What's behind the assault on Basra
Naftana ('Our Oil' in Arabic) is an independent UK-based committee supporting democratic trade unionism in Iraq. It works in solidarity with the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU). It strives to publicize the union's struggle for Iraqi social and economic rights and its stand against the privatization of Iraqi oil demanded by the occupying powers. For more information see the IFOU's website.Dollars & Sense has covered the IFOU, most recently in David Bacon's feature article, Iraqi Workers Strike to Keep their Oil.
About the current assault on Basra, David Bacon told D&S: "It is very important to let people in this country understand that under the accusations about the 'militias' is an effort by the Iraqi government and the US to consolidate control over the oil and ports, and eliminate those parts of the political opposition that have successfully opposed them."
Here is the press release Naftana distributed to the media in Britain, in full:
Basra Assault Confirms Presence of British Forces a Threat to Political and Trade Union Rights in Iraq
Naftana 28
March 2008
In a series of telephone calls from Basra over the past 48 hours, Iraqi trade union activists appeal for solidarity and describe how the so-called 'Security Plan' started midnight 24 March with intense shelling and fire from all kind of weapons.
The attacking forces now besieging Basra stretched all the way to the city from Dhi Qar province. Two armoured divisions are deployed, in addition to thousands of policemen, backed by US and British planning and air cover.
They have cut off electricity supplies, food and water on the city of 1.5 million people. Hundreds have been killed or injured in a savage, premeditated and unprovoked attack, now spreading to much of Iraq as the people protest and show solidarity with Basra's beleaguered people.
They describe the attack as far worse than the invasion of 2003 and begun in the same barbaric manner that the criminal Saddam employed against Basra to crush the March 1991 people's uprising. They remind us that the present puppet Iraqi government sentenced Saddam's Defence Minister to death few months ago for similar crimes of waging war on civilians.
The assault is backed by the US and British occupation forces, particularly in providing air cover. US planes are also bombarding areas in the Basra, several southern cities and Baghdad, where tens of thousands marched yesterday denouncing the 'puppet regime'. It is now, along with many other cities, under a strict
curfew enforced by regime and occupation forces.
Trade union leaders have asked us to inform the public in Britain that the government's attack on Basra serves the occupation. The city is 'steadfast' and the onslaught will end in 'utter failure.' The city streets were free of the occupying forces before the assault and the regime's attacks will make it even more dependent on the occupation forces, they stressed.
Naftana, the UK support committee for the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions in the struggle for democratic trade unionism in Iraq, condemns British collusion in the preparation of the assault on Basra city and British participation in air strikes.
Naftana urges all to join in calling for an immediate withdrawal of British forces from Iraq, ending the US-led occupation, and for the payment of reparations to Iraq.
In the absence of adequate media coverage of the nature and context of this savage onslaught, Naftana wants to set the record straight on UK involvement.
In December 2007, the Basra Development Commission (BDC) was formally announced after discussions between Gordon Browne and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih. (Source.) Browne appointed a British businessman, Michael Wareing, Chief Executive of KPMG International as 'Commissioner', apparently heading the BDC. (Source.) Wareing visited Basra in February and made outrageous comments, confirming his real interests to be those of predatory business rather than the security, development and well-being of Basra and its people.
Wareing told The Observer: 'If you look at many other economies in the world, particularly the oil-rich economies, many of these places are quite challenging countries in which to do business. Frankly, if you can successfully operate in the Niger Delta, that is a very different benchmark from imagining that Basra needs to be like London or Paris.' (Source.)
Wareing's appointment was welcomed by Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a major advocate of the 2003 invasion and of privatisation. On March 13 the British Defence Minister Des Browne met with Salih in Basra Airport.
Browne promised to show new action on 'security' in Basra province and to bring Umm Qasr port up to 'the highest international standards'. (Source.)
What this meant was made clear by Salih who threatened the Governor, people of Basra and port workers' union of Umm Qasr saying 'there must be a very strong military presence in Basra to eradicate these militias'. (Source.)
