With Chomsky-like clarity, she zeroes in on the state of the neocon's project and the problems they face completing it -- and how we can help ensure they fail.
...if genuine democracy ever came to Iraq, the real goals of the war--control over oil, support for Israel, the construction of enduring military bases, the privatization of the entire economy--would all be lost. Why? Because Iraqis don't want them and they don't agree with them.
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I believe Paul Wolfowitz genuinely thought that Iraqis would respond like the contestants on a reality TV show and say: "Oh my God. Thank you for my brand-new shiny country." They didn't. They protested that 500,000 people had lost their jobs. They protested the fact that they were being shut out of the reconstruction of their own country, and they made it clear they didn't want permanent U.S. bases.
That's when the administration broke its promise and appointed a CIA agent as the interim prime minister. In that period they locked in--basically shackled--Iraq's future governments to an International Monetary Fund program until 2008. This will make the humanitarian crisis in Iraq much, much deeper. Here's just one example: The IMF and the World Bank are demanding the elimination of Iraq's food ration program, upon which 60 percent of the population depends for nutrition, as a condition for debt relief and for the new loans that have been made in deals with an unelected government.
In these elections, Iraqis voted for the United Iraqi Alliance. In addition to demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of troops, this coalition party has promised that they would create 100 percent full employment in the public sector--i.e., a total rebuke of the neocons' privatization agenda. But now they can't do any of this because their democracy has been shackled. In other words, they have the vote, but no real power to govern.
She goes on to say that the best strategy for opposing the war is a campaign promoting democracy in Iraq. Not Bush's fake democracy, but actual self-determination for Iraqis. She says we've allowed Bush to hijack the very term "democracy" and we've backed ourselves into a corner as the "cut and run" opposition to the war. We need a more positive agenda that reclaims the high ground.
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