Alphabet City: Lately you have been writing about Iraq, and American political tactics in Iraq. What model of democracy and freedom do you think the Americans are putting in place in Iraq at the moment?

Naomi Klein: The model for democracy and freedom in Iraq is a combination of liberal electoral democracy and free markets. We’ve been told since 1989 and the so-called “end of history” that this is the only way to rule. And the architects behind the invasion of Iraq are true believers. They genuinely believe that this is the optimal way to run a country, and that this is fundamentally what all people want. The problem arose when they started to implement some radical market reforms immediately after the invasion, such as de-Baathification, which was essentially a neoliberal, not a neoconservative, policy of privatizing of the state for the sake of creating markets.

Now I believe that Paul Wolfowitz really believed that Iraqis wanted this. The model is of the “extreme makeover.” To me, it wasn’t a coincidence that during the two years of the Iraqi occupation Americans were sitting at home watching an explosion of Extreme Makeover reality television shows. The shows and the war share a common narrative: a team of experts descends on your home, life, closet, relationship, and pronounces that you are totally hopeless. They throw everything out. You hand yourself over to stylists, career counselors, art directors, etc.: essentially “experts” in one or another aspect of life. You are reconstructed into an entirely new person by surgery or by the bulldozing of your home. . . . And I think this describes the neocon/neoliberal narrative about Iraq: Halliburton, Bechtel, KPMG, all of these private multinational corporations—who are experts in engineering, accounting, the oil industry—would implement this extreme makeover of Iraq, which had been turned into a blank slate by the “shock and awe” bombing. The country had, in their minds, been erased for the sake of being reborn.

And I think there was something exciting, actually, for these true believers to have what they considered to be a blank slate like Iraq because Iraq had been sealed off from the world since this whole new economic era began in 1989. The First Gulf War began in 1991, that’s when the sanctions began. Unlike the introduction of neoliberal economic policies in the former Soviet Union or in Latin America, there was no local government they had to negotiate with. They didn’t have to twist any arms or convince anyone it was a good idea. I mean they were running the show; it was an occupied country in the hands of the US and Britain. I believe that that was their vision: implement this radical economic construction, give birth to a new nation, culturally, economically, and politically. That included everything from a brand-new television station to treating the holy sites as tourist destinations to privatizing the banks and the oil industry. Every aspect of society was contracted out to “experts” before the war even began.

The problem began when Iraqis didn’t respond like the contestants on an extreme makeover show, with weepy enthusiasm and abject gratitude. Instead, they became angry with these reforms and started to resist. They began to exercise their newfound freedom—like the fact that they were able to publish newspapers, like the fact that they had access to satellite television, like the fact that they could organize themselves politically and start political parties—to reject these economic reforms. You started to see local elections happening, some very critical articles in the local press, and some extremely critical coverage on stations like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.

And this wasn’t unreflective . . . there were themes that Iraqis were resisting specific US policies. There was a poll that was conducted by the International Republican Institute asking the Iraqis in this period if they could vote for a politician, what sorts of policies would they vote for? Would you vote for a politician promising to create jobs in the public sector—a statist government? And 49 per cent of Iraqis said that they would. And they asked would you vote for a politician promising to create jobs in the private sector? And only 4.5 per cent of Iraqis said that they would. It became clear that rather than this radical compatibility or even identity between free markets and free people—which the Bush administration believes in so strongly that it is actually a plank of the national security strategy of the United States—there was an open clash between the desires of these so-called free people and the free market.

AbC: In the beginning, Iraq was the suspect nation extraordinaire—it was the most suspect nation with the most suspect weapons, it was really plucked out of a set of possibilities and given primary importance. . .

Klein: ...and it was perfect for that because of the sanctions. The label of suspect is most powerful when there is very little information about the suspect. Suspicion really indicates a lack of information. Obviously language barriers help with that, but also when you have a country that is sealed off by policy—you can’t travel there, people can’t travel from there to visit your country, you can’t even publish books from there—there is ample opportunity for so much misinformation. There was a deliberate policy to have no information, or communication, coming out of Iraq. So it was a perfect suspect.

AbC: Yet it went from total suspect to total projection of the Wolfowitzian ideal.

Klein: You saw this come out really powerfully when there was almost a delight, on the part of the Americans, in the destruction of the country. There was the “shock and awe” of the bombing, but also, in the looting and burning afterwards. There was no attempt made to protect the country. It was really the incarnation of the myth of redemptive violence, the idea that Iraq was being cleansed by fire, and it would be reborn. And the nucleus of cells for that rebirth was the only structure that they guarded, the oil ministry.

