No. 263, Jan. 29-Feb. 4, 2004

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COMMENTARY





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Bush’s Iraq: An appointocracy

 

No child’s behind left

 








Bush’s Iraq: An appointocracy

By Naomi Klein

“The people of Iraq are free,” declared US President George W. Bush in Tuesday’s State of the Union address. The day before, 100,000 Iraqis begged to differ. They took to the streets of Baghdad shouting “Yes, yes to elections. No, no to selection.”

According to Iraq occupation chief Paul Bremer, there really is no difference between the White House’s version of freedom, and the one being demanded on the street. Asked on Friday whether his plan to form an Iraqi government through appointed caucuses was headed toward a clash with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call for direct elections, Mr. Bremer said he had no “fundamental disagreement with him.”

It was, he said, a mere quibble over details. “I don’t want to go into the technical details of refinements. There are, if you talk to experts in these matters, all kinds of ways to organize partial elections and caucuses. And I’m not an election expert, so I don’t want to go into the details. But we’ve always said we’re willing to consider refinements.”

I’m not an election expert either, but I’m pretty sure there are differences here than cannot be refined. Ayatollah al-Sistani’s supporters want every Iraqi to have a vote, and for the people they elect to write the laws of the country — your basic, imperfect, representative democracy.

Mr. Bremer wants his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to appoint the members of 18 regional organizing committees. The committees will then select delegates to form 18 selection caucuses. These selected delegates will then further select representatives to a transitional national assembly. The assembly will have an internal vote to select an executive and ministers who will form the new government of Iraq. That, Bush said in his address, constitutes “a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty.”

Got that? Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add to that the fact that Mr. Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and that Mr. Bush was appointed to his by the US Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by appointee’s appointee’s appointees’ appointees’ appointees’ selectees.

The White House insists that its aversion to elections is purely practical: there just isn’t time to pull them off before the June 30 deadline. So why have the deadline? The most common explanation is that Bush needs “a braggable” on the campaign trail: When his Democratic rival raises the specter of Vietnam, Mr. Bush will reply that the occupation is over, we’re on our way out.

Except that the United States has absolutely no intention of actually getting out of Iraq. It wants its troops to remain, and it wants Bechtel, MCI, and Halliburton to stay behind and run the water system, the phones, and the oil fields. It was with this goal in mind that, on Sept. 19, Mr. Bremer pushed through a package of sweeping economic reforms that The Economist described as a “capitalist dream.”

But the dream, though still alive, is now in peril. A growing number of legal experts are challenging the legitimacy of Mr. Bremer’s reforms, arguing that under the international laws that govern occupying powers — the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions — the CPA can only act as a caretaker of Iraq’s economic assets, not as its auctioneer. Radical changes such as Mr. Bremer’s Order 39, which opened up Iraqi industry to 100 per cent foreign ownership, violate these laws and could therefore be easily overturned by a sovereign Iraqi government.

That prospect has foreign investors seriously spooked, and many are opting not to go into Iraq. The major private insurance brokers are also sitting it out, having assessed Iraq as too great an expropriation risk. Mr. Bremer has responded by quietly canceling his announced plan to privatize Iraq’s 200 state firms, instead putting up 35 companies for lease (with a later option to buy). For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign Iraqi government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva Regulations, can legally sell off Iraq’s assets.

But will it? Given the widespread perception that the United States is not out to rebuild Iraq but to loot it, if Iraqis were given the chance to vote tomorrow, they could well immediately decide to expel US troops and to reverse Mr. Bremer’s privatization project, opting instead to protect local jobs. And that frightening prospect — far more than the absence of a census — explains why the White House is fighting so hard for its appointocracy.

Under the current US plan for Iraq, the transitional national assembly would hold onto power from June 30 until general elections are held no later than Dec. 31, 2005. That’s 17 leisurely months for a non-elected government to do what the CPA could not legally do on its own: invite US troops to stay indefinitely and turn Mr. Bremer’s capitalist dream into binding law. Only after these key decisions have been made will Iraqis be invited to have their say. The White House calls this self-rule. It is, in fact, the very definition of outside-rule, occupation through outsourcing.

