The Crimes of Neo-Liberal Rule in Occupied Iraq
By David Whyte. 2007
133 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The scale and intensity of the appropriation of Iraqi oil revenue makes the 2003 invasion one of the most audacious and spectacular crimes of theft in modern history. The institutionalisation of corporate corruption that followed the invasion can only be understood within the context of the coalition forces' contempt for universal principles of international law enshrined in the Hague and Geneva treaties. Neo-liberal shock therapy imposed on Iraq by the Anglo-American government of occupation provided momentum to an economic order which privileged the primacy and autonomy of market actors over laws intended to enshrine universal protections for civilian populations in war and conflict. As the US government-appointed auditor has subsequently established, an unknown proportion of Iraqi oil revenue has disappeared into the pockets of contractors and fixers in the form of bribery, over-charging, embezzlement, product substitution, bid rigging and false claims. At least $12 billion of the revenue appropriated by the coalition regime has not been adequately accounted for. This neo-liberal strategy of economic colonization was facilitated by major violations of the international laws of conflict and by unilaterally granting immunity from prosecution to US personnel. The suspension of the normal rule of law by the occupying powers, in turn, encouraged Coalition Provisional Authority tolerance of, and participation in, the theft of public funds in Iraq. State-corporate criminality in the case of occupied Iraq must therefore be understood as part of a wider strategy of political and economic domination.
Subfields: Nature and Landscape Conservation, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70c785a111c2b0168e7186448dd8b32093703590
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Citations in the corpus
- Pre-Crime and Counter-Terrorism Imagining Future Crime in the ‘War on Terror’ (2009, background): “…out the links between domestic prisons and imprisonment in America’s global prisons, such as Guantanamo Bay ( Carlton 2006 ; Gordon 2006 ; McCulloch and Scraton 2009 ), and criminological contributions that draw links between neo-liberalism, corruption and the ‘ war on terror ’ ( Whyte 2007 ).”