Shock And Surge  

Michael Weiss at Slate has a roundup of articles on the now doomed Iraq oil law - "Oil Over but the Shoutin'". Looks like they aren't going to hand over the oil quietly - I guess the next move is put the pressure on to break up the country into 3 more easily intimidated pieces or start "persuading" some of the legislators out of hours...

Cyberspace judges the all-but-kaput Iraqi oil law as the final indicator that political reconciliation in Iraq is impossible.

Oil Over but the Shoutin': Once cited as a major benchmark for political compromise, Iraq's drafted "oil law," which would have controlled the management of the nation's oil fields and determined revenue-sharing, appears doomed. Problems arose between Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani and the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has already begun selling oil exploration contracts to Western companies.

Kyle E. Moore at lefty blog Comments From Left Field says the not-so-invisible hand of U.S. privatization is behind the stalled legislation: "In truth, this is a classic example of setting the Iraqis up for failure. At a time when political reconciliation is absolutely, positively the single most important thing in regards to fixing Iraq, we are balancing that reconciliation on a highly divisive bill that undermines our own position by tipping our hand on 'why we're really there.' "

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo sees cronyism leading all the way back to Texas: "The story though connects up with another one … the decision of the Kurdistan regional government to sign an oil exploration deal with Dallas-based Hunt Oil, run by Mr. Ray L. Hunt. …[R]emember, Hunt, ... is also a pal of the president's. Indeed, President Bush has twice appointed Hunt to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. So while the president is striving to get the Iraqis to meet these benchmarks one of his own pals -- and more importantly, political appointees -- is busy helping to tear the whole thing apart."

Lefty "RFK Lives" at Daily Kos cites a much-discussed Paul Krugman editorial, which mentions the Hunt connection and concludes that the marketplace has already decided in favor of Iraq's dissolution: "While I've never worshipped at the altar of the Mighty Market, on this occasion, the markets offer the most accurate reflections of existing reality. It is extraordinarily ironic that a country that largely does worship there remains so ignorant of the fact that the markets have spoken on this literal life and death issue."

Liberal journalist Brian Beutler laments what even the Bushies knew was a major determinant for Iraq's success: "This was in some ways an insight the Bush administration got exactly right. Without some widely agreed upon method of distributing resources (a reconciliation, if you will) the people of Iraq would be left with little choice but to battle with each other over oil wealth. Oil is perhaps the key incentive warring factions have to stop fighting and take an interest in the stabilization of their country. That it wasn't enough says something important."

Something important ? Perhaps that they don't want to hand over "the greatest prize of all" (and the only real economic asset the country possesses) to a bunch of foreigners who have killed or made refugees of a significant percentage of the population. Is that really such a difficult a concept to grasp ?

There are other ways of sharing the oil wealth that don't involve handing it over to big oil and being allowed a small share of the revenues. Here's a very simple one: Iraqi National Oil Co created with ownership of all discoevered and "undiscovered" (cough) oil reserves in Iraq - oil company then privatised with every Iraqi receiving one share in company - hey presto, a free market solution that shares the oil wealth. You'll never see this discussed as an option (or the left wing alternative which doesn't include the privatisation step).

Instead, all the framing I'm seeing (even on "liberal" blogs) is a simple (and false) choice between "pass this US drafted oil law" or "Iraqis don't want national reconciliation - breakup and civil war awaits". What a crock.

From the same post, a look at some of the reactions to Bush's latest incoherent ravings.

Honey, change the channel: President Bush delivered a speech Thursday in which he affirmed that the surge is indeed working and that, as a sign of its success, he's now ready to recall about 21,700 troops from Iraq. Bloggers aren't having it.

Andrew Sullivan notes that Bush is a "humbled" president: "He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading."

Wonkette had better things to do, but read the transcript. Kind of: "Did he mean to say that Iraq's government was 'getting things done' and then list things that they specifically weren't getting done? Like 'oil revenue sharing' and 'not getting blown the fuck up'? The Post lists other examples of Bush's speech contradicting government reports and shit Bush said himself like a week ago."

"The surreal timeline of the Iraq war is littered with moments like these—too many about-faces and nonsensical blunders to keep a firm grip on reason," writes Peter Scheer at lefty site TruthDig. "And now, the one goal supporters of the war seem determined to realize is to achieve some vague, if delusory, sense of victory."

Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine" (which also discussess the proposed Iraqi oil law) is getting lots of attention this weekend, with The Guardian having a huge roundup of excerpts and commentary.

