Saudi Gazette
December 12, 2003

During a press conference at the Pentagon earlier this year, a journalist asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld if there was some cognitive dissonance between the Bush administration’s hawkish Iraq policy and negotiations with North Korea over that country’s nuclear weapons programs.

I’m not sure I know what cognitive dissonance is, the secretary replied. Perhaps Rumsfeld does not know what the term means, which is essentially holding two conflicting ideas at the same time.

But when the Bush administration barred companies from non-coalition partners particularly France, Germany and Russia – from bidding for Iraqi reconstruction contracts while asking those same governments to forgive Iraq’s debt, the administration shows it knows how to engage in the practice.

The money up for grabs in Iraq is not chump change. The US Congress has appropriated nearly $19 billion for reconstruction efforts in war-shattered Iraq. Most of that will probably go to a handful of firms closely connected to the Pentagon through a long history of contracting.

But Iraq’s debt is no small matter either. Estimates vary, but Jubilee Iraq, a UK-based organization seeking complete forgiveness of Iraqi debt, estimates Baghdad s total foreign debt between $100-$150 billion. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia, Japan, and France are the largest creditors.

Add perhaps another $30 billion of unpaid reparations from 1991 Gulf War, and Iraq’s debt becomes truly staggering. There will probably be negotiations between the US and its adversaries, some friendly horse trading a little debt forgiveness in exchange for a contract or a sub-contract.

This is all very unseemly. Neither the international reconstruction fund, or US taxpayer dollars allocated for Iraqi reconstruction, nor Iraq itself should be spoils of war up for grabs by the highest or best-connected bidder. Iraqis cannot effectively rebuild their country and rejoin the global community unless they can get out from underneath their government’s staggering debt. It, and the war reparations, need to be forgiven.

Rebuilding Iraq is not America’s job. It is not France’s job. It does not require foreign firms bringing in Western engineers and hiring Indian or Filipino laborers when there are thousands of highly skilled and competent Iraqis with little to do.

Reconstruction is something the Iraqis should be doing, on their own. Of course they will need the help of the international community, with technical expertise and with capital. But they are more than capable of rebuilding their own shattered country. At the very least, Iraqis and not some US official in the bowels of the Pentagon should be able to choose whose help they can seek. And whose help they will accept.