The reconstruction of New Oraq

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GI15Ak01.html

By Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
9/15/2005

"At times it is hard to ignore the comparisons between Baghdad (where I was less than a month ago and have spent more of the last two years) and New Orleans: the anarchy, the looting, some of it purely for survival, some of it purely opportunistic. We watched a flatbed truck drive by, a man on the back with an M-16 looking up on the roofs for snipers, as is common in Iraq. Private security contractors were stationed outside the Royal St Charles Hotel; when asked if things were getting pretty wild around the area, one of them replied, 'Nope. It's pretty Green Zone here'."

- (David Enders, Surviving New Orleans, Mother Jones online)

In the decade before September 11, 2001, "globalization", a word now largely missing in action, was on everyone's lips and we constantly heard about what a small, small world this really was. In the aftermath of Katrina, that global smallness has grown positively claustrophobic and particularly predatory.

Iraq and New Orleans now seem to be morphing into a single entity, New Oraq, to be devoured by the same limited set of corporations, let loose and overseen by the same small set of Bush administration officials. In President George W Bush's new world of globalization, first comes the destruction, and only then does one sit down at the planetary table to sup.

In recent weeks, news has been seeping out of Iraq that the "reconstruction" of that country is petering out, because the money is largely gone. According to American officials, reported T Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times last week, "The US will halt construction work on some water and power plants in Iraq because it is running out of money for projects." A variety of such reconstruction projects crucial to the everyday lives of Iraqis, the British Guardian informs us, are now "grinding to a halt" as "plans to overhaul the country's infrastructure have been downsized, postponed or abandoned because the $24 billion budget approved by Congress has been dwarfed by the scale of the task."

Water and sanitation projects have been particularly hard hit; while staggering sums, once earmarked for reconstruction, are being shunted to private security firms whose hired guns are assigned to guard the projects that can't be done. With funds growing scarce, various corporations closely connected to the Bush administration, having worked the Iraqi disaster for all it was worth (largely under no-bid, cost-plus contracts), are now looking New Orleans-ward.

Ground Zero Iraq
The American occupation of Iraq began in April 2003 with a prolonged moment of chaos that set the stage for everything to follow. In the first days after Baghdad fell, the occupying army stood by idly (guarding only the Oil Ministry and the intelligence services) while Iraqi looters swept away the institutional, administrative and cultural underpinnings of the country. The newly installed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), soon to be led by American viceroy L Paul Bremer, followed up by promptly disbanding the only institution that remained half-standing, the Iraqi military. At the same time, a new American administration was set up inside the increasingly well-fortified and isolated Green Zone in Baghdad, staffed largely by Bush cronies. ("Neo-con kindergarten" was the way some insiders derisively referred to the young Bush supporters sent out from Washington to staff the lower levels of the CPA for months at a time.)

The CPA then instituted a flat tax, abolished tariffs, swept away laws that might have prevented the foreign ownership of Iraqi companies, allowed the full repatriation of profits abroad and threatened to reduce state-sponsored food and fuel subsidies. For Iraqis, this was more than just "shock and awe"; it was to be caught in the whirlwind. Call it Year Zero for Iraq or Ground Zero for the new Bush order. Iraq, stripped for action, was ready to be strip-mined - and it was then that Washington called in its crony corporations to "reconstruct" the land.

Leading the list was Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a subsidiary of the energy firm Halliburton, the mega-corporation over which Vice President Dick Cheney once presided. From providing fuel to building bases, doing KP to supplying laundry soap, it supported the newly privatized, stripped-down American military - and for that it "received more money from the US involvement in Iraq than any other contractor", a sum that has already crested US$10 billion with no end in sight.

The Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco-based engineering firm, known at home for its staggering cost overruns on Boston's "Big Dig" (Central Artery/Tunnel Project) and its especially close ties to the Republican Party, raked in almost $3 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts just in the nine months after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Fluor Corporation, an Orange County, California-based firm that inked a joint $1.1 billion deal with a London company in 2004 for "construction services for water distribution and treatment systems in Iraq" was a winner; as was the Shaw Group Inc, which in early 2004 opened a Baghdad office to support "an approximately $47 million task order in Iraq for facility upgrades, installation of utilities and other infrastructure improvements" and was also awarded a separate $88.7 million construction deal, among other contracts.

Another successful bidder in the Iraqi lottery was CH2M Hill, a Colorado-based company that, in a joint venture, took in a $28.5 million reconstruction contract in 2004 and teamed up with other contractors for a $12.7 million electrical power generation deal. These firms were joined at the table by other heavy-hitters and a dizzying array of smaller-fry American sub-contractors, from the KBR-connected food service company Event Source to Bechtel's marine survey sub-contractor, Titan Maritime.

More than two years after the American superpower occupied Iraq and called in its reconstructors, however, the scorecard for "reconstruction" looked remarkably like one for deconstruction. The country was essentially looted and no one was left on guard, not even at the Oil Ministry. Money was spent profligately, and sometimes evidently simply pilfered. Bremer himself reputedly had a slush fund of $600 million in cash for which, according to Ed Harriman (who did a superb study of the various reports by US auditors on the ensuing mayhem in the London Review of Books), there was "no paperwork".

When Bremer left Baghdad in June of last year, the CPA had already run through $20 billion in Iraqi funds, mostly generated by oil revenues and earmarked for "the benefit of the Iraqi people" (though only $300 million in US funds). Much of it seems to have gone to American companies for their various reconstruction tasks. US auditors, Harriman reports, "Have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution." It was evidently a field day of malfeasance and - a particular signature of the Bush administration - lack of accountability. In the meantime, KBR was massively overcharging the Pentagon for all those privatized tasks the military no longer cared to do, while its officials were living the good life. (Typically, KBR's "tiger team" of accountants, sent out to Kuwait to check on company overcharges, stayed in a five-star hotel to the tune of $1 million in taxpayers' money.)

The results we now know well. Electricity and oil production, for instance, still remain at or below the figures for the worst days of Saddam's embattled regime; and on that cleared land at Ground Zero Iraq, a fierce resistance movement rages, while, from Basra to Mosul, disappointment with and disapproval of the American occupiers only grows.

Now, these same corporations are being loosed on the southeastern United States on the same no-bid, cost-plus basis. Like Baghdad and much of Iraq, New Orleans and the Mississippi coast have just experienced "shock and awe" - Katrina's winds and waters, not US cruise missiles. With troops occupying New Orleans, the Bush administration-allied corporations of the whirlwind that feed off chaos and destruction are already moving in. In this sense, the next wave of chaos has, from their point of view, arrived like the proverbial cavalry, just in the nick of time.

End Part I