The Shock Doctrine: The Looting.. You are No One..

Joanne98

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Sun Jan-06-08 01:30 PM
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The Shock Doctrine: The Looting.. You are No One..

Edited on Sun Jan-06-08 01:33 PM by Joanne98

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 ofjects that are particular 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 disapeared. 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." 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 disapeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned out shell. "Our national heritage is lost," pronounced a Baghdad high-school teacher. 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."

Thanks mostly to the 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 plan 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."

They were warned...
During the 1991 Gulf War, thirteen Iraqi museums were attacked by looters, so their 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 since Saddam had emptied the prisons a few months earlier) The Pentagon had been warned by leading archaeologists that it needed to have an air-tight 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.

Even without the police, however, there were enough US soldiers in Baghdad for a few to be dispatched to the key cultural sites, but they weren't sent. there were numeruous reports of US soldiers hanging out by their armored vehicles and watching as trucks loaded with loot drove by-a reflection of the 'stuff happens" indifference coming staight from Rumsfeld.

The airport was looted...
The result was an estimated $100 million dollars 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.

Some insight into why there was so little official interest in stopping the looting has since been provided by two men who played pivotal roles in the occupation-Peter McPherson, the senior economic advisor to Paul bremer, and John Agresto, director of higher education reconstruction for the occupation. McPherson said that when he saw Iraqis taking state property-cars, buses, ministry equipment-it didn't bother him. His job, as Iraq's top economic shock therapist, was to radically downsize the state and privatize it's assets, which meant that the looters were really giving him a jump-start. "I thought the privatization that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," he said. A veteran bureaucrat of the Reagan administration and a firm believer in Chicago School economics, McPherson termed the pillage a form of public-sector "shrinkage."

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