by Naomi Klein
And then there is Henry Kissinger, the man who kicked off the counterrevolution with his support for Pinochet’s coup. In his 2006 book State of Denial, Bob Woodward revealed that Dick Cheney holds monthly meetings with Kissinger, while Bush meets with Kissinger about half as frequently, “making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.” Cheney told Woodward, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else.”33
But who was Kissinger representing in all those top-level meetings? Like Baker and Shultz, he used to be a secretary of state, but hasn’t held that post for three decades. Since 1982, when he started his privately held and secretive company, Kissinger Associates, his job has been to represent a roster of clients that is said to have included everyone from Coca-Cola to Union Carbide to Hunt Oil to the engineering giant Fluor (one of the biggest reconstruction contract winners in Iraq)—and even his old partner in the Chilean covert action, ITT.34 So when he met with Cheney, was he acting as elder statesman, or as high-priced lobbyist for his oil and engineering clients?
Kissinger gave a strong indication of where his loyalties lay in November 2002, when Bush named him to chair the 9/11 Commission, perhaps the most crucial role any patriot could be called out of retirement to perform. Yet when the families of the victims asked Kissinger to produce a list of his corporate clients, pointing to potential conflicts of interest with the investigation, he refused to cooperate with this basic gesture of public accountability and transparency. Rather than disclose the names of his clients, he stepped down as chair of the commission.35
Richard Perle, a friend and business associate of Kissinger’s, would make that precise choice a year later. Perle, a defense official under Reagan, was asked by Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board. Before Perle took over, the board was a quiet advisory panel, a way to pass on the knowledge of former administrations to the one in office. Perle turned it into a platform for himself, using the impressive title to argue forcefully in the press for a preemptive attack on Iraq. He also used it in other ways. According to a Seymour Hersh investigation in The New Yorker, he touted the title to solicit investment for his new company. Perle, it turned out, was one of the first post-9/11 disaster capitalists—just two months after the attacks, he launched his venture capital firm Trireme Partners, which would invest in firms developing products and services relevant to homeland security and defense. In letters soliciting business, Trireme boasted of its political connections: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board.” Those three were Perle, his friend Gerald Hillman and Henry Kissinger.36
One of Perle’s early investors was Boeing—the Pentagon’s second-largest contractor—which kicked in $20 million to get Trireme going. Perle became an outspoken Boeing fan, writing an op-ed supporting Boeing’s controversial $17 billion tanker contract with the Pentagon.*37
Although Perle told his investors all about his pull at the Pentagon, several of his colleagues on the Defense Policy Board say he failed to tell them about Trireme. On hearing about the company, one described it as “at the edge of or off the ethical charts.” In the end, all the knots of conflict caught up with Perle and he, like Kissinger, had to choose: make defense policy or profit from the War on Terror. In March 2003, just as the war in Iraq was starting and the contractor bonanza was about to begin, Perle stepped down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.38
There is nothing that enrages Richard Perle more than the suggestion that his advocacy of unlimited war to end all evil is in any way influenced by the enormous profitability of that proposition for him personally. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer confronted Perle with Hersh’s observation that “he has set up a company that may gain from a war.” It would seem self-evidently true, yet Perle blew up, calling Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.” He told Blitzer, “I don’t believe that a company would gain from a war…. The suggestion that my views are somehow related for the potential for investments in homeland defense is complete nonsense.”39
It was a strange claim. If a venture capital firm that was set up to invest in security and defense companies managed not to gain from a war, it would surely be failing its investors. The episode raised larger questions about the role played by figures such as Perle, who exist in a gray zone between disaster capitalist, public intellectual and policy maker. If a Lockheed or Boeing executive went on Fox News to make the case for regime change in Iran (as Perle has done), their obvious self-interest would negate any intellectual arguments they offered. Yet Perle continues to be introduced as an “analyst” or as a Pentagon adviser, perhaps as “a neocon,” but certainly there is never any suggestion that he might just be an arms dealer with an impressive vocabulary.
Whenever members of this Washington clique are confronted with their economic interests in the wars they support, they invariably respond the way Perle did: the entire suggestion is preposterous, simple-minded, vaguely terrorist. The neocons—a group that includes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Shultz, Jackson and, I would argue, Kissinger—take great pains to project themselves as egghead intellectuals or hawkish realists, driven by ideology and big ideas, not anything so worldly as profit. Bruce Jackson, for instance, says Lockheed did not approve of his extracurricular foreign policy work. Perle says that his association with the Pentagon has hurt him in business since “it means there are…things you can’t say and do.” Perle’s partner Gerald Hillman insists that Perle “is not a financial creature. He doesn’t have any desire for financial gain.” Douglas Feith, when he was undersecretary of defense for policy, claimed that “the vice president’s former connection [with Halliburton] made people in the government reluctant to award the contract, not eager to do it, even though awarding it to KBR [Kellogg, Brown and Root, the former Halliburton subsidiary] was the right thing to do.”40
Even their most committed critics tend to portray the neocons as true believers, motivated exclusively by a commitment to the supremacy of American and Israeli power that is so all-consuming they are prepared to sacrifice economic interests in favor of “security.” This distinction is both artificial and amnesiac. The right to limitless profit-seeking has always been at the center of neocon ideology. Before 9/ 11, demands for radical privatization and attacks on social spending fuelled the neocon movement—Friedmanite to its core—at think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage and Cato.
