by Naomi Klein
That certainly is what happened in Iraq. If the war’s architects convinced themselves that there would be no political blowback from their economic program, it was probably not because they believed Iraqis would actively consent to such policies of systematic dispossession. Rather, the war planners were banking on something else—the disorientation of Iraqis, their collective regression, their inability to keep up with the pace of transformation. They were banking, in other words, on the power of shock. The guiding assumption of Iraq’s military and economic shock therapists, best articulated by the former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, was that Iraqis would be so stunned by U.S. firepower, and so relieved to be rid of Saddam, “that they could be easily marshaled from point A to point B.”4 Then, after a few months, they would emerge from their postwar daze, pleasantly surprised to be living in an Arabic Singapore, a “Tiger on the Tigris,” as some market analysts were excitedly calling it.
Instead, a great many Iraqis immediately demanded a say in the transformation of their country. And it was the Bush administration’s response to this unexpected turn of events that generated the most blowback of all.
Dismantling Democracy
In the summer after Iraq’s invasion, there was so much pent-up hunger for political participation that Baghdad, for all its daily hardships, displayed an almost carnival-like atmosphere. There was anger at Bremer’s layoffs, and frustration with the blackouts and the foreign contractors, but for months that anger was primarily expressed through outbursts of unregulated, exuberant free speech. All summer there were daily protests outside the gates of the Green Zone, many by workers demanding their old jobs back. Hundreds of new newspapers flew off printing presses, filled with articles critical of Bremer and his economic program. Clerics preached politics during the Friday sermons, a freedom impossible under Saddam.
Most exciting of all, there were spontaneous elections breaking out in cities, towns and provinces across the country. Finally free of Saddam’s iron grip, neighbors were convening town hall meetings and electing leaders to represent them in this new era. In cities like Samarra, Hilla and Mosul, religious leaders, secular professionals and tribespeople worked together to set local priorities for reconstruction, defying the worst predictions about sectarianism and fundamentalism. Meetings were heated, but by many accounts they were also joyous: the challenges were enormous but freedom was becoming a reality. In many cases, U.S. forces, believing their president when he said the army had been sent to Iraq to spread democracy, played a facilitating role, helping to organize the elections, even building ballot boxes.
The democratic enthusiasm, combined with the clear rejection of Bremer’s economic program, put the Bush administration in an extremely difficult position. It had made bold promises to hand over power to an elected Iraqi government in a matter of months and to include Iraqis in decision making right away. But that first summer left no doubt that any relinquishing of power would mean abandoning the dream of turning Iraq into a model privatized economy dotted with sprawling U.S. military bases; economic nationalism was far too deeply ingrained in the populace, particularly when it came to the national oil reserves, the greatest prize of all. So Washington abandoned its democratic promises and instead ordered increases in the shock levels in the hope that a higher dosage would finally do the trick. It was a decision that brought the crusade for a pure free market back full circle to its roots in the Southern Cone of Latin America, when economic shock therapy was enforced by brutally suppressing democracy and by disappearing and torturing anyone who stood in the way.
When Paul Bremer first arrived, the U.S. plan was to convene a large constituent assembly, representing all sectors of Iraqi society, where delegates would vote for the members of an interim executive council. After spending two weeks in Baghdad, Bremer scrapped the idea. Instead, he decided to handpick the members of an Iraqi Governing Council. In a message to President Bush, Bremer described his process for selecting the Iraqi members of the council as “a cross between blind man’s bluff and three-dimensional tictac-toe.”5
Bremer had said that the council would have governing power, but once again he changed his mind. “My experience with the Governing Council at this point suggested this would not be a great idea,” the former envoy later said, explaining that the council members were too slow and deliberative—traits unsuitable for his shock therapy plans. “They couldn’t organize a twocar parade,” Bremer said. “They were simply not able to make decisions in a timely fashion, or any decisions. Moreover, I still felt very strongly about the importance of getting a constitution in place before we handed sovereignty to anybody.”6
Bremer’s next problem was the elections breaking out in towns and cities across the country. At the end of June, only his second month in Iraq, Bremer sent word that all local elections must stop immediately. The new plan was for Iraq’s local leaders to be appointed by the occupation, just as the Governing Council had been. A defining showdown took place in Najaf, the holiest city for Iraq’s Shia, the largest religious denomination in the country. Najaf was in the process of organizing citywide elections with the help of U.S. troops when, only one day before registration, the lieutenant colonel in charge got a call from Marine Major General Jim Mattis. “The election had to be canceled. Bremer was concerned that an unfriendly Islamic candidate would prevail…. Bremer would not allow the wrong guy to win the election. The Marines were advised to select a group of Iraqis they thought were safe and have them pick a mayor. That was how the United States would control the process,” wrote Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor, the authors of Cobra II, regarded as the definitive military history of the invasion. In the end, the U.S. military appointed a Saddam-era army colonel as Najaf ’s mayor, as they did in cities and towns across the country.*7
In some cases, Bremer’s ban came after Iraqis had already voted in elections for local representatives. Undaunted, Bremer ordered the creation of new councils. In the province of Taji, RTI, the Mormon-dominated contractor tasked with building local government, dismantled the council that local people had elected months before it arrived and insisted on starting from scratch. “We feel we are going backwards,” one man complained. Bremer insisted that there was “no blanket prohibition” against democracy. “I’m not opposed to it, but I want to do it a way that takes care of our concerns…. Elections that are held too early can be destructive. It’s got to be done very carefully.”8
At that point, Iraqis were still expecting Washington to make good on its promise to organize national elections and hand over power directly to a government elected by the majority of citizens. But in November 2003, after he canceled local elections, Bremer flew back to Washington for huddled meetings at the White House. When he returned to Baghdad, he announced that general elections were off the table. Iraq’s first “sovereign” government would be appointed, not elected.
