As the war winds down and the rebuilding ensues, voices from around the world can be heard offering their respective visions of
a new Iraq.

From their summit in Athens on April 17, European Union leaders called for a “central role” for the United Nations, “including in the process leading toward self-government for the Iraqi people.”
The foreign ministers of eight Middle Eastern countries — all of Iraq’s neighbors, plus Egypt and Bahrain — echoed that sentiment at their meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia the next day.
Meanwhile, in Iraq itself, tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets of Baghdad, demanding a speedy removal of coalition troops and the establishment of an Islamic state.
From this cacophony of voices, a consensus has emerged: The United States is not to monopolize the rebuilding process in order to shape a new government in its own interests.
Yet this is precisely what the Bush administration intends to do. America will rebuild Iraq the same way it invaded it — unilaterally. The architects of the reconstruction are the same men who orchestrated the destruction, and they are unlikely to change strategies midstream.
The Defense Department, though the war is all but over, will remain the dominant influence in Iraq long afterwards. Never mind talk of the United Nations; even the State Department is being squeezed out of the reconstruction to make room for a select group with special connections to the national security establishment.
Jay Garner, head of the rebuilding process, was hand-picked for the job by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who sat with him on inquiries into the threat of ballistic missile attacks on the United States; both are proponents of a missile defense system. Garner is also connected to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a militaristic think tank stacked with retired officers. On JINSA’s board of directors: Richard Perle, who was appointed chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board by Rumsfeld, a position he recently resigned amid controversy over his lunch with a Saudi arms dealer, among other things.
Philip Carroll, who will oversee oil operations, is a former Shell Oil CEO who also served on the Greater Houston Partnership, a business lobby among whose members was Halliburton, the company with which Vice President Dick Cheney is now so infamously associated. Carroll left Shell in 1996 to run Fluor — one of the handful of companies invited to bid on the lucrative Iraq reconstruction project — until last year.
The company that won that contract, Bechtel, has its own ties to the highest echelons of the defense community. Jack Sheehan, a senior vice president with the company, is a retired Marine Corps general who serves on the aforementioned Defense Policy Board; former executives include Reagan’s secretaries of state and defense, George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. Bechtel was to oversee the construction of an oil pipeline between Iraq and Jordan back in 1983, when Saddam Hussein and the United States were still on good terms. The facilitator of this deal, which eventually fell through, was none other than Rumsfeld, who negotiated privately with Hussein in Baghdad during a two-year stint as special presidential envoy to the Middle East.
Because of the overwhelming influence of the Defense Department on the rebuilding process, it is unlikely that the new Iraq will accommodate the interests of its people or of the international community, when they conflict with those of the U.S. right-wing national security establishment. The neoconservative branch of the Bush administration will actively shape Iraq according to its own preferences.
For evidence of this, we need look no further than the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group that has returned to wield its influence on the newly liberated country. Its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, rejected by the State Department as having virtually no support within Iraq — he has been away for 40 years — has been embraced by the Department of Defense. U.S. Special Forces thus provided transportation and training for Chalabi’s personal militia upon his arrival in Kurdish-controlled territory in February, and continue to do so.
From these unfolding events, it seems highly likely that Chalabi is being groomed to play a large role in the forthcoming provisional government, though he claims this is not the case. If he indeed accedes to power, he will owe both his position and his newly rebuilt country to the Department of Defense. I wonder, then, where his allegiance will lie?
Whatever we think of Operation Iraqi Freedom, let us not indulge in the kind of self-congratulatory myth making that such appellations very deliberately promote. The people of Iraq, though liberated from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, will not taste meaningful self-direction for a very long time.