By
John Chuckman
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
(YellowTimes.org) – I do get tired of reading claims that oil is
the reason why Mr. Bush wants to attack Iraq. Perhaps commentators
pick oil because it seems to give clarity where there is so little,
evoking the slightly romantic image of 19th century troops in pith
helmets, scrambling for colonial resources.
I don't want to be guilty of discouraging Americans from giving
up on their horribly wasteful and polluting SUVs, for there are many
important reasons to encourage them to do so, but at least for now,
oil supply is not one of them.
Yes, of course, Bush's light-truck constituency cares about oil,
and Iraq's reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia's. But the
notion that a great power needs physically to control sources of a
plentiful raw material is simply outdated. The nationalization of
oil reserves, a worldwide phenomenon of a few generations ago, is
something not likely to be undone, and, besides, a very comfortable
modus vivendi has grown up between producing and consuming
governments.
Anything resembling American expropriation of
Middle East oil fields would produce tidal waves not just in the
Arab world, but in places like Mexico and Venezuela. I cannot think
of a better way of causing Al Qaeda recruits to line up in a dozen
countries much the way alarmed, idealistic, young Britains lined up
in 1914 to fight "the damned Bosch." Even with the hillbilly crowd
running the White House, I think it safe to say this approach is not
on.
Iraq's reserves are of no value to Iraq unless their production
is for sale. No matter who runs Iraq, it is a sure bet that its oil
will flow for as long as the reserves hold out, at prices worked out
under those cozy arrangements of producing and consuming countries.
In recent years, it has only been America's harsh economic
restrictions on Iraq that prevented a possible glutting of the oil
market.
Iraq's reserves represent a gigantic future revenue stream, many
hundreds of billions of dollars. Bush's crowd definitely wants this
future revenue stream put into hands that are friendlier to American
policy.
The uncertainty that Saddam Hussein represents for American
policy-makers is not uncertainty over the availability of oil; it is
uncertainty over what Hussein may choose to do with the revenue
stream over the decade or so possibly left to his rule, and it is
the uncertainty of what Israel may do in response.
Hussein's army is not a serious threat to Israel. Its leadership
and equipment make it inferior in almost every respect to the IDF,
and it certainly doesn't have the United States supplying
round-the-clock military intelligence, new technical capabilities, a
bottomless supply of spare parts, and diplomatic pouches full of
cash.
But Hussein with a small nuclear arsenal is quite another matter.
Israel is a small country, and just two or three nuclear devices
could devastate its highly-urbanized population. And you wouldn't
need missiles to achieve this. School buses, delivery trucks,
aircraft, or fishing boats are all more accurate delivery systems
than Iraqi Scuds.
That is the reason why Israel not only has nuclear weapons but
has more of them than it would at first appear to need as a
deterrent. The concept at work here is having a deterrent that
compensates for Israel's small size vis-à-vis a threat from a much
larger country or a group of countries.
The United States, it seems almost childishly unnecessary to say,
does not care about how wicked or unpleasant Hussein may be. Nor
does it care about his record on human rights. The truth is that he
is no worse than the many cutthroats with whom the U.S. cozily does
business.
The problem with Hussein is that he won't play the game under
rules the U.S. has laid down. Oh, he has cooperated in the past, and
for considerable periods of time, he was treated as one of America's
useful clients, receiving many special favors. He was especially
useful when he went to war against revolutionary Iran and ground
down that nation's ardor and resources and young people with years
of bloody conflict.
America's role in that conflict was the same utterly amoral one
it has so often taken where it saw that the shedding of someone
else's blood might achieve some desired dirty work.
But when it became clear that Hussein was working to arm himself
with nuclear weapons, an excuse to flatten him and remove his
capacity had to be found. Ergo, America's secret diplomatic wink at
his intention to invade Kuwait, setting him up for Desert Storm.
This was a conflict that also had little to do with oil, except that
possession of Kuwait's reserves would swell Hussein's revenue stream
and speed the day when the U.S. would be required always to address
him as "sir."
