Now that the war is happening, it is useless to maintain the fiction that we can protest for peace. We are now left to the task of critiquing the way that the war is conducted and looking towards the future. The question becomes not ‘who will win the war?’, but ‘who will win the peace?’.

Apparently, the first post-war reconstruction project has been awarded to a US company. Post war reconstruction? Kinda seems to me that we are in the middle of a war here. Is this just a little presumptuous to award contracts for the management and reconstruction of Iraq before the war has been won. You better think that there was a pretty interesting force majeure clause in that contract [all of the lawyers laugh uproariously].

The article goes on to say that the US Agency for International Development has sought tenders from a select group of US companies for various post-war reconstruction efforts, including seaport administration, public health, primary and secondary education etc etc. The process has been criticised because, among other reasons, no foreign companies were invited to tender.

I can think of another reason. HELLO!!!?? The US has not won the war. The US is not even fighting the war - I am pretty sure it is a coalition of the willing. So why is it that the US gets to hoist its flags over captured cities, and why is it that the US gets to decide what the post-war landscape in Iraq is going to look like? In my history books, after the war was won or lost, all the relevant countries got together and decided what would happen. Now even if this means the bizarre carving up of Germany among the allies, shouldn’t us Aussies get to control a slice of Iraq? Or the poms? Shouldn’t we be able to fight over our respective areas of the conquered country and create a history which might allow Iraq to market a highly profitable checkpoint-charlie-like tourist attraction in the future?

Or (and here is a radical idea), shouldn’t the post-war situation for Iraq be governed and determined by an international body rather than one particular nation, by the global community rather than one particular ideology. Or are we saying that a country like the US can circumvent international conventions to invade another country, and purely by right of that initiative, get to control the manner and direction of that country’s development post war. To me that sounds suspiciously like imperialism.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2003 at 11:09 pm by dan and is filed under iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.