July-August 2004:
The RNC & Pacifist Strategy
Sovereignty, U.S. Style
Billions for Arms
Youth & Counter-Recruitment
Where to Go During the RNC
Letters

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

Sovereignty, U.S. Style

By G. Simon Harak
with Daniel and Faimie Kingsley

he Los Angeles Times is now reporting that the much-hyped demolition of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdous Square was staged by U.S. military psychological operations. At the same time, reporters and prominent news media have belatedly admitted that their reporting on the lead-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq was at best uncritical. Hearing this, we might be tempted to believe that the media have learned their lesson, and that reporting on Iraq will be less accepting of the official government line.

So when we read, for example, “U.S. Hands Authority To Iraq Two Days Early” in the Washington Post, or “U.S. Transfers Power to Iraq 2 Days Early” in the New York Times and the identical headline in the Los Angeles Times, or “U.S. Transfers Sovereignty to Iraqi Government” in USA Today, or “U.S. Transfers Power to Iraq Two Days Early” in the Chicago Tribune (with the sub-head “Hand-over is completed today”), or simply “Freedom” as a banner headline in the New York Post, we might believe that a chastened and reformed media have done their job and are now accurately reporting the political reality in Iraq. (None of the June 28 headlines read “Independence,” by the way.)

But while the media declare that the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the defeated country for almost two years, has now given Iraq authority, power, sovereignty and freedom, a few critics—including, not surprisingly, the War Resisters League—are voicing reservations about the nature of the alleged “transfer of sovereignty” to the interim Iraq government. In a sense, we are making explicit the unease of some 60 percent of the U.S. populace, who saw that the early “transfer” indicated a failed U.S. policy in Iraq.

The troops on Iraqi soil were not transferred away from Iraq. The coalition forces—most of which are U.S. troops—are not going home to their respective countries. In fact, the U.S. government is talking about sending more troops in. It is calling up even the Individual Ready Reserves for only the third time in history and extending the stay of troops already in Iraq. Japan and Korea are sending more troops—although, they hope, only in an advisory role. All told, there will be some 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq on the 14 or more permanent bases built (in most part by private contractors) there since the 2003 invasion.

What Wasn’t Transferred
Control of these troops, stationed on Iraq’s own soil, was not and will not be transferred to Iraq. The bombing of Fallujah a few days after the “transfer” seems to indicate quite the reverse: On July 4, U.S. troops dropped four 500-pound bombs and two 1,000-pound bombs on a suspected militant safe house in the city of Fallujah, killing 15 members of one family, according to witnesses, and turning the building into a 30-foot-deep pit of sand and rubble. One survivor, 17-year-old Yasser Abed, told reporters that 15 members of his family, including 12 children, were killed in the air strike. Most of the people under the bombs were dismembered. The new interim Iraqi government stated that it had assisted the attackers with “intelligence.” Thus it appears that the new government is working with, and even for, the U.S. military.

(The U.S. troops, incidentally, will be exempt from prosecution by the international community for human rights violations. Until June 30—that is, for nearly the first two years of the invasion and occupation—this country’s troops were covered by an exemption granted by the United Nations in acquiescence to U.S. demands. But the U.N. Security Council boggled at a third year of exemption, especially in light of the growing scandal of the torture of Iraqis by U.S. military and private contractors at check points and in prisons. So the U.S. government made a separate agreement with some 90 nations that they will not prosecute U.S. military personnel for human rights abuses, torture or war crimes in Iraq.)

Nor, it seems was sovereignty even over its own military transferred to Iraq. Last March 25, the U.S.-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, issued an executive order that proclaimed, “All trained elements of the Iraqi armed forces shall at all times be under the operational control of the commander of coalition forces for the purpose of conducting combined operations.” (The U.S. military hopes to train about 40,000 Iraqi troops for attacks against “insurgents” among their own people.) As with all such orders of the Coalition Provisional Authority and its head, that order cannot be rescinded by the new “sovereign” Iraqi government.

It seems almost redundant to say that Iraq’s interim government is not politically sovereign either. It cannot make laws extending beyond its interim authority. It cannot rescind laws made by the Coalition Provisional Authority. It cannot make treaties with other governments.

Perhaps most important, economic power was not transferred to Iraq. Since the early 1970s, about 95 percent of Iraq’s foreign exchange has come from the sale of oil. As a result, according to Michael Hill of the Baltimore Sun, the new government has received only $10 billion from oil revenues since the invasion and occupation. Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of the oil-plus conglomerate Halliburton (formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney), now has sole control over the production of oil in Iraq. (Note that under U.S. presidential order #13303, transnational oil companies operating in Iraq have been given complete immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed in Iraq.) Again, the interim giovernment’s disbursement of those funds is limited by the oversight of a panel with members from the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the World Bank.

Beyond oil, Bremer’s 2003 Order #39 granted 100 percent ownership of all other economic sectors in Iraq to foreign—mostly U.S.—companies. That covers electricity, water treatment, transportation, communications, construction, street paving, delivery of goods, garbage collection, prison management—everything. The order further allows the transfer of 100 percent of the profits from these ventures out of Iraq “without delay.” These companies are engaged in what commentator Naomi Klein has called a “multibillion-dollar robbery of Iraq.” A report by the Institute for Policy Studies think tank estimated that Bremer had issued nearly 100 orders that, among other things, give U.S. corporations “virtual free rein over the Iraqi economy while largely excluding Iraqis from a reconstruction effort which has failed to provide for their basic needs.” Thus we might say that there is indeed a transfer of economic power occurring in Iraq, only it seems to be going in the opposite direction. We also note that the new government cannot alter any of the “reconstruction” contracts for Iraq, nor offer any new ones.

