UPDATED - ColdType

chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny
Penny – ‘The sky is falling’. I’ve never seen anything
like it! And here is a country that’s being
liberated, here are people who are going from
being repressed and held under the thumb of a
vicious dictator, and they’re free. And all this
newspaper could do, with eight or ten headlines,
they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they
claimed we had shot – one thing after another.
It’s just unbelievable . . .”
Privatization on the way
ZNET, on the left, carries a report itemizing
more manna from the City on the Hill but also
notes that the post war plans call for privatizing
the Iraqi economy. What socialism there was
there apparently has to go. “The $4.8 million
management contract for the port in Umm Qasr
has already gone to a U.S. company, Stevedoring
Services of America, and the airports are on the
auction block. The U.S. Agency for International
Development has invited U.S. multinationals to
bid on everything from rebuilding roads and
bridges to printing textbooks. Most of these contracts
are for about a year, but some have
options that extend up to four. How long before
they meld into long-term contracts for privatized
water services, transit systems, roads, schools
and phones? When does reconstruction turn
into privatization in disguise?
“California Republican Congressman Darrel
Issa has introduced a bill that would require the
Defense Department to build a CDMA cellphone
system in postwar Iraq in order to benefit
‘U.S. patent holders.’ As Farhad Manjoo noted in
Salon, CDMA is the system used in the United
States, not Europe, and was developed by Qual-
SO, THIS IS VICTORY
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comm, one of Issa’s most generous donors.
“And then there’s oil. The Bush Administration
knows it can’t talk openly about selling off Iraq’s
oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell. It leaves
that to Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraq petroleum
ministry official. ‘We need to have a huge
amount of money coming into the country,’ Chalabi
says. ‘The only way is to partially privatize
the industry.’”
Ah, yes, those weapons
WE look forward to some news outlet running a
chart on all this with frequent updates. Interestingly,
BBC World led this morning with a
reminder that the weapons of mass destruction
alleged to be hidden in Iraq have yet to be found.
UN weapons instructor Hanz Blix has offered to
go back in to finish the job that, shall we say, was
put on hold by preemptive war. No thanks, says
Washington which is, nonetheless reportedly
hiring l,000 now out of work UN weapons inspectors
do the job under Washington’s watchful eye.
Colin Powell insists the weapons will be found.
Having covered the work of the Drug Enforcement
Agency in America for years, I have no
doubt they will.
Encouraging the chaos
SLOWLY, stories we haven’t seen and claims we
haven’t heard are emerging. They challenge the
unrelieved picture of a beneficent liberation.
One is from Sweden’s leading newspaper Dagens
Nyheter, whose impressive offices I have visited.
It interviews Khaled Bayomi, who has taught and
researched Middle Eastern conflicts for ten
years at the University of Lund where he is also