We have posted criticisms of the book Johann Norberg calls The Shlock Doctrine primarily from economists and the Right. This criticism comes from the Left, written by Jonathan Chait at the New Republic.
Klein repeatedly implies that there is something
immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda without
explaining why this is so. After all, Friedman wanted to overhaul the
New Orleans public education system because he believed, rightly or
wrongly, that vouchers would work better. If you thought your house was
horribly designed, and a tornado flattened it, would you rebuild it
exactly as before?
The notion that crises
create fertile terrain for political change, far from being a ghoulish
doctrine unique to free-market radicals, is a banal and ideologically
universal fact. (Indeed, it began its dubious modern career in the
orbit of Marxism, where it was known as "sharpening the
contradictions.") Entrenched interests and public opinion tend to run
against sweeping reform, good or bad, during times of peace and
prosperity. Liberals could not have enacted the New Deal without the
Great Depression. Communist revolutions have generally come about in
the wake of wars. The liberal economist Victor R. Fuchs once wrote that
"national health insurance will probably come to the United States in
the wake of a major change in the political climate, the kind of change
that often accompanies a war, a depression, or large-scale civil
unrest."
Fuchs did not mean that the public
would never accept universal health insurance unless they had been
brutalized into doing so. Nor was his observation evidence that he
longed for disaster to befall the United States. Most American liberals
today would admit that the sorry state of the American economy, foreign
policy, and political life has created a golden opportunity for
progressive reform. There is nothing odious about this. Yet Klein takes
analogous observations from conservatives as proof that the right
"prays for crisis the way drought-stricken farmers pray for rain." ...
Most critics of the war believe the notion of exporting democracy to a
hostile Arab country was doomed in its conception. Some war supporters
counter that the occupation could have succeeded, but bungling and
incompetence caused it to fail. Klein is staking out a third, esoteric,
highly original position. She says that the occupation could have
succeeded, but the Bush administration did not want it to succeed. She is explicit about this:
Had the Bush administration kept its promise to hand over power quickly
to an elected Iraqi government, there is every chance that the
resistance would have remained small and containable, rather than
becoming a countrywide rebellion. But keeping that promise would have
meant sacrificing the economic agenda behind the war, something that
was never going to happen.
Never? Ten pages later Klein concedes that, starting in December 2006,
the Pentagon pulled a "dramatic about-face" and decided to re-open
Iraq's state factories. Her cheerful insouciance in the face of such
inconvenient facts points to an odd, slightly endearing quality of
hers: she is conscientious enough to provide readers with facts that
blow her thesis to smithereens, yet at the same time she is deluded
enough not to notice the rubble of her thinking on the floor. So Klein
makes a big deal about the comic but stillborn efforts by some
Republican ideologues to transform Iraq into a flat-tax paradise, but
she also notes that very little privatization actually took place in
Iraq, and indeed that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had
just three staffers devoted to privatizing Iraqi state industries. You
would think this latter fact would undermine her belief that
privatizing Iraq's economy was the central goal of the war. Alas, no.
She thinks it just goes to show that "the CPA itself was too privatized
to privatize Iraq."
So Klein attributes the failure to privatize Iraq to the CPA's
incompetence, but she deems every other apparent failure to be a
deliberate plan to foster chaos. To make this case, Klein runs through
every one of the administration's post-war mistakes and explains why it
was no mistake at all. Paul Bremer, the director of reconstruction and
humanitarian assistance, decided to purge Baathists from the Iraqi
government not because they were Baathists but because they were
government employees. De-Baathification, Klein writes, "had little to
do with anti-Saddamism and everything to do with free-market fervor."
She further insists that the widespread episodes of looting in early
2003 "cannot be dismissed as mere oversights," but were part of the
American plan to dismantle the Iraqi state.
With the pseudo-clarity of a conspiracy theorist, Klein dismisses out
of hand the possibility of incompetence. There were memos warning the
Army of looting, she ominously notes--scanting the possibility that
bureaucratic lethargy, rather than conscious intent, prevented the
memos' warnings from being acted upon at ground level. That widespread
bungling and mismanagement also followed Hurricane Katrina strikes
Klein as proof of intentionality. "The fact that exactly the same
errors as those made in Iraq were instantly repeated in New Orleans,"
she remarks, "should put to rest the claim that Iraq's occupation was
merely a string of mishaps and mistakes marked by incompetence and lack
of oversight."
