Nicole Colson is a reporter for Socialist Worker newspaper and has written about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in previous issues of the ISR.

I THINK that the reconstruction is something that most [Iraqi] people have a hard time seeing, because a lot of the destruction from the war is still right out there in the streets. The buildings that were partially destroyed are still sitting there in the same condition. There are piles of rubble in the streets. There’s no kind of community reconstruction going on, and there were a lot of promises made about that. I think that people living in Baghdad are pretty cynical about the actual reconstruction. They read the newspapers. They hear about $87 billion being appropriated. And then they don’t see anything. So, I think the conclusion that a lot of people come to is that this money is just going to line the pockets of big U.S. corporations that are getting the contracts. They’re probably right.

The unemployment rate is 70 percent, so that puts most people in a pretty desperate situation economically. The occupation authority, especially this guy Thomas Foley, who was a Bush fundraiser and who is now head of private-sector development for the occupation authority, is publishing lists of Iraqi state enterprises that are on the block for privatization. Most people know that what that really means is that if those enterprises are sold, new owners are going to come in and they’re going to lay off a lot of people. Given that the unemployment rate is already at 70 percent, that’s a pretty scary threat for a lot of people.

WELL, IT hasn’t happened–yet. Privatization is something that they’re talking about, and they’re even holding conferences in London and Washington once or twice a week where they bring in U.S. corporations and basically show them what is potentially available in terms of the assets in Iraq that can be sold off. But, they’ve also passed new laws that provide a framework for this to take place in. They’ve issued a new law called Order No. 39, that allows 100 percent foreign ownership and repatriation of profits, and another law that establishes a flat tax of 15 percent–something that they’ve never been able to get through the Congress here, but that they can just dictate in Iraq because nobody can tell them no.

But, that’s as far as it’s gone, for a number of reasons. One is that the security situation is such that I don’t think that they can get buyers to come in and buy the stuff yet. So they have to get that settled. Also, they have to have a government in place that can legally sell state enterprises. The occupation authority itself can’t legally do that because international law prohibits it. In order to reassure those foreign companies that will come in and buy these assets that they’re not going to be challenged 10 years later for having illegally bought something that didn’t belong to the sellers, they have to have an Iraqi government in place that’s willing and able to do that. And they don’t have that yet. So there’s still some things that need to take place. But what’s really clear is that this is what the intention of the Bush administration is, and they’re going step by step.

In fact, they actually have done it a little bit. They’ve sold the port of Um Qasr–or, they didn’t actually sell the port, but they brought in Stevedoring Services of America to run the port of Um Qasr under a concession. That’s the functional equivalent of privatizing that port. So that’s now being operated by a foreign corporation.

I think there’s still some other hurdles they have to get over in order to do that totally, but the direction of it is really clear. They talk about this openly, and make all kinds of public pronouncements about it all the time in Iraq.

THE WAGES in Iraq, up until the occupation, were set by the Iraqi government, because it was a planned, centralized, state-run economy. So when the occupation authority took over, they began going over wage classifications. Essentially, they’ve issued new wage schedules which are actually the same as the old wage schedules.

What it means is that, in state-owned enterprises, which are still the bulk of the Iraqi economy, the wages are all the same because they’re established by the government. The wage schedule is $60 to $120 or $180 a month, and is the same from factory to factory, wherever you go.

What the occupation authority did, though, was eliminate a lot of the subsidies that were sort of "add-ons" to people’s salaries that made them much more "survivable." Things like subsidies for food, housing, profit-sharing and bonuses were all wiped out at the beginning of the occupation. In some cases, workers suffered a drastic reduction in their income because of that. That again was done by "executive fiat" by the occupation authority, effecting all workers in Iraq. They are in charge. It’s like the occupation authority is the boss of those workers. All the terms of wages and benefits and the working conditions are set by the Ministry of Finance, and under the Ministry of Finance you have things like the oil ministry and the ministry for mineral resources, which administer the actual factories.