I wish people would distinguish between "free markets" and the worst excesses of neoliberalism and neoconservatism (at the risk of sounding like the libertarian equivalent of some 1950's leftist complaining that Stalin wasn't a real socialist). Free markets are just a way of allocating resources efficiently, and in most cases they are a very good tool for achieving the desired outcome. They shouldn't be made into some form of religion or dogma, and nor should they be used as a convenient strawman to thrash and blame for all the world's evils because some people have used them as a fig leaf for imperialist or neocolonialist adventurism. What is happening in Iraq isn't a "free market" at work, its militant mercantilism. There is a difference.

The Huffington Post has a review of the book and some thoughts on the Republican party as a form of gang. In recent years I've also come to think of the neoconservative elite as a modern day band of brigands - stealing from foreigners with one (usually heavily armed) hand and the local populace (via the treasury) with the other...

You might have read the piece in Salon the other day where John Dean laments the passing of the Republican Party as a positive, or, even, a non-damaging force in American life. The party he has known for forty years, and the party he says that his friends now know, is a hateful, entirely corrupt, and self-interested body composed of those who take revenge and those who fear having revenge taken upon them. Every current candidate for the presidency is "authoritarian" in an extreme and unAmerican way that Dean thinks would have in earlier decades been "corrected" by the political system, but the Republicans, according to Dean, have broken the political system precisely so that it won't correct them. Sounds like the financial markets, doesn't it?

Personally, I would have put things slightly differently. The Republican Party now seems to work like a gang, in which the most valued qualities in members are loyalty to the gang and the leader, obedience to authority, and violence toward outsiders. The gang is constantly having to prove its dominance, and so candidates for leadership vie with one another for the most tyrannical or violent rhetoric, rhetoric which simultaneously demonizes those who don't accept the authority of the gang and the leader and removes all rules and laws for the gang and the leader. No one is exempt from the wrath of the gang. In this case, the Republican party has now separated itself fairly clearly from the general American population, and as Americans support it less, they come to seem to the Republicans to be more and more the enemy. The far away enemy is one thing, in terms of threat (think Al Qaeda, Shiites, Sunnis) but the enemy close at hand is more threatening because their enmity is seen as a "betrayal." ...

John Dean should start reading Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which is being published next week, simultaneously in the US and in Britain. As Karl Marx pointed out, history and politics are not only psychological, they are also material. This week, the Guardian is running not only four excerpts from Klein's book, but also several commentaries both disagreeing and agreeing with her thesis. Her thesis is this (and if I am slightly inaccurate, blame me, not Naomi): In the fifties and sixties in the US, at least two lines of thought converged. One was about how to change people's minds without leaving marks and the other was about what was the best way of organizing a given economy. The first grew out of experiments in psychological torture (whoops, I mean electrocshock therapy) run by Ewen Cameron in the late 1940s. The theory was that patients could be rid of mental illnesses by "regressing" them to an infantile state, attaining a "clean slate" upon which new patterns of behavior and thought would be etched. Cameron used both electroshock and powerful drugs to attain his clean slate, having no actual knowledge of the chemistry of the brain or how it works -- in other words, he was operating in accordance with a metaphor. The result of Cameron's experiments, for the patients, was often considerable loss of short term and even long term memory and a subsequent lifelong feeling of "blankness" on the part of the patients (apparently, later refinements of electroshock techniques have mitigated these effects). In the 1950s, the CIA redirected these techniques toward torture of political opponents, allegedly to find out information, but really to test the techniques themselves (hello, Jose Padilla!).

At the same time, Milton Friedman was coming up with the idea that if only an economy could be purified of any kind of restraints on the free market (for example labor unions or socialized medicine or history), then the free market would be able to perfectly gauge the value of any type of good or service, and therefore an economy would balance itself, and, most importantly, inflation would be controlled (also, as you can see, a metaphor, or, perhaps, an extended analogy).

According to Klein, it soon became apparent that all powerful shocks to a system had a similar effect, whether the system was a human body or a national body, and this was to temporarily disable the system's defenses. The US government, the CIA, and the free market economists began to act on this insight, to collude in larger experiments. The first of these was the right wing coup, in Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, in 1973. At the time, Chile had a functioning leftish government and economy, and the voters had already rejected Friedman's pure free market troika: privatization of government functions, an end to social spending, and deregulation.The new economy was dependent upon outside investors and highly profitable to them -- let's call that the allure of globalization. Pinochet set about instilling terror in the population (that's the shock therapy) using death squads, exemplary killings, and torture. Taking advantage of this, the economists installed the new free market way of doing things within days of the coup. But Friedman's ideas did not work -- inflation rose. In the eighties, the Chilean government tried again, this time by inducing a profound economic crash -- essentially impoverishing the populace in order to bring them to heel. Ultimately, the Chilean "miracle" (Friedman's term) did nothing for the population, but it did enrich the top ten per cent and put 45% below the poverty line. It turns out that as far as the economists were concerned, this was a good thing.

