Democracy? Or Something Else?

President G.W. Bush has done his vision thing. He claims that his vision is to bring democracy to the Middle East. But his record in Iraq tells a different story. There he is bringing a particular kind of imitation democracy: the kind with pay-to-play elections, and above all, one dominated by the military corporate political complex, with global corporations as the dominant governors and beneficiaries. It is a corporate democracy without labor unions, or protection for workers, families or the environment.


What's going wrong in Iraq? Bloody political struggles, vicious guerilla warfare, the chaos of the tragically unforeseen or just inadequate planning, the accumulating consequences of self-righteousness and hubris---all these are widely reported and discussed. But just reading the newspaper and surfing the net yields another answer, as bitter as any and more familiar than most: greed.

The dots are there to be connected. They outline a portrait of corporate greed, arm-in-arm with political greed, an all-too familiar marriage in America, now being exported instead of democracy.

The United States government has taken on the responsibility of running and rebuilding Iraq. But even now, some 70% of the Iraqi workforce is unemployed. High unemployment preceded the war to some extent, but there were government subsidies for basic needs that now are gone. The army of some 400,000 men was disbanded, without pay or pension. The country's manufacturing has shut down. Basic services like electricity and water are still spotty and uncertain. For a society with a substantial middle class, with an urbanized and educated population, this is catastrophe. This is slow motion forest fire, combined with daily earthquakes.

And, of course, it is recipe for violence. For the angry and desperate, modern arms are easily obtained. It is apparently easy to steal as well from virtually unguarded American ammo dumps; military manpower has reportedly been diverted to searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction. This is not to claim that all the violence is spontaneous and unorganized, nor to attempt to identify any of the perpetrators.

What is the American occupation doing about all this? Apart from recruiting for a security force and hiring a few Iraqis to pick up trash and scour sewers for paltry wages, the U.S. is providing a huge object lesson in how corporate democracy works.

Most of large contracts for Iraq's reconstruction have gone to a small number of U.S. corporations, and as the Center for Public Integrity recently reported, most were large donors to the Bush 2000 campaign. The corporations with the closest ties to Bush and members of his administration are among those reaping the biggest benefits.

San Francisco based Bechtel and its subsidiaries alone got 10 contracts worth more than $1 billion. (Several of its officials serve on important Bush administration boards, and former Bechtel executive and Bush advisor George Shultz remains on its board of directors.) But the star so far is energy conglomerate Halliburton, which vice president Cheney ran until 2000. Thanks largely to its Iraq contracts, Halliburton's sales rose 39% in the third quarter this year to over four billion dollars. The profits of its Kellogg, Brown and Root unit operating in Iraq quadrupled on an 80% increase in sales. In just three months, KBR delivered an operating profit of $34 million on revenues of $900 million. Its contracts in Iraq were worth more than $2 billion.

These profits were registered while two U.S. Members of Congress accused KBR of importing gasoline into Iraq at inflated prices, with U.S. taxpayers footing the bill. (This is not the first time KBR has been accused of gouging the U.S. government. In 1997 the company was sued for overcharging the U.S. army on plywood.) Iraqi importers are bringing in oil and gasoline for much less, as Halliburton itself admits. Which raises a very interesting question: why are U.S. companies getting contracts to do what Iraqi companies could be doing? After all, Iraqi companies and professionals built much of what needs to be re-built. Wouldn't the sane-not to mention the decent-thing be to give Iraqis these contracts, and employ Iraqi workers?

One answer is that this may be happening, in a way. Bechtel claims to be employing some 30,000 Iraqis. Iraqi companies are indeed subcontracting to do reconstruction work, but these contracts are controlled by huge American corporations. According to at least one usually dependable as well as eloquent Iraqi blog ("Baghdad Burning" at www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com) these Iraqi firms are doing so often at much lower costs than U.S. corporations estimated. The documented case of the Iraqi gasoline importer lends credence to this generalization. But the blog goes on to assert that savings doesn't go either to the Iraqis or back to U.S. taxpayers. It goes in the pocket of the corporations that overestimated the costs and got the contracts. This is certainly worth investigation by American journalists.

There are other disquieting assertions. U.S. companies are importing unskilled labor from Southeast Asia and elsewhere to work on their projects in Iraq. Officially this is because of security concerns, but getting workers at less than Iraqis would be paid adds to corporate profits. Labor journalist David Bacon has also charged that the Bush administration is systematically destroying labor unions in Iraq, and ignoring labor rights in its planning for Iraq's future. "Baghdad Burning" reports that Iraqi businesses must go through the KBR corporation, rather than the provisional government, in order to do business in their own country. This observer within Iraq concurs with western journalists who conclude that there is a concerted effort to privatize even basic services in Iraq, so global corporations rather than any Iraqi government will essentially control Iraq.

Journalist Bacon claims that none of the $87 billion just appropriated by Congress will go to Iraqi workers or to the Iraqi unemployed. (Others assert that there is no indication within the bill of how the figure of $19 billion for reconstruction was arrived at, nor are there provisions for how it will be spent.) If workers and the unemployed are left out, at least the Bush administration is consistent. That $87 billion is money that will not go to the unemployed in America (and despite the purported spurt in growth this quarter, more jobs were lost). None of it goes to hard-pressed workers or their families: to the parents who will see their Social Security dwindle and the children who will have their futures mortgaged by deficits. Short-sighted greed rules here in the U.S. as well. Yet no one will be surprised if those same corporations currently at the trough for Iraq, soon pony up again to contribute to the Bush war chest, expected to exceed $200 million for the next campaign.

What might be expected of the American electorate is a complex question. But even considering the other factors operating in Iraq, it's not hard to see how such bold greed would contribute to the kind of violence and tribulation we are probably just beginning to see there. It also provides a picture of what the Bush Vision truly means.