(Hugely updated below)

Hmmm:

But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.

By the time Bremer departed in June 2004, Iraq was in a precarious state. The Iraqi army, which had been dissolved and refashioned by the CPA, was one-third the size he had pledged it would be. Seventy percent of police officers had not been screened or trained. Electricity generation was far below what Bremer had promised to achieve. And Iraq’s interim government had been selected not by elections but by Americans. Divisive issues were to be resolved later on, increasing the chances that tension over those matters would fuel civil strife.

To recruit the people he wanted, O’Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

Smith said O’Beirne once pointed to a young man’s résumé and pronounced him “an ideal candidate.” His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.

O’Beirne, a former Army officer who is married to prominent conservative commentator Kate O’Beirne, did not respond to requests for comment.

Hmm

[A]s he prepared to leave Iraq, Mr. Bremer listed reduced tax rates, reduced tariffs and the liberalization of foreign-investment laws as among his major accomplishments. Insurgents are blowing up pipelines and police stations, geysers of sewage are erupting from the streets, and the electricity is off most of the time — but we’ve given Iraq the gift of supply-side economics.

If the occupiers often seemed oblivious to reality, one reason was that many jobs at the C.P.A. went to people whose qualifications seemed to lie mainly in their personal and political connections — people like Simone Ledeen, whose father, Michael Ledeen, a prominent neoconservative, told a forum that “the level of casualties is secondary” because “we are a warlike people” and “we love war.”

Still, given Mr. Bremer’s economic focus, you might at least have expected his top aide for private-sector development to be an expert on privatization and liberalization in such countries as Russia or Argentina [some ‘expertise’ that turned out to be, Paul; but, yes, in principle better an expert or even an ‘expert’ than a hack -Retardo]. But the job initially went to Thomas Foley, a Connecticut businessman and Republican fund-raiser with no obviously relevant expertise. In March, Michael Fleischer, a New Jersey businessman, took over. Yes, he’s Ari Fleischer’s brother. Mr. Fleischer told The Chicago Tribune that part of his job was educating Iraqi businessmen: “The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review.”

Uhuh:

And when it comes to oil, the Plan leaves nothing to chance—or to the Iraqis. Beginning on page 73, the secret drafters emphasized that Iraq would have to “privatize” (i.e., sell off) its “oil and supporting industries.” The Plan makes it clear that—even if we didn’t go in for the oil—we certainly won’t leave without it.

If the Economy Plan reads like a Christmas wishlist drafted by U.S. corporate lobbyists, that’s because it was.

From slashing taxes to wiping away Iraq’s tariffs (taxes on imports of U.S. and other foreign goods), the package carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the small, soft hands of Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the capo di capi of the lobbyist army of the right. In Washington every Wednesday, he hosts a pow-wow of big business political operatives and right-wing muscle groups—including the Christian Coalition and National Rifle Association—where Norquist quarterbacks their media and legislative offensive for the week.

Once registered as a lobbyist for Microsoft and American Express, Norquist today directs Americans for Tax Reform, a kind of trade union for billionaires unnamed, pushing a regressive “flat tax” scheme.

Acting on a tip, I dropped by the super-lobbyist’s L-Street office. Below a huge framed poster of his idol (“NIXON— NOW MORE THAN EVER”), Norquist could not wait to boast of moving freely at the Treasury, Defense and State Departments, and, in the White House, shaping the post-conquest economic plans—from taxes to tariffs to the “intellectual property rights” that I pointed to in the Plan.

Uhhh:

Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in “rebuilding Iraqâ€? trade shows, in Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman. The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as “a capitalist dream,â€? and a flurry of new consulting firms were launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well-connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign manager. “Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold mine,â€? one of the company’s partners enthused. “One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.â€?

Gavin adds: Catch that? A 7-11 could knock out 30 Iraqi-owned stores. As in, a medium-large, American-owned corporation could with one new retail outlet knock out and eliminate 30 locally-owned Iraqi businesses, and glad to see them go. Is there any frisson here at all, or just an obvious and petty plan, which (pardon me for going all Whoopdy-Quaker here) stinks, and I mean stinks (STINKS), unto God in heaven? (/quaker)

Actually, don’t pardon me.

I submit that Joe Allbaugh (and most if not all of the Joe Allbaughs) don’t know the difference among any such things, and, failing not-knowing, know not to think toward the difference.

[Gav out]

Soon there were rumors that a McDonald’s would be opening up in downtown Baghdad, funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side, HSBC would have branches all over the country, Citigroup was preparing to offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil, and the bell was going to ring on a New York‒style stock exchange in Baghdad any day.

