The odious iraqui debt

25 September 2003 by Eric Toussaint

On the 10^th and 11^th of April 2003, the finance ministers of the G8 G8 Group composed of the most powerful countries of the planet: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA, with Russia a full member since June 2002. Their heads of state meet annually, usually in June or July. nations assembled in Washington, where the Secretary of State of the US-Treasury, John Snow, demanded that Russia, France and Germany in particular should drop their odious debt towards Iraq. The USA made this demand not because they were interested in seeing the debt dropped, but as a political bargain, as a way of raising the stakes against countries that were opposed to the war. The idea was to find a way to convince France, Germany and Russia to change their position and thereby render legitimate the war. The idea was to make it possible for those who took military action to immediately start with the reconstruction of Iraq by using the oil revenues without having to service debt payments

Author

Eric Toussaint

is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.
He is the author of Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc.
See his bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Toussaint
He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.