The US construction giant Bechtel is giving up on Iraq. Along with the likes of Halliburton — the company which George Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney used to run — American firms piled into Iraq behind their military in 2003. They were in search of mandates to rebuild the country’s infrastructure that had either become rundown during sanctions or blown to pieces in the invasion. They are going home.
Cynics described the rush for lucrative contracts as payola time. Some even suggested that US warplanes and cruise missiles had actually destroyed targets just so American companies could be paid, with Iraqi money, to rebuild them. In the early days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, firms from around the world rushed to win work. There was much bad feeling when the plum jobs were given to US businesses. It was not long before allegations of overcharging surfaced. Halliburton, for instance, was accused of billing the US military an extra half billion dollars for supplying them with fuel.
There was however a positive side to the massive presence of US firms in the rebuilding of Iraq. Probably more than any other nation, these were companies that were geared up to undertake, in a relatively short period of time, such a massive program of civil works and, most importantly, create jobs for many hundreds of thousands of unemployed Iraqis.
There was a potentially “virtuous circle.” The more projects that could be agreed and set in train, the quicker Iraqis de-mobbed from the army or the long-term unemployed of the Shiite slums could start to earn a living wage and look toward a bright and prosperous future. And so it seemed to be for a while, as the job of rebuilding the oil industry, restoring power, communications and transport, and refurbishing hospitals and schools got under way.
Tragically the insurgency was also hitting its stride. It very quickly became clear to the men of violence that it was easier and safer to target construction workers and hard-to-defend oil pipelines than it was to confront the Coalition forces. The humiliation of George Bush began early on as anyone working for a foreign company was put on notice by a series of murders that they were risking their lives. Many Iraqis, determined to rebuild their economy or just plain too poor to give up good salaries, ignored the warnings and carried on working. A lot have paid with their lives.
Bechtel in announcing that it was withdrawing from Iraq after completing 98 of 100 contracts worth some $2.3 billion said that 52 of its employees had been murdered and 49 had been injured in the last three years. The security situation had become so dire that it could no longer operate effectively in the country. Thus the hoped-for virtuous circle has become a vicious circle. The more the violence the less jobs can be maintained. The more people remain unemployed, the greater the disaffection and the greater the anger and violence.
