The NY Times has a piece today entitled Iraq Private Sector Falters; Rolls of Government Soar. And as Neocons hurry to expand the basic definition of the "Surge" to retrospectively include things such as bribing former insurgents and Al Qaeda to no longer shoot at American Troops (aka the "Sunni Awakening") ... I think it's time to make sure people understand the basic disaster that neocon ideology was from Day 1 in Iraq.
If the invasion of Iraq was the original sin, the compounding sin was the Bremmer-directed campaign to rid a formerly Socialist country of it's former economic underpinnings, and replace them all with a free-market bonanza.
Nothing new here - Naomi Klein pegged it in her Harpers article Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia four years ago:
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.
...
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.
It would be nice if our media would spend some time looking into how much of the success of the "surge" can be attributed just to finally biting the bullet and accepting that Iraq's former economic system had to at least be partially restored in order to bring some stability to the country.
The New York Times piece today treads lightly around the edges of this topic:
In 2006, 31 percent of Iraq’s labor force was working in the public sector ... The agency expects that figure to reach 35 percent this year, about 5 percentage points short of where the C.I.A. estimated it to be on the eve of the 2003 invasion.
This figure is not atypical for the region, but it hardly indicates the free market state initially envisioned by the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which pushed for full and rapid privatization in its first few months.
But someone needs to come out and say it before the lesson is lost. We had no damn idea what we were doing when we invaded Iraq. It was the work of a bunch of "Mayberry Machiavellis". 30 thousand more troops in Iraq was just some very expensive lipstick on a pig. And 4 more years of those same folks in power will only bring us more of the same budget-busting smoke and mirrors.