IRAQ
THIS WAR IS ABOUT PRIVATIZATION
Ok enough of this crap, about contractors. Lets call a spade a spade, these so called contractors are hired guns; mercenaries attached to the US military. So why isn't the media calling them that? Cause the news would read different. Lets take Fallujah for instance if you heard or read or watched a news broadcast that said four heavily armed mercenaries were ambushed and killed by residents of Fallujah, well that would have a different spin than calling them contractors.
Contractors imply some guys in coveralls working driving a truck or building something or serving food to someone. It does not imply a guy in military khakis carrying weapons. Mercenaries are hired killers however, and calling them contractors as if they were another truck driver, is clever and disingenuous and the media has played right into this rhetorical slight of hand.
Iraq is Bush and the Republicans first full scale Privatized war. Sure mercenaries have been used in other recent conflicts but not on this scale. Bremers role in Iraq is to privatize all existing state owned industries and civil infrastructure.
The military is being supported by 10,000 mercenaries from companies in the US and UK. The UK is the largest supplier of mercenaries, it has several of the largest companies, made up of former SAS, special ops personnel.
The US has recently seen a boom in private security/mercenary companies all headquartered in Virginia around the CIA and Pentagon. These companies are made up of ex US military personnel and ex CIA.
To say that these folks don't understand the military code they once served is ridiculous. The reality is they are outside the Uniform Code of Justice because the US Congress did NOT declare War in Iraq. However in 2000 the US Congress passed a law that would put these 'civilian' mercenaries under Military oversight, they just haven't applied it.
Mercenaries (Military Contractors sic) are part of the overall effort of the US to contract out all the support services in its operations in Iraq. Troop suppliers are contracted out, field operations contain military personnel supported by contracted out food, medical and material supply personnel. Infrastructure is being built by private contractors such as Bechtel and Halliburton. Much of this is not just oil pipelines, but the schools and hospitals, electrical generating stations, etc.
Sure the US says its building hospitals and schools, but lets look at what they are building, private hospitals and private schools. The ideology of privatization and contracting out, so called free enterprise is behind the destruction and reconstruction of Iraq. Saddam was the excuse. The reasons for the war are many, oil security, Israel’s security, most importantly what Bush and his Republicans bring to Iraq is in the words of Senator Elizabeth Dole: "a free market." So privateers are running the country under the protection of mercenaries and US troops.
What about the workers in Iraq? They are not allowed to organize unions under a 1987 law passed by Saddam. Since the state controlled all enterprises all workers were made government employees under the law.
Bremer has continued to use this law to disallow free collective bargaining in Iraq. Independent unions have arisen and workers have gone on strike only to be told by the Coalition Government and its Finance ministry they have no right to strike or unionize. US military forces have attacked union offices in Baghdad.
There are no union or worker representatives present in the Governing Council nor has the UN made any effort to include the workers and their unions in the new government coming into effect in July.Yet the ILO is part of the UN and has not been called in to review the conditions of the working class in Iraq.
This is reality of the war in Iraq, it is to take over the infrastructure of the country, remove it from state control and sell it off to the highest bidder, which is exactly what Bremer and Company are currently doing. State run industries are being sold off at fire sale prices with no concern for the workers in those industries.
Lets look at where all the billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq are going
Mercenaries cost $100,000 a year
Contracted Truck Drivers (like James Halwell) $1000 a week
Average Iraqi Oil worker- $160 a month
This is the real outrage of Bush's Privatization war.
Until the media ends its complicity with the US government by calling mercenaries "contractors" the people of Canada, the US and the UK will continue to be hoodwinked as badly as the Iraqi prisoners.
Printed online at Indymedia, Resist.ca, Rabble.ca, and excerpted in Alberta Views, September 2004
Don't Call them Contractors
Dear Editor
Lets call a spade a spade, these so called military 'contractors' are hired guns; mercenaries, attached to the US military. So why isn't the media calling them that? Cause the news would read different.
Lets take Fallujah for instance if you heard or read or watched a news broadcast that said four heavily armed mercenaries were ambushed and killed by residents of Fallujah, well that would have a different spin than calling them contractors.
Contractors imply some guy in coveralls working driving a truck or building something or serving food to someone. It does not imply a guy in military kahkis carrying weapons. Mercenaries are hired killers however, and calling them contractors as if they were another truck driver is clever and disingenuous, and the media has played right into this rhetorical slight of hand.
The military is being supported by 10,000 mercenaries from companies in the US and UK. The UK is the largest supplier of mercenaries, it has several of the largest companies, made up of former SAS, special ops personnel.
The US has recently seen a boom in private security/mercenary companies all headquartered in Virginia around the CIA and Pentagon. These companies are made up of ex US military personnel and ex CIA.
To say that these folks don't understand the military code they once served is ridiculous. The reality is they are outside the Uniform Code of Justice because the US Congress did NOT declare War in Iraq. However in 2000 the US Congress passed a law that would put these 'civilian' mercenaries under Military oversite, they just haven't applied it.
Until the media ends its complicity with the US government by calling mercenaries "contractors" the people of Canada, the US and the UK will continue to be hoodwinked as badly as the Iraqi prisoners.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afganistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
The current undeclared war being conducted by NATO against Yugoslavia on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians has been seen as a political act. Both left and right wing commentators those in favour of the war and those opposed have posed their arguments in political and humanitarian terms.
