Fisk--'Meet the New Iraqi Strongman: Paul Bremer'

[Aidoneus]

a few days late, but a good read.

Meet the New Iraqi Strongman: Paul Bremer
Thugs in Business Suits
By ROBERT FISK

Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" very well. He wears a business suit and combat boots. As the proconsul of Iraq, you might have thought he'd have more taste. But he is a famous "anti-terrorism" expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast army of international companies-most of them American, of course-and creating the first democracy in the Arab world. Since he seems to be a total failure at the "anti-terrorist" game-50 American soldiers killed in Iraq since President George Bush declared the war over is not exactly a blazing success-it is only fair to record that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well.

In theory, the news is all great. Oil production is up to one million barrels a day; Baghdad airport is preparing to re-open; every university in Iraq is functioning again ; the health services are recovering rapidly; and mobile phones have made their first appearance in Baghdad. There's an Iraqi Interim Council up and hobbling.

But there's a kind of looking-glass fantasy to all these announcements from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the weasel-worded title with which the American-led occupation powers cloak their decidedly undemocratic and right-wing credentials. Take the oil production figures. Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, even chose to use these statistics in his "great day for Iraq" press conference last week, the one in which he triumphantly announced that 200 soldiers in Mosul had killed the sons of Saddam rather than take them prisoner. But Lt-Gen Sanchez was talking rubbish. Although oil production was indeed standing at 900,000 barrels per day in June (albeit 100,000bpd less than the Sanchez version), it fell this month to 750,000. The drop was caused by power cuts--which are going to continue for much of the year-and export smuggling. The result? Iraq, with the world's second-highest reserves of oil, is now importing fuel from other oil producing countries to meet domestic demands.

Then comes Baghdad airport. Sure, it's going to re-open. But it just happens that the airport, with its huge American military base and brutal US prison camp, comes under nightly grenade and mortar attack. No major airline would dream of flying its aircraft into the facility in these circumstances. So, weird things are happening. The Iraqis are told, for example, that the first flights will be run by "Transcontinental Airlines" (a name oddly similar to the CIA's transport airline in Vietnam), which is reported to be a subsidiary of "US Airlines" and the only flight will be between Baghdad and- wait for it-the old East Berlin airport of Schonefeld. A British outfit calling itself "Mayhill Aviation" has printed advertisements in the Iraqi press saying that it intends to fly a Boeing 747 once a week from Gatwick to Basra, a route which suggests that it is going to be British military personnel and their families who end up using the plane.

Open universities are good news. And few would blame Bremer for summarily firing the 436 professors who were members of the Baath party. In the same vein, the CPA annulled the academic system whereby student party members would automatically receive higher grades. This is real de-Baathification. But then it turned out that there wouldn't be enough qualified professors to go round. Quite a number of the 436 were party men in name only and received their degrees at foreign universities. So, at Mustansiriyah University, for example, the very same purged professors were re-hired after filling out forms routinely denouncing the Baath party. Bremer seems to have a habit of reversing his own decisions; having triumphantly announced that he'd sacked the entire Iraqi army, he was humiliatingly forced to put them back on rations in case they all decided to attack US soldiers in Iraq.

--snip--

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk09092003.html

[bemildred]

1. This is all so familiar.

I worked in defense for a long time. The "managers" were
great politicians, bureaucratic infighters, PR men, but
they couldn't manage taking a shit without technical help,
they always believed that things were fundamentally simple,
that with faith and fortitude and unremitting positive thoughts
everything could be made to work and the contract could be
completed successfully, and they all had absolute faith in their
own ability no matter how many times they fell flat on their face.
And things were always going according to plan, no matter what.