What Salih, himself a former militia leader, was concerned about were organised port workers who had earlier confronted the American SSA Marine corporation in Umm Qasr and the Danish Maersk corporation in Khor az-Zubair in the two years after these companies were imposed by the occupying forces in 2003. (Since 2003 the first shortened its name to SSA Marine. See here and here on Umm Qasr, and see here and
here on Khor az-Zubair.)
The new plans involve privatisation measures opposed by the port workers, who are supported by other trade unions and port management. It is likely that the planned corporate takeover of the port is required in order to facilitate the activities of international oil companies.
Nevertheless, the scale of what was afoot was not apparent, but the link between military action and breaking trade unionism was. On March 17-18 the US Vice-President Dick Cheney was in Baghdad meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki who presently heads the attack on Basra city. (Source.) Top of the agenda was the oil law (Source.) and how to insure its passage. The oil law means that international oil majors will control Iraqi oil for many decades.
Various reports reveal that the present carnage was coordinated and agreed with British and American leaders. Naftana believes they commanded it.
Why? The tide of national public opinion has turned against long-term troop deployment in both the UK and the USA. If the war was fought for oil and total domination of Iraq, then those most closely associated to those interests must speed up their plans. The present onslaught aims to break popular resistance, especially from the Sadrist movement, to the passage of the oil law and to the occupation itself.
Beyond that, with local elections looming next autumn, it aims to destroy morally and physically the popular base which would otherwise be set to drive, first from local power, and subsequently from national power, the US/UK allies, Nouri al-Maliki (al-Dawa party), his main allies in the Supreme Islamic Council, led by Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and the Kurdish leaders, Talbani and Barzani.
Naftana calls on all who support democratic trade unionism to stand by the people of Iraq, with the port workers of Umm Qasr and the oil workers of Southern Iraq, with workers in Baghdad and many other cities who are in danger of physical elimination.
Privatization is only part of the story; as David Bacon emphasizes, control over the oil industry is also a central aim of US and British interests. Greg Palast made this point in his interview with D&S back in May of last year:
Dollars & Sense: Many progressives are focused on privatization of the Iraqi economy, including its oil industry, as Bush's real goal for the invasion. But you write about two radically different plans within the administration, the neo-cons' versus Big Oil's—and Big Oil's plan was the one opposed to privatization. What's going on here?
Greg Palast: A lot of intelligent folk believe that before the tanks started to roll, Bush had a secret plan to grab Iraq's oil fields. That's wrong. He had TWO plans. In Armed Madhouse, I show you both—the result of two years undercover for the BBC. The plans conflict. There's the neo-con plan: Privatize—that is, sell off—everything, "especially the oil" industry. That's a quote from the neo-cons' 101-page planning document. That didn't happen because a Jim Baker team—he's the lawyer for both Exxon and Saudi Arabia—secretly wrote a 323-page plan that called for CONTROLLING the oil flow, not owning it. The purpose was to LIMIT the supply of oil from Iraq and keep prices high. This would "enhance [Iraq's] relationship with OPEC," the oil cartel—just the opposite of the neo-con plan, which aimed to break OPEC. So dig it: the invasion was about LIMITING the flow of oil from Iraq and keeping prices high, not about grabbing the oil to bring prices down. The secret Baker plan is now the law in Iraq and oil prices are over $50 a barrel. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Labels: Basra, David Bacon, IFOU, Iraq, Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, Naftana
The Three Trillion Dollar War
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have updated their estimate of the costs to the United States (direct and indirect) of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in an article in yesterday's Times of London. We reported on an early version of their original findings in our Economy in Numbers column in the July/August 2006 issue of D&S.Stiglitz and Bilmes's research on this topic have estimated the costs of the wars in three categories: (1) direct costs to the U.S. government (including Department of Defense spending, spending by the Veterans Administration, demobilization costs, and interest on debt incurred because of the wars); (2) economic costs that are not borne by the government (e.g. the lost economic contributions of reservists while they are deployed, or after they are dead or injured); and (3) larger macroeconomic costs to the U.S. economy as a whole (e.g. those resulting from increases in the price of oil, plausibly due to instability in the Middle East resulting from the war).
