The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

From democracynow.org

The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

We speak with Antonia Juhasz about her new book, "The Bush
Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time." The book
tracks the radical neo-liberal economic program the Bush
administration has tried to impose on Iraq, which threatens to
leave Iraq's economy and oil reserves largely in the hands of
multinational corporations.

04/25/06 Democracy Now

Listen online at http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=20060425

* Antonia Juhasz, visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy
Studies. For years, she was Project Director at the International
Forum on Globalization. - Website: TheBushAgenda.org

TRANSCRIPT: -

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is an author who has been tracking
the Bush administration's goals in Iraq since the invasion.
Antonia Juhasz has written about them in a new book. It's called
The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. The
book tracks the radical neo-liberal economic program the Bush
administration has tried to impose on Iraq, which threatens to
leave Iraq's economy and oil reserves largely in the hands of
multinational corporations. It's an agenda, says Antonia Juhasz,
that the Bush administration is trying to bring to all corners of
the globe.

Antonia Juhasz joins us in our Firehouse studio. She's a visiting
scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. For years she was
Project Director at the International Forum on Globalization.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: And congratulations on this book.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the leadership of Iraq?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, I would argue that the most important
member of the new leadership is Adel Abdel Mahdi, who has been in
every U.S.-appointed Iraqi government post-the-invasion. He was
the Finance Minister of the interim government, the Vice
President of the transitional government and was just named Vice
President of the permanent government. He was actually the man
that the Bush administration wanted to be the new prime minister
of Iraq. The deal that was worked out was that another member of
the Dawa Party, just like Mr. Jaafari, would become prime
minister, and then Mahdi, who is a member of the SCIRI Party,
would be vice president.

It's a position that allows him to continue to be the most
aggressive advocate of the Bush agenda in Iraq, which I argue is
opening Iraq -- continuing to open Iraq to U.S. corporate
invasion. Currently, 150 U.S. corporations have received $50
billion worth of contracts, as you said in the introduction, to
utterly fail in reconstruction in Iraq, but the money has still
been granted. And Mahdi is the person who advanced Paul Bremer's
one hundred orders in Iraq that opened up the economy. But more
importantly to the Bush administration, he is the person who has
most aggressively pushed their agenda for a new oil law in Iraq,
which would open up Iraq's oil sector, the vast majority of
Iraq's oil sector, to private foreign corporate investment.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the Bremer orders. You spend a lot of
time in the book on them. Can you talk about Paul Bremer,
Bremer's blueprint by BearingPoint, the orders themselves?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. You know, in the report that you were
quoting in the beginning of the hour, which said that the
reconstruction failed because of poor planning, it's a myth that
there was not a post-war planning done by the Bush
administration. The reason why it failed was because the
interests it was serving were U.S. multinationals, not
reconstruction in Iraq.

That plan was ready two months before the invasion. It was
written by BearingPoint, Inc., a company based in Virginia that
received a $250 million contract to rewrite the entire economy of
Iraq. It drafted that new economy. That new economy was put into
place systematically by L. Paul Bremer, the head of the
occupation government of Iraq for 14 months, who implemented
exactly one hundred orders, basically all of which are still in
place today. And everyone who is watching who is familiar with
the policies of the World Trade Organization, the North American
Free Trade Agreement, the World Bank, the I.M.F., will understand
the orders.

They implement some of the most radical corporate globalization
ideas, such as free investment rules for multinational
corporations. That means corporations can enter Iraq, and they
essentially don't have to contribute at all to the economy of
Iraq. The most harmful provision thus far has been the national
treatment provision, which meant that the Iraqis could not give
preference to Iraqi companies or workers in the reconstruction,
and therefore, U.S. companies received preference in the
reconstruction. They hired workers who weren't even from Iraq, in
most cases, and utterly bungled the reconstruction.

And the most important company, in my mind, to receive blame is
the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco. They have received $2.8
billion to rebuild water, electricity and sewage systems, the
most important systems in the life of an Iraqi. After the first
Gulf War, the Iraqis rebuilt these systems in three months' time.
It's been three years, and, as you said, those services are still
below pre-war levels.

