Iraq: Seeing a Victory

There are no disasters; there are only opportunities. – Dick Cheney

News from the Middle East might seem to suggest that all is not well with American foreign policy. However, if one understands the war on terror as free-market capitalist enterprise rather than as some sort of public or government service to the local natives, then the nightly news broadcasts reveal to us victory upon victory not defeat. In this light, President Bush’s oft misunderstood statement, in May of 2003, of “mission accomplished” can be seen as not only completely accurate but as heralding a new age of riches for the richest that has not been equaled in American history.

As is usual and to be expected, the witless liberal media get the story wrong, mistaking innovative business practice for waste and fraud, grotesquely characterizing superior sales technique as a crime against humanity. Their biased commentary misconstrues both the purpose and the high quality of the work in progress. Measure our government’s achievement by the standards that define a commercial success – maximizing the cost to the consumers of the product, minimizing the risk to the investors – and we discover in the White House and the Pentagon, also in the Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, not a crowd of incompetent fools as so often depicted in the pages of the New York Times, but rather a company of visionary entrepreneurs, worthy of comparison with the class of Americans who built the country’s railroads, mines, and who liberated the Western prairie from the undemocratic buffalo. Hear the message served with every Republican banquet speech – that private interest precedes the public good, that money is good for rich people, bad for poor people – and who can say that the war in Iraq has proved to be anything other than the transformation of a godforsaken desert and dangerous threat to American interests into a defense contractor’s Garden of Eden?

For the friends of the free market operating in Iraq it doesn’t matter who gets killed or why; every day is payday, and if from time to time events superficially appear to take a turn for the worse – another twenty or thirty Arabs annihilated in a mosque, a BBC cameraman lost on the road to the airport – back home in America, with the flags affixed to every pickup and the executive compensation packages firmly in place, the stock prices for our reliably patriotic corporations rise with the smoke from the car bombs exploding in Ramadi and Falluja. Lockheed-Martin up from $52 to $75 between July 2003 and July 2006. Its hated rival, Boeing, up from $36 to $77; ExxonMobil up from $36 to $65; Chevron up from $36 to $66; Fluor up from $34 to $87; and king of all of them, Haliburton up from $22 to $74. From the proper perspective – the one extensively covered by the conservative media – the homeland’s economy is booming and everybody who is somebody is getting richer.

See our nation’s foreign policy as a juggernaut to keep the little nations of the developing world in their proper places – the stone age for naughty ones and the bronze age for obedient ones – never to rise to the level of near-potential competitor with our most esteemed multinationals, and more of our victories and economic successes become clearer.

Iraq, for example, in 1989, was generally the most modern, secular, cosmopolitan Arab economy and society on Earth. It was inhabited by a diverse population living in peaceful prosperity with each other. It enjoyed an ancient, extensive agriculture with a complex system of canals and waterways and pipelines irrigating vast fields of grain, fruits, and vegetables and supplying growing metropolitan areas with ample free potable water. Education was universal and free to all. Free health care offering the most modern treatments and ample medicines was provided to every citizen. Gasoline cost a nickel a gallon. Its great cities were lit up with neon lights thanks to inexpensive power supplied by one of the most extensive electrical grids in the Middle East. Commerce of many kinds was carried on 24 hours a day protected by the most powerful of Arab military establishments. All of this and more thanks to a state owned oil corporation that carefully managed the nation’s most valuable national resource for the good of most Iraqis. Politically it was one of the very few Arab nations who’s government was not run by a despotic monarchy – there were even elections both local and national.

In short, there was much about Iraq in 1989 to trouble American “interests” – that is to say, the richest and most powerful people living in America. Iraq had been a staunch ally of the West, particularly to America and the UK, for over twenty years, nonetheless, the excessive prosperity and social services spending there was only barely tolerated. Unfortunately, it gave a message of hope to millions throughout the Middle East that their everyday lives could be better. But all this bad news for American interests improved as the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, became more aggressive, perhaps coaxed by covert American advice. He began providing money for the families of Arabs and Palestinians who willingly died fighting against the Zionist state of Israel. He attempted a hostile take-over of Kuwait’s oil market that was thwarted by an international consortium organized by American interests (and paid for with other people’s money). Finally, in spite of a decade of harsh trade restrictions and other humiliating sanctions enforced against Iraq and paid for by American taxpayer dollars, in 2000, Saddam announced his plans to open his own oil borse where buyers and sellers of oil could transact in euros rather than petrodollars, furthermore, Iraq henceforth would only sell its oil for euros, an act that pointed an economic dagger directly at the soft, white financial throats of American interests. And so, his fate and that of the Iraqi people was sealed. Their story would become an example to all those in the developing world who might dream of one day rising above their station in life.

Today, Iraq is a near stone age economy. Gasoline costs nearly 100 times as much as it did in 1989 and is sold in bottles on the black market by roadside vendors. The electrical grid is destroyed with little power available on a sporadic basis. The dams and waterways and safe water supply are gone. The modern sewage disposal system of the cities is destroyed. Many schools and universities are barracks for American troops. Hospitals are understaffed, mostly unfunded, and perpetually short of medicines and supplies. The Iraqi farmers are forced by law to buy expensive seed, fertilizers, and equipment from American corporations or risk losing their farms. Unemployment is above 50% in many areas. Civil war atrocities and periodic revenge attacks by American military forces are commonplace. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens are rounded up wholesale to be imprisoned and tortured or simply disappear. Billions of dollars of oil revenue is missing and cannot be accounted for. The state owned oil corporation is defunct so that now, American and British oil corporations are in control of an unaudited flow from wellhead to market generating huge profits that no longer must be shared in the form of social services to the ordinary Iraqi citizens. In short, American interests have every reason to be ecstatic over the windfall they gained – through no risk to themselves in either blood or treasure – and which will continue to amass to them for the foreseeable future without any operating cost assessed to them or ongoing investment required of them.

I am deeply grateful to Lewis Lapham (Harper’s, Sept. 2006) for most of the phrasing I borrowed from him in the first three paragraphs. He put into words my thoughts so beautifully.