I post this rather lengthy report in its entirety as it seems vaguely relevant.  I was trying to tell you about how Iraq was about oil, and how they have paved the way for a new corporate America-friendly "Saddam."  Investigative reporter Greg Palast dishes the horrifying details here.
"We hate that son of a b*tch!"
--Dubya on Palast

Adventure Capitalism - The Hidden 2001 Plan to Carve-up Iraq
TomPaine.com
by Greg Palast
Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Why were Iraqi elections delayed? Why was Jay Garner fired? Why are our troops
still there? Investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovers new documents that
answer these questions and more about the Bush administration’s grand designs on
Iraq. Like everything else issued during this administration, the plan to
overhaul the Iraqi economy has corporate lobbyist fingerprints all over it.

---

In February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a 101-page document
came my way from somewhere within the U.S. State Department.  Titled pleasantly,
"Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Growth," it was part of a larger
under-wraps program called "The Iraq Strategy." 

The Economy Plan goes boldly where no invasion plan has gone before:  the
complete rewrite, it says, of a conquered state's "policies, laws and
regulations." Here's what you'll find in the Plan:  A highly detailed program,
begun years before the tanks rolled, for imposing a new regime of low taxes on
big business, and quick sales of Iraq's banks and bridges�in fact, "ALL state
enterprises"â€â€Â�to foreign operators.  There's more in the Plan, part of which
became public when the State Department hired consulting firm to track the
progress of the Iraq makeover. Example:  This is likely history's first military
assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation's copyright
laws.

And when it comes to oil, the Plan leaves nothing to chance�or to the Iraqis.
Beginning on page 73, the secret drafters emphasized that Iraq would have to
"privatize" (i.e., sell off) its "oil and supporting industries."  The Plan
makes it clear that�even if we didn't go in for the oil�we certainly won't leave
without it.

If the Economy Plan reads like a Christmas wishlist drafted by U.S. corporate
lobbyists, that's because it was.

From slashing taxes to wiping away Iraq's tariffs (taxes on imports of U.S. and
other foreign goods), the package carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the
small, soft hands of Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the capo di capi of the lobbyist army of the right.  In Washington
every Wednesday, he hosts a pow-wow of big business political operatives and
right-wing muscle groups�including the Christian Coalition and National Rifle
Association�where Norquist quarterbacks their media and legislative offensive
for the week.

Once registered as a lobbyist for Microsoft and American Express, Norquist today
directs Americans for Tax Reform, a kind of trade union for billionaires
unnamed, pushing a regressive "flat tax" scheme.

Acting on a tip, I dropped by the super-lobbyist's L-Street office.  Below a
huge framed poster of his idol ("NIXON� NOW MORE THAN EVER"), Norquist could not
wait to boast of moving freely at the Treasury, Defense and State Departments,
and, in the White House, shaping the post-conquest economic plans�from taxes to
tariffs to the "intellectual property rights" that I pointed to in the Plan.

Norquist wasn't the only corporate front man getting a piece of the Iraq cash
cow.  Norquist suggested the change in copyright laws after seeking the guidance
of the Recording Industry Association of America.

And then there's the oil.  Iraq-born Falah Aljibury was in on the drafting of
administration blueprints for the post-Saddam Iraq.  According to Aljibury, the
administration began coveting its Mideast neighbor's oil within weeks of the
Bush-Cheney inauguration, when the White House convened a closed committee under
the direction of the State Department's Pam Wainwright.  The group included
banking and chemical industry men, and the range of topics over what to do with
a post-conquest Iraq was wide.  In short order, said Aljibury, "It became an oil
group."

This was not surprising as the membership list had a strong smell of petroleum.
Besides Aljibury, an oil industry consultant, the secret team included
executives from Royal-Dutch Shell and ChevronTexaco.  These and other oil
industry bigs would, in 2003, direct the drafting of a 300-page addendum to the
Economy Plan solely about Iraq's oil assets.  The oil section of the Plan,
obtained after a year of wrestling with the administration over the Freedom of
Information Act, calls for Iraqis to sell off to "IOCs" (international oil
companies) the nation's "downstream" assets�that is, the refineries, pipelines
and ports that, unless under armed occupation, a Mideast nation would be loathe
to give up.

---The General Versus Annex D---

One thing stood in the way of rewriting Iraq's laws and selling off Iraq's
assets:  the Iraqis.  An insider working on the plans put it coldly:  "They have
Wolfowitz coming out saying it's going to be a
democratic country … but we're going to do something that 99 percent of the
people of Iraq wouldn't vote for."

In this looming battle between what Iraqis wanted and what the Bush
administration planned for them, the Iraqis had an unexpected ally, Gen. Jay
Garner, the man appointed by our president just before the invasion as a kind of
temporary Pasha to run the soon-to-be conquered nation.

