by Naomi Klein
Iraq had another advantage. While the U.S. military was busy fantasizing about refighting Desert Storm with a technological upgrade equivalent to “the difference between Atari and PlayStation,” as one commentator put it, Iraq’s military capacity had been hurtling backward, eroded by sanctions and virtually disassembled by the United Nations–administered weapons inspection program.9 That meant that, compared with Iran or Syria, Iraq seemed the site for the most winnable war.
Thomas Friedman was forthright about what it meant for Iraq to be selected as the model. “We are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We are doing nation-creating,” he wrote—as if shopping around for a large, oil-rich Arab nation to create from scratch was a natural, even “noble” thing to do in the twenty-first century.10 Friedman is among many of the onetime war advocates who has since claimed that he did not foresee the carnage that would follow from the invasion. It’s hard to see how he could have missed that detail. Iraq was not an empty space on a map; it was and remains a culture as old as civilization, with fierce anti-imperialist pride, strong Arab nationalism, deeply held faiths and a majority of the adult male population with military training. If “nation creating” was going to happen in Iraq, what exactly was supposed to become of the nation that was already there? The unspoken assumption from the beginning was that much of it would have to disappear, to clear the ground for the grand experiment—an idea that contained, at its core, the certainty of extraordinary colonialist violence.
Thirty years earlier, when the Chicago School counterrevolution took its first leap from the textbook to the real world, it also sought to erase nations and create new ones in their place. Like Iraq in 2003, Chile in 1973 was meant to serve as a model for the entire rebellious continent, and for many years it did. The brutal regimes that implemented Chicago School ideas in the seventies understood that, for their idealized new nations to be born in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, whole categories of people and their cultures would need to be pulled up “from the root.”
In the countries that suffered the political cleansings, there have been collective efforts to come to terms with this violent history—truth commissions, excavations of unmarked graves and the beginnings of war crimes trials for the perpetrators. But the Latin American juntas did not act alone: they were propped up before and after their coups by Washington, as has been amply documented. For instance, in 1976, the year of Argentina’s coup, when thousands of young activists were snatched from their homes, the junta had full financial support from Washington. (“If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” Kissinger had said.)11 That year, Gerald Ford was president, Dick Cheney was his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld was his secretary of defense, and Kissinger’s executive assistant was an ambitious young man named Paul Bremer. These men faced no truth-and-justice process for their roles in supporting the juntas and went on to enjoy long and prosperous careers. So long, in fact, that they would be around three decades later to implement a strikingly similar—if far more violent—experiment in Iraq.
In his 2005 inaugural address, George W. Bush described the era between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror as “years of repose, years of sabbatical—and then there came a day of fire.”12 The Iraq invasion marked the ferocious return to the early techniques of the free-market crusade—the use of ultimate shock to forcibly wipe out and erase all obstacles to the construction of model corporatist states free from all interference.
Ewen Cameron, the CIA-funded psychiatrist who had tried to “depattern” his patients by regressing them to infantile states, had believed that if a little shock was good for this purpose, more was better. He blasted brains with everything he could think of—electricity, hallucinogens, sensory deprivation, sensory overload—anything that would wipe out what was and give him a blank slate on which to imprint new thoughts, new patterns. With a far larger canvas, that was the invasion and occupation strategy for Iraq. The architects of the war surveyed the global arsenal of shock tactics and decided to go with all of them—blitzkrieg military bombardment supplemented with elaborate psychological operations, followed up with the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by rounding up those who resisted and subjecting them to “gloves-off” abuse.
Often, in the analyses of the war in Iraq, the conclusion is that the invasion was a “success” but the occupation was a failure. What this assessment overlooks is that the invasion and occupation were two parts of a unified stategy—the initial bombardment was designed to erase the canvas on which the model nation could be built.
War as Mass Torture
For the strategists of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the answer to the question of “where to stick the needles” appears to have been: everywhere. During the 1991 Gulf War, roughly three hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired over the course of five weeks. In 2003, more than three hundred and eighty were launched in a single day. Between March 20 and May 2, the weeks of “major combat,” the U.S military dropped more than thirty thousand bombs on Iraq, as well as twenty thousand precision-guided cruise missiles—67 percent of the total number ever made.13
“I am so scared,” Yasmine Musa, a Baghdad mother of three said during the bombings. “Not a single minute passes by without hearing and feeling a drop of a bomb somewhere. I don’t think that a single meter in the whole of Iraq is safe.”14 That meant Shock and Awe was doing its job. In open defiance of the laws of war barring collective punishment, Shock and Awe is a military doctrine that prides itself on not merely targeting the enemy’s military forces but, as its authors stress, the “society writ large”—mass fear is a key part of the strategy.
