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IRAQ: U.S. Rewards War Backers

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Apr 3 2003 (IPS) - The United States is digging into its coffers to reward, and even lure, countries to support its invasion of Iraq but some observers warn that the practise could prove costly in the future for the world’s only superpower.

On Tuesday, U.S. Senate and House appropriations committees unanimously passed a bill granting a request from President George W. Bush for a supplemental wartime budget that, among other things, rewards foreign regimes aiding the U.S. war effort in Iraq.

The bipartisan bill is due for a final vote on Thursday but looks set to pass with little opposition. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has warned that a failed vote could jeopardize the administration’s ability to make deals with countries aiding the war effort.

Of the 79.5 billion dollars approved in the bill, five billion dollars will go to foreign regimes. The cost of the war has been estimated by independent economists at between 50 and 100 billion dollars.

Jordan, a country of 4.5 million people and a strong supporter of the war, will get 1.1 billion dollars, including 406 million earmarked for its military. Among other measures, the country threw out Iraqi diplomats after an appeal from Washington and is said to be helping with intelligence.

Egypt, which has allowed U.S. warships to use the Suez Canal and violently cracked down on domestic opposition to war, will receive 300 million dollars.

Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, a staunch U.S. ally, has for years urged other Arab countries to force Iraq to re-admit United Nations weapons inspectors and has also backed calls for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to step down.

Israel is in line for one billion dollars, which will reportedly be used to leverage a further nine billion dollars in loan guarantees.

During debates on the bill, some U.S. senators said the money would be used to help defray the cost of safeguarding the Jewish nation against rocket attacks from Baghdad, although the country has not been attacked.

Afghanistan will get 127 million dollars to support security and economic growth, on top of 170 million dollars specifically for the new Afghan army. Kabul is helping Washington’s so-called ”war on terror” and its central government has contributed troops to hunt down members of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group.

Pakistan, under military ruler General Pervez Musharraf, is to receive 175 million dollars from Washington to support "counter-terrorism activities", which largely involve sharing intelligence and giving political support to the United States. The money will also enable Musharraf to consolidate his dictatorship against Islamic opponents.

Turkey was allotted one billion dollars, which could be leveraged into about eight billion dollars worth of loans, congressmen said.

The Turkey provision has proven controversial, with representatives deciding to attach a proviso to the bill warning the country, whose parliament denied Washington’s request to use its territory as the launch pad for a northern invasion on Iraq, that the reward is conditional on further support.

No assistance will be made available to Ankara until Secretary of State Colin Powell reports to Congress that Turkey "is cooperating with the United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom".

The administration had originally offered a package worth 16 billion dollars to Turkey but that was withdrawn after its parliament refused access to the military. The one billion dollars now in the bill is enough for Washington to maintain its strategic relationship with Ankara, according to representatives.

Immediately after this week’s vote, Powell, who was in Turkey, said Ankara had agreed to allow emergency landings for coalition aircraft, to take in wounded and to permit the U.S. military to transport food and medicine across Turkish territories to troops in northern Iraq.

Ankara also has permitted U.S. and British warplanes to use its airspace.

This is not the first time Washington has flexed its financial muscle to win the backing of foreign regimes, many of them dictatorial, as in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.

After the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the administration wasted no time in rewarding its allies in the ”war against terrorism”.

It revoked economic sanctions on Pakistan and India, rescheduled some 379 million dollars of Pakistan’s bilateral debt and proposed to broaden Indonesia’s trade preferences. Washington also gave Jordan a long overdue free-trade agreement.

During the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, which contributed a large number of ground troops, saw its official foreign debt cut in half as a payback.

But the growing trend of buying support could signal a failure of U.S. diplomacy and powers of persuasion, according to one expert.

"The U.S. has been buying allies through foreign military finance for years now," said Miriam Pemberton, research fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. "This is certainly upping the ante and it certainly doesn’t pass the smell test."

Pemberton, whose institute recently published a report describing Washington’s so-called ”coalition of the willing” who back the attack on Iraq as the "coalition of the coerced", said that resorting to dollar diplomacy does not augur well for U.S. foreign policy or for how the administration spends taxpayers’ money.

The next time the United States wants to assemble a coalition, she suggested, countries could defer until promised more money.

"This is a failure of U.S. diplomacy to make the case to any but a small handful of our allies that this war is the right thing to do," she said.

"It hardly bodes well for us. There isn’t any question that this is going to be used as a justification for new rounds for requests (from allies) and more deals. The question is how the U.S. public is going to feel about all these quantities of resources given to foreign countries to buy their cooperation on any future initiative.”