War is good for business

Who else shares my six-year-old feeling that we've entered the 21st century at the mercy of a gang of greedy, power-hungry amoral thugs, who have their blood-soaked hands firmly gripped around the levers of American, and world, power?

Last week I said this to a friend who agreed, and added that coupled with the sense of anger he has at a world gone wrong, is the feeling of helplessness that comes with the knowledge that few or none of the outlaws in control will ever be brought to justice.

Note for a moment in the above photo, the dress sense of L. Paul Bremer, former Iraq governor on behalf of George W. Bush. Nothing encapsulates the age in which we now live better than the business-suit-and-army-boots: if the Iraq War has made some American corporations richer, it's because their power and influence has been helpfully extended by co-opting a new security service known as the United States Military.

And note for a moment also, the inevitable outcome, in the photo below.



Bremer has been criticized for many things during his time as Iraq boss in the immediate 'post-war' period, but what few media outlets reported was his unusual attention to an unusual area of Iraqi governance: the corporate tax laws:

"In September [2003], to entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, [Bremer] enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years." [Harper's Magazine, September 2004]

All American pronouncements on freeing the Iraqi people from the yoke of Saddam Hussein were and are mere empty words. Iraq was "open for business," Bremer also said two weeks after arriving in Baghdad, and around the world (again, barely reported by any media outlets) Iraq trade fairs hung out banners inviting multinationals to an unprecedented capitalist feast: not just a new market, but an entire country up for grabs, with no restrictions on corporations' actions.

The people who put this policy into action can be admired for one thing: the sheer vast scale of this enterprise, unprecedented since perhaps the first British imperialists gazed upon their rudimentary world maps and saw, not other people's lands, but stuff to be grabbed.

But sometimes people, mere people, get in the way of the most ambtious of plans. Bremer's first action as governor of Iraq was this: "he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers." [Harper's Magazine, September 2004]

Imagine how state or federal employees in this country would react if suddenly relieved of their jobs, income, pensions, well-being, sense of pride in their work, source of economic provision for their families, and then imagine if the lay-offs came at the behest of a foreign military occupation. American soldiers are dying in Iraq not because of some shady group of America-hating, beyond-the-pale 'terrorists.' They are being killed by the people who had the misfortune to get in the way of the biggest American corporate business opportunity since the West was won.

This is crime of monstrous proportions. No one who is really and truly responsible for it will ever be brought to justice. Have a nice day.