Privatization of everything except natural resources comes to be the new economic reality:
DUBAI (Reuters) - U.S.-controlled Iraq Sunday unveiled sweeping reforms allowing foreign investors into all sectors except oil, ending 30 years of state economic control...Iraqi Finance Minister Kamel al-Keylani said Sunday the reforms would 'significantly advance efforts to build a free and open market economy in Iraq,' spur economic growth and speed Iraq's re-entry into the international community...The list of reforms for liberalizing foreign investment, the banking sector and taxes and tariffs read like a recipe devised by Washington for a capitalist Iraq...'Iraq needs jobs, it needs to have growth,' a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq's reconstruction said... The surprisingly broad measures, which end an era of economic domination under Saddam Hussein and the socialist Baath Party, were aimed at improving global opinion before a donors' conference in Madrid next month..."The fact that they ban investment in oil resources is good because it sends the message that America was not only after Iraq's oil," an Arab finance minister who declined to be identified said of the steps.
