The Corporate Sacking Of Iraq

If you think that the Bushites had no post-war plan for what they would do in Iraq after our military ousted Saddam, think again. You can see their plan in policies that were quietly and autocratically imposed on the Iraqi people during the reign of Mr. L. Paul Bremmer III, who was our occupying czar there.

While America's media establishment has been focused on the raging war by Iraqi insurgents and by the Bushites' attempt to enthrone a puppet government there, the neo-con laissez-faire zealots in the administration have been gleefully using this ravaged country as their own ideological playground. For years, these AynRandian theorists have longed to create their utopia of a corporate state, and they've used the IMF, World Bank, WTO and other monkey wrenches to try to implement their theories in Latin America and elsewhere. But they've never had an entire economy at their disposal... until they grabbed Iraq.

While Baghdad was burning, Bremmer arrived. Rather than putting out the fires, he used them as a distraction to issue decrees that instantly opened up Iraq to a total corporate takeover.

For example, his decrees open all of that nation's public assets to foreign corporate ownership, and they allow 100 percent of the country's industries - from banking to food - to be owned by foreigners. Also, Bremmer ruled that 100 percent of the profits that foreign investors make in Iraq can now be hauled out of the country - there's no requirement that any of these profits be reinvested there, nor do the investors have to pay even a dime in taxes on the profits they haul away. This isn't "liberation," as the Bushites like to call their Iraqi adventure - it's legalized looting... and it's fueling the continuing anger and armed resistance by the Iraqi people, who're determined not to have their nation looted.

To get this full story, see Naomi Klein's explosive article in Harper's Magazine. You can read it at www.harpers.org.