The Shock Doctrine traces what the US, the CIA, the economists, the Neocons, and the multinational corporations learned from the Chilean experiment and subsequent ones (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Poland, Russia, China, England) and finally makes its way to Iraq (this is a 590 page book, and the print is small). Essentially, they learned that a small economy is easier to "regress" than a large one, that the shock has to be brutal, and that the free market doesn't work as Friedman said it would (automatically assigning appropriate value), but that it sure does make a few people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that these people were Friedman's (and his students') benefactors and paymasters. They also learned to lie lie lie in order to sell what amounts to a program of inhuman greed to voters who have other needs, wishes, and ideas.

For our purposes, the more interesting section of Klein's book is about Iraq, where she traveled in the first year after the invasion, and this section forms part of her series of posts at the Guardian. She believes that the Iraq War was intended to not only steal Iraqi oil, but also to impose a radical free market on an unwilling populace, and that that was what was behind the installation of Bremer as the capo of Iraqi reconstruction. She believes that, thanks to the resistance of the Iraqis and their deep resentment at being used and exploited by the Americans, this effort has failed. However, a parallel effort, to shock the US economy into absolute deregulation, privatization, and an end to social spending, has been and is succeeding. What this amounts to is the fleecing of the American taxpayer in order to enrich the war making industries. The byproduct, as in Chile, is the gutting of the rule of law and the American political system as we have known it. Why did Bush and Cheney go to war? Well, where do they get their fortunes? The Shock Doctrine works perfectly for them. As for that 45% below the poverty line, well, once the globalizing manufacturers exported the well-paying US jobs, then the globalizing financiers moved in and sold the newly impoverished working class a few sub-prime mortgages guaranteed to take whatever else they had. Then the financiers screamed for a bailout, and Bernanke gave it to them.

Simon Jenkins at The Guardian has an article which is part "Power of Nightmares" and part Eisenhower's ominous farewell speech - Oh! What a Lovely War on Terror - it's the number the arms dealers love - asking "I admit it is a grim question for a fine autumn weekend, but is liberty in decline ?". I think its fair to say liberty is facing some determined resistance at the present time but hopefully it will prevail in the not too distant future.

The philosopher AC Grayling is in no doubt of the answer. He has produced the sort of book that meets Chesterton's test of "forcing a man to change philosophies and religions" through a sharp blow to the head. His weapon is history, presented 18th-century style as a sustained tract - Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty & Rights that Made the Modern West. Grayling argues gloomily that the Whig view of history as a steady progress towards human freedom no longer applies. It reached its climax in the second half of the 20th century with the defeat of fascism and communism. We all cheered and declared that history would die.

No chance, says Grayling. Though much about the world continues to improve - like yesterday's reported fall in child mortality - "we are beginning to descend the far side of Parnassus". Our parents would be amazed that, in peacetime Britain, every public space is monitored by police cameras; private movement is traceable by satellites that follow cars and phones; misbehaving citizens can be imprisoned on the say-so of neighbours; easily readable government ID cards will carry a mass of personal information; suspects are incarcerated indefinitely without trial; and torture has returned to the armoury of the state. They might also find it incredible that 21st-century Britain has revived the 19th-century invasion of distant lands because it dislikes their regimes, or "to spread western values".

Grayling's case is that this swelling infringement of personal liberty is not a minor tweaking of law and order but a loss of freedoms that "cost blood and took centuries" to acquire. They drove Milton to war, Paine to exile and Cobbett to jail. Thousands were slain, burned or tortured to death in their cause. Each retreat from such liberty is defended by home secretaries since "the innocent have nothing to fear". Tell that to the Britons who were held in Guantánamo, none of whom has ever been charged.

The justification for all this is the threat of attack from religious fanatics. Yet, as Grayling points out, this is a criminal menace rather than anything on a par with past strategic threats. While the Islamists may declare their ambition to be a "western caliphate", this is as ludicrously implausible as the dreams of 19th-century anarchists. Modern cities are always vulnerable to explosions, but the west is surely robust enough to withstand any serious threat to the character or constitution of its states. The rantings of Osama bin Laden cannot justify reversing the tide of western liberty. Indeed, while arming against communism helped defeat communism, arming against terrorism only feeds the beast.

The noblest testament to freedom is the American constitution, yet, as Grayling points out, the latest statute passed under its aegis runs contrary to its ethos. The mission of the Patriot Act is "to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes". Montesquieu and Madison would have been appalled at such generalised statism. Nor are the act's powers temporary, wartime ones; they are permanent, as are Britain's myriad terrorism laws. By extending state power to curb civil liberty they do the terrorist's job (such as it is) for him. Never was Franklin's maxim more apt, that he who would put security before liberty deserves neither. Freedom cannot be strengthened by being weakened. That is the sophistry of dictatorship.