I think what you are seeing in Iraq is the use of shock as a political weapon, and the most dramatic example of that was the war itself, the “shock and awe” campaign which pummeled the ground, preparing it for this new country. When that didn’t work and people resisted anyway, they had to use other forms of shock to control the population. You started to see increasingly repressive and heavy-handed tactics such as the collective punishing of cities like Fallujah, which CNN called “Shock and Awe II.” But also on an individual level the use of shock in Abu Ghraib, as a means, I believe, less of extracting information and more of social control. I don’t think torture is an effective interrogation technique and I think people know that. What torture is really good at is making people fearful—it’s a message. In this sense, I’m not even convinced that information is as tightly controlled as we may think it is, in terms of information escaping from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. I think that it is part of the use of torture that rumors of torture must escape. Its primary effectiveness as a tool is as a warning to the broader population that if you step out of line you end up in one of these dark places with no rights whatsoever.

So I think that shock, in terms of a means to political control, was also related to the imposition of economic shock therapy, because as the population rebelled against the economic conditions postwar, increasingly shocking tools and methods had to be used to try to frighten people into submission. The phrase “economic shock therapy” is a really disturbing one that economists use. It actually comes not from torture but from early psychiatry. The person who invented shock therapy as a treatment for mental illnesses was an Italian psychiatrist who got the idea, he said, from visiting a slaughterhouse. He watched how the animals were prepared for slaughter by electroshock; they were shocked and then became obedient. They had a small seizure and then they were very easy to herd to slaughter, and for some reason he thought that this would be a good thing to try on his patients, that this seizure would create the control or the calmness that was lacking.

The theory of economic shock therapy is that you shock the body politic in the same way as you shock the body with shock therapy treatment and people are unable to react and defend themselves. You don’t privatize the schools first and then the health care; you do it all at once. So the body politic can’t respond to everything all at once and it enters into a state of seizure. Shock therapy was used right after the collapse of the Soviet Union when people didn’t even know what country they were living in. And in Latin America it was the Chicago boys who moved in right after the military coups. So if you look at that model you also see where torture comes in, because it was the shock of the coup, the shock of the collapse, the shock of the changes, and the shock of the reforms, but you also have the shock of the torture all alongside which was a warning to anyone thinking of resisting these reforms that the absolute worst thing will happen to you if you try to resist. So all of these forms of shock work together.

The logical limit of this method is the disappearance—it is the most extreme absence of information. In Argentina, where 30,000 people disappeared in the seventies, the Argentine generals really perfected the use of disappearances as a political tool. Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile was brought in with a massacre, it was just a bloodbath where 3,000 people died, it created a huge uproar. The generals in Argentina had their coup three years later in 1976 and they learned—and they say this—they learned from the mistakes Pinochet made. They didn’t feel that the massacre model—which provoked international outrage—they didn’t feel it was the most effective form of social control. It was better just to snatch people out of their homes into these places that they didn’t even admit existed, the concentration camps all around the country. And they would deliberately allow bodies to wash ashore—they would just arrive as warnings. They would never admit that anybody had been made to disappear, and when their mothers would ask for them, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, they would just say, “Well, maybe they went to Europe.” But the warning was more powerful, than the bloodbath, that this could happen to anyone, but with the simultaneous denial that anything was even happening.

AbC: So because it’s structured on absence there’s no event, no public object, to address yourself to in resistance, psychologically or politically.

Klein: Yes. And there are a few other ways in which this was an effective means of social control. People were tortured inside the camps for information, and the people I talked to who were inside the camps said that they didn’t have the impression that the information was even being used for anything, the point was just to gather information but also to send the broader message that information is dangerous.

I was talking to an Iraqi student at a Canadian university and he was politically active but not about issues relating to Iraq, or relating to being Muslim, or any issues relating to the war on terror, and I asked him why and he said, “Because I study biology and the combination of being Iraqi and studying biology I think would make me a suspect.” In his mind he had already internalized all of these signals about what makes you a suspect and he was already adapting accordingly, and one of the ways he was adapting was by not speaking out on these issues.

He was self-censoring. Social control is most effective when the messages are sent strongly enough that people censor themselves and don’t have to actively be censored. I think there are a lot of stories like that. I have another Iraqi friend at another university, who, when he doesn’t shave for a few days, there are complaints about him—other students feel threatened because he fits the profile. So he’s internalized the idea that looking a certain way makes him a threat, that makes him fit the profile of the suspect.

AbC: It’s almost beyond your control what kind of information will trigger that “suspect” profile in a computer or in the mind of an analyst.