That means that the world is once again facing a choice about Iraq. Will its democracy emerge stillborn, with foreign troops dug in on its territory, multinationals locked into multiyear contracts controlling key resources, and an entrenched economic program that has already left 60 - 70 percent of the population unemployed? Or will its democracy be born with its heart still beating, capable of building the country Iraqis choose?

On one side are the occupation forces. On the other are growing movements demanding economic and voter rights in Iraq. Increasingly, occupying forces are responding to these movements by using fatal force to break up demonstrations, as British soldiers did in Amarah earlier this month, killing six. Yes, there are religious fundamentalists and Saddam loyalists capitalizing on the rage in Iraq, but the very existence of these pro-democracy movements is itself a kind of miracle: after 30 years of dictatorship, war, sanctions and, now, occupation, it would certainly be understandable if Iraqis met further hardships with fatalism and resignation. Instead, the violence of Mr. Bremer’s shock therapy appears to have jolted tens of thousands into action.

Their courage deserves our support. Last week, at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, author and activist Arundhati Roy called on the global forces that opposed the Iraq war to “become the global resistance to the occupation.” She suggested choosing “two of the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction of Iraq” and targeting them for boycotts and civil disobedience.

In his State of the Union address, President Bush said, “I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.” He is being proven right in Iraq every day — and the rising voices are chanting, “No, no USA. Yes, yes elections.”

Source: (Toronto) Globe & Mail

No child’s behind left

By Greg Palast

Go ahead, George, and lie to me. Lie to my dog. Lie to my sister. But don’t you ever lie to my kids.

Deep into your State of the Siege lecture tonight, long after sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, you came after our children. “By passing the No Child Left Behind Act,” you said, “We are regularly testing every child ... and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

You said it...and then that little tongue came out; that weird way you stick your tongue out between your lips like the little kid who knows he’s fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. I saw that snakey tongue dart out and I thought, “He knows.”

And what you know, Mr. Bush, is this: you’ve ordered this testing to hunt down, identify, and target for destruction the hopes of millions of children you find too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.

Here’s how No Child Left Behind and your tests work in the classrooms of Houston and Chicago. Millions of 8 year olds are given lists of words and phrases. They are graded, like USDA beef: some prime, some OK, many failed.

Once the kids are stamped and sorted, the parents of the marked children ask for you to fill your tantalizing promise, to “make sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

But there is no “better option,” is there, Mr. Bush? Where’s the money for the better schools to take in the kids getting crushed in cash-poor districts? Where’s the open door to the suburban campuses with the big green lawns for the dark kids with the test-score mark of Cain.

And if I bring up the race of the kids with the low score, don’t get all snippy with me, telling me your program is color blind. We know the color of the kids left behind; and it’s not the color of the kids you went to school with at Philips Andover Academy.

You know and I know that the testing is a con. There is no “better option” at the other end. The cash went to the end the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire’s son another million.

But you’ll tell me you took tests as a youth. I know you did. And you scored on the Air Guard flight test 25 out of 100, one point above too dumb to fly. But you zoomed past the other would-be flyboys. They were stamped, “Ready for ‘Nam.” And you took a test to get into Yale. And though your pet rock scored a wee bit higher than you, your grandpa on the Yale board provided the “better option” which got you in.

Here in New York City, your educational Taliban, led by Republican Mayor Bloomberg, had issued an edict to test the third-graders. Winnow out the chaff and throw them back, exactly where they started, to repeat the same failed program another year. In other words, the core edict of No Child Left Behind is that failing children will be left behind another year. And another year and another year.

You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program - because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: Identify the nation’s loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. The system will provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale alumni club, to punch the McDonald’s cash registers color-coded for illiterates, to pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new service economy order.

Source: Guerrilla News Network