ABSTRACT
Will neo-liberals reassess the effectiveness of attempts to reshape configurations of power and interest through institutional and governance solutions and aim more directly at various forms of coalition-building or intervention in political conflicts? It is significant that neo-conservatives have clearly recognised the limits to enforcing change through institutional reform and taken the view that market-based reforms at both the economic and political level require nothing less than the elimination of entrenched ruling groups and their entire edifice of institutions and authority, if necessary by pre-emptive military strikes (see Mallaby 2002; Cooper 2002). The case of Iraq represents the quintessential insight into this thinking where the destruction of the Baathist government and its political apparatus created a seeming tabula rasa into which marketbased economic policies could be introduced at will by the Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, the ultimate technocratic authority. These policies included provisions that are the dreams of neo-liberals in the USA itself, among them a flat tax rate of 15 per cent grafted onto plans for extensive institutional reform in the bureaucracy and in the political sphere, including a framework of democratic institutions (Peck 2004: 392; Tabb 2006). It seemed that nothing could go wrong.
