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Iraq Under U.S. Occupation?
Saturday, November 30, 2002
By Vijay Prashad
People's Weekly World Newspaper

Vijay Prashad is the author, most recently, of “Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism,” Common Courage Press and Zed Press, 2002



Even as they have no credibility, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) has begun to talk to the French and the Russian oil merchants about access to Iraqi oil. In September 2002, Chalabi told the Washington Post, "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil." In mid-October 2002, the INC said that "it would open the oil sector to all companies, including U.S. majors, and give particular attention to contracts made with Russia and France." This was a patently obvious way of winning support in the Security Council not only for a war on Iraq, but also for the INC to find favor in the post-Ba’th future.

From the White House, reports leak out about plans for an Iraq after the Ba’th (the ruling party of Iraq). The main scenarios do not allow for the development of democracy in Iraq. Each of them is built on a racist assumption: that the Iraqis either need a military dictator or else a monarch – any form of democracy is impossible to imagine.

The denials came fast after the press ran a story in early October 2002 that the White House contemplates the occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces and the creation of an Occupation regime, as in Japan post-1945. Close to a hundred thousand troops will enter Iraq, General Tommy Franks will take over as Supreme Commander of the occupied lands, the regime will arrest "war criminals" and try them, and "de-Ba’thize" Iraq.

The U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan, National Security Council’s expert on West Asia, and a point man on the aftermath scenarios, Zalmay Khalilzad, conceded that "the costs will be significant" (at least $16 billion per year), but that the U.S. will commit the necessary resources "and we would have the will to stay for as long as necessary to do the job."

When asked about the plans for occupation, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, "Should it come to that, and the president hopes that it does not come to that, but should it come that we would have an obligation to put in place a better regime," the military will take charge. "We are obviously doing contingency planning, and there are lots of different models from history that one could look at: Japan, Germany."

Japan is the example most often provided by those in the know. In Japan, the MacArthur-led Occupation dismantled sections of the fascist bureaucracy, but also dislocated the capacity for the socialists to rebuild their political bases. Trade unions came under the gun as MacArthur privileged the zaibatsu, the industrial cliques that continue to dominate Japanese society. In 1951, MacArthur laid out his basic, racist, theory for the Occupation: "Measured by the standards of modern civilization, [the Japanese] would be like a boy of twelve as compared with our development of 45 years." Because of the slow development of the misbegotten Japanese, MacArthur argued, the U.S. Army could "implant basic concepts there," such as a respect for authority and for institutional power (for an excellent primer on the Occupation, see the first few chapters in John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, 1999).

The parallel with Japan perhaps fluffs the glory of the Pentagon, but it is not fully accurate. The real comparison for the region is the period of Iraq’s rule by the British Mandate (1914-1932).
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2002 © People's Weekly World Newspaper.

Dan