The most widely recognized case of blowback was provoked by Bremer's first major act, the firing of aproximately 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. "De-Baathification," as it was called, was supposedly driven by a desire to clean out the government of Saddam loyalists. No doubt that was part of the motivation, but it does not explain the scale of layoffs or how deeply they savaged the public sector as a whole, punishing workers who were not high-level officials.
Bremer made no secret of his antipathy for Iraq's "Stalinist economy," as he described the country's state-run companies and large ministries....
At the same time, bremer's classic Chicago school decision to fling open the borders to unrestricted imports while allowing foreign companies to own 100% of Iraqi assets infuriated Iraq's business class. many responded by funding the resistance with what little revenue they had left. After covering the first year of the Iraqi resistance in the Sunni Triangle, the investigative reporter Patrick Graham wrote in Harper's that Iraqi businessmen "are outraged by the new foreign investment laws, which allow foreign companies to buy up factories for very little. Their revenues have collasped, becuase the country has been flooded with foreign goods...The violence, these business men realize, is their only competitive edge. It is simple business logic: the more problems there are in Iraq, the harder it is for outsiders to get involved."
Like the lifting of all trade restrictions, Bremer's plan to privatize Iraq's two hundred state companies was regarded by many Iraqi's as yet another US act of war. Workers learned that in order to make the companies attractive to foreign investors, as many as two-thirds of them would have to lose their jobs. At one of Iraq's state-owned firms-a compound of seven factories that produced cooking oil, soap, dishwashing liquid and other basics- I heard a story that brought into sharp relief how many new enemies had been created by the privatization announcement. I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant was sold despite their objections. "There are two choices," he said smiling kindly. Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside it. But it will not be privatized." It was an early warning-one of many-that the bush team had definitely overestimated it's ability to shock Iraqi's into submission.
The Young Republicans
Much has been made of the youth and inexperience of the US political appointees in the CPA-the fact that a handful of twenty-something Republicans were given key roles overseeing Iraq's $13 billion budget. While there's no question that the members of the so-called brat pack were alarmingly young, that was not their greatest liability. These were not just any political cronies; they were frontline warriors from America's counterrevolution against all things Keynesianism, many of them linked to the Heritage Foundation, ground zero of Friedmanism
since it was launched in 1973. So whether they were twenty-two-year-old Dick Cheney interns or sisty-something university presidents, they shared a cultural antipathy to government and governing that, while invaluable for the dismantling of social security and the public education system back home, had little use when the job was actually to build up public institutions that had been destroyed.
In fact, many seemed to believe that the process was unnecessary. James Haveman, in charge of re-building Iraq's health-care system, was so idealogically opposed to free, public health care that, in a country were 70% of child deaths are caused by treatable illnesses such as diarrhea, and incubators are held together with duct tape, he decided that an overarching prioity was to privatize the drug distribution system.
Baghdad orphans starving
Iraqi teenaged prostitutes
The double standards were explosive, as the systematic exclusion of Iraqi's from the plan. Having suffered through the sanctions and the invasion, most Iraqis naturally assumed that they had the right to benefit from the reconstruction of their country-not just from the final product but from the jobs created on the way. When tens of thousands of foreign workers poured across Iraq's borders to take up jobs with foreign contractors, it was seen as an extension of the invasion. Rather than reconstruction, this was destruction in a different gise-the wholesale wiping out of the country's industry, which had been a powerful source of pride, one that cut across sectarian lines. Only fifteen thousand Iraqis were hired to work for the US funded reconstruction during bremer's tenure, a staggeringly low figure. "When the Iraqi people see all these contracts going to foreigners and these people bring in their own security guards and their own engineers, and we're just suppose to watch them, what do you expect?" Nouri Sitto, an Iraqi American, told me when we met in the green Zone. Sitto had moved back to Baghdad to assist the CPA with the reconstruction, but he was tired of being diplomatic. "The economy is the number-one reason for the terrorism and the lack of security."
The catastrophic failure to reconstruct also shared direct responsibility for the most lethal form of blowback-the dangerous rise of religious fundamentalism and sectarian conflict. when the occupation proved unable to provide the most basic services, including security, the mosques and the local militias filled the vacume. The young Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr proved particulary adept at exposing the failures of Bremer's privatized reconstruction by running his own shadow reconstruction in Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, earning himself a devoted following. Funded through donations to mosques, and perhaps later with help from Iran, the centers dispatched electricians to fix power and phone lines, organized local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, ran blood drives and directed traffic. "I found a vacume, and no one filled the vacume," al-Sadr said in the early days of the occupation, adding "What I can do, I do." He also took the young men who saw no jobs and no hope in Bremer's Iraq, dressed them in black and armed them with Kalashnikovs. The result was the Mahdi Army, now one of the most brutal forces in Iraqi's sectarian battles. These militias are corporatism's legacy too; if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security and services to Iraqis, al-Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers. as it was, corporate America's failures laid the groundwork for al-Sadrs successes.
Iraq under Bremer was the logical conclusion of Chicago School theory: a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees, mostly contract workers, living in a Halliburton city-state, tasked with signing corporate-friendly laws drafted by KPMG and handing out duffle bags of cash to Western contractors protected by mercenary soldiers, themselves shielded by full legal immunity. All around them were furious people, increasingly turning to religious fundamentalism because it's the only source of power in a hollowed-out state. Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of a fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the idealogy that gave it birth.
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