SimBaghdad

In a fascinating article in the September issue of Harper's Magazine, Naomi Klein refutes the common wisdom that the Bush administration didn't have a plan for post-war Iraq. In fact, she claims the plan all along was to use the blank slate of an occupied Iraq to play a giant game of SimCity based on neo-conservative econo-political ideology, i.e. free-market capitalism and privatization unhindered by taxes, tariffs, regulation, or any other state influence. Unfortunately I can't fully agree with her conclusion that "in trying to design the best place in the world to do business, the neocons have managed to create the worst, the most eloquent indictment yet of the guiding logic behind deregulated free markets." I don't think (based on the evidence presented in the article) that their failure is necessarily due to faulty principles, but more to gross incompetence and self-defeating blind spots. Importing concrete blast walls for $1000 when they could be made locally for $100 does not seem to follow from any capitalist notion; it's either sheer ignorance and mismanagement, or some sort of inverted xenophobia, a belief that putting any money into the hands of Iraqis must be a bad thing. Still, even if you discount her apparent biases against capitalism (which she reduces to "greed is good") and globalization (her caricaturized references to the "men in dark blue suits" from the IMF), it's a compelling and tragic story of the failed reconstruction of Iraq.