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Carving Up The New Iraq  
Part Three: By Neil Mackay
 
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)