Foreign Policy In Focus | Special Report | Iraq’s Neoliberal Constitution Herbert Docena | September 02, 2005

Article 25: “The state shall guarantee the reforming of the Iraqi economy according to modern economic bases, in a way that ensures complete investment of its resources, diversifying its sources and encouraging and developing the private sector.”

The Iraqis—even those who were willing to cooperate with the Americans—wanted, at least on paper, to build a Scandinavian-type welfare system in the Arabian desert, with Iraq’s vast oil wealth to be spent upholding every Iraqi’s right to education, health care, housing, and other social services. “Social justice is the basis of building society,” the draft declared. All of Iraq’s natural resources would be owned collectively by the Iraqi people. Everyone would have the right to work and the state would be legally bound to provide employment opportunities to everyone. The state will be the Iraqi people’s collective instrument for achieving development. (See key provisions in matrix below.)

In other words, the Iraqis wanted a country different from that which the Americans had come to Iraq for. They, or at least those who were involved in drafting the constitution, wanted nothing of the kind of economic and political system that Bremer and other U.S. officials had been attempting to create in Iraq ever since the occupation began. What the occupation authorities wanted was to fulfill “the wish-list of international investors,” as The Economist magazine had described the economic policies they began imposing in the country in 2003.

Read the whole article to find out about the heavy hand of the US and the evolution of the document.