It has recently been revealed that the Coalition Provisional Authority had spent only about two percent of the more than $18.7 billion of U.S. taxpayer money that Congress sent to Iraq for its “reconstruction.” The White House budget office report showed that the U.S. occupation authorities had spent nothing on health care or water and sanitation—dire needs in Iraq—although $9 million was spent on administrative expenses. Power to disburse those funds was not transferred to the Interim Iraqi Government, but was retained by the new U.S. ambassador and his “staff.” We can imagine the leverage that will give the new ambassador in future dealings with the Iraq government.

And the U.S. General Accounting Office reports that we have handed over to the Iraqis a country that in many ways is worse than before the war. For example, in 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces—home of nearly 20 million of Iraq’s 26 million people—electricity was available fewer hours per day on average this past June than before the war. (Note that “before the war” means after 13 years of nearly continuous U.S./U.K. bombing, together with the most devastating sanctions in history.)

In the days before he departed, Bremer issued a number of last-minute, unrescindable orders, one of which declared that all private contractors working in Iraq would be exempt from prosecution under Iraqi law. Crucially, that protection extends to the growing number of privately contracted “security forces” in Iraq. Estimates place their number in excess of 10,000 and growing, making them the second largest armed force in Iraq. These are not even subject to the minimal internal control and Geneva conventions—however frequently-flouted—that U.S. Army troops answer to.

It is true that control over the Iraq Development Fund was transferred to Iraq. This $20 billion was Iraq’s oil money that remained unspent (mostly because of U.S. vetoes on Iraqi-proposed contracts) from the “oil-for-food” program during the 13 years of U.S.-led genocidal sanctions against Iraq. However, in a last-minute spending frenzy, the Coalition Provisional Authority gave away almost all the Iraqi money to “reconstruction” companies—even though reconstruction was supposed to be financed by the $18.7 billion allocated by Congress.

What Was Transferred
The remaining $.9 billion was indeed transferred to the interim government to run the country with.

Also transferred was a $140 billion national debt, much of it assigned to Iraq by the Governing Council of United Nations Compensation Commission (without any representation or voice from Iraq) during the 13-year sanctions era.

Saddam Hussein was turned over to the Iraqi courts for trial, though he continues to be held by the U.S. forces. Five thousand other Iraqi prisoners will continue to be held by the foreign forces in Iraq; they will not be turned over to the interim government.

Iraq does have power over an internal police force, and on July 7, declared that it had new emergency powers, including a provision allowing interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to impose martial law. Interestingly the interim Human Rights Minister Bakhityar Amin compared the new laws to the USA PATRIOT Act. This seems to be another, albeit disturbing, kind of authority transferred from the U.S. government to Iraq’s.

Allawi, by the way, was a CIA “asset” and has admitted to taking money from the spy agencies of 11 other countries. According to Patrick Cockburn of The Independent of London, “[Allawi] is the person through whom the controversial claim was channeled that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be operational in 45 minutes.” To the disappointment of U.N. representative to Iraq Lakdhar Brahimi, the selection of Allawi was forced through by the U.S. (Brahimi subsequently resigned his post.)

Living outside Iraq for the past 30 years, Allawi has no support among the people of Iraq. Even after he served on the Iraq Governing Council for more than a year, only seven percent of Iraqis wanted to see him as prime minister; only the president of the Iraq Governing Council had less support. We observe with wry interest that, along with all the other members of the interim government, Allawi is an expatriate who has not transferred his family back to Iraq.

This political disempowerment of the interim government extends throughout the ranks. For example, Haider al-Abadi is Iraq’s Minister of Communications. But as Yochi J. Dreazen and Christopher Cooper of the Wall Street Journal report, “The authority to license Iraq’s television stations, sanction newspapers and regulate cellphone companies was recently transferred to a commission whose members were selected by Washington. The commissioners’ five-year terms stretch far beyond the planned 18-month tenure of the interim Iraqi government. … .” A series of similar edicts de facto remove power from other ministries as well, and each ministry in the interim government has a Coalition “adviser” attached to it.

The most dramatic handover of authority in Iraq took place when the Coalition Provisional Authority transferred all its far-reaching powers not handed over to the interim government—that is, most of them—to the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi Reconstruction and Management Office, and Paul Bremer transferred authority to John Negroponte, the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq. (Negroponte, by the way, has a history of substantial human rights violations in Central America.) The combined staff of those two entities will be largely identical to the Provisional Authority staff—about 3,000 members, mostly private contractors representing companies that have received contracts for “reconstructing” Iraq. They are presently quartered in the same extended palace complex the CPA was quartered in. There seems to have been some change here, but mostly in name only. Or, as the Iraqis say, “Different saddle, same donkey.”

To return to the beginning of our questions about Iraq’s sovereignty, some may wonder why so many foreign troops need to remain in Iraq. We believe that the answer is the same as the reason we sent the troops to invade Iraq in the first place. On the evidence of both the invasion and the occupation, the U.S. military was to all intents and purposes commandeered by big-money companies and their representatives in government to effect and maintain what amounts to a corporate takeover of an entire nation.

As has unfortunately been the custom for much of the past 50 years, the countries the United States first defeats and then grants “sovereignty” to have to learn a whole new definition of the word.

G. Simon Harak is the Anti-Militarism Coordinator in the national office of the War Resisters League. He is now coordinating WRL’s “Stop the Merchants of Death” campaign. He can be reached at amc@warresisters.org or (212)228-0450, ext. 104. Daniel and Faimie Kingsley are volunteers with the “Stop the Merchants of Death” program.