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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A slick Iraqi-American business consultant, full of hip chatter and bogus expertise, stands ready to lead an army of global capital into the "emerging market" of his ancestral homeland.
Mar 26, 2003 | While most Americans are still glued to TV, radio and the Web, trolling for news of advancing troops and potentially phony Saddam Hussein appearances, some of our fellow citizens are quietly preparing for the blossoming of something even more glorious than a Saddam-free Iraq: a brand new market. Iraq has oil wealth, and as it blinks its eyes and steps out of the dark cave of a decade-plus of United Nations sanctions, there's a long shopping list to spend it on. Kenneth Pollack, in his influential book "The Threatening Storm," writes that rebuilding Iraq will probably require:
"[M]odernizing agriculture, reviving and reforming education, restoring health care (including rebuilding hospitals and modernizing equipment and practices), repairing infrastructure, building and repairing housing, restoring sanitation and sewage services, restructuring and reforming the police force, establishing the rule of law, training lawyers and judges, building political parties, promoting transparency and accountability in governance, restoring and modernizing the energy sector, promoting the adoption of international standards of accounting, enveloping a regulatory banking system, privatizing industry, creating capital markets for investment, providing loans for the start-up of new companies, and building an independent media and political institutions."
Nowhere on that list will you find the importation of smooth-talking consultants specializing in advising industries that, in the United States, are currently facing plummeting stock prices, stagnant markets and indictments of their top executives on charges of fraud. But, heck, they probably need that, too.
At least, that's the thinking behind "The New Iraq," a book about the future of Iraq and what someone hoping to profit from it ought to know. Its author, Joseph Braude, works for Pyramid Research, an outfit providing "international market analysis and consulting services to the global communications industry." He has recently appeared on the "Today" show and been quoted in major newspapers, touting his insights into Iraq's future. He represents that breed of civilian who arrives in a newly occupied nation in the wake of the military personnel, aid workers and intelligence operatives, sniffing around after the money to be made amid all the flux and ferment. But Braude is more than just your average carpetbagger. His is an extraordinary racket: He aims to get rich and famous by hustling the hustlers.
Braude knows the rhetorical advantage of leading with the unexpected and then moving on so briskly that his audience never gets the chance to recover its balance. Although "The New Iraq" must have gone to press in February, he starts with the assumption that a U.S.-led invasion will 1) happen and 2) succeed, breezing by the possibility, taken quite seriously by Pollack and many others, that the nation might be ravaged by violence among rival factions and warlords after the dictator is gone. He jumps past the prevailing tone of the conversation about Iraq -- the grave focus on international law, civilian casualties and the political repercussions of U.S. intervention in an Arab nation -- and skips right to the cool pragmatism and cheerfully bland positive thinking of the trend analyst. It's a move concocted out of pure chutzpah, designed to make him look like a daring, original mind.
Remember those pundits of the new economy, the ones who specialized in making sweeping announcements that business had been entirely revolutionized by technology, that no previous rules applied anymore, that the only way to thrive was to hire such daring young thinkers as themselves at exorbitant hourly rates to teach you to "think outside the box"? Well, Braude is a latter-day version of the same. Those high-tech gurus didn't know much more than anybody else about what the future held, but they understood that when people feel confused, they're likely to swallow anything you dish out, if you dish it with enough panache and self-confidence. It's a skill that's essential to the business consultant's stock in trade -- advising people on how to do something you've never done yourself.
Business consultants come in a few varieties. Some are hired to subject a company's employees to inane, daylong workshops and provide bosses with someone on whom to blame the decision to lay off 20 percent of the staff. Braude doesn't appear to be one of these, though he does write with a certain grim relish about Iraqi workplaces that "deserve the sort of grueling audit that outside consultants are sometimes called upon to carry out on bloated corporations," and where, after the regime change, "enough coffee-slurping party hacks will get the boot for slacking off to usher in new blood in short order."
Instead, Braude is the sort of consultant who makes pronouncements about "sectors" and "overhaul strategies." (Pyramid issues a lot of reports about the state of the cellular-telephone business in various "emerging markets.") He traffics in the business writer's old standby, the sanitized parable meant to illustrate eternal truths about business, except that his have a regional twist. There's the tale of the "postmaster" of the Abbasid Empire, for example, and how the network of roads he traveled might have looked, from space, "like a diagram of the World Wide Web, with nodes and ports linking distant places." You see, even the caliphs of the 8th century faced "the challenges of effective information flow."
