[NYTr] Naomi Klein: The Erasing of Iraq

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Guardian - Sep 11, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk

[Extracted from "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster  Capitalism"
by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane on September 20.]

The erasing of Iraq

It's a tried-and-tested torture technique: strike fear into your 
victims, deprive them of cherished essentials and then eradicate their 
memories. In 2003, the US applied this on an enormous scale for its 
invasion of Iraq. And then, after Saddam's regime crumbled, Washington 
set out to rebuild the traumatised country through a disastrous 
programme of privatisation and unfettered capitalism

by Naomi Klein

When the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was grabbed by US agents at JFK 
airport in 2002 and taken to Syria, a victim of extraordinary rendition, 
his interrogators engaged in a tried-and-tested torture technique. "They 
put me on a chair, and one of the men started asking me questions ... If 
I did not answer quickly enough, he would point to a metal chair in the 
corner and ask, 'Do you want me to use this?' I was terrified, and I did 
not want to be tortured. I would say anything to avoid torture." The 
technique Arar was being subjected to is known as "the showing of the 
instruments," or, in US military lingo, "fear up". Torturers know that 
one of their most potent weapons is the prisoner's own imagination - 
often just showing fearsome instruments is more effective than using them.

As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, US news media outlets 
were conscripted by the Pentagon to "fear up" Iraq. "They're calling it 
'A-Day'," began a report on CBS News that aired two months before the 
war began. "A as in airstrikes so devastating they would leave Saddam's 
soldiers unable or unwilling to fight." Viewers were introduced to 
Harlan Ullman, an author of the Shock and Awe doctrine, who explained 
that "you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons 
at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes". The anchor, Dan 
Rather, ended the telecast with a disclaimer: "We assure you this report 
contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help 
the Iraqi military." He could have gone further: the report, like so 
many others in this period, was an integral part of the Department of 
Defense's strategy - fear up.

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. Would it be worse than 1991? If the Americans really thought 
Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, would they launch a nuclear attack?

One answer was provided a week before the invasion. The Pentagon invited 
Washington's military press corps on a special field trip to Eglin Air 
Force Base in Florida to witness the testing of the Moab, which 
officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but which everyone in 
the military calls the "Mother of All Bombs". At 21,000lb, it is the 
largest non-nuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in the words 
of CNN's Jamie McIntyre, "a 10,000ft-high mushroom-like cloud that looks 
and feels like a nuclear weapon".

In his report, McIntyre said that even if it was never used, the bomb's 
very existence "could still pack a psychological wallop" - a tacit 
acknowledgement of the role he himself was playing in delivering that 
wallop. Like prisoners in interrogation cells, Iraqis were being shown 
the instruments. "The goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition 
so clear and so obvious that there's an enormous disincentive for the 
Iraqi military to fight," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained 
on the same programme.

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 US troops drew closer to Baghdad, the 
ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four 
Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off 
millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the phone exchanges 
continued - 12 in total - until, by April 2, there was barely a phone 
working in all of Baghdad. During the same assault, television and radio 
transmitters were also hit, making it impossible for families in 
Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a weak signal carrying 
news of what was going on outside their doors.

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. 
Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents 
begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing 
numbers into the reporters' hands along with pleas to call a brother or 
an uncle in London or Baltimore. "Tell him everything is OK. Tell him 
his mother and father are fine. Tell him hello. Tell him not to worry." 
By then, most pharmacies in Baghdad had sold out of sleeping aids and 
anti-depressants, and the city was completely cleaned out of Valium.

Next to go were the eyes. "There was no audible explosion, no 
discernible change in the early-evening bombardments, but in an instant, 
an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful, endless 
night," the /Guardian/ reported on April 4. Darkness was "relieved only 
by the headlights of passing cars". Trapped in their homes, Baghdad's 
residents could not speak to each other, hear each other or see outside. 
Like a prisoner destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was 
shackled and hooded.

