THE HANDSTAND

JUNE 2003

  Article: Repressive Regime Takeover for Saddam -- Meet the New Boss...Same as the Old One
The shaping of a repressive colonial regime
By Bill Vann
3 May 2003

The Bush administration has selected L. Paul Bremer, the former 'counter-terrorism ambassador' of the Reagan administration, to become the top US official overseeing the creation of a new puppet regime in Iraq.

Media reaction to the announcement has focused almost entirely on the internecine disputes between the State Department and the Pentagon. Most press reports have asserted that with the ascendancy of a former career diplomat, Secretary of State Colin Powell has scored a victory against his powerful rivals headed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  There no doubt exist bitter divisions within the administration over strategy and tactics in Iraq. It became increasingly clear, moreover, that retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, selected by Rumsfeld to head a Pentagon-controlled Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, was far out of his depth in attempting to forge a US-controlled 'transitional government' in the face of massive popular opposition.

Yet Bremer's selection is significant above all for what it reveals about the nature of the regime that Washington is seeking to create. The question must be asked: what precisely are this man's qualifications to oversee the Bush administration's purported goal of establishing 'a government of, by and for the Iraqi people?'

While Bremer served for 23 years as a career State Department diplomat, he has enjoyed the closest ties to the right wing of the Republican Party for at least two decades. In 1981, then-President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State Alexander Haig appointed him as his special assistant in charge of the department's 'crisis management' center. Four years later, he was named ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, responsible for developing and implementing US policies to combat terrorism. It was during this period that Washington labeled the African National Congress of South Africa and virtually every other national liberation movement as 'terrorist' organizations.

It was on Bremer's watch that the Reagan administration ordered US warplanes to carry out a terrorist bombing of Libya killing 40 civilians, including the adopted daughter of the country's leader Muammar Gaddafi. In an earlier version of 'preemptive strike,' the administration described the bombing raid as 'self-defense against future attack.'

After leaving the State Department, Bremer joined Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm headed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, where he was named managing director. Among the principal clients of the firm are US multinationals seeking assistance in penetrating foreign markets.

In 1996, Bremer drafted an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled 'Terrorists' friends must pay a price,' in which he called for the Clinton administration to deliver ultimatums to and then launch unprovoked military attacks against countries throughout the Middle East.The countries that he said should be targeted included Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan. Curiously, Iraq was omitted.

In 1999, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives placed Bremer in charge of a commission on terrorism, largely as a means of goading the Clinton administration on issues of national security.
In October 2001, he became the chairman and CEO of the Crisis Consulting Practice of Marsh Inc, a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies that advises corporations on threats of terrorism and other potential crises.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Bremer became increasingly involved as an advisor to the administration. He headed a panel on counterterrorism formed by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank close to the Bush White House.

His principal advice consisted of ending restrictions on the CIA going back to the 1975 Church Commission, which investigated the agency's involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders and the overthrow of elected governments. He also called for the lifting of rules requiring CIA agents in the field to obtain permission from higher-ups in the agency before placing known killers on the agency's payroll.

Earlier this year, Bremer participated with ex-CIA Director James Woolsey in a 'teach-in' organized by a group called 'Americans for Victory over Terrorism' and the UCLA student Republicans. It was at that conference that Woolsey, a close associate of Bremer, described the ongoing 'war on terrorism' as the 'fourth world war,' predicting that it would last far longer than either World War I or World War II.

'Over the decades to come,' he said, '...we will make a lot of people very nervous.' Referring to various Arab leaders, he added, 'We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march.' Woolsey, one of the most vociferous proponents of the US war on Iraq, is reportedly been considered for a leading role as well in the Iraqi 'reconstruction' operation.

Deflating the widespread reports about Bremer's appointment representing a victory for Powell and 'moderation,' the Washington Post noted: 'But Bremer, 61, is described as a hard-nosed hawk who is close to the neoconservative wing of the Pentagon. He is supported by Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, officials said, and White House aides said the appointment affirms Bush's satisfaction with Pentagon control over Iraq until a new government is in place.'

General Garner, meanwhile, will reportedly stay on, reporting to Bremer. He is supposedly in charge of repairing Iraq's infrastructure and seeing to humanitarian needs. He has repeatedly insisted, however, that the country faces no real problems. 'There is no humanitarian crisis ... and there's not much infrastructure problem here, other than getting the electrical grid structure back together,' he told reporters earlier this week.

Shortly after Garner made this remark, a coalition of eight major international relief organizations issued a statement implicitly criticizing apparent US indifference to a major humanitarian crisis developing in the country.The statement said in part: 'Already under severe strain and under-resourced before the war began, hospitals, water plants and sewage systems have been crippled by the conflict and looting.'Hospitals are overwhelmed, diarrhea is endemic and the death toll is mounting. Medical and water staff are working for free, but cannot continue for long. Rubbish, including medical waste, is piling up. Clean water is scarce and diseases like typhoid are being reported in southern Iraq.'

Garner and the US occupation forces are deliberately covering up this crisis in an attempt to stifle any questioning of US activities in Iraq and to prevent any international agencies from getting in the way of the fulfillment of US war aims.

The general began his military career as a US Army 'advisor' supervising the 'strategic hamlet' program during the Vietnam War in which tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants were forced off their land and driven into concentration camps surrounded by barbed-wire. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Garner commented: 'If President Bush had been president we would have won' the Vietnam War, adding that the US could have invaded the North.

