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[This long, very shocking article offers a good preliminary brief for the
prosecution of the US in the International Criminal Court. Here we see the
breathtaking, rapacious, criminal greed of the Bush regime's plans to rip
off Iraq. Also breathtaking is their blind and arrogant ignorance --
Iraqis are an educated people who are not stupid enough to meekly allow
their country to be starved and stolen by American robber barons -- not
without a fight:
"At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant
was sold despite the workers' objections. 'There are two choices,' he
said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. 'Either we will set the
factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will
blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized.'"
John Negroponte's brutal occupation and counter-insurgency tactics won't
work in Iraq as well as they worked in El Salvador. Nor will Madison
Avenue's imperialist glitzy propaganda -- Iraqis are better insulated,
culturally, than the banana republics of the western hemisphere from the
lure of Walt-Mart SuperCenters. They're also ready to fight back -- and
not gently -- as the US, to its unadmitted shock and dismay, is finding
out every day.
Klein's re****t also illustrates in chilling detail what the Monster of the
North would love to do in Cuba, with the willing connivance of their Cuban
exile pals in Miami. This is why, when Cuba was forced to permit foreign
capital into the country after the USSR's destruction, the government
insisted that "joint enterprises" be established, with the state watching
over the practices and profits of the cor****ations. And, this is why
handling the inevitable end of the US blockade will be one of Cuba's most
critical challenges. Right now the blockade provides a filter for some of
the worst excesses of consumerism and cor****ate greed. Opening up the
country to some of the capitalist culture (dollar stores, the internet,
etc.) has already had a corrosive effect on Cuban society. An end to the
blockade must not be permitted to turn Cuba into a "free market" (read:
"free-for-all") for anti-labor, environment-destroying US cor****ate
thieves. -NY Transfer]
Harpers - Sept 24, 2004
http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
Baghdad: Year Zero
by Naomi Klein
It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what I
was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began, at the
height of what should have been a construction boom, but after weeks of
searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from
tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane. It was big and
yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner
in a busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness
some of the reconstruction I had heard so much about. But as I got closer
I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding anything -- not one
of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over
the city, nor one of the many power lines that remained in twisted heaps
even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was
hoisting a giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULAH:
HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.
Seeing the sign, I couldn't help but think about something Senator John
McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is "a huge pot of honey
that's attracting a lot of flies." The flies McCain was referring to were
the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who
flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and
laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts
and Iraq's famed oil wealth but the myriad investment op****tunities
offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of
being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam
Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common
explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by
everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and
deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have "a postwar plan." The only
problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration
did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to
lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
* * *
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished
belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good
just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good
for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs
and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need
or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal
conditions for cor****ations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they
in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that
governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to
prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological
advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds,
perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and
alarmist environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would
finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A
country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it
would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming
showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never
seen. Every policy that liberates multinational cor****ations to pursue
their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a
flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no owner****p
restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some
short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be
given up to create new op****tunities for growth and investment. Jobs would
have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local
businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete.
But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for
the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions
were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild
itself.
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under
explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence
of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the
extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.
* * *
Torturers believe that when electrical shocks are applied to various parts
of the body simultaneously subjects are rendered so confused about where
the pain is coming from that they become incapable of resistance. A
declassified CIA "Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual from 1963
describes how a trauma inflicted on prisoners opens up "an interval --
which may be extremely brief -- of suspended animation, a kind of
psychological shock or paralysis. . . . [A]t this moment the source is far
more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply." A similar theory applies
to economic shock therapy, or "shock treatment," the ugly term used to
describe the rapid implementation of free-market reforms imposed on Chile
in the wake of General Augusto Pinochet's coup. The theory is that if
painful economic "adjustments" are brought in rapidly and in the aftermath
of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a government
collapse, the population will be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the
daily pressures of survival, that it too will go into suspended animation,
unable to resist. As Pinochet's finance minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo,
declared, "The dog's tail must be cut off in one chop."
That, in essence, was the working thesis in Iraq, and in keeping with the
belief that private companies are more suited than governments for
virtually every task, the White House decided to privatize the task of
privatizing Iraq's state-dominated economy. Two months before the war
began, USAID began drafting a work order, to be handed out to a private
company, to oversee Iraq's "transition to a sustainable market-driven
economic system." The document states that the winning company (which
turned out to be the KPMG offshoot Bearing Point) will take "appropriate
advantage of the unique op****tunity for rapid progress in this area
presented by the current configuration of political circumstances." Which
is precisely what happened.
L. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003,
until he caught an early flight out of Baghdad on June 28, admits that
when he arrived, "Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the
air****t." But before the fires from the "shock and awe" military onslaught
were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pu****ng
through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the
International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in
Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist
at the World Bank, describes Bremer's reforms as "an even more radical
form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world."
The tone of Bremer's tenure was set with his first major act on the job:
he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors,
nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the
country's borders to absolutely unrestricted im****ts: no tariffs, no
duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he
arrived, was "open for business."
