When the idea of invading an Arab country and turning it into a model state first gained currency after September 11, the names of several possible countries were floated-Iraq, Syria, Egypt and, Michael Ledeen's preference, Iran. Iraq had a great deal to recommend it however. In addition to its vast oil reserves, it also made a good central location for military bases now that Saudi Arabia looked less dependable, and Saddam's use of chemical weapons on his own people made him easy to hate. Another factor, often overlooked, was that Iraq had the advantage of familiarity.
The 1991 Gulf War had been the US's last major ground offensive involving hundreds of thousands of troops, and in the twelve years since, the Pentagon had been using the battle as a template in workshops, training and elaborate war games. One example of this postgame theory was a paper that had captured the imagination of Donald Rumsfeld called Shock and Awe: Achieving rapid Dominance. Written by a group of maverick strategists at the National Defence University in 1996, the paper posotions itself as an all-purpose military doctrine, but it is really about re-fighting the Gulf War. Its lead author, the retired navy commander Harlan Ullman, explained that the project began when general Chuck Horner, the commander of the air war in the 1991 invasion, was asked about his greatest frustration in fighting Saddam Hussein. He replied that he did not know where to "stick the needle" to make the Iraqi army collapse. "Shock and Awe," writes Ullman (who coined the phrase) "was intended to address this question: If Desert Storm could be refought, how could we win in half the time or less and with far fewer forces?.. The key to its success is finding the entry points for Horner's needles-the spots that, when targeted, get an enemy to collapse immediately." The authors were convinced that if the US military ever got the chance to fight Saddam again, it would be in a far better position to find those "entry points," thanks to new satelitte technologies and breakthroughs in precise weaponry that would allow it to insert the "needles" with unprecedented accurancy.
Iraq had another advantage. While the US military was busy fantasizing about refighting Desert Storm with a technological upgrade equivalent to"the difference between Atari and Playstation," as one commentator put it, Iraq's military capacity had been hurtling backwards, eroded by sanctions and virtually disassembled by the United Nations-administered weapons inspection program. That meant that, compared with Iran or Syria, Iraq seemed the site for the most winnable war.
Thomas Friedman was forthright about what it meant for Iraq to be selected as the model. "We are not doing nation-building in Iraq. we are doing nation-creating," he wrote-as if shopping around for a large, oil-rich Arab nation to creat from scratch was a natural, even "noble" thing to do in the twenty-first century. Friedman is among many of the onetime war advocates who has since claimed that he did not foresee the carnage that would follow the invasion. It's hard to see how he could have missed that detail. Iraq was not an empty space on a map; it was and remains a culture as old as civilization, with fierce anti-imperialist pride, strong Arab nationalism, deeply held faiths and a majority of the adult male population with military training. If "nation creating" was going to happen in Iraq, what exactly was supposed to become of the nation that was already there? The unspoken assumption from the beginning was that much of it would have to just disappear, to clear the ground for the grand experiment-an idea that contained, at its core, the certainty of extraordinary colonialist violence.
Thirty years earlier, when the Chicago School counterrevolution took its first leap from the textbook to the real world, it also sought to erase nations and create new ones in their place. Like Iraq in 2003, Chile in 1973 was meant to serve as a model for the entire rebellious continent, and for many years it did. The brutal regimes that implemented Chicago School ideas in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, whole categories of people and their cultures would need to be pulled up "from the root."
In the countries that suffered the political cleansings, there have been collective efforts to come to terms with this violent history-truth commissions, excavations of unmarked graves and the beginnings of war crimes trials for the perpetrators. But the Latin American juntas did not act alone: they were propped up before and after their coups by Washington, as has been amply documented. For instance, in 1976, the year of Argentina's coup, when thousands of young activists were snatched from their homes, the junta had full financial support from Washington. ("If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly," Kissinger had said.) That year, Gerald Ford was president, Dick Cheney was his chief of staff, Donald Rumfeld was his secretary of defense, and Kissinger's executive assistant was an ambitious young man named Paul Bremer. These men faced no truth-and-justice process for their roles in supporting the juntas and went on to enjoy long and prosperous careers. So long, in fact, that they would be around three decades later to implement a strikingly similar-if more far violent-experiment in Iraq.
In his 2005 inaugural address, George W Bush described the era between the end of the Cold war and the start of the War on Terror as "years of repose, years of sabbatical-and then there came a day of fire." The Iraq invasion marked the ferocious return to the early techniques of the free-market crusade-the use of ultimate shock to forcibly wipe out and erase all obstacles to the construction of model corporatist states free from all interference.
Ewen Cameron, the CIA funded psychiatrist who had tried to "depattern" his patients by regressing them to infantile states, had believed that if a little shock was good for this purpose, more was better. He blasted brains with everything he could think of-electricity, hallucinogens, sensory deprivation, sensory overload-anything that would wipe out what was and give him a blank slate on which to imprint new thoughts, new patterns. With a far larger canvas, that was the invasion and occupation strategy for Iraq. The architects of the war surveyed the global arsenal of shock tactics and decided to go with all of them-blitzkrieg military bombardment supplemented with elaborate psycological operations, followed up with the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by rounding up those who resisted and subjecting them to "gloves-off" abuse.
Often, in the analyses of the war in Iraq, the conclusion is that the invasion was a "success" but the occupation was a failure. what this assessment overlooks is that the invasion and occupation were two parts of a unified strategy-the initial bombardment was designed to erase the canvas on which the model nation could be built.
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