Imperiets sande ansigt

Britiske soldater anklages nu for seksuelle overgreb på en dengang kun 14-årig fange i Irak, et af de “brune” lande, der for tiden ikke skønnes at kunne “klare sig selv” og som “vores” drenge derfor er nødt til at boltre sig i – hvis det for nogen lyder som det 19. århundredes kolonialisme, er det, fordi det ret klart er den, vi er kommet tilbage til.

Som Lenin fra Lenin’s Tomb gør opmærksom på, er der ikke noget særligt usædvanligt ved sådanne angreb, der formentlig er en helt naturlig konsekvens af den racisme, der ligger til grund for hele besættelsen og det sprog, den forsvares i:

This sort of daily, often quite arbitrary, violence by forces who accept the minimum possible responsibility for their behaviour is just so much background noise to the war against barbarism/extremism/terrorism/savagery/etc. It just blends into the screams from the torture chambers and the crunch of metal against bone as troops shoot up cars at checkpoints or lob missiles into houses. The fact that this is perfectly ordinary behaviour by imperialist troops, under whatever authority and of whatever nationality, is always missed. Whether in Kosovo, Somalia or Haiti, whether the military mission is conducted under the NATO brand or the UN brand, there always emerges some sickening stories of systematic physical and sexual abuse of the supposed recipients of humanitarian largesse.

Den eneste grund til at vi overhovedet hører om den aktuelle sag er måske, at den er ekstrem – alle de “almindelige” tilfælde af overgreb og tortur forsvinder i mængden: “Had it been left at a whipping and beating for the crime of stealing milk, it may not have ever been reported.”

Hvornår begynder de første, tilsvarende sager om danske soldaters optræden i Afghanistan mon at dukke op? Et land, hvor USA stadig opretholder store fangelejre, hvor tortur praktiseres præcis så rutinemæssigt som på Guantánamo. Hvad har danske soldater dog at gøre på den galej – og så som “allierede”?

Røveri ved højlys dag

Naomi Klein i The Guardian om de nye kontrakter om udnyttelse af de irakiske oliereserver, der giver de multinationale selskaber den største bid af kagen:

One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of backroom arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oilfields, accounting for half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under the control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign corporations will keep 75% of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25% for their Iraqi partners.

That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anti-colonial struggles. According to Greg Muttitt, a London-based oil expert, the assumption up until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop new fields in Iraq – not to take over those which are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. “The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company,” he told me. “This is a total reversal of that policy, giving the Iraq National Oil Company a mere 25% instead of the planned 100%.”

So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Paradoxically, it is Iraq’s suffering – its never-ending crisis – that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain Iraq’s treasury of its main revenue source. The logic goes like this: Iraq’s oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology, while the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq needs to start producing more oil urgently. Why? Also because of the war. The country is shattered and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to western firms have failed to rebuild it.

And that’s where the new contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.

Det er åbenbart slut med det “post-koloniale” i et besat land som Irak – en udvikling, som resten af verden nok skal bide mærke i.