PORTLAND, MAINE: The American invasion and occupation of Iraq has polarized Maine and the nation like nothing since the Vietnam War. This polarization hit home last week when the University of Maine’s "Doing Business in Iraq" conference for the corporate elite, scheduled for November 13 in Scarborough, was postponed until next spring.
University of Maine and University of Southern Maine faculty and students, as well as members of the state’s peace groups, had vociferously protested this meeting devoted to what they saw as the corporate exploitation of Iraq — and the university’s sponsorship of it. Along with activists from as far away as Boston, they had planned demonstrations outside the Black Point Inn. So, when the last-minute postponement came, they declared a victory.
Conference organizers, on the other hand, deny they were influenced by the protests. The postponement occurred, they say, because a couple of scheduled speakers couldn’t attend. And they say they can’t understand why anyone would want to protest what they consider legitimate corporate investment in Iraq.
Notice the different words? Exploitation versus investment? The country’s polarization could be vividly perceived in the different languages spoken by the two sides of this dispute. It is as if they live in different countries.
This polarization has vast implications for both the political left and the right, but perhaps more for the left. Opposition to the war has galvanized the left in a way not seen since the 1970s — not only the antiwar activists but even the Democratic establishment. The left is, quite remarkably, on the offensive.
But what will it — particularly, the Democratic Party — do with this energy? A crossroads looms ahead in the political fog. Although the Scarborough conference’s collapse — for the time being, anyway — is a small event in the grand scheme of things, it could prefigure and symbolize a new political direction for the Democrats and the nation.
SOME RARE GLOATING
Whatever political fog may lie ahead, last week it was a bright new day for the state’s dogged antiwar, anti-corporate-globalization leaders. This small, hardy, and emotional band could not contain its gloating over the demise of "Doing Business in Iraq: The Private Sector" — which to these folks had looked like a caricature of a cabal of the military-industrial, Bush-and-Bechtel right wing. The most paranoid lefties could not have fantasized such bogeymen. And they had been driven out of town!
"It was the power of the people who spoke out that cancelled this conference!" exclaimed Jack Bussell at a celebratory Portland City Hall news conference, on November 12. A soldier of Veterans for Peace, he spoke to 25 murmuring and applauding activists and a solitary representative of the press.
Decrying "corporate vultures" with "frothing mouths" willing to "walk over the bodies of our sons and daughters and the bodies of the millions of Iraqis who have died in the course of the previous two invasions and 12 years of killing sanctions to divide up the resources of Iraq," he pledged to work to make the postponement permanent, as did the others present.
But at the Orono campus’s business school — officially, the College of Business, Public Policy, and Health, the corporate conference’s host — there was insistence that the postponement occurred only because two members of the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council could not attend due to "concerns related to the current situation" in their country. The school’s dean, Daniel Innis, also admitted "by spring, we expect to have a clearer picture of the economic landscape in Iraq and the role that the private sector will play." The conference, he says, is scheduled for March 18 or 25, 2004.
"The protests weren’t an issue," Innis adds.
However, Peter Hoff, the university’s cautious president, publicly wondered if some of the conference’s features were proper for the university to support, such as the secret list of corporations involved with it.
Hoff was "getting extremely uncomfortable," claims Douglas Allen, a UM philosophy professor and protest leader.
Another protester asks: "How often do you see a conference cancelled because a couple of speakers couldn’t come?"
PUTTING UM IN THE CORPORATE BIG TIME
The event was supposed to be the business school’s coming out into the corporate think-tank big leagues. "This sort of thing is done by Harvard and other business schools," says Innis. Doing Business in Iraq was intended to be first in a series of forums — the Global Focus Series — to launch the somewhat obscure school, which annually graduates 150 bachelors and 30 MBAs, on the tumultuous seas of the globalizing economy. The series hopes to have a forum next year on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a subject that also could prove contentious.
The Black Point Inn session was not going to be an academic meeting where professors read papers on a theme, Innis says, but rather educational in a more vocational way, for corporate executives as well as for university students. In addition to an expected 75 to 100 corporate attendees, 10 grad students, six undergrads, and even one high-school student would have been present. (Innis says he wondered if the high-schooler was a plant by the protesters.) The students would have gotten in free under the university’s umbrella. The corporate people would have had to pay $850 each.
These latter were clearly the people to be served. Sessions were to be on "Understanding the Contracting Process for the Reconstruction of Iraq," explained by a United States deputy undersecretary of defense; "The Role and Function of the Coalition Provisional Authority," explained by another high Department of Defense official; and "Supporting Investment in Iraq," elucidated by Ross Connelly, the executive vice president of the federal government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), which guarantees loans to American companies investing in unstable countries.
