O
Old Redneck
Guest
America's Deadly Shock Doctrine in Iraq
By Naomi Klein, Henry Holt
Posted on September 14, 2007, Printed on September 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62525/
The following is an excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Henry Holt, 2007) and first
appeared in the UK Guardian (read other excerpts here and here). The
video to the right is a short documentary explaining the thesis of
Klein's book. Read more about the documentary here.
When the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was grabbed by US agents at JFK
airport in 2002 and taken to Syria, a victim of extraordinary
rendition, his interrogators engaged in a tried-and-tested torture
technique. "They put me on a chair, and one of the men started asking
me questions ... If I did not answer quickly enough, he would point to
a metal chair in the corner and ask, 'Do you want me to use this?' I
was terrified, and I did not want to be tortured. I would say anything
to avoid torture." The technique Arar was being subjected to is known
as "the showing of the instruments," or, in US military lingo, "fear
up". Torturers know that one of their most potent weapons is the
prisoner's own imagination -- often just showing fearsome instruments
is more effective than using them.
As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, US news media outlets
were conscripted by the Pentagon to "fear up" Iraq. "They're calling
it 'A-Day'," began a report on CBS News that aired two months before
the war began. "A as in airstrikes so devastating they would leave
Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight." Viewers were
introduced to Harlan Ullman, an author of the Shock and Awe doctrine,
who explained that "you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the
nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in
minutes". The anchor, Dan Rather, ended the telecast with a
disclaimer: "We assure you this report contains no information that
the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military." He could
have gone further: the report, like so many others in this period, was
an integral part of the Department of Defense's strategy -- fear up.
Iraqis, who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband satellites
or in phone calls from relatives abroad, spent months imagining the
horrors of Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became a potent
psychological weapon. Would it be worse than 1991? If the Americans
really thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, would they
launch a nuclear attack?
One answer was provided a week before the invasion. The Pentagon
invited Washington's military press corps on a special field trip to
Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to witness the testing of the Moab,
which officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but which
everyone in the military calls the "Mother of All Bombs". At 21,000lb,
it is the largest non-nuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in
the words of CNN's Jamie McIntyre, "a 10,000ft-high mushroom-like
cloud that looks and feels like a nuclear weapon".
In his report, McIntyre said that even if it was never used, the
bomb's very existence "could still pack a psychological wallop" -- a
tacit acknowledgement of the role he himself was playing in delivering
that wallop. Like prisoners in interrogation cells, Iraqis were being
shown the instruments. "The goal is to have the capabilities of the
coalition so clear and so obvious that there's an enormous
disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight," Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld explained on the same programme.
When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory
deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city's sensory inputs
were cut off; the ears were the first to go.
On the night of March 28 2003, as US troops drew closer to Baghdad,
the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four
Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off
millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the phone
exchanges continued -- 12 in total -- until, by April 2, there was
barely a phone working in all of Baghdad. During the same assault,
television and radio transmitters were also hit, making it impossible
for families in Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a
weak signal carrying news of what was going on outside their doors.
Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most
psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of
hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to
call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to
reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment.
Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents
begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing
numbers into the reporters' hands along with pleas to call a brother
or an uncle in London or Baltimore. "Tell him everything is OK. Tell
him his mother and father are fine. Tell him hello. Tell him not to
worry." By then, most pharmacies in Baghdad had sold out of sleeping
aids and anti-depressants, and the city was completely cleaned out of
Valium.
Next to go were the eyes. "There was no audible explosion, no
discernible change in the early-evening bombardments, but in an
instant, an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful,
endless night," the Guardian reported on April 4. Darkness was
"relieved only by the headlights of passing cars". Trapped in their
homes, Baghdad's residents could not speak to each other, hear each
other or see outside. Like a prisoner destined for a CIA black site,
the entire city was shackled and hooded.
Next it was stripped. In hostile interrogations, the first stage of
breaking down prisoners is stripping them of their own clothes and any
items that have the power to evoke their sense of self -- so-called
comfort items. Often objects that are of particular value to a
prisoner, such as the Qur'an or a cherished photograph, are treated
with open disrespect. The message is "You are no one, you are who we
want you to be," the essence of dehumanisation. Iraqis went through
this unmaking process collectively, as they watched their most
important institutions desecrated, their history loaded on to trucks
and disappeared.
