Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine

Cross-posted at Maine Owl
The U Maine - Iraq Business Conference

“Postponed” on November 11, 2003 but never actually canceled, the original agenda still is posted HERE! We’re still waiting for a new date for the Conference.

More than any other event around which we have organized against the Iraq invasion, conquest, and occupation, none hit home harder than the University of Maine School of Business / Iraq Business Alliance conference which was scheduled for Scarborough, Maine on November 13, 2003.

It’s agenda was extremely revealing of reasons for the invasion other than “weapons of mass destruction.” The keynote speaker was to have been the late Casper Weinberger Sr., the former Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration. Rumors flew that the Dark Lord himself, Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, would drop in for a secret slot on the agenda.

This is a partial listing of people and presentations that were to be included.

The Future of Economic Development for Iraq
Moderator: Ambassador Frank Wisner, Vice Chairman, AIG

Panel: Mr. Ross J. Connelly, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of OPIC; Mr. Don DeMarino, National Chairman of the U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, and Member of Executive Committee and Founding Director of U.S.-Iraq Business Alliance; Mr. Rubar Sandi, Chairman of Corporate Bank, Chairman of Al Katin Group, and Founding Director of U.S.-Iraq Business Alliance; Mr. Richard Greco Jr., Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Special Projects, Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

Priority Sectors for Development
Moderator: Ambassador William Walker, Managing Director of Millenium Capital Consultants

Panel: Mr. Don DeMarino – Banking; Mr. Dennis A. Sokol – Healthcare; Mr. Rubar Sandi–Development Construction; Mr. Bob Barnett–Communications…

So what went wrong that stopped all these serious people from having their Conference? First, Iraqis objected and an insurgency was just getting into full swing. Evidently, some Iraqis felt that the program these business people had in mind represented plunder of their country, and they were not having any of it. I believe that to be one of two real reasons the Conference did not happen.

The second was that the plan for “rapid” privatization of Iraq’s economy and Iraqi industry (including oil) ran seriously afoul of 100 years of international law. Of course concepts like limits on “usurfruct rights” meant absolutely nothing in the Cheney system. A Mount Desert Island resident and close friend of the late Mr. Weinberger, Denis Sokol, put this unconcern for international law on full display in an interview with the Bangor Daily News, published in a front-page article, provocatively titled “Gold Rush,” on November 1, 2003.

Because this piece is no longer available online, I have posted it in its entirety at Maine Owl. It’s a stunning piece of capitalist arrogance that should be a key chapter in the book of failures of the Bush Administration.

A few days after the Conference was “postponed,” the Americans totally shifted gears and instituted the new “sovereignty” plan, about which at the time I posted very extensively in the original Deep Blade Journal, still in the archives HERE. The horrors that followed are almost too terrible to reflect on right now.

Here are archive links on this period that reveal crucial history of the real reasons behind the invasion of Iraq and the role played by the University of Maine along with how our protest of the business conference put that truth into sharp focus.

Contemporaneous blog postings in the original Deep Blade Journal: HERE.

My Reference Article containing many links for original documents and news stories, HERE.

Our November 8, 2003 op-ed in the Bangor Daily News, U Maine and war profiteering, HERE.

Post discussing what the BDN Sokol interview reveals about secret pre-war decisions and planning during mid 2002, in light of the contents of the “Downing Street memo” first publicly seen in May 2005, HERE.

The November 1, 2003 article from the BDN, “Gold Rush,” is posted HERE. Excerpt below…

“We have support from the executive branch of government, and I would like to leave it at that,” Bar Harbor businessman Dennis Sokol, one of four founders of the alliance, said in recent interviews. “The fact is, they’ve been very supportive.”

The alliance was formed eight months before the U.S. declared war on Iraq and has been influential in getting the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, led by the United States, to create business-friendly laws meant to spawn economic development in the war-ravaged nation.

And they’re hungry for more than just Big Macs, Cokes and Levis, he said.

There is money to be made, lots of money, in virtually every economic sector in Iraq, said Sokol, who also founded the U.S.-Russia Business Council when the Soviet Union threw off communism and embraced a free market economy in 1992.

Sokol has made a fortune running for-profit hospitals in Russia and other foreign countries, so when he speaks, other businesses listen.

“When there are diamonds and gold out in the street, you don’t wait a couple of years to go pick it up,” Sokol said of his group’s efforts to get American investment and business into Iraq as soon as possible.

How’d all that turn out?