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At a recent meeting of the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and World Bank, held in Dubai, the puppet Finance Minister installed by the American colonisers of Iraq, announced that the so-called ‘interim government’, has taken the decision to privatise the entire economy of Iraq, save the oil and minerals sector.
The statement added further that foreigners would be entitled to an outright purchase of the assets that used to be in the state sector, while they would also be allowed a hundred percent repatriation of the profits and their capital.
The announcement of the wholesale dismantling of the national assets of Iraq, for the sharks of imperialist capital to swallow (no doubts, the American transnational companies will take the lion’s share) comes as no surprise to observers of the unfolding scenario in Iraq. In a most unprecedented manner the Bush administration, employing the most blatant lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, launched a war against a sovereign state, removed its government, installed puppet administration, and has now taken the decision to sell the country to the highest bidder.
They obviously left the oil assets for now, because of the anticipated outcry that would greet the decision to privatise Iraqi oil fields and assets. But everybody in the world is aware, that the main reason why the illegal war and occupation of Iraq has been conducted in the first place, is for the American oil companies to eventually seize this treasure trough. It’s just a matter of time before this choice asset is finally taken, lock, stock, and barrel!
It is also indicative that the decision to sell Iraqi assets was announced in the midst of very interesting developments within Iraqi and in the international system. On the one hand, the resistance to American occupation was becoming widespread and the American causalities are mounting by the day. Of course, the colonial occupiers continue to delude themselves that those who resist their occupation and plunder of Iraq are remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime and foreign Islamist terrorists.
The situation has become so serious, that George Bush has asked the US Congress for an additional appropriation of billions of Dollars to prosecute his continued illegal occupation of Iraq, while his popularity ratings at home continues to drop with each new dead American that falls to the bullets of the Iraqi resistance. As the 2004 elections draw nearer, Bush has become considerably agitated about the likely impact in a year’s time, of continuing resistance, and the consequence in the number of dead American soldiers.
It is for this reason that he was obliged to return to the United Nations, which he had warned to join him in his aggression, or risk becoming irrelevant just a year ago. Yet in his most arrogant speech, asked for the commitment of the world body, on American terms, to the Iraqi quagmire.
Similarly, he has been pressuring countries like Pakistan, India, and Turkey, to send troops to help break the backbone of the resistance to American colonial occupation of Iraq; or at least die for his adventure, while ensuring that the body bags will not return in the direction of America, which almost certainly would cost him the 2004 elections
Daily Trust will like to warn countries whose leaders would accept to be arm-twisted by the United States to send troops to Iraqi, that they have no right to oppose the Iraqi struggle for national liberation. What is unfolding in Iraq, is a continuation of battles that peoples of Third World countries have carried out in the past, either in Vietnam, Korea, Angola, Namibia, or several other places where foreign forces have occupied their lands, and tried to steal their natural resources, and truncate their independence right to make history.
The scenario in Iraq is a particularly blatant expression of the arrogance and viciousness of the only superpower, and the danger it represents for the contemporary world. The world should not bail out the United States from the quicksand it dug itself into through the unjust war that it fought in Iraq to satisfy its ravenous appetite for the oil riches of that country. Neither does the international community have the right to hamper Iraq’s right to free itself from American occupation. That right is enshrined in the charter of the United Nations Organisation.
It would therefore, be the greatest subversion of international law, to help consolidate the American colonial enterprise of plunder in Iraq. Iraq has ensured that the scales have fallen off the hypocrisy which rules contemporary international relations.