The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by
occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country
that was.
"The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped
display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the
National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the
first human society," reported the Los Angeles Times. "Gone are 80% of
the museum's 170,000 priceless objects." The national library, which
contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in
Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur'ans had
disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a
burned-out shell. "Our national heritage is lost," pronounced a
Baghdad high-school teacher. A local merchant said of the museum, "It
was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn't recover the looted
treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen."
McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called
it "a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a
culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed".
Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organised salvage missions
in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artefacts has been
recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the
memory lobotomy was intentional -- part of Washington's plans to
excise the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their
own model. "Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture," 70-year-old Ahmed
Abdullah told the Washington Post, "and they want to wipe out our
culture."
As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by
Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it is true that Rumsfeld did not plan
for Iraq to be sacked -- but he did not take measures to prevent it
from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were
failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.
During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters,
so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old
regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to
respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the
prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by
leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to
protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26
Pentagon memo to coalition command listed "in order of importance, 16
sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad". Second on the list was
the museum. Other warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international
police contingent in with the troops to maintain public order -another
suggestion that was ignored.
Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in
Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they
weren't sent. There are numerous reports of US soldiers hanging out by
their armoured vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove
by -- a reflection of the "stuff happens" indifference coming straight
from Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting,
but in other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International
Airport was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time,
smashed furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the
runway: "US soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs
ripped out many of the planes' fittings, slashed seats, damaged
****pit equipment and popped out every windshield." The result was an
estimated $100m worth of damage to Iraq's national airline -- which
was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early
and contentious partial privatisation.
Some insight into why there was so little official interest in
stopping the looting has since been provided by two men who played
pivotal roles in the occupation -- Peter McPherson, the senior
economic adviser to Paul Bremer, and John Agresto, director of higher
education reconstruction for the occupation. McPherson said that when
he saw Iraqis taking state property -- cars, buses, ministry equipment
-- it didn't bother him. His job, as Iraq's top economic shock
therapist, was to radically downsize the state and privatise its
assets, which meant that the looters were really just giving him a
jump-start. "I thought the privatisation that occurs sort of naturally
when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck
that the state used to own, was just fine," he said. A veteran
bureaucrat of the Reagan administration and a firm believer in Chicago
School economics, McPherson termed the pillage a form of public-sector
"shrinkage".
His colleague John Agresto also saw a silver lining as he watched the
looting of Baghdad on TV. He envisioned his job -- "a never-to-be-
repeated adventure" -- as the remaking of Iraq's system of higher
education from scratch. In that context, the stripping of the
universities and the education ministry was, he explained, "the
opportunity for a clean start," a chance to give Iraq's schools "the
best modern equipment". If the mission was "nation creating," as so
many clearly believed it to be, then everything that remained of the
old country was only going to get in the way. Agresto was the former
president of St John's College in New Mexico, which specialises in a
Great Books curriculum [which emphasises an education based on broad
reading]. He explained that although he knew nothing of Iraq, he had
refrained from reading books about the country before making the trip
so that he would arrive "with as open a mind as I could have". Like
Iraq's colleges, Agresto would be a blank slate.
If Agresto had read a book or two, he might have thought twice about
the need to erase everything and start all over again. He could have
learned, for instance, that before the sanctions strangled the
country, Iraq had the best education system in the region, with the
highest literacy rates in the Arab world -- in 1985, 89% of Iraqis
were literate. By contrast, in Agresto's home state of New Mexico, 46%
of the population is functionally illiterate, and 20% are unable do
"basic math to determine the total on a sales receipt". Yet Agresto
was so convinced of the superiority of American systems that he seemed
unable to entertain the possibility that Iraqis might want to salvage
and protect their own culture and that they might feel its destruction
as a wrenching loss.