Like every conspiracy theory, Klein's account of the fate of the world
finally lacks internal logic. She points to one instance of American
soldiers dismembering Iraqi passenger planes, inflicting "$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." If the point of the war was to hand control of
Iraq's state assets to American corporations, wouldn't American troops
be protecting those assets instead of destroying them?
But her most explosive charge is that Bush and his cabal are not merely
the puppets of war profiteers, but war profiteers themselves. "Key Bush
officials have maintained their interests in the disaster capitalism
complex," thereby "allowing them to simultaneously profit from the
disasters they help unleash." Klein provides two examples of such
conflicts of interest. The first is that Donald Rumsfeld maintained his
stock in Gilead Sciences, which holds the patent for Tamiflu, even
while serving as defense secretary. Get it? Rumsfeld would stand to
profit from a flu pandemic. But surely you don't have to be an admirer
of Rumsfeld to doubt that he would engineer an outbreak of a deadly
virus in order to fatten his stock portfolio. (Indeed, one suspects
that even if Rumsfeld tried to pull off such a dastardly scheme, he
would probably wind up creating a cure for the flu by mistake and
render Tamiflu worthless.)
The other piece of data that Klein cites to support her charge that
Bush administration officials profit from the disasters that they cause
is Vice President Cheney's holdings in Halliburton. "When he leaves
office in 2009 and is able to cash in his Halliburton holdings," she
charges, "Cheney will have the opportunity to profit extravagantly from
the stunning improvement in Halliburton's fortunes." This is a
spectacular accusation--that the driving force behind the Iraq war
stands to gain millions of dollars from it. You might wonder why John
Kerry did not make this an issue in 2004, or why liberal pundits have
not crusaded against Cheney's blatant self-dealing. The answer, of
course, is that it is completely untrue. Cheney has signed a legally
binding agreement to donate to charity any increase in his Halliburton
stock. (Honest-- you can look this up on factcheck.org.) Lord knows
Rumsfeld and Cheney have committed enough actual misdeeds not to need
indicting with imaginary ones. ...
[Klein] pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little
attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits
at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know
what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to find out. Her
ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one
breathtaking sentence:
Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the
right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long
associations--Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American
Enterprise Institute--called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that
has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the
service of a corporate agenda.
Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the
1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the
1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate
interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism.
The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject
the New Deal. They favor what they now call "national greatness" over
small government. And their foreign policy often collides head-on with
corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places
such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on
political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover,
the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with
neoconservatism. (Russell Kirk delivered a famous speech at the
Heritage Foundation in which he declared that "not seldom has it seemed
as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of
the United States.") And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at
all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it
opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.
Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain
Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In
her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose
minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to
Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement "Friedmanite to the core," and
identifies the Iraq war as a "careful and faithful application of
unrestrained Chicago School ideology" over which Friedman presided.
What she does not mention--not once, not anywhere, in her book--is that
Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an
act of "aggression."
It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the
central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she
identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein's mistake
exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because
he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same
thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always,
or even usually, served by war.
What makes Klein's thesis so odd, and so awful,
is that in fact there is an unlimited supply of raw material, an
abundant basis in reality, for the sorts of arguments that she wants to
make. The last two decades certainly have seen the global spread of
absolutist free-market ideology. Many of the newest adherents of this
creed are dictators who have learned that they can harness the riches
of capitalism without permitting the freedoms once thought to flow
automatically from it. In the United States, the power of labor unions
has withered, and prosperity has increasingly come to be defined as
gross domestic product or the rise of the stock market, with the actual
living standards of the great mass of the population an afterthought.
Corporations, which can relocate nearly anywhere around the world, have
used their flexibility as a cudgel against workers, who do not enjoy
the privileges of mobility. Domestic policy has aggressively sharpened
income inequalities, and corporations have enjoyed unfettered influence
to a degree not seen in a hundred years. And the president did start a
war without paying the slightest bit of attention to the country that
he would be left occupying or how its people would react.
All
these things are true. And all these things are enormous outrages and
significant problems. It's just that they are not the same outrage or
the same problem. And Naomi Klein's relentless lumping together of all
her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of
the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.