The fact that this war is a direct result of the current crisis of global capitalism, has been overlooked if not out right ignored by those debating on either side of the war.
That politics should be divorced from economics as well as their military implications reveals the short comings of current left wing analysis and critique.
One reason is that this war is happening in our time, at this moment in history.
It is hard to stand back and look at the larger picture, when an immediate
response is demanded by the situation.
But this war is just one more low intensity conflict that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in fact more of them will occur as the contradictions of capitalism expand exponentially through the process of global neo-liberalization and the creation of international trading blocs.
A political-economic interpretation of this war is needed to put this moment in its historical context, free of the prejudices of the current power politics at play but by no means ignoring them or their influence.
The current war in Yugoslavia has stabilized the global financial capital market.
The justifications for the war are irrelevant propaganda, the real reason is fourfold:
The launch of the Euro Dollar and the development of the European Union as a perceived threat to American geo-political and military hegemony, and the subsequent need to expand that hegemony in Europe via NATO.
The collapse of the Russian and Asian economies which created a deflationary economic cycle (stagflation).
The increasing exponential boom bust cycle on Wall Street, where the market breaks 10,000 crashes and booms again to 11,000 points all occurring during the war.
The need to destroy excess production in order to stabilize the world market and expand the neo-liberal trade accords and trading blocs, which had been stalled by a mass movement world wide in opposition to those accords. This is a ‘bombing’ war, aimed at the destruction of production capabilities in Yugoslavia weaking it for a Marshall like reconstruction plan via the European Union, and the need for the United States to rid itself of large amounts of costly armaments.
The old adage that when capitalism reaches a crisis it uses war as a way of stabilizing itself should not surprise us at the end of the 20th Century. The fact that capitalism as a global market no longer needs to create ‘World Wars’ but can function with low intensity wars, to do this, is what is new.
Hard on the heals of a year long market depression in Asia, and the complete collapse of the Russian economy in the spring of this year, the world capitalist system now faced a deflationary cycle, mass overproduction and stagflation, economic terms not used since the 1930’s.
The launch of the Eurodollar and the creation of the European Union, added a new trading bloc challenge to American Economic and Political hegemony. The subsequent expansion of euro-capitalists like the Dahlmer-Benz/Chrysler merger are symptomatic of trading bloc hegemonic struggles in this period of global expansion of the capitalist world system.
Both the crash of the Asian trading blocs and the expansion of the EU trading bloc produced a bust on Wall Street.
Since the war began Wall Street has subsequently broken the 10,000 and 11,000 point mark. War is the health of capital and its state.
Most commentators have focused on the political/humanitarian issues around this war. These are not the prime factors for this war, they are the propaganda issues that are used to arouse the support of the various publics.
Like the war against Iraq, which was a low intensity conflict a test ground for the latest in American weapons technology, this war is more about global financial capitalism than about geo-politics or territorial acquisition. The war against Iraq, and the subsequent war in the Sudan, were about maintaining American corporate hegemony over oil. In Iraq’s case the war was to curtail the pending dumping of billions of gallons of oil onto the market which would have disastrous economic consequences for the Transnational Oil Companies and their OPEC client states.
It was a war to maintain market share.
The international intervention in the Sudan, was also an oil war, in order to secure
a stable political and economic situation for predominately American Trans-National Oil companies in the region.
The fact that limited intervention was conducted by the United Nations in Rwanda, was due to the lack of support French Imperialism garnered for its geo-political and economic interests in the region. Destabilization of this region , which is rich in oil, heavy metals and other mineral resources, was in the vested interests not of French Imperialism but its competitors in the European Union and of course the United States.
Yugoslavia is the current victim of the neo-liberal agenda.
Mass mobilizations against the third world debt, the MAI and other trade accords as well as calls for capital controls (such as the Tobin Tax) had been garnering strength and legitimacy when the war was declared.
The war immediately resulted in a boom on Wall Street thus thwarting the very real danger of a deflationary drive towards stagflation in the United States. It allowed the U.S. to reassert its hegemony via NATO over the European Union. And it allowed Russia to be a player in European geo-politics providing a momentary stabilization in its economic and political spiral towards chaos.
The war now allows the United States a greater say in the power politics of dividing up the Balkans, which had been until now dominated by the EU and its most powerful member; Germany.
Conversely it has worked in favour of stabilizing the Euro, as well as cementing the EU as a political as well as economic alliance, with Britain acting as the voice of Europe backing it’s American allies.
Canada’s role in supporting NATO’s war, reveals the depth and dangers of the corporate trade agreements and economic blocs like APEC, NAFTA, the WTO.
These accords, as well as our membership in NATO, compelled the Liberal Government to act as a comprador nation to American Imperialism, completely negating our ability to act independently as a member of the UN Security Council with the right to veto.
This is a market driven war, it is about trade agreements and the expansion of neo-liberal globalization and economic stabilization. National sovereignty, ethnic cleansing and the creation of Balkan democracy are so much propaganda masking the real reason for this war; to remedy the contradictions of an overheated global capitalist world system facing a pending global depression.
Also see:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/REGIONAL/ECE/flaws.pdf
The fatal flaws underlying NATO'S intervention in Yugoslavia
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
USI, New Delhi April 6, 1999
Iraq
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