AMY GOODMAN: BearingPoint. Why have we never heard of this
company? Where does it come from?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: BearingPoint was KPMG Consulting, but had to
change its name in the wake of the Arthur Andersen scandal, but
BearingPoint picked up all of Arthur Andersen's old clientele and
is essentially just the reborn KPMG. And BearingPoint, you
probably haven't heard of, though, because they work in the back
room. They write things like new economic policies, but are not
the people seen on the ground implementing the policies.

Actually, there's a wonderful story that I tell in the book by a
member of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.
occupation government in Iraq, who says, 'One day these people
from this place called BearingPoint came up and started telling
us about these economic policies that were so unrealistic. I
didn't know who they were and what they were talking about.'
Well, what they were talking about was an economic agenda that
seemed completely ridiculous for the people on the ground who are
looking at sewage flowing through the streets and Iraqis saying
over and over and over again, 'The most important thing we need
is electricity. Just electricity. Just give us our electricity
back,' and failing to do it.

But this was BearingPoint, and they are still there. Their
contract was renewed. They're still focusing in particular on
privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises. That's almost
the sole focus of their current contract, and that contract goes,
I believe, until 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: You have a quote of Lakhdar Brahimi, who is the U.N.
Special Adviser to Iraq. A few years ago, he said, "Bremer,"
talking about L. Paul Bremer, "is the dictator of Iraq. He has
the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his
agreement in this country."

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Bremer became the dictator of Iraq. His orders
laid out the law. Now, probably the most important thing to know
is that that was completely illegal under international law. The
Geneva Conventions are very specific about what an occupying
power should do. It must provide basic security and services. It
cannot change the laws or the political structure of the country
it occupies. The Bush administration did exactly the opposite --
changed all the fundamental economic and political laws and
utterly failed to provide for the security and the basic needs of
the Iraqi people. What you hear most often in Iraq today is
people saying, "Please just put us back where we were before you
came."

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Antonia Juhasz, author and
activist, wrote The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy
at a Time. Now, gas is over $3 in many places. What's the
connection?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, here's the connection. The Bush
administration is the most beholden administration probably in
American history to the oil and gas industry. This is the first
time in history that the President, Vice President and Secretary
of State are all former energy company officials. In fact, both
Bush and Rice have more experience as energy company officials
than they do as government leaders. Cheney outbeats them. He's
spent 30 years working for government. However, his five years at
Halliburton have been so profitable that you might say that his
Halliburton years outweigh their oil years, because Bush was a
very bad oil company executive. But their links to the oil sector
are deep.

The oil industry provided more than 13 times more money to the
Bush-Cheney ticket in the first round of elections than it did to
his competitor, nine times more in the second. And this industry
has been absolutely coddled by the Bush administration: enormous
tax subsidies, deregulation, and, I would argue, a war waged on
their behalf.

Now, there's two intimate connections between the war and the
price of gas. But first, I think it's very important for people
to understand that the vertical integration of the oil industry,
which has been absolutely exacerbated under the Bush
administration. For example, ChevronTexaco and Unocal merging
into one company, the completion of Exxon and Mobil's merger, all
of these little companies merging into enormous behemoths, so
that you have ExxonMobil being the company that has received the
highest profits of any company in the world, over the last two
years, ever in the history of the world. That is because of the
vertical integration and monopoly power of these companies. That
means that they control exploration, production, refining,
marketing and sales.

The price of oil at the pump is about 50% the price of a barrel
of oil, about 25% taxes, and then the rest is marketing and just
the price determined by the company at the pump. So that means
that about 18% to 20% is absolutely determined by the oil
companies themselves and governed by the companies themselves. So
they could reduce the price of oil and reduce their profit
margin, or they could jack up the price of oil and increase their
profit margin. They have chosen to do the latter.