Garner's an old Iraq hand who performed the benevolent autocratic function in
the Kurdish zone after the first Gulf War.  But in March 2003, the general made
his big career mistake.  In Kuwait City, fresh off the plane from the United
States, he promised Iraqis they would have free and fair elections as soon as
Saddam was toppled, preferably within 90 days.

Garner's 90-days-to-democracy pledge ran into a hard object:  The Economy Plan's
'Annex D.'  Disposing of a nation's oil industryâ€â€Â�let alone redrafting trade and
tax lawsâ€â€Â�can't be done in a weekend, nor in 90  days.  Annex D lays out a strict
360-day schedule for the free-market makeover of Iraq.  And there's the rub: It
was simply inconceivable that any popularly elected government would let America
write its laws and auction off the nation's crown jewel, its petroleum industry.

Elections would have to wait. As lobbyist Norquist explained when I asked him
about the Annex D timetable, "The right to trade, property rights, these things
are not to be determined by some democratic election."  Our troops would simply
have to stay in Mesopotamia a bit longer.

---New World Orders 12, 37, 81 and 83---

Gen. Garner resisted�which was one of the reasons for his swift sacking by
Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld on the very night he arrived in Baghdad last
April.  Rummy had a perfect replacement ready to wing it in Iraq to replace the
recalcitrant general.  Paul Bremer may not have had Garner's experience on the
ground in Iraq, but no one would question the qualifications of a man who served
as managing director of Kissinger Associates.

Pausing only to install himself in Saddam's old palace�and adding an extra ring
of barbed wire�"Jerry" Bremer cancelled Garner's scheduled meeting of Iraq's
tribal leaders called to plan national elections.  Instead, Bremer appointed the
entire government himself.  National elections, Bremer pronounced, would have to
wait until 2005.  The extended occupation would require our forces to linger.

The delay would, incidentally, provide time needed to lock in the laws,
regulations and irreversible sales of assets in accordance with the Economy
Plan.

On that, Bremer wasted no time.  Altogether, the leader of the Coalition
Provisional Authority issued exactly 100 orders that remade Iraq in the image of
the Economy Plan.  In May, for example, Bremerâ€â€Â�only a month from escaping out
Baghdad's back door�took time from fighting the burgeoning insurrection to sign
orders 81â€â€Â�"Patents,"and 83, "Copyrights."  Here, Grover Norquist's hard work
paid off.  Fifty years of royalties would now be conferred on music recording.
And 20 years on Windows code.

Order number 37, "Tax Strategy for 2003," was Norquist's dream come true: taxes
capped at 15 percent on corporate and individual income (as suggested in the
Economy Plan, page 8).  The U.S. Congress had rejected a similar flat-tax plan
for America, but in Iraq, with an electorate of one�Jerry Bremer�the public's
will was not an issue.

Not everyone felt the pain of this reckless rush to a free market.  Order 12,
"Trade Liberalization," permitted the tax- and tariff-free import of foreign
products.  One big winner was Cargill, the world's largest grain merchant, which
flooded Iraq with hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat.  For Iraqi farmers,
already wounded by sanctions and war, this was devastating. They could not
compete with the U.S. and Australian surplusses dumped on them.  But the import
plan carried out the letter of the Economy Plan.

This trade windfall for the West was enforced by the occupation's agriculture
chief, Dan Amstutz, himself an import from the United States.  Prior to George
Bush taking office, Amstutz chaired a company funded by Cargill.

There's no sense cutting taxes on big business, ordering 20 years of copyright
payments for Bill Gates' operating system or killing off protections for Iraqi
farmers if some out-of-control Iraqi government is going to take it away after
an election.  The shadow governors of Iraq back in Washington thought of that,
too.  Bremer fled, but he's left behind him nearly 200 American "experts,"
assigned to baby-sit each new Iraqi minister�functionaries also approved by the
U.S. State Department.

---The Price---

The free market paradise in Iraq is not free.

After General Garner was deposed, I met with him in Washington. He had little
regard for the Economy Plan handed to him three months before the tanks rolled.
He especially feared its designs on Iraq's oil assets and the delay in handing
Iraq back to Iraqis. "That's one fight you don't want to take on," he told me.

But we have.  After a month in Saddam's palace, Bremer cancelled municipal
elections, including the crucial vote about to take place in Najaf.  Denied the
ballot, Najaf's Shi'ites voted with bullets.  This April, insurgent leader
Moqtada Al Sadr's militia killed 21 U.S. soldiers and, for a month, seized the
holy city.

"They shouldn't have to follow our plan," the general said.  "It's their
country, their oil."  Maybe, but not according to the Plan.  And until it does
become their country, the 82nd Airborne will have to remain to keep it from
them.


For the interview with Jay Garner and more details of The Plan, see "Bush Family
Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," out this month on DVD. Watch a
segment: http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm
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