Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Naomi Klein: “It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites--Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti--a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert "democracy builders" lecture governments on the importance of transparency and "good governance," yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.”

Klein decries what she calls "disaster capitalism", where after a natural disaster—her examples are Hurricane Mitch and the South East Asia Tsunami—and unnatural, such as the war in Iraq, leading to the World Bank or other non-govnernmental organizations pushing for privatization of state-owned assets. She wrote the article before Hurricane Katrina hit, but she no doubt would have found cause for concern, for example, the now-repealed "Gulf Coast Wage Cut".

The following was written and linked to at the time that the Abu Ghraib photos came out in the first quarter of 2004. Though I continue to stand by my support for the Americans invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein (supported it what I knew then and still support the decision knowing what I know now), Bush at the time that the photos were published, I was appalled and thought Bush should have fired Rumsfeld.

Tim Bray: “Don't torture people.” I was—and still am—also in the minority of Canadians in favour of the invasion into Iraq, and the photos of torture coming out—with more evidently to come—made me wonder how stupid do you have to be to belong to the best-armed army in history? The actions of the GIs disgust me, not merely because their actions are disgusting (they are), but because they are counter-productive. The photos plainly show that the me—”and startlingly, women—thought of the Iraqi prisoners as inhuman.

Reid: “I supported this war. I find it infuriating that 20 months after toppling Saddam, unmasked men loiter in broad daylight after murdering elections officials in downtown Baghdad, and then leave unmolested. I find it doubly infuriating that those who supported this war often seem incapable of openly discussing the implications an attack like this has, even if they are “silver lining” implications. I find it triply infuriating when they focus instead on what is likely the most trivial aspect of this attack, whether the photographer was in on it.”

Christopher Hitchens agrees with Niall Ferguson that comparisons of the current situation Iraq to that of Vietnam are flawed: “If the United States were the nation that its enemies think it is, it could quite well afford to Balkanize Iraq, let the various factions take a chunk each, and make a divide-and-rule bargain with the rump. The effort continues, though, to try and create something that is simultaneously federal and democratic. Short of that, if one absolutely has to fall short, the effort must continue to deny Iraq to demagogues and murderers and charlatans. I can't see how this compares to the attempt to partition and subjugate Vietnam, bomb its cities, drench its forests in Agent Orange, and hand over its southern region to a succession of brutal military proxies.”

Niall Ferguson: “What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations "mandate" under British trusteeship. (Nota bene, if you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi'ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa - where British forces were besieged - and reached as far as Kirkuk.”

Ferguson is arguing that looking to Vietnam for a comparison to today is flawed, and that, as in the above quote, Iraq in the 1920s provides an instructive case for the Americans in Iraq now.

Timothy Noah presents a theory as to why Paul Wolfowitz was wrong about Iraq this time around: “Wolfowitz was corrupted by early success. Twenty-odd years ago, Wolfowitz took two very lonely positions that proved to be spectacularly right. As a consequence, he developed an unshakable belief that once he's thought through a problem [...] he should ignore the cavils of lesser minds. Time will prove that he's right.”

Timothy Noah seems awfully confident that Wolfowitz was wrong that “post-Saddam Iraq would quickly get back on its feet”. The key word for me is "quickly": I'd be interested to see how Noah and Wolfowitz differ on the definition, it only being a year since Saddam was ousted.