Activist busts W’s “blood for oil” bid in Iraq

BY DENNIS GEISINGER

Bush and his adminstration is covered in oil and blood. (Photo illustration by Southside Pride)

American activist Antonia Juhasz, a leading international trade and economic policy analyst and author of “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time” (HarperCollins), just completed a stay in the Twin Cities, speaking about her research into the Bush administration’s use of our military to persuade oil-rich countries in the Middle East to relinquish much of their petroleum resources to American corporations. She has just completed writing her second book, “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’ s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do To Stop It” (Harper Collins), which is due for release in September. Juhasz appeared at a Jan. 27 Sunday morning service and at a speech on the following Monday evening at St. Joan of Arc Church in South Minneapolis. That Monday afternoon, she had also spoken at Macalester College in St. Paul. Southside Pride had the opportunity of talking with Juhasz between engagements, to ask her about the insights that her work has given her about the connections between U.S. foreign policy and the interests of American oil companies. We sat down with her in the home of Marie and John Braun, chairs of the Twin Cities Peace Campaign/Focus on Iraq, and began by citing her credentials—

SSP: B.A. from Brown University and a master’s degree from Georgetown University in public policy. Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. Teacher, lecturer, contributing author and co-author of a number of books and articles on economic globalization. Legislative assistant for trade policy and other issues for John Conyers Jr. (D-MI), chair of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD), former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Testified before Congress on the impact of the War in Iraq. Former project director of the International Forum on Globalization. Awarded “The Sentinel” by the Nevada Alliance for Workers Rights, “For those who have engaged in a lifelong activism.”

Tell us about your family and what drew you into a life of political activism.

Antonia Juhasz

Juhasz: I can’ t remember when I wasn’t an activist. I organized a chapter of Amnesty International in my high school in Boulder, Colo., and we were able to get the school to divest [from] the apartheid government in South Africa.

I grew up in a very academic family. My four sisters all have doctoral degrees. I’m actually the least educated in my family. My father is a professor in architectural design at The University of Colorado and my mother, who is retired now, taught women’s studies and English there. Growing up, my parents gave me a strong sense of public service, but I think that even beyond that, they gave me the sense that my opinion and my ideas really mattered.

SSP: Changing the law when the law doesn’t fit its needs has become a hallmark of the Bush administration. Is the new National Hydrocarbon Law, which is currently before the Iraqi Parliament, an example of how the President is trying to make it legal in Iraq for American oil companies to get a share of what has been under exclusive Iraqi control?

Juhasz: A new oil law is one of the benchmarks that Bush has imposed on Iraq. Anyone that you talk to in Iraq is clear that the law was drafted by America. It took a war—an invasion—to change 30 years of oil policy in the Middle East. Soon after the invasion, a U.S.-appointed senior adviser to the Iraqi Oil Ministry announced that the new Iraqi government would honor few, if any, of the dozens of contracts signed with foreign oil companies under Saddam Hussein. Guidelines for a new petroleum law later submitted by Bush operatives to Iraq’s Supreme Council for Oil Policy advised privatization of the planned Iraq National Oil Company. One of the proposal’s highlights would turn all undeveloped oil and gas fields over to private international oil companies. Only 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields have been developed, so this would put 64 percent of Iraq’s oil into the hands of foreign firms. And once U.S. oil companies get their contracts, they’ll still need protection. What better security force is there than 144,000 American troops?

SSP: Much of the criticism about the state of post-war Iraq has been fueled by a perception that the Bush Administration had no clear plan in place before the invasion. You say in your article, “The Spoils of War,” that “The administration had a very clear economic plan ... [prepared] by the U.S. consultancy firm Bearing Point, Inc., which ... received a $250 million contract to remake Iraq’s economic infrastructure.” Why haven’t we heard of Bearing Point?

Juhasz: Well, they’re a very behind-the-scenes company. They’re one of a growing trend of companies that figure out models for the privatization of economies based on national ownership. L. Paul Bremer III—head of the U.S. occupation government of Iraq—followed Bearing Point’s plan to the letter. His “100 Orders,” with the exception of all but a handful, remain in place today. Bremer’s orders included firing the entire Iraqi military—some half a million men—in the first weeks of the occupation. Suddenly jobless, many of these men took their guns with them and joined the violent insurgency.

