :)
E via via di seguito.
-Stefano