Connelly is a former Bechtel Group top executive. Bechtel, the main business of which is construction, is one of the big corporations — many of whose executives are George W. Bush campaign donors — that were given the first, massive, controversial no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq after the American invasion. Aficionados of Maine politics may remember Connelly as the Republican candidate beaten by Democratic First District congressman Tom Allen in 1998. In 2000, he was chairman of Bush for President in Maine.
The Department of Defense/Republican Party/Bechtel nexus is perhaps best exemplified by the conference’s planned lunch keynoter: the Honorable Caspar Weinberger, one-time Reagan Secretary of Defense, chairman of Forbes magazine, former vice president and general counsel of Bechtel, part-time Mount Desert Island resident, and a man indicted in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal (though pardoned by the first President Bush).
The University of Maine by itself would not have been able to collect such a high-powered group. Co-sponsor was the US-Iraq Business Alliance, a trade and investment organization headquartered outside of Washington. It was formed recently under the leadership of Dennis Sokol, a high-flying businessman who also has a home on Mount Desert.
Sokol says the alliance has about 40 members, mostly large corporations, but also the University of Maine. Despite criticism from protesters — and nudges by UM President Hoff — the alliance continues to refuse to release the list of its members. James Burrows, the group’s executive director, says it won’t reveal it until early next year. Of Hoff’s problem, he says: "I’d be delighted to speak to him."
The Scarborough event was to be part of a sequence of events the business alliance has planned, for this country and abroad, to be held over a year’s time. The series theoretically will culminate in a large exhibition in Baghdad in November 2004. The first meeting was held in London in October, attended by ExxonMobil, Delta, and many other companies. Some speakers scheduled for the Black Point Inn had spoken there.
The London conference attracted protesters, though Innis says he never saw them.
"A neo-liberal economy is being imposed on an already impoverished country with unprecedented haste and with absolutely no democratic process," one protest spokeswoman told the Guardian newspaper.
The Guardian also ran an editorial: "Nowadays, at least in more civilized countries, we do not let armies rampage for booty. We leave the pillaging to men in suits and we don’t call it pillaging any more. We call it economic development."
The number-one man in a suit involved with the business alliance, Sokol, is the 60-year-old chairman of his family’s private company, the Connecticut-based American Hospital Group. It runs 40 for-profit hospitals and clinics worldwide. Sokol refuses to divulge the company’s revenues or number of employees.
Two of its high-end clinics — for foreigners and newly rich Russians and Ukrainians — are in Moscow and Kiev. Sokol established them in the capitalist gold rush that occurred after the Soviet Union collapsed. Described in the New York Times by a Moscow competitor as a corporate "buccaneer," he sees similar financial opportunities in the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s crony-socialist regime and the American-military-enforced transformation to capitalism.
"When there are diamonds and gold out in the street, you don’t wait a couple of years to go pick it up," he rather notoriously told the Bangor Daily News when discussing his alliance’s intentions for Iraq. ("I was taken aback" by these comments, UM’s Hoff says.)
Even as violence against American soldiers mounts in Baghdad and international-aid groups leave, Sokol is bullish on Iraq. He warns that Europeans are beating Americans to the investment punch. "We’re probably the only country that is not aggressive [in business investments] over there," he claims.
Sokol recently visited Iraq himself "to understand the situation from a security standpoint" and to evaluate the need for a health-care center. He has agreed to set up a 50,000-square-foot primary-care outpatient clinic in Baghdad.
"There’s a larger wealthier class than I expected," he comments. This fact may mean his company’s kind of medical services will be in demand.
He saw troops and guards, but he didn’t feel in danger — yet he wore a bulletproof vest and packed a gun.
Sokol maintains he is "not a right-winger," but he is such a believer in the economic and social benefits of the American corporate system that he sees no need to apologize for wanting to make money in Iraq. Money-making "is what makes America great . . . Corporations provide employment."
He seems genuinely baffled, in fact, by those who protest foreign investment in Iraq.
"I don’t know what they’re protesting about!" he says in exasperation.
Besides making money, he wants to help the people of Iraq, he says, and these two things go together.
"Profit isn’t a dirty word," agrees Daniel Innis, the UM dean. "If Iraq is to succeed, there must be a strong and functioning economy in place."
A VERY DIFFERENT LANGUAGE
Sokol and Innis should have attended the City Hall peace-group press conference in the august, high-ceilinged State of Maine Room. They might have learned that the protesters don’t share any of their assumptions.
