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TRANSCRIPT: -
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is an author who has
been tracking the Bush administration's goals in Iraq since
the invasion. Antonia Juhasz has written about them in a new
book. It's called The Bush Agenda: Invading the World,
One Economy at a Time. The book tracks the radical
neo-liberal economic program the Bush administration has
tried to impose on Iraq, which threatens to leave Iraq's
economy and oil reserves largely in the hands of
multinational corporations. It's an agenda, says Antonia
Juhasz, that the Bush administration is trying to bring to
all corners of the globe.
Antonia Juhasz joins us in our Firehouse
studio. She’s a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy
Studies. For years she was Project Director at the
International Forum on Globalization. Welcome to Democracy
Now!
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thanks for having me,
Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on
this book.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the
leadership of Iraq?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, I would argue
that the most important member of the new leadership is Adel
Abdel Mahdi, who has been in every U.S.-appointed Iraqi
government post-the-invasion. He was the Finance Minister of
the interim government, the Vice President of the
transitional government and was just named Vice President of
the permanent government. He was actually the man that the
Bush administration wanted to be the new prime minister of
Iraq. The deal that was worked out was that another member
of the Dawa Party, just like Mr. Jaafari, would become prime
minister, and then Mahdi, who is a member of the SCIRI
Party, would be vice president.
It’s a position that allows him to continue
to be the most aggressive advocate of the Bush agenda in
Iraq, which I argue is opening Iraq -- continuing to open
Iraq to U.S. corporate invasion. Currently, 150 U.S.
corporations have received $50 billion worth of contracts,
as you said in the introduction, to utterly fail in
reconstruction in Iraq, but the money has still been
granted. And Mahdi is the person who advanced Paul Bremer's
one hundred orders in Iraq that opened up the economy. But
more importantly to the Bush administration, he is the
person who has most aggressively pushed their agenda for a
new oil law in Iraq, which would open up Iraq’s oil sector,
the vast majority of Iraq's oil sector, to private foreign
corporate investment.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the
Bremer orders. You spend a lot of time in the book on them.
Can you talk about Paul Bremer, Bremer's blueprint by
BearingPoint, the orders themselves?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. You know, in
the report that you were quoting in the beginning of the
hour, which said that the reconstruction failed because of
poor planning, it’s a myth that there was not a post-war
planning done by the Bush administration. The reason why it
failed was because the interests it was serving were U.S.
multinationals, not reconstruction in Iraq.
That plan was ready two months before the
invasion. It was written by BearingPoint, Inc., a company
based in Virginia that received a $250 million contract to
rewrite the entire economy of Iraq. It drafted that new
economy. That new economy was put into place systematically
by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupation government of
Iraq for 14 months, who implemented exactly one hundred
orders, basically all of which are still in place today. And
everyone who is watching who is familiar with the policies
of the World Trade Organization, the North American Free
Trade Agreement, the World Bank, the I.M.F., will understand
the orders.
They implement some of the most radical
corporate globalization ideas, such as free investment rules
for multinational corporations. That means corporations can
enter Iraq, and they essentially don't have to contribute at
all to the economy of Iraq. The most harmful provision thus
far has been the national treatment provision, which meant
that the Iraqis could not give preference to Iraqi companies
or workers in the reconstruction, and therefore, U.S.
companies received preference in the reconstruction. They
hired workers who weren't even from Iraq, in most cases, and
utterly bungled the reconstruction.
And the most important company, in my mind,
to receive blame is the Bechtel Corporation of San
Francisco. They have received $2.8 billion to rebuild water,
electricity and sewage systems, the most important systems
in the life of an Iraqi. After the first Gulf War, the
Iraqis rebuilt these systems in three months' time. It’s
been three years, and, as you said, those services are still
below pre-war levels.
