Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Interesting..

I personally think the most arduous part of this expansion of western stabilizing principals is existent within Islam not favoring a separation of church and state. A closer look at the ideologies of these regions within Iraq will tell you where it could very well be in the next seven to ten years.

Shiites and Sunnis don’t want a separation of church/state. The Sunnis want their monarchies back and the Shia Muslims want a repressive Khomenei styled regime(the Kurds are not a majority). This could very well lead to a civil war as has been discussed many times and so we are going to have to babysit it and that may mean going back in years later.

The nationalization of oil is really very much the golden fleece of a dictatorship as it is incentive to take up jihad upon a sitting government. June 30 will not mean an end to jihadist activities as I would contend neither would our pull out when we are ready a few years down the road. This area may always be an area of terrorist activities as now the oil is nationalized(as was under Hussein but this is different) spurring warring factions onward in their campaigns of violence.

I’d love to be Pax Americana hopeful but it doesn’t appear that peace will be the end result. A look at Nicaragua is a look at Iraq with exception to that there won’t be the secularity of a respectable split of Church/state in Iraq.

This may for a decade or more to come, be a place of tention and when the mullahs run for office..Bango! Authoritarian Islamic dictatorship!

Another Khomenei or Qaddafi with an anti-western militant Islamic ideology and probably supporting terror as Iran still does to this day.

I don’t see a Sbarro’s or an Orange Julius popping up there any time soon. Islam is a different sort of religion with constructs within it that are not Democracy friendly at all only dictatorship friendly. Political correctness does not apply to the truth about Islam, the best we can hope for with Islam is something like Jordan, that’s about it and that’s a far cry from Iraq right now.

Empires are bad things. They are big government, statism, bad economics, anti-liberty, radical and unconservative all in one.

I’m glad to see this post over here. Of all the reasons publicly given by the Administration for the invasion of Iraq - and of all the arguments posited by WatchBloggers for that matter - none of them even approach the level of sanity, rationality, and logic as a simple “Empire” argument. Which is, of course, another way of saying the “Oil” argument.

Americans on the right like to ridicule the left’s argument that the invasion of Iraq was over oil. Indeed, most liberal arguments focus on the oil issue as one where fat cat oil barons reap magnificent profits from