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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (715848)	11/30/2005 9:20:41 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

WHAT? You never even heard of the 3 plus years that the Pentagon / State Department / C.I.A. / D.I.A. inter-agency task force for Iraq put into the planning for the occupation of Iraq after the over-throw of Saddam? Nor the forced retirement of the General who testified before Congress (relying upon the task force's reccomendations) and offered his support for their call for '300,000' troops to effectively occupy Iraq? Where the heck have you been, Geoff?

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (715848)	11/30/2005 9:22:56 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

There was no training of Iraqis during the first year of the occupation. That year was wasted.

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (715848)	11/30/2005 10:09:04 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

The State Department’s Future of Iraq Project (inter-agency) generated a thirteen-volume report on how to restore basic services and transition to democracy after the war. google.com The admin dumped the plans shortly before the war.... Instead they went for an 'asset strip', which ran a-cropper because (among other factors), as the article below notes: ---------- Baghdad Year Zero Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia harpers.org ---------- It had no basis in legality, thus, not much in practicality. :) " The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”" "One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union...." "... When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq’s Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as “the wish list of foreign investors,” there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq’s legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must “comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907.” Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country’s existing laws unless “absolutely prevented” from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the “public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural assets” of the country it is occupying but is rather their “administrator” and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since America didn’t own Iraq’s assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made under Bremer’s rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse because their investments had violated international law from the outset." "By November, trade lawyers started to advise their corporate clients not to go into Iraq just yet, that it would be better to wait until after the transition. Insurance companies were so spooked that not a single one of the big firms would insure investors for “political risk,” that high-stakes area of insurance law that protects companies against foreign governments turning nationalist or socialist and expropriating their investments."