The White House insists that American taxpayers won't be paying to rebuild Iraq. Mitchell Daniels, Jr., the President's budget director, says Iraq will bepaying for these repairs itself, out of future oil revenues.
Okay, so if Iraq is going to foot the bill, who exactly is going to make money doing all this repair work?
You'd expect the Administration would want a lot of nations to be involved. After being criticized for going to war with only the British at our side, the White House would surely want to make the reconstruction of Iraq a global effort. Under no circumstances would it want to create the impression that onlya handful of big American corporations were going to profit from this. That would confirm some of the worst suspicions around the world about the role big American corporations play in setting Administration policy.
It turns out the White House has decided that the entire job of rebuilding Iraqwill be done by ... big American corporations. Not even British companies will be allowed in on the bidding. The British are reliable enough to help us toppleSaddam Hussein and destroy a lot of Iraq's infrastructure in the process, but apparently not reliable enough to earn money rebuilding Iraq. You can imagine how Tony Blair is taking this news.
By the way, according to the rules of the World Trade Organization, national governments are not allowed to limit bidding to their own nations' companies. But the White House says it must limit this bidding to American corporations, because winning contractors have to work with classified information.
The White House doesn't explain why the British, for example, can't be trusted with classified information. Nor does it explain exactly why it takes classified information to rebuild a bridge or a road.
Perhaps the oddest thing about all this is no one even knows what constitutes an "American" corporation any more. Bechtel, for example, which willbe allowed in on the bidding, has 47,000 employees in 67 countries, including China, Egypt, France, Oman, and Russia. IBM, which will also be allowed to bid, has executives and shareholders all over the world. These huge companies may be headquartered in the United States, but they're really global corporations.
So, in a way, the rebuilding of Iraq will be a global effort -- even if the Bush administration hasn't designed it that way.
