Conventional wisdom says that "the invasion of Iraq was initially successful, but the plan for peace was faulty," according to Michael Schwartz, writing in TomPaine.com on 28 March (
http://www.tompaine.com).. Most observers today agree that not enough troops were deployed to protect Saddam's arms depots or to police the conquered civilian population, and the Iraqi army was disbanded too hastily, along with every single Baathist government servant. In other words, General Shinseki was right.
This consensus is fundamentally wrong, or, worse yet, only
minimally correct.
Mr. Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, does agree that the initial Coalition blitzkreig was militarily successful, and contends that there was one single, golden moment after the fall of Baghdad when the Bush administration "might have avoided triggering a formidable armed resistence." The proto-civil war now in evidence was "not an inevitable result of the invasion, but of Bush administration actions taken afterwards."
What destroyed any possibility of a successful transition to a peaceful, reasonably democratic Iraq was the instantaneous and total imposition of Bush's Republican neo-con economic philosophy on Iraq without regard for consequences. Naomi Klein in an article in Harpers (http:harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html) explains that this shock therapy was based on the programs imposed in the 1990's by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on Argentina (which was bankrupted as a result), on Russia after the fall of the Soviets (which "immiserated" the Russian people and led sequentially to Putin's ruthless subjugation of the new Russian plutocrats), and on other unfortunate third world countries.
In other words, instant Globalization and complete laissez faire capitalism in its most ruthless, jungle capitalism form was the Bush Plan for postwar Iraq-- see, critics are wrong, Bush DID have a plan.
Bush's Man in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, ordered instant privatization of the Iraqi economy with the idea that prostrate Iraq was a perfect laboratory in which to prove to the world the remarkable abilities of laissez-faire capitalism, unencumbered by carping criticisms from the Democratic Party at like at home, or by nasty unions interfering with the entrepreneurs. It was economic engineering at its finest, demobilizing government-owned factories and other state businesses which formed 40 percent of the Iraqi economy, thus coincidentally removing the food, product, and fuel subsidies that previously guaranteed low-income Iraqis basic staples. When Bremer demobilized state-owned enterprises, including Iraq's huge cement industry and its electrical, sanitation, and water purification systems, he also forbade them to bid on "reconstruction" contracts, and invited the enormous multinationals like Halliburton to do so. The Economist magazine reported that "Iraq under Bremer is a capitalist dream."
At first there was a gratifying (to the neo-cons) surge in sales to the Iraqi middle class of goods unavailable under the blockaded Saddam regime: air conditioners, cell phones, and so on, all imported by the now dominant multinational corporations-- obviously, the media proclaimed, Capitalism works best for consumers! The brief consumption-driven spring petered out in the winter of 2003-2004. The abrupt influx of the luxury consumer products imported by the outside multinationals, which they had sold frequently at a loss to drive out competition in time-honored tough business style, forced local businesses into bankruptcy. Soon a small depression swept neighborhood after neighborhood clean of locally-owned shops which previously had served these communities, returning their incomes back into the community.
Meanwhile, the destruction of state-owned enterprises created instant unemployment, and as a result millions of unemployed workers and former soldiers had no income with which to support their families. Feeble attempts by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to provide minimal paychecks (for doing nothing) to such state workers and soldiers were too little, too, late, and sank without a trace into graft-hungry hands. The social fabric frayed, creating vicious gangs which sought "to redress their own economic hardship" by looting public buildings and private homes of anything that could be sold on the black market, and kidnapping for ransom became a thriving cottage industry once the Occupation dismantled the Iraqi police force.
After the initial rush by so many multinationals to take over the Iraqi businesses and engage in reconstruction, almost nothing happened. It turned out that Bremer and the CPA did not have the legal authority to sell all those Iraqi businesses and factories, and the lawyers for the greedy corporations warned them not to engage in such a project since, when a native government took over from the Occupation, the outsiders would likely lose their investments. So reconstruction died, and the proposed laboratory of privatization, unfettered capitalism, and free markets stagnated. It was the final nail in the coffin of the Iraqi economy.
To top it all off, the multinationals, having saturated the consumer market with all the appliances, etc., the market could absorb, abruptly withdrew because their profits declined, leaving whole neighborhoods with empty shops and no source of products or services. A sort of reverse multiplier effect inexorably gripped the country, with unemployment now somewhere between 30% and 60%. True, the Kurdish areas, formerly insulated by the "no fly" zone, have fared reasonably well, as has a part of the southern region for similar reasons, but the heart of the country is still un-reconstructed, devastated, and in economic depression.
The amazing thing is that in 2003 the initial protest and request to ameliorate the situation was not violent, but American troops fired on the peaceful demonstrators, killing 13 civilians. The Occupation from the beginning chose to respond with what Schwartz describes as "forceful, almost gleeful repression." The Bush spin was that any protest was a sign of Baathist agitators, attempting to return to power, and, if dealt with sternly, the disruptive influences would diminish. Unfortunately, it was not the Baathists so much as desperate, angry average Iraqis protesting, and the harsh American response, with no attempt by the CPA to tackle the economic roots of the problem, created a vicious circle. Americans kept raising the ante, including home invasions and torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons to squeeze out intelligence about the supposed subversives, which thus kept recruiting new protesters, who turned more and more violent themselves. "The American policy of repression backfired royally." By November 2005 the so-called insurgency created, in the Sunni area alone, about 700 small-scale military engagements per WEEK.
minimally correct.
American military forces were neither designed nor trained to act as a local police force, and were not prepared to suppress protests based on economic distress. It would have been no different if more troops had been on the ground, or if the Iraqi army had been left intact (it would surely have ended up being another kind of problem). No, the problem was the Occupation which insisted on destroying the domestic economy, redesigning it from the top down, attempting to do in a space of a few months what the World Bank had tried to do over a period of several years. Shock and Awe to begin the Invasion, and gruesome economic shock, akin to rape, on the economy and social fabric immediately thereafter, was too much.
The root cause of the "insurgency" is therefore economic-- neo-con Republican economics. Does it remind you of the failure of the conservatives to re-build New Orleans after Katrina?