Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Oct 10-11, 2003
Baghdad

PRE-OCCUPIED

In an article I wrote a few weeks ago, I asked which was the wilderness: Iraq or the US? Of course, in their own way both are wildernesses.

The CPA has 10,000 detainees. By contrast, the US, a country only ten times as populous as Iraq, has a million detainees.

Iraq is occupied by foreign military. The US is occupied by a domestic military and police machine. This machine abuses human rights and chills democratic initiative both internationally and domestically.

Elements within Iraq resist an Occupation still struggling for control. In the US the Occupation is vastly far more successful and systematic. It is vastly more subliminal and entrenched. Read, for example, Herbert Marcuse’s classic, One Dimensional Man.

The last presidential election was a blatant fraud. Our civil rights are methodically eroded. And toward what end? The corporate exploitation and despoliation of the labor, land and resources of the US.

US people are largely unaware they inhabit an empire. The further tragedy is that US people are also unaware that they themselves are colonized.

The people of the US and the people of Iraq have much in common. Iraqis seem more aware of this than are US folks. Some US activists may come to Iraq to ‘help’; better that we use the opportunity to resist the same empire colonizing ourselves.

THE CORPORADOS

See The Corporate Invasion of Iraq: Profile of U.S. Corporations Awarded Contract U.S./British-Occupied Iraq, 35pp, revised 6/11/03, prepared by U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) for The Workers of Iraq and The International Labor Movement. Contact info: info@uslaboragainstwar.org. www.uslaboragainstwar.org.

From the Executive Summary, p.2:

“The most urgent priority now is to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, to establish security and basic public services, and to quickly organize an interim governing authority that fairly represents all elements of Iraqi society. This will put the nation on the road to popular governance, and should lead to the speedy withdrawal of all foreign military forces from Iraq.”

“Prior to its suppression by the Hussein regime, Iraq enjoyed a robust and broadly representative labor movement. However, the occupying powers have invited into Iraq private corporations with an established record of labor, environmental and human rights violations. These corporations were chosen by the Bush administration, which itself is considered by many as the most anti-worker, union-hostile administration in modern U.S. history.”

“This report profiles eighteen of the most prominent U.S. corporations to which the Bush administration has given large, highly profitable contracts to operate in Iraq.”

“Half or more are privately owned and therefore not required to account to public shareholders, nor to file even the minimal financial reports required of publicly traded corporations.”

“The record recounted in the pages of this report is marked by cost overruns, accounting irregularities, financial dereliction, fraud, bankrupcy, overcharging, price-gouging, profiteering, wage-cheating, deception, corruption, health and safety violations, worker and community exploitation, human and labor rights abuses (including the use of forced labor), union-busting, strike-breaking, environmental contamination, ecological irresponsibility, malpractice, criminal prosecutions, civil law suits, privatization of public resources, collusion with dictators, trading with regimes in violation of international sanctions, drug-running, prostitution, excessive executive compensation, and breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders and the public.”

p.4:”. . .a 1987 [Iraqi] law outlawed independent trade unions in favor of a government-controlled federation, prohibited unions in the public sector and in state-owned enterprises, and made almost all strikes illegal.”

Oct 11, Saturday

Folks were out most of the day yesterday; I held down the fort. A day off. Read most of a novel Cynthia brought me, Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. Anil is a Sri Lankan forensic anthropologist, educated in the west, who goes back home to work on the exhumed victims of the death squad terror of the late eighties. The atmosphere of fear and surveillance: “Whom do you trust?” — resembles that of Iraq today.

p. 286: “The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him.
He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”