http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/created-instability-middle.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
It was all to be a kind of war-fighting miracle. The American
invaders would be greeted as liberators, the mission quickly
accomplished
, and “major combat operations” ended in a flash — as George Bush so infamously
announced on May 1, 2003, after his
Top Gun landing on the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln. No less miraculous was the fact that it would essentially be a freebie. After all, as undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz
pointed out
at the time, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” which meant that a
“liberated” country could cover all “reconstruction” costs without
blinking.
The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful sense that they were
building an American protectorate. So why wouldn’t it be a snap to
carry out their ambitious plans to privatize the Iraqi economy,
dismantle the country’s vast public sector (throwing another army of
employees out of work), and bring in crony corporations to help run the
country and giant oil companies to rev up the energy economy, lagging
from years of sanctions and ill-repair? In the end, Washington’s Iraq
would — so they believed — pump enough crude out of one of the greatest
fossil fuel reserves on the planet to sink OPEC, leaving American power
free to float to ever greater heights on that sea of oil. As the
occupying authority, with a hubris stunning to behold, they issued
“orders” that
read as if they had been written by officials from some nineteenth-century imperial power.
In short, this was one for the history books. And not a thing —
nothing — worked out as planned. You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred.
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