And one of the things that has helped them do that is, first of
all, the United States is receiving a tremendous amount of oil
from Iraq. Oil is down in overall export and production, but not
tremendously so. We were -- at prewar was 2.5 million barrels a
day. We're now at about 2 or 2.2 million barrels a day. But 50%
of that, on average, is coming to the United States, and it's
being brought to the United States by Chevron and Exxon and
Marathon. The myth of dramatically reduced supply has helped them
create an argument to the American public, which is, you know,
it's a time of war, we're suffering, gas prices are going to go
up, everyone needs to come in and support this because this is
war. Well, that's just not true. The companies are using that as
a myth to help make it okay for them to receive these utterly
ridiculous profits.

AMY GOODMAN: In your chapter "A Mutual Seduction," you have a
quote of Ken Derr, the former C.E.O. of Chevron, 1998. I know his
tenure well. It was the time in the Niger Delta that Chevron was
involved with the killing of two Nigerian villagers, who were
protesting yet another oil spill of Chevron and jobs not being
given to the local community as they drilled for oil. But your
quote here says, "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas,
reserves I would love Chevron to have access to." And then you
follow that by a quote of John Gibson, Chief Executive of
Halliburton Energy Service Group, who says, "We hope Iraq will be
the first domino and that Libya and Iran will follow. We don't
like being kept out of markets, because it gives our competitors
an unfair advantage."

ANTONIA JUHASZ: I love it when they're honest. It doesn't happen
very often. Yeah, these companies have been explicit, for
decades, that they want in, particularly to Iraq. The reason is
obvious. Iraq certainly has the second largest oil reserves in
the world, but some geologists believe it has the largest, at
least on par with Saudi Arabia. That's a tremendous pool of
wealth. And not just have the companies been clear that they want
access to that oil, U.S. leaders -- for example, *** Cheney,
Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld -- have all
been explicit for the past 20 years that what the U.S. needs to
do is gain increased access to the region's oil, and most
explicitly during the '90s, Iraq's oil, that this is something
that shouldn't be in the hands of Saddam Hussein.

The difference, going into the current Bush administration, was
that the rhetoric changed to and the reality changed to not just
we need a new leader, we need a new -- a fully new political and
economic structure in Iraq, and we need to be in that country to
make sure that that structure gets put into place. And that is
exactly what they have achieved, and now Halliburton, Chevron,
Bechtel, Lockheed Martin have profited tremendously from this
process already. Chevron's -- the U.S. value of Iraqi oil,
imported Iraqi oil, has increased by 86% between 2003 and 2004.
Those profits have gone to Exxon, Chevron and Marathon.

Chevron has seen its most profitable years in its entire 125-year
history over the last two years. They are making out like
bandits. They have been at the forefront of advocating for
decades for increased U.S. economic access to Iraq. And now, they
are one of the few companies that are poised once the new oil law
is implemented. And that oil law has its history in the U.S.
State Department, in the Iraqi Oil and Energy Working Group that
formed right before the war.

A member of that working group whose last name is Aloum, and I'm
blanking on his first name [Ibrahim Bahr], became Oil Minister of
Iraq. He's the man who eviscerated all of the pre-existing oil
contracts that Saddam Hussein had signed. At the end of Saddam
Hussein's tenure, he had signed about 30 contracts with companies
from all around the world to give them access to Iraq's oil
sector. None of those contracts were with the United States or
U.S. oil companies. The Cheney Energy Task Force, that met at the
very beginning of the Bush administration, mapped out foreign
suitors to Iraqi oil, listed all of the companies, all of the
countries, the fields that they had access to, within a document
that said we need --the U.S. needs to get greater access to
Middle East oil.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who Cheney met with?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Cheney met with -- thank goodness for the Supreme
Court, that ruled to release these documents, because otherwise
they were completely secret. He met with Bechtel, Chevron,
Halliburton, Exxon, all of the largest oil companies and all of
the largest oil engineering companies, and they decided we need
to increase our access to Middle Eastern oil.

Aloum then became Iraq's Oil Minister.