This neo-colonialist blindness is a running theme in the war on
terror. At the US-run prison at Guant
By Naomi Klein, Henry Holt
Posted on September 14, 2007, Printed on September 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/62525/
The following is an excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Henry Holt, 2007) and first
appeared in the UK Guardian (read other excerpts here and here). The
video to the right is a short documentary explaining the thesis of
Klein's book. Read more about the documentary here.
When the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was grabbed by US agents at JFK
airport in 2002 and taken to Syria, a victim of extraordinary
rendition, his interrogators engaged in a tried-and-tested torture
technique. "They put me on a chair, and one of the men started asking
me questions ... If I did not answer quickly enough, he would point to
a metal chair in the corner and ask, 'Do you want me to use this?' I
was terrified, and I did not want to be tortured. I would say anything
to avoid torture." The technique Arar was being subjected to is known
as "the showing of the instruments," or, in US military lingo, "fear
up". Torturers know that one of their most potent weapons is the
prisoner's own imagination -- often just showing fearsome instruments
is more effective than using them.
As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, US news media outlets
were conscripted by the Pentagon to "fear up" Iraq. "They're calling
it 'A-Day'," began a report on CBS News that aired two months before
the war began. "A as in airstrikes so devastating they would leave
Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight." Viewers were
introduced to Harlan Ullman, an author of the Shock and Awe doctrine,
who explained that "you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the
nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in
minutes". The anchor, Dan Rather, ended the telecast with a
disclaimer: "We assure you this report contains no information that
the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military." He could
have gone further: the report, like so many others in this period, was
an integral part of the Department of Defense's strategy -- fear up.
Iraqis, who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband satellites
or in phone calls from relatives abroad, spent months imagining the
horrors of Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became a potent
psychological weapon. Would it be worse than 1991? If the Americans
really thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, would they
launch a nuclear attack?
One answer was provided a week before the invasion. The Pentagon
invited Washington's military press corps on a special field trip to
Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to witness the testing of the Moab,
which officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but which
everyone in the military calls the "Mother of All Bombs". At 21,000lb,
it is the largest non-nuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in
the words of CNN's Jamie McIntyre, "a 10,000ft-high mushroom-like
cloud that looks and feels like a nuclear weapon".
In his report, McIntyre said that even if it was never used, the
bomb's very existence "could still pack a psychological wallop" -- a
tacit acknowledgement of the role he himself was playing in delivering
that wallop. Like prisoners in interrogation cells, Iraqis were being
shown the instruments. "The goal is to have the capabilities of the
coalition so clear and so obvious that there's an enormous
disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight," Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld explained on the same programme.
When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory
deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city's sensory inputs
were cut off; the ears were the first to go.
On the night of March 28 2003, as US troops drew closer to Baghdad,
the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four
Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off
millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the phone
exchanges continued -- 12 in total -- until, by April 2, there was
barely a phone working in all of Baghdad. During the same assault,
television and radio transmitters were also hit, making it impossible
for families in Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a
weak signal carrying news of what was going on outside their doors.
Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most
psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of
hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to
call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to
reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment.
Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents
begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing
numbers into the reporters' hands along with pleas to call a brother
or an uncle in London or Baltimore. "Tell him everything is OK. Tell
him his mother and father are fine. Tell him hello. Tell him not to
worry." By then, most pharmacies in Baghdad had sold out of sleeping
aids and anti-depressants, and the city was completely cleaned out of
Valium.
Next to go were the eyes. "There was no audible explosion, no
discernible change in the early-evening bombardments, but in an
instant, an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful,
endless night," the Guardian reported on April 4. Darkness was
"relieved only by the headlights of passing cars". Trapped in their
homes, Baghdad's residents could not speak to each other, hear each
other or see outside. Like a prisoner destined for a CIA black site,
the entire city was shackled and hooded.
Next it was stripped. In hostile interrogations, the first stage of
breaking down prisoners is stripping them of their own clothes and any
items that have the power to evoke their sense of self -- so-called
comfort items. Often objects that are of particular value to a
prisoner, such as the Qur'an or a cherished photograph, are treated
with open disrespect. The message is "You are no one, you are who we
want you to be," the essence of dehumanisation. Iraqis went through
this unmaking process collectively, as they watched their most
important institutions desecrated, their history loaded on to trucks
and disappeared.