AMY GOODMAN: BearingPoint. Why have
we never heard of this company? Where does it come from?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: BearingPoint was KPMG
Consulting, but had to change its name in the wake of the
Arthur Andersen scandal, but BearingPoint picked up all of
Arthur Andersen's old clientele and is essentially just the
reborn KPMG. And BearingPoint, you probably haven't heard
of, though, because they work in the back room. They write
things like new economic policies, but are not the people
seen on the ground implementing the policies.
Actually, there’s a wonderful story that I
tell in the book by a member of the Coalition Provisional
Authority, the U.S. occupation government in Iraq, who says,
‘One day these people from this place called BearingPoint
came up and started telling us about these economic policies
that were so unrealistic. I didn't know who they were and
what they were talking about.’ Well, what they were talking
about was an economic agenda that seemed completely
ridiculous for the people on the ground who are looking at
sewage flowing through the streets and Iraqis saying over
and over and over again, ‘The most important thing we need
is electricity. Just electricity. Just give us our
electricity back,’ and failing to do it.
But this was BearingPoint, and they are
still there. Their contract was renewed. They’re still
focusing in particular on privatization of Iraq's
state-owned enterprises. That's almost the sole focus of
their current contract, and that contract goes, I believe,
until 2007.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a quote of
Lakhdar Brahimi, who is the U.N. Special Adviser to Iraq. A
few years ago, he said, “Bremer,” talking about L. Paul
Bremer, “is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money. He has
the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this
country.”
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Bremer became the
dictator of Iraq. His orders laid out the law. Now, probably
the most important thing to know is that that was completely
illegal under international law. The Geneva Conventions are
very specific about what an occupying power should do. It
must provide basic security and services. It cannot change
the laws or the political structure of the country it
occupies. The Bush administration did exactly the opposite
-- changed all the fundamental economic and political laws
and utterly failed to provide for the security and the basic
needs of the Iraqi people. What you hear most often in Iraq
today is people saying, “Please just put us back where we
were before you came.”
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Antonia
Juhasz, author and activist, wrote The Bush Agenda:
Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Now, gas is over
$3 in many places. What's the connection?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, here's the
connection. The Bush administration is the most beholden
administration probably in American history to the oil and
gas industry. This is the first time in history that the
President, Vice President and Secretary of State are all
former energy company officials. In fact, both Bush and Rice
have more experience as energy company officials than they
do as government leaders. Cheney outbeats them. He’s spent
30 years working for government. However, his five years at
Halliburton have been so profitable that you might say that
his Halliburton years outweigh their oil years, because Bush
was a very bad oil company executive. But their links to the
oil sector are deep.
The oil industry provided more than 13 times
more money to the Bush-Cheney ticket in the first round of
elections than it did to his competitor, nine times more in
the second. And this industry has been absolutely coddled by
the Bush administration: enormous tax subsidies,
deregulation, and, I would argue, a war waged on their
behalf.
Now, there's two intimate connections
between the war and the price of gas. But first, I think
it’s very important for people to understand that the
vertical integration of the oil industry, which has been
absolutely exacerbated under the Bush administration. For
example, ChevronTexaco and Unocal merging into one company,
the completion of Exxon and Mobil's merger, all of these
little companies merging into enormous behemoths, so that
you have ExxonMobil being the company that has received the
highest profits of any company in the world, over the last
two years, ever in the history of the world. That is because
of the vertical integration and monopoly power of these
companies. That means that they control exploration,
production, refining, marketing and sales.
The price of oil at the pump is about 50%
the price of a barrel of oil, about 25% taxes, and then the
rest is marketing and just the price determined by the
company at the pump. So that means that about 18% to 20% is
absolutely determined by the oil companies themselves and
governed by the companies themselves. So they could reduce
the price of oil and reduce their profit margin, or they
could jack up the price of oil and increase their profit
margin. They have chosen to do the latter.
