Some of these qualities -- the dehumanization, the emphasis on technology, the predictability of the consumer's experience -- are common to modern armies. What Rumsfeld and his coterie have brought to the Pentagon is the mindset shared by many of the Bush administration's big donors -- the culture of growth-oriented hypercapitalism.

The consumer, in this case, is the enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or the Taliban or another foreign foe. McArmy is intended to serve not just as the instrument of American hegemony but also as the very embodiment of militant hypercapitalism. Iraq was to be a showcase. It was intended to send a message of invincibility to militant Islam. McArmy's planned triumph in Iraq would have sent a message both to the Bush administration's critics at home and to its reluctant allies abroad: Hypercapitalism works against jihad as well as against ma-and-pa restaurants.

But McArmy is failing the test. Rumsfeld's downsized force of 140,000 troops -- including some 40,000 mostly Hispanic green-carders -- are stretched too thin to protect themselves, let alone prevent looting, sabotage and attacks on Iraqis who cooperate with Americans. They lack the language skills and cultural preparation necessary for effective peacekeeping. They were trained and equipped to deliver "shock and awe" and little else. They were prepared only for cookie-cutter roles, for the short horizon, not for the more complex constabulary role that would be required of them.

McArmy might have been adequate for the first phase of the war, George Ritzer told Salon. "In terms of fighting the war, the McArmy idea apparently worked well. It's with winning the peace that it doesn't work well. You can't just go in and level town after town and still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis."

While it is true, he says, that those whom McArmy is fighting or occupying are its consumers -- "reluctant consumers," he adds -- Americans back home are consumers at another level, and they are seeking a predictable experience. "The message in fighting the war both times in Iraq was: We can do this pretty easily and without much cost to us," he says. "And then we're kind of ill-prepared for what we now face." The expectation of a predictable experience has created, in Ritzer's view, "a crisis of expectations."

Privatization itself -- apart from McDonaldization -- has led to other problems. Many of the logistical components such as modular barracks, field kitchens, and mail delivery were outsourced to private contractors. The result? Months into the war, GIs were still camped out, still eating the loathed MREs, and are still without adequate water. Mail is backlogged for weeks.

"We thought we could depend on industry to perform these kinds of functions," Lt. Gen. Charles S. Mahan, the Army's logistical chief, told journalist David Wood in an interview for Newhouse Publications last summer. But, as Linda K. Theis, who oversees some civilian logistics contracts, reminded Wood: "You cannot order civilians into a war zone." Replacing 1,100 Marine cooks with civilians seemed like a bright idea to someone two years ago. But during the bloody Battle of the Bulge in 1944, Army cooks doubled as riflemen; in McArmy, civilian cooks can walk off the job.

Similarly stalled is the task of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure -- outsourced to Halliburton, Bechtel, and other big contributors to the Bush campaign. Baghdad stays paralyzed, without reliable electricity. Even in Basra, where the Shiite clerics were most oppressed by Saddam Hussein, anger is growing against the occupiers. The desert is hot, the stench of sewage ubiquitous, potable water scarce.

Assessing all this, one has to ask of the Pentagon's new planners: What were they thinking? The answer, perhaps, is that they were not thinking. The privatization zealots running the Pentagon and the White House are paid handsomely not to outthink their corporate sponsors. Which highlights the glaring flaw in the neocon mythology: The profit motive does not always serve the public good.

In the final analysis, as McArmy demonstrates so poignantly in Iraq, the neoconservative ideology is the expression, not of "free market" capitalism, but of monopoly capitalism as practiced by subsidy-bloated companies like Halliburton and Bechtel, whose insider position allows them to dip into the pockets of American taxpayers.

At bottom, the whole adventure in Iraq is a house of cards. The Bush administration's reluctance to acknowledge the financial cost of the war steals a page from Enron's accounting practices. Bush's tax cut, before the initial $87 billion bill came due, was reminiscent of the boxes of cigars given out by glad-handing Enron executives at the last stockholder meeting before the jig was up.

But the administration's accounting sleight-of-hand is only an extension of the something-for-nothing fallacy of privatization that inspired the move to eliminate Head Start from the federal budget and transfer it to the states under block grants. Or the plan to replace dedicated National Park Service employees with outsourced McRangers. The difference is one of degree and visibility.

In the end, the cheap meal is not so cheap. If Iraq becomes a rallying point for militant Islam -- not just in Iraq, but wherever Western cultural encroachment is perceived as a threat -- then our military capacity is likely to be drained on a scale unprecedented since Vietnam.

Now, of course, the administration would like nothing better than to outsource peacekeeping to the United Nations. The task of nation building requires specialized skills and is highly labor intensive, even at the constabulary level -- to say nothing of its being politically untenable. In the meantime, every car bomb that explodes, every oil pipeline that ruptures, every mob that surrounds American soldiers, is a reminder -- surely even to Donald Rumsfeld, the Ronald McDonald of warfare -- that there is no such thing as "fast war."

Recent Stories