The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

As is now well known, nothing about Bush’s anti–Marshall Plan went as intended. Iraqis did not see the corporate reconstruction as “a gift”; most saw it as a modernized form of pillage, and U.S. corporations didn’t wow anyone with their speed and efficiency; instead they have managed to turn the word “reconstruction” into, as one Iraqi engineer put it, “a joke that nobody laughs at.”22 Each miscalculation provoked escalating levels of resistance, answered with counterrepression by foreign troops, ultimately sending the country spiraling into an inferno of violence. As of July 2006, according to the most credible study, the war in Iraq had taken the lives of 655,000 Iraqis who would not have died had there been no invasion or occupation.