I’m glad that the war in Iraq is going well (to the degree that you can say that any war “goes well”). Hopefully the killing will soon be over. I went on record as a naysayer, someone who warned of dire consequences if our nation went to war alone in Iraq. It looks as if I am being proved wrong. Mr. Bush and his people were right; the US military was ready to do the job, while Saddam Hussein and his military cronies were a lot weaker and stupider than I had imagined. And I’m glad to be wrong here, if it means that lives have been saved.
But I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out what this war was about. Being someone of liberal sentiment, it’s tempting to accept the theory that the war was all about oil; i.e., that rich Americans like President Bush long to get even richer by exploiting the black gold which lies beneath the sands and hills of Iraq (and the major US construction companies won’t do too badly either in gaining contracts for the rebuilding of Baghdad and Basra; e.g., Bechtel, Fluor, and VP Cheney’s beloved Halliburton).
But there’s another side of me that looks twice before jumping into comfortable liberal smugness. I’d like to know what Mr. Bush and company were really thinking and give it a fair hearing, but I don’t think that I (or most anyone else) have had that opportunity. The reasons for the war that they have offered have been quite lame; the liberal line almost wins by default. And yet I know that the President and company aren’t stupid. The problem, I think, is that they’re lazy; they are dealing with complex truths that don’t come across well in a 30-second spin, so they stick to the sound bites, even if bogus. In doing so, they rob our nation of the opportunity for an important debate about where we go from here.
Let’s have a look at what Washington has been feeding us (and which a whole lot of Americans have been swallowing). As to terrorism, Saddam Hussein did not plan nine-eleven, and is not even friends with the people who did. Sure, he has offered al Qaeda some support; mostly because of his fear of becoming one of their victims if he didn’t. But then again, a lot of other nations are currently supporting terrorism, and we’re not invading them. If the rationale were to follow up on Afghanistan by going after other international supporters of al Qaeda, we’d have invaded Yemen and Saudi Arabia instead.
As to weapons of mass destruction: sure, Saddam had ’em and has used ’em. But so far, Iraq’s lame military response to our occupation indicates that its military resources were in pretty bad shape. Saddam presented a continuing threat regarding chemical and biological weapons, but given the pathetic status of his military, the problem was probably being contained quite well by the UN trade sanctions and weapons inspection program. If the question was truly one regarding weapons of mass destruction (and the ability to use them), our troops would now be slogging it out in the hills of North Korea.
As to protecting the UN’s honor given the disrespect shown to it over the years by Iraq, how much honor did we leave it with after refusing to put a major regime change action before the Security Council? Mr. Bush has shot a much bigger hole in the UN’s side than Saddam ever did. It’s pretty clear now that our diplomatic efforts since last fall were mostly window dressing. Back in 1991, when we really needed UN support to kick a still-powerful Iraqi military out of Kuwait, the President and Secretary of State were busy commuting back and forth across the Atlantic as to gain European unity and Arab support. This time, they stayed in the office and made a few calls. It was obviously a rather half-hearted effort, just enough to build an excuse that “we tried”.
No, I think that the issue behind what Mr. Bush and company did in Iraq comes down to oil. Let’s face it: there are lots of other nasty dictators out there whom the US has lived with (and are still living with). A lot of pro-war people compare Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, thus linking our military action in Iraq with our involvement in WW2. OK, think about this: Hitler killed 6 million people and we went after him. Stalin killed 20 million people, but we decided to live with him. If Saddam Hussein was in Rwanda or Uganda (like Idi Amin, remember him?), gassing obscure tribal villages, he’d have gotten mostly a big yawn along the Potomac. But Saddam Hussein was sitting on top of the world’s second largest usable reserve of oil, and once had an army powerful enough to take down his neighbors, who in fact had the number one oil reserve. The guy truly had a knife on our economic jugular. But his knife eventually turned to rust, so we pushed him away and shook him and his nation down for the loot in their own pockets. It would be funny, if real people weren’t dying.
A lot of liberals seem to get this far in their analysis and then stop, ready to proclaim moral victory. But wait a minute. What if Hussein had been able to disrupt our oil flow, or had made us pay dearly for it? Sorry, trendy liberals, but you’re gonna have to do better than to mumble something about banning SUVs and promoting renewable energy. You’re probably not going to be getting your own kids to their next soccer practice sessions on wind power. Our way of life is extremely dependent upon oil. Without a reliable supply of it, the standard of living that we’ve become accustomed to here in the US could fall off very quickly — we saw that in the 1970s following the OPEC embargos. Americans were very unhappy until Ronald Reagan and a whole lot of lucky breaks in the 80s made them smile again.
The reality is this: domestic oil production is crashing (and trashing the fragile environments in Alaska to get a few more drops won’t help), and even our neighbors (Mexico and Canada) can’t slake our thirst for the stuff. Sure, there are lots of other places in the world where new oil is being found; but just because you find oil someplace doesn’t mean that it will reach your gas tank. You need stable governments and pipelines and tanker terminals and computers and refineries and other stuff to make that happen. There may be plenty of oil in Venezuela and Nigeria, but as we’ve seen, the system for getting it out and turning it into something usable doesn’t always work right.
