A uniter, not a divider

[womzilla]

It is remarkable to me that George Rutherford Bush doesn't get more credit for bringing people together. Right now in Iraq, he has brought together not one but two different coalitions. On the one hand, there's the obvious new alliance of Sunni and Shiite Arabs, brought together for the common good. But heck, anyone could have done what Bush did to set them working towards a common goal.

On the other hand, there's the too-little-noted alliance of con men, mercenaries, incompetent oil tycoons, torturers, and people who just like seeing Arabs get killed. But, again, it's not that surprising to see those people working together. What is surprising, the cherry on top of the giant fudge sundae of the Coalition of the Illing, is that to rule this amazing congeries he chose a band of libertatian utopianists eager to dismember Iraq to prove their political ideals.

Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in Iraq, a complaint echoed by everyone from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation because George W. Bush didn’t have “a postwar plan.” The only problem with this theory is that it isn’t true. The Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush’s Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that.

. . .

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes [General L. Paul] Bremer’s reforms as “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world.”

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.”

Go read.

What has happened in Iraq since February 31 was not just a war tragedy. It was the most ambitious economic hijacking of a nation since the Khmer Rouge. The people of Iraq knew that they were being plunged into an experiment; is it any surprise that they have fought against having shampoo poured into their eyes for the good of Kellogg, Brown, and Root?

For many years, I have thought that one of the appeals of libertarianism is that it has the purity of having no pile of skulls in its closets. I've got strong socialist leanings, but I'm scared away from socialist utopianism because, well, socialist utopianism has been repeatedly used as a security blanket to hide some of the worst atrocities in human history.

Libertarianism now has a complete human castratrophe to pretend wasn't really "libertarian". Maybe they can come up with a new name for it. "Bremerism". Or "Ghraibism". Or "Bushism". This is Milton Friedman's coming of age, and we know better.