With the War on Terror, the neocons didn’t abandon their corporatist economic goals; they found a new, even more effective way to achieve them. Of course these Washington hawks are committed to an imperial role for the United States in the world and for Israel in the Middle East. It is impossible, however, to separate that military project—endless war abroad, and a security state at home—from the interests of the disaster capitalism complex, which has built a multibillion-dollar industry based on these very assumptions. Nowhere has the merger of these political and profit-making goals been clearer than on the battlefields of Iraq.
PART 6
IRAQ, FULL CIRCLE
OVERSHOCK
One of the risks in shock-based operations has to do with the likelihood of “unintended consequences,” or in precipitating reactions that have not been anticipated. For example, extensive attacks against a nation’s infrastructure, electrical grid, or economic system can create such extreme hardship that the resulting backlash bolsters rather than weakens our opponent’s national will to fight.
—Lieutenant Colonel John N. T. Shanahan, “Shock-Based Operations,” Air & Space Power, October 15, 2001
Direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility, and further defiance…. Interrogatees who have with stood pain are more difficult to handle by other methods. The effect has been not to repress the subject but to restore his confidence and maturity.
—Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, CIA manual, 1963
; CHAPTER 16
ERASING IRAQ
IN SEARCH OF A “MODEL” FOR THE MIDDLE EAST
The introverted schizophrenic or melancholic may be likened to a walled city which has closed its gates and refuses to trade with the rest of the world…. A breach is blown in the wall, and relations with the world are re-established. Unfortunately we cannot control the amount of damage done in the bombardment.
—Andrew M. Wyllie, a British psychiatrist, on electroshock therapy, 19401
In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.
—Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, on his support for the invasion of Iraq2
It was March 2004. I had been in Baghdad for less than three hours, and it wasn’t going well. First, our car hadn’t shown up at the airport checkpoint, and my photographer, Andrew Stern, and I had to hitch a ride on what was already being called “the most dangerous road in the world.” When we made it to the hotel in the busy Karada district, we were greeted by Michael Birmingham, an Irish peace activist who had moved to Baghdad before the invasion. I had asked if he could introduce me to a few Iraqis concerned about the plans to privatize their economy. “No one here cares about privatization,” Michael told us. “What they care about is surviving.”
A tense debate followed about the ethics of bringing a political agenda to a war zone. Michael wasn’t saying that Iraqis supported the privatization plans—only that most people had more urgent concerns. They were worried about bombs going off in their mosques or finding a cousin who has disappeared into the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison. They were thinking about how to get drinking and bathing water for tomorrow, not whether a foreign company wanted to privatize their water system and sell it back to them in a year. The job of an outsider, he argued, is to try to document the reality of war and occupation, not to decide what Iraqi priorities ought to be.
I defended myself as best as I could, pointing out that selling this country off to Bechtel and ExxonMobil wasn’t an idea I had dreamed up—it was already in its early stages, spearheaded by the White House’s top envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III. For months I had been reporting on the auctioning off of Iraq’s state assets from trade shows in hotel ballrooms, surreal events where body-armor salesmen terrified businessmen with stories of severed limbs while U.S. trade officials assured everyone that it really wasn’t as bad as it seemed on TV. “The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground,” I was told earnestly by a delegate at the “Rebuilding Iraq 2” conference in Washington, D.C.
The fact that it was hard to find people in Baghdad who were interested in talking about economics was not surprising. The architects of this invasion were firm believers in the shock doctrine—they knew that while Iraqis were consumed with daily emergencies, the country could be auctioned off discreetly and the results announced as a done deal. As for journalists and activists, we seemed to be exhausting our attention on the spectacular physical attacks, forgetting that the parties with the most to gain never show up on the battlefield. And in Iraq there was plenty to gain: not just the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves but territory that was one of the last remaining holdouts from the drive to build a global market based on Friedman’s vision of unfettered capitalism. After the crusade had conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier.
While Michael and I debated back and forth, Andrew went to have a cigarette on the balcony. As he opened the glass door, all the air seem to be sucked out of the room. Outside the window was a ball of lavalike fire, deep red flecked with black. We grabbed our shoes and ran in our socks down five flights of stairs. The lobby was covered in shattered glass. Around the corner, the Mount Lebanon Hotel lay in rubble, along with a neighboring house, destroyed by a thousand-pound bomb, making it, at that point, the largest attack of its kind since the end of the war.
