Fueling the insurgency

Reuters reports that "Washington is far behind in plans to pump $21 billion into Iraq's reconstruction, bogged down by an insurgency that has killed hundreds of contractors and diverted funds to security."

This sort of story implies that if all those terrorists and "foreign fighters" hadn't shown up in Iraq, the country wouldn't be anything like the basketcase it is now. Milk and honey might be flowing.

This is a convenient narrative for an occupying power and, you might recall, Naomi Klein did a rather convincing job turning it on its head in her Harper's article, "Baghdad Year Zero."

In that September 2004 essay, Klein concluded that the insurgency didn't undermine Iraq's rehabilitation from the outset. To the contrary, the resistance exploded precisely because of the way the Busheviks went about trying to rebuild the country via Bremer's privatization scheme. She wrote:

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now.

The insurgency today is an entirely different beast than what existed right after the invasion. But the main point is that, until the late summer of 2003, there was no significant insurgency to speak of. Sure, there were ex-military and Baathists, and even those notorious foreign fighters, who conducted low-level operations against US targets and infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of the war. Yet these elements showed little tactical acumen and drew little support from the general population, unlike today, when the insurgency seems to grow stronger and more adept with each passing day.

Here it's worth mentioning a new report by Carl Conetta of the PDA, which describes in great detail how the occupation and resistance feed on each other. The executive summary is available here and Kevin Zeese lays out some of its claims in this article.

Americans would do well to take note of Conetta's survey. It doesn't suggest that "staying the course," whatever the hell that means, is a viable or wise option. That path only leads to more carnage, instability, and money wasted. In other words, the longer the occupation continues, the worse things will get.