Armed Madhouse

I needed a book to read on a flight back from Boston yesterday and (for *some* reason) I couldn't find Hitch's book God is not Great, in either the B&N or the airport bookstore (I strongly suspect it is being kept behind the counter to avoid "offending" anyone), so at the last minute I picked up Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse. I am also reading the quite excellent Guests of the Ayatollah by Mark Bowden (of Black Hawk Down fame), but unfortunately I left it in my checked bag. So I grabbed Madhouse and got on the plane.

Now, I have never been convinced of the case for war against Iraq, but it took me awhile to figure out why I was right. While suspicious of the President, that really wasn't enough, and while having some very minor intelligence and not so minor Iraqi friends who used to be in the nuclear business, that only seemed to justify my position, not really inform it as much as I liked to think. My worry was I was right for the wrong reason, a problem at least as bad as being wrong for the wrong reason. Eventually I figured out where my reluctance had come from and why; I was against the war because I recognized a marketing campaign when I see one and anything being sold that hard raised a lot of red flags. It was as simple as that. My job involves a great deal of marketing, so I have a pretty good feel for folks pushing a weak product, and this fit the bill. Weak facts, lots of conjecture, personal attacks on Hans Blix, "buy now before the price goes up" kind of urgency, etc. I'd like to think it was for more lofty, intellectual analysis, but it really wasn't, that came later after I had made up my mind.

So I picked up Armed Madhouse, read the first 30 pages or so and put it down as a far-left masturbatory exercise. Cute, but not definitely from a paranoid left kind viewpoint, I had thought. So instead I watched Alien vs. Predator (which was much, much better than I expected). My Digiplayer ran out of juice, so I picked up the book again and realized the author was from the BBC, then gave it another look. The BBC has been, over the last 5 years, much better at covering America than American journalists. Also, in flipping through it, Palast cites a memo from Grover Norquist about the libertarian economic "rules" the neo-cons wanted for post-war Iraq.

Then the penny dropped

Because, I happened to be paying a lot of attention to the Iraq economic rules (we were considering doing a microsoft based project in post-war Iraq back when we thought that Iraq would be stable in a few months), and I could not figure out a) why the laws they set up were so fucking bizarre, and b) why so many basic things failed to happen. Also, in my blog-wanderings I had seen the Norquist memo, but had never put these things together. Palast has a whole chapter where he maps the memo against the outcomes and shows how the "libertarian workers paradise" resulted in the outcome we all saw.

and it made sense.

ut-oh.

Palast has lots of documentary evidence in the book he cites, most of it I just assumed was far left nuthouse stuff. Looking up a bit of this morning, I see that it's not. And, while I doubt it's "all true", it is unnervingly logical. I recommend picking it up and reading it yourself. I remain skeptical, but I can't easily dismiss his conclusions as quickly as I had hoped.