And one of the things that has helped them
do that is, first of all, the United States is receiving a
tremendous amount of oil from Iraq. Oil is down in overall
export and production, but not tremendously so. We were --
at prewar was 2.5 million barrels a day. We’re now at about
2 or 2.2 million barrels a day. But 50% of that, on average,
is coming to the United States, and it’s being brought to
the United States by Chevron and Exxon and Marathon. The
myth of dramatically reduced supply has helped them create
an argument to the American public, which is, you know, it’s
a time of war, we’re suffering, gas prices are going to go
up, everyone needs to come in and support this because this
is war. Well, that's just not true. The companies are using
that as a myth to help make it okay for them to receive
these utterly ridiculous profits.
AMY GOODMAN: In your chapter "A
Mutual Seduction," you have a quote of Ken Derr, the former
C.E.O. of Chevron, 1998. I know his tenure well. It was the
time in the Niger Delta that Chevron was involved with the
killing of two Nigerian villagers, who were protesting yet
another oil spill of Chevron and jobs not being given to the
local community as they drilled for oil. But your quote here
says, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas, reserves
I would love Chevron to have access to.” And then you follow
that by a quote of John Gibson, Chief Executive of
Halliburton Energy Service Group, who says, “We hope Iraq
will be the first domino and that Libya and Iran will
follow. We don't like being kept out of markets, because it
gives our competitors an unfair advantage.”
ANTONIA JUHASZ: I love it when
they’re honest. It doesn’t happen very often. Yeah, these
companies have been explicit, for decades, that they want
in, particularly to Iraq. The reason is obvious. Iraq
certainly has the second largest oil reserves in the world,
but some geologists believe it has the largest, at least on
par with Saudi Arabia. That's a tremendous pool of wealth.
And not just have the companies been clear that they want
access to that oil, U.S. leaders -- for example, Dick
Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld --
have all been explicit for the past 20 years that what the
U.S. needs to do is gain increased access to the region's
oil, and most explicitly during the ‘90s, Iraq's oil, that
this is something that shouldn’t be in the hands of Saddam
Hussein.
The difference, going into the current Bush
administration, was that the rhetoric changed to and the
reality changed to not just we need a new leader, we need a
new -- a fully new political and economic structure in Iraq,
and we need to be in that country to make sure that that
structure gets put into place. And that is exactly what they
have achieved, and now Halliburton, Chevron, Bechtel,
Lockheed Martin have profited tremendously from this process
already. Chevron’s -- the U.S. value of Iraqi oil, imported
Iraqi oil, has increased by 86% between 2003 and 2004. Those
profits have gone to Exxon, Chevron and Marathon.
Chevron has seen its most profitable years
in its entire 125-year history over the last two years. They
are making out like bandits. They have been at the forefront
of advocating for decades for increased U.S. economic access
to Iraq. And now, they are one of the few companies that are
poised once the new oil law is implemented. And that oil law
has its history in the U.S. State Department, in the Iraqi
Oil and Energy Working Group that formed right before the
war.
A member of that working group whose last
name is Aloum, and I'm blanking on his first name [Ibrahim
Bahr], became Oil Minister of Iraq. He's the man who
eviscerated all of the pre-existing oil contracts that
Saddam Hussein had signed. At the end of Saddam Hussein's
tenure, he had signed about 30 contracts with companies from
all around the world to give them access to Iraq's oil
sector. None of those contracts were with the United States
or U.S. oil companies. The Cheney Energy Task Force, that
met at the very beginning of the Bush administration, mapped
out foreign suitors to Iraqi oil, listed all of the
companies, all of the countries, the fields that they had
access to, within a document that said we need --the U.S.
needs to get greater access to Middle East oil.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who
Cheney met with?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Cheney met with --
thank goodness for the Supreme Court, that ruled to release
these documents, because otherwise they were completely
secret. He met with Bechtel, Chevron, Halliburton, Exxon,
all of the largest oil companies and all of the largest oil
engineering companies, and they decided we need to increase
our access to Middle Eastern oil.
Aloum then became Iraq’s Oil Minister.
AMY GOODMAN: Ibrahim Bahr Al-Aloum.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you very much.