These people, who this past spring demonstrated against the invasion, saw their opposition to the war totally vindicated when they learned there was going to be a conference devoted to the economic development of Iraq by American corporations connected to the Bush administration.
"Is this why our government fought this war?" asks a Peace Action Maine email message containing "talking points" for letters to the editor.
The message makes another connection: "The corporate free-trade model that has led to thousands of jobs lost in Maine through agreements such as NAFTA is the model being imposed from above on the people of Iraq."
Indeed, the free-trade, economic-globalization issue is a theme among protesters conversing about the American-led development of Iraq. The UM conference "offers some real opportunities for direct organizing on an issue that is fundamentally about the connections between militarism and corporate globalization," declares another Peace Action Maine (http://www.peaceactionme.org/index.html) email.
Here are some other examples of the protesters’ views that Sokol and Innis might find interesting. They were expressed at the Portland press conference, in letters to the editor or op-eds, or in emails bouncing around activist list-serves:
• "The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation need to be understood in the context of a ‘National Security Strategy’ designed to make the world safe for ‘free markets’ and ‘free trade’ " (PICA, Peace through Interamerican Community Action).
• "At a time when Iraq is still governed by the US occupation forces, and the publicly owned utilities and other resources are being sold to foreign investors prior to any consent from a duly constituted Iraqi government, a conference focused on ‘business opportunities’ can only be seen as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty" (statement by 29 USM faculty members).
• "The fascists are alive and well and living in the White House" (Leslie Manning, labor organizer, at the Portland press conference).
At the Portland meeting, a USM faculty union resolution was distributed that objected to the corporate invasion of Iraq when, it was alleged, the US authorities have frozen most Iraqi wages, prohibited strikes, and forbidden the organizing of unions in the public sector (in which most Iraqis work).
Many protesters refer with horror to Order 39, issued in September by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. It states "foreign participation in newly formed or existing business entities in Iraq shall not be limited" except in the case of banks, insurance companies, and the extraction of oil and other natural resources. Foreign businesses are also allowed to take profits out of the country. The provisional authority in August put a major Bush campaign fundraiser, business executive Thomas Foley, in charge of privatizing 194 state-owned enterprises.
The broad operating assumption at the highest level of the international government/business junction has been that there must be a great infusion of private capital in Iraq. At the October Madrid "donors" conference of governments, when the US tried to obtain contributions for Iraq’s reconstruction, both US and UN officials encouraged the roughly 200 corporate representatives present to invest in Iraq.
IT’S NOT JUST RADICALS WHO QUESTION THE CORPORATE INVASION
The reality about corporate investment in Iraq, however, is more nuanced than eager investors’ hopes. The military, political, and security situation in the country is far from settled, as a glance at the daily papers shows.
Order 39, too, is controversial well beyond antiwar or antiglobalization activists. International lawyers have warned that the sale of state assets or the opening of Iraq to 100-percent foreign investment may be illegal under Iraq’s constitution and the Hague and Geneva conventions. Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that "the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorized by international law" in a highly publicized leak of a memo.
Even Dennis Sokol concedes "an elected government may come in and throw everything out." Adds James Burrows: "Iraqi honor is in play and it is very important."
And by no means does everyone in elite circles think the American corporatization of Iraq is a great idea. Basically, the Democrats don’t like it, at whatever level.
Two notable examples are Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and ex-Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, Democratic presidential candidates. They were asked about the Doing Business in Iraq conference when they attended the November 8 Maine Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson Jackson dinner, held this year in Saco.
"Part of the problem [in Iraq] is the perception of the American occupation," said Kerry. He believed the conference wouldn’t be helpful for this perception.
"It would be great if they got together to take advantage of Maine’s economy," he observed sarcastically about the corporations interested in Iraq.
Kerry said it was a wrong signal to the Iraqi people to have "President Bush’s campaign manager set up shop" there.
Bush’s manager in the 2000 election was Joe Allbaugh, who quit this year as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to establish a consulting firm, New Bridge Strategies, to assist corporations in doing business in Iraq.
Kerry also specifically rejected the idea that American companies should be able to own 100 percent of Iraqi businesses: "It creates a cultural clash. It invites tension."
"It can’t be American companies," said Dean — who was caught more on the fly — about the investments needed to rebuild Iraq. He also was "deeply concerned" over Bush’s motivations in rebuilding Iraq.
A local Democrat, congressman Tom Allen, one of the leaders in Congress last year against the US unilaterally attacking Iraq, has similar thoughts.
