What
went wrong in Iraq? Wrong
answer By Michael Schwartz
The media love anniversaries, the grimmer
the better. On the third anniversary of the
invasion of Iraq, US newspapers and TV news were
filled to the brim with retrospectives on the
origins of the Iraq war, reassessments of how it
was conducted by the Bush administration and
reconsiderations of the current
quagmire-cum-civil-war in that country.
An
amazing aspect of this sort of heavy coverage of
events past is the degree of consensus that
quickly develops among all mainstream outlets on
certain fundamental (and fundamentally
controversial) issues. For example, the question
of "what went wrong" in Iraq is now almost
universally answered as follows:
The
invasion was initially successful, but the plan
for the peace was faulty. Bush administration
officials misestimated the amount of resistance
they would find in the wake of Baghdad's fall.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian
officials in the
Pentagon ignored military
warnings and did not deploy sufficient soldiers to
handle this initial resistance. As a result, the
occupation was unable to quell the rebellion when
it was small.
This first blunder allowed
what was at best a modest insurgency to grow to
formidable proportions, at which point occupation
officials committed a second disastrous blunder,
dismantling the Iraqi army, which otherwise could
have been deployed to smash the rebellion.
Bottom line: former army chief of staff
General Eric Shinseki was right. If the US had
deployed the several hundred thousand troops that
he insisted were needed to lock down the country
(instead of hustling him into retirement), then
the war would have been short and sweet, and the
US would now be well on its way both to victory
and withdrawal.
This, I think, is a fair
summary of the thinking on Iraq currently dominant
in the mainstream media and, because it ignores
the fundamental cause of the war-after-the-war -
the American attempt to neo-liberalize Iraq - it
is also profoundly wrong.
A hurricane
of privatization The claim that the war has
an economic foundation may sound strange in the
context of American media coverage, because it is
so unfamiliar. So let me begin by agreeing with
two key points in the currently fashionable media
analysis: the initial attack on Saddam Hussein's
regime was a success and there was a moment - just
after the fall of Baghdad - when the Bush
administration might have avoided triggering a
formidable armed resistance. The war and
proto-civil war of the current moment were not the
inevitable result of the invasion, but of Bush
administration actions taken afterwards.
We do not remember much of this now, but
just after Saddam was toppled the American victors
announced that a sweeping reform of Iraqi society
would take place. The only part of this still much
mentioned today - the now widely regretted
dismantling of the Iraqi military - was but one
aspect of a far larger effort to dismantle the
entire Ba'athist state apparatus, most notably the
government-owned factories and other enterprises
that constituted just about 40% of the Iraqi
economy. This process of dismantling included
attempts, still ongoing, to remove various food,
product and fuel subsidies that guaranteed
low-income Iraqis basic staples, even when they
had no gainful employment.
Without going
into the tortured details (forcefully described at
the time by Naomi Klein in an indispensable
Harper's magazine article), this neo-liberal
"shock treatment" was adapted from programs
undertaken by the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank all around the globe in
the 1990s, including those that immiserated Russia
after the USSR collapsed and that helped to
bankrupt Argentina.
Because the
privatizers of the Bush administration were,
however, in control of a largely prostrate and
conquered country, the Iraqi reforms were enacted
more swiftly and in a far more draconian manner
than anywhere else on the planet.
Within
six months, for example, the American occupation
government, the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), had promulgated all manner of laws designed
to privatize everything in Iraq except established
oil reserves. (New oil discoveries, however, were
to be privatized.) All restrictions were also
taken off foreign corporations intent on buying
full control of Iraqi enterprises; nor were
demands to be made of those companies to reinvest
any of their profits in Iraq.
At the same
time, state-owned enterprises were to be
demobilized and sidelined. They were to be
prevented from participating either in repairing
facilities damaged during the invasion (or
degraded by the decade of sanctions that preceded
it) or in any of the initially ambitious
reconstruction projects the US commissioned.
This policy was so strict that even
state-owned enterprises with specific expertise in
Iraqi electrical, sanitation and water
purification systems - not to speak of Iraq's
massive cement industry - were forbidden from
obtaining subcontracts from the multinational
corporations placed in charge of rejuvenating the
country's infrastructure.
The elimination
of all protections for local commerce quickly
threw the market wide open to large multinational
marketing companies. This resulted in an immediate
surge of sales to the Iraqi middle class of
previously unobtainable goods such as air
conditioners, cell phones and all manner of
electronic devices. Though few remember this
today, many American journalists reported the
influx of such goods as an early sign of coming
prosperity - and of how successful an economy
could begin to be once freed from the oppressive
binds of state control and state ownership.