AMY GOODMAN: From your book.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: From my book. It’s
good to remember what's in my book. Canceled all of the
pre-existing oil contracts. Now, Abdel Mahdi has said
several times, “The new oil law, when it’s put in place, is
going to be very good for U.S. oil companies.” Chevron,
Exxon, the other companies are sort of hovering on the
outside. They’ve signed what are called “memoranda of
understanding,” essentially free services. Chevron has been
training Iraqi workers in the United States for years,
mapping -- doing mappings, free services, so that they are
ready, when the permanent government is in place, to sign
contracts. And then, I believe, once those contracts are
signed, they will get to work, but they need security. And
what better security force than 150,000 American troops. And
I do not think that those troops will leave, unless we all
have something to do about it, until the oil companies are
safely at work.
AMY GOODMAN: In our next segment
we’re going to talk about the protest in this country, but I
wanted to ask you about Henry Kissinger and his role in
this.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, Henry Kissinger
is a fascinating character in all realms. He has been
fascinating for me to follow, because in that chapter that
you talked about, “Turning Toward Iraq,” I look at U.S.
business interests and how they aggressively pursued a
greater U.S. relationship with Iraq.
Henry Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates
the same year that Ronald Reagan opened up for first time
economic relationships between the United States and Iraq.
Reagan was the hottest pursuer, until George Bush, Sr. came
onto the team and really pushed for better relationships was
Saddam Hussein. But Kissinger and Associates was a lead
advice --providing advice to multinational corporations on
how to operate abroad, and one of the lead advocates of
enhancing the U.S. economic relationship with Iraq.
Then, one of his managing directors, L. Paul
Bremer, left Kissinger and Associates and went to found his
own crisis management company, which essentially advised
multinational corporations on how to operate under the
horrible consequences of corporate globalization policies.
He wrote a wonderful paper where he said, you know, the
policies of corporate globalization create inequality,
increase the cost of services, creates hostilities, so
corporations, you really need to buy my insurance, because
that's the only way to protect yourself against these
policies. And then he went on and implemented those policies
in Iraq.
But Kissinger aggressively lobbied, as well,
for the second Iraq war and wrote some blistering op-eds, in
particular, arguing for the need to invade. And I would
imagine, although the records of Kissinger Associates are
remarkably secret, that he is now working to help advance
the interests of his companies.
But one of the things that has happened is
that while U.S. companies have received billions of dollars
for the reconstruction, the environment in Iraq is not safe.
It’s not what the Bush administration had hoped for three
years in, and so the companies are sort of waiting on the
edges, just like the oil companies are waiting on the edges,
to take advantage of this new economic environment. While
they wait, however, the U.S. Middle East Free Trade Area
advances, and that's where the trillions of dollars are
already starting to flow.
AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz is our
guest. Her book is The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One
Economy at a Time. You write, “To replace the Bush agenda,
we must address each of its key pillars individually -- war,
imperialism and corporate globalization.” Can you outline
your vision of an alternative to the Bush agenda?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. The last
chapter of the book provides the whole analysis, so I will
do it shortly here. But the most important thing, I guess,
to say at the outset is I believe that we are already doing
this, that we have incredible activist movements that have
made it so that only 30% of the population even trusts the
President today, only 35% even believe in the war -- that is
because of the tremendous organizing that has taken place --
and that what we have to do is enlarge the mobilizing that
we are already doing and just bring more people into the
fold, that what we are doing is working. But the first is,
on the war, obviously, I believe that we have to bring the
troops home. But we also have to bring all of the economic
transformers home, like the BearingPoints. We have to cancel
all of the reconstruction contracts. And we have to make all
those companies give back the money for their failed
reconstruction.
AMY GOODMAN: Make Bechtel give back
$2.8 billion?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: $2.8 billion.
Absolutely. For utterly failing in its contractual
obligations. That’s Parsons with almost -- I'm going to get
the numbers wrong -- with $5 billion, Shaw Group
International with something like $5 billion. And these are
all companies that should sound familiar to people who are
following the reconstruction in New Orleans. And these
companies are also failing in New Orleans. They shouldn't
get our money if they fail. If they did a great job, they
can have my money -- I'm fine with that -- but not if they
utterly fail and create more hatred and animosity towards
the United States. So they need to give back their money.
