http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1343214AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the leadership of Iraq?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Well, I would argue that the most important member of the new leadership is Adel Abdel Mahdi, who has been in every U.S.-appointed Iraqi government post-the-invasion. He was the Finance Minister of the interim government, the Vice President of the transitional government and was just named Vice President of the permanent government. He was actually the man that the Bush administration wanted to be the new prime minister of Iraq. The deal that was worked out was that another member of the Dawa Party, just like Mr. Jaafari, would become prime minister, and then Mahdi, who is a member of the SCIRI Party, would be vice president.
It’s a position that allows him to continue to be the most aggressive advocate of the Bush agenda in Iraq, which I argue is opening Iraq -- continuing to open Iraq to U.S. corporate invasion. Currently, 150 U.S. corporations have received $50 billion worth of contracts, as you said in the introduction, to utterly fail in reconstruction in Iraq, but the money has still been granted. And Mahdi is the person who advanced Paul Bremer's one hundred orders in Iraq that opened up the economy. But more importantly to the Bush administration, he is the person who has most aggressively pushed their agenda for a new oil law in Iraq, which would open up Iraq’s oil sector, the vast majority of Iraq's oil sector, to private foreign corporate investment.
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