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Carving Up The New Iraq  

By Neil Mackay  

(Sunday Herald) IRAQ lies in ruins this morning. Its cities are bombed; 
its buildings have been torched by teenage arsonists; its shops, 
hospitals, factories and homes have been looted. This is Year Zero for 
Iraq. The old regime is gone and the United States is to rebuild this 
country literally from the ground up.  

Since the beginning of the year, America has had its reconstruction 
plan in place. Answering directly to Centcom commander General 
Tommy Franks, retired Lt Gen Jay Garner will be in command of the 
reconstruction effort. He will be aided by a series of military hardmen, 
diplomats and Republican party place-men who will help the United 
States create "Free Iraq" - aided by exiles who are returning to get 
their share of the spoils.  

This isn't a selfless exercise. In a special Sunday Herald investigation, 
we have charted the network of financial kickbacks, political pay-backs, 
cronyism, self-interest and ferocious ideology that underpins the entire 
reconstruction scheme.  

The US denies that men like Jay Garner are in effect the first wave of a 
military occupation. The Bush administration insists that it wants these 
men to work their way out of a job as quickly as possible. Some have 
mentioned three months as the possible length of their tenure in Iraq 
- others, more realistically, claim five years is a more likely term, 
taking the length of the US occupation of post-war Japan as the best 
comparison. America will be entrenched in this nation for decades to 
come. The colonisation process has begun already.  

In this investigation we have traced the roots of the reconstruction 
process back to the ideologues - the neo-conservatives now in the 
ascendancy in the US government - who devised the scheme. These 
men see the US military as the "cavalry on the new American frontier", 
they wanted Saddam "regime changed" long before Bush took power 
and they have long dreamt of a permanent US satellite in the Gulf. 
They have also been brutally honest about having a say over Iraq's 
oil fields.  

Ideology is ideology, but in the US government political theory goes 
hand-in-hand with big business. The end result of the lofty musings of 
Republican hawks fashioning the concepts behind the new world order 
is money-grubbing for the yankee dollar. The world isn't just watching 
the spread of a political philosophy in Iraq, it is watching a conquest 
by and for US big business as well. The term "military-industrial" complex 
brings to mind crazy conspiracy theories , but let's consider the term 
again. Each and every one of the companies in the running or in 
posession of contracts to reconstruct Iraq are either major Republican 
donors or have government staff working for them. The donations to the 
Republican party - and also to George W Bush himself - run into 
millions .  

Is this payback time? In the UK, connections like this between big 
business and politicians would be front page news for months. But 
not so in America.  

There is more to this than just kickbacks. The Americans call it "the 
favour bank", we call it more simply cronyism. The connections between 
the reconstructors is staggering. If these people aren't in the same 
think-tank together, then they work for the same companies, have the 
same friends and interests.  

Just look at one example - under our power-brokers section you will 
find Andrew Natsios. He's the head of USAid, the government department 
which hands out Iraqi reconstruction contracts. Would it surprise you 
to find out that Natsios has a connection to a company called Bechtel 
which is - yes - tipped for a rather lucrative contract? Then there's 
IRG. It secured one of the eight government contracts up for grabs. 
Are you shocked to learn IRG has four vice-presidents and 24 other 
staff who at one time worked for USAid? There's also a subsidiary of 
Halliburton, the oil giant once run by Dick Cheney (Bush's number two), 
which stands to make a cool $500 million out of reconstruction.  

With only a few exceptions, there is a smoking gun for all those behind 
the reconstruction work. Whether it's a seat on a board, shares in a 
firm, a favour owed here or there, these question the impartiality of 
seriously powerful people and ask important questions about the levels 
of self-interest that lie behind the rebuilding of Iraq. While Iraq may 
be free of Saddam, it looks like it's going to be the most lucrative 
country on Earth for the foreseeable future - at least for US hawks anyway.  

THE NEO-CONSERVATIVES

Paul Wolfowitz

The deputy defence secretary is the arch-ideologue of the 
Bush administration and the key architect in the Pentagon 
of the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.  

Like many of the reconstructors Wolfowitz of Arabia, as he is known, is 
a ranking member of the leading neo-conservative think-tank the Project 
for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocated regime change 
in Iraq even before George W Bush took office. He is also, like many of 
the reconstruction team, a key member of the ultra-right-wing Jewish 
Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) - a think-tank that puts 
Israel and its security at the heart of US foreign policy. Many of the 
reconstuctors - known as Wolfie's People or the True Believers - are 
hand-picked place- men chosen by the defence deputy. Wolfowitz is the 
ideological link in Team Bush's grand scheme. His thinking is and was 
central to the war and its aftermath.  

Lewis Libby

Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff is a long-standing face at 
the Pentagon, having served in the defence department during George 
Bush Snr's presidency. He is also friend, confidant and a neo-con 
fellow-traveller with Wolfowitz, and a founding member of the PNAC.  

He sits on the board of the Rand Corporation, a research and 
development corporation which has a huge number of contracts with 
the Pentagon. Zalmay Khalilzad (see the Arabs), Bush's special 
envoy to the the Iraq opposition, was an employee of Rand Corp.  

Libby owns shares in armament companies and has various oil 
interests. He is a consultant to Northrop Grumman, the defence 
contractor, which has an influential voice on the Defence Policy 
Board (DPB), the so-called brains of the Pentagon. Rand Corp, 
which won $83m in Pentagon contracts, is linked to the DPB.  

Donald Rumsfeld

A founding member of the PNAC, the Pentagon supremo is probably 
one of the best-connected men in American politics. It was Rumsfeld 
who personally designed the Iraqi invasion plan.  