In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America’s hands. This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.

Same as it ever was (long excerpt, but it has to be to set up the pay-off at its conclusion):

The imperialism of the late nineteenth century has been much discussed by historians. It had many causes, not all of them political. Explorers were eager to chart the Dark Continent and often used patriotic motives as an excuse for purely academic curiosity. Christian missionaries wished to rescue the Africans from paganism. Philanthropists wished to end the Arab slave trade. Empire became a demagogic cry, if only to divert the working classes from their economic and social grievances at home.

On a more practical basis, colonies were supposed to offer profitable markets as they had done in the eighteenth century. More than this, they were supposed to offer profitable openings for investment. According to an ingenious view, first propounded by the English economist J A Hobson, and then taken up by Lenin, the yield on capital was diminishing at home as industries became fully developed and production outstripped demand. Investment in the undeveloped colonies provided what Lenin called ‘super-profit’. Hence the motive behind imperial expansion was the old search for wealth.

This view has been sharply discredited in recent years. It has been clearly shown for instance, that the direct connection between overseas investment and the new imperialism, as laid down by Hobson and Lenin, has been grossly exaggerated. British overseas investment certainly increased greatly at this time, but most of it went to South America, the United States and other independent countries, not to the newly-acquired African colonies. Few of these colonies indeed ‘paid’ the countries which acquired them.

The annual cost to Germany of administering the Cameroons was five times as great as her total trade with the colony, and much the same applied to other countries. Nor is there any clear evidence that the yield from colonial investment was higher than that from investment at home. On the contrary, the dabbler in overseas shares was far likelier to lose his money. In almost every case, European countries spent a great deal of money in acquiring colonies which proved of little economic value.

These arguments, though true, are also irrelevant. They treat European countries as communities in which policies were conducted for the benefit of all, much as companies are conducted, or supposed to be, for the benefit of the shareholders. This was not so. Benefit went to the few who determined policy and shaped public opinion; it was of no concern to them that this was achieved at great loss to the many. James Thurber, the American comic artist, drew extremely ugly women. When told that his women were not attractive, he replied: ‘They are to my men.’ Similarly, when we are told that imperialism was not profitable, we can reply ‘It was to the imperialists.’ The humble investor might lose his money, but the mighty company promoter did not go away empty-handed even if the company he promoted went bankrupt.

Overseas railways often did not pay those who invested money in them, but they paid those who built them and those who peddled the shares. The Boer war cost the British taxpayer a great deal of money, but South Africa also produced many millionaires. In Edwardian times these millionaires occupied most of the houses in Park Lane. Clearly, imperialism brought economic gain to some people, if not to the imaginary national community, and the lucky few could hire journalists and historians to bamboozle the many.

Economic imperialism was a striking example of conspicuous waste, the doctrine laid down by Thorstein Veblen. According to Veblen, capitalism needs a steady increase in expenditure to keep going, and the great problem is to find new excuses for spending money. Imperialism was a splendid way of doing it. If some great nobleman had offered to stay at home instead of becoming Viceroy of India on condition that he was given a rise in the peerage and 200,000 [pounds sterling] this would have been an excellent bargain for the British taxpayer. But, of course, no one considered it, and the nobleman duly went to India. James Mill said early in the nineteenth century that the Empire was a system of out relief for the British aristocracy. By the end of the century it had become a system of out relief for British capitalists also.

Update: See also Billmon. (Blarg! I consciously did this post in the Billmon style of several dovetailed quotations preceding a concluding quote that establishes historical context or analogy. What does Billmon do with the same story? Write a post in the traditional blog style. And it’s still better than mine!)

Another Update: I should pay better attention; more to the point, I should refresh Atrios’s page when I start writing shit. He links to this post by Tristero which in turn links to this post by Digby. Good stuff all around. Atrios also links to Matthew Yglesias whose interesting take underlines the fact that he’s done a complete about-face on Iraq. Yglesias catches Jonathan Chait arguing that it’s only because of Bush’s incompetence that the Iraq War turned out as it did. Actually, Iraq was doomed from the start, and though Bush’s ideological and incompetent hacks made a worse mess than anyone had thought possible, it’s still a fact that Hurricane ‘Iraqi Freedom’ — the invasion itself — is the real root cause of the mess, and would still be no matter the subsequent occupiers, “liberal” or, as it turned out, reactionary glibertarian fuckfaces. Chait, moron that he is, thinks technocrat centrist occupiers would have set Iraq right. Actually, the war and occupation itself made inevitable the gigantic fuck-up, no matter the character or skill of the warmonger or the occupier (which, as it happened, just made things go from awesomely bad to much much worse).

