DOING AN END RUN AROUND DEMOCRACY
There have been times in my reporting from disaster zones when I have had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing not just a crisis in the here and now, but a glimpse of our collective future—a preview of where the road we are all on is headed unless we somehow grab the wheel and swerve. When I listen to Trump speak, with his obvious relish in creating an atmosphere of chaos and destabilization, I often think: I’ve seen this before, I’ve seen it in those strange moments when portals seemed to open up into our collective future.
One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive.
I watched another such dystopian window open in 2003 in Baghdad, shortly after the invasion. At that time, the US occupation had carved the city in two. At its heart, behind enormous concrete walls and bomb detectors, there was the Green Zone—a little chunk of the United States rebuilt in Iraq, with bars serving hard liquor, fast-food joints, gyms, and a pool where there seemed to be a party 24/7. And then—beyond those walls—there was a city bombed to rubble, where there was often no electricity for hospitals, and where violence, between Iraqi factions and US occupation forces, was spiraling out of control. That was the Red Zone.
The Green Zone at the time was the fiefdom of Paul Bremer, former assistant to Henry Kissinger and director of Kissinger’s consulting firm, whom George W. Bush had named as the chief US envoy to Iraq. Since there was no functioning national government, that essentially made him Iraq’s supreme leader. Bremer’s was an entirely privatized empire. Dressed in combat boots and a sharp business suit, Bremer was always protected by a phalanx of black-clad mercenaries working for the now-defunct company Blackwater, and the Green Zone itself was run by Halliburton—one of the largest oil field companies in the world, previously headed by then vice president Dick Cheney—along with a network of other private contractors.
When US officials made forays outside the Green Zone (or the “emerald city,” as some journalists called it), they did so in heavily armored convoys, with soldiers and mercenaries pointing machine guns outward in all directions, guided by an ethic of “shoot first, ask questions later.” Regular Iraqis supposedly being liberated by all this weaponry had no protection, except for the kind provided by religious militias in exchange for loyalty. The message broadcast by the convoys was loud and clear: some lives count a hell of a lot more than others.
From deep inside his Green Zone fortress, Bremer issued decree after decree about how Iraq should be remade into a model free-market economy. Come to think of it, it was a lot like Donald Trump’s White House. And the edicts were pretty similar too. Bremer ordered, for instance, that Iraq should have a 15 percent flat tax (quite similar to what Trump has proposed), that its state-owned assets should be rapidly auctioned off (under consideration by Trump), and that government should be dramatically downsized (Trump again). The pace was frantic. Bremer, with an eye on the fossil fuel fields of Iraq and beyond, was determined to get his country makeover done before Iraqis went to the polls and had any kind of say in what their “liberated” future would look like.
In one particularly surreal chapter, Bremer and the State Department brought in advisers from Russia who had led that country’s disastrous experiment with “economic shock therapy,” the corruption-laden deregulation and privatization frenzy which produced that country’s notorious class of oligarchs. Inside the Green Zone, the visitors—including Yegor Gaidar, known as Russia’s “Dr. Shock”—lectured the US-appointed Iraqi politicians about how important it was to radically remake the economy all at once and without hesitating, before Iraq’s population recovered from the war. Iraqis would never have accepted these policies if they’d had a say (and they did in fact reject many of them later). It was only the extreme crisis that made Bremer’s plan conceivable.
In fact, Bremer’s open determination to auction off Iraq’s state-owned assets under cover of crisis did a lot to confirm the widespread perception that the invasion was more about liberating Iraq’s wealth for foreign companies than about liberating its people from despotism. The country spiraled into violence. The US military and its private contractors responded with more violence, more shocks. Unfathomable sums of money disappeared into the black hole of the contractor economy—money that came to be known as “Iraq’s missing billions.”
It wasn’t just the seamless merger of corporate power and open warfare that felt like a glimpse into the dystopian future imagined so many times in science fiction and Hollywood films. It was also the clear mechanism of using crisis to ram through policies that would never have been feasible in normal times. It was in Iraq that I developed the thesis for The Shock Doctrine. Originally, the book was going to focus exclusively on Bush’s war, but then I started to notice the same tactics (and the same contractors, such as Halliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel…) in disaster zones around the world. First came an intense crisis—natural disaster, terrorist attack—then came the blitzkrieg of pro-corporate policies. Often the strategy of crisis exploitation was discussed right out in the open—no dark conspiracy theories required.
As I delved deeper, I realized that this strategy had been a silent partner to the imposition of neoliberalism for more than forty years. That “shock tactics” follow a clear pattern: wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called “extraordinary politics,” suspend some or all democratic norms—and then ram the corporate wish list through as quickly as possible. The research showed that virtually any tumultuous situation, if framed with sufficient hysteria by political leaders, could serve this softening-up function. It could be an event as radical as a military coup, but the economic shock of a market or budget crisis would also do the trick. In the midst of hyperinflation or a banking collapse, for instance, the country’s governing elites were frequently able to sell a panicked population on the necessity for attacks on social protections, or enormous bailouts to prop up the financial private sector—because the alternative, they claimed, was outright economic apocalypse.
The Shock Doctor’s Handbook