Given these limitations on the Iraqi government's ability to control oil revenues, the biggest potential source of funding for infrastructure rebuilding in the near term will likely be the money allocated by the U.S. Congress
The US purse is mightier than its sword. This is how the US effective runs the Western hemisphere. Other countries are "sovereign," until they go against the will of the US. Then we threaten to crush them economically if they do not bend to our will.
afoaf is from a small Caribbean island country. The villagers have become accustomed to DEA-sponsored helicopters spraying poison from the air onto whatever they think looks like it might be marijuana. Of course, it's a tropical rain forest and all plants are green, so you can imagine that it is hard to tell what is what, and they often end up killing off lots of innocent plants, not to mention poisoning the water. Breadfruit and other edible food plants grow everywhere, and this is what the villagers eat. Some of them drink water straight from the stream. One particular villager, who was upset about the poison-spraying, ran out underneath the airborne helicopter, which was 10-20 metres in the air, and waved his machete (which is a knife, btw) at them, cursing. He was promptly gunned down by machine gun fire.
So the entire tiny nation is in a uproar over this man's death and they take their grievance to their government, which complains to the US. The answer they got from the Americans was something like, "Tough sh*t. If you don't like it, too bad. If you continue to press this issue, we will quietly shift a tiny fraction of our tourism away from your country, which is enough to economically crush you. And stay away from our helicopters." The island government is smart enough to know that if they fight the US, conditions in their country will deteriorate enough for the island voters to throw out the existing government. And thus they do nothing.
This same situation repeats itself over and over. The War on Drugs is only a small aspect of the way that the US uses its economic power. More far-reaching policy is born from the IMF and WTO. The 3rd world countries have gone through the cycle of borrowing themselves into debt, defaulting, restructuring, defaulting again, and so forth. Only each time the restructuring agreement gets more restrictive. Now it is at the point where the IMF/WTO are dictating to countries the percentage of their annual budgets that they are allowed to spend on "luxuries" like health care. If they spent too much on health care, then they might not be able to pay the interest on their debt to the IMF, which is mostly the US. Also, the trend of international debt is privatization, so instead of the IMF loaning to Mexico, it's private companies like Citibank. Problems arise when the creditor's mandated budget does not meet the country's needs. Mexico has been a puppet of the IMF, and their health care has gotten much worse. It's hard to know how many people died as a result of this policy (Dead peasants are difficult to count) but the number is tremendous.
stolaf.edu
(pictures of IMF and WTO protests)
The irony is that "free" trade and the "aid" of the "free" world has brought economic servitude to the third world. Their economies are struggling just to pay interest on their debt to us when times are good. When times are bad for their economies, we just lend them more money. The most effective methods of control are not visible. They are hard to fight because they are hard to see.
All of this relates to Iraq in that we want to rule with an iron fist, but from behind a curtain. The Americans mandated that Iraqi government bodies be 25% female. Right away, there is 25% who owe their political careers to the Americans and will almost certainly always vote their way. This is just one of the many tools of backstage control. Others are:
in the name of Iraqi freedom & democracy
all our enemies are "terrorists"
protecting the oil "for the Iraqis"
keeping the Iraqi nation together
These are all supposedly noble causes that allow the US to exert control without appearing to be the conquering and occupying power that it is. |