SSP: The Bush people must have known this was going to blow up in their faces—half a million armed men and no jobs. Was it a ploy to further destabilize the country?
Juhasz: No, I think it was a miscalculation that there would be no insurgency.

SSP: What about the bungling of the reconstruction? Was the freeze-out of Iraqi companies and personnel in the rebuilding of their country—something that you say the Iraqis accomplished in three months after the first Gulf War—calculated as another move to keep the country in a state of disaster? Or was it just plain, old inefficiency of pork barrel politics?

Juhasz: It’s important to bring this up now at the five-year anniversary of the invasion. Bremer also fired thousands of Iraq’s administrators. American companies have received preferential treatment over Iraqis in the awarding of reconstruction contracts. New laws reduced taxes on all corporations by 25 percent and opened up the entire economy to private foreign investment. Foreign firms can now own 100 percent of Iraqi businesses (as opposed to partnering with Iraqi firms) and to send their profits home without having to invest a cent in the struggling Iraqi economy. Iraqi laws governing banking, foreign investment, patents, copyrights, business ownership, taxes, the media, agriculture and trade were all changed to conform to U.S. goals. And American firms have performed miserably in fulfilling reconstruction contracts. The Bechtel Corp., at best, has fulfilled 50 percent of its contract. Most people don’t realize because it’s not in the press that there’s now four hours of electricity a day in Baghdad, a modern city that before the invasion had electricity 24 hours a day. We must demand that these contractors are held accountable. But all in all, it’s going OK—if you don’t care about peace and stability. The troops have done a great job protecting the oil infrastructure.

SSP: You talk about Iraq as being only a step in a larger plan for corporate domination in the Middle East. Is the push to sign up Arab states in the US/Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) the cornerstone of that plan?

Juhasz: This is a really bold way of trying to extend U.S. influence in the Middle East. The Bush administration has used the Iraq war to convince nations across the Middle East to adopt its free trade agenda. The coalition includes among its 120 members, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Bechtel and Halliburton—companies intimately connected to the Bush administration that have already been big winners in Iraq. A unique negotiating strategy has been implemented for the MEFTA. Rather than negotiate with all of the nations as a bloc, the U.S.
negotiates one-on-one with each country, meaning that every nation—some half the size of one state in the U.S.—must deal with the most dominant nation in the world. If successful, the MEFTA would be concluded by 2013 with 20 signed countries.

SSP: In a video of a town hall meeting in San Francisco, you call Nancy Pelosi “Her Esteemed Majesty” at least partly because she was refusing to attend. Did you ever get an audience or a response from Pelosi? Are the Democrats afraid to touch the economic control issue of Iraq because of its profit implications for American business?

Juhasz: Pelosi never talked to us. A significant part of the Democratic Party shares the Republican goals in Iraq. The three top Democratic candidates talk about the U.S. presence in Iraq as protecting the oil. The goal of the Democratic leadership is to get the Presidency. I think they’ve seriously miscalculated how to do that—the 2006 elections were supposed to be about the war—they weren’t. There is an Out-of-Iraq Caucus in Congress of about 70 members being held down by Pelosi. She may well go down in history as the person who broke the back of the Democratic Party because she took money from the oil companies in order to win an election.

SSP: Finally, what can average citizens who are troubled by this government capitulation to corporate interests do to stem the tide?

Juhasz: One of our calls is for “Separation of Oil and State.” This is an idea started in the 90s with the demand for elected officials to denounce tobacco money—which has greatly diminished the influence of the tobacco industry in this country. One of the questions is, ‘Will we organize?’ We have to acknowledge our influence over companies and elected officials. We have to educate ourselves on how to react as consumers. We have to see our control over our personal practices as antiwar strategies. Local actions do reflect out. Shifting away from an oil-based economy is an antiwar strategy. If we don’t change our consumption of oil, we’re going to have to fight a lot of wars.