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before
the invasion, Iraq's non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200
state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to
wa****ng machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and
announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. "Getting
inefficient state enterprises into private hands," he said, "is essential
for Iraq's economic recovery." It would be the largest state liquidation
sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Bremer's economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to
entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws
unprecedented in their generosity to multinational cor****ations. There
was Order 37, which lowered Iraq's cor****ate tax rate from roughly 40
percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign
companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the
natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of
the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be
required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they
could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40
welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that
remained of Saddam Hussein's economic policies was a law restricting trade
unions and collective bargaining.
If these policies sound familiar, it's because they are the same ones
multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in
international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever
enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at
once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the
world to being, on paper, its widest-open market.
* * *
At first, the shock-therapy theory seemed to hold: Iraqis, reeling from
violence both military and economic, were far too busy staying alive to
mount a political response to Bremer's campaign. Worrying about the
privatization of the sewage system was an unimaginable luxury with half
the population lacking access to clean drinking water; the debate over the
flat tax would have to wait until the lights were back on. Even in the
international press, Bremer's new laws, though radical, were easily
upstaged by more dramatic news of political chaos and rising crime.
Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in
"rebuilding Iraq" trade shows, in Wa****ngton, London, Madrid, and Amman.
The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as "a capitalist dream," and a
flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies
get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with
well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies,
started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. "Getting the
rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine," one of
the company's partners enthused. "One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock
out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country."
Soon there were rumors that a McDonald's would be opening up in downtown
Baghdad, funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and
General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side,
HSBC would have branches all over the country, Citigroup was preparing to
offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil, and
the bell was going to ring on a New York-style stock exchange in Baghdad
any day.
In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for
the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the
intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that
other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the
anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual
for what to do once the country was safely in America's hands. This
represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush
Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two
interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White
House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.
* * *
As the British historian Dilip Hiro has shown, in "Secrets and Lies:
Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After," the Iraqi exiles pu****ng for the
invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. On one side were "the
pragmatists," who favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate
entourage, securing access to oil, and slowly introducing free-market
reforms. Many of these exiles were part of the State Department's Future
of Iraq Project, which generated a thirteen-volume re****t on how to
restore basic services and transition to democracy after the war. On the
other side was the "Year Zero" camp, those who believed that Iraq was so
contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch. The
prime advocate of the pragmatic approach was Iyad Allawi, a former
high-level Baathist who fell out with Saddam and started working for the
CIA. The prime advocate of the Year Zero approach was Ahmad Chalabi, whose
hatred of the Iraqi state for expropriating his family's assets during the
1958 revolution ran so deep he longed to see the entire country burned to
the ground -- everything, that is, but the Oil Ministry, which would be
the nucleus of the new Iraq, the cluster of cells from which an entire
nation would grow. He called this process "de-Baathification."
A parallel battle between pragmatists and true believers was being waged
within the Bush Administration. The pragmatists were men like Secretary of
State Colin Powell and General Jay Garner, the first U.S. envoy to postwar
Iraq. General Garner's plan was straightforward enough: fix the
infrastructure, hold quick and dirty elections, leave the shock therapy to
the International Monetary Fund, and concentrate on securing U.S.
military bases on the model of the Philippines. "I think we should look
right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East," he told the
BBC. He also paraphrased T. E. Lawrence, saying, "It's better for them to
do it imperfectly than for us to do it for them perfectly." On the other
side was the usual cast of neoconservatives: Vice President Dick Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who lauded Bremer's "sweeping
reforms" as "some of the most enlightened and inviting tax and investment
laws in the free world"), Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and,
perhaps most centrally, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Whereas
the State Department had its Future of Iraq re****t, the neocons had
USAID's contract with Bearing Point to remake Iraq's economy: in 108
pages, "privatization" was mentioned no fewer than fifty-one times. To the
true believers in the White House, General Garner's plans for postwar Iraq
seemed hopelessly unambitious. Why settle for a mere coaling station when
you can have a model free market? Why settle for the Philippines when you
can have a beacon unto the world?
The Iraqi Year Zeroists made natural allies for the White House
neoconservatives: Chalabi's seething hatred of the Baathist state fit
nicely with the neocons' hatred of the state in general, and the two
agendas effortlessly merged. Together, they came to imagine the invasion
of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world saw death, they
saw birth -- a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire. Iraq
wasn't being destroyed by cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos, and
looting; it was being born again. April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, was
Day One of Year Zero.
While the war was being waged, it still wasn't clear whether the
pragmatists or the Year Zeroists would be handed control over occupied
Iraq. But the speed with which the nation was conquered dramatically
increased the neocons' political capital, since they had been predicting a
"cakewalk" all along. Eight days after George Bush landed on that aircraft
carrier under a banner that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, the President
publicly signed on to the neocons' vision for Iraq to become a model
cor****ate state that would open up the entire region. On May 9, Bush
proposed the "establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a
decade"; three days later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to replace Jay
Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks. The message was
unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to the believers.