The about-turn may well have had something to do with a poll, conducted in this period by the Washington-based International Republican Institute. It asked Iraqis what kind of politicians they would vote for if they had the chance. The results were a wake-up call for the Green Zone corporatists: 49 percent of Iraqi respondents said they would vote for a party promising to create “more government jobs.” Asked if they would vote for a party promising to create “more private sector jobs,” only 4.6 percent said yes. Asked if they would vote for a party promising to “keep coalition forces until security is good,” only 4.2 percent said they would.9 Put simply, if Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and if that government had real power, Washington would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals.
Some critics of the neocon wing of the Bush regime fault its Iraq plan for relying too heavily on democracy, for displaying a wide-eyed faith in self-determination. Airbrushed from this narrative is the actual track record of the entire first year of occupation, when Bremer cut down de
mocracy wherever it reared its hydra head. Within his first six months in the job, he had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat. And not one of the high-profile neocons who now blame the problems in Iraq on the absence of “an Iraqi face” supported the calls for direct elections coming from the streets of Baghdad and Basra.
Many who were posted in Iraq in the early months draw a direct link between the various decisions to delay and defang democracy and the ferocious rise of the armed resistance. Salim Lone, a UN diplomat who was in Iraq after the invasion, saw the pivotal moment as Bremer’s first antidemocratic decision. “The first devastating attacks on the foreign presence in Iraq, for example, came soon after the United States selected in July 2003 the first Iraqi leadership body, the Iraqi Governing Council: The Jordanian mission and then, soon after, the UN’s Baghdad headquarters were blown up, killing scores of innocents…the anger over the composition of this council, and for UN support for it, was palpable in Iraq.” Lone lost many friends and colleagues in the attack.10
Bremer’s canceling of national elections was a bitter betrayal for Iraq’s Shia. As the largest ethnic group, they were certain to dominate an elected government after decades of subjugation. At first, Shia resistance took the form of massive peaceful demonstrations: 100,000 protesters in Baghdad, 30,000 in Basra. Their unified chant was “Yes, yes, elections. No, no selections.” “Our main demand in this process is to establish all the constitutional institutions through elections and not appointments,” wrote Ali Abdel Hakim al-Safi, the second most senior Shia cleric in Iraq, in a letter to George Bush and Tony Blair. He declared Bremer’s new plan “nothing other than replacing one dictatorship with another” and warned that if they went ahead with it, they would find themselves fighting a losing battle.11 Bush and Blair were unmoved—they praised the demonstrations as evidence of freedom’s flowering but bulldozed ahead with the plan to appoint Iraq’s first post-Saddam government.
It was at this juncture that Moqtada al-Sadr became a political force to be reckoned with. When the other main Shia parties decided to participate in the appointed government and to abide by an interim constitution that was written inside the Green Zone, al-Sadr broke ranks, denouncing the process and the constitution as illegitimate and openly comparing Bremer to Saddam Hussein. He also started building up the Mahdi Army in earnest. After peaceful protests had no effect, many Shia became convinced that if majority-rule democracy was ever to become a reality, they would have to fight for it.
Had the Bush administration kept its promise to hand over power quickly to an elected Iraqi government, there is every chance that the resistance would have remained small and containable, rather than becoming a countrywide rebellion. But keeping that promise would have meant sacrificing the economic agenda behind the war, something that was never going to happen—and that is why the violent repercussions of America’s denial of democracy in Iraq must also be counted as a form of ideological blowback.