This is the face that America is presenting to the people of Iraq. The task of Bremer and Garner is to quickly patch together a figurehead Iraqi regime made up of former Ba'athists and anyone else who can be bought. The job of this regime will be to legitimize continued US military occupation
"IN THE AGE OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT,TELLING THE TRUTH IS A REVOLUTIONARY ACT" 
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STOPPRESS
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030623&s=klein

Lookout by Naomi Klein
The Nation - June , 2003

The streets of Baghdad are a swamp of crime and uncollected garbage. Battered local businesses are going bankrupt, unable to compete with cheap imports. Unemployment is soaring and thousands of laid-off state workers are protesting in the streets.

In other words, Iraq looks like every other country that has undergone rapid-fire "structural adjustments" prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous "shock therapy" in the early 1990s to Argentina's disastrous "surgery without anesthetic." Except that Iraq's "reconstruction" makes those wrenching reforms look like spa treatments.

Paul Bremer, the US-appointed governor of Iraq, has already proved something of a flop in the democracy department in his few weeks there, nixing plans for Iraqis to select their own interim government in favor of his own handpicked team of advisers. But Bremer has proved to have
something of a gift when it comes to rolling out the red carpet for US multinationals.

For a few weeks Bremer has been hacking away at Iraq's public sector like former Sunbeam exec "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap in a flak jacket. On May 16 Bremer banned up to 30,000 senior Baath Party officials from government jobs. A week later, he dissolved the army and the information ministry, putting more than 400,000 Iraqis out of work without pensions or re-employment programs.

Of course, if Saddam Hussein's henchmen and propagandists held on to power in Iraq it would be a human rights disaster. "De-Baathification," as the purging of party officials has come to be called, may be the only way to prevent a comeback by Saddam's crew--and the only silver lining of George Bush's illegal war.

But Bremer has gone far beyond purging powerful Baath loyalists and moved into a full-scale assault on the state itself. Doctors who joined the party as children and have no love for Saddam face dismissal, while low-level civil servants with no ties to the party have been fired en
masse. Nuha Najeeb, who ran a Baghdad printing house, told Reuters, "I...had nothing to do with Saddam's media, so why am I sacked?"

As the Bush Administration becomes increasingly open about its plans to privatize Iraq's state industries and parts of the government, Bremer's de-Baathification takes on new meaning. Is he working only to get rid of Baath Party members, or is he also working to shrink the public sector as a whole so that hospitals, schools and even the army are primed for privatization by US firms? Just as reconstruction is the guise for privatization, de-Baathification looks a lot like disguised downsizing.

Similar questions arise from Bremer's chainsaw job on Iraqi companies, already pummeled by almost thirteen years of sanctions and two months of looting. Bremer didn't even wait to get the lights back on in Baghdad, for the dinar to stabilize or for the spare parts to arrive for Iraq's hobbled factories before he declared on May 26 that Iraq was "open for business." Duty-free imported TVs and packaged food flooded across the border, pushing many stressed Iraqi businesses, unable to compete, into bankruptcy. This is how Iraq joined the global "free market": in the dark.

Paul Bremer is, according to Bush, a "can-do" type of person. Indeed he is. In less than a month he has readied large swaths of state activity for corporate takeover, primed the Iraqi market for foreign importers to make a killing by eliminating much of the local competition and made sure there won't be any unpleasant Iraqi government interference--in fact, he's made sure there will be no Iraqi government atall while key economic decisions are made. Bremer is Iraq's one-man IMF.

Like so many Bush foreign policy players, Bremer sees war as a business opportunity. On October 11, 2001, just one month after the terror attacks in New York and Washington, Bremer, once Ronald Reagan's Ambassador at Large for counterterrorism, launched a company designed to capitalize on the new atmosphere of fear in US corporate boardrooms. Crisis Consulting Practice, a division of insurance giant Marsh & McLennan, specializes in helping multinationals come up with "integrated and comprehensive crisis solutions" for everything from terror attacks to accounting fraud. Thanks to a strategic alliance with Versar, which specializes in biological and chemical threats, clients of the two companies are treated to "total counterterrorism services."
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> To sell this sort of high-priced protection to US firms, Bremer had to make the kinds of frank links between terrorism and the failing global economy that activists are called lunatics for articulating. In a November 2001 policy paper titled "New Risks in International Business," he explains that free-trade policies "require laying off workers. And opening markets to foreign trade puts enormous pressure on traditional retailers and trade monopolies." This leads to "growing income gaps and social tensions," which in turn can lead to a range of attacks on US firms, from terrorism to government attempts to reverse privatizations or roll back trade incentives.

He could be describing the backlash his own policies are provoking in Iraq. But then guys like Bremer always know how to play both sides. Like a hacker who cripples corporate websites then sells himself as a network security specialist, in a few months Bremer may well be selling terrorism insurance to the very companies he welcomed into Iraq.

And why not? As Bremer told his clients back at Marsh, globalization may have "immediate negative consequences for many," but it also leads to "the creation of unprecedented wealth." It has for Bremer and his cronies. On May 15, three days after he arrived in Iraq, his former boss, MMC chairman Jeffrey Greenberg, announced that 2002 "was a great year for Marsh; operating income was up
31 percent.... Marsh's expertise in analyzing risk and helping clients develop risk management programs has been in great demand.... Our prospects have never been better."

Many have pointed out that Bremer is no expert on Iraqi politics. But that was never the point. He is an expert at profiting from the war on terror and at helping US multinationals make money in far-off places where they are unpopular and unwelcome. In other words, he's the perfect man for the job.

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