"a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies"
heres an amazing article by naomi klein in last months harper's:
www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
its a good serious read, so print it out and take some time to go through it all. it is the most thorough and devastating account of the failure of the neo-con post war plan for iraq.
Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
Harper's Magazine, September 2004.
By Naomi Klein.
*exerpts*
Seeing the sign, I couldn ’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that ’s attracting a lot of flies. ”The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq ’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
*****
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war ’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. 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, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. 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 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. ”
*****
Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in “rebuilding Iraq ”trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman. The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as “a capitalist dream, ”and a flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine, ”one of the company ’s partners enthused. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country. ”
*****
Take, for instance, Bremer ’s first casualties. The soldiers and workers he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn ’t all disappear quietly. Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of the armed resistance. “Half a million people are now worse off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It ’s alternative employment, ”says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer ’s other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose companies are threatened by Bremer ’s investment laws have decided to make investments of their own —in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
*****
From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq ’s state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero‒apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. “I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can ’t do anything, we need an order from President Bush. ’”Back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. ”
*****
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don ’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it ’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected —the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone —from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn ’t injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans refuse to help get Iraq ’s cement factories running again: among those making the decisions, “no one believes in the public sector. ”
*****
I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn ’t working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day, but when guests arrive —would-be investors, ministry officials, journalists —they get them going. “For show, ”she explained. Behind us, a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and secured with duct tape.
*****
At the same time as al Sadr ’s followers were shouting “Down with America ”outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they would never recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn ’t look anything like a capitalist dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.
*****
www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html
its a good serious read, so print it out and take some time to go through it all. it is the most thorough and devastating account of the failure of the neo-con post war plan for iraq.
Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
Harper's Magazine, September 2004.
By Naomi Klein.
*exerpts*
Seeing the sign, I couldn ’t help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that ’s attracting a lot of flies. ”The flies McCain was referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq ’s famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
*****
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war ’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. 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, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. 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 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. ”
*****
Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in “rebuilding Iraq ”trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman. The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as “a capitalist dream, ”and a flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine, ”one of the company ’s partners enthused. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country. ”
*****
Take, for instance, Bremer ’s first casualties. The soldiers and workers he laid off without pensions or severance pay didn ’t all disappear quietly. Many of them went straight into the mujahedeen, forming the backbone of the armed resistance. “Half a million people are now worse off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the insurgency going. It ’s alternative employment, ”says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business group Kubba Consulting. Some of Bremer ’s other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that many of the businessmen whose companies are threatened by Bremer ’s investment laws have decided to make investments of their own —in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
*****
From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq ’s state-owned companies. In keeping with their Year Zero‒apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the looting was going on, he went to a nearby U.S. Army base and begged for help. “I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can ’t do anything, we need an order from President Bush. ’”Back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. ”
*****
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don ’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it ’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the protected —the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone —from the unprotected and exposed. If that wasn ’t injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100. Minister Tofiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans refuse to help get Iraq ’s cement factories running again: among those making the decisions, “no one believes in the public sector. ”
*****
I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn ’t working a few minutes before. She explained that they have only enough electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day, but when guests arrive —would-be investors, ministry officials, journalists —they get them going. “For show, ”she explained. Behind us, a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic and secured with duct tape.
*****
At the same time as al Sadr ’s followers were shouting “Down with America ”outside the Green Zone, something was happening in another part of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks would prove a devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they would never recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn ’t look anything like a capitalist dream; it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.
*****
posted by andy at 2:37 PM
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