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Baghdad year zero What a strange title? was my first thought about this article. But as I started to read it gets immediately clear. Poor Iraq got so many suffering from the war and after war reincarnation so its life could be hardily called year zero, meaning that the life here seamed as its just had began exactly from zero.
The essay Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon Utopia, by Naomi Klein is telling us about the economical air which nowadays breathing hall Iraq nation. In searching of the reconstruction boom that is so much heard about, the author found up only the crane, that wasnt rebuilding anything not one of the bombed-out government buildings that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines The crane was hoisting a great billboard to the top of a three-story building, which was saying: Sunbulah: honey 100 % natural, made in Saudi Arabia. From the words of the person who saw the real situation we can judge a post war plan of the Bush Administration. What was the highest point of it? Adherents of Bush's theory called Iraq a huge pot of honey thats attracting a lot of flies, and the idea of the plan was to lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies. And under the honey we should understand not just no-bid contracts and Iraq's famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Also the paper says greatly about L. Paul Bremer, a man who used an appropriate advantage of the unique opportunity by unleashing his shock therapy pushing through more wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank, describes Bremer's reforms as an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet world. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market. Then Naomi Klein admit the point of view of the British historian Dilip Hiro, whos work Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi freedom and after, exiles the Iraqi pushing for the invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. So that appeared pragmatists and Year Zero camp.
Firsts favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate entourage, securing access to oil, and slowly introducing free-market reforms. The Year Zero camp believed that Iraq was so contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch. Pragmatics was presented by Iraq Allawi and Year Zeros side was presented by Ahmad Chalabi. The pragmatists position was to: fix the infrastructure, hold quick and dirty elections, leave the shock therapy to the International Monetary Fund, and concentrate on securing U. S. military bases on the model of the Philippines.
On the other side were people who lauded Bremer's sweeping reforms as some of the most enlightened and inviting tax and investment laws in the free world. To the true believers in the White House, General Garners plans for postwar Iraq seemed hopelessly unambitious. Why settle for a mere coaling station when you can have a model free market? Why settle for the Philippines when you can have a beacon unto the world? The main point of them was privatization. But the history showed that they had only increased their political capital.
On May 9, Bush proposed the establishment of a U. S. -Middle East free trade area within a decade; three days later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to replace Jay Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks. The message was unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to the believers. So, as the author made her own investigation in this paper get clear that Washingtons plan had not materialized. There was, as yet, no McDonalds or Wal-Mart in Baghdad, and even the sales of state factories, announced so confidently nine months earlier, had not implement.
The author had made two great meetings: one with Communications Minister Haider al-Abadi and the other with minister of Industry Mohamad Topic. Both sad the policy of Mr. Bremer is even illegal. Also they told about a meeting never reported in the press that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the twenty-five members of Iraq's Governing Council as well as the twenty-five interim ministers decided unanimously that they would not participate in the privatization of Iraq's state-owned companies or of its publicly owned infrastructure. The physical risks of doing business in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out of control.
This, once again, was not part of the original plan. When Bremer first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he was able to walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During his first four months on the job, 109 U. S. soldiers were killed and 570 were wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer's shock therapy had taken effect, the number of U.
S. casualties almost doubled, with 195 soldiers killed and 1, 633 wounded. There are many in Iraq who argues that these events are connected that Bremer's reforms were the single largest factor leading to the rise of armed resistance. The Financial Times has declared Iraq the most dangerous place in the world in which to do business. Its quite an accomplishment: 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. The free market will no doubt come to Iraq, but the neoconservative dream of transforming the country into a free-market utopia has already died, a casualty of a greater dream second term for George W.
Bush. Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder. Whatever youre seeing, its not as bad as it appears.
You just need to accept that on faith. Bibliography Klein, Naomi Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon Utopia. Harpers Magazine, September 2004.
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