"Seeing Iraq through the globalization lens"

[scarletwoman]

This is an excellent piece.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0405/p09s02-coop.html
By Mark LeVine

BAGHDAD AND AMMAN – If you haven't been in Jordan in several years, Amman's fashionable Mecca Mall is a bit disorienting - especially if you've just come from more than a week in Baghdad. There are luxury shops selling designer clothes made in Syria, ads for "Sex and the City," a chic bowling alley and coffee shops, and a multiplex theater showing first-run movies, including "The Passion" - it's not hard to believe that globalization is taking root in this corner of the Middle East, however troubled its experience elsewhere in the region.

<snip>

It may be hard for Americans to understand the occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend. Here, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity - oil. And corporations allied with the occupying power literally scrounge the country for profits, privatizing everything from health care to prisons, while Iraqi engineers, contractors, doctors, and educators are shunted aside.

Like economic globalization in so many other countries of the developing world, this model in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. My visits to hospitals, schools, think tanks, political party headquarters, art galleries, and refugee camps reveal conditions clearly as bad, and often worse, than on the eve of the US invasion. So outside the Kurdish north, there is almost universal antipathy for the occupation, for what Iraqis refer to derisively as the "Governed Council" (whose members are dismissed as paid employees of the occupiers), and for a draft constitution that analysts here feel has enough holes to ensure continued repression and corruption, however appealing the veneer of democracy.

<snip>

Iraq is sliding toward chaos; a state that many Iraqis increasingly believe is exactly where the US wants them to be. A prominent Iraqi psychiatrist who has worked with the CPA and the US military explained to me that "there is no way the United States can be this incompetent. The chaos here has to be at least partly deliberate." The main question on most people's minds is not if his assertion is true, but why?

(more...)

sw

[scarletwoman]

1. Another Mark Levine piece, "Chaos Theory"

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10195

This is basically an expanded and rather more hard-hitting version of the article in the CSMonitor in my first post.

sw