Another element that distinguishes Shock and Awe is its acute consciousness of war as a cable news spectacle, one playing to several audiences at once: the enemy, Americans at home and anyone else thinking of making trouble. “When the video results of these attacks are broadcast in real time worldwide on CNN, the positive impact on coalition support and negative impact on potential threat support can be decisive,” the Shock and Awe manual states.* From the start, the invasion was conceived as a message from Washington to the world, one spoken in the language of fireballs, deafening explosions and city-shattering quakes. In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind explains that for Rumsfeld and Cheney, “the primary impetus for invading Iraq” was the desire “to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.” Less than a war strategy, it was a “global experiment in behaviorism.”15
Warfare is always partly a performance, always a form of mass communication, but Rumsfeld’s marshaling of his tech and media know-how from the business world put the marketing of fear at the center of U.S. military doctrine. During the Cold War, the fear of a nuclear attack was the core of the deterrence strategy, but the idea was for the nuclear missiles to stay in their silos. This attack was different: Rumsfeld’s war would use everything short of a nuclear bomb to put on a show designed to bombard the senses, pull and play on emotion, and convey lasting messages, with targets carefully chosen for their symbolic value and their made-for-TV impact. In this way, Rumsfeld’s theory of war, part of his project of “transformation,” had far less in common with the “force-on-force” battlefield strategies of the generals, who were always slowing him down, and far more in common with the terrorists against whom Rumsfeld had declared permanent war. Terrorists don’t try to win through direct confrontation; they attempt to break public morale with spectacular, televisual displays that at once expose their enemy’s vulnerability and their own capacity for cruelty. That was the theory behind the 9/11 attacks, just as it was the theory behind the invasion of Iraq.
Shock and Awe is often presented as merely a strategy of overwhelming firepower, but the authors of the doctrine see it as much more than that: it is, they claim, a sophisticated
psychological blueprint aimed “directly at the public will of the adversary to resist.” The tools are ones familiar from another arm of the U.S. military complex: sensory deprivation and sensory overload, designed to induce disorientation and regression. With clear echoes of the CIA’s interrogation manuals, “Shock and Awe” states, “In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events.” The goal is “rendering the adversary completely impotent.” This includes such strategies as “real-time manipulation of senses and inputs…literally ‘turning on and off ’ the ‘lights’ that enable any potential aggressor to see or appreciate the conditions and events concerning his forces and ultimately, his society” as well as “depriving the enemy, in specific areas, of the ability to communicate, observe.”16 The country of Iraq was subjected to this experiment in mass torture for months, with the process beginning well before the bombs started falling.
Fear Up
When the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was grabbed by U.S. agents at JFK airport in 2002 and taken to Syria, a victim of extraordinary rendition, his interrogators engaged in a tried-and-tested torture technique. “They put me on a chair, and one of the men started asking me questions…. If I did not answer quickly enough, he would point to a metal chair in the corner and ask, ‘Do you want me to use this?’…I was terrified, and I did not want to be tortured. I would say anything to avoid torture.”17 The technique Arar was being subjected to is known as “the showing of the instruments,” or, in U.S. military lingo, “fear up.” Torturers know that one of their most potent weapons is the prisoner’s own imagination—often just showing fearsome instruments is more effective than using them.
As the day of the invasion of Iraq drew closer, U.S. news media outlets were conscripted by the Pentagon to “fear up” Iraq. “They’re calling it ‘A-Day,’” began a report on CBS News that aired two months before the war began. “‘A’ as in airstrikes so devastating they would leave Saddam’s soldiers unable or unwilling to fight.” Viewers were introduced to Harlan Ullman, a Shock and Awe author, who explained that “you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes.” The anchor, Dan Rather, ended the telecast with a disclaimer: “We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military.”18 He could have gone further: the report, like so many others in this period, was an integral part of the Department of Defense’s strategy—fear up.
Iraqis, who picked up the terrifying reports on contraband satellites or in phone calls from relatives abroad spent months imagining the horrors of Shock and Awe. The phrase itself became a potent psychological weapon. Would it be worse than 1991? If the Americans really thought Saddam had WMDs, would they launch a nuclear attack?
