I’ve gotten a number of responses from TPM Readers to my earlier post arguing that the only credible understanding of the guiding aim of the Iraq adventure — at this point, with all we’ve learned — is long-term domination of strategy natural resources. Or to put it more bluntly, to control the oil.
A few readers say this is too sour an assumption. TPM Reader BH, after outlining a democratizing theory, says …
If you view the situation through the lens of neo-conservative foreign policy, it becomes clear that ensuring the successful installation of a functioning democracy in Iraq — which will theoretically spark democratic revolutions across the Middle East, all benefitting the U.S. indirectly — is the Bush administration’s likely justification for maintaining a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq.
At present, your logic seems to be: There are only two possible purposes of maintain a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq: nefarious (i.e., securing the world’s oil supply), and virtuous (i.e., ensuring democracy for Iraq). Bush is nefarious. Therefore, the purpose of Bush’s desire to maintain a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is to secure the world’s oil supply.
I don’t find any of this persuasive. In fact, I find the whole bit of reasoning needlessly over-determined. I myself wrote a long article just before the war started, explaining how the grand neo-con plan was to institute an outward unfolding cycle of democratizing and chaos in the region that would ultimately topple almost all the governments in the region.
So is it about democracy after all? Of course, it is. But approaching the matter at this level of soft and vague generality is meaningless. If you’re out to control a country, its territory or its resources, of course having the country be stable, respectable and democratic is a great thing. There are always these great tag lines that we want an Iraq that is democratic, is allied to the US in our various endeavors, doesn’t threaten its neighbors, fights with us in the war on terror, etc. If nothing else, even the most cynical and militaristic of Americans — the Dick Cheney type — wants democracies so long as they are pliant and generate the right policies. But this is only the idealism of laziness, a fuzzy coating for real aims that sometimes the deeply cynical even half believe.
But given the particularities of the situation, the permanent occupation of Iraq simply isn’t compatible with the aim of democratizing the country. It’s just something that would be nice. And wouldn’t it? Look at their words and their actions and you see that what the people in the White House mean by ‘democratization’ is to keep our troops in the country long enough that they start ordering their affairs peaceably and through orderly processes and decide through those processes that they want us to stay and continue using the country as a base for US power in the region. It’s a grand have your cake and eat it too.
Is it all to get hold of the oil? I don’t think large groups of people are often able to sustain such crude goals, at least not that baldly stated, even to themselves. But that’s the heart of it. Bundled up in their own shallow and lazy thinking, the main actors’ idea was that we can take this region where a lot of people really don’t seem to like us much and if we just sit on them long enough we can get them to like us, because that’s what happened in Germany and Japan, right?
