Frontline's most recent 2-part documentary on the Iraq War was yet another look into how George Bush got us into the fucking mess we are in the Middle East. The how of it well known, but it's interesting to see it again. Every time I watch one of these things (like No End in Sight), I just can't believe it. I can't believe how fucked the whole situation is. How imminently avoidable the whole situation was and how this fucking war is going to haunt us for generations, even more so than Vietnam because of the nature of the geopolitics of region.

Anyway, in viewing these gut-wrenching documentaries, I've always been left with one big question. Why? Of course, there's been speculation of all sorts, but we've never really gotten the full story of the why, until now, that is. I've been reading Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. It's one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. Essentially it's the story of Milton Freidman and his neoconservative economic minions at the University of Chicago and how they've used "Shock and Awe" to institute rapacious free-market policies against the will of the people all over the globe starting with Chile in 1970s to Iraq and New Orleans today.

When you look at Iraq through the prism of free-market capitalism, all the decisions and policies start to make sense (in a warped a twisted fucked-up way). Friemanism essentially has 3 tenets: Privatization, Deregulation, Reduction in social programs. The CPA was set up in Iraq to create a free-market Disneyland with the idea that neoconservatives could point to the country as a model of their laissez faire revolution.

How's that working out for you?