Overthrow Series

 

Iraq [Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006]

 

Iraq-Iran War

 

In the 1980s, Iraq was engaged in a horrific eight-year was with Iran. Bitterly anti-American militants had recently seized power in Iran, and President Reagan was eager to ensure that they did not win this was. Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld, his special Middle East envoy, to meet Saddam and ask him what the United States could do to help his cause. Soon afterward, American intelligence agencies began sending Saddam reports about Iranian troop movements that allowed him to fend off what might have been abject defeat.

 

Over the next seven years, the United States sold Saddam $200 million worth of weaponry, as well as a fleet of helicopters. Washington also gave him $5 billion in agricultural credits and a $684 million loan to build an oil pipeline to Jordan, a project he awarded to the California based Bechtel Corporation.

 

Saddam Invades Kuwait

 

The Americans had not objected when Saddam attacked Iran nearly a decade before, and he wanted to be sure they would not object this time either. Glaspie told him what he wanted to hear. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait,” she told Saddam.

 

Eight days later, Saddam sent his army into Kuwait, easily subdued it, and announced that it had become Iraq’s nineteenth province. To his great surprise, President Bush reacted with outrage. Kuwait was a key supplier of oil to the United States, and Bush vowed that the Iraqi occupation would “not stand.” By invading Kuwait, evidently under the mistaken impression that the United States would approve, Saddam turned himself into a pariah in the eyes of Washington.

 

On January 16, 1991, the American-led coalition launched a bombing campaign against Iraq and Iraqi positions in Kuwait. It followed with a land invasion, not only chasing the Iraqi army out of Kuwait but pursuing it most of the way back to Baghdad. Some urged Bush to press on to the capital itself and depose Saddam, but he prudently declined.

 

Saddam Survives – U.S. Plots Unfinished Business

                                    

Saddam survived all these assaults. Some powerful Americans, especially several who had held important posts in past Republican administrations, found his resilience unbearable. They harbored a deep sense that Saddam had gotten the better of them, and developed a passionate determination to crush him.

 

When Bush’s son assumed the presidency at the beginning of 2001, several of these men found themselves back in power. Among them were Cheney, who had been the father’s secretary of defense and was the son’s vice president; Wolfowitz, who had been a senior defense department official under the father and became the department’s second-ranking figure in the son’s administration; and Rumsfeld, who had been President Gerald Ford’s defense secretary In the 1970s, took that post for a second time in 2001.

 

They returned to office determined to complete what they saw as unfinished business in Iraq. Beneath them lay an intense desire for vindication, for final victory over an adversary who had taunted the United States – and the Bush family – for more than a decade.

 

Drumbeat for War -- WMDs and Axis of Evil

 

The public drumbeat for war intensified steadily during 2002. On January 29, in his State of the Union address, President Bush named Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil” that posed “a grave and growing danger” to the United States and the rest of the world. He called the Iraqi regime on of the most dangerous on earth, and asserted that it was developing, or actively seeking to develop, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

 

Most of Bush’s advisors, recognizing that he had made up his mind to dispose Saddam, embraced the idea and urged him on. CIA director George Tenet was among the most enthusiastic. His analyst had found clues suggesting that Saddam might be concealing forbidden weapons, but no hard proof.

 

“The worst thing that could happen,” Bush said, “would be to allow a nation like Iraq, run by Saddam Hussein, to develop weapons of mass destruction, and then team up with terrorist organizations so they can blackmail the world.” No one could disagree with that. For the world to stand idly by while a brutal dictator built weapons of mass destruction and passed them on to terrorists would be not just irresponsible but suicidal.

 

Bush decided it was time for Secretary of State Powell to address the Security Council, present the evidence against Saddam, and demand a resolution endorsing military action against him. In the autumn of 2002, the United States Senate and House of Representatives voted by large margins to authorize President Bush to use force in Iraq if he deemed it necessary.

 

The United States had massed 130,000 solders in Kuwait and tens of thousands more nearby. Britain, the only other super power that supported Operation Iraqi Freedom, had 25,000 there, and there were small, symbolic contingents from Poland and Australia. At midday on March 19, the first American to advance teams crossed into Iraq.

