Bold is emphasis mine.

Bremer's vanguard participation in the homeland security industry was ideal preparation for Iraq. That's because the Bush administration used the same formula to rebuild Iraq that it had pioneered to respond to 9/11" it treated postwar Iraq as if it was an exciting IPO, brimming with free-wheeling, quick-profit potential. So while Bremer may have stepped on plenty of toes, his mission never was to win Iraqi hearts and minds. Rather, it was to get the country ready for the launch of Iraq Inc. Seen in that light, his early, much-maligned decisions have an unmistakable logical coherence.

After replacing general Jay Garner as the top US envoy, Bremer spent his first four months in Iraq almost exclusively focused on economic transformation, passing a series of laws that together make up a classic Chicago School shock therapy program. Before the invasion, Iraq's economy had been anchored by its national oil company and by two hundred state-owned companies, which produced the staples of the Iraqi diet and the raw materials of its industry, everything from cement to paper and cooking oil. The month after he arrived in his new job, Bremer announced that the two hundred firms were going to be privatized immediately. "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands," Bremer said, "is essential for Iraq's economic recovery."

Next came the new economic laws. To entice foreign investors to take part in the privatization auction and to build new factories and retail outlets in Iraq, Bremer enacted a radical set of laws described by The Economist in glowing terms as the "wish-list that foreign investors and donor agencies dream of for developing markets." One law lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 45 percent to a flat 15 percent (straight out of the Milton Friedman playbook). Another allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets - preventing a repeat of Russia, where the prizes went to the local oligarchs. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest, and they would not be taxed. The decree also stipulated that investors could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years and then be eligible for renewal, which meant that future elected governments would be saddled with deals signed by their occupiers. The one area on which Washington held back was oil: its Iraqi advisers warned that any move to privatize the state oil company or to lay claim to untapped reserves before an Iraqi government was in place would be seen as an act of war. But the occupation authority did take possession of $20 billion worth of revenues from Iraq's national oil company, to spend as it wished (*Some $8.8 billion of this money is often referred to as "Iraq's missing billions" because it disappeared into US-controlled Iraqi ministries in 2004, virtually without a trace...).

The White House was so focused on unveiling a shiny new Iraqi economy that it decided, in the early days of the occupation, to launch a brand-new currency, a massive logistical undertaking. The UK firm De La Rue did the printing, and bills were delivered in fleets of planes and distributed in armored vehicles and trucks that ran at least a thousand times throughout the country - at a time when 50 percent of the people still lacked drinking water, the traffic lights weren't working, and crime was rampant.

Although it was Bremer who implemented these plans, the priorities were coming straight from the top. Testifying before a Senate committee, Rumsfeld described Bremer's "sweeping reforms" as creating "some of the most enlightened - and inviting - tax and investment laws in the free world." At first, investors seemed to appreciate the effort. Within a few months, there was talk of a McDonald's opening in downtown Baghdad - the ultimate symbol of Iraq joining the global economy - funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side, HSBC, the international bank headquartered in London, was awarded a contract to open branches all over Iraq, while Citigroup announced plans to offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil. The oil majors - Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Russia's Lukoil - made tentative approaches, signing agreements to train Iraqi civil servants in the latest extraction technologies and management models, confident that their time would soon arrive.

Bremer's laws, designed to create the conditions for an investor frenzy, were not exactly original - they were merely an accelerated version of what had been implemented in previous shock therapy experiments. But Bush's disaster capitalism cabinet was not content to wait for the laws to take effect. Where the Iraq experiment entered bold new terrain was that it transformed the invasion, occupation, and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market. This market was created, just as the homeland security complex was, with a huge pot of public money. For reconstruction alone, the boom was kicked off with $38 billion from the US COngress, $15 billion from other countries, and $20 billion of Iraq's own oil money.

When the initial billions were announced, there were, inevitably, laudatory comparisons with the Marshall Plan. Bush invited the parallels, declaring the reconstruction "the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan," and stating in a televised addressed in the early months of the occupation that "America has done this kind of work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments."

What happened to the billions earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction, however, bore no relationship to the history Bush invoked. Under the original Marshall Plan, American firms benefitted by sending equipment and food to Europe, but the explicit goal was to help war-torn economies recover as self-sufficient markets, creating local jobs and developing tax bases capable of funding domestic social services - the results of which are ine vidence in Germany's and Japan's mixed economies today.

The Bush cabinet had in fact launched an anti-Marshall Plan, its mirror opposite in nearly every conceivable way. It was a plan guaranteed from the start to further undermine Iraq's badly weakened industrial sector and to send Iraqi unemployment soaring. Where the [post-WWII] plan had barred foreign firms from investing, to avoid the perception that they were taking advantage of countries in a weakened state, this scheme did everything possible to entice corporate America (with a few bones tossed to corporations based in countries that joined the "Coalition of the Willing"). It was this theft of Iraq's reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by unquestioned, racist assumptions about US superiority and Iraqi inferiority - and not mere the generic demons of "corruption" and "inefficiency" - that doomed the project from the start.

None of the money went to Iraqi factories so they could reopen and form the foundation of a stable economy, create local jobs, and fund a social safety net. Iraqis had virtually no role in this plan at all. Instead, the US federal government contracts, most of them issued by USAID, commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed in Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq. It was, as the occupation authorities repeatedly said, "a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Iraq" - all the Iraqi people needed to do was unwrap it. Even Iraqis' low-wage labor wasn't required for the assembly process because the major US contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and the California-based engineering giant Parsons preferred to import foreign workers whom they felt confident they could control. Once again the Iraqis were cast in the role of awed spectators - first awed by US military technology and then by its engineering and management prowess.

As in the homeland security industry, the role for the government employees - even US government employees - was cut to the bone. Bremer's staff was a mere fifteen hundred people to govern a sprawling country of 25 million. By contrast, Halliburton had fifty thousand workers in the region, many of them lifelong public servants lured into the private sector by offers of better salaries.

US troops and contractor numbers in Afghanistan by year

You can hear defeat in that guy's voice all the way back in 2013

It's a very interesting documentary

Hearing that Steuber guy complain about the Afghan police abuse of the supply depots and payroll, I'm like dude that's the point. I think this view became especially prevalent in all the snivelling mea culpas that popped up recently. It's easy to blame Afghanis for being lazy and dumb for not buying into the war that we caused. The real blame ought to be on Colt , Smith & Wesson, Raytheon etc hand in hand with western governments: all who stood to make a profit by the adventures in the Middle East. The grift is not a special Afghani moral failing, rather it's been the whole unspoken point of the occupation, and who better to teach that than us. War is a racket.