Klein: Baghdad Year Zero

[bemildred]

Just read it if you haven't yet.

It was only after I had been in Baghdad for a month that I found what
I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a year after the war began,
at the height of what should have been a construction boom, but after
weeks of searching I had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery
apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: a construction crane.
It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse
of it around a corner in a busy shopping district I thought that I was
finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so
much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not
actually rebuilding anything - not one of the bombed-out government
buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many
power lines that remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of
summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a
giant billboard to the top of a three-story building. SUNBULA:
HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.

Seeing the sign, I couldn't help but think about something Senator
John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is "a huge pot
of honey that's attracting a lot of flies." The flies McCain was
referring to were the Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the
venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley
Fighting Vehicles and laser-guided bombs. The honey that drew
them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq's famed oil wealth but
the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had
just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first
by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by
asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.

Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most
common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint
echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: 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.

Autonomy & Solidarity