More from Baghdad Year Zero – Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia

What a scathing inditement of the spiritual forebears of the Neocon movement (the hope of utopic , economic purity and prosperity )….Thanks MIke, for the sobering pointer to this article, and your thoughts in your blog

Baghdad Year Zero (Harpers.org)

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. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.
Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign, where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right-thinking investor would touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their core beliefs beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and pray harder

when the ends become larger than the lives that must be rolled over in the process of that ultimate goal, against which any obstacles are destined to become “collateral damage”, the moral bankruptcy of such a vision (which is darkness at its core) is evident, at least to those who have caught a glimpse; just a “clue” as to the heart of the Biblical vision of shalom; justice; the “New Jerusalem”.