Just in case anyone has forgotten, the dream of the neocons was quite different from what has actually transpired in Iraq.

They honestly thought their twisted ideology was going to result in the perfect case study for their beliefs (and line their wallets in the process). Far from the privatized utopia they were expecting, their experiment on the flesh and blood residents of Iraq has instead resulted in an ever escalating death toll.

Here’s a bit from the article by Naomi Klein in Harper’s way back in 2004.

In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America’s hands. This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.