Next it was stripped. In hostile interrogations, the first stage of 
breaking down prisoners is stripping them of their own clothes and any 
items that have the power to evoke their sense of self - so-called 
comfort items. Often objects that are of particular value to a prisoner, 
such as the Qur'an or a cherished photograph, are treated with open 
disrespect. The message is "You are no one, you are who we want you to 
be," the essence of dehumanisation. Iraqis went through this unmaking 
process collectively, as they watched their most important institutions 
desecrated, their history loaded on to trucks and disappeared.

The bombing 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," 
reported the Los Angeles Times. "Gone are 80% of the museum's 170,000 
priceless objects." The national library, which contained copies of 
every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened 
ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur'ans had disappeared from the 
Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell. "Our 
national heritage is lost," pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher. A 
local merchant said of the museum, "It was the soul of Iraq. If the 
museum doesn't recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of 
my own soul has been stolen." McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the 
University of Chicago, called it "a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory 
of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of 
years, has been removed".

Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organised salvage missions 
in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artefacts has been 
recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the 
memory lobotomy was intentional - part of Washington's plans to excise 
the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their own model. 
"Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture," 70-year-old Ahmed Abdullah told 
the Washington Post, "and they want to wipe out our culture."

As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by 
Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it is 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.

During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so 
there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old regime 
and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to respond 
in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the prisons 
several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by leading 
archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to protect 
museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26 Pentagon memo to 
coalition command listed "in order of importance, 16 sites that were 
crucial to protect in Baghdad". Second on the list was the museum. Other 
warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international police contingent 
in with the troops to maintain public order -another suggestion that was 
ignored.

Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in 
Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they 
weren't sent. There are numerous reports of US soldiers hanging out by 
their armoured vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove by 
- a reflection of the "stuff happens" indifference coming straight from 
Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting, but in 
other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International Airport 
was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time, smashed 
furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the runway: "US 
soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of 
the planes' fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and 
popped out every windshield." The result was an estimated $100m worth of 
damage to Iraq's national airline - which was one of the first assets to 
be put on the auction block in an early and contentious partial 
privatisation.

Some insight into why there was so little official interest in stopping 
the looting has since been provided by two men who played pivotal roles 
in the occupation - Peter McPherson, the senior economic adviser to Paul 
Bremer, and John Agresto, director of higher education reconstruction 
for the occupation. McPherson said that when he saw Iraqis taking state 
property - cars, buses, ministry equipment - it didn't bother him. His 
job, as Iraq's top economic shock therapist, was to radically downsize 
the state and privatise its assets, which meant that the looters were 
really just giving him a jump-start. "I thought the privatisation that 
occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or 
began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," he 
said. A veteran bureaucrat of the Reagan administration and a firm 
believer in Chicago School economics, McPherson termed the pillage a 
form of public-sector "shrinkage".

His colleague John Agresto also saw a silver lining as he watched the 
looting of Baghdad on TV. He envisioned his job - "a 
never-to-be-repeated adventure" - as the remaking of Iraq's system of 
higher education from scratch. In that context, the stripping of the 
universities and the education ministry was, he explained, "the 
opportunity for a clean start," a chance to give Iraq's schools "the 
best modern equipment". If the mission was "nation creating," as so many 
clearly believed it to be, then everything that remained of the old 
country was only going to get in the way. Agresto was the former 
president of St John's College in New Mexico, which specialises in a 
Great Books curriculum [which emphasises an education based on broad 
reading]. He explained that although he knew nothing of Iraq, he had 
refrained from reading books about the country before making the trip so 
that he would arrive "with as open a mind as I could have". Like Iraq's 
colleges, Agresto would be a blank slate.

If Agresto had read a book or two, he might have thought twice about the 
need to erase everything and start all over again. He could have 
learned, for instance, that before the sanctions strangled the country, 
Iraq had the best education system in the region, with the highest 
literacy rates in the Arab world - in 1985, 89% of Iraqis were literate. 
By contrast, in Agresto's home state of New Mexico, 46% of the 
population is functionally illiterate, and 20% are unable do "basic 
math[s] to determine the total on a sales receipt". Yet Agresto was so 
convinced of the superiority of American systems that he seemed unable 
to entertain the possibility that Iraqis might want to salvage and 
protect their own culture and that they might feel its destruction as a 
wrenching loss.

