I got the following lette from a reader, Peter Su. Thought it best to try to answer his questions here, and start with the letter:

After we executed worshippers in a Sadr City mosque one week and sent Rice to pressure Jaafari to step down the next, I'd started suspecting, even before reading "Iraq In and Out of the News," that we were intentionally keeping Iraq in chaos to keep their oil off the market.

Then, scrolling up, I find you've already discarded the pseudo-conspiracy theory after reading Schwartz on TomDispatch. But after finishing both your "It's the Economy, Stupid" and his piece, I can't find anything in either to explicitly reject the notion of Bush intentionally failing in Iraq; as you say, "that theory fits the evidence well enough."

The closest I found was the reporting of a brief post-invasion boom in Iraq, before the shit really hit the fan. Since that sort of empty, dangerously inflated boom prosperity seems economic dogma among Bush's kind, do you mean that, if they were really trying to wreck Iraq to keep it off the market, they would have implemented policy that THEY thought would fail (and, who knows, might actually have worked?). Or am I missing something between the lines that a better educated reader would infer?

If the latter, and if your time and inclination permits, would be grateful to see a post from you on why our failure in Iraq was more via incompetence than intent. I'm reasonably well-read, so if I missed some economic inference in both the TomDispatch piece and your own, I don't think I'd be the only one who would especially appreciate its explication.

I did shift gears between the two posts -- a mere day apart -- in response to the new (or poorly remembered) data that Schwartz brought up. As both posts argue, ever since the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 the net effect of US policy has been to damage Iraq: in particular, to undermine the bonds of civil society, in turn wrecking Iraq's economy and dramatically reducing living standards. The question is whether this effect had been Bush's intent all along. Intent is always hard to establish -- all the more so given the secrecy under which Bush et al. developed their policies and the deliberate confusion caused by their many false statements about what they wanted to do and why.

It seems to me that intent is worth discussing, but it has two distinct sides. One is that there is a distinct political need now to try to nail down what America's intent is in Iraq. Bush has been very slippery in this regard -- indeed, it often looks like they're making it up as they go along. If we can start to nail this down, we can start to assess progress (or lack thereof) and start to rationally adjust the tactics and/or the goals to reality.

The other is historical: what was the real intent at the moment they decided to invade? I suspect that the answer there is a cluster of ideological views that center around the idea that the US has ought to assert its power more aggressively to remake the world in our image. The most succinct expression of this was formulated by Madeleine Albright when she called the US "the indispensible nation"; she in turn drew on a long legacy of self-flattery known as American exceptionalism and the mythic aura of "the American Century" -- how American economic vitality and military prowess increasingly loomed over the world throughout the 20th century. This core idea spawned two main ideological threads: the economic doctrine of neoliberalism and the political doctrine of neoconservatism. Both were rooted in the Cold War, and reflect its twin axes: neoconservatism was directed against political foes, above all the Soviet Union; neoliberalism's enemy was any political support for the working class or the world's poor. Both doctrines ultimately depended on self-deceptions: the naked pursuit of self-interest required a cloak of high moral principles, which the neos appropriated almost indiscriminately. By focusing so tightly on their faith, they in turn developed a blindness to the world around them, especially to how adverse effects that followed application of their theories.

Neoliberalism is actually the broader framework, in that it mostly works through seduction with only a hint of force. The masters of capital offer debt to developing countries, then demand concessions when the debt cannot be serviced. The concessions typically grant further private access and control to capital while undermining any efforts to build self-sufficiency, leading to cycles of debt and disaster while capital extracts its profits. The least productive of all such loans are those stolen by elites and recycled as the local elites join the rarefied ranks of world capitalists. All this activity is touted as development aid, but all it really develops is capital. Developing countries face the choice of "aid" that works against them or isolation.

Neoliberalism is insidious; neoconservatism gets much nastier. You can think of them as two arms of the mob: the loanshark and the muscle guys. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and Eastern Europe surrendered to neoliberalism, resulting in a drastic deflation of their economies -- from which Russia, in particular, has never recovered. That left small, scattered groups of isolated nations -- the so-called rogue states. What the neoconservatives believed was that by demonizing those states and flounting American power they could complete the task of integrating the world's last holdouts into a single worldwide system dominated by private capital: a world of the rich, for the rich. In order for this to happen, the rich needed their own captive state, a service that the increasingly corrupt US political system provided -- especially in electing George W. Bush, a man instinctively eager to defend Dubai oil princes against overwhelming American public opinion.

For the neos Iraq was the jackpot. Its oil reserves were second only to safely privatized Saudi Arabia, yet it remained stubbornly outside the system, despite over twenty years of harrassment and isolation. The neos had no patience to wait for a Soviet-style collapse. They managed to convince themselves that the US had the power to flip Iraq into the system, and that the Iraqis would love them for it. There are many reasons why this couldn't and wouldn't work, but the whole march up to the war was swallowed up in the falsehoods expedient to sell the war, a program so unpopular that the neos coulnd't afford to admit, even to themselves, that the post-war might be even tougher than the pre-war. But then the neos already had vast experience at rationalizing the unsavory effects of their past successes.

