If you were away from your computer this weekend, God bless you. But you missed this Kevin Drum post on the new look at Iraqi reconstruction:
When Jay Garner tried to hire well-regarded experts who had real experience with reconstruction plans, he was turned down because they were too “liberal.” When Garner was abruptly replaced by Paul Bremer, Bremer staffed the CPA with inexperienced ideologues recruited from the Heritage Foundation. Foreign contractors were banned from Iraq out of pique, regardless of whether they were the best qualified. Unions were trampled and ignored because they didn’t fit the privatization agenda. Naomi Klein, who traveled to Iraq last year to report on the reconstruction for Harper’s, found Bremer pursuing plans for Iraq that were so outlandish they tested even her well-known skills for hyperbole…
{ 11 comments }
Andrew Reeves 04.11.05 at 7:45 am
It’s not surprising that large aspects of the reconstruction of Iraq were something of a goat-f**k, to put it mildly. But the conclusion that Klein et al are drawing, namely that the Iraqi insurgents are really just enraged about privatization strikes me as hollow. Or rather, it strikes me as certain people attempting to shoe-horn the Iraq insurgency into their own worldview.
The belief that it may seem like people who want to bring back Ba’ath rule allied with Salafi fanatics are really just enraged about neo-liberalism doesn’t really ring true. Otherwise, the insurgency wouldn’t be concentrated in those areas that one would expect an insurgency of Ba’athists/Salafis to be concentrated.
People enraged about neo-liberalism tend not to drive truck bombs into Shi’ite mosques.
Patrick R 04.11.05 at 7:46 am
The Bush Administration doesn’t like people who try to approach problems from a practical solution? It prefers blind idealogues?!!
Been there, heard that. Where’s the real news?
KCinDC 04.11.05 at 8:57 am
I don’t know how much it contributes to the insurgency, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that if more Iraqi young men were employed in reconstruction then fewer Iraqi young men would be going around blowing stuff up. Besides, reconstruction money would go a lot further when paying Iraqis rather than US contractors.
CKR 04.11.05 at 9:05 am
It is common practice in the “developed” world to award “development” contracts to its own contractors. This is as true of the EU as the US. I have worked with recipients to do the very best they could to get jobs to their own people.
If development is a goal, that should extend to the companies and people who can do the work. Naive of me. Sorry.
The second-best is for a foreign country to manage the project and hire local labor.
Looks like the Bushies went all the way to the other end of the scale. Looks like none of us are surprised.
Ted 04.11.05 at 9:15 am
Andrew, to the extent that Klein and co. are arguing that the insurgency is fueled by opposition to privatization and laissez faire economics, you’re right that they’re making a silly argument. But that’s not how I read it. It seems to me that they’re making the argument that the forces in charge of Iraqi reconstruction made ideology their guiding star, and that it predictably led to incompetent decision-making.
dsquared 04.11.05 at 9:28 am
The belief that it may seem like people who want to bring back Ba’ath rule allied with Salafi fanatics are really just enraged about neo-liberalism doesn’t really ring true. Otherwise, the insurgency wouldn’t be concentrated in those areas that one would expect an insurgency of Ba’athists/Salafis to be concentrated.
Depends what you mean by “concentrated”. Sadr City and Najaf are Shi’ite areas. The Shi’ite militias wound down around the elections because Muqtada and al-Sistani calculated it would be to their political advantage to do so, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away.
Andrew Reeves 04.11.05 at 9:37 am
As I read it (and yes, I did skim a bit), Klein’s argument seems to be that the insurgency is as strong as it is because there are so many Iraqis disaffected with the privatization plans of the Bush administration. While there is no denying that there are lots of Iraqis who are more than willing to fire off some rounds for a wad of cash, I think that there is a temptation to look for The One Big Cause for why the last two years have been such a massive cock-up. Moreover, I think that if you are of left/liberal leanings, then there is going to be something of a tendency to assume that the One Big Cause is something that you yourself think is a bad idea.
Again, none of this is to deny that the Bush administration behaved in a manner that was breathtaking in its stupidity in Iraq. I just think that the insurgency would be pretty strong regardless of how things were going economically, given that Hussein had been planning for Gulf War II since before the dust from Gulf War I had settled.
Andrew Reeves 04.11.05 at 9:44 am
dsquared,
The thing is, the Mahdi army is something of a different animal from the insurgency that is usually planting IED’s, attacking Iraqi cops, etc. Sadr’s guys (or at least as far as I can tell from the news) tended to fight, negotiate, etc. out in the open (well, as much as *anything* that happens over there can be said to be “out in the open”). The end of semester open fights that Sadr staged last year were not the sort of grinding brutality that the Ba’athists are up to. So it’s bad in Najaf if their hit by an occasional mass-casualty bombing or Mahdi Army mischief, but they don’t have the constant drumbeat of the insurgency that a place like Baghdad does.
abb1 04.11.05 at 11:12 am
May I suggest once again: Guerilla War in Sadr City by Michael Schwartz.
lemuel pitkin 04.11.05 at 11:41 am
Klein is right about the agenda, but how far was it actually implemented? My sense is, not very far. Were any state assets privatized uner the CPA? Who on earth would have bought them?
nofundy 04.11.05 at 12:36 pm
Neocons never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, especially when there’s ideology to promote!
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