Tony Judt has Chait’s number:

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at ‘anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in’ (New York Times, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he ‘didn’t realise’(!) how detrimental American actions would be to ‘the struggle’ but insists even so that anyone who won’t stand up to ‘Global Jihad’ just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq War of failing ‘to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously’. The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.’

Yglesias says:

Last, a word about the stakes. Chait writes that in this dispute “At stake is nothing less than who gets to direct the party’s foreign policy.” I’m not super-concerned about personnel as such. Indeed, I obviously have no standing to argue that nobody who supported the war should be listened to about anything in the future. My concern is about policies. The implication of the “dodger” argument is that, in the future, when we have a competent Democratic administration it makes sense to try and spread democracy by toppling hostile entrenched dictatorships, occupying their territory, and rebuilding them as liberal democracies. This, to my mind, would be a disaster.

Heh Indeed. Until the doctrine of pre-emptive war and the bigoted assumption that other nations’ sovereignty and self-determination starts and stops at our leisure is taken away from the neoconservative and “neoconservative-lite’ foriegn policy elites, more messes like Iraq will happen.

But I dissent slightly from Yglesias’s distinction between policy and personel. From the same Taylor essay as quoted above, before thrashing the looters and overlords analogous to our Rethuglican occupiers of Iraq, Taylor let loose on those analogous to our benevolent imperial Technocrat Centrists:

The virtuous administrators of the nineteenth-century Indian Civil Service regarded the Indians as inferior. Indians took bribes. They put the interest of their family before that of the state. They neglected the drains. They worshipped many gods of the most peculiar sort. The British administrators have been described by an admirer as Platonic Guardians. To a less enthusiastic eye they appear to be complacent prigs. After all, if they were so keen on improvement, there was plenty to improve in their own country without interfering in the affairs of a distant civilization which had done them no harm.

The Indian Civil Service provided the richest outlet for the products of the public-school system which was now flourishing in England. These so-called public schools — actually expensive private schools — grew up in order to provide the sons of the gentry and the wealthy middle classes with what previously had been an aristocratic education. Those who passed through the public schools were known as ‘gentlemen’. Unfortunately, having acquired a gentleman’s culture and tastes, they also needed a gentleman’s income. Where were they to acquire it? Certainly not by trade or industry, in which most English people made their livelihood.

The Indian Civil Service was the prefect answer. Its members, qualified mainly by their command of Latin and Greek, were safely immune from any taint of trade. They felt that they were discharging a religious mission. At the same time, they led the life of gentlemen, with households of fifteen to twenty native servants. Retiring at an early age on a high pension, they returned to gentlemanly ease in England with their sons following the same careers.

It is thus easy to decide who benefited from the Indian Empire. Its administration helped to perpetuate the English class system throughout the nineteenth century. The benefit for British society is less obvious. The public schools were conservative institutions. Their outlook sapped the spirit of enterprise and invention that had carried Great Britian forward during the Industrial Revolution

The analogy here is more tenative with some aspects, but spot-on with others — specifically with regard to institutional groupthink. Chait is part of an elite that thinks the same way: wingnutty. And of course the way they think is not the way we think, as even he admits:

The liberal wing of the party has long been aware that although Democratic voters are generally dovish, the party’s foreign policy elite is fairly hawkish. Liberals, understandably, want to depose that hawkish elite and replace it with a dovish one. Flynt Leverett, a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry, complained that “Democrats have fallen into a ‘soft neoconservatism’ that has dulled the party’s voice on foreign policy.” John Tirman, in his book, “100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World,” writes, “When I see a liberal hawk, I smell a rat.”

That’s right, and Chait is a hawk who will not give up his most precious stance of pre-emptive warwarwar. So he tries to argue that he should be allowed to keep said stance and still be allowed into the Democratic aviary and, what’s more, the stance is good for everyone. Chait is an ‘expert’; his opinion is not changing, so it follows (to him) that ours must. But then he’s a hawk, who can only think like a hawk. We are another species entirely. Thus the impasse. No pre-emptive war and empire for us, thanks — look at what the results of it are. The sooner that Chait and fellow hawks understand that the rules have changed, and that they can be Liberals or “pre-emptive warriors’ but not both, the better. As for me, I think they join the wingnuts, with whose foriegn policy sentiments they naturally sympathize.