And that money, I believe, needs to be put
into a reconstruction trust fund that is directed
exclusively towards Iraqi companies and Iraqi workers, and
in the book I outline the dozens, if not hundreds, of Iraqi
private and public companies that are more than capable of
performing this work -- they just need money -- and the
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers who are absolutely
capable of performing this work. The money just needs to get
to them.
AMY GOODMAN: I think most people
would be surprised hearing you say this.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: That Iraqi soldiers are
not ready, and certainly they hear nothing about the Iraqi
business community or corporations that could be involved in
this reconstruction.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Absolutely. I mean,
there are hundreds of state-owned enterprises, factories,
consulting businesses, engineers. After the first Gulf War,
Iraqi engineers rebuilt bridges, roads, electricity, water.
All of these -- as I said, both private and public companies
are still there.
What happened with the soldiers isn't that
they weren’t capable of being soldiers. It’s that Paul
Bremer fired the entire Iraqi army in his first week of
being in Iraq. Half a million men were sent home with their
weapons into an unemployment environment that was 50% to 70%
unemployment. They then were joined by 120,000 of Iraq's
leading bureaucrats, who were also all fired by Paul Bremer
at the beginning of the occupation, because he didn’t want
people to stand in the way of his new economic regime.
They all then watched as American companies
came in and took billions of dollars in reconstruction money
and failed. And it created enormous hostility and anger. And
of the half a million men that were members of the Iraqi
army, only some 200,000, at the best, are now back in the
military, and they’re being trained under the American
occupiers, and there's tremendous hostility still. So I
don't think that the Iraqis are poor soldiers. I think
they’re pissed at the occupation, and they are also facing
an incredibly hostile environment within which they are
working. And so, they’re having a difficult time. Again,
that was a private company that made the decision to fire
the Iraqi military. Ronco Consulting had the contract of
what to do with the military, and they’re the ones, I
imagine, that decided they should all be fired.
So, reconstruction can happen. The money
just needs to get to the Iraqis. I also think that there is
just some tremendous work that's been done by groups around
the world who have followed reconstruction, that have
demonstrated that the more local the decision-making is in a
post-war country, the more likely you’re going to get to see
reconstruction really hit where it needs to be met and the
more likely people are going to commit to a locality, so, as
much as possible, directing reconstruction funds down,
devolving them to the local level and disbursing the
reconstruction funds not in one huge spurt so that you get a
wild west mentality, which is ‘We’ve got to spend it now,
we’ve got to spend it fast,’ which breeds corruption, when
suddenly $50 billion is dropped into anyone's lap, but to
disburse it and make it a guaranteed amount over even ten,
even fifteen years, so that the reconstruction can be done
thoughtfully, and again, so that it can devolve to the local
level.
And I say, because I believe, unfortunately,
that the new Iraqi government is simply not reflective of
the people of Iraq -- however, it is the Iraqi government --
that there should be an international monitoring board that
partners with the Iraqi government, made up of
non-governmental groups with specific knowledge in
reconstruction, obviously Iraqi civil society groups and
people from the appropriate United Nations offices that have
expertise, and maybe one representative of the United States
government, since most of the money would be U.S. taxpayer
money, but certainly not with, you know, oversight over the
rest of the every member of the committee.
AMY GOODMAN: And the troops? The U.S.
troops?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: U.S. troops have to
be withdrawn. There’s just no -- there's no way around it.
It’s not going to be pretty. And I think we fool ourselves
if we say peace will rain on Iraq as soon as the U.S.
soldiers leave. But it is still unquestionable that U.S.
troops are creating more hostility than they are solving.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll have to
leave it there. In our next segment, talk about the peace
protests in this country. Antonia Juhasz has been our guest.
Her book is called The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One
Economy at a Time. Thank you for joining us.
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you, Amy.
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