This is an article by Naomi Klein that was in Harpers last September. I posted it here at DU in October of 2004, and it got about 8 responses. It is a shocking article, yet I think we know in our guts it is true.
I get criticized here a lot for posting statements made by the DLC and its associated groups..the PPI and The Third Way. I have been posting some things this week by their blogger, Bull Moose, suggesting we not question Bush on the war...lest we be called defeatists.
He lectures Murtha, Dean, and Pelosi for their words about Iraq. He misquotes and does them injustice. He says we need to call for success there. If you read this article, you will see it is not the Iraqis or our military who will benefit from staying. And that the only success will be for the corporations.
A long time friend of mine lost a son in Iraq this month. It did not need to happen at all. I am angry that people in Democratic blogs and forums are trying so hard to shut up our Democrats who say anything about the war not being won. And even those who speak out are not really saying the truth.
http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.htmlThis is such a long piece that I can only post a few snips.
Klein's premise is that it was to be a perfect place for the corporations to experiment.
"Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed."
The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.
Klein presents an alarming picture of Paul Bremer's tactics there in the beginning. I knew some of this but not all. It is absolutely alarming in its heartlessness, and it is only the beginning of what she lays out.
The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
To those who are saying we don't need to have a plan to get out, you need to read this all the way through. I doubt that country will ever forget what we have done to them.
And she even mentions the Young Republicans getting to play bigshot there. I did not know this, and it is absolute unvarnished arrogance.
Many of the other CPA postings were equally ideological. The Green Zone, the city within a city that houses the occupation headquarters in Saddam’s former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching Baghdad’s new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an email home that “I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security forces.” The college senior’s favorite job before this one? “My time as an ice-cream truck driver.” In those early days, the Green Zone felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for people who think the Peace Corps is a communist plot. It was a chance to sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry “incoming”—all while being guarded around the clock by real soldiers.
If you care about what your country is doing, read it all.
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