Baghdad: free market utopia

Thanks to skippy for directing all of us to the Naomi Klein article that came out in Harper's a few months ago that is finally available on line.

In it she describes the Bush regimes ambitions to turn Iraq into a model for "small government' and "free enterprise," or the BS we've been served up for years about the optimal economic conditions of deregulation and free market competition. I'll give the ending away and tell you that Klein says Bush, Bremer & Company have failed -- and in the process Iraq has spiralled into the state of catastrophic chaos in which we find it today. But the story of the failure is devastating because according to Klein, there are an opening when a more civic minded, more responsible set of policies that respected Iraqi institutions as legitimate rather than as chunks of real estate to be auctioned off -- would have made an enormous difference in the winning of "hearts and minds."

But how can we expect the Republicans to respect Iraqi institutions when they don't respect American ones?