IT'S JUST BUSINESS
Do you have faith in the Bush Administration being motivated at heart by truly humanitarian concerns? Or could there be another, less selfless explanation for its eagerness to wage war?
No one who knows United States history should be surprised to learn that business interests are a major driving force of our nation's international relations and diplomacy. Even today, business interests will be a cause -- maybe even the cause -- for shedding the blood of American servicemen and servicewomen.
It needs to be remembered that since the mid 1990s there has been a fierce competition among a dozen or so nations over "executory contracts" with Iraq --i.e., contracts to do business with Iraq after the U.N. sanctions are lifted. It is not a pretty tale. I see no 'good guys' in it, especially when I think about my relatives who are at this moment on the front lines of the Kuwait-Iraq border because of it.
Throughout the latter half of the 1990's a great many nations favored lifting the U.N. sanctions supposedly to ease the terrible toll they were taking on the Iraqi people. The U.S. either stopped all such efforts cold in the U.N. or grudgingly agreed to minor adjustments in the permitted trade, always arguing that Iraq had not yet proved its compliance with the U.N. disarmament resolutions and that in any event Saddam was misusing the income for his own grandiose palaces and to re-build his army.
However, quite a few individual nations -- China, France, Russia, Germany among them -- managed an end-run of sorts around the sanctions by negotiating "executory" trade contracts with Iraq. These did not involve any immediate payments, and they were to become effective only after the U.N. lifted sanctions in their entirety. Among these executory contracts were the huge Russian oil pipeline contract and the French ElfFina drilling contract, both of which were widely publicized three and two years ago, although they were expressly contingent on eventual lifting of the sanctions. Hundreds of other such contracts were reported to the U.N., catalogued in Iraqi government files, and even posted on a web site maintained by the Iraqi foreign trade department.
It is no surprise that since 1991, U.S. law had not permitted United States companies to enter into existing contracts with Iraq except in strict accord with the U.N. sanctions. In addition, our domestic trade laws prohibited such "executory contracts." When American companies realized that their competitors were getting an edge by negotiating future contracts, they complained bitterly to Washington. Congress repealed the anti-executory contract trade and commerce regulations in 1998.
Trouble was, after that Saddam either still refused to deal with (most) U.S. companies or the U.S. companies found themselves still losing out to foreign competitors. Either way, domestic commercial businesses felt they had been frozen out of the robust and growing Iraqi executory contract market. (The two infamous Halliburton subsidiary contracts, which were concluded under Mr. Dick Cheney's executive tenure, were existing contracts approved by the U.N. under the sanctions.)
Bottom line: Well before the French openly opposed the U.S. effort to get U.N. approval for a new war against Iraq, it had become clear that when, and not if, sanctions were finally lifted all that Iraqi wealth which Mr. Bush says belongs to the Iraqi people was going to be committed to trading with almost everyone except U.S. companies. The Bush team was keenly aware of this as they came into office in January 2001. In public statements, congressional testimony, and elsewhere administration trade spokesmen, when asked if they were at all concerned about the well publicized executory contracts being signed with other nations' state-owned or private corporations, said no, they weren't; then they often darkly hinted that after all such executory, or future, contracts were only as good as the staying power of the regime that made them.
Consistent with this frequent theme, "regime change" was the first articulated 'reason' for the war threats against Iraq which the Bush administration offered -- well before 9-11. It is the one Messrs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Cheney have consistently returned to, even as they displayed, or feigned, momentary interest in other rationales such as 'bringing democracy to the Iraqi people' or 'remaking the Middle East' or 'protecting Israel' or '9-11' or the supposed 'al Quaeda connection.' It also helps to explain why Bush's press spokesman said this week that U.S. troops intended to occupy Iraq whether or not Saddam left the country.
It's just business, folks. Not weapons of mass destruction, or exporting the blessings of democracy, or foiling Ossama bin Ladin. At bottom, the New Iraq War is all about American companies making money for themselves and their investors.
The surest prediction about the inevitable war is this: Once we "are" the government of Iraq, we will cancel all prior executory contracts entered into by the Hussein regime and call for a new feast. Everything will be up for grabs on a smorgasbord of our own design, under our own house rules.
And, by the way -- no French or Russian dressing will be served. |
