{"id":2778,"date":"2003-01-12T10:12:37","date_gmt":"2003-01-12T10:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=537"},"modified":"2003-01-12T10:12:37","modified_gmt":"2003-01-12T10:12:37","slug":"iraq-at-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2778","title":{"rendered":"IRAQ AT LAST"},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven\u0092t published much of anything about Iraq, although I\u0092ve written a bunch about it. Most of what I\u0092ve written has represented my own confusion about there I stand, and while honesty is doubtless interesting, simply standing up and saying \u0093I\u0092m confused\u0094 seemed like a waste of my time and yours.
\nBut I saw something<\/a> the other day over at Oliver Willis\u0092 place<\/a> that made me sit up and think.
\nIt 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. \u0091Spoils of war\u0094 they call it.
\nNow I don\u0092t doubt that someone has floated this as a concept, but I\u0092m also a little dubious about whether it has been adopted as U.S. policy. I Googled it, and find the same story \u0096 literally, the same story, by Knute Royce, republished in three places \u0096 Newsday<\/a>, the Sydney Morning Herald<\/a>, and the Gulf News<\/a> in the UAE. Googling Knute Royce I see that he\u0092s apparently a two-time Pulitzer winner and the Washington D.C. correspondent for Newdsay, so he\u0092s a credible guy. My jury’s out on this one.
\nBut thinking about this brought some small clarity to my thoughts, and I realized just what we\u0092re doing wrong.
\nThere are (at least) two issues at stake in our approach to the Middle East.
\nThe 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\u0092t built economies and societies that offer much to the average person.
\nThe 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\u0092s and became intellectual commonplaces in the 90\u0092s with traditions in Muslim history of conflict with the West.
\nThe second issue, funded by the profits of the first issue, 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.
\nThe second issue is a genuine threat to us, to our allies in the West, and to the people who are forced to live in religious dictatorships in Islamist countries (note that not all Islamic countries are religious dictatorships or post aggressive threats to the West).
\nThe problem is in no small part of our (again, the West\u0092s) 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\u0092t mean we should let ourselves be attacked by him as a way of assuaging our guilt.
\nWe 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.
\nThere\u0092s a bunch of issues collapsed into that paragraph that will require discussion and explanation\u0085at a later time.
\nRight now, I want to focus on one thing; that if we\u0092re going to do this, we need to do it for the right reasons, or at least for reasons that aren\u0092t transparently wrong.
\nIf we are going to invade Iraq, we need to make two public and firm commitments:
\n1)\tWe aren\u0092t 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\u0092d want to buy them. Sounds like a deal could be made.
\n2)\tWe\u0092re in this for the long haul. We don\u0092t get to \u0091declare victory and go home\u0092 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 we\u0092re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we\u0092re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.
\nThere are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it\u0092s 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. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we\u0092re moving toward isn\u0092t.
\nWe need to make a grand moral gesture to make it clear to the world that 1) isn\u0092t the case. Personally, I think that it needs to come both from the American people and businesses, from our government.
\nI think the whole anti-SUV thing isn\u0092t a bad place to start. It\u0092s an incredibly powerful symbol to the rest of the world that we\u0092re killing people in Iraq so we can buy Suburbans. I don\u0092t believe it should be legislated, I don\u0092t believe they should be banned, but I think that we should each examine what we\u0092re willing to give up to play our part in changing the world so that 9\/11 is an aberration.
\nI 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\u0092ll 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?
\nI\u0092m 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. I don\u0092t 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 are.
\nSo if the Democrats want a response to the war, here it is:
\n1)\tWe won\u0092t take Iraqi oil as booty;
\n2)\tWe will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipleline, we won\u0092t sell them to Japan)
\n3)\tWe\u0092re in this for the duration.
\nIf we can\u0092t answer all three as a solid \u0093yes\u0094, we shouldn\u0092t go. If we can, we should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u0092t published much of anything about Iraq, although I\u0092ve written a bunch about it. Most of what I\u0092ve written has represented my own confusion about there I stand, and while honesty is doubtless interesting, simply standing up and saying \u0093I\u0092m confused\u0094 seemed like a waste of my time and yours. But I saw something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}