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.