"It’s an amazing idea," he says of the conference — "with all the charges of profiteering, to promote Iraq as a place to do business."
It’s amazing to him, too, when much of the country is angry about the US invasion and the increasingly violent occupation:
"I don’t think I’ve seen people so angry since I’ve been in Congress, and they’re angry not just about Iraq." People are upset, he says, because Bush is "governing to the right" — in his view, far to the right.
"This is not a healthy period in American life," he says of the divisions in the country. "The center is not holding."
A former Democratic occupant of Allen’s congressional seat, Tom Andrews, now head of the Washington-based antiwar coalition Win Without War (http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/), agrees the country is polarizing because of what he sees as Bush’s "radical" politics in both domestic and foreign policy.
"The irony is that George Bush ran on a platform of bringing people together," he says. "But they service their clients — the radical right and their business interests."
Their business interests include businesses that want to invest in Iraq. "To see our corporations reap the profits, to guarantee the spoils to them . . ." Andrews’s voice falls into amazement.
"The Iraqi people see what is going on," he continues. "Even our own handpicked Iraqi Governing Council has been complaining for months about the wasting of millions of dollars in obscene contracts" to American companies. "But the key to our success there is to be seen as legitimate, as liberators."
Andrews feels that the American people, too, are beginning to see what is going on. There is anger at the occupation and at the fact "that the US decided that it would be the world’s military dictator."
As a result, he says, "Bush’s poll numbers are beginning to drop like a stone."
WITHER THE LEFT?
The turn in public opinion against Bush and his administration’s Iraq war and occupation parallels other developments affecting the American political left. The fury over the war is complemented by lesser but still sharp anger over Bush’s domestic policies, by detestation of Bush as a person, by hostility to the Southern-based radical right, and by heightened suspicion of corporate America and its globalizing tendencies.
The anger has propelled a progressive, antiwar Howard Dean to the front of the Democratic presidential pack. It has infused life into every liberal protest movement. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council, the voice of the "moderate" Clintonian Democrats, has been relegated to carping about Dean. And, specifically, recently, locally, an expression of left-wing anger very likely sank the Doing Business in Iraq conference.
These could be triumphant developments for the left. But some think they could be politically dangerous.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently warned fellow liberals about the consequences of becoming vitriolic. She quoted a widely discussed Pew Research Center poll (www.pewresearchcenter.org) that found the country — to cite the Pew report’s title — to be "Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized." Democrats were found overwhelmingly to believe the Iraq war was the wrong decision (54 to 39 percent), while most Republicans and independents feel it was the right thing to do. In a dramatic statistical demonstration of the polarization, Republicans approve the war by 85 to 10 percent.
The Pew study quantifies how Democrats, on many specific issues, have become significantly more liberal and Republicans significantly more conservative. The poll numerically explains the huge gap in rhetoric and understanding of the world that exists between, say, corporate millionaire Dennis Sokol and Veterans for Peace activist Jack Bussell. Or even between Sokol and Howard Dean and John Kerry.
Dowd fears that left-wing anger will "turn off voters" — presumably, she means the middle-of-the-road independents who swing most national elections. Many commentators these days recall how left-wing anger over the Vietnam War propelled antiwar candidate George McGovern into the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination — and then (after the GOP painted him a radical) to electoral disaster against Richard Nixon.
The Democrats ought to recognize "that we’re just back to election night 2000," cautions Republican pollster and Bowdoin professor Chris Potholm about the divergence taking place. "After 9-11 there was an artificial solidarity."
He concedes, though, that Bush may be in trouble if the insurgency isn’t crushed in Iraq by next year, though he tends to see the political problem Bush has with Iraq as not a question of whether the US should have invaded but as a question of success — "the US doesn’t seem to be winning." He remembers that a majority of Americans supported the Vietnam War until it appeared the US was losing.
In any case, Bush and his conservative team no longer look unbeatable, as they did for a year or more after September 11, 2001. In most polls, Bush now runs neck-and-neck with a generic Democratic challenger.
Moreover, political anger and alienation can have unpredictable results. Opposition to the Vietnam War, even if it didn’t elect McGovern in 1972, swiftly destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency in 1968.
And look at what just happened in Maine: Unpredictably, some of the very biggest corporate chieftains and high administration officials were forced to slink away before they even got here — or so it is claimed.
A final lesson from what happened to the Doing Business in Iraq conference may be that middle-of-the-road swing voters may turn out to be like middle-of-the-road university administrators: They don’t like something that is extremely divisive.
And absolutely no one could dispute that George W. Bush is extremely divisive.
Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley (at) prexar.com
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