As it happened, though, this surge did not
last into the winter of 2003-4. The problem, it
turned out, was that the CPA-induced economic
"opening" to multinational competition
administered a series of death blows to locally
based enterprises. First of all, shops selling any
item that could be imported by foreign companies
found themselves in the unenviable position of
competing with lower-priced goods that the
multinationals could either provide at such prices
or afford to sell at a loss to capture the market
(ie, run the local competition out of business).
So a depression swept through small business in
Iraq, leaving neighborhoods without their normal
complement of shops and without the income that
they plowed back into communities.
Second,
the demobilization of the army and the sidelining
of state enterprises resulted in an almost
immediate unemployment crisis. Even though many
state enterprises continued to pay employees (for
doing nothing) and the Coalition Provisional
Authority belatedly decided to pay Saddam's former
soldiers (also for doing nothing), this money did
not regularly reach the targeted groups.
The fragmentary administration set up by
the occupation was monumentally inefficient at
delivering any services, including paychecks, and
significant sums were evidently simply gobbled up
by increasingly corrupt remnants of the Ba'athist
administrative apparatus. As a result, millions of
unemployed workers and soldiers, lacking the money
to feed their families, also lacked the money to
support local merchants.
These depressed
neighborhoods became incubators for ferocious
criminal gangs, who sought to redress their own
economic hardship by looting public buildings and
private dwellings of anything that might yield a
return on the black (or export) market. Looting,
which began with the fall of the government,
became a permanent feature of Iraqi urban life
once the occupation dismantled the Iraqi police
force.
As time passed without the
establishment of effective law enforcement,
criminality became organized and systematic,
targeting professionals and shopkeepers who had
substantial assets or retained incomes; kidnapping
for ransom became a regular fact of life for
prosperous Iraqis.
As this crisis
deepened, multinational corporations found they
had sold just about all the appliances the market
could bear and were no longer making sufficient
profits to continue their marketing efforts in
much of Iraq. So they simply withdrew from
now-unprofitable local markets, leaving
communities already sprinkled with the empty shops
of bankrupt local merchants bereft of needed
products and services.
Those who still had
incomes found it increasingly difficult to obtain
needed resources. A reverse multiplier effect
began to take hold as Iraqis who remained
prosperous were forced to shop, work or live
outside their former communities, only depleting
and depressing them further. Unemployment rates
quickly exceeded 25% in many communities, and
today - as this process reaches its third
anniversary - nationwide unemployment estimates
range from a depression-level 30% to a staggering
60%, depending on the source you consult.
A response of savage
repression This economic debacle affected
different parts of the country with differing
degrees of severity. Containing a large proportion
of the government apparatus and the commerce of
the country, Baghdad, the capital, was hit with
catastrophic force. Previously favored Sunni
cities outside Baghdad, where the largest
proportion of state enterprises were located, were
similarly devastated. In addition, it was from
these communities that the bulk of demobilized
government employees had been drawn.
The
Shi'ite cities in the south were strongly
affected, but not as profoundly as the "Sunni
triangle". After 12 years of post-Gulf-War-I
autonomy under the Anglo-American "no-fly zone",
the Kurds were largely shielded from the economic
destruction. In effect, their isolation from the
Iraqi economy now insulated them as well from the
neo-liberal depression wrought by the US
occupation.
Naturally, then, the
discontent was most ferocious in Sunni areas,
substantial in Shi'ite areas and relatively mild
in the Kurdish ones. By the fall of 2003, as anger
mounted, so did the protests, with the largest and
most insistent coming from Sunni cities and the
Sunni areas of Baghdad. These protests were made
more pronounced by the residual loyalty many
Sunnis held for the Saddam regime and their
greater sense of violation from the invasion.
At first, many of the protests were
peaceful, focusing either on local economic
issues, or on general conditions that were
worsening, not improving, after months of
occupation. Typically, people demanded services
and jobs from the CPA. It is now lost to history,
but the run-up to the ferocious first battle of
Fallujah in April, 2004 - triggered by the
mutilation of four private security contractors -
actually began a full year earlier when American
troops fired on a peaceful protest organized
around a host of local issues, killing 13 Iraqi
civilians. It was exactly this sort of ferocious
reaction to peaceful protest that made the US
military such a factor in the stoking of what
would become an ongoing rebellion.
