Previously titled "Strap on your tinfoil hat, it's gonna be a bumpy ride."
Lawrence O'Donnell was on Al Franken's radio show last week. He said something that I thought really rang true:
O'Donnell: I insist that the Bush Administration and president Bush has a Cut and Run strategy for Iraq.
That is why he's constantly saying we must never cut and run from Iraq.
Since hearing that, other bits of information have been falling into place for me. More below the cut.
[There's no link for this quote because I transcribed it from a podcast. It's from the Al Franken Show, 1 Feb 2006.]
O'Donnell: I insist that the Bush Administration and president Bush has a Cut and Run strategy for Iraq. That is why he's constantly saying we must never cut and run from Iraq. No one on the Democratic side is proposing that as you know. That's not what Murtha said. Murtha said let's get out of there in a reasonable way, as fast as we can, in a way that makes sense and protects everyone involved, as best we can.
That may be six months, it may take a year, but let's start working on our exit strategy as opposed to our endless comittment. Bush is obviously going to reduce troop strength there before the Congressional elections.
He has to -- everybody in the Republican congress knows he has to. He's going to tell you that the generals want the troop strength reduced. That's what he was trying to tell you last night [2006 SOTUS]. That whole thing about, you know, "we're not going to let any civilian politicians decide the troop strength," is the obvious and big screaming lie of the speech. And this has been a campaign... (Al laughs)... it's a semantic campaign that they've been running for months, which is: "We are going to cut and run, so we must accuse the other side of wanting to do that, and label that as pure evil, so when we do it, you will not recognize that that's what we're doing."
Franken: Right, because how could he be cutting and running because he's been spending all this time saying we won't cut - we can't cut and run.
O'Donnell: Right. And you know we have one previous experience with this which is identical rhetorically, which was Richard Nixon, who cut and run from Vietnam in the most humiliating possible way. And to me what was humiliating about it, the most extreme humiliating thing about it was that he could have done that on his first day in the presidency... (Al laughs)... instead of 30,000 American deaths later. It was nothing but a phony political ego exercise to say "I'm not going to cut and run," and he cut and run over a stupid five-year period, instead of a five month period.
O'Donnell is by no means the first person to present this idea. Robert Freeman wrote almost the exact same thing in 2003, but he lacks O'Donnell's insight into why BushCo says one thing and then does another (although, sometimes I wonder if they're not just still sore that Pappy Bush got all that grief for his "Read my lips - no new taxes" thing.)
The next piece of information that stuck with me was this NYT headline from January: "U.S. won't complete Iraq projects." The full article can be read here. The article has an "Oh dear, we weren't able to accomplish some important projects for the Iraqi people" tone, but I'm not impressed. I've always thought the goal of the reconstruction projects was to enrich American contractors. If the corporations wanted the projects to continue, they would continue with BushCo's backing. If they're giving up, it's because they've decided that the projects are no longer attractive and profitable. Perhaps the days of easy money are gone with the CPA. Now there's a different, more dangerous market, where you don't always get the advantage of cheap labor.
Although American corporations have made a bundle in Iraq, I seem to remember that they had a somewhat different vision of their Iraqi market. The goal was more like what what the World Bank and the IMF seek to accomplish with carrots and sticks rather than bombs and bullets: deregulation and privatization. With that in mind I dug up this last puzzle piece: a great article about the original neocon vision for Iraq by Naomi Klein.
[T]he most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan [is that] Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn't have "a postwar plan." The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
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.
She goes on to explain the failure of that vision:
The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer's reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.
Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder.
If, as Klein believes, the US was there to create a capitalist utopia, then when the hope for that utopia dies, why would we stay? The goal had more to do with open markets and deregulation, not just profits for military contractors and security services. After the corporations all cut and run, no doubt our military will do the same.
Except, well, that's silly. George W. Bush would never ever Cut and Run.