Klein: Except for one thing: opposition. Fighting the system is virtually a guarantee of drawing attention to yourself. And this is what politically makes such systems self-perpetuating—because the people who would be most outspoken against them are so acutely aware of themselves as suspects that they have internalized the message that the best thing to do is to be as innocuous as possible, as quiet as possible. So it’s working, I would say it’s working.

AbC: Where is the counterforce?

Klein: I think we are in a strange moment. I don’t think it is a moment for either optimism or pessimism, and that the utterly unrepentant unilateralism of the Bush administration, and the shredding of international law at every level, and the promotion of the people who are most disdainful of the rule of law both internationally and within the US, from John Bolton at the UN to Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank to Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, is creating space outside the US for dissent.

There is a global hegemony around the core issues about how we should live. I would say that pre-Bush, under Clinton, there was a real consensus—the power blocs were all pretty much on the same page in terms of pushing neoliberal economics and this sort of “liberal democracy plus free markets equals peace and harmony” agenda. The real hawks and neocons in the Bush administration didn’t like that period. These are warriors, fundamentally, and there was a moment in his second inaugural address in which Bush referred to the years between the Cold War and September 11th as “years of repose, a sabbatical.” They don’t like a lack of war—war is what they are good at. They are comfortable thinking of the world as great clashes between civilizations and I think that without some greater purpose America is just a shopping mall. They want shopping infused with holy purpose. In the Cold War you were fighting Communism by shopping. And we saw that immediately after September 11th, Bush’s message was quite literally “go shopping for your country, go shopping or the terrorists win.” In between, in the years of repose, shopping was just shopping—banal and in its own way, questionable.

But I think that the embrace of the war model, “with us or against us,” has created spaces around the world for many different forms of dissent, and that the new lack of consensus in the world is a source of optimism. I was in Argentina when the war began and there was this wonderful feeling of being off the radar, of not being important to the centers of power. You know, when Latin America is on the radar it’s never been a good thing. You have a little bit of that talk around Cuba and Venezuela now, but there was this feeling when we were in Argentina; there were incredible explosions of social movements, they went through five presidents in three weeks, factories were being occupied and turned into workers’ cooperatives, and no one was noticing. So there is a way that other parts of the world, by not embracing the US “with us or against us” model, are not part of that dichotomy and I think there’s reason for optimism there, because over against the US’s laboratory in Iraq you get other local laboratories, which inevitably produce other ways of governing, other ways of living, and they are starting to work. Venezuela is right now a very powerful counterexample for Iraq, because this is another oil-rich nation that is embracing redistributive policies, precisely the policies that Wolfowitz tried to fight with everything he had from emerging in Iraq.

AbC: Because the imperial attention is elsewhere.

Klein: This is the thing. When we were in Argentina making a film about occupied factories, all the cameras were leaving; all the big cameras. The big cameras were leaving and the little cameras were arriving. There was just a little bit of breathing room, a feeling of not being the primary suspect. But that’ll change. The hope is that by the time it changes there will have been a chance for these social movements to get strong enough that they are in a better position to resist, because usually they get stamped out before that even happens.

This liberating aspect of a lack of suspicion ultimately serves to show how torture, and war in general, are blinding and debilitating for democracy, which is why it is called shock and awe, why it is called shock. It prevents you from thinking about anything but the horror in front of you and this process is tremendously beneficial to those in power who don’t want us asking these questions about who is served by torture.

AbC: How do you personally respond to this blinding effect?

Klein: I went to Iraq when I did and to do the research that I did, because I knew that shock—both the shock of the people and the shock of the nation—was being used to turn it into a free-market laboratory. It wasn’t as if they were hiding it, but nobody was acknowledging the local legitimacy of the resistance average Iraqis were feeling, or observing market changes on a local level. And this is natural. In the context of a war you cover the blood and the bombs, not the fact that they are selling off the water system and that they’ve announced the privatization of state companies. When I was in Iraq I had to fight every human and journalistic instinct in me in order to focus my research on the economic side and treat the bombs as secondary. In that sense it was utterly counterintuitive, what I was doing. I mean we would be driving down a highway with bombs going off all around us and we would keep driving, not stop, so that we could get to a state-owned vegetable oil company so that we could interview the workers about plans to privatize the company. Every journalistic instinct is telling me to stop, and my photographer was ready to kill me, because obviously it is a lot sexier to take pictures of things blowing up than to talk to people in a factory. But I believed, and continue to believe to this day, that we can understand the bombs better and can understand the torture better, by not seeing it as primary, not being blinded by the human sensationalism of it all. We can understand it all better if we look to the role it plays in producing concrete goals: a political and economic agenda. Only when you expose this agenda as primary can you have truly effective resistance.

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