AMY GOODMAN: Ibrahim Bahr Al-Aloum.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: From your book.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: From my book. It's good to remember what's in my
book. Canceled all of the pre-existing oil contracts. Now, Abdel
Mahdi has said several times, "The new oil law, when it's put in
place, is going to be very good for U.S. oil companies." Chevron,
Exxon, the other companies are sort of hovering on the outside.
They've signed what are called "memoranda of understanding,"
essentially free services. Chevron has been training Iraqi
workers in the United States for years, mapping -- doing
mappings, free services, so that they are ready, when the
permanent government is in place, to sign contracts. And then, I
believe, once those contracts are signed, they will get to work,
but they need security. And what better security force than
150,000 American troops. And I do not think that those troops
will leave, unless we all have something to do about it, until
the oil companies are safely at work.

AMY GOODMAN: In our next segment we're going to talk about the
protest in this country, but I wanted to ask you about Henry
Kissinger and his role in this.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, Henry Kissinger is a fascinating character
in all realms. He has been fascinating for me to follow, because
in that chapter that you talked about, "Turning Toward Iraq," I
look at U.S. business interests and how they aggressively pursued
a greater U.S. relationship with Iraq.

Henry Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates the same year that
Ronald Reagan opened up for first time economic relationships
between the United States and Iraq. Reagan was the hottest
pursuer, until George Bush, Sr. came onto the team and really
pushed for better relationships was Saddam Hussein. But Kissinger
and Associates was a lead advice --providing advice to
multinational corporations on how to operate abroad, and one of
the lead advocates of enhancing the U.S. economic relationship
with Iraq.

Then, one of his managing directors, L. Paul Bremer, left
Kissinger and Associates and went to found his own crisis
management company, which essentially advised multinational
corporations on how to operate under the horrible consequences of
corporate globalization policies. He wrote a wonderful paper
where he said, you know, the policies of corporate globalization
create inequality, increase the cost of services, creates
hostilities, so corporations, you really need to buy my
insurance, because that's the only way to protect yourself
against these policies. And then he went on and implemented those
policies in Iraq.

But Kissinger aggressively lobbied, as well, for the second Iraq
war and wrote some blistering op-eds, in particular, arguing for
the need to invade. And I would imagine, although the records of
Kissinger Associates are remarkably secret, that he is now
working to help advance the interests of his companies.

But one of the things that has happened is that while U.S.
companies have received billions of dollars for the
reconstruction, the environment in Iraq is not safe. It's not
what the Bush administration had hoped for three years in, and so
the companies are sort of waiting on the edges, just like the oil
companies are waiting on the edges, to take advantage of this new
economic environment. While they wait, however, the U.S. Middle
East Free Trade Area advances, and that's where the trillions of
dollars are already starting to flow.

AMY GOODMAN: Antonia Juhasz is our guest. Her book is The Bush
Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. You write, "To
replace the Bush agenda, we must address each of its key pillars
individually -- war, imperialism and corporate globalization."
Can you outline your vision of an alternative to the Bush
agenda?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Yeah. The last chapter of the book provides the
whole analysis, so I will do it shortly here. But the most
important thing, I guess, to say at the outset is I believe that
we are already doing this, that we have incredible activist
movements that have made it so that only 30% of the population
even trusts the President today, only 35% even believe in the war
-- that is because of the tremendous organizing that has taken
place -- and that what we have to do is enlarge the mobilizing
that we are already doing and just bring more people into the
fold, that what we are doing is working. But the first is, on the
war, obviously, I believe that we have to bring the troops home.
But we also have to bring all of the economic transformers home,
like the BearingPoints. We have to cancel all of the
reconstruction contracts. And we have to make all those companies
give back the money for their failed reconstruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Make Bechtel give back $2.8 billion?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: $2.8 billion. Absolutely. For utterly failing in
its contractual obligations. That's Parsons with almost -- I'm
going to get the numbers wrong -- with $5 billion, Shaw Group
International with something like $5 billion. And these are all
companies that should sound familiar to people who are following
the reconstruction in New Orleans. And these companies are also
failing in New Orleans. They shouldn't get our money if they
fail. If they did a great job, they can have my money -- I'm fine
with that -- but not if they utterly fail and create more hatred
and animosity towards the United States. So they need to give
back their money.