Andrew ran with his camera to the wreckage; I tried not to, but ended up following. After only three hours in Baghdad, I was already breaking my one rule: no bomb chasing. Back at the hotel, all the indie reporters and NGO types were drinking arak and trying to get their adrenalin under control. Everybody kept grinning at me and saying, “Welcome to Baghdad!” I glanced at Michael, and we both silently acknowledged that, yes, he had won the argument. The last word came from the war itself: “Bombs, not journalists, set the agenda here.” And they certainly do. They don’t just suck oxygen into their vortex, they demand everything: our attention, our compassion, our outrage.
That night I thought about Claudia Acuña, the extraordinary journalist I had met in Buenos Aires two years earlier who had given me a copy of Rodolfo Walsh’s “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta.” She had warned me that extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. In a way, it had happened already to the antiwar movement. Our explanations for why the war was waged rarely went beyond one-word answers: oil, Israel, Halliburton. Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.
The invasion of Iraq was sold to the public on the basis of fear of weapons of mass destruction because, as Paul Wolfowitz explained, WMDs were “the one issue that everyone could agree on”—it was, in other words, the lowest-common-denominator excuse.3 The more rarefied reason, favored by the most intellectual proponents of the war, was the “model” theory. According to the pundits who advanced this theory, many of them identified as neocons, terrorism was coming from multiple locations in the Arab and Muslim world: the September 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon; Iran was funding Hezbollah; Syria was housing Hamas’s leadership; Iraq was sending money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. For these war advocates, who conflated attacks on Israel with attacks on the U.S., as if there were no differences between the two, that was enough to qualify the entire region as a potential terrorist breeding ground.
So what was it about this part of the world, they asked, that produced terrorism? Ideologically blinded from seeing either U.S. or Israeli policies as contributing factors, let alone provocations, they identified the true cause as something else—the region’s deficit in free-market democracy.*4
Since the entire Arab world could not be conquered all at once, a single country needed to serve as the catalyst. The U.S. would invade that country and turn it into, as Thomas Friedman, chief media proselytizer of the theory, put it, “a different model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world,” one that in turn would set off a series of democratic/neoliberal waves throughout the region. Joshua Muravchik, an American Enterprise Institute pundit, forecast a “tsunami across the Islamic world” in “Tehran and Baghdad,” while the archconservative Michael Ledeen, an adviser to the Bush administration, described the goal as “a war to remake the world.”†5
Within the internal logic of this theory, fighting terrorism, spreading frontier capitalism and holding elections were bundled into a single unified project. The Middle East would be “cleaned out” of terrorists and a giant free-trade zone would be created; then it would all be locked in with after-the-fact elections—a sort of three-for-one special. George W. Bush later simplified this agenda to a single phrase: “spreading freedom in a troubled region,” and many mistook the sentiment as a starry-eyed commitment to democracy.6 But it was always that other kind of freedom, the one offered to Chile in the seventies and to Russia in nineties—the freedom for Western multinationals to feed off freshly privatized states—that was at the center of the model theory. The president made that perfectly clear only eight days after declaring an end to major combat in Iraq
when he announced plans for the “establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a decade.”7 Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz, a veteran of the Soviet shock therapy adventure, was put in charge of the project.
When the idea of invading an Arab country and turning it into a model state first gained currency after September 11, the names of several possible countries were floated—Iraq, Syria, Egypt and, Michael Ledeen’s preference, Iran. Iraq had a great deal to recommend it, however. In addition to its vast oil reserves, it also made a good central location for military bases now that Saudi Arabia looked less dependable, and Saddam’s use of chemical weapons on his own people made him easy to hate. Another factor, often overlooked, was that Iraq had the advantage of familiarity.
The 1991 Gulf War had been the U.S.’s last major ground offensive involving hundreds of thousands of troops, and in the twelve years since, the Pentagon had been using the battle as a template in workshops, training and elaborate war games. One example of this postgame theory was a paper that had captured the imagination of Donald Rumsfeld called Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Written by a group of maverick strategists at the National Defense University in 1996, the paper positions itself as an all-purpose military doctrine, but it is really about refighting the Gulf War. Its lead author, the retired navy commander Harlan Ullman, explained that the project began when General Chuck Horner, the commander of the air war in the 1991 invasion, was asked about his greatest frustration in fighting Saddam Hussein. He replied that he did not know where to “stick the needle” to make the Iraqi army collapse. “Shock and Awe,” writes Ullman (who coined the phrase) “was intended to address this question: If Desert Storm could be refought, how could we win in half the time or less and with far fewer forces?…The key to its success is finding the entry points for Horner’s needles—the spots that, when targeted, get an enemy to collapse immediately.”8 The authors were convinced that if the U.S. military ever got the chance to fight Saddam again, it would now be in a far better position to find those “entry points,” thanks to new satellite technologies and breakthroughs in precision weaponry that would allow it to insert the “needles” with unprecedented accuracy.
