Focus Iraq: The economy, the oil and the privatizations since the invasion of 2003
An American solider walks out to an oil platform in Iraq Photo: Shane T. McCoy - US Military
What is the best way to build a democracy in the world’s third richest oil-country? Answer: Outsource the planning of the new system to a company and let them take care of it. This may sound unreal but that was the way it was done in Iraq shortly after the invasion in 2003. The economy of Iraq went from being a planned economy to a fiasco of privatization dictated by a “Free Market for Dummies” book. The economy was not the only thing to be privatized - everything was in some way touched by the new order.
See also: Foreign policy in focus article on the oil heist, Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugmans’s column on the military and privatizations,
When in October 2009 the Ugandan MP David Bahati tabled a draft bill proposing a harshening of the country’s already severely punitive anti-homosexuality legislation, the international community was outraged. Or so the media said. Sure enough, official communications from Europe and North America spoke clearly in terms of alienation and disgust - at the November Commonwealth Summit in Trinidad and Tobago, Canada’s and the UK’s respective heads of state, Stephen Harper and Gordon Brown, were so scathingly critical that the Ugandan MP Kassiano Wadri told a Guardian journalist that “if Uganda is to be expelled from the British Commonwealth, then let us go”. On the same note, Sweden, then holder of the EU presidency, threatened to cut off development aid should the bill be passed. It can be debated, however, whether this Western response can really be titled an international outcry. In fact, a closer look at legislated - and, more importantly, implemented - gay rights world-wide presents a rather bleak view from a humanitarian angle.
A diary written by Sailor Lucas Le Provost of the COP15. One of the numerous ships navigating amidst world politics.
On the 1st of December, the European Union’s new treaty, the Lisbon Treaty, entered into force. Appropriately enough, a lecture on the implications of the new Treaty was held in Lund the following day by Mr Henrik Norinder. Mr Norinder, who has a background in European and Swedish Constitutional Law and who has specialized in Competition Law and Internal Market Law, teaches EU Law at Lund University and is an associate at a law firm. During the lecture Mr Norinder gave a brief background of the Lisbon Treaty and highlighted some of the innovations in the document that from now on will constitute the legal basis for the EU. The lecture ended up in a discussion about whether the Lisbon Treaty could be seen as the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’.
