Politics & Power Quote by Juan Cole

The line lands like a raised eyebrow disguised as trivia. “Did you know” isn’t an invitation to curiosity so much as a trapdoor: Cole is setting up a revelation meant to reframe the Iraq War as not only a military project but an economic one. The hook is domestic. By invoking “some politicians” who couldn’t win a flat tax at home, he suggests a kind of policy laundering: ideas too unpopular for U.S. voters can be installed abroad under the cover of occupation and reconstruction.

The specificity of “15 percent” does a lot of work. It’s concrete enough to feel like proof, not opinion, and it points to a familiar ideological package: flat taxes are a signature of market-fundamentalist reform, sold as simplicity and growth, criticized as regressive and redistributive upward. Pairing “individual and corporate income” tightens the implication that the beneficiaries aren’t Iraqi households as such, but capital and investors - the class that most readily crosses borders.

Cole’s subtext is about asymmetry and consent. In a democracy, taxation is supposed to be negotiated through politics; in a war zone, it can be imposed through administrative decree, insulated from local accountability. The sentence “but in Iraq they do it” carries the quiet indictment: sovereignty becomes pliable when a country is dependent, occupied, or “being rebuilt.”

Context matters: in the mid-2000s, U.S. administrators and advisers helped reshape Iraq’s economic rules amid privatization debates and emergency legal orders. Cole’s intent is to puncture the humanitarian alibi and ask what kinds of “freedom” were being exported - and for whom.