ON MONDAY, Iraq's National Assembly will release a draft constitution to be voted on by the people in two months. Since February, vital issues have been debated and discussed by the drafting committee: the role of Islamic law, the rights of women, the autonomy of the Kurds and the participation of the minority Sunnis.
But what hasn't been on the table is at least as important to the formation of a new Iraq: the country's economic structure. The Bush administration has succeeded in maintaining a stranglehold on issues such as public versus private ownership of resources, foreign access to Iraqi oil and U.S. control of the reconstruction effort -- all of which are still governed by administration policies put into place immediately after the invasion. The Bush economic agenda favors foreign interests -- American interests -- over Iraqi self-determination.
Over a year ago, orders were put in place by L. Paul Bremer III, then the U.S. administrator of Iraq, that were designed to "transition [Iraq] from a ... centrally planned economy to a market economy" virtually overnight and by U.S. fiat. Those orders were also incorporated into the transitional administrative law -- Iraq's interim constitution -- and the economic restructuring they mandate is well underway.
Laws governing banking, investment, patents, copyrights, business ownership, taxes, the media and trade have all been changed according to U.S. goals, with little real participation from the Iraqi people. (The TAL can be changed, but only with a two-thirds majority vote in the National Assembly, and with the approval of the prime minister, the president and both vice presidents.) The constitutional drafting committee has, in turn, left each of these laws in place.
A central component of the Bush economic agenda is foreign corporate access to, and privatization of, Iraq's once state-run economy. Thus, an early Bremer order allowed foreign investment in and the privatization of all 192 government-owned industries (excluding oil extraction).
After the election of the transitional government, the Ministry of Industry and Minerals fell right in line, announcing plans to partially privatize most of its 46 state-owned companies and open them to foreign investment as part of a plan to establish a "liberal, free-market economy."
