By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US, UK, Australia and others in the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ was carried out in the name of planting the seeds of democratic society in the Middle East and stamping out terrorism.
The result which the whole world is now staring at is not only the escalation and intensification of terrorism in the region, but also the growth of what the Vatican now calls ‘Wold War III’ by instalment.
The media frenzy is focused on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and how its original sponsors (the US and NATO) would like to use it to justify their project to destroy Iran and Syria.
On April 28 2003, just over one month after the US-UK invasion of Iraq, the then Daily News in the section called, The Business Daily, published a short story called, ‘Africa fears losing aid to post-war Iraq’.
This was supposed to be a major finding at the 2003 G8 conference held in Paris following the invasion of Iraq.
Mr Geoffrey Nyarota was the editor of The Daily News then.
The story went as follows:
“African states fear the rush to provide funds to rebuild Iraq could deprive the world’s poorest continent of the funds it desperately needs to mitigate crushing poverty.”
The article then cited Pierre-Andre Wiltzer, the French Cooperation Minister, who said: “The reconstruction of Iraq is a real problem, but it should not come at the price of reduction in the efforts needed to develop Africa.”
The article concluded:
“Plagued by wars, drought and poverty Africa faces daunting problems. “Sub-Saharan countries take up the last 28 places in the ‘Human Development Index’ of the UN Development Programme.”
By selecting the G8 story on Iraq and Africa for Madzimbahwe in April 2003, what was Nyarota saying?
We as Africans and Madzimbahwe were supposed of feel abandoned, left behind and overshadowed by the progress represented by Iraq under US-UK occupation.
Not only was Iraq receiving the gift of Western regime change and democracy, but all the available global cash was flowing in its direction (according to The Daily News); and Madzimbahwe were being invited to feel jealous, to wish for their country to be invaded too, and for their land revolution to be abandoned; so that imperialism and its cash would smile again upon them.
But how could Africa be envious of the terror that descended on Iraq in 2003, the terror which has brought ethnic chauvinism and sectarianism to a once unified nation, the terror which has given birth to ISIS?
How could Africa be viewed as wishing the same on itself?
Nyarota was following the Western neo-liberal regime change script for Zimbabwe and one can get a glimpse of the theory behind the script from Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:
“For three decades, Milton Friedman and his followers had exploited moments of shock in other countries – – foreign equivalents of (September 11 2001) starting with (Augusto) Pinochet’s coup (in Chile) on September 11 1973.”
“What happened (in the US) on September 11 2001, is that an ideology hatched in (North) American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home (through the terror bombing of New York and the Pentagon.)”
From the point of view of the architects of neo-liberalism and regime change, terror and shock, even when unintended, presented the greatest opportunities. That is what the G8 story published in Zimbabwe by Nyarota was meant to convey. The invasion of Iraq was a great opportunity which Africa missed, temporarily.
The significance of the G8 story published by Nyarota in Zimbabwe on April 28 2003 was that the terror and brutality unleashed on Iraq in March 2003 represented a new type of war which Africa should be sorry to miss, a war based in financialisation and financialism, where direct global cash-flows were the beginning and end of economic growth and prosperity.
The fate of society, culture, morality and civilisation did not matter.
“(This) is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all ‘evil’ abroad… The ultimate goal for the corporations at the centre of the complex (or nexus) is to bring the model of for-profit-government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state – – in effect, to privatise government.”
In other words, redefining the interests of the finance sector as constituting the economy will not only distort economic indicators in favour of finance; it will also turn events that are unmitigated disasters for the people into the most lucrative transactions for powerful forces of corporate finance; and it will further consolidate the power of finance as a dictatorship in every respect against people, against communities and against nations.
More than three fourths of the current US-NATO war against Russian sovereignty and against the people of Ukraine is being waged through the manipulation of financial flows and indices.
But the corporate minority behind ‘financialisation’ and ‘financialism’ do know that stock markets and financial indices do not represent real wealth or the real economy.
They know that in the event of a crash of the whole system of financial flows, one cannot rebuild real societies on stocks and indices!
As Executive Intelligence Review pointed out back in 1997:
“The international financier oligarchy, grouped around the House of Windsor, knows that the world financial bubble (based on financialisation and financialism) – – which they themselves have created – – cannot be sustained, and will burst.
“They are getting out of paper financial instruments and into hard commodities, precious metals, such as gold; strategic metals such as cobalt and tantalum; base metals, such as copper and zinc; energy supplies; and increasingly scarce food supplies.
“They want either to own the physical assets, or, better still, own the mine production facility for these assets.”
It is not all about financial flows and stock market indices.
The new scramble for Africa is about precious metals and strategic minerals.
It is about energy, timber, land and foodstuffs, including biodiverse socks of plant life.
The war over Ukraine is partly about the control of massive grain-producing plains which are extremely fertile.
Financialisation and financialism are meat to obscure all these, so that we count projects, donations, millionaires, billionaires and the celebrities they patronise as indicators of wealth.