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and no desire to cripple it's future power like Germany's. Are you saying the Iraq invasion was a kind of corporate imperialism? I'm ready to hear your 'capitalism's sinister role' argument.

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As head of the CPA, Bremer moved swiftly to draft a series of laws to govern Iraq, which at the time had no constitution, nor legally-constituted government. The new laws of the US occupation authority numbered 100 in all, and were put into effect in April 2004. One of the Orders mandates that no elected Iraqi government will have the power to alter the US-imposed laws. The new laws, or Orders, as they were called, would insure that the economy of Iraq would be remade along lines of a US-mandated ‘free-market’ economic model.

Bremer pushed through more drastic economic changes in one month than the International Monetary Fund managed over three decades in Latin America. Former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Prize laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, described Bremer’s reforms as ‘an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.’

Bremer’s first act was to fire 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers.

Next, he opened the country’s borders to unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Two weeks after Bremer came to Baghdad in May 2003, he cynically declared Iraq to be ‘open for business.’ Whose business he didn’t say but it soon became clear.

Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil economy had been dominated by some 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, 2003 Bremer announced that these state firms would be privatized immediately. ‘Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,’ he said, ‘is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.’

CPA Order 37 lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. Without tax revenues, the state would be unable to pay a role in anything.

Order 39 allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. This ensured unrestricted foreign business activities in the country. Investors could also take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country. They would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed.



Bremer’s Order 81

The CPA explicitly defined the legal importance of the 100 Orders to leave no doubt that they were, indeed, orders. An Order was defined as, ‘binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.’ In other words, Iraqis were told, ‘do it or die.’ The law of occupation was supreme.

Buried deep among the Bremer laws was Order 81, ‘Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law’.

At the heart of Order 81 was the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) provision. Order 81, states: ‘Farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties or any variety mentioned in items 1 and 2 of paragraph (C) of Article 14 of this Chapter.’

In plain English, this gives holders of patents on certain plant varieties, i.e. large foreign multinationals, absolute rights for 20 years over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture. The protected plant varieties are Genetically Modified or Gene Manipulated (GM) plants, and an Iraqi farmer who chose to plant such seeds must sign an agreement with the seed company holding the patent that he would pay a ‘technology fee’ and an annual license fee for planting the patented seeds.

Any Iraqi farmer seeking to take a portion of those patented seeds to replant in following harvest years would be subject to heavy fines from the seed supplier. Iraqi farmers would become vassals, not of Saddam Hussein, but of multinational GM seed giants.

Iraqi seed treasure destroyed

Iraq is part of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, where the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created ideal conditions for crop cultivation. Iraqi farmers have existed since approximately 8,000 B.C. and had developed the rich seed variety for almost every variety of wheat used in the world today. They did this through a system of saving a share of seeds and replanting, developing new naturally resistant hybrid varieties through the new plantings.

For years, the Iraqis had held samples of such precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank, located, ironically, in Abu Ghraib, the city made infamous as a US military torture prison site in 2004. Following the US occupation and various bombing campaigns, the historic and invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished, a possible further casualty of the Iraq war.

Bremer’s Pentagon advisers had very different plans for Iraq’s food future.

Iraqi agriculture was to be ‘modernized,’ industrialized and reoriented away from traditional family multi-crop farming, into US-style agribusiness enterprises, producing for the ‘world market.’ Serving the food security needs of hungry Iraqis would be purely incidental to that plan.

The CPA’s Order 81, behind the cover of complicated legal jargon, in effect, turned the food future of Iraq over to global multinational private companies, hardly the liberation most Iraqis had hoped for.

Order 81 on Intellectual Property Rights, was not negotiated between a sovereign government and the WTO, or another government. It was imposed on Iraq without debate, from Washington. According to informed Washington reports, the specific details of Order 81 on plants were written for the US Government by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops.


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As soon as Order 81 had been issued, USAID began delivering thousands of tons of US-origin ‘high-quality, certified wheat seed” for subsidized, initially near cost-free distribution through the Agriculture Ministry, to desperate Iraqi farmers. The USAID refused to allow independent scientists to determine whether the seed was GMO seed or not. Naturally, should it prove to have been GMO wheat seed, within one or two seasons, Iraqi farmers would find themselves suddenly dependent on paying royalty fees to foreign seed companies to survive.