A Reagan-era diplomat turned entrepreneur, Bremer had recently proven his
ability to transform rubble into gold by waiting exactly one month after
the September 11 attacks to launch Crisis Consulting Practice, a security
company selling "terrorism risk insurance" to multinationals. Bremer had
two lieutenants on the economic front: Thomas Foley and Michael Fleischer,
the heads of "private sector development" for the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA). Foley is a Greenwich, Connecticut, multimillionaire, a
longtime friend of the Bush family and a Bush-Cheney campaign "pioneer"
who has described Iraq as a modern California "gold rush." Fleischer, a
venture capitalist, is the brother of former White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer. Neither man had any high-level diplomatic experience and both
use the term cor****ate "turnaround" specialist to describe what they do.
According to Foley, this uniquely qualified them to manage Iraq's economy
because it was "the mother of all turnarounds."
Many of the other CPA postings were equally ideological. The Green Zone,
the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in Saddam's
former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the
Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never
have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who
had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching
Baghdad's new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former
intern to Dick Cheney, re****ted in an email home that "I am assisting
Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic
security forces." The college senior's favorite job before this one? "My
time as an ice-cream truck driver." In those early days, the Green Zone
felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for people who think the Peace Corps is a
communist plot. It was a chance to sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry
"incoming" -- all while being guarded around the clock by real soldiers.
The teams of KPMG accountants, investment bankers, think-tank lifers, and
Young Republicans that populate the Green Zone have much in common with
the IMF missions that rearrange the economies of developing countries from
the presidential suites of Sheraton hotels the world over. Except for one
rather significant difference: in Iraq they were not negotiating with the
government to accept their "structural adjustments" in exchange for a
loan; they were the government.
Some small steps were taken, however, to bring Iraq's U.S.-appointed
politicians inside. Yegor Gaidar, the mastermind of Russia's mid-nineties
privatization auction that gave away the country's assets to the reigning
oligarchs, was invited to share his wisdom at a conference in Baghdad.
Marek Belka, who as finance minister oversaw the same process in Poland,
was brought in as well. The Iraqis who proved most gifted at mouthing the
neocon lines were selected to act as what USAID calls local "policy
champions" -- men like Ahmad al Mukhtar, who told me of his countrymen,
"They are lazy. The Iraqis by nature, they are very dependent. . . . They
will have to depend on themselves, it is the only way to survive in the
world today." Although he has no economics background and his last job was
reading the English-language news on television, al Mukhtar was appointed
director of foreign relations in the Ministry of Trade and is leading the
charge for Iraq to join the World Trade Organization.
* * *
I had been following the economic front of the war for almost a year
before I decided to go to Iraq. I attended the "Rebuilding Iraq" trade
shows, studied Bremer's tax and investment laws, met with contractors at
their home offices in the United States, interviewed the government
officials in Wa****ngton who are making the policies. But as I prepared to
travel to Iraq in March to see this experiment in free-market utopianism
up close, it was becoming increasingly clear that all was not going
according to plan. Bremer had been working on the theory that if you build
a cor****ate utopia the cor****ations will come -- but where were they?
American multinationals were happy to accept U.S. taxpayer dollars to
reconstruct the phone or electricity systems, but they weren't sinking
their own money into Iraq. There was, as yet, no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in
Baghdad, and even the sales of state factories, announced so confidently
nine months earlier, had not materialized.
Some of the holdup had to do with the physical risks of doing business in
Iraq. But there were other more significant risks as well. When Paul
Bremer shredded Iraq's Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The
Economist greeted approvingly as "the wish list of foreign investors,"
there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely
illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security
Council Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United
States and Britain as Iraq's legitimate occupiers. It was this resolution
that empowered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the
resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must "comply fully with
their obligations under international law including in particular the
Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907." Both
conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate historical
tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can
economically strip the nations they control. With this in mind, the
conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country's existing
laws unless "absolutely prevented" from doing so. They also state that an
occupier does not own the "public buildings, real estate, forests and
agricultural assets" of the country it is occupying but is rather their
"administrator" and custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is
reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan: since
America didn't own Iraq's assets, it could not legally sell them, which
meant that after the occupation ended, an Iraqi government could come to
power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public
hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf region, to bar foreign firms from
owning 100 percent of national assets. If that happened, investments made
under Bremer's rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse
because their investments had violated international law from the outset.
By November, trade lawyers started to advise their cor****ate clients not
to go into Iraq just yet, that it would be better to wait until after the
transition. Insurance companies were so spooked that not a single one of
the big firms would insure investors for "political risk," that
high-stakes area of insurance law that protects companies against foreign
governments turning nationalist or socialist and expropriating their
investments.
Even the U.S.-appointed Iraqi politicians, up to now so obedient, were
getting nervous about their own political futures if they went along with
the privatization plans. Communications Minister Haider al-Abadi told me
about his first meeting with Bremer."I said, 'Look, we don't have the
mandate to sell any of this. Privatization is a big thing. We have to wait
until there is an Iraqi government.'" Minister of Industry Mohamad Tofiq
was even more direct: "I am not going to do something that is not legal,
so that's it."
