
United States of America (USA)
By the same author
Eric Toussaint
25 September 2003 by Eric Toussaint
On the 10th and 11th of April 2003, the finance ministers of the G8 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