The Rebuilding Disaster: Triumph of Baseless Ideology
If you replace “good old USSR” with “post-war Iraq” in the previous paragraph, every word is still 100 percent accurate. Ever since the Iraq invasion in early 2003, far-right conservatives and free-market capitalists have been using Iraq as their private sandbox for socioeconomic experiments. Almost every decision about the future of Iraq has been guided not by practicality and not by what is best for the Iraqi people, but rather what is in line with a two-decade old economics textbook. At the head of this ideological war was the Coalition Provisional Authority, who, in the wake of war, immediately destroyed everything they could about pre-war domestic Iraq. When President Bush speaks of Iraq being a forerunner in the Middle East, he is not just talking about democracy; he also means economically, much in the way Lenin and Stalin spoke of their country being a forerunner.
The ongoing catastrophe of rebuilding Iraq is a direct result of this administration’s decision to import radical ideas with no heed for what the conditions in Iraq demanded. Disaster is what happens when you let academic exercises dominate common sense, and Iraq is – and will be – no exception. Here are some examples, since you probably will not see them presented in this fashion in that darned socialist media:
The Flat Tax – Yes, the love child of conservatives such as Steve Forbes and Phil Graham is getting a chance in Iraq. With Order 37, the CPA introduced a tax that would not exceed 15 percent of income for individual or corporate entities starting in 2004 and rolling into perpetuity. As a side note, the same order dictated that foreigners in the country would not have to pay restaurant or hotel taxes. Is this something we would want for our country? No, not here or in Western Europe, but our arrogant conservative intellectuals have imposed their fantasy with full steam. Sure, men like Jack Kemp will tell you that the flat tax has had staggering success in Russia, but frankly, they’re full of crap. Despite its recent economic rise, Russia is still in the toilet-bowl comparatively, and – here’s the kicker – economists Cliff Gaddy and William Gale have shown that Russia’s GDP was on the rise before they implemented the flat tax, and that the flat tax actually stunted, or had no effect on, its growth. Will it work in Iraq? Who knows! The point is that it is entirely untested under those conditions, they eschewed taxation ideas that have had moderate success (not to mention the old Iraqi tax structure) and our leaders are putting life and resources in danger to test their cute little ideas about how to make the world rosy.
Health Care – While the results of the flat tax may not be seen for some time, one alteration that had immediate impact on the welfare of Iraqis was in the health care sector. According to UNICEF, Iraq had one of the highest standards of health throughout the 1980s. That system was primarily based on a network of public health centers. From the first Gulf War to the second Gulf War, their health system was plagued by U.S./U.N. sanctions that prevented key medicines and equipment from reaching their country. Of course, this did not stop the U.S. from declaring that their health system was woeful and destroying every shred of it in 2003, wishing to start from scratch with co-pays and free market insurance and all that good stuff American consumers love to death (literally in some cases). The result? Both MEDACT and UNICEF have reported that the health of the Iraq people has gone down a landslide since 2003. Child mortality, illness, and malnourishment have risen meteorically, and many institutes have made compelling arguments that the heath of their people was better off under Saddam Hussein. Ashamed that America has destroyed a country’s health care system, causing additional death and disease, only so it’s leaders can gain an upper hand in future debates about health care? I am!
Free Market Ideology – CPA Order 39 made it a violation for the Iraqi government or public sector to favor contracts from Iraqi businesses. If I have to explain to you why this is a bad idea when you have massive unemployment and lots of loose guns around, you need to go back to third grade. Instead of promoting domestic employment and a strong workforce, the Bush administration decided to promote foreign involvement and free-market ideology. If a country has serious unemployment problems, why are promoting bringing foreigners in? The answer in long-term ideology. These clowns threw away what Iraq needs now for their myopic dream of the future that has no basis in reality.
That process – the one of letting ideas trump reality – is known and widely-agreed upon to be awful in the short term. Heck, Order 1 was to purge the government of the previous ruling party, which put 120,000 people out of jobs and effectively destroyed all bureaucratic system in place so they could start fresh with their little playground of textbook conservative ideas. Was any of this remotely democratic? No. Smart in the short-term? No. Guaranteed to be a success? No.
Imposing ideology on a country and letting intellectual pipedreams take priority over practicality is a dangerous business. Though Bolshevik Russia had brief moments of glory, it’s fair to say the entire 70-year experiment was a disaster, especially in the countries where they imposed their dogmatic selves on other systems such as East Germany. Often, you’ll here conservative advocates claim that rebuilding Iraq will be an endeavor like rebuilding Japan or Germany, and that it will be well worth it. Au contraire. In neither Germany nor Japan did the United so boldly assert the untested thoughts of old intellectuals onto a society with no regard for reality as they did in Iraq. In fact, had they used the model of Germany and Japan instead of trying to make Iraq a laboratory for economic conservatism, things might be moving along better right now.
Unfortunately, they made a horrible choice in letting the dogmatic ideas of a few unrealistic, haughty men in ivory towers run the rebuilding instead of sense and adjustment. If there’s one lesson we should have learned from 1989, it’s that you can’t impose rigid dogma on a country like what the USSR did to Poland or Hungary or even itself. Funny, isn’t it, that so many people who shouted “evil empire” seem to have missed one of the major historical points?
