- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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raw material is simply outdated.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
world-wide 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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-a-vis a threat from a much larger country or a group of
countries.
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- 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 the U.S. cozily does business with.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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
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 afterwards in their smoking,
rat-infested ruins to cope. 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.
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- 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.
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- This change is thanks to the brave efforts of some genuine
statesman. Perhaps, it is most of all is 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.
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- The inspectors work against tremendous odds. Bush has
pulled out all the stops in trying to browbeat, coax, or bribe others 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.
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- John Chuckman encourages your comments: <mailto:jchuckman@YellowTimes.org>jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
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