 

Some of history’s greatest conquerors have paused near Baghdad before assaulting it. None ever assembled as overwhelming a force as the United States Army massed around the ancient city in the spring of 2004. Its commanders had a simple plan. They encircled Baghdad with tanks to prevent defenders from fleeing, and then sent troops in to capture palaces, military bases, and other keystones of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

 

Colonel David Perkins, the commander of a mechanized infantry brigade, smashed his way to the center of Baghdad in an audacious “Thunder Run,” using only his own men, a total of fewer than one thousand. They would take this city of five million, he promised, in a single day.

 

Mission Accomplished

 

Bush appeared on television to tell the world that the American-led invasion of Iraq had begun, twenty-four hours earlier than originally planned. He said bombs were falling on selected targets of military importance and that these strikes were “the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”

 

Iraqi soldiers by the thousands ripped off their uniforms and melted into the countryside as American columns charged northward. The invading force faced no sustained resistance on the ground, no aerial bombardment, and no chemical or biological attacks.

 

On May 1, forty-three days after the war began, he stepped out of a fighter jet onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, anchored a few miles off the coast of California. Dressed in a pilot’s flight suit, he strode across the deck like a proud conqueror. Then, in a speech to hundreds of soldiers and sailors and airmen on board, he declared that “major combat operations” in Iraq had ended. Behind him hung a giant banner that summarized his speech in two words: “Mission Accomplished.”

 

In the most spectacular misjudgment of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Bush and his aides convinced themselves that there would be no serious problems after the invasion. They dismissed those who warned otherwise as whining doubters.

 

Mission Not Accomplished

 

Trouble began just hours after Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, as looters raged through Baghdad and criminals ran amok. Then, six weeks later, the Americans decreed the dissolution not simply of Saddam’s secret police and elite Republican Guard but of the entire Iraqi army.  That left more than 300,000 young men, all armed and trained in military tactics, without work and seething with anger against the occupier. Within a few months, enemies of the occupation built the most potent insurgent force the United States had faced since its misadventure in Vietnam.

 

The other shock that awaited Americans after they deposed Saddam was that he had, in fact, been telling the truth when he claimed not to have any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.

 

The war turned Iraq into a cauldron of violent anarchy and a magnet for fanatics from around the world. It set off a global wave of anti-American passion that had no precedent in history. Worst of all, it consumed enormous resources that might have been used in the war against Al Qaeda and other terror groups. The Iraq war allowed them to continue their worldwide jihad, launching deadly attacks in Indonesia, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere.

 

Military occupations are by their nature oppressive, and although the abusive tactics that American soldiers used in Iraq may have seemed defensible from the army’s perspective, they angered many Iraqis and countless others around the world. This anger rose to a fever pitch when graphic photographs emerged showing that American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, had treated prisoners in shocking ways.

Shock Doctrine Series

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts

 

In the summer after Iraq’s invasion, there was so much pent-up hunger for political participation that Baghdad, for all its daily hardships, displayed an almost carnival-like atmosphere. There was anger at Bremer’s layoffs, and frustration with the blackouts and the foreign contractors, but for months that anger was primarily expressed through outbursts or unregulated, exuberant free speech.

 

Most exciting of all, there were spontaneous elections breaking out in cities, towns and provinces across the country. Finally free of Saddam’s iron grip, neighbors were convening town hall meetings and electing leaders to represent them in this new era. In many cases, U.S. forces, believing their president when he said the army had been sent to Iraq to spread democracy, played a facilitating role, helping to organize the elections, even building ballot boxes.

 

The democratic enthusiasm, combined with the clear rejection of Bremer’s economic program, put the Bush administration in an extremely difficult position. It had made bold promises to hand over power to an elected Iraqi government in a matter of months and to include Iraqi in decision making right away. But that first summer left no doubt that any relinquishing of power would mean abandoning the dream of turning Iraq into a model privatized economy dotted with sprawling U.S. military bases; economic nationalism was far too deeply ingrained in the populace, particularly when it came to the national oil reserves, the greatest prize of all.

