Re: Patrick Seale "The Bush administration's dangerous colonial adventur

It's typical of imperial powers to place in charge of colonial bureacracies misfits, alcoholics or just basically incompetent individuals.  Similarly,  the businesses which engage in the colonial exploitation of the local economies,  often with a good deal of assistance from the treasuries of metropole and peripheral state,  often drift into insolvency in the manner of the Savings & Loan industry or similar industries in which company funds,  government loans  and stockholder investments are looted by corporate officials.  It's a very old trend.  And if anything makes political science a science it's the simple fact that such experiments are repeatable and are observable phenomenon recurring over time and in a variety of settings. Although it is fair to say that Old Oil firms are unlikely to fold any time soon,  some British and American companies will certainly fold in Iraq after they are through gorging themselves on all the wealth they possibly can.   When the Bush Administration speaks of the reconstruction of Iraq it is likely they are thinking in these terms:
1)  Rebuild Iraq's ports, pipelines, refineries, and access roads to oil fields and facilities;
2) Burn Iraq's $80 billion budget surplus as quickly as possible;
3) Take over Iraq's banking system as quickly as possible to gain control over deposits;
4) Dump grain on Iraq's agricultural markets as quickly as possible to make the nation food dependent;
5) Argue that the funds utilized to facilitate the flow of oil from Iraq to the Western economies will bring tax revenue and revenue sharing monies into the treasury of Iraq,  under US administrative control, and swear that everything else will fall into place for the Iraqi population;
6) Hope that the $100 billion or so from the US Treasury in the war against Iraq is well digested on Wall Street,  to get the old pump sufficiently primed in order to demonstrate that the fundamentals of the military / industrial complex are sound.

KR