I DON’T know about the administration of the oil-for-food program. But the prices are going up, for a lot of reasons. Prices have been decontrolled to a certain extent, and also the rate of inflation is very high right now. What that means is that the price of anything that’s imported goes up. For Iraq right now, an awful lot of things are imported.

Even things that weren’t imported before are imported now, like gasoline. It’s kind of crazy, because here’s one of the countries that has the most oil resources in the world, and yet, they’re re-importing gasoline. Partly it’s because they’re having trouble getting the industrial infrastructure to function, but part of it’s also corruption. I heard stories in the refinery about how they had this system for evading the sanctions when Saddam Hussein was there, where they would basically load oil onto ships and send them out into the Gulf.

So, there are now ships sitting out there in the Gulf–with oil that was loaded onto them back in the old days–that are now docking and reselling that oil back to Iraq. That also increases prices too. People are really caught in an economic vice.

I DIDN’T visit every factory in Iraq, but I believe based on what I saw that there is union activity going on in workplaces all over Iraq. I would guess that it would be pretty hard to find a state-owned factory right now in Iraq where workers have not started the organizing process.

I don’t know about all the little small businesses, privately owned business, but even some of those are affected. I heard from a group of workers from brick factories about 50 miles south of Baghdad, who came in to talk to us about their organizing process, too.

That is one of the encouraging things, that workers have seized this moment to begin organizing themselves because they were prevented from doing that by Saddam Hussein.

That also includes the Union of the Unemployed. With unemployment as high as it is, obviously, there’s a lot of desperation. The Union of the Unemployed has been an important organization in trying to advocate for the rights of unemployed workers and to lead public demonstrations in which people insist on the establishment of an unemployed benefits system and [insist] that the money that’s supposed to be spent on reconstruction and jobs actually produces some jobs–which it hasn’t so far.

The problem is that this is not something that the occupation authority wants to happen. I think that the reason is that they have their own intentions for these factories and these enterprises.

The privatization is obviously going to lead to a lot of job losses, and the impact on workers is going to be pretty horrific. They know that, and they don’t want people to be organized in such a way that they can try to stop the privatization or fight against layoffs or this kind of economic impact. That’s why [the CPA] keeps enforcing this [1987] law from Saddam Hussein’s time that says that, in those enterprises, people don’t have the right to organize a union and bargain.

THAT’S RIGHT. They’re holding that one in their hip pocket, so to speak. When and if the moment comes when workers really try to shut down these enterprises in order to prevent privatization, for instance, that’s the law that’s going to be used to stop them.

THAT’S HARD for me to say. I think that even the Union of the Unemployed, which is the main organization that’s holding public demonstrations right now, is very careful about it. When I talked to Qasim Hadi, he said "We have to be very careful about how we organize these demonstrations, and ensure that we provide our own security for them."

Because, as he says, you have to imagine what the level of desperation is, and their level of anger, and so if we organize a demonstration and bring people down to the compound where the occupation authority is and there are soldiers there, we’re going to have people in this demonstration who are going to be so angry that they’re going to try–if we don’t prevent them from doing it–to assault the soldiers. So, we have to be very careful to make sure that things don’t get out of hand and result in people actually getting killed.

And there have been demonstrations, not organized by the unemployed union, but more spontaneous ones, where Iraqi police have actually fired on demonstrators and killed demonstrators.

There are also these spontaneous protests about jobs that are going on too, which do result in this. We asked the Workers Democratic Trade Union Federation, "Well, okay, why do you not organize mass protests against the enforcement of the 1987 law?"

They said, "Well, in the current situation, that might be used by provocateurs to create incidents that we might not be able to control. So, we have to be very careful about that. Right now we’re trying to use other avenues to see if we can’t get rid of the law."

It’s not a comparable situation to the U.S. or to Europe, where we sort of accept as a given that mass demonstrations can take place in a relatively legal manner. That they can be controlled and not lead to bloodshed–although, after the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami, one wonders.

Still, that’s a far cry from Iraq. So, even though the occupation authority makes these mealy-mouthed statements about how "everybody has rights and people can demonstrate and everybody has the freedom to say what they want," the reality on the ground is far different.

