[Peace-discuss] corp. looting and book burning in Iraq

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, April 12, 2003,]

They put US troops round the Oil Ministry and the headquarters of the
Secret Police, but stood aside as the mobs looted Baghdad's Archaeological
Museum and torched the National Library. It sounds like something right
out of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, only here the troops
protecting the American Petroleum Institute are lobbyists and politicians,
lobbing tax breaks over the wall.

As regards culture, Newt & Co, you'll recall, reached for their guns
whenever the word came up. What libraries here that have survived in any
useful condition here have FBI snoops asking to see what the brown
furriners have been reading. No need to worry about the locals. By the
time the attack here on public education is over, the sort of people who
once used public libraries to make their way up in the world won't be able
to read.

US troops also sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the
Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of
Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of
Information. Meanwhile these same troops lost no time in protecting such
important assets as the North Oil Company, the state-owned firm running
Iraq's northern oil fields. Colonel William Mayville, told the embedded
press that he wanted to send the message, "Hey, don't screw with the oil."

There's nothing out of place about the complacency with which Rumsfeld and
the others have regarded the looting of Baghdad, extolling it as somehow
the forgivable portent of freedom. "It's untidy," the endlessly loquacious
Rumsfeld confided. "And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make
mistakes and commit crimes."

Freedom to loot, the conversion of public assets into private property, is
a core "free-enterprise" tenet, raised to the level of religious belief in
recent years, in contrast to the more preferable posture of the Robber
Barons of yesteryear who viewed themselves more realistically as fellows
smart enough to figure out the combo to the safe.

We've just come through a decade of spectacular looting of the sort that
made Bush and Cheney millionaires. In the late Nineties the executive
suites of America's largest companies became a vast hog wallow. CEOs and
finance officers would borrow millions from some cooperative bank, using
the money to drive up company stock prices, thereby inflating the value of
their options. $1.22 trillion was the total of borrowing by non-financial
corporations between 1994 and 1999, inclusive. Of that sum, corporations
used just 15.3 per cent for capital expenditures. They used 57 per cent of
it, $697.4 billion, to buy back stock and thus enrich themselves, which
was surely the wildest smash and grab in the history of corporate
thievery.

Any of this relevant to what's going on in Iraq? Most certainly, and we
don't mean merely that Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress
will be unable, if he installed in Iraq as the US's local puppet, to visit
nearby Jordan where the fragrance of financial impropriety lingers ,
concerning a $200m (£127m) banking scandal in Jordan recently detailed in
The London Guardian by David Leigh and Brian Whitaker. In 1992, Chalabi
was tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years'
jail on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and
currency speculation.

Capitalism, as Joseph Schumpeter hopefully pointed out, is premised on
destruction. Lay waste the old, roll out the new. The missionaries of the
free market and of Christianity hastening into Baghdad are intent on
reinventing the place along capitalist lines under the overall spiritual
guidance of the Judeo-Christian tradition. That means tolerating, nay,
encouraging mobs to wipe out the past, whether in the form of ancient
Islamic manuscripts or public institutions.

Sweden's largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an interview April
11 with a Swedish researcher of Middle Eastern ancestry who had gone to
Iraq to serve as a human shield. Khaled Bayoumi told the newspaper, "I
happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people
to begin the plundering." He described how US soldiers shot security
guards at a local government building on Haifa Avenue on the west bank of
the Tigris, and then "blasted apart the doors to the building." Next,
according to Bayoumi, "from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic
encouraging people to come close to them."

At first, he said, residents were hesitant to come out of their homes
because anyone who had tried to cross the street in the morning had been
shot. "Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what
they wanted in the building," Bayoumi continued. "The word spread quickly
and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there
when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to
the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the
plundering continued there. "I stood in a large crowd and watched this
together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not
to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the
plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther
north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one that
watched with disgust."

Anyone who saw how "free enterprise" was nurtured in the former Soviet
Union will be able to presage Iraq's future. The brunt of the UN sanctions
imposed after 1991 was always born by the poor, even as Saddam's plumbers
installed gold taps in his bathrooms. These poor, after their brief taste
of the freedom to loot (honored by Ari Fleischer, who probably had
different views of the looting in Los Angeles after the Rodney King
verdict a few years ago), will relapse into abject poverty. Gangster
entrepreneurs will take over, under western approval and with fervent
editorials in the Wall Street Journal about the New Iraq, whose prospects
are about as rosy as when Ulagu the Mongol laid the place waste in 1248.

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