JIM LEHRER: What would you say to somebody in the United States who questions whether or not getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth the cost of more than a thousand lives now and billions and billions of U.S. dollars?
PRIME MINISTER IYAD ALLAWI: Well, I assure you if Saddam was still there, terrorists will be hitting there again at Washington and New York, as they did in the murderous attack in September; they'll be hitting also on other places in Europe and the Middle East. ...
Here we have a US-installed foreign head of state, whose travel schedule is determined by the US State Department, visiting the US to buoy the president's election campaign and spouting demonstrable lies in order to support a retrospective rationale for war that the White House wants Americans to believe but lacks the gall to state explicitly.
-- Joshua Marshall
Legal Fiction adds some more evidence about why we should be disgusted at all of this. This includes key Republicans, not just Dick Cheney and George Bush, suggesting that anyone who calls into question Allawi's comments (and wild eyed optimism as to conditions in Iraq) somehow "undermine our young men and women who are serving over there" (Sen. Hatch). LF also has a a poetic take on Kerry71 challenging Kerry04.
Naomi Klein also has been of interest to me lately as recent posts might suggest. For instance, I recently saw a documentary she made with her husband entitled The Take, which concerns a workers movement in Argentina to "expropriate" closed businesses. Its website as well as some articles posted there can provide you with some more details, but basically, it is a small lesson of hope for those harmed worldwide by ill advised heavy-handed capitalism.
Argentina is but one nation whose central government chose or more likely were pressured to choose a form of capitalism run amok that would even be seen as unwise in this country. The shock therapy turns out badly, the usual victims arise, and rebellion from below is seen as dangerously radical. This film suggests yet again Klein has a point -- globalization and the growing power of international capitalism is dangerous without careful safeguards, respect of democracy, and basic human rights.
The film is also a good companion piece to her recent piece in Harpers that suggests related problems are arising in Iraq. The connection is made early in the piece:
But before the fires from the "shock and awe" military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer's reforms as "an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world."
Klein is an economist, but her piece suggests a sadly consistent theme: the inability of those who carry forth our policy in Iraq to truly understand (or respect) the society they are fucking up. [Pardon my bluntness; The Take portrayed various protests with slogans sure to include some variant of "screw you."] This is seen by a policy that tries to force democracy by foreign military action, furthering discontent, hatred of America, and terrorism in the process. It also is shown by trying to totally reconstruct the Iraqi economy by privatization and foreign capital:
The tone of Bremer's tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country's borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was "open for business."
Klein explained how unfortunately some of the plans were just a tad illegal, though given the war itself was deemed a violation of international law by the head of the body ideally most concerned about the matter, perhaps this isn't too relevant. All the same, we decided to use our surrogates (puppets) to do the job for us. This would be legal. Economic disorder, including of the sort mentioned above, however ironically led to violence that made the planned economic reforms (sic) untenable. Moqtada al Sadr also took advantage of the situation:
Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations, the centers dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines, organize local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic where the streetlights don't work. And yes, they organize militias too. Al Sadr took Bremer's economic casualties, dressed them in black, and gave them rusty Kalashnikovs ...
Klein notes that "the CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall [concrete walls that protects selective areas from attack]; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100." Just one example how another way is possible. For instance, an Iraqi Marshall Plan that helped to rebuild the country we did so much to break ("you break it, you own it") with local resources and control might have helped greatly. Such a plan would have not seen Iraq as some neoconservative playground (one packed with twenty-somethings whose major qualifications seems to be support from the Heritage Foundation), but as a country with a long tradition of capitalism but one tempered with (local) government sector support.
The Bremer plan just seems part and parcel of the imperialism that isn't even done very well. Klein ends up with a sadly too likely prophecy:
After an endless succession of courageous last stands and far too many lost lives, Iraq will become a poor nation like any other, with politicians determined to introduce policies rejected by the vast majority of the population, and all the imperfect compromises that will entail.
Sounds a bit too familiar.