Rebuilding Iraq: The Problem of Democracy

Broadcast on Marketplace; May 19, 2003

The thing about democracy is that it starts bottom up, not top down. It's hard to impose at the barrel of a gun. That only leads to anarchy, the quicker road back to tyranny than forward to democracy. Trouble is, the Bush administration doesn't seem to have a very clear notion of what democracy means - let alone what democracy in Islamic Iraq might mean.

Forget it. The Bush administration plans instead to remake Iraq's economy in the U.S.'s image. Besides farming out reconstruction contracts to firms like Bechtel and Halliburton, the US Agency for International Development has called for mass privatization. That includes heavy U.S. private sector involvement in Iraqi privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially in the oil industries, according to U-S-A-I-D's own specs.

Whoa! Never mind that these far-reaching "reforms" will benefit American private corporations more than the Iraqis. Never mind that almost no international involvement by the World Bank or IMF, let alone the U.N., is contemplated. But aren't these the democratic decisions a new Iraqi democratic regime would most expect to make -- the very essence of their new sovereignty?!

No, marketization is not the same thing as democratization. If the Iraqis are to be empowered to determine their own future, then surely the decision about whether they should have public or private media, a state run oil industry, or one farmed out to foreign energy corporations, must be theirs, not ours. If we take it from them, then the last rationale still standing for the invasion of Iraq - its democratization - will be as delusional and fraudulent as those still missing "weapons of mass destruction."

In New York, this is Benjamin Barber for Marketplace

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