Friday, October 15, 2004
Naomi Klein Explains It All
Here is another highly recommended article that appeared in Harper's last month. I have long leaned toward the opinion that all military conflicts have some underlying economic basis. Nation states like corporations act in their own self-interest, or at least try to. Countries do not really go to war for altruistic reasons. In order to get people to actually fight and die they will not hesitate to cast the decision to go to war in the most noble light possible but leaders do not really send their nation's sons and daughters to die in a foreign land in order to release its inhabitants from misery. Never have, never will. Participation in a war needs to "serve" a nation's "interests". This does not mean that wars are never justified, it just means that we need to look past the propaganda used to sell a war to its underlying economic justifications. Why do I bring this up? Now that all of the original justifications for the Iraq war have been thoroughly discredited the one that Bush supporters are hanging there hat on is, "Saddam was a bad guy who was torturing and killing his own people." I will certainly agree that he was a bad guy but he had been a bad guy for a very long time and he certainly has a lot of bad guy company among the world's leaders. I am not a child and don't like to be treated like one. So why did we really go to war?
Some have said that the Iraq war is all about oil. This is way overstated, it is not just about oil, but it most certainly is about commerce. Klein's take on the neo-cons' war has the ring of truth to it for me. She lays out a very good case for how the neo-conervative's blind faith in their economic dogma led them into the disaster of Iraq.
Read this article (especially you, Phil).
Here is a little teaser:
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
Here is another highly recommended article that appeared in Harper's last month. I have long leaned toward the opinion that all military conflicts have some underlying economic basis. Nation states like corporations act in their own self-interest, or at least try to. Countries do not really go to war for altruistic reasons. In order to get people to actually fight and die they will not hesitate to cast the decision to go to war in the most noble light possible but leaders do not really send their nation's sons and daughters to die in a foreign land in order to release its inhabitants from misery. Never have, never will. Participation in a war needs to "serve" a nation's "interests". This does not mean that wars are never justified, it just means that we need to look past the propaganda used to sell a war to its underlying economic justifications. Why do I bring this up? Now that all of the original justifications for the Iraq war have been thoroughly discredited the one that Bush supporters are hanging there hat on is, "Saddam was a bad guy who was torturing and killing his own people." I will certainly agree that he was a bad guy but he had been a bad guy for a very long time and he certainly has a lot of bad guy company among the world's leaders. I am not a child and don't like to be treated like one. So why did we really go to war?
Some have said that the Iraq war is all about oil. This is way overstated, it is not just about oil, but it most certainly is about commerce. Klein's take on the neo-cons' war has the ring of truth to it for me. She lays out a very good case for how the neo-conervative's blind faith in their economic dogma led them into the disaster of Iraq.
Read this article (especially you, Phil).
Here is a little teaser:
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.
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