Armed Liberal: My Thoughts on Iraq

This is an expansion of a piece I recently did at Armed Liberal.

I haven’t published much of anything about Iraq, although I’ve written a bunch about it and thrown it away. Most of what I’ve written has represented my own confusion about there I stand, and while honesty is a good thing, simply standing up and saying “I’m confused” seemed like a waste of my time and yours.

But I saw something the other day over at Oliver Willis’ place that made me sit up and think and finally brought me to some clarity.

It was an article in Newsday, suggesting that members of the Administration have floated a plan to take and sell Iraqi oil to pay the costs of the invasion. ‘Spoils of war” they call it.
Now I don’t doubt that someone has floated this as a concept, but I’m also a little dubious about whether it has been adopted as U.S. policy. I Googled it, and find the same story – literally, the same story, by Knute Royce, republished in three places – Newsday, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Gulf News in the UAE. Googling Knute Royce I see that he’s apparently a two-time Pulitzer winner and the Washington D.C. correspondent for Newdsay, so he’s a credible guy. My jury's still out on this one. But even if we don’t just take the oil as ‘reparations’ for our costs of invading, we’re apparently looking hard at the impacts on the energy economy. The Guardian has an article:

A model for the carve-up of Iraq's oil industry was presented in September by Ariel Cohen of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close links to the Bush administration.
In The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement, Cohen strikes a similar note to Chalabi, putting forward a road map for the privatisation of Iraq's nationalised oil industry, and warning that France, Russia and China were likely to find that a new INC-led government would not honour their oil contracts.

There are (at least) two issues at stake in our approach to the Middle East.

The first is that we (the industrial West) have profited quite substantially from Middle Eastern oil; our trading partners there have profited as well, but the profits haven’t built economies and societies that offer much to the average person. In fact, in an effort to ly keep their hands on the wealth that oil produces, these countries tend to be ruled by oppressive despots.

The second issue is that in no small part in response to the dysfunctional societies that have been built and maintained with our oil money, a culture has emerged which is virulently anti-Western; it combines the anti-Western Romantic intellectual strains that flowered in the 60’s and became intellectual commonplaces in the 90’s with traditions in Muslim history of conflict with the West. The despotic rules of the Middle East have supported these movements as a way of defusing the internal political pressure for reform.

This second issue, funded by the profits of the first, has emerged as a chronic, low-level war that has most dramatically shown itself on 9/11, but has cost thousands of lives over the last decade in less-dramatic attacks.

This second issue is a genuine threat to us, and to our allies in the West, as the hate and frustration has built to the point where it is being and will continue to be acted upon. In addition, the people who are forced to live in religious dictatorships in Islamist countries suffer (note that not all Islamic countries are religious dictatorships or post aggressive threats to the West).

This problem is in no small part of our (again, the West’s) making; we traded freedom for stability in the region in order to have secure and compliant trading partners. But having had a role in raising a psychopath doesn’t mean we should let ourselves be attacked by him as a way of assuaging our guilt.

I am coming to believe that the fight is inevitable. The rage that has grown in the Middle East won’t burn itself out, and the opportunities for reform are too few to deny it fuel.

If we are going to fight, we have a clear choice; we can fight to secure a supply of affordable oil, and to intimidate the other countries in the region into maintaining our supply of cheap oil; or we can fight to dismantle the social structures that our oil money and their dictators have created and attempt to free the people who have been forced to live hopeless, squalid lives. The first may come as a consequence of the second, but the second will never come as a consequence of the first. If we can help create stable societies in the Middle East, they will most likely be good trading partners. If we create good trading partners, they will most likely have to continue the repression that fuels their population’s hopelessness and rage.

There’s a bunch of issues collapsed into that paragraph that will require substantial discussion and explanation…at a later time.

Right now, I want to focus on one thing; that if we’re going to do this, we need to do it for the right reasons, or at least for reasons that aren’t transparently wrong.

If we are going to invade Iraq, we need to make two public and firm commitments:

1) We aren’t in it for the oil. Not in the short run, anyway. A prosperous, stable Middle East would doubtless want to sell and exploit their natural resources. We’d want to buy them. Sounds like a deal could be made. But planning now for our own version of ‘crony capitalism’ stinks, and it is already costing us much of our credibility and moral leadership.

2) We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t get to ‘declare victory and go home’ when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And while we’re damn good with stuff and money, this is going to take much more, and we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves, work, and be willing to sweat with this for some time.

There are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it’s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. I don’t think that Germany is a good example, because once we de-Nazified, there was some tradition of liberal politics to work with. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we’re moving toward doesn’t have any of that.

3) We need to make a grand moral gesture to make it clear to the world that 1) isn’t the case. ly, I think that it needs to come both from the American people and businesses, from our government.

I think the whole anti-SUV thing is a good place to start. It’s an incredibly powerful symbol to the rest of the world that we’re killing people in Iraq so we can buy Hummers, Excursions, and Suburbans. I don’t believe it should be legislated, I don’t believe they should be banned, but I think that we should each examine what we’re willing to give up to play our part in changing the world so that 9/11 is an aberration.

I do think that on a national level, we should talk about moving toward taxing energy to encourage efficiency; there are a lot of arguments about this, but I’ll make a simple one: we can buy energy from outside our economy, or we can buy ingenuity and products that save it from within it. Which one leads to jobs?

I’m not one of the liberals who has a vision of essentially 19th Century village life as the way we all should live. That goal is of people who have an essentially abstemious belief set, and see a frugal life as it’s own reward. I don’t believe that sacrifice and frugality are in themselves character-building or good moral values. I do believe that sacrifice in the name of a goal is a good thing, and that frugality in the name of building a better future is something we could all use.

So if the Democrats want a response to the war, here it is:

1) We won’t take Iraqi oil as booty;
2) We will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipeline, we won’t lie to Congress and the people and go sell the oil to Japan)
3) We’re in this for the duration.

If we can’t answer all three as a solid “yes”, we shouldn’t go. We should just close out eyes, hunker down and hoep for the best.

If we can, we should. We’re in a fight, and wishing it away won’t make it disappear.