Both al-Abadi and Tofiq told me about a meeting -- never re****ted in the
press -- that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the
twenty-five members of Iraq's Governing Council as well as the twenty-five
interim ministers decided unanimously that they would not participate in
the privatization of Iraq's state-owned companies or of its publicly owned
infrastructure.
But Bremer didn't give up. International law prohibits occupiers from
selling state assets themselves, but it doesn't say anything about the
puppet governments they appoint. Originally, Bremer had pledged to hand
over power to a directly elected Iraqi government, but in early November
he went to Wa****ngton for a private meeting with President Bush and came
back with a Plan B. On June 30 the occupation would officially end -- but
not really. It would be replaced by an appointed government, chosen by
Wa****ngton. This government would not be bound by the international laws
preventing occupiers from selling off state assets, but it would be bound
by an "interim constitution," a document that would protect Bremer's
investment and privatization laws.
The plan was risky. Bremer's June 30 deadline was awfully close, and it
was chosen for a less than ideal reason: so that President Bush could
trumpet the end of Iraq's occupation on the campaign trail. If everything
went according to plan, Bremer would succeed in forcing a "sovereign"
Iraqi government to carry out his illegal reforms. But if something went
wrong, he would have to go ahead with the June 30 handover anyway because
by then Karl Rove, and not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, would be
calling the shots. And if it came down to a choice between ideology in
Iraq and the electability of George W. Bush, everyone knew which would
win.
* * *
At first, Plan B seemed to be right on track. Bremer persuaded the Iraqi
Governing Council to agree to everything: the new timetable, the interim
government, and the interim constitution. He even managed to slip into the
constitution a completely overlooked clause, Article 26. It stated that
for the duration of the interim government, "The laws, regulations, orders
and directives issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority . . . shall
remain in force" and could only be changed after general elections are
held.
Bremer had found his legal loophole: There would be a window -- seven
months -- when the occupation was officially over but before general
elections were scheduled to take place. Within this window, the Hague and
Geneva Conventions' bans on privatization would no longer apply, but
Bremer's own laws, thanks to Article 26, would stand. During these seven
months, foreign investors could come to Iraq and sign forty-year contracts
to buy up Iraqi assets. If a future elected Iraqi government decided to
change the rules, investors could sue for compensation.
But Bremer had a formidable opponent: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the
most senior ****a cleric in Iraq. al Sistani tried to block Bremer's plan
at every turn, calling for immediate direct elections and for the
constitution to be written after those elections, not before. Both
demands, if met, would have closed Bremer's privatization window. Then, on
March 2, with the ****a members of the Governing Council refusing to sign
the interim constitution, five bombs exploded in front of mosques in
Karbala and Baghdad, killing close to 200 wor****pers. General John
Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, warned that the country was on
the verge of civil war. Frightened by this prospect, al Sistani backed
down and the ****a politicians signed the interim constitution. It was a
familiar story: the shock of a violent attack paved the way for more shock
therapy.
When I arrived in Iraq a week later, the economic project seemed to be
back on track. All that remained for Bremer was to get his interim
constitution ratified by a Security Council resolution, then the nervous
lawyers and insurance brokers could relax and the sell-off of Iraq could
finally begin. The CPA, meanwhile, had launched a major new P.R.
offensive designed to reassure investors that Iraq was still a safe and
exciting place to do business. The centerpiece of the campaign was
Destination Baghdad Exposition, a massive trade show for potential
investors to be held in early April at the Baghdad International
Fairgrounds. It was the first such event inside Iraq, and the organizers
had branded the trade fair "DBX," as if it were some sort of Mountain
Dew-sponsored dirt-bike race. In keeping with the extreme-s****ts theme,
Thomas Foley traveled to Wa****ngton to tell a gathering of executives that
the risks in Iraq are akin "to skydiving or riding a motorcycle, which
are, to many, very acceptable risks."
But three hours after my arrival in Baghdad, I was finding these
reassurances extremely hard to believe. I had not yet unpacked when my
hotel room was filled with debris and the windows in the lobby were
shattered. Down the street, the Mount Lebanon Hotel had just been bombed,
at that point the largest attack of its kind since the official end of the
war. The next day, another hotel was bombed in Basra, then two Finnish
businessmen were murdered on their way to a meeting in Baghdad. Brigadier
General Mark Kimmitt finally admitted that there was a pattern at work:
"the extremists have started ****fting away from the hard targets . . .
[and] are now going out of their way to specifically target softer
targets." The next day, the State Department updated its travel advisory:
U.S. citizens were "strongly warned against travel to Iraq."
The physical risks of doing business in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out of
control. This, once again, was not part of the original plan. When Bremer
first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he was able
to walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During his first
four months on the job, 109 U.S. soldiers were killed and 570 were
wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer's shock therapy had
taken effect, the number of U.S. casualties almost doubled, with 195
soldiers killed and 1,633 wounded. There are many in Iraq who argue that
these events are connected -- that Bremer's reforms were the single
largest factor leading to the rise of armed resistance.