This neo-colonialist blindness is a running theme in the war on terror. 
At the US-run prison at Guantánamo Bay, there is a room known as "the 
love shack". Detainees are taken there after their captors have decided 
they are not enemy combatants and will soon be released. Inside the love 
shack, prisoners are allowed to watch Hollywood movies and are plied 
with American junk food. Asif Iqbal, one of three British detainees 
known as the "Tipton Three," was permitted several visits there before 
he and his two friends were finally sent home. "We would get to watch 
DVDs, eat McDonald's, eat Pizza Hut and basically chill out. We were not 
shackled in this area ... We had no idea why they were being like that 
to us. The rest of the week we were back in the cages as usual ... On 
one occasion Lesley [an FBI official] brought Pringles, ice cream and 
chocolates; this was the final Sunday before we came back to England." 
His friend Rhuhel Ahmed speculated that the special treatment "was 
because they knew they had messed us about and tortured us for two and 
half years and they hoped we would forget it".

Ahmed and Iqbal had been grabbed by the Northern Alliance while visiting 
Afghanistan on their way to a wedding. They had been violently beaten, 
injected with unidentified drugs, put in stress positions for hours, 
sleep deprived, forcibly shaven and denied all legal rights for 29 
months. And yet they were supposed to "forget it" in the face of the 
overwhelming allure of Pringles. That was actually the plan.

It's hard to believe - but then again, that was pretty much Washington's 
game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorise the entire country, deliberately 
ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are 
ransacked, then make it all OK 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 weeks.

Paul Bremer, appointed by Bush to serve as director of the occupation 
authority in Iraq, admits that when he first arrived in Baghdad, the 
looting was still going strong and order was far from restored. "Baghdad 
was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the airport. There was no 
traffic on the streets; there was no electricity anywhere; no oil 
production; no economic activity; there wasn't a single policeman on 
duty anywhere." And yet his solution to this crisis was to immediately 
fling 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". Overnight, Iraq went 
from being one of the most isolated countries in the world, sealed off 
from the most basic trade by strict UN sanctions, to becoming the 
widest-open market anywhere.

While the pickup trucks stuffed with loot were still being driven to 
buyers in Jordan, Syria and Iran, passing them in the opposite direction 
were convoys of flatbeds piled high with Chinese TVs, Hollywood DVDs and 
Jordanian satellite dishes, ready to be unloaded on the sidewalks of 
Baghdad's Karada district. Just as one culture was being burned and 
stripped for parts, another was pouring in, prepackaged, to replace it.

One of the US businesses ready and waiting to be the gateway to this 
experiment in frontier capitalism was New Bridge Strategies, started by 
Joe Allbaugh, Bush's ex-head of Fema [Federal Emergency Management 
Agency]. It promised to use its top-level political connections to help 
US multinationals land a piece of the action in Iraq. "Getting the 
rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products would be a gold mine," 
one of the company's partners enthused. "One well-stocked 7-Eleven could 
knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country."

Like the prisoners in Guantánamo's love shack, all of Iraq was going to 
be bought off with Pringles and pop culture - that, at least, was the 
Bush administration's idea of a postwar plan.

Ewen Cameron was a psychiatrist who performed CIA-funded experiments on 
the effects of electric shock and sensory deprivation on patients, 
without their knowledge, in the 1950s. When I was researching what he 
did I came across an observation made by one of his colleagues, a 
psychiatrist named Fred Lowy. "The Freudians had developed all these 
subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem," 
he said. "Cameron wanted to drill right through and to hell with the 
layers. But, as we later discovered, the layers are all there is." 
Cameron thought he could blast away all his patients' layers and start 
again; he dreamed of creating brand-new personalities. But his patients 
weren't reborn: they were confused, injured, broken.