Commentators have ascribed the chaotically belligerent aftermath of 9/11 to weak western leaders craving popularity in the glamour of war. Tony Blair said he "believed passionately that we are at mortal risk" from Islamism. It was the sort of threat that the risk theorist Ulrich Beck describes as "always an elixir to an ailing leader".

I think more sinister forces are at work: those on display in the Royal Docks. In 1953 America's last true soldier/president, Eisenhower, warned of a "military/industrial complex" in danger of running amok. Its wealth could bend democracy to its will, using paranoia to seize control of budgets and policies alike. The outcome would be "a tragic waste of resources ... humanity hanging on a cross of iron", with armies seeking war for their employment. Elected leaders, said Eisenhower, fed such a complex at their peril.

The growth of Islamist terror, always described as "al-Qaida linked" (as international crime was always "mafia-linked"), meets Eisenhower's thesis. With the threat of communism gone, the military/industrial complex needs a new cause. Allied to a booming police and intelligence bureaucracy, it has grasped eagerly at terrorism. It has no interest in keeping that threat in proportion, and every interest in exaggerating it. To cover the bungles that led to 9/11, this security/industrial complex portrayed the terrorists as awesome and ubiquitous, capable of building vast bomb-proof bunkers in the Hindu Kush, fake plans of which were dumped on a gullible press. State security agencies dance to the tune of Oh! What a Lovely War. They enslave the language of freedom in the cause of repression.

Seen in the light of history, I do not find Grayling's alarmism out of order. It is simply true that in Britain and America arms dealers, in league with security bureaucrats, have fuelled public debate with extreme paranoia. Those who defend liberty are accused of appeasing an unseen enemy. Those who plead democracy are accused of threatening the state. If the freedom show is to get back on the road, some battles must clearly be fought over and again.

Newsweek has an article on Iraq Veterans Against The War (which has branded the surge a failure) and spokesman Adam Kokesh.

As a week of antiwar activities kicks off in Washington on Saturday, Marine Corps veteran Adam Kokesh will be a familiar face. The 25-year-old former sergeant was in the news earlier this week when he was escorted out of the House Armed Service Committee’s hearing for Gen. David Petraeus. Dressed in a black anti-Iraq War T shirt and a desert camouflage hat, Kokesh unfurled a small sign that said GENERALS LIE, SOLDIERS DIE and was summarily escorted out of the room while House aides struggled to get the general’s microphone working.

Kokesh wasn’t arrested, but if he had been it wouldn’t have been the first time. In the eight months since he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, the telegenic Kokesh has become a fixture on the antiwar scene giving speeches, blogging, staging mock military patrols and being arrested in cities all over country. He was on Larry King's CNN show Thursday night, and Wonkette snarkily reports sightings of Kokesh in cafes around D.C.

Kokesh, who did an eight-month tour in Fallujah in 2004, is one of a growing number of both active and veteran military members who are publicly opposing the continued occupation of Iraq. In January, Appeal for Redress, a group of active-duty, Reserve and National Guard personnel presented a petition of 1,000 signatures to Congress calling for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. And in August, seven active-duty soldiers took the almost unprecedented step of writing an editorial in The New York Times criticizing the military leadership and calling U.S. forces an occupying force that “long ago outlived its welcome.” (Two of those soldiers died in an accident in Iraq this week.) ...

And to close, a Bush joke from Past Peak.

On Labor Day enroute to a summit in Australia, President Bush made an unannounced stop in Anbar province, Iraq, stopping at the Anbar Province Regional Airport. Why Iraq? Why now? Well, as the president explained, "I have come to see with my own eyes the remarkable changes that are taking place in Anbar province." He's not looking with other people's eyes, he's looking with his.

In all, Bush was in Iraq for a total of six hours, all of it within the 17-mile perimeter of the highly-secured Al Asad airbase. His take away? [on screen: Bush saying, "When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like"] — a giant, heavily-armed U.S. military base surrounded by a bloody sectarian free-for-all.

He's a dreamer. — Jon Stewart

Links:

* Professor Smartass - Iraq oil law NOT theft for big oil says Bushie Khalilzad, former big oil consultant
* Index Research - Iraq: New U.S. Base - Wasit
* Democracy Now - Michael Klare on the Internal War For Control of Iraq's Oil
* Lew Rockwell - What the Warfare State Really Costs
* Asia Times - Behind the Anbar myth . "Petraeus, the iPod general - a player of what is fed by his master's voice, the White House".
* Alternet - CentCom Chief Fallon: Petraeus Is "An Ass-Kissing, Little Chickensh*t"
* Past Peak - 1.2 Million Iraqis Killed By The War
* Past Peak - Bush Missing ?
* Huffington Post - War Critics Barack Obama, Ron Paul Get Most Military Donations
* Tom Paine - Failure of Energy Policy. Failure of Foreign Policy