Take, for instance, Bremer's first casualties. The soldiers and workers he
laid off without pensions or severance pay didn't all disappear quietly.
Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of
the armed resistance. "Half a million people are now worse off, and there
you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It's alternative
employment," says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business
group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer's other economic casualties also
have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose
companies are threatened by Bremer's investment laws have decided to make
investments of their own -- in the resistance. It is partly their money
that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
These developments present a challenge to the basic logic of shock
therapy: the neocons were convinced that if they brought in their reforms
quickly and ruthlessly, Iraqis would be too stunned to resist. But the
shock appears to have had the opposite effect; rather than the predicted
paralysis, it jolted many Iraqis into action, much of it extreme. Haider
al-Abadi, Iraq's minister of communication, puts it this way: "We know
that there are terrorists in the country, but previously they were not
successful, they were isolated. Now because the whole country is unhappy,
and a lot of people don't have jobs . . . these terrorists are finding
listening ears."
Bremer was now at odds not only with the Iraqis who opposed his plans but
with U.S military commanders charged with putting down the insurgency his
policies were feeding. Heretical questions began to be raised: instead of
laying people off, what if the CPA actually created jobs for Iraqis? And
instead of ru****ng to sell off Iraq's 200 state-owned firms, how about
putting them back to work?
* * *
>From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain
>for
Iraq's state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero --
apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war,
U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator
factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he
went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. "I asked one of the
officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the
looters. I was crying. The officer said, 'Sorry, we can't do anything, we
need an order from President Bush.'" Back in Wa****ngton, Donald Rumsfeld
shrugged. "Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do
bad things."
To see the remains of Asaad's football-field-size warehouse is to
understand why Frank Gehry had an artistic crisis after September 11 and
was briefly unable to design structures resembling the rubble of modern
buildings. Asaad's looted and burned factory looks remarkably like a
heavy-metal version of Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with waves of
steel, buckled by fire, lying in terrifyingly beautiful golden heaps. Yet
all was not lost. "The looters were good-hearted," one of Asaad's painters
told me, explaining that they left the tools and machines behind, "so we
could work again." Because the machines are still there, many factory
managers in Iraq say that it would take little for them to return to full
production. They need emergency generators to cope with daily blackouts,
and they need capital for parts and raw materials. If that happened, it
would have tremendous implications for Iraq's stalled reconstruction,
because it would mean that many of the key materials needed to rebuild --
cement and steel, bricks and furniture -- could be produced inside the
country.
But it hasn't happened. Immediately after the nominal end of the war,
Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the reconstruction of Iraq,
followed by an additional $18.4 billion in October. Yet as of July 2004,
Iraq's state-owned factories had been pointedly excluded from the
reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to Western
companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction im****ted at
great expense from abroad.
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the im****ted products and foreign
workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous
resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And
Iraqis don't have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it's on
display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall.
The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq,
separating the protected -- the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes,
military bases, and, of course, the Green Zon -- from the unprotected and
exposed. If that wasn't injury enough, all the blast walls are im****ted,
from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that
Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again.
There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but
most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry
of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to
help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and
meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to
$1,000 per im****ted blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make
them for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the
Americans refuse to help get Iraq's cement factories running again: among
those making the decisions, "no one believes in the public sector."[1]
This kind of ideological blindness has turned Iraq's occupiers into
prisoners of their own policies, hiding behind walls that, by their very
existence, fuel the rage at the U.S. presence, thereby feeding the need
for more walls. In Baghdad the concrete barriers have been given a popular
nickname: Bremer Walls.
As the insurgency grew, it soon became clear that if Bremer went ahead
with his plans to sell off the state companies, it could worsen the
violence. There was no question that privatization would require layoffs:
the Ministry of Industry estimates that roughly 145,000 workers would have
to be fired to make the firms desirable to investors, with each of those
workers sup****ting, on average, five family members. For Iraq's besieged
occupiers the question was: Would these shock-therapy casualties accept
their fate or would they rebel?
* * *
The answer arrived, in rather dramatic fa****on, at one of the largest
state-owned companies, the General Company for Vegetable Oils. The complex
of six factories in a Baghdad industrial zone produces cooking oil, hand
soap, laundry detergent, shaving cream, and shampoo. At least that is what
I was told by a receptionist who gave me glossy brochures and calendars
boasting of "modern instruments" and "the latest and most up to date
developments in the field of industry." But when I approached the soap
factory, I discovered a group of workers sleeping outside a darkened
building. Our guide rushed ahead, shouting something to a woman in a white
lab coat, and suddenly the factory scrambled into activity: lights
switched on, motors revved up, and workers -- still blinking off sleep --
began filling two-liter plastic bottles with pale blue Zahi brand
dishwa****ng liquid.
I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn't
working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough
electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day,
but when guests arrive -- would-be investors, ministry officials,
journalists -- they get them going. "For show," she explained. Behind us,
a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and
secured with duct tape.