Every detail of the post-war reconstruction has to be cleared by the 
defence secretary. Each and every neo-con in the Pentagon owes their 
position to him. One fact he doesn't want reminded about is his former 
glad-handing with Saddam as Reagan's special envoy to Iraq in the 
early 1980s. While Saddam was blitzing the Ayatollah's armies with 
chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, Rumsfeld spent most of his time 
talking to the Ba'ath Party about the building of an oil pipeline on 
behalf of the construction company Bechtel. Bechtel's former vice-chairman 
is George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state. Bechtel is one of the 
front-runners in the bid to secure US government contracts to rebuild Iraq.  

Douglas J Feith

Under-secretary for policy at the Pentagon, he picks and selects 
members of the DPB and is on the board of advisers of Jinsa. As a 
lawyer, Feith represented Northrop Grumman (see defence box). He 
was a Pentagon place-man when Perle was assistant defence secretary 
in the 1980s and hired Michael Mobbs (see power- brokers) to work at 
his law firm Feith and Zell. Zealously pro-Israeli, Feith is a keen 
fan of Chalabi (see Arabs) as are Perle and Rumsfeld. Other Iraqis 
who'll be keen to get his ear include: Jalal Talebani (Patriotic 
Union of Kurdistan); Maj General Tawfiq al- Yassiri (Iraqi National 
Coalition); Massoud Barzani (Kurdish Democratic Party); Ayadh Allawi 
(Iraqi National Accord); Shaif Ali Bin Hussein (Constitutional Monarchy 
Party); Abdelaziz al-Hakim (brother of Muhammed Bakr al-Hakim the 
leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and Major
General Saad Obeidi (former head of Iraqi psychological warfare).  

Richard Perle

The Pentagon's Prince of Darkness is a key member of Jinsa and a 
prominent member of the American Enterprise Institute (described by 
Ronnie Reagan as one of the most influential right-wing US think-tanks) 
along with Dick Cheney's wife Lynne. He also sits on the Foundation for 
the Defence of Democracies, another right-wing think-tank, along with 
James Woolsey, tipped to become the information minister in the 
post-war Iraqi interim government.  

Perle acted as an advisor to the lobbying firm run by Douglas J Feith 
- the Pentagon's under-secretary of defence. Perle was also chair of 
the DPB until he resigned following a scandal over a conflict of interests 
relating to his business connections. However, he still sits on the board 
of the DPB. Perle is seeking permission from the Committee on Foreign 
Investment, on which the defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld sits, to 
run telecommunications businesses in Asia. He is also a member of 
neo-con think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, and 
worked as an aide to ultra-right-wing former Israeli premier, Benyamin 
Netanyahu.  

Dick Cheney

Capitol Hill's resident hawk-in-chief, is a PNAC founding member and 
a was on Jinsa's board of advisors. The Vice-President was defence 
secretary under Bush Snr and has been calling for Saddam's head for 
over a decade. He was chairman and CEO of oil company Halliburton, 
the corporate behemoth. Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg Brown and 
Root has secured contracts worth up to $7 billion from the US army's 
Corp of Engineers to put out oil well fires in Iraq. He is a trustee 
of the American Enterprise Institute and has had numerous oil interests. 
He has links to Chevron, for whom he negotiated the building of an oil 
pipeline from the Caspian Sea. Condoleeza Rice, the national security 
advisor, was the director of Chevron until 2001 - and even had an oil 
tanker named after her. During Condi's tenure, Chevron's CEO Kenneth 
Derr once said: "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas - reserves 
I'd love Chevron to have access to." Dick Cheney's wife Lynne sat on 
the board of Lockheed Martin, which manufactures Cruise missiles and now 
has a $800 million military satellite which will help troops in Iraq.  

Michael Joyce

The former president of the Bradley Foundation, one of the largest 
and most influential right-wing organisations in America. It set up 
the PNAC led by William Kristol. Kristol's Weekly Standard is viewed 
in Washington as the in-house paper for Team Bush. The Standard is 
bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch. Joyce once said that Bush's key people 
such as Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "were clearly influenced by 
Bradley Foundation thinking".  

There are rumours that Joyce's "best buddy" William Bennett, 
Reagan's education secretary and Bush Snr's drug czar, will 
have some involvement with Iraq's post-war education system.  

Joyce has phoned Bennett with the words: "This is coach Joyce and 
this is what I want you to do." Neil Bush, Dubya's brother, has also 
been spoken of in connection with rebuilding the education system in 
Iraqi.  

Joyce is a self-styled moral guardian of American family values who, 
along with James Woolsey, is an adviser to Americans for Victory over 
Terrorism, a group that wants to stifle criticism of American military 
muscle.  

James Woolsey

A long-time supporter of war on Iraq and PNAC and Jinsa member, the 
former director of the CIA has been named as the likely minister of 
information in the new Iraq. His business interests have included: the 
arms company British Aerospace; the Titan Corporation, which provides 
military interpreters and DynCorp, which provides bodyguards for Hamid 
Karzai, the Afghani president and has installed a police force monitoring 
service in Bosnia. DynCorp is being sued for human rights violations in 
Bosnia, environmental health disasters in Ecuador and fraud in America. 
He was a partner in the law firm, Shea and Gardner, which acts as 
foreign agents for the Iraqi National Congress, led by Chalabi. He is 
vice-president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a corporate consultant firm, 
which won a contract to develop a computer model of post-war Iraqi 
society after the first Gulf war I. Booz Allen is also closely linked 
to the DPB. He said that "only fear will re-establish [Arab] respect 
for us ... we need a little bit of Machiavelli". He has also said: 
"We really don't need the Europeans. Anyways, they will be the first 
in line patting us on the back following our success and saying they 
were with us all along."  

/CONTINUED/

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