Naomi Klein tells it like it is re: the Iraqi "election"

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050228&s=klein

She gets in a couple of real zingers in the end. Here's a snippet:

The election results are in: Iraqis voted overwhelmingly to throw out the US-installed government of Iyad Allawi, who refused to ask the United States to leave. A decisive majority voted for the United Iraqi Alliance; the second plank in the UIA platform calls for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq."

There are more single-digit messages embedded in the winning coalition's platform. Some highlights: "Adopting a social security system under which the state guarantees a job for every fit Iraqi...and offers facilities to citizens to build homes." The UIA also pledges "to write off Iraq's debts, cancel reparations and use the oil wealth for economic development projects." In short, Iraqis voted to repudiate the radical free-market policies imposed by former chief US envoy Paul Bremer and locked in by a recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

So will the people who got all choked up watching Iraqis flock to the polls support these democratically chosen demands? Please. "You don't set timetables," George W. Bush said four days after Iraqis voted for exactly that. Likewise, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the elections "magnificent" but dismissed a firm timetable out of hand. The UIA's pledges to expand the public sector, keep the oil and drop the debt will likely suffer similar fates. At least if Adel Abd al-Mahdi gets his way--he's Iraq's finance minister and the man suddenly being touted as leader of Iraq's next government.

Al-Mahdi is the Bush Administration's Trojan horse in the UIA. (You didn't think they were going to put all their money on Allawi, did you?) In October he told a gathering of the American Enterprise Institute that he planned to "restructure and privatize state-owned enterprises," and in December he made another trip to Washington to unveil plans for a new oil law "very promising to the American investors." It was al-Mahdi himself who oversaw the signing of a flurry of deals with Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco in the weeks before the elections, and it is he who negotiated the recent austerity deal with the IMF. On troop withdrawal, al-Mahdi sounds nothing like his party's platform and instead appears to be channeling Dick Cheney on Fox News: "When the Americans go will depend on when our own forces are ready and on how the resistance responds after the elections." But on Sharia law, we are told, he is very close to the clerics.

...remarkably good over the last couple of years on the (socio-)economics of the Iraq fiasco. She's been quite supurb (and devastatingly precise) on the blatant, bare-faced audacity of the "coalition's" appropriation of the riches of Iraq.

The oil, the gas, the roads, the buildings, the sanitation, the water, the electricity - every single conceiveble entity was taken by Bremer (TAKEN, TAKEN, TAKEN I tell ya!), with absolutely no international authority or legitimacy, and handed out to a cabal of most-favoured bidders. Not many Iraqis invloved in it all, surprisingly. A nifty 21st century land-grab.

So, a bit like what happened in 90's USSR/Russia, the vast profits that can be earned from a country's resources - resources that in a very real sense belong to the Iraqis - were lost forever to their true owners. If someone stole MY oil I'd be fucking raging!!

Imagine you are an Iraqi having to sit in a queue for petrol at a station, while all around you bubble-away some of the most prosperous oil-wells on the planet. It is a steaming hot day, the line is a mile long, and everyone is getting tetchy. How long before you blew a gasket (literally/metaphorically). I, for one would be absolutely seething with rage after 2 minutes.

And that isn't some communist manifesto people - they are plain and simple matters of fact and natural morality. You don't even need to be a leftie to grasp the injustice.

And the pro-war crowd wonder why there is resentment? Worse still (and I suspect this is the case), they think the Iraqis are too stupid or uninformed or gutless to notice? The condesension is revolting. And, for what it's worth, this mentality is a classic, classic trap for over-reaching and arrogant colonialists to fall into.

And there is one big problem making it all worse...the likes of Bush and Bremer probably think that all this is genuinely fair. Why wouldn't those ungrateful Iraqis want nice big companies to come in a fix up their roads and schools and water? Profit is merely a reward for enterprise. Right?

Of course, completely fucking wrong.