In one dark corner of the plant, we came across an old man hunched over a
sack filled with white plastic caps. With a thin metal blade lodged in a
wedge of wax, he carefully whittled down the edges of each cap, leaving a
pile of shavings at his feet. "We don't have the spare part for the proper
mold, so we have to cut them by hand," his supervisor explained
apologetically. "We haven't received any parts from Germany since the
sanctions began." I noticed that even on the assembly lines that were
nominally working there was almost no mechanization: bottles were held
under spouts by hand because conveyor belts don't convey, lids once
snapped on by machines were being hammered in place with wooden mallets.
Even the water for the factory was drawn from an outdoor well, hoisted by
hand, and carried inside.
The solution proposed by the U.S. occupiers was not to fix the plant but
to sell it, and so when Bremer announced the privatization auction back in
June 2003 this was among the first companies mentioned. Yet when I visited
the factory in March, nobody wanted to talk about the privatization plan;
the mere mention of the word inside the plant inspired awkward silences
and meaningful glances. This seemed an unnatural amount of subtext for a
soap factory, and I tried to get to the bottom of it when I interviewed
the assistant manager. But the interview itself was equally odd: I had
spent half a week setting it up, submitting written questions for
approval, getting a signed letter of permission from the minister of
industry, being questioned and searched several times. But when I finally
began the interview, the assistant manager refused to tell me his name or
let me record the conversation. "Any manager mentioned in the press is
attacked afterwards," he said. And when I asked whether the company was
being sold, he gave this oblique response: "If the decision was up to the
workers, they are against privatization; but if it's up to the
high-ranking officials and government, then privatization is an order and
orders must be followed."
I left the plant feeling that I knew less than when I'd arrived. But on
the way out of the gates, a young security guard handed my translator a
note. He wanted us to meet him after work at a nearby restaurant, "to find
out what is really going on with privatization." His name was Mahmud, and
he was a twenty-five-year-old with a neat beard and big black eyes. (For
his safety, I have omitted his last name.) His story began in July, a few
weeks after Bremer's privatization announcement. The company's manager,
on his way to work, was shot to death. Press re****ts speculated that the
manager was murdered because he was in favor of privatizing the plant, but
Mahmud was convinced that he was killed because he opposed the plan. "He
would never have sold the factories like the Americans want. That's why
they killed him."
The dead man was replaced by a new manager, Mudhfar Ja'far. Shortly after
taking over, Ja'far called a meeting with ministry officials to discuss
selling off the soap factory, which would involve laying off two thirds of
its employees. Guarding that meeting were several security officers from
the plant. They listened closely to Ja'far's plans and promptly re****ted
the alarming news to their coworkers. "We were shocked," Mahmud recalled.
"If the private sector buys our company, the first thing they would do is
reduce the staff to make more money. And we will be forced into a very
hard destiny, because the factory is our only way of living."
Frightened by this prospect, a group of seventeen workers, including
Mahmud, marched into Ja'far's office to confront him on what they had
heard. "Unfortunately, he wasn't there, only the assistant manager, the
one you met," Mahmud told me. A fight broke out: one worker struck the
assistant manager, and a bodyguard fired three shots at the workers. The
crowd then attacked the bodyguard, took his gun, and, Mahmud said,
"stabbed him with a knife in the back three times. He spent a month in the
hospital." In January there was even more violence. On their way to work,
Ja'far, the manager, and his son were shot and badly injured. Mahmud told
me he had no idea who was behind the attack, but I was starting to
understand why factory managers in Iraq try to keep a low profile.
At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant
was sold despite the workers' objections. "There are two choices," he
said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. "Either we will set the
factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will
blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized."
If there ever was a moment when Iraqis were too disoriented to resist
shock therapy, that moment has definitely passed. Labor relations, like
everything else in Iraq, has become a blood s****t. The violence on the
streets howls at the gates of the factories, threatening to engulf them.
Workers fear job loss as a death sentence, and managers, in turn, fear
their workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly more complicated
than the neocons foresaw.[2]
* * *
As I left the meeting with Mahmud, I got word that there was a major
demonstration outside the CPA headquarters. Sup****ters of the radical
young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their
newspaper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of
publi****ng "false articles" that could "pose the real threat of violence."
As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer "is pursuing a
policy of starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with
procuring their daily bread so they do not have the chance to demand their
political and individual freedoms." To me it sounded less like hate
literature than a concise summary of Milton Friedman's recipe for shock
therapy.
A few days before the newspaper was shut down, I had gone to Kufa during
Friday prayers to listen to al Sadr at his mosque. He had launched into a
tirade against Bremer's newly signed interim constitution, calling it "an
unjust, terrorist document." The message of the sermon was clear: Grand
Ayatollah Ali al Sistani may have backed down on the constitution, but al
Sadr and his sup****ters were still determined to fight it -- and if they
succeeded they would sabotage the neocons' careful plan to saddle Iraq's
next government with their "wish list" of laws. With the closing of the
newspaper, Bremer was giving al Sadr his response: he wasn't negotiating
with this young upstart; he'd rather take him out with force.
