The Cash Cow
Aug 26th, 2007 at 12:55 am by Susie
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi with a remarkable piece on the great Iraq war swindle. Warning: after you read it, you’ll most likely want to scream or break something:
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.
iSusie, I remember you said this at least a couple of years ago, and I remember saying it myself: What the Bush administration does can best be understood not as policies and politics but as rape and pillage.
Nice to see an American news outlet run an article about the Incredible Iraq Contracting Magic Show and the Disappearing Bales of Hundreds Effect. NPR gave the same story literally minutes on — was it All Things Considered? — a couple of months ago, too. And loud cries of “scoop, scoop” for them both, but where are the rest of Our Only Media™?
More to the point, the London Review of Books ran this back in July ‘05, and where were America’s Professional Journalists™ then? (Well, it was “Shark Week.” I can guess.)
Professional Journalism™ — gotta love it! So nice and quiet!
With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
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