According to the initial conclusions of their research (released in February of 2006; they didn't publish the study until later that year), the first two categories of costs (direct and indirect--not including the larger macroeconomic costs), could be conservatively estimated at between $937 billion and $1.5 trillion. They estimated the macroeconomic costs to the United States as "are potentially very large; possibly even a multiple of the direct costs," that is, possibly several trillion dollars beyond the costs to the government.
The article in yesterday's London Times estimates the total costs more definitively at $3 trillion:
From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.
The article goes on to estimate the costs to the UK:
[T]he budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs, the total impact on the UK will exceed £20 billion.
(The added social costs to the UK are proportionately lower than those in the United States because the UK is a net exporter of oil.)
Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that the current Iraq war will cost ten times the first Gulf war, and one-third more than the Vietnam War.
The Bush administration's cost estimates in advance of the war were of course drastically lower than the actual costs. Donald Rumsfeld estimated the costs at $50 to $60 billion, and was outraged when Bush's economic advisor Larry Lindsey said it would cost $200 billion. According to Stiglitz and Bilmes, Lindey downplayed his higher estimate by saying that "The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."
And shouldn't defense spending stimulate the economy? Shouldn't we expect, on Keynesian grounds, that all the money the government is lavishing on the war would stimulate the economy? Yet we are sinking into recession. In the upcoming (March/April) issue of D&S, Arthur MacEwan will answer this question in our "Ask Dr. Dollar" column.
Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq, Joseph Stiglitz, Linda Bilmes, war
Naomi Klein at Firedoglake
The discussion appears to be over, but earlier today Naomi Klein was fielding questions about her new book at the weekly Firedoglake book salon.What is the shock doctrine? Klein explains:
I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.We haven't been using Klein's terminology, but disaster capitalism should be a familiar concept to readers of Dollars & Sense. In "Fisherfolk Out, Tourists In" (July/August 2005), for example, Vasuki Nesiah wrote:
Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.
From Thailand to Sri Lanka, the tourist industry saw the tsunami through dollar signs. The governments concerned were on board from the outset, quickly planning massive subsidies for the tourism industry in ways that suggest the most adverse distributive impact. Infrastructure development will be even further skewed to cater to the industry rather than to the needs of local communities. Within weeks of the tsunami, the Alliance for the Protection of National Resources and Human Rights, a Sri Lankan advocacy group, expressed concern that "the developing situation is disastrous, more disastrous than the tsunami itself, if it is possible for anything to be worse than that." ...And I heard similar analysis from local African American activists along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, following Hurricane Katrina. When I interviewed Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives (March/April 2006), he said:
Proposals announced by TAFREN [Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation] and by various government officials call for the building of multi-lane highways and the wholesale displacement of entire villages from the coast. Coastal lands are to be sliced up into designated buffer zones and tourism zones. The government is preventing those fishing families who wish to do so from rebuilding their homes on the coast, ostensibly because of the risk of future natural disasters; at the same time, it's encouraging the opening of both new and rebuilt beachfront tourist hotels.
The plans are essentially roadmaps for multinational hotel chains, telecom companies, and the like to cater to the tourism industry. Small-scale fishing operations by individual proprietors will become more difficult to sustain as access to the beach becomes increasingly privatized and fishing conglomerates move in. The environmental deregulation proposed in the PRSP will open the door to even more untrammeled exploitation of natural resources. None of the reconstruction planning is being channeled through decision-making processes that are accountable or participatory. Ultimately, it looks like reconstruction will be determined by the deadly combination of a rapacious private sector and government graft: human tragedy becomes a commercial opportunity, tsunami aid a business venture.
Not unpredictably, even the subsidies planned for the tourism industry in the wake of the tsunami are going to the hotel owners and big tour operators, not to the porters and cleaning women who were casual employees in hotels. Many of the local residents who were proprietors or workers in smaller tourism-related businesses, now unemployed, are not classified as tsunami-affected, so they are denied even the meager compensation they should be entitled to. The situation is much worse for the vast informal sector of sex workers, souvenir sellers, and others whose livelihood depended on the tourism industry. If the tsunami highlighted the acute vulnerability that accompanies financial dependence on the industry, the tsunami reconstruction plans look set to exacerbate this vulnerability even further.
