The United States and the Coalition Provisional Authority – occupation by proxy?

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) governed Iraq from 2003 following Resolution 1483 of the UN Security Council. This Resolution affirmed that Iraq was in a state of occupation and that there were occupying powers. The Resolution referred to the United States of America and the United Kingdom as ‘occupying powers under the unified command of the “Authority”’, the ‘Authority’ being the CPA. However, the legal status of the CPA and its relationship to the US (the focus of this article) is not entirely clear, both under US domestic law and international law. This lack of clarity could have significant implications for the US’s responsibility for the CPA’s conduct. As with private military companies, a CPA-style administration of territory could become a tool for states to quarantine their risk under the law of occupation. This article contends that the theory of occupation by proxy may help clarify the legal status of the CPA and its relationship to the US and could assist in closing the identified gap in responsibility. To support this argument, this article establishes a legal framework for the theory of occupation by proxy which is then applied to the CPA and US.

The Iraq War, 2003–2011

The George W. Bush administration showed signs of biased decision-making before and after the 2003 Iraq invasion, which it claimed was necessary because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. With Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, the administration focused narrowly on regime change and failed to plan for the aftermath of war. With the fall of Baghdad, the administration expanded US goals under the Coalition Provisional Authority without the capabilities to pursue them. Although the administration adjusted course in 2007, its new “surge” strategy, based on counterinsurgency principles, had the US military pursuing modest goals to suit available capabilities. Then the administration benefited unexpectedly from an alliance with Sunni insurgents (the Anbar Awakening) and the stand-down of the principal Shiite militia opposing US forces. US strategy finally amounted to staying the course through 2011, when the Obama administration chose to leave Iraq rather than seek a negotiated compromise.

Money Laundering Amidst Mortars: Legislative Process and State Authority in Post-Invasion Iraq

16 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 523 (2007)There existed a substantial divergence between the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. and U.K. run entity responsible for governing Iraq after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the Iraqi body politic over the most fundamental assumptions and biases underlying political and economic forms of human association. This made effective governance by the CPA an impossible proposition. The disparate assumptions and biases in question related to the relationship of state authority and law to alternative religious and culturally based sources of authority. Specifically, the dominant Iraqi assumption is that religious institutions of authority, and in particular, the powerful Shi'i religious institution known as the marja'iyya, are not political, and that therefore matters that should be governed by religious authority are to be administered largely by elements operating beyond state control. Any prescriptive approach to legal change in Iraq requires an understanding of this central fact. The Article attempts to demonstrate this thesis with reference to a CPA order concerning money laundering whose terms the author participated in negotiating. In this example, the Iraqi presuppositions and biases manifested themselves in objections to CPA proposals regarding preferred modalities of regulation and enforcement, with regulatory exemptions sought for particular commercial actors over whom it was assumed that alternative, non state based forms of authority were more appropriate. The Article proposes a solution to this problem through a paradigm shift in the understanding of certain religious prohibitions on commercial activity, which could lead to a more salutary regulatory regime that harmonizes both state and religious forms of authority.

American Misconceptions about Iraq and the 2003 Invasion

This chapter discusses the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It argues that the war plans included assumptions about the strength of the Iraqi regime/state and the amount of control that the regime exerted over the religious landscape, which turned out to be false. The regime had shaped and demarcated the Shi‘i religious landscape in accordance with its political goals. The regime was much more robust and exerted much more control than planners of the literature on Iraq suggested. The chapter also discusses the reasons for the misperceptions. The regime hid its control over the religious landscape in attempt to show that it enjoyed un-coerced popular support. These misperceptions led the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by L. Paul Bremer, to enact policies that paved the way for the emergence of religious insurgents.

Saving seed under international intellectual property Treaties and Iraqi Patent Law = La regulación de la reserva de semillas para resembrarlas en los tratados internacionales de propiedad industrial y en la legislación iraquí de patentes

This study analyses legal position of saving seeds in internal and international levels, for example the TRIPS Agreement and the UPOV Convention of 1991. In this context the study attempts to compare and analyse the latest regulations of saving seeds in Iraq to previous amendments carried out by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and previous Iraqi governments and to the TRIPS Agreement. The study finds out that the Law No. 15 of 2013 on Registration, Accreditation and Protection of Agricultural Varieties is an attempt to comply with the TRIPS Agreement by providing plant variety protection.Keywords: Intellectual Property Law of Iraq, Saving Seeds, Plant Variety Protection, TRIPS Agreement, UPOV Convention of 1991.Resumen: Este artículo analiza la regulación legal de la práctica de los agricultores consistente en conservar semillas de su propia producción para proceder a sembrarlas en el siguiente ciclo de cultivo. Se analiza la regulación en el ámbito nacional y en el internacional, incluyendo la contenida en el Acuerdo ADPIC y en el Convenio de la UPOV de 1991. En este contexto, el trabajo compara y analiza las últimas regulaciones al respecto en Irak (incluidas las modificaciones introducidas por la Autoridad Provisional de la Coalición Internacional y por el gobierno iraquí) con la regulación del Acuerdo ADPIC. El estudio concluye que la Ley Nº 15 de 2013 sobre Registro, Acreditación y Protección de Variedades Agrícolas es un intento de cumplir con el Acuerdo sobre los ADPIC al proporcionar protección de variedades vegetales.Palabras clave: Legislación iraquí de propiedad intelectual e industrial, reserva de semillas, protección de variedades vegetales, Acuerdo sobre los ADPIC, Convenio de la UPOV de 1991.

Food for the Global Market: The Neoliberal Reconstruction of Agriculture in Occupied Iraq (2003–2004) and the role of international law

This paper revisits the occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The focus of my analysis is the agricultural reforms promoted by the occupying power, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which aimed at the marketisation of agricultural production, at the enhancement of the position of multi-national agribusiness and in the total integration of Iraq in global food markets. More specifically, this article maintains that the aggressively neoliberal reform of Iraq’s agriculture can be better understood as the extreme end of a wider spectrum of promotion of neoliberal state-building through international law and international institutions post-1990.

Consequences of Iraqi De-Baathification

Ambassador Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority, America’s interim government between Saddam’s fall and the independent establishment of a new Iraqi government, issued two specific orders during his term which combined to create a power vacuum in the weakened nation. The first order, or the De-Baathification order, eliminated the top four tiers of Saddam’s Baath party from current and future positions of civil service. The second disbanded the Iraqi military. Both orders worked to eliminate the institutional memory of all Iraqi institutions, requiring Bremer to establish the nation’s new government from its foundations up. This resulted in a poor security situation that ultimately allowed a strong insurgency, recruited from unemployed disaffected youth, to develop, which paved the way for the beginnings of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.