One answer was provided a week before the invasion. The Pentagon invited Washington’s military press corps on a special field trip to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida to witness the testing of the MOAB, which officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast but which everyone in the military calls the “Mother of All Bombs.” At twenty-one thousand pounds, it is the largest nonnuclear explosive ever built, able to create, in the words of CNN’s Jamie McIntyre, “a ten-thousand-foot-high mushroom-like cloud that looks and feels like a nuclear weapon.”19
In his report, McIntyre said that even if it was never used, the bomb’s very existence “could still pack a psychological wallop”—a tacit acknowledgment of the role he himself was playing in delivering that wallop. Like prisoners in interrogation cells, Iraqis were being shown the instruments. “The goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there’s an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight,” Rumsfeld explained on the same program.20
When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city’s sensory inputs were cut off; the ears were the first to go.
On the night of March 28, 2003, as U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the phone exchanges continued—twelve in total—until, by April 2, there was barely a phone working in all of Baghdad.*21 During the same assault, television and radio transmitters were also hit, making it impossible for families in Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a weak signal carrying news of what was going on outside their doors.
Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment. Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing numbers into the reporters’ hands along with pleas to call a brother or an uncle in London or Baltimore. “Tell him everything is okay. Tell him his mother and father are fine. Tell him hello. Tell him not to worry.”22 By then, most drugstores in Baghdad had sold out of sleeping aids and antidepressants, and the city was completely cleaned out of Valium.
Next to go were the eyes. “There was no audible explosion, no discernible change in the early evening bombardments, but in an instant, an entire city of 5 million people was plunged into an awful, endless night,” The Guardian reported on April 4. Darkness was “relieved only by the headlights of passing cars.”23 Trapped in their homes, Baghdad’s residents could not speak to each other, hear each other or see outside. Like a prisoner destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was shackled and hooded. Next it was stripped.
Comfort Items
In hostile interrogations, the first stage of breaking down prisoners is stripping them of their own clothes and any items that have the power to evoke their sense of self—so-called comfort items. Often objects that are of particular value to a prisoner, like the Koran or a cherished photograph, are treated with open disrespect. The message is “You are no one, you are who we want you to be,” the essence of dehumanization. Iraqis went through this unmaking process collectively, as they watched their most important institutions desecrated, their history loaded onto trucks and disappeared. The bombing badly injured Iraq, but it was the looting, unchecked by occupying troops, that did the most to erase the heart of the country that was.
“The hundreds of looters who smashed ancient ceramics, stripped display cases and pocketed gold and other antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq pillaged nothing less than records of the first human society,” reported the Los Angeles Times. “Gone are 80 per cent of the museum’s 170,000 priceless objects.”24 The national library, which contained copies of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Korans had disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell. “Our national heritage is lost,” pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher.25 A local merchant said of the museum, “It was the soul of Iraq. If the museum doesn’t recover the looted treasures, I will feel like a part of my own soul has been stolen.” McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called it “a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed.”26
Thanks mostly to the efforts of clerics who organized salvage missions in the midst of the looting, a portion of the artifacts has been recovered. But many Iraqis were, and still are, convinced that the memory lobotomy was intentional—part of Washington’s plans to excise the strong, rooted nation that was and replace it with their own model. “Baghdad is the mother of Arab culture,” seventy-year-old Ahmed Abdullah told The Washington Post, “and they want to wipe out our culture.”27
As the war plann
ers were quick to point out, the looting was done by Iraqis, not foreign troops. And it’s true that Rumsfeld did not plan for Iraq to be sacked—but he did not take measures to prevent it from happening either, or to stop it once it had begun. These were failures that cannot be dismissed as mere oversights.
During the 1991 Gulf War, thirteen Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so there was every reason to believe that poverty, anger at the old regime and the general atmosphere of chaos would prompt some Iraqis to respond in the same way (especially given that Saddam had emptied the prisons several months earlier). The Pentagon had been warned by leading archaeologists that it needed to have an airtight strategy to protect museums and libraries before any attack, and a March 26 Pentagon memo to coalition command listed “in order of importance, 16 sites that were crucial to protect in Baghdad.” Second on the list was the museum. Other warnings had urged Rumsfeld to send an international police contingent in with the troops to maintain public order—another suggestion that was ignored.28
Even without the police, however, there were enough U.S. soldiers in Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they weren’t sent. There are numerous reports of U.S. soldiers hanging out by their armored vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove by—a reflection of the “stuff happens” indifference coming straight from Rumsfeld. Some units took it upon themselves to stop the looting, but in other instances, soldiers joined in. The Baghdad International Airport was completely trashed by soldiers who, according to Time, smashed furniture and then moved on to the commercial jets on the runway: “U.S. soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of the planes’ fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and popped out every windshield.” The result was an estimated $100 million worth of damage to Iraq’s national airline—which was one of the first assets to be put on the auction block in an early and contentious partial privatization.29