April 24, 2004

Whose chaos is it anyway?, By Tom LeVine
by Liza Sabater

I've already seen Mark Levine's theory of chaos in Iraq pop in several places and I must say, he's found a place in my list of "Required Reading" with articles such as TomDispatch > Tomgram: LeVine on sponsored chaos in Iraq | TOMPAINE.com - Chaos Theory | Seeing Iraq through the globalization lens | csmonitor.com | The chaos theory in action (Asia Times).

After the chaos and grieving of September 11, I remember saying that the breach in air security just did not feel right. It was too easy, to simple. There was no other explanation but that it happened not because the White House did not know it was going to happened but because they took a "wait and see" strategy that, hopefully, would help them find an excuse to go after Iraq. The more I read Mark LeVine's articles, the more I am convinced that September 11 was chaos created by the "purposeful incompetence" of Cheney, Bush, Rice & Company.

The following is an excerpt from Whose Chaos Is This Anyway?:

It is perhaps hard for Americans to understand their occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization; but Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of such a trend, a place in which chaos is king and the revenues flow back to the corporate "homeland" like water from a tap. Here, as a start, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity, oil. While corporate prospectors allied with the U.S. scavenged the country in mammoth SUVs filled with downsized former soldiers turned high-priced security guards for any opportunity to profit from Iraq's misery, inside Baghdad's massively fortified Green Zone, where the CPA rules over a non-country, their counterparts drafted regulations for "privatizing" everything from health care to prisons and for delivering them into the same corporate hands.

You only have to spend a few hours in the no-less fortified Baghdad Airport checking out the new colonial bureaucrats and Bible Belt contractors passing through to get a sense of how such a world operates. Aside from gazing at a departure/arrivals boards with "delayed" notifications from who knows how many years ago, the most interesting way to pass the time is to chat with them. At least when I was there, most of the two dozen or so white men (and a few women) I spoke with or on whose conversations I eavesdropped were from the South or Midwest. All were clearly in Iraq for one thing -- money -- and happy to say so. Some were on quick trips to Basra or Kirkuk scouting out contracts; others had crisscrossed the country for the previous months or year intent on such tasks as training bomb-sniffing dogs for the Army. There were contract employees of USAID, workers for the privately run RTI International -- making $100,000 per year with hazard pay for jobs that would pay less than half that at home -- and assorted contractors looking to milk some of the billions of dollars in congressionally-mandated reconstruction aid. As a group, they were a reminder that the chaos of war and occupation provides wonderful opportunities for corporations and individuals to make levels of profits, unchecked by the laws and regulations that hamper profitability in peacetime and are usually unrealizable under normal circumstances. But -- and this is the other side of chaos, even for those who profit from it -- all of those departing were relieved or happy to be leaving, even though a number of them planned to return.

There is, needless to say, nothing new about war profiteering. But there is something new about the way it's being done in Iraq. In the post-Cold War era, global corporations and the government elites with whom they work have great incentives to sponsor global chaos and the violence it generates. This gives "opening markets" a new meaning in our age. We know from the experience, for instance, of post-Soviet Kazakhstan or even of Russia itself, how political and social chaos lead to the formation of competing networks of criminal gangs and exceedingly corruptible political parties, filled with potential dynastic families and their friends, all competing for resources and power in the decidedly one-sided contest that is the globalized market economy.

Here's the bio circulating in the article. For more about the author go to Mark LeVine: A Critical Voice of the New Generation.

Mark LeVine, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is the co-editor, with Pilar Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of 'Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation' (Perceval Press, 2003) and author of the forthcoming 'Why They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of Globalization' (Oneworld Publications, 2004).

Read this man. Now!

Posted by Liza Sabater in Empire, Iraq, Required Reading, Viggo Mortensen, War
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