At the same time, US demand for oil grows and grows, despite conservation efforts and alternative energy research. Part of this reality is due to general population growth, but a large part is due to higher living expectations. Lots of people now expect to live in bigger houses, drive bigger cars (read SUVs), have jobs in places that you can only get to by car (i.e., de-urbanization and suburban sprawl), and never be anywhere where there isn’t air conditioning. (Little story: back in the 60’s when I was growing up, a car with an air conditioner was a real novelty; sweating in July was just what you did. By contrast, in 1998, I bought a new car and didn’t want an air conditioner, but the salesman at first refused to sell me such a car! After some yelling and unpleasantries he finally relented, but the next year, air conditioners became standard equipment on the car I bought).
The American way of life today takes lots of energy, mostly in the form of oil (oil is about the most versatile way of delivering usable energy where it’s needed). Technology is finally showing some hope of replacing oil with something just as versatile, i.e. hydrogen, but it will take 25 to 30 years until it becomes economically tenable and our infrastructure can adapt to it. So, for the next two or three decades, the US will remain extremely dependent upon Middle Eastern oil. The Gulf region is the place with the biggest reserves and the most established system for getting it out of the ground and shipped to us.
Up to now, we’ve been pretty lucky in that the main oil producing states in the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait) have been politically stable. Sure, there was the shake-up in Iran and the problem of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but other world-wide oil sources came on line and we didn’t have an oil shortages because of them. But over the past few years, we’ve seen a new threat to our main sugar daddies in the sand: al Qaeda.
And you thought al Qaeda only blew up buildings. Sorry, folks, but Osama Bin Laden ultimately has much bigger fish to fry than a World Trade Center here and a disco in Bali there. Like Mr. Bush, he’s also going for regime change, but his two biggest targets are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: oil and the bomb. The House of Saud is officially pro-US, but it tries to play both sides by quietly bribing al Qaeda with “charitable contributions”. The bottom line is that the Saudi princes are running scared these days. They’ve been living high off the profits from the oil they sell us while ignoring the poverty of their own people. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has been rabble rousing lately in their back yards amidst the unwashed masses. They’re just a few riots and explosions away from an Islamic fundamentalist version of St. Petersburg in October, 1917.
What then? Perhaps a new Saudi government that will ratchet back oil production and drive the price per barrel up to $100. Gas lines return to the USA, fights break out as Excursions and Suburbans jockey for position at $5-a-gallon pumps that are closing early for the day. Thermostats are turned down to 65 degrees in January, double-digit inflation returns followed by recession and double-digit unemployment. Americans become very unhappy and depressed, seeing their standard of living going down after years and years of continual improvement.
That may never happen, but it’s worth worrying about. And when you worry a lot, the rational thing to do is to take out some insurance. Which here means trying to secure a pro-American government on top of a huge and presently under-utilized oil field in the Middle East, one that could just about make up for Saudi oil reductions if need be. Saddam Hussein basically was just what the insurance broker ordered. His regime was a rotting piece of fruit just waiting to drop; most knowledgeable Middle Eastern observers agree that sooner or later there would have been a coup against him. If the US didn’t come in and shake the tree, sooner or later someone else would have. Perhaps it would have been the Iranians, through their ties to the Shiite majority in Iraq just across their border. Perhaps it would have been al Qaeda, through their affiliation with Sunnis tired of Baath Party rule. Or just some pro-nationalist Republican Guard generals. Who knows.
Mr. Bush appears to have stolen their thunder here. If he can take it the rest of the way and establish a stable pro-American government that will allow full development and use of Iraq’s prodigious oil resources, then suburban Americas can sleep tonight in their 4,500 square foot homes assured that for the foreseeable future they can get their kids to Saturday soccer practice in the air-conditioned comfort of their Grand Cherokees (and have jobs to drive to on Monday in glass box office buildings near remote Interstate intersections). There won’t be any Octobrist riots along the curving streets of exurban America due to cold, hunger and unemployment.
Bottom line: this war was about oil, though not in quite the way that the liberal naysayers would have it; and it was also about al Qaeda, but not in the way that Mr. Bush explained it. The war was arguably justified in that it will help prevent wrenching social and economic disruptions here in America. But it will have a very high cost in terms of the effectiveness of the UN and our relationships with Europe and the Arab world. And, let’s not forget, many people lost their lives or were severely injured.
I’d like to say that the war was avoidable, but I know that my own lifestyle and quest for security (e.g., driving to work most days, although I am taking the train a bit more lately) contributes to the need for what happened. I just hope that we will be fair to the people of Iraq and try to ameliorate their poverty, and that we will do so more and more throughout the world (even if that means no tax cut, and even higher taxes, if fairly administered). Poverty is the ultimate root of all security threats. Maybe we could also try to live more simply here in the US, read fewer luxuries, somewhat smaller cars, somewhat smaller houses, jobs closer to home, etc. while at the same time pushing our technologies and infrastructures to free us from our extreme dependency upon oil. Bottom line here, can we see where we are and what happened, and try to do something to avoid repeating it in the future?