In
fact, in 2003, the occupation response to protests
was forceful, almost gleeful, repression. Top
officials of the CPA and the US military command
considered these demonstrations, peaceful or not,
the most tangible signs of ongoing Ba'athist
attempts to facilitate a future return to power.
They therefore applied the occupation's iron heel
on the theory that forceful suppression would soon
defeat or demoralize any "dead-enders" intent on
restoring the old regime.
Protests were
met with arrests, beatings, and - in any
circumstances deemed dangerous to US troops -
overwhelming, often lethal military force. Home
invasions of people suspected of anti-occupation
attitudes or activities became commonplace,
resulting in thousands of arrests and numerous
firefights.
Detention and torture in Abu
Ghraib and other American-controlled prisons were
just one facet of this larger strategy, fueled by
official pressure - once a low-level rebellion
boiled up - to get quick information for further
harsh, repressive strikes. In general, the Iraqi
population came to understand that dissent of
whatever sort would be met by savage repression.
This policy might have worked if, as Bush
administration officials regularly claimed, the
resistance had indeed been nothing but remnants of
the Saddam regime, thirsting for a return to
power. It might even have worked - or at least
worked somewhat better - if the growing resistance
had rested only on the anger people felt about the
occupation of their homeland by an alien army. In
these circumstances, protesters might have decided
to bide their time in the face of overwhelming
demonstrations of force.
It was, however,
an unworkable policy in the face of a deepening
disaster caused by the CPA's own economic nostrums
which, by generating new problems, kept recruiting
new protesters (and deepening the anger of
existing rebels). In this context, the CPA's
heavy-handed responses were like oil to the
flames. The rear guard of a deposed regime was a
tiny part of their problem when protest and
rebellion were fundamentally being fueled by a
rapidly growing economic depression endangering
the livelihoods of a majority of the Iraqi
population.
In such circumstances, each
act of repression added the provocation of
brutality, false arrest, torture and murder to the
economic crimes that triggered the protests to
begin with. And each act of repression convinced
more Iraqis that peaceful protest would not work;
that, if they were going to save their lives and
those of their families, a more aggressive,
belligerent approach would be necessary.
Ignoring eternal verities In
this context, the American policy of repression
backfired royally, stoking an ever angrier, more
violent, more widespread, better supported
resistance. Eventually, in both Sunni and Shi'ite
areas, major uprisings occurred and, in the Sunni
cities, these developed into more-or-less
continuous warfare that by November resulted in
about 700 small-scale military engagements per
week. Could the US have suppressed even this
economically driven rebellion, had it flooded the
country with American troops (as Shinseki
recommended) and kept the Hussein army more or
less intact, using it - as Saddam had - to
suppress growing discontent? Perhaps, but as long
as American administrators were intent on
privatizing the country, this too might have
backfired.
As a start, the American Army
was not trained or prepared to act as the sort of
local police force that might have contained
protests generated by economic discontent. Even
Shinseki's estimates rested on the existence of a
viable Iraqi military to maintain law and order.
Yet, retaining an army after overthrowing a
government and rearranging its economic
foundations is quite a different feat from
retaining one after a coup d'etat that changes
little except the leadership.
CPA
officials rightly feared major resistance from all
the forces that served, and were served by, the
old system, including the military, which in the
Iraqi case benefited from government-controlled
enterprises as much as any other part of the
establishment.
Certainly, an alien army
entered Iraq, destroyed that country's
sovereignty, and stoked nationalist resentments.
But major media outlets in this country have lost
track of the fact that what also entered Iraq was
an American administration wedded at home and
abroad to a fierce, unbending, and alien set of
economic ideas.
By focusing attention only
on the lack of US (and Iraqi) military power
brought to bear in the early days after the fall
of Baghdad, they ignore some of the deeper reasons
why many Iraqis were willing to confront a
formidable military machine with only small arms
and their own wits. They ignore - and cause the
American public to ignore - the fact that there
was little resistance just after the fall of
Baghdad and that it expanded as the economy
declined and repression set in. They ignore the
eternal verity that the willingness to fight and
die is regularly animated by the conviction that
otherwise things will only get worse.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of
Sociology and Faculty Director of the
Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony
Brook University, has written extensively on
popular protest and insurgency, and on American
business and government dynamics. His books
include Radical Protest and Social Structure,
and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail
address is Ms42@optonline.net.
