No War profits in this economy, no sir!

[pynchonoid]

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1035778928749&call_pageid=968332188492

Mar. 10, 2003. 01:00 AM
RICK WESTHEAD
BUSINESS REPORTER
The invasion of Iraq hasn't even begun and already
Rubar Sandi is drawing up post-war plans to repair
decrepit oil wells, overhaul the financial services
sector and revamp its economy.

A Washington merchant banker who fled Iraq 28 years
ago, Sandi — who's involved with the U.S. State
Department's "Future of Iraq" project — wants Canadian
companies to vie for a share of the
multibillion-dollar rebuilding effort.

"For the past 10 years nothing has been built in
Iraq," said Sandi, 49. "The sewage has been running
off into the rivers, telecommunications doesn't really
exist and the hospitals and schools go back to before
the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-88. The stakes are
staggering."

The White House estimates the war and first year of
reconstruction may cost as much as $139 billion, and
the United States may decide which firms are hired to
repair a crippled Iraq. 

The U.S. Agency for International Development is
already inviting American contractors, including Fluor
Corp., Halliburton Co.'s Kellog Brown & Root unit and
Perini Corp. to tender for a $900 million contract to
manage reconstruction work.

"When this conflict is resolved it's going to be time
to award our friends and stick it to our enemies,"
said Ken Allard, a former U.S. army colonel who's now
a professor at Georgetown University's Centre for
Peace and Security Studies in Washington.

"It's going to be the U.S. bearing the cost of the
cleanup and repairs," he said. "It's going to choose
who gets those contracts."

Sandi said the U.S. state department advised him two
months ago it plans to include companies from outside
the United States in the reconstruction of Iraq's
economy, courts, hospitals and schools.

But for Canadian companies like Calgary's Safety Boss
Inc., a specialist in capping burning oil wells,
Ottawa's position on Iraq could be a hindrance. Safety
Boss chief executive Mike Miller has 150 firefighters
poised to fly to Iraq and cap the wells, but what he
could really use is a Washington lobbyist.

"It's a big political football," he said. "We could be
left out because we're in Canada and the political
waffling here isn't helping."

A decade after Safety Boss was hired by the Kuwaiti
government to cap 180 wells set on fire by Iraqi
President's Saddam Hussein's soldiers, Miller said
he's concerned his company might be at a competitive
disadvantage if the U.S. government invades Iraq
without the sanction of the United Nations.

While Miller said he's had low-level correspondence
with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, he noted that
state officials in Oklahoma and Texas already are
scrambling to ensure that local firefighting companies
— RPC Inc.'s Cudd Pressure Control, Boots & Coots
International and Wild Well Control — are chosen ahead
of international competitors if Iraq's wells need to
be capped.

In 1991, billions of dollars were spent rebuilding
Kuwait after Iraq's occupation. The Iraqis dug combat
trenches into highway lanes, mined factories and even
set fire to Kuwait City's luxury hotels. After putting
out oil fires and restoring electricity and other
essential services, the focus shifted to a second
phase of reconstruction. Hundreds of contracts worth
at least $1 billion combined were awarded. Most of the
business went to U.S.-based companies like Motorola
Inc., AT&T Corp. and Raytheon Co., which installed an
air-traffic-control system at Kuwait's main airport.

But some Canadian companies shared in the
reconstruction.

Montreal engineering firm SNC Lavalin Group Inc.,
which includes rebuilding airstrips, roads and hydro
plants among its specialties, won a contract in Kuwait
following the Gulf War. Winnipeg's Bonar Inc., which
had made jute bags for potatoes, grain and seed since
1906, began making sandbags for an American company
that shipped them to the Gulf. The company later was
acquired by Hood Packaging Corp.

As soon as the war began, TransCanada PipeLines Ltd.,
which had struggled to get U.S. approval for a $3.2
billion expansion to carry natural gas to Long Island,
N.Y., from Ontario, received the go-ahead from the
U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The looming
conflict in Iraq is a chance for similarly lucrative
deals. 

Iraq is 25 times as large as Kuwait with twice as many
oil and gas wells. Even if none of Iraq's 1,600 wells
is set ablaze, the cost of modernizing them may exceed
$4.4 billion in the first two years alone, Sandi said.
If the majority of them are on fire, that cost may
double.

Other areas where Sandi said the state department may
need assistance include privatizing Iraq's fleet of 13
passenger aircraft, abandoning the Iraqi dinar in
favour of either the euro or U.S. dollar,
renegotiating the country's $23 billion debt and
housing the 1 million people living in refugee camps
in Iraq.

[...] Other companies that may bolster sales following
a war might include Nortel Networks Corp. — its
one-time distributor in the Middle East was Bin Laden
Telecommunications Inc., a subsidiary of the
construction group founded by Osama bin Laden's father
— Ellis-Don Construction of Toronto, Volvo Motor
Graders Inc. in Goderich, water purification company
Zenon Environmental Inc. in Oakville and SNC-Lavalin.

"We go where our clients want us to, so long as it's
with the approval of the Canadian government and the
United Nations," said Gillian McCormack, a
spokesperson with SNC Lavalin, which last year won a
$475 million contract to operate an irrigation project
in Libya.

Several company executives said they didn't want to
appear over-zealous about the chance to fatten profits
in Iraq given that the business probably will come in
the aftermath of a bloody conflict.

"We're not ambulance chasers," said Andrew Benedict,
chief executive at Zenon Environmental Inc. of
Oakville, which won a contract in Afghanistan to
supply Canadian army bases with water purifiers. 




"[...] this ex-refinery, Jamf Olfabriken Werke AG, is
not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.
Only waiting for the right connections to be set up,
to be switched on . . . modified, precisely,
deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but
part of a plan both sides -- "sides?"-- had always
agreed on . . . [...] if what the IG built on this
site were not at all the final shape of it, but only
an arrangment of fetishes, come-ons to call down
special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers [...] It
means this War was never political at all, the
politics was all theater, all just to keep the people
distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated
instead by the needs of technology . . . by a
conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying,
'Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of
Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn
is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding,
funding, ahh more, more. . . . The real crises were
crises of allocationa nd priority, not among firms--it
was only staged to look that way--but among the
different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics,
Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by
the ruling elite . . . " 
(Gravity's Rainbow, p. 520-521)

"Don't forget the real business of the War is buying
and selling. The murdering and the violence are
self-policing, and can be entrusted to
non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is
useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as
diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so
that children may be taught History as sequences of
violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared
for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a
stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to
try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still
here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of
markets."
Gravity's Rainbow, p. 105

-Doug






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