When I arrived at the demonstration, the streets were filled with men
dressed in black, the soon-to-be legendary Mahdi Army. It struck me that
if Mahmud lost his security guard job at the soap factory, he could be one
of them. That's who al Sadr's foot soldiers are: the young men who have
been shut out of the neocons' grand plans for Iraq, who see no
possibilities for work, and whose neighborhoods have seen none of the
promised reconstruction. Bremer has failed these young men, and everywhere
that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In
****a slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a
kind of shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations, the centers
dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines, organize local garbage
collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic
where the streetlights donā't work. And yes, they organize militias too.
Al Sadr took Bremer's economic casualties, dressed them in black, and gave
them rusty Kalashnikovs. His militiamen protected the mosques and the
state factories when the occupation authorities did not, but in some areas
they also went further, zealously enforcing Islamic law by torching liquor
stores and terrorizing women without the veil. Indeed, the astronomical
rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is
another kind of blowback from Bremer's shock therapy: if the
reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al
Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound
followers.
At the same time as al Sadr's followers were shouting "Down with America"
outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part of the
country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers
were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like
trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a devastating blow
for the neocons, one from which they would never recover. With these
images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn't look anything like a capitalist
dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.
The day I left Baghdad was the worst yet. Fallujah was under siege and
Brig. Gen. Kimmitt was threatening to "destroy the al-Mahdi Army." By the
end, roughly 2,000 Iraqis were killed in these twin campaigns. I was
dropped off at a security checkpoint several miles from the air****t, then
loaded onto a bus jammed with contractors lugging hastily packed bags.
Although no one was calling it one, this was an evacuation: over the next
week 1,500 contractors left Iraq, and some governments began airlifting
their citizens out of the country. On the bus no one spoke; we all just
listened to the mortar fire, craning our necks to see the red glow. A guy
carrying a KPMG briefcase decided to lighten things up. "So is there
business class on this flight?" he asked the silent bus. From the back,
somebody called out, "Not yet."
Indeed, it may be quite a while before business class truly arrives in
Iraq. When we landed in Amman, we learned that we had gotten out just in
time. That morning three Japanese civilians were kidnapped and their
captors were threatening to burn them alive. Two days later Nicholas Berg
went missing and was not seen again until the snuff film surfaced of his
beheading, an even more terrifying message for U.S. contractors than the
charred bodies in Fallujah. These were the start of a wave of kidnappings
and killings of foreigners, most of them businesspeople, from a rainbow of
nations: South Korea, Italy, China, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines,
Turkey. By the end of June more than ninety contractors were re****ted dead
in Iraq. When seven Turkish contractors were kidnapped in June, their
captors asked the "company to cancel all contracts and pull out employees
from Iraq." Many insurance companies stopped selling life insurance to
contractors, and others began to charge premiums as high as $10,000 a week
for a single Western executive -- the same price some insurgents
re****tedly pay for a dead American.
For their part, the organizers of DBX, the historic Baghdad trade fair,
decided to relocate to the lovely tourist city of Diyarbakir in Turkey,
"just 250 km from the Iraqi border." An Iraqi landscape, only without
those frightening Iraqis. Three weeks later just fifteen people showed up
for a Commerce Department conference in Lansing, Michigan, on investing in
Iraq. Its host, Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, tried to reassure his
skeptical audience by saying that Iraq is "like a rough neighborhood
anywhere in America." The foreign investors, the ones who were offered
every imaginable free-market enticement, are clearly not convinced; there
is still no sign of them. Keith Crane, a senior economist at the Rand
Cor****ation who has worked for the CPA, put it bluntly: "I don't believe
the board of a multinational company could approve a major investment in
this environment. If people are shooting at each other, it's just
difficult to do business." Hamid Jassim Khamis, the manager of the largest
soft-drink bottling plant in the region, told me he can't find any
investors, even though he landed the exclusive rights to produce Pepsi in
central Iraq. "A lot of people have approached us to invest in the
factory, but people are really hesitating now." Khamis said he couldn't
blame them; in five months he has survived an attempted assassination, a
carjacking, two bombs planted at the entrance of his factory, and the
kidnapping of his son.
Despite having been granted the first license for a foreign bank to
operate in Iraq in forty years, HSBC still hasn't opened any branches, a
decision that may mean losing the coveted license altogether. Procter &
Gamble has put its joint venture on hold, and so has General Motors. The
U.S. financial backers of the Starwood luxury hotel and multiplex have
gotten cold feet, and Siemens AG has pulled most staff from Iraq. The bell
hasn't rung yet at the Baghdad Stock Exchange -- in fact you can't even
use credit cards in Iraq's cash-only economy. New Bridge Strategies, the
company that had gushed back in October about how "a Wal-Mart could take
over the country," is sounding distinctly humbled. "McDonald's is not
opening anytime soon," company partner Ed Rogers told the Wa****ngton Post.
Neither is Wal-Mart. The Financial Times has declared Iraq "the most
dangerous place in the world in which to do business." It's quite an
accomplishment: in trying to design the best place in the world to do
business, the neocons have managed to create the worst, the most eloquent
indictment yet of the guiding logic behind deregulated free markets.
