Knowledge Brings Fear
Motto of Mars U, Futurama
The above is absolutely true. The more I know about the Bush Administration, the more I am afraid.
I was thinking about writing a diary about how the CPA and Bremer (remember them?) had basically shut down all state-owned enterprises in Iraq and refused to buy anything from them (like cement), which I thought might be a pretty important element in Iraq's current troubles. But TomDispatch.com beat me to the punch, and did a far better job than I would have even dreamed of. For those who are unfamiliar with TomDispatch, this is a must-read-regularly site for all intelligent Kossacks (which is all of you, of course). I read a lot of intelligent websites and blogs, but this one is right at the top of the list. Tom Engelhardt is brilliant, the people he interviews are generally brilliant, and his guest columnists are brilliant.
The latest essay is by Michael Schwartz, a Professor of Sociology, among other things. I highly recommend that you go and read the original. He first sums up the mainstream media's thinking on what the cause of the trouble in Iraq is:
This first blunder (Ed: not enough troops deployed) allowed what was at best a modest insurgency to grow to formidable proportions, at which point occupation officials committed a second disastrous blunder, dismantling the Iraqi army which otherwise could have been deployed to smash the rebellion.
However, he says, this is "profoundly wrong". Certainly not having enough troops and disbanding the Iraqi army were factors that led to the current situation. But the primary factor, he says (and I agree) can be stated this way:
We do not remember much of this now, but just after Saddam was toppled the American victors announced that a sweeping reform of Iraqi society would take place. The only part of this still much mentioned today -- the now widely regretted dismantling of the Iraqi military -- was but one aspect of a far larger effort to dismantle the entire Baathist state apparatus, most notably the government-owned factories and other enterprises that constituted just about 40% of the Iraqi economy. This process of dismantling included attempts, still ongoing, to remove various food, product, and fuel subsidies that guaranteed low-income Iraqis basic staples, even when they had no gainful employment.
In other words, shutting down the state-run apparatus led to massive unemployment. This led to people, otherwise favorably inclined towards the US, to join the insurgency.
Within six months, for example, the American occupation government, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), had promulgated all manner of laws designed to privatize everything in Iraq except established oil reserves. (New oil discoveries, however, were to be privatized.) All restrictions were also taken off foreign corporations intent on buying full control of Iraqi enterprises; nor were demands to be made of those companies to reinvest any of their profits in Iraq.
Note the phrase, "Nor were demands to be made of those companies to reinvest any of their profits in Iraq"? Doesn't this remind of you of how Wal-Mart operates? They come in, sell goods cheaper than local companies, send the profits home to Arkansas, and basically gut the economies of towns across America. Now think of doing that on a country-wide scale, overnight.
I think it almost goes without saying that Bush thought this would be a windfall for American companies, particularly oil companies. Let's always remember the true cause of the war: oil. No amount of dodging and twisting about WMDs, Saddam-al Qaeda connections, and "spreading democracy" should hide this root cause. The oil companies would get a windfall by being able to outright own any new oil discoveries in Iraq. Halliburton would get a lot of money servicing these oil companies (of course they've gotten a windfall from the debacle, but that wasn't Plan A.)
The elimination of all protections for local commerce quickly threw the market wide open to large multinational marketing companies. This resulted in an immediate surge of sales to the Iraqi middle class of previously unobtainable goods like air conditioners, cell phones, and all manner of electronic devices. Though few remember this today, many American journalists reported the influx of such goods as an early sign of coming prosperity -- and of how successful an economy could begin to be once freed from the oppressive binds of state control and state ownership.
As it happened, though, this surge did not last into the winter of 2003-4. The problem, it turned out, was that the CPA-induced economic "opening" to multinational competition administered a series of death blows to locally based enterprises. First of all, shops selling any item that could be imported by foreign companies found themselves in the unenviable position of competing with lower-priced goods that the multinationals could either provide at such prices or afford to sell at a loss to capture the market (i.e., run the local competition out of business). So a depression swept through small business in Iraq, leaving neighborhoods without their normal complement of shops and without the income that they plowed back into communities.
And finally, this led to:
These depressed neighborhoods became incubators for ferocious criminal gangs, who sought to redress their own economic hardship by looting public buildings and private dwellings of anything that might yield a return on the black (or export) market. Looting, which began with the fall of the government, became a permanent feature of Iraqi urban life once the occupation dismantled the Iraqi police force. As time passed without the establishment of effective law enforcement, criminality became organized and systematic, targeting professionals and shopkeepers who had substantial assets or retained incomes; while kidnapping for ransom became a regular fact of life for prosperous Iraqis.
As this crisis deepened, multinational corporations found they had sold just about all the appliances the market could bear and were no longer making sufficient profits to continue their marketing efforts in much of Iraq. So they simply withdrew from now-unprofitable local markets, leaving communities already sprinkled with the empty shops of bankrupt local merchants bereft of needed products and services.
The Iraqis protested, but were met with savage repression, in which innocent people got killed, adding even more impetus to the insurgency. And here we are, today.
I would add one other factor to this equation. I think it was important that the US didn't clamp down on the weapons dumps across Iraq. These dumps, containing millions of tons of weapons and explosives, gave the insurgents the means to fight back. Without the weapons they would have wanted to fight back but might not have had the means. As it stands, Col. Hackworth, before he died, said that the Iraqi insurgency is the best-armed in the history of the world.
Still, the most important factor was probably, as Prof. Schwartz says, the crazy "shock treatment" of trying to go from a Stalinist, command economy - overnight - to not just a capitalist one, but a "pure" capitalist one. This is purely due to ideology, and I think it can be laid directly at the feet of Bush himself. As a former professor of his at Yale has said, Bush hated socialism (which he equated with communism) in all its forms, with a passion. Which is why he wants to tear apart the New Deal and things like Social Security. The Bush Administration can blame the media all it wants for the debacle, but the root cause was this example of ideology run amuck. They thought that somehow, "magically", free markets would cure all, in a country that had literally no experience with free markets for hundreds of years. Now, I personally like free enterprise as much as the next guy, far more than socialism or communism, but this was a completely crazy, cuckoo-bananas, idea.
This is the knowledge I've gained of the Bush Administration in my reading: they are incompetent, stupid, ideologues, who believe in magical thinking. In other words, they're barking mad. And that knowledge makes me afraid.
And one last word for George W. Bush: Cakewalk. Cakewalk, cakewalk, cakewalk. CAKEWALK!