[W]hat you'll find is that the unresolved problems pertaining to any one of those issues can be overlain on a map: that the lowest-lying land is typically where black folks, generations ago, would have acquired their land; where they would have settled and developed their communities, which would have been the least disturbed by 20th-century infrastructure; and that now, in the wake of a "Mississippi miracle"--the economic revitalization of the coast, for example, the advent of dockside casinos--would be the most ripe or prime for redevelopment.David Bacon, writing in this year's Annual Labor Issue, sees similar forces at play in Iraq.
Today, you've got casino- and tourism-driven feudalism, coupled with militarism, constituting much of the local economy. Katrina has probably raised the cachet of the casinos and the military bases even more as the two main mules that are gonna pull us out of this mud. Government contracts for shipbuilding; bigger, wider roads and highways for trucking. Deeper, wider, dredged out shipping lanes for shipping; free trade agreements. Bigger and better casinos with more bells and whistles. More of the same is the economic forecast, because they can't imagine anything else.
President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country's oil (and its electrical power stations, ports, and other key facilities) to remain in public hands.Perhaps the quickest way to understand how shock plays into all of this is to watch the short film based on Klein's book.
The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process....
The occupation has always had an economic agenda. In 2003 and 2004 occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: first you destroy society; then you let the corporations rebuild it."
The Bush administration won't leave Iraq in part because the economic agenda is still insecure.
One Firedoglake commenter asked Klein,
Isn’t shock a funciton of any visionary change, regardless of whether it is left or right? Mao & Pol Pot come to mind. Why, then, is it disaster capitalism rather than disaster transformationalism?Klein replied:
I wrote this book because the far left has been held accountable for the crimes and abuses required to impose its utopian, year-zero fantasies. The far right has not. And when criminals are not held accountable for their crimes, they re-offend. It’s worth remembering that Paul Bremer was Kissinger’s right hand man during the coup in Chile in 1973.In today's discussion, Klein emphasized nonetheless that market forces are not all powerful and that, in fact, we are at an important turning point.
The so-called “free market” is in crisis today - we see it with sub-prime, a s well as with the massive disillusionment with the Bush Administration. Even Greenspan warns in his book that people are losing faith in market fundamentalism.
This is a moment for the left/progressives to propose our vision with real confidence and without apologies. We shouldn’t be afraid to be angry at grotesque injustice, and we need to stop being apologetic about believing in universal human rights and universal health care.
Labels: Books, Disaster Capitalism, firedoglake, Gulf Coast, Iraq, katrina, mississippi, Naomi Klein, oil, sri lanka, tsunami, unions
"The Profits of Escalation" and the Price of Privatization
In a recent (January 10th) article in Counterpunch, "The Profits of Escalation: Why the US is Not Leaving Iraq," Ismael Hossein-Zadeh exposes the economic interests, beyond oil, that are driving escalation in Iraq. Some highlights:...
The fact is that not everyone is losing in Iraq. Indeed, while the Bush administration's wars of choice have brought unnecessary death, destruction, and disaster to millions, including many from the Unites States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. At the heart of the reluctance to withdraw from Iraq lies the profiteers' unwillingness to give up further fortunes and spoils of war.
Pentagon contractors constitute the overwhelming majority of these profiteers. They include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex maze of over 100,000 service contractors and sub-contractors such as private army or security corporations and "reconstruction" firms.[1] These contractors of both deconstruction and "reconstruction," whose profits come mainly from the US treasury, have handsomely profited from the Bush administration's wars of choice.
...
The rise of the fortunes of the major Pentagon contractors can be measured, in part, by the growth of the Pentagon budget since President George W. Bush arrived in the White House: it has grown by more than 50 percent, from nearly $300 billion in 2001 to almost $455 billion in 2007. (These figures do not include the Homeland Security budget, which is $33 billion for the 2007 fiscal year alone, and the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast approaching $400 billion.)