Iraq's shock therapists blasted away at the layers too, seeking that 
elusive blank slate on which to create their new model country. They 
found only the piles of rubble that they themselves had created, and 
millions of psychologically and physically shattered people - shattered 
by Saddam, shattered by war, shattered by one another. Bush's in-house 
disaster capitalists didn't wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up. 
Rather than a tabula rasa, purified of history, they found ancient 
feuds, brought to the surface to merge with fresh vendettas from each 
new attack - on a mosque in Karbala, in Samarra, on a market, a 
ministry, a hospital. Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with 
a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

Which, of course, requires more blasting - upping the dosage, holding 
down the button longer, more pain, more bombs, more torture. Former 
deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who had predicted that 
Iraqis would be easily marshalled from A to B, has since concluded that 
the real problem was that the US was too soft. "The humane way in which 
the coalition fought the war," he said, "actually has led to a situation 
where it is more difficult to get people to come together, not less. In 
Germany and Japan [after the second world war], the population was 
exhausted and deeply shocked by what had happened, but in Iraq it's been 
the opposite. A very rapid victory over enemy forces has meant we've not 
had the cowed population we had in Japan and Germany ... The US is 
dealing with an Iraqi population that is un-shocked and un-awed." By 
January 2007, Bush and his advisers were still convinced that they could 
gain control of Iraq with one good "surge". The report on which the 
surge strategy was based aimed for "the successful clearing of central 
Baghdad".

In the 70s, when the corporatist crusade began, it used tactics that 
courts ruled were overtly genocidal: the deliberate erasure of a segment 
of the population. In Iraq, something even more monstrous has happened - 
the erasure not of a segment of the population, but of an entire 
country; Iraq is disappearing, disintegrating. It began, as it often 
does, with the disappearance of women behind veils and doors, then the 
children disappeared from the schools - as of 2006, two-thirds of them 
stayed home. Next came the professionals: doctors, professors, 
entrepreneurs, scientists, pharmacists, judges, lawyers. An estimated 
300 Iraqi academics have been assassinated by death squads since the US 
invasion, including several deans of departments; thousands more have 
fled. Doctors have fared even worse: by February 2007, an estimated 
2,000 had been killed and 12,000 had fled. In November 2006, the UN High 
Commission for Refugees estimated that 3,000 Iraqis were fleeing the 
country every day. By April 2007, the organisation reported that 4 
million people had been forced to leave their homes - roughly one in 
seven Iraqis. Only a few hundred of those refugees had been welcomed 
into the United States.

With Iraqi industry all but collapsed, one of the only local businesses 
booming is kidnapping. Over just three and a half months in early 2006, 
nearly 20,000 people were kidnapped in Iraq. The only time the 
international media pays attention is when a westerner is taken, but the 
vast majority of abductions are Iraqi professionals, grabbed as they 
travel to and from work. Their families either come up with tens of 
thousands in US dollars for the ransom money or identify their bodies at 
the morgue. Torture has also emerged as a thriving industry. Human 
rights groups have documented numerous cases of Iraqi police demanding 
thousands of dollars from the families of prisoners in exchange for a 
halt to torture. It is Iraq's own domestic version of disaster capitalism.

This was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was 
selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world. The 
occupation had begun with cheerful talk of clean slates and fresh 
starts. It didn't take long, however, for the quest for cleanliness to 
slip into talk into "pulling Islamism up from the root" in Sadr City or 
Najaf and removing "the cancer of radical Islam" from Fallujah and 
Ramadi - what was not clean would be scrubbed out by force.

That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other 
people's countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It 
is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their 
past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the 
scorched earth - only then that the dream of total creation morphs into 
a campaign of total destruction.

The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq is the creation of the 
lethally optimistic architects of the war - it was preordained in that 
original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase, "a model for a new 
Middle East". The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology 
that demanded a tabula rasa on which to write its new story. And when no 
such pristine tableau presented itself, the supporter of that ideology 
proceeded to blast and surge and blast again in the hope of reaching 
that promised land.