THE LAST one actually was that they were doing a street-sweep down the street where the office of the unemployed union and the Workers Communist Party is located. In the course of the street-sweep, they went into those premises and supposedly found two submachine guns. Under the occupation authority regulations, you’re allowed to have one.

So, they were accused of having more than they were permitted to have, and so they arrested these two guys based on that, held them for a while and then let them go.

I wasn’t there, but it sounds to me like it was a pretext. In other words, that they were giving them a warning, telling them "Don’t fuck with us or things could get really bad for you really fast."

THE VIOLENCE started escalating as we were there, and has gotten a lot worse since we left. But even when we were there, there was the bombing of the Baghdad Hotel, which was just a couple blocks from where we were, and they had bombed the Turkish embassy.

So, it’s not going well for the coalition from the point of view of being able to contain and suppress this guerrilla war against the occupation. Obviously, they’ve not been able to do that.

You do see troops all over the place, patrolling in their Humvees. The occupation is very visible to Iraqis. It’s not like the U.S. troops stay hidden in a compound somewhere and the people who are doing the patrolling are Iraqis–though that’s not to say that there aren’t Iraqi police out there. The U.S. presence is a very high-profile presence

It’s not just firing on demonstrators. The Global Exchange project in Iraq, Occupation Watch, is documenting just the incidents that happen day-in and day-out, in which soldiers fire on civilians and kill them, in order to try and help the families get at least some kind of compensation and then also to use that to make a case against the occupation itself.

It’s really kind of amazing how many people are getting killed all the time. The troops will set up these checkpoints, and it’s not like there’re a lot of signs before you get to the checkpoint saying "Checkpoint ahead, slow down and stop." So what will happen is that people will drive into the checkpoints not knowing that they’re there until it’s too late. They panic, try to drive out, the troops fire on them as if they were guerrillas, and people die.

Those things breed, I think, even more resentment than the firing on demonstrators, because it’s so clear that the violence is being directed at people who aren’t doing anything political. They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think that the level of anger is just growing and growing and growing. I don’t think any "Iraqization" of this occupation is going to work. The only thing that’s going to stop it is for the troops to leave.

I THINK the protests in Miami are very connected to what’s happening in Iraq for a lot of reasons. One is this neoliberal scheme of equating the free market with democracy and saying that all barriers to the operation of corporations are going to be removed and that all assets that belong to nations are going to be privatized and turned over to private owners–it’s the basic rule in both cases. That’s what the FTAA is about, and that’s what the model that they’re trying to impose in Iraq is about too. The protests are really against the same thing.

Also, I think that they both highlight the fact that we’re not living on an island somewhere, but that we’re affected by this, too. Obviously, the cost of the occupation of Iraq is being paid by working people, primarily in the United States right now. That $87 billion is our tax money. The impact that it has on us is pretty devastating. Not only is that money then not available for things like summer sessions in community colleges in California, but when that neoliberal economy develops, you have workers pitted against each other from country to country.

Take this argument now about removing the steel tariffs. I’m not a protectionist, but I think what’s happening here is you have these competing groups of huge corporations that are basically jousting with each other and jousting for markets. The people who are losing and getting trampled underfoot are working people. [Corporations] are trying to compete for markets by lowering the cost of labor as much as they can. And who’s paying that price?

Those are the rules that are being enforced on us. This is the 10th anniversary of NAFTA, and the Department of Labor itself has certified over 400,000 workers for extended unemployment because under the treaty they were entitled to it if they could prove that they lost their jobs due to NAFTA. And everybody knows that that’s a big under-count.

Here we have 10 years of NAFTA showing that the impact of that in the U.S. was the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. In Mexico, there are over 400,000 people who’ve lost their jobs in the maquiladoras because they tied their economy to the U.S. market, and when the U.S. market went into recession, all of a sudden they were producing stuff that nobody could buy and workers began to lose their jobs. These are the "rules," whether it’s in Iraq, or Mexico or the FTAA.

That’s the connection. We’re all being affected by the operation of this global economy. When they implement, if they’re able to, this neoliberal regime in Iraq, the impact is not going to be felt just by Iraqi workers.