WaPo on Blade Runner: Iraq

(9:30 PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

Well, here is an article to pay attention to.  From today’s Washinton Post:

New Contracts Reflect Continued Presence in Iraq

By Walter Pincus

Monday, June 2, 2008; Page A11

The depth of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the difficulty the next president will face in pulling personnel out of the country are illustrated by a handful of new contract proposals made public in May.

The contracts call for new spending, from supplying mentors to officials with Iraq’s Defense and Interior ministries to establishing a U.S.-marshal-type system to protect Iraqi courts. Contractors would provide more than 100 linguists with secret clearances and deliver food to Iraqi detainees at a new, U.S.-run prison.

The proposals reflect multiyear commitments. The mentor contract notes that the U.S. military “desires for both Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defense to become mostly self-sufficient within two years,” a time outside some proposals for U.S. combat troop withdrawal. The mentors sought would “advise, train [and] assist . . . particular Iraqi officials” who work in the Ministry of Defense, which runs the Iraqi army, or the Ministry of Interior, which runs the police and other security units.

I suggest reading the entire article.

There are a number of issues here.

First, the Washington Post reporter, Walter Pincus, writes that the length of these contracts will make it difficult for the next President (assuming it’s Obama) to leave Iraq.  This is nonsense, but there is a deeper point to it.  As a matter of fact, the existence of contracts should not hinder an executive decision to leave Iraq, or the actual departure, by one minute.  At most, the US government would simply pay the contractors a kill fee of 100% the value of the contract and tell them to bug out.

The deeper point, though, is that this is the sort of thing that a Democratic President could use as an excuse not to leave, or to say that leaving would take more time than originally thought.  Similar to the Bush-Maliki swindle I wrote about recently, the issue is not that these things create real obstacles for an exit from Iraq — rather, they provide rationales for staying for a political party elected on the promise that they would leave.

Second, I note this story as further evidence that there is no Iraqi government.  There is, rather, an extended experiment in disaster capitalism going on in Baghdad.  New contractors will be “advising” government officials, guarding judges, and, we read later in the article, providing food for inmates at “prisons” re-named as “Theater Internment Facility Reconciliation Center,” i.e. re-education camps.

Iraq is the Blade Runner future we who are old enough saw and feared coming since the cyber-punk 80’s: an inverted fascist state in which the corporations are holding the reigns.  It is the model for the future.

The weak public presence and the robust corporate one reflected the fact that the Bush cabinet was using Iraq’s reconstruction (over which it had complete control, in contrast to the federal bureaucracy back home) to implement its vision of a fully outsourced, hollow government.  In Iraq, there was not a single government function that was considered so “core” that it could not be handed to a contractor, preferably one who provided the Republican Party with financial contributions or Christian foot soldiers during election campaigns.  The usual Bush motto governed all aspects of the foreign forces’ involvement in Iraq: if a task could be performed by a private entity, it must be.

So while Bremer may have signed the laws, it was private accountants who designed and managed the economy.  (BearingPoint, an offshoot of the major international accounting and consulting firm KPMG, was paid $240 million to build a “market-driven system” in Iraq — the 107-page contract mentions the word “privatization” fifty-one times; much of the orginial contract was written by BearingPoint.)  Think tanks were paid to think (Britain’s Adam Smith Institute was contracted to help privatize Iraq’s companies.)  Private security firms and defense contractors trained Iraq’s new army and police (DynCorp, Vinnell and the Carlyle Group’s USIS, among others).  And education companies drafted the post-Saddam curriculum and printed the new textbooks.  (Creative Associates, a management-and-education-consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., was given contracts worth more than $100 million for these tasks.)*

* Ahmed al-Rahim, an Iraqi American who worked with Creative Associates, explained, “The initial idea was that we would write a curriculum and bring it into Iraq.”  As it turned out, Iraqis complained that “something packaged in America was not acceptable, and it was scrapped.”

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, pp. 357-358

Will such a future come to pass in America?  That is hardly the point.  It is the reality in Iraq, and it is our fault.  

This, as much as anything, is why we must leave Iraq; so that the Iraqis can start to build whatever country they choose, free of the maniacal opium-haze capitalist fantasies of the American theives of Baghdad.

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 Haliburton 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.  Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Docrtine, pp. 359