A bit late, I’m finally getting around to reading the September Harper’s. Unfortunately, they still don’t post content, so you’ll have to find your own copy to read two remarkable articles.

First, Lewis Lapham’s article about how the Right has developed its “message machine” through almost forty years of focused philanthropy, including some interesting stories about how they tried to court him. Funny, he seems so thoroughly liberal now — has that developed since then, or did they think that maybe enough cash could change his point of view?

And second, Naomi Klein’s piece, “Baghdad Year Zero,” in which she points out that, in fact, the Bush administration did have a plan for rebuilding Iraq — just one which has totally failed so far. The Neocons went in, ideology a-blazin’, to make Iraq a test case for unbridled capitalist freedom. The net effect has been what looks to Iraqis like nothing more than old-fashioned looting, which has unsurprisingly made it pretty easy to recruit members to the resistance. Ironically, then, a strong and brutal resistance has made Iraq a particularly unfriendly place to do business, no matter how little taxation or restriction against foreign ownership of Iraqi companies.

Klein’s piece ends with an anecdote which seems to transcend its original time and apply even to this week:

[Thomas Foley, t]he former head of “private sector development” has left Iraq, a country he had described as “the mother of all turnarounds,” and has accepted another turnaround job, as co-chair of George Bush’s re-election committee in Connecticut. On April 30 in Washington he addressed a crowd of entrepreneurs about business prospects in Baghdad. It was a tough day to be giving an upbeat speech: that morning the first photographs had appeared out of Abu Ghraib, including one of a hooded prisoner with electrical wires attached to his hands. This was another kind of shock therapy, far more literal than the one Foley had helped to administer, but not entirely unconnected. “Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not as bad as it appears,” Foley told the crowd. “You just need to accept that on faith.”