 

If Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and if the government had real power, Washington would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. So Washington abandoned its democratic promises and instead ordered increases in the shock levels in the hope that a higher dosage would finally do the trick.

 

At that point, Iraqis were still expecting Washington to make good on its promise to organize national election and hand over power directly to a government elected by the majority of citizens. In November 2003, Bremer canceled local elections. When he returned to Baghdad, he announced that general elections were off the table. Iraq’s first “sovereign” government would be appointed, not elected. Bremer sent word that all local leaders were to be appointed by the occupation.

 

Bremer’s canceling of national elections was a bitter betrayal for Iraq’s Shia. As the largest ethnic group, they were certain to dominate an elected government after decades of subjugation. At first, Shia resistance took form of massive peaceful demonstrations: 100,000 protesters in Baghdad, 30,000 in Basra. Their unified chant was “Yes, yes, election. No, no selections.”

 

Had the Bush administration kept its promise to hand over power quickly to an elected Iraqi government, there is every chance that the resistance would have remained small and containable, rather than becoming a countrywide rebellion. But keeping that promise would have meant sacrificing the economic agenda behind the war, something that was never going to happen.

Shock Doctrine Series

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts

 

Iraqis did not see the corporate construction as “a gift”; most saw it as a modernize form of pillage, and U.S. corporations didn’t wow anyone with their speed and efficiency; instead they have managed to turn the word “reconstruction” into a joke than nobody laughs at.

 

Bremer made no secret of his antipathy for Iraq’s “Stalinist economy,” as he described the country’s state-run companies and large ministries, and he had no appreciation of the specialized skills and the years of accumulated knowledge possessed by Iraq’s engineers, doctors, electricians, and road builders. He did not consider how the sudden amputation of Iraq’s professional class would make it impossible for the Iraqi state to function and therefore hinder his own work.

 

If within six months of the invasion, Iraqis had found themselves drinking clean water from Bechtel pipes, their homes illuminated by GE lights, their infirm treated in sanitary Parsons-built hospitals, their streets patrolled by competent DynCorp-trained police, many citizens would probably have overcome their anger at being excluded from the reconstruction process. But none of this happened, and well before Iraq resistances forces began systematically targeting reconstruction sites it was clear that applying laissez-faire principles to such a huge government task had been a disaster.

 

The most widely recognized case of blowback was provoked by Bremer’s first major act, the firing of approximately 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 up the government of Saddam loyalists. That ideological blindness had three concrete effects: it damaged the possibility of reconstruction by removing skilled people from their posts, it weakened the voice of secular Iraqis, and it fed the resistance with angry people.

 

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 the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world.

 

Shock Doctrine Series

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts

 

In the original Washington plan, Iraq was going to become a frontier just as Russia had been in the early nineties, but this time it would be U.S. firms - not local ones or European, Russian or Chinese – that would be first in line for the easy billions. In Iraq, Washington cut out the middlemen: the IMF and the World Bank were regulated to supporting roles, and the U.S. was front and center.

 

Paul Bremer was the government. Paul Bremer received trade and investment laws by email for the Department of Defense, printing them out, signing them and imposing them by fiat on the Iraqi people. Peter McPherson, the senior economic advisor to Paul Bremer, his job, as Iraq’s top economic shock therapist, was to radically downsize the state and privatize its assets.

 

Bremer spent his first four months in Iraq almost exclusively focused on economic transformation, passing a series of laws that together make up a classic Chicago School shock therapy program. Before the invasion, Iraq’s economy had been anchored by its national oil company and bytwo hundred state owned companies, which produced the staples of  the Iraqi diet and the raw materials of its industry, everything from cement to paper and cooking oil. The month after he arrived at his new job, Bremer announced that the two hundred firms were going to be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” Bremer said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.”

 

One law lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 45 percent to a flat 15 percent. Even better, investors could take 10 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest, and they would not be taxed.

 

The White House was so focused on unveiling a shiny new Iraq economy that it launched a brand-new currency. Bills were delivered in fleets of planes and distributed in armored vehicles and trucks that ran at least a thousand missions throughout the country. Within a few months, there was talk of a McDonald’s opening in downtown Baghdad, the ultimate symbol of Iraq joining the global economy.

