IRAQ

Independent: US 'corporate invasion' brings no respite from war By Justin Huggler and Seb Walker in Baghdad

Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad yesterday. Not to a skyline bristling with cranes but to a city where there is still no electricity for much of the day because less power is being generated than under Saddam Hussein.

Almost five months after the overthrow of Saddam, entire neighbourhoods are still without phone lines. The government offices bombed in the war are still blackened shells. Next to them stand the burnt-out ruins of ministries and shopping centres set on fire in the looting that followed.

But the US Defence Secretary was unlikely to see those, cocooned in security to keep him from the seething anger against the American occupation. Much of Baghdad is still an armed American camp. The country's infrastructure is in a worse state than it was under Saddam.

One of the accusations levelled at the US invasion was that it was simply paving the way for a subsequent American corporate invasion. But despite billions of dollars of contracts won by American companies, there are no visible signs of reconstruction at all.

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