Old Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago had some pithy students -- Donald Rumsfeld, for one -- who tasered his mentor's laissez faire economic theories into a shock-and-awe geopolitical blueprint for remaking American democracy. The idea was to turn the country into a venture-capitalist model for the world to catch up with. Manufacturing? Let the third world do it. No pesky, profit-compromising minimum wage laws or social consciences to interfere. Plus, the industrial spill could sicken India or Bangladesh, the Mexican ratlands or the remoter parts of China . . . not suburban Connecticut or Santa Monica-by-the-Sea.
Meanwhile, in our neocon colonies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America, and here at home, U.S. Guv's job could be gradually downsized to policing the empire, while the multi-nationals did the real legislating -- it's not for nothing that voter apathy has thrived in the past 20 years, while lobbying firms like Jack Abramoff's grew by leaps and bounds. "Privatize everything!" had been Friedman's mantra.
Naturally, this is all a gradual process, so what Rumsfeld, Vice Prez Cheney, the Bush brood, Richard Perle, Karl Rove, the lupine Paul Wolfowitz (another U. of Chi ideologue), and old hands like Henry Kissinger have done is package the erosion in progressive vocabulary: "the global economy"; "NAFTA"; "privatization"; "transparency"; "economic drift" (my fave -- who would back small entrepreneurs like Hugo Chavez on the Big Board?)
But the truth is, there's a playbook, as vital and narrow as Bill Belichik's: By Sept. 11 (!), 1973, when Augusto Pinochet's Chilean fascists riddled elected socialist president Salvadore Allende's body with bullets, young, Chilean CIA-sponsored economists, newly-graduated from -- where else? -- the U. of Chi, had already delivered "The Brick," a solid, U.S.-approved plan for the "reconstruction" of Chilean society, back on home turf. The unshaveable Richard Nixon and the bizarrely croaking Kissinger (physical signs of moral corruption?), were implementing Friedman's vision the hard way. But, of course, for the good of the world.
Fast-forward to Proconsul Paul Bremer's investiture in 2003 in Iraq. Bremy had been an assistant to Rummy in R's first term as Defense Secretary, 1990-92, during the Bush I regime. Then, while Rum made some dough as CEO of General Instrument Corp. for eight years, during the Clinton "hiatus" (NAFTA, a Bush I agenda, was sold by Slick Willy after he was badly shaken by Hill's "Democrat" failure on Health Care reform), Bremer apprenticed with Kissinger Associates on Park Avenue.
When his education was complete, Bush II was in office, and Bremer helped set up Homeland Security. His reward was a job as interim governor of Iraq. Of course Clinton had already fixed up Blackwater USA, the "private" mercenary corporation from the Great Dismal Swamp (!) in North Carolina, with a $27 million contract to guard U.S. officials in Afghanistan. This opened the door for its becoming the unofficial U.S. SWAT team in Iraq and elsewhere, since its founder, Eric Prince, a former Navy SEAL and arch-conservative Republican billionaire from Michigan, was up to his Tom Cruise buzz cut in Paul Wolfowitz's old "Project for a New American Century" white paper -- through the Family Research Council, another neocon outfit.
"The Project for a New American Century" was a reworking of Uncle Milty Friedman's world domination/privatizing theories. Part of it was leaked to the Times and Post during Bush I, and caused enough of a flap in those more innocent days to be forced into semi-hibernation during the Clinton years -- one of the reasons the conservatives were so rabidly against Bill at Whitewater, etc., was that he was holding up the show. But with the coming of 9/11, Bush II made TPFANAC the Dubya foreign policy. Before that, Blackwater had scored a $35 million gig teaching the Navy how to guard against attacks like the one on the USS Cole, and came into its own on April Fool's Day, 2004, when four of its men were killed by insurgents in an open jeep in Fallujah, then smoked like sausages and hung up to dry on a bridge over the Euphrates river. Bush II had his Alamo, and by June, Blackwater had a $320 million deal with the State Department to provide so-called diplomatic security services.
Blackwater, by the way, was generously staffed by former aides to then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
Since then it's been at the head of the private security forces in Iraq, first ahead of even Halliburton, Dick Cheney's old company, the Carlisle Group, Science Applications International, and Raytheon. It has an estimated 40 to 60,000 personnel on the ground, vastly swelling the numbers of American fighters the president and General Petraeus acknowledge in their estimates of "troop strength", and that's not counting the other companies. It's also never been "registered" to operate in Iraq, as its rivals have, thus protecting it from depredations by pissed-off Iraqi government officials, tired of having the civilian population run over and killed by tough-guy cowboys in wraparound sunglasses, and slinging burp guns like North Philly gangbangers: "Drive-bys? What about Bush's fly-bys? How about Rove's bye-byes?" a banger I know told me in August.
The recent push by the "sovereign" Iraq government, media whipping boys for the administration's historical failures in the Middle East, to have Blackwater expelled from Iraq, came after a series of minimally-reported Blackwater incidents: last May, there was a two-day gun battle on the front steps of the Iraq Interior Ministry in eastern Baghdad, downplayed by CNN and other bastions of a free press, in which Blackwater thugs "accidentally" shot a number of passers-by in "retaliation" for having been shot at themselves; last Christmas, an off-duty Blackwater guard, tipsy with holiday cheer, killed the bodyguard of the Vice-President of Iraq at a party! After a protest by Nouri al-Maliki himself, the man was whisked back to the States, and Blackwater is "cooperating" in an "investigation" by American officials. Imagine if one of Cheney's bodyguards had been shot by an Iraqi . . .
The incident that set the current Blackwater expulsion demand off occurred last Sunday and again received minimal reporting here. An Iraqi driver got too close to a State Department convoy in Baghdad, and ignored signals to move off. Blackwater opened fire. At least nine Iraqis were killed, 16 wounded. In death, they were instantly labeled "insurgents", as all the Iraqis killed by occupation forces are. (The reason Al-Jazeera, the independent Arab news service, is hated and shunned by patriots like Rumsfeld and Kissinger, is that it had a camera crew inside Fallujah, and showed F-16s attacking the city, when the U. S. Command had denied that it was happening.)
Condi Rice was on the phone to Maliki immediately, sympathizing and vowing to "investigate." Ambassador Ryan Crocker, fresh from his media tag-team campaign with General Petraeus to extend the war, opined that Blackwater "plays a vital part" in the U.S. mission against terrorism, and therefore shouldn't be kicked out of Iraq.
What didn't get mentioned is that Blackwater is a key player in U. S. "privatization" master plans: War is a racket. The implications of wars fought by corporations to generate profits for shareholders come down to this: war racketeers provide bodies, weapons and supplies; profits are maximized based on the quantity of bodies killed and wounded, the volumes of weapons used and destroyed, and the amount of property damaged -- rebuilding lets you make $ on the upside and the downside. Outfits like Blackwater, Raytheon and Halliburton provide cover for the Rumsfeld/ Friedman Doctrine: venture capitalism uber alles, and in turn the reconfigured U.S. Guv, a kind of brand name in itself for an outmoded political system these days, provides cover for the companies doing the dirty work. Everything is Disney-fied.
Bush's crew may be discredited at the moment, but "The Project for a New American Century" lives on.
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