 

The model pioneered by Cheney for Halliburton in the Balkans, where bases were transformed into mini Halliburton towns, was adopted on a vastly larger scale. In addition to Halliburton’s construction and management of military bases across the country, the Green Zone was, from the start, a Halliburton-run city-state, with the company in charge of everything from road maintenance to pest control to movie and disco nights.

 

Even the job of building “local democracy” was privatized, given to the North Carolina-based Research Triangle Institute in a contract worth up to $66 million, though it’s not clear what qualified RTI to bring democracy to a Muslim country. The leadership of the company’s Iraq operation was dominated by high-level Mormons – people like James Mayfield, who told his mission back in Houston that he thought Muslims could be persuaded to embrace the Book of Mormon as compatible with the teachings of the prophet Muhammad.

 

Privatizing Iraq’s Oil

 

In December 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long awaited report, It called for the U.S. to “assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise” and to “encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.

 

Washington’s timing was extremely revealing. At the point when the law was pushed forward, Iraq was facing its most profound crisis to date: the country was being torn apart by sectarian conflict with an average of one thousand Iraqis killed every week. Saddam Hussein had just been put to death in a depraved and provocative episode. Simultaneously, Bush was unleashing his surge of troops in Iraq, operating with less restricted rules of engagement. Iraq in this period was fat too volatile for the oil giants to make major investments, so there was no pressing need for a new law – except use the chaos to bypass public debate on the most contentious issue facing the country.

 

Iraq’s main labor unions declared the “the privatization of oil is a red line that may not be crossed” and condemned the law as an attempt to seize Iraq’s “energy resources at a time when the Iraqi people are seeking to determine their own future while still under conditions of occupation.” The law that was finally adopted by Iraq’s cabinet in February 2007 was even worse than anticipated. The law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist along Iraq’s broken and ineffective government.

 

It’s hard to overstate the disgrace of this attempted resource grab. Iraq’s oil profits are the country’s only hope of financing its own reconstruction when some semblance of peace returns. To lay claim to that future wealth in a moment of national disintegration was disaster capitalism at its most shameless.

 

Shock Doctrine Series

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts

 

Saddam did not pose a threat to U.S. security, but he did pose a threat to U.S. energy companies, since he had recently signed contracts with a Russian oil giant and was in negotiations with France’s Total, leaving U.S. and British oil firms with nothing; the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world were slipping out of the Anglo-American grasp.

 

The war was a rational policy choice, the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, and the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.

 

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. That was Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of a few weeks. Shock and Awe is often presented as merely a strategy of overwhelming firepower, but it is much more than that: it is a sophisticated psychological blueprint aimed “directly at the public will of the adversary to resist.”

 

Many of the key players in Iraq’s invasion and occupation were veterans of the original team in Washington that had demanded shock therapy in Russia: Dick Cheney was defense secretary when George Bush Sr. crafted his post-soviet Russian policy, and Paul Wolfowitz was Cheney’s deputy, while Condoleeza rice served as Bush Sr.’s chief adviser on Russia’s transition. For all these top players, and dozens of lesser ones, Russia’s experience in the nineties, despite its abysmal results for ordinary people, was often evoked, without irony, as the model for Iraq to emulate in its transition.

 

Rumsfeld’s marshalling of his tech and media know-how from the business world put the marketing of fear at the center of U.S. military doctrine. As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, U.S. news media outlets were conscripted by the Pentagon to “fear up” Iraq.  Iraqis who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband satellites or in phone calls from relatives abroad spent months imagining the horrors of Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became a potent psychological weapon.

 

When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city’s sensory inputs were cut off; the ears were the first to go. On the night of March 28, 2003, as U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phones across the city. Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment. Next to go were the eyes. In an instant, an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful, endless night.

 

Iraqis went through this unmaking process collectively, as they watched their most important institutions desecrated, their history loaded onto trucks and disappeared. The bombings badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was. The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society. As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it’s true that Rumsfeld did not plan for Iraq to be sacked – but he did not take measures to prevent it from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.