Body Shocks
As resistance mounted, the occupation forces fought back with escalating shock tactics. These came late at night or very early in the morning, with soldiers bursting through doors, shining flashlights into darkened homes, shouting in English (a few words are understood: “motherfucker,” “Ali Baba,” “Osama bin Laden”). Women reached frantically for scarves to cover their heads in front of intruding strangers; men’s heads were forcibly bagged before they were thrown into army trucks and sped to prisons and holding camps. In the first three and half years of occupation, an estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007.12 Inside the prisons, more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth-baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical currents running from live wires.
Three decades earlier, the neoliberal crusade had begun with tactics like these—with so-called subversives and alleged terrorists grabbed from their homes, blindfolded and hooded, taken to dark cells where they faced beatings and worse. Now, to defend the hope of a model free market in Iraq, the project had come full circle.
One factor that made the surge in torture tactics all but inevitable was Donald Rumsfeld’s determination to run the military like a modern, outsourced corporation. He had planned the troop deployment less like a defense secretary and more like a Wal-Mart vice president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. Having whittled the generals down from their early requests for 500,000 troops to fewer than 200,000, he still saw fat to trim: at the last minute, satisfying his inner CEO, he cut tens of thousands more troops from the battle plans.13
Although his just-in-time forces were capable of toppling Saddam, they had no hope of handling what Bremer’s edicts created in Iraq—a population in open rebellion and a gaping hole where Iraq’s army and police used to be. Lacking the numbers to bring control to the streets, the occupation forces did the next best thing: they scooped the people off the streets and put them in the jails. The thousands of prisoners rounded up in the raids were brought to CIA agents, U.S. soldiers and private contractors—many of them untrained—who conducted aggressive interrogations to find out whatever they could about the resistance.
In the early days of the occupation, the Green Zone had played host to economic shock therapists from Poland and Russia; now it became a magnet for a different breed of shock experts, those specializing in the darker arts of suppressing resistance movements. The private security companies padded their ranks with veterans of the dirty wars in Colombia, South Africa and Nepal. According to journalist Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater and other private security firms hired more than seven hundred Chilean troops—many of them special forces operators—for Iraq deployment, some of whom had trained and served under Pinochet.14
One of the highest-ranking shock specialists was the U.S. commander James Steele, who arrived in Iraq in May 2003. Steele had been a key figure in Central America’s right-wing crusades, where he had served as chief U.S. adviser to several Salvadoran army battalions accused of being death squads. More recently, he had been a vice president at Enron and had originally gone to Iraq as an energy consultant, but when the resistance rose up, he switched back to his old persona, becoming Bremer’s chief security adviser. Steele was eventually directed to bring to Iraq what unnamed sources at the Pentagon were chillingly calling “the Salvador option.”15
John Sifton, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq did not fit the usual pattern. Usually in conflict zones, abuses take place early on, in the so-called fog of war, when the battlefield is chaotic and no one knows the rules. That’s what happened in Afghanistan, Sifton said, “but Iraq was different—things started off professional and then they got worse, not better.” He dates the shift to late August 2003—four months after Baghdad fell. It was at that point, he says, that the reports of abuse began streaming in.
According to this timeline, the shock of the torture chamber emerged immediately following Bremer’s most controversial economic shocks. Late August was the end of Bremer’s long summer of lawmaking and election canceling. As those moves sent ever more recruits to the resistance, U.S. soldiers were sent to break down doors and try to shake the defiance out of Iraq, one military-age man at a time.
The timing of this shift can be clearly tracked through a series of declassified documents that came to light in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The paper trail begins on August 14, 2003, when Captain William Ponce, an intelligence officer at the top U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, sent an e-mail to his fellow officers stationed around the country. It contained the now notorious statement: “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees…[a colonel] has made it clear th
at we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks.” Ponce solicited ideas for the techniques that interrogators would like to use on prisoners—what he called a “wish list.” Suggestions came shooting back into his inbox, including “low-voltage electrocution.”16
Two weeks later, on August 31, Major General Geoffrey Miller, warden of the Guantánamo Bay prison, was brought to Iraq on his mission to “Gitmoize” the Abu Ghraib prison.17 Two weeks after that, on September 14, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, top commander in Iraq, authorized a wide range of new interrogation procedures based on the Guantánamo model, including deliberate humiliation (called “pride and ego down”), “exploit[ing] Arab fear of dogs,” sensory deprivation (called “light control”), sensory overload (yelling, loud music) and “stress positions.” It was shortly after the Sanchez memo was sent out, in early October, that the incidents documented in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs took place.18
The Bush team had failed to shock Iraqis into obedience either with Shock and Awe or with economic shock therapy. Now the shock tactics became more personal, using the Kubark interrogation manual’s unmistakable formula for inducing regression.