After killing perhaps a hundred thousand innocent people with its
bombing, destroying much of Iraq's water and sanitation systems
(something not widely known in the U.S.), its electricity grid, and
much other infrastructure, the U.S. never expected Hussein to
survive in power. How much better to let internal pressures do the
work rather than U.S. troops, it being certain that the coalition
would have collapsed over an invasion of Iraq itself. All the
arguments militating against an invasion today were the same then.
No-fly zones, intended to irritate and embarrass him, CIA plottings,
and, most of all, a murderous embargo were supposed to quicken
events.
The policy has miserably failed. Hussein remains firmly in
control, and no opposition worth mentioning exists. And talk about
evil, more than a million Iraqis have died prematurely since Desert
Storm as a result of America's embargo combined with the devastating
effects of bombed water and sewer facilities. The U.S.
unquestionably bears a terrible moral responsibility for all that
death.
So despite clear evidence that Hussein had nothing to do with Al
Qaeda, had no nuclear weapons, had no ready prospect of having any,
and ignoring the many valid arguments against invasion, the Bush
crowd seized the opportunity offered by the angry haze around 9/11
to topple him.
Bush displays classic American impatience and petulance about
having a problem cleared away as quickly as possible, even if it is
done at the cost of other people's lives. What Bush is really
telling the world is that instead of allowing a patient U.N. regime
of inspections to continue until the day Hussein departs the scene,
he would rather start a war that will kill tens of thousands more
innocent Iraqis, infuriate millions of people in other countries,
and be done with the matter.
Bush has no reasonable successor to put in Hussein's place, and,
as with almost all the U.S.'s inglorious postwar interventions, the
poor people of Iraq will certainly be left to cope afterwards in
their smoking, rat-infested ruins. The U.S. has no more patience for
long-term assistance and planning than it does for the long-term
efforts at diplomacy and international cooperation that could
readily maintain the status quo.
Of course, Mr. Bush has a very noisy cheering section in Mr.
Sharon and Mr. Netanyahu and their American supporters. It really is
not possible for America to damage and cripple Iraq enough to
satisfy them.
Were the policy summed up in concise and accurate terms, "Do you
favor killing maybe another hundred thousand people (mostly
civilians as is always the case in modern war) in order to get Iraq
quickly off our diplomatic plate?" I wonder just how many Americans
would continue supporting Bush. Of course, Mr. Bush's teams of hacks
and propagandists do not use such terms when addressing Americans,
and all Mr. Bush's words to them are charged with cheap emotions
rather than facts.
But many of the world's leaders have conspired to blunt Mr.
Bush's drive to war. We now hear from Mr. Bush an entirely different
argument from what we heard not many months ago. The issue now is
clearly weapons, not garbage about terror or evil or the need for
democracy in the Middle East. But, of course, if the issue is truly
weapons, an efficient inspection regime is all that is required, not
a major war. In effect, Mr. Bush's pathetic arguments have been
turned diplomatically on their heads.
This change is thanks to the brave efforts of some genuine
statesmen. Perhaps it is most of all owing to the heroic efforts of
Mr. Blix and his team of U.N. inspectors. If Mr. Blix succeeds in
stopping Bush's rush to war, he will be one of the most deserving
candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize on record.
The inspectors work against tremendous odds. Bush has pulled out
all the stops in trying to browbeat, coax, or bribe other nations to
support his goal. He has forgiven loans, dropped strictures, hinted
at reprisals, and thrown around tons of money, and Mr. Blix has
worked against a nasty White House campaign to harass and vilify
him.
Of course, Bush's attitudes are inextricably linked to the
experience of his father. If you don't think that such highly
personal attitudes often play a role in history, you haven't studied
enough of it. But, in this case, they are embarrassingly evident to
the whole world and should have no influence in a matter of such
profound consequences.
[John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian
oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of
history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of
reason, and concern for human decency. He is a member of no
political party and takes exception to what has been called
America's "culture of complaint" with its habit of reducing every
important issue to an unproductive argument between two
simplistically defined groups. John regards it as a badge of honor
to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South
Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of
something like three million Vietnamese in their own land because
they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in
Canada, which he is fond of calling "the peaceable kingdom."]
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