Large Pentagon contractors have been the main beneficiaries of this windfall. For example, a 2004 study by The Center for Public Integrity revealed that, for the 19982003 period, one percent of the biggest contractors won 80 percent of all defense contracting dollars. The top ten got 38 percent of all the money. Lockheed Martin topped the list at $94 billion, Boeing was second with $81 billion, Raytheon was third (just under $40 billion), followed by Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics with nearly $34 billion each.[2]
...
This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or "difficulty" of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, "There are a lot of contractors making a fortune and we don't want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay."[13]
It follows that US troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq as long as antiwar voices are not raised beyond the premises and parameters of the official narrative or justification of the war: terrorism, democracy, civil war, stability, human rights, and the like. Antiwar forces need to extricate themselves from the largely diversionary and constraining debate over these secondary issues, and raise public consciousness of the scandalous economic interests that drive the war.
...
Read the full article in Counterpunch.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has recently covered the other side of this profiteering: the shuttering of state-owned industries. Referring to Iraq as "a country that looters have ravaged since 2003"—a phrase that takes on a different meaning in light of Hossein-Zadeh's article—James Glanz of the Times recounts the "insistence by the initial American occupation authority that once [state-owned factories were] closed, vibrant free markets would spring into existence to fill the void," and Iraqis' recent efforts to re-open the factories. Click here (or see below) for the full text of the article. See also early coverage by Dollars & Sense on profiteering in Iraq and the role of oil.
THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ; Aging and Shut, Iraq Factories May Reopen and Mitigate Ills
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: January 18, 2007 [New York Times]
Inside a huge shuttered factory on the gritty western fringes of this outlaw desert town, thousands of ornate porcelain sinks, toilets and other fixtures sit in row after row next to the automated ovens and assembly lines that once churned out the products but lie silent under a thin film of yellow desert dust.
However, neither the fancy ceramics nor the machines appear to be damaged, a miracle that no one can quite explain in one of the most dangerous cities of a country that looters have ravaged since 2003.
Whatever the explanation, some American and Iraqi officials believe that surviving factories like this one—once considered inefficient, government-subsidized behemoths—could present a last chance of sorts for dealing with two problems that have remained stubbornly unsolved since the invasion: Iraq's reconstruction and its insurgency.
The factories, state-owned enterprises under Saddam Hussein's government, would appear to be the unlikeliest of saviors—things like a bus factory in an ethnically riven area south of Baghdad, a tomato paste factory in the Kurdish north, and a second plant in Ramadi that makes floor tiles with silk-screened floral patterns. The factories went dark after the invasion for a variety of reasons, including an insistence by the initial American occupation authority that once they closed, vibrant free markets would spring into existence to fill the void.
But neither those markets nor the expected commercial and social benefits of the $30 billion American-financed reconstruction program have materialized. So a few officials and local leaders are returning to the shuttered plants in hopes of finding a cheaper way to help the economy and perhaps create jobs to attract young men who might otherwise join the insurgency.
The dusty old plants are more evocative of guys with lunch pails than the big thinkers who once believed that expensive American reconstruction projects would remake the face of Iraq. ''Any opportunity to re-employ more people and give the government a chance to get income from these factories is important,'' said Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, an Anbar tribal leader, as he toured the porcelain and tile factories in his flowing black-and-gold robes. ''Especially in this time when Anbar is experiencing terrorism.''
The sheik added, in reference to the idle Iraqis who put the unemployment rate at anywhere from an estimated 30 percent to 60 percent, ''They are normal human beings—they would rather work than make violence.''
In Ramadi on Tuesday, Sheik Sattar and several Iraqi officials, including the Anbar governor and the manager of the ceramics plant, met with Paul A. Brinkley, a senior Pentagon official who, following up on a tip from the American military command, has taken it upon himself to push the revival of state-owned enterprises that he thinks can be restarted with modest financing.
''That factory could be running in a week,'' Mr. Brinkley said just after the visit. ''It's amazing to me in this city, after all that this city has gone through, that a factory with that level of robotic equipment is still in that kind of condition.''
Still, the meeting—in an unheated second-floor conference room within a ransacked office building next to the plant—revealed some of the barriers that this last-ditch effort is likely to face. Those barriers include vast inertia within the Iraqi government bureaucracy and questions about whether even the small amounts of cash needed for the effort will be forthcoming from either Iraqi or American sources.
