Visiting Iraq for the first time after the Invasion ended, Naomi Klein was immediately struck by a billboard going up advertising foreign goods. Contrary to what is commonplace thinking today, there always was a detailed long-term plan for postwar Iraq. The War which was supposedly started for reasons of a regime change to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein was really aimed at something quite different from the start - a culture change, the subjugation of the Iraqi population to a new belief that greed is good, and to overthrow its existing cultural order, not just its political order. Like giant corporations, the British and American governments marketed the war with the ultimate spin, freedom. Dishonestly brandishing values like democracy, the aim of the War was all along changing the way of daily life in Iraq that had existed for centuries.
At the suggestion of Naomi Klein, No War further develops the theme of her essay with contributions by authoritative writers and thinkers Susan Watkins, Bryan Mealer and Walter Laqueur. In Dying for Dollars Bryan Mealer describes grippingly how the real Bush / Blair plan of a hostile takeover of Iraqi resources and culture was marketed by the US to investors as God s work with its distant echo of the crusades. He captures the extraordinary candour that is used to entice business man to invest in relieving a country of assets because an Iraqi making $15 a day thinks he is rich. Startlingly he describes how it is the US military that led the pitch. In A Puppet for All Seasons Susan Watkins shows that in the transfer of power to Iraqi civilians the US is developing a policy started in Afghanistan of filling the Iraqi Administration with Iraqi civilians who are part of the American security services complex and can still lay little or no claim to having any legal authority
