The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

Bremer’s canceling of national elections was a bitter betrayal for Iraq’s Shia. As the largest ethnic group, they were certain to dominate an elected government after decades of subjugation. At first, Shia resistance took the form of massive peaceful demonstrations: 100,000 protesters in Baghdad, 30,000 in Basra. Their unified chant was “Yes, yes, elections. No, no selections.” “Our main demand in this process is to establish all the constitutional institutions through elections and not appointments,” wrote Ali Abdel Hakim al-Safi, the second most senior Shia cleric in Iraq, in a letter to George Bush and Tony Blair. He declared Bremer’s new plan “nothing other than replacing one dictatorship with another” and warned that if they went ahead with it, they would find themselves fighting a losing battle.11 Bush and Blair were unmoved—they praised the demonstrations as evidence of freedom’s flowering but bulldozed ahead with the plan to appoint Iraq’s first post-Saddam government.