In the TPM interview with Wesley Clark that I mentioned yesterday, Clark criticized the Bush administration’s “underlying ideological drive that overrides pragmatism.” For Clark (and for many in the center-left), the lack of a pragmatic expert culture has been particularly lacking in both foreign policy and the economy. Which makes Jeff Madrick’s discussion of Iraq’s financial plan particularly interesting:
[B]y almost any mainstream economist’s standard, the plan, already approved by L. Paul Bremer III, the American in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is extreme - in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq’s economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor. Is this Middle Eastern nation, racked by war, ready for such severe experimentation? Moreover, the radical laws have been adopted without a democratic Iraqi government to discuss or approve them.
As Madrick argues, the free market fundamentalism is hazardous and likely to produce results as disastrous as it did in post-Communist Russia. The story has fallen through the news cycle cracks, but it ultimately is an imporant part of the reconstruction of Iraq.
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