There are also serious questions on whether officials in the focus of the United States presence in Iraq, within the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, are ready to support factories that were seen as no more than relics of an era that American ingenuity and reconstruction were going to make forever obsolete.
As with so much else in Iraq, there is no clear measure of how extensive the network of state-owned industries is, although the government lists at least 192 companies outside the energy and security sectors. Government and business officials estimate that more than 600,000 employees are still receiving at least some of their salaries, even though almost all of the factories are closed.
After presiding over the collapse of that network in the early days of the war, the United States now appears ready to lend some help to Mr. Brinkley's efforts to revive parts of it. Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Scott, who leads the Joint Contracting Command for Iraq and Afghanistan and is based in Baghdad, said in an interview that he was making a push to use Iraqi companies for supplying things like housing and basic services for the American military here.
General Scott said that although his prime goal was not revitalizing factories, if one of the companies Mr. Brinkley was working with made the right product, it would be given fair consideration. ''It's kind of a version of matchmaking,'' he said.
How far that process will take Mr. Brinkley's effort is unclear. Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, said in a recent interview that he was in favor of using military purchases to give Iraqi companies a boost, but that ultimately the United States would promote private enterprise over government entities. "That's obviously the right thing to do,'' he said. ''The question is, how do you get from here to there?''
But a senior United States official said he believed that at least until recently, officials at the center of American power here, in the Green Zone, had retained their unbending orientation toward privatization. The official said that he asked Americans in the Green Zone why they were buying buses abroad for use in Iraq when a struggling state-owned Iraqi firm in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, was making a similar vehicle.
''The answer was shocking,'' the official said. ''It was, 'We've denied these people access to the global free market for 15 years; I'm not going to go back to them and say that you've got to buy buses from some state-owned enterprise.' ''
During a visit last week to Erbil, in Iraq's Kurdish north, Mr. Brinkley said in a meeting with local officials that when the enterprises ''are laying idle due to our policy of shutting them off, we have an obligation to restore them to the Iraqi people.''
Each of the factories comes with different and highly specific challenges, a fact illustrated by the closed tomato paste factory in Erbil, which Mr. Brinkley also visited. With distribution across Iraq before the invasion, the factory limped along for a while afterward and as recently as 2004 produced 804,210 cans—''without loss of one can due to quality,'' said the plant engineer, Satar S. Mustafa.
Since then, a financial group in Erbil has bought the modest-sized factory, with its shiny chutes, choppers, ovens and other equipment. But the operation is still waiting for what the Erbil group hopes is an American investor, said Azzat M. Othman, who is the group's executive manager and says he worked on Wall Street in various capacities for 25 years before returning home to Kurdistan.
''What we are really looking for is an investor who has an interest in this type of operation,'' said Mr. Othman, who estimates that the factory will generate 100 to 150 jobs.
The porcelain factory is another case entirely. When a worker unlocks a set of big metal doors and slides them back with a boom, a darkened interior perhaps 100 yards in either direction shelters machinery that looks as if it had just been purchased. Half-finished sinks sit in rows along the assembly lines like sculptures left by some artist who intended to return and complete the work with a few strokes of the chisel.
And there is inventory. An assessment by the American occupation officials who shut this factory concluded that it was too small and inefficient to turn a profit in a competitive marketplace, but sinks with paisley and vine patterns look as if they could be sitting on shelves at Home Depot. The toilets are sturdy.
The Iraqis, who intend to keep the plant within the government and say that it could start up again if given an allocation of electricity, insisted that an American take one of the sinks as a sample. It was shoved into one of the armored vehicles belonging to the American military unit that brought the officials here.
But even if everything else here works perfectly, the question hovering over the project is whether the factory will be attacked now that it is associated with Americans. Sheik Sattar, who has already gained fame in Iraq for leading a coalition of Anbar tribes against Al Qaeda, said that would not be a problem.
After all, he said, the factory has remained in good condition until now. ''We protected it,'' he said. Whether the same assurances can be given for the other factories around the country remains to be seen.
Labels: Iraq, privatization, profiteering