The violence has not just kept investors out; it also forced Bremer,
before he left, to abandon many of his central economic policies.
Privatization of the state companies is off the table; instead, several of
the state companies have been offered up for lease, but only if the
investor agrees not to lay off a single employee. Thousands of the state
workers that Bremer fired have been rehired, and significant raises have
been handed out in the public sector as a whole. Plans to do away with the
food-ration program have also been scrapped -- it just doesn't seem like a
good time to deny millions of Iraqis the only nutrition on which they can
depend.
* * *
The final blow to the neocon dream came in the weeks before the handover.
The White House and the CPA were ru****ng to get the U.N. Security Council
to pass a resolution endorsing their handover plan. They had twisted arms
to give the top job to former CIA agent Iyad Allawi, a move that will
ensure that Iraq becomes, at the very least, the coaling station for U.S.
troops that Jay Garner originally envisioned. But if major cor****ate
investors were going to come to Iraq in the future, they would need a
stronger guarantee that Bremer's economic laws would stick. There was only
one way of doing that: the Security Council resolution had to ratify the
interim constitution, which locked in Bremer's laws for the duration of
the interim government. But al Sistani once again objected, this time
unequivocally, saying that the constitution has been "rejected by the
majority of the Iraqi people." On June 8 the Security Council unanimously
passed a resolution that endorsed the handover plan but made absolutely no
reference to the constitution. In the face of this far-reaching defeat,
George W. Bush celebrated the resolution as a historic victory, one that
came just in time for an election trail photo op at the G-8 Summit in
Georgia.
With Bremer's laws in limbo, Iraqi ministers are already talking openly
about breaking contracts signed by the CPA. Citigroup's loan scheme has
been rejected as a misuse of Iraq's oil revenues. Iraq's communication
minister is threatening to renegotiate contracts with the three
communications firms providing the country with its disastrously poor cell
phone service. And the Lebanese and U.S. companies hired to run the state
television network have been informed that they could lose their licenses
because they are not Iraqi. "We will see if we can change the contract,"
Hamid al-Kifaey, spokesperson for the Governing Council, said in May.
"They have no idea about Iraq." For most investors, this complete lack of
legal certainty simply makes Iraq too great a risk.
But while the Iraqi resistance has managed to scare off the first wave of
cor****ate raiders, there's little doubt that they will return. Whatever
form the next Iraqi government takes -- nationalist, Islamist, or free
market -- it will inherit a shattered nation with a cru****ng $120 billion
debt. Then, as in all poor countries around the world, men in dark blue
suits from the IMF will appear at the door, bearing loans and promises of
economic boom, provided that certain structural adjustments are made,
which will, of course, be rather painful at first but well worth the
sacrifice in the end. In fact, the process has already begun: the IMF is
poised to approve loans worth $2.5 - $4.25 billion, pending agreement on
the conditions. After an endless succession of courageous last stands and
far too many lost lives, Iraq will become a poor nation like any other,
with politicians determined to introduce policies rejected by the vast
majority of the population, and all the imperfect compromises that will
entail. The free market will no doubt come to Iraq, but the
neoconservative dream of transforming the country into a free-market
utopia has already died, a casualty of a greater dream -- a second term
for George W. Bush.
The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that
the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom
that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that
ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer's reforms unleashed
forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from
armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed
young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in
Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a
cor****ate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business
meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are
so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now.
For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological
belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.
Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place
on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal,
unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the
bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the
country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local
government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most
shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a
failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green
Zone neocons and their masters in Wa****ngton are no more likely to
reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to
search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of
opium and *** slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply
close their eyes and pray harder.
Which is precisely what Thomas Foley has been doing. The former head of
"private sector development" has left Iraq, a country he had described as
"the mother of all turnarounds," and has accepted another turnaround job,
as co-chair of George Bush's reelection committee in Connecticut. On
April 30 in Wa****ngton he addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs about
business prospects in Baghdad. It was a tough day to be giving an upbeat
speech: that morning the first photographs had appeared out of Abu Ghraib,
including one of a hooded prisoner with electrical wires attached to his
hands. This was another kind of shock therapy, far more literal than the
one Foley had helped to administer, but not entirely unconnected.
"Whatever you're seeing, it's not as bad as it appears," Foley told the
crowd. "You just need to accept that on faith."
[Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and writer/producer of "The Take," a
new documentary on Argentina's occupied factories.]
Notes:
1. Tofiq did say that several U.S. companies had expressed strong interest
in buying the state-owned cement factories. This sup****ts a widely held
belief in Iraq that there is a deliberate strategy to neglect the state
firms so that they can be sold more cheaply--a practice known as "starve
then sell."
2. It is in Basra where the connections between economic reforms and the
rise of the resistance was put in starkest terms. In December the union
representing oil workers was negotiating with the Oil Ministry for a
salary increase. Getting nowhere, the workers offered the ministry a
simple choice: increase their paltry salaries or they would all join the
armed resistance. They received a substantial raise.
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