The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by
occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country
that was.
"The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped
display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the
National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the
first human society," reported the Los Angeles Times. "Gone are 80% of
the museum's 170,000 priceless objects." The national library, which
contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in
Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Qur'ans had
disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a
burned-out shell. "Our national heritage is lost," pronounced a
Baghdad high-school teacher. A local merchant said of the museum, "It
was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn't recover the looted
treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen."
McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called
it "a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a
culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed".
Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organised salvage missions
in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artefacts has been
recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the
memory lobotomy was intentional -- part of Washington's plans to
excise the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their
own model. "Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture," 70-year-old Ahmed
Abdullah told the Washington Post, "and they want to wipe out our
culture."
As the war planners were quick to point out, the looting was done by
Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it is true that Rumsfeld did not plan
for Iraq to be sacked -- but he did not take measures to prevent it
from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were
failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.
During the 1991 Gulf war, 13 Iraqi museums were attacked by looters,
so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old
regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to
respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the
prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by
leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to
protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26
Pentagon memo to coalition command listed "in order of importance, 16
sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad". Second on the list was
the museum. Other warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international
police contingent in with the troops to maintain public order -another
suggestion that was ignored.
Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in
Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they
weren't sent. There are numerous reports of US soldiers hanging out by
their armoured vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove
by -- a reflection of the "stuff happens" indifference coming straight
from Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting,
but in other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International
Airport was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time,
smashed furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the
runway: "US soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs
ripped out many of the planes' fittings, slashed seats, damaged
****pit equipment and popped out every windshield." The result was an
estimated $100m worth of damage to Iraq's national airline -- which
was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early
and contentious partial privatisation.
Some insight into why there was so little official interest in
stopping the looting has since been provided by two men who played
pivotal roles in the occupation -- Peter McPherson, the senior
economic adviser to Paul Bremer, and John Agresto, director of higher
education reconstruction for the occupation. McPherson said that when
he saw Iraqis taking state property -- cars, buses, ministry equipment
-- it didn't bother him. His job, as Iraq's top economic shock
therapist, was to radically downsize the state and privatise its
assets, which meant that the looters were really just giving him a
jump-start. "I thought the privatisation that occurs sort of naturally
when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck
that the state used to own, was just fine," he said. A veteran
bureaucrat of the Reagan administration and a firm believer in Chicago
School economics, McPherson termed the pillage a form of public-sector
"shrinkage".
His colleague John Agresto also saw a silver lining as he watched the
looting of Baghdad on TV. He envisioned his job -- "a never-to-be-
repeated adventure" -- as the remaking of Iraq's system of higher
education from scratch. In that context, the stripping of the
universities and the education ministry was, he explained, "the
opportunity for a clean start," a chance to give Iraq's schools "the
best modern equipment". If the mission was "nation creating," as so
many clearly believed it to be, then everything that remained of the
old country was only going to get in the way. Agresto was the former
president of St John's College in New Mexico, which specialises in a
Great Books curriculum [which emphasises an education based on broad
reading]. He explained that although he knew nothing of Iraq, he had
refrained from reading books about the country before making the trip
so that he would arrive "with as open a mind as I could have". Like
Iraq's colleges, Agresto would be a blank slate.
If Agresto had read a book or two, he might have thought twice about
the need to erase everything and start all over again. He could have
learned, for instance, that before the sanctions strangled the
country, Iraq had the best education system in the region, with the
highest literacy rates in the Arab world -- in 1985, 89% of Iraqis
were literate. By contrast, in Agresto's home state of New Mexico, 46%
of the population is functionally illiterate, and 20% are unable do
"basic math
was so convinced of the superiority of American systems that he seemed
unable to entertain the possibility that Iraqis might want to salvage
and protect their own culture and that they might feel its destruction
as a wrenching loss.
This neo-colonialist blindness is a running theme in the war on
terror. At the US-run prison at Guant