Words&Dirt

“Where the Iraq experiment entered bold new terrain was that it transformed the invasion, occupation and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market.  This market was created, just as the homeland security complex was, with a huge pot of public money.  For reconstruction alone, the boom was kicked off with $38 billion from the U.S. Congress, $15 billion from other countries and $20 billion of Iraq’s own oil money.

When the initial billions were announced, there were, inevitably, laudatory comparisons with the Marshall Plan.  Bush invited the parallels, declaring the reconstruction ‘the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan,’ and stating in a televised address in the early months of the occupation that ‘America has done this kind of work before.  Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments.’

What happened to the billions earmarked for Iraq’s reconstruction, however, bore no relationship to the history Bush invoked.  Under the original Marshall Plan, American firms benefited by sending equipment and food to Europe, but the explicit goal was to help war-torn economies recover as self-sufficient markets, creating local jobs and developing tax bases capable of funding domestic social services––the results of which are in evidence in Germany’s and Japan’s mixed economies today.

The Bush cabinet had in fact launched an anti-Marshall Plan, its mirror opposite in nearly every conceivable way.  It was the plan guaranteed from the start to further undermine Iraq’s badly weakened industrial sector and to send Iraqi unemployment soaring.  Where the post-Second World War plan had barred foreign firms from investing, to avoid the perception that they were taking advantage of countries in a weakened state, this scheme did everything possible to entice corporate America (with a few bones tossed to corporations based in countries that joined the ‘Coalition of the Willing’).  It was this theft of Iraq’s reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by unquestioned, racist assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi inferiority––and not merely the generic demons of ‘corruption’ and ‘inefficiency’––that doomed the project from the start.

None of the money went to Iraqi factories so they could reopen and form the foundation of a sustainable economy, create local jobs and fund a social safety net.  Iraqis had virtually no role in this plan at all.  Instead, the U.S. federal government contracts, most of them issued by USAID, commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed in Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq.  It was, as the occupation authorities repeatedly said, ‘a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Iraq’––all Iraqis needed to do was unwrap it.  Even Iraqis’ low-wage labor wasn’t required for the assembly process because the major U.S. contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel and the California-based engineering giant Parsons preferred to import foreign workers whom they felt confident they could control.  Once again Iraqis were cast in the role of awed spectators––first awed by U.S. military technology and then by its engineering and management powers.

As in the homeland security industry, the role for government employees––even U.S. government employees––was cut to the bone.  Bremer’s staff was a mere fifteen hundred people to govern a sprawling country of 25 million.  By contrast, Halliburton had fifty thousand workers in the region, many of them lifelong public servants lured into the private sector by offers of better salaries.

The weak public presence and the robust corporate one reflected the fact that the Bush cabinet was using Iraq’s reconstruction (over which it had complete control, in contrast to the federal bureaucracy back home) to implement its vision of a fully outsourced, hollow government.  In Iraq, there was not a single governmental function that was considered so ‘core’ that it could not be handed to a contractor, preferably one who provided the Republican Party with financial contributions or Christian foot soldiers during election campaigns.  The usual Bush motto governed all aspects of the foreign forces’ involvement in Iraq: if a task could be performed by a private entity, it must be.”

–The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 438-40

“She slept with a man in her arms for the first time in decades, and woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.”

––Wool (Omnibus Edition), by Hugh Howey, loc. 1546