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Explain the sanctions then ?

Was that not set up to punish Iraq ?

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There's more, if you care to look. Try googling iraq+CPA+orders

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Originally posted by kpo:

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Explain the sanctions then ?

Was that not set up to punish Iraq ?

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Well Sadaam was a monster with a history of WMD programmes - that explains the sanctions for me... How do you explain them, murderous U.S spite? Seriously, what was the U.S interest in sanctions beyond taming a tyrant?

It seems to me we should have ousted Sadaam in 1991 when there was international backing for the invasion, and then built up Iraq to be prosperous and free - just like the U.S did with ww2 defeated foes Japan and Germany.

Heads should roll

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Well, some would argue that WE have a democracy with a "free" press (owned by corporations, I might add). Nonetheless, we've pretty much acted as an imperial power at least since the Spanish-American War, and I would say that we've devolved into a corporatocracy despite democracy, so I've come to the sad conclusion that democracy is no barrier to, or guarantee of, economic freedom.

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Anyway, I used to think that democracy could solve everything. When I was told by a brilliant colleague that it took only 200 years for the Constitution to be completely corrupted I was shocked right down to my shoes, because that was my touchstone... Sure, we were imperialist and our system ran on "one dollar one vote" but someday the people would rise up and right the wrongs through peaceful democratic change. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I no longer think that free elections are the answer to everything.

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So killing over a million people on a theory with no evidence is ok in your book is it ?

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And even later when it was known the sanctions were doing nothing but causing suffering and death

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The motive of the US rings hollow when looking at the result

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Originally posted by kpo:

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So killing over a million people on a theory with no evidence is ok in your book is it ?

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You've lost me here...

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And even later when it was known the sanctions were doing nothing but causing suffering and death

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You think they did nothing to limit Saddam's terrorising of the region? Isn't his list of atrocities much quieter under the sanctions?

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The motive of the US rings hollow when looking at the result

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Well what do you think is the motive for the sanctions? You're yet to suggest a convincing one...

Heads should roll

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Originally posted by kpo:
You think they did nothing to limit Saddam's terrorising of the region? Isn't his list of atrocities much quieter under the sanctions?

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Prolonging the {Iran-Iraq} war was phenomenally expensive. Iraq received massive external financial support from the Gulf states, and assistance through loan programs from the U.S. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing and enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The U.S. Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of U.S. grain exporters.
...{T}he U.S. had begun, several years earlier, to provide it with intelligence and military support (in secret and contrary to this country's official neutrality) in accordance with policy directives from President Ronald Reagan... By the summer of 1983 Iran had been reporting Iraqi use of using chemical weapons for some time.... The U.S had intelligence ... describing Iraq's "almost daily" use of chemical weapons, concurrent with its policy review and decision to support Iraq in the war. The intelligence indicated that Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces, and, according to a November 1983 memo, against "Kurdish insurgents" as well. ... What was the US response to the use of CW? .... Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 114, dated November 26, 1983, concerned specifically with U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war. The directive reflects the administration's priorities: it calls for heightened regional military cooperation to defend oil facilities, and measures to improve U.S. military capabilities in the Persian Gulf, and directs the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take appropriate measures to respond to tensions in the area. It states, "Because of the real and psychological impact of a curtailment in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf on the international economic system, we must assure our readiness to deal promptly with actions aimed at disrupting that traffic." ... {By} late March 1984... the U.S. had publicly condemned Iraq's chemical weapons use. {But}... Although official U.S. policy still barred the export of U.S. military equipment to Iraq, some was evidently provided on a "don't ask - don't tell" basis. In April 1984, the Baghdad interests section asked to be kept apprised of Bell Helicopter Textron's negotiations to sell helicopters to Iraq, which were not to be "in any way configured for military use" The purchaser was the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.... During the spring of 1984 the U.S. policy... "favor[ed] expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities" ... force in the Middle East, and to keep the oil flowing.

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Sorry if it seems like I'm dumping information on you, KPO.

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I've come to the conclusion that our military interventions are almost ALWAYS in support of higher profits for our corporations...

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I haven't suggested motive, because to tell you the truth I don't give a damn why they did it.

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