Until Bush invaded Iraq, neoconservatism was mostly an untested theory. The credit the neocons took for the collapse of the Soviet Union is suspicious given that far harsher sanctions on much weaker countries ranging from Cuba to North Korea to Iraq had failed to do anything but lower living standards and harden resistance to the US. Afghanistan didn't prove much either -- the key there was a diplomatic deal to flip Pakistan, depriving the Taliban of their crucial international supporters. On the other hand, neoliberalism has been tested extensively. It is a theory that for the most part has worked to make the rich richer, at least in the short term. Of course, if you're not rich, you might think differently -- and you can point to masses of data that show that neoliberal policies depress wages, reduce safety nets and worker protections, curtail government support of infrastructure, and prematurely kill local businesses that could be real seeds of development.

Even neoliberalism's "rich get richer" dividend needs some qualification. What the neos try to do is to create a virtuous circle between wealth and political power, so they appeal most strongly to the subset of the rich whose wealth depends most on political connections. Two prime examples are oil, which is based on a legal claim to a natural resource, and arms, which primarily sell to states. Those industries are the core of the Bush junta, with mining, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and banks similarly aligned to benefit from political favoritism. The neos, in turn, have privatized government services to create an industry that functions as a new patronage system. One thing to recognize here is that the neos' agenda, in and of itself, is intrinsically unpopular in America: it serves the special interests of a small fraction of Americans (and others), and often works against the best interests of the majority. So politicians like Bush have had to wrap their neo agenda up in a broader, more popular program of social conservatism. They've been very successful at that, but the whole game depends on their ability to convince enough of us that they know what they're doing and that what they're doing is right. They've studied carefully enough to know that the essence of sales is conviction, and that's why they have to keep a straight face -- hence, no admission of mistakes.

This is a long, roundabout way of getting back to the question. It doesn't make sense that the invasion of Iraq was meant just to wreck the country and run up gas prices, even though that's about all they've actually accomplished, for two reasons. The first is that there were simpler, more surefire ways of accomplishing those goals -- indeed, twelve years of sanctions and random bombings was doing a pretty effective job of it. The second is that occupying Iraq risked a failure of such magnitude that it would expose the entire conceit of their ideology -- which is pretty much what has happened, although the magnitude of their failure is only beginning to sink in. Clearly, the war's architects believe that they could make their gamble pay off. They had convinced themselves that US military power packed such shock and awe that Iraqis would sensibly give up their independence and submit to American direction. They had convinced themselves that the US political and economic system was so productive, so superior in principle, that Iraqis would be happy to lift themselves up through their prescriptions. To say that they were wrong would be an extreme understatement. They were fucking insane, which is what happens to crooks whose scams are so successful their fantasies are freed from any effective checks and balances.

On the other hand, there's no real evidence that, even faced with overwhelming evidence of failure, the Bush administration has altered any of their fundamental goals in Iraq. They've yielded some tactical ground on democracy, but continue their manipulations to get something resembling the complaisant government they've always wanted. They still strike out at anyone who crosses them -- lately the Shiite militias in addition to whole Sunni cities. They continue to build their "enduring" bases. Bush has ruled out any discussion of leaving as long as he's still president. Evidently, they still believe that their plan is the right one, and that it will succeed unless the folks back home get all chickenshit and vote them out of office. Meanwhile, the Iraqis fighting them and otherwise misbehaving are just hurting themselves.

The latter point illustrates one of the neos' most critical traits: the ability to blame their victims. This both protects their sense of their own innocent high principles and inures to the consequences of their acts. The conservative mindset has always assumed that the hard life of the poor is an inevitable consequence of the human condition. The neos, by aggressively promoting the interests of the rich, make the inevitable happen all that much more. It must be nice to blunder through life with nothing tugging at your conscience. But if they really had no inkling of the damage they do, you'd think they'd be less secretive, and less cautious about avoiding the docket in the Hague.

How much of the destruction of Iraq was caused by Bush's economic policies as compared to the military occupation is hard to determine. The policies very quickly put a lot of people out of work, and a lot of firms out of business, but so did the chaos and terror -- and as Schwartz pointed out, the brutal repression of dissent tremendously accelerated the armed resistance and still more brutal repression. Resistance itself was inevitable, and the surge of looting as soon as Saddam's regime melted away established chaos as a norm in a way that the US never got a handle on. The temporary surge in business as foreigners sold cell phones and used cars wasn't a real bubble in any economic sense -- it was just another form of looting. Once the resistance reached critical mass, reconstruction halted, and with it any chance to stabilize the country. Since then the US has been far too busy dodging defeat to accomplish anything.

It's easy to become cynical about the use of military force, since its destructive power is so obvious. If Bush wanted to pound Iraq back to the stone age, all it would take is a little more of what they're already doing anyway. But neoliberal economics is a subtler weapon of mass destruction. Thus far no one has suggested that it is being wielded for any reason more nefarious than mere greed. The neos don't deny greed so much as try to rationalize it as an engine for what little of the common good they can grasp. So it's unlikely that they meant to destroy Iraq through their economic and political ideologies. But it's inevitable that they did. And it's essential to their nature that they deny their culpability and blame the Iraqis and all those other evildoers who butted in -- the most dangerous of which are the antiwar masses back home.