The Need for Real, not Theoretical Economic Freedom and Momentum

In 2003, Iraq was turned into a nation of people with no jobs and no way to get jobs, no daily routine, and essentially nothing to lose. However, the existence of an occupying power, did provide something for many of those newly directionless people, and what happenned next is pretty well known.

Let me take a stab at a rough division into sectors of economies in the modern world

• Government proper - military, police, courts, postal service, tax collection, ...
• Government-industrial complex - i.e. most manufacturing in the USSR as well as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but should we also include road building and maintenance in the U.S.?
• Education - may well belong to some larger category - to be determined.
• Private goods-creation (industry but also building, restaurants, ...)
• The business of exchange of everything else
• The Primordial Soup, from which new political life forms are apt to emerge. The people with nothingto do and often nothing to lose.

So you could say one factor in Iraq was that perhaps half the population got thrown into the primordial soup overnight. A similar thing happenned in post-Soviet Russia.

In Iraq, had we not had the silver bullet idea that
toppling the dictator == Freedom and Democracy == Things will be "normal" like in the U.S.
we might have done a sober analysis of the institutions that kept peoples' lives from falling apart, and tried to preserve those activities that could be divorced from the criminality of Saddam's state. These included "inefficient" state run industry (by the quotes I'm not asserting it was efficient, but compared to what? To nothing being manufactured, and people having no place to go to work?), which I gather the occupying forces tried to disband overnight, as well as the military, which was either disbanded or non-functional during the period when most of what was left of Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed, which made it far more difficult to bring back any sort of normal economic life, which helped keep millions of people in the primordial soup for a very long time.

The disbanding of the state industrial complex was done in the name of Free Marketism, but it took the Iraqis further away from the ideal of a humming society of people producing and exchanging goods.

This seems pretty incomplete, but my life is chopped up into such little pieces that I have to for not put things "out there". I realize my understanding is sketchy and based on too few sources, but I'm trying, and I think many people who know less than me are going around sounding totally sure of themselves.