And that money, I believe, needs to be put into a reconstruction
trust fund that is directed exclusively towards Iraqi companies
and Iraqi workers, and in the book I outline the dozens, if not
hundreds, of Iraqi private and public companies that are more
than capable of performing this work -- they just need money --
and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers who are absolutely
capable of performing this work. The money just needs to get to
them.

AMY GOODMAN: I think most people would be surprised hearing you
say this.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: That Iraqi soldiers are not ready, and certainly
they hear nothing about the Iraqi business community or
corporations that could be involved in this reconstruction.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Absolutely. I mean, there are hundreds of
state-owned enterprises, factories, consulting businesses,
engineers. After the first Gulf War, Iraqi engineers rebuilt
bridges, roads, electricity, water. All of these -- as I said,
both private and public companies are still there.

What happened with the soldiers isn't that they weren't capable
of being soldiers. It's that Paul Bremer fired the entire Iraqi
army in his first week of being in Iraq. Half a million men were
sent home with their weapons into an unemployment environment
that was 50% to 70% unemployment. They then were joined by
120,000 of Iraq's leading bureaucrats, who were also all fired by
Paul Bremer at the beginning of the occupation, because he didn't
want people to stand in the way of his new economic regime.

They all then watched as American companies came in and took
billions of dollars in reconstruction money and failed. And it
created enormous hostility and anger. And of the half a million
men that were members of the Iraqi army, only some 200,000, at
the best, are now back in the military, and they're being trained
under the American occupiers, and there's tremendous hostility
still. So I don't think that the Iraqis are poor soldiers. I
think they're pissed at the occupation, and they are also facing
an incredibly hostile environment within which they are working.
And so, they're having a difficult time. Again, that was a
private company that made the decision to fire the Iraqi
military. Ronco Consulting had the contract of what to do with
the military, and they're the ones, I imagine, that decided they
should all be fired.

So, reconstruction can happen. The money just needs to get to the
Iraqis. I also think that there is just some tremendous work
that's been done by groups around the world who have followed
reconstruction, that have demonstrated that the more local the
decision-making is in a post-war country, the more likely you're
going to get to see reconstruction really hit where it needs to
be met and the more likely people are going to commit to a
locality, so, as much as possible, directing reconstruction funds
down, devolving them to the local level and disbursing the
reconstruction funds not in one huge spurt so that you get a wild
west mentality, which is 'We've got to spend it now, we've got to
spend it fast,' which breeds corruption, when suddenly $50
billion is dropped into anyone's lap, but to disburse it and make
it a guaranteed amount over even ten, even fifteen years, so that
the reconstruction can be done thoughtfully, and again, so that
it can devolve to the local level.

And I say, because I believe, unfortunately, that the new Iraqi
government is simply not reflective of the people of Iraq --
however, it is the Iraqi government -- that there should be an
international monitoring board that partners with the Iraqi
government, made up of non-governmental groups with specific
knowledge in reconstruction, obviously Iraqi civil society groups
and people from the appropriate United Nations offices that have
expertise, and maybe one representative of the United States
government, since most of the money would be U.S. taxpayer money,
but certainly not with, you know, oversight over the rest of the
every member of the committee.

AMY GOODMAN: And the troops? The U.S. troops?

ANTONIA JUHASZ: U.S. troops have to be withdrawn. There's just no
-- there's no way around it. It's not going to be pretty. And I
think we fool ourselves if we say peace will rain on Iraq as soon
as the U.S. soldiers leave. But it is still unquestionable that
U.S. troops are creating more hostility than they are solving.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we'll have to leave it there. In our next
segment, talk about the peace protests in this country. Antonia
Juhasz has been our guest. Her book is called The Bush Agenda:
Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. Thank you for joining
us.

ANTONIA JUHASZ: Thank you, Amy.


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