Naomi Klein has a very detailed, very well researched article in the September Harper's called, "Baghdad Year Zero, Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia." It lays out the only plan that BushCo seemed to have going into this nightmare, which was 'Hey, kids! Let's destroy a country so we can perform the ultimate economic experiment."
Klein contends that while BushCo critics claim that the problem with Iraq is that Dear Leader didn't have a post-war plan, the truth is that he did and we are seeing the results of it every violent, bloody day:
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 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.
snip
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.
One more excerpt:
Torturers believe that when electrical shocks are applied to various parts of the body simultaneously subjects are rendered so confused about where the pain is coming from that they become incapable of resistance.
snip
That, in essence, was the working thesis in Iraq, and in keeping with the belief that private compaines are more suited than governments for virtually every task, the White House decided to privatize the task of privatizing Iraq's state-dominated economy.
Buy the magazine to read how - it's grimly fascinating. Just keep in mind how many innocent people died for this experiment to happen - so that the Iraqis would be in so much pain, that they wouldn't know how to resist what was happening to them. This never was about freedom and democracy in the Middle East. It was about allowing the multinational corporations that already own the USA an opportunity to broaden their markets. It's about building a new world order with corporations acting as states and with the economy of existiing states in such disarray (witness the path of the US today) that they have no choice but to comply with what the multinationals, via agencies like the WTO, demand. It is the ultimate treason to sign on to this plan and the current administration hasn't only signed on, they are some of its architects.
There's a related, shorter story of how the Iraq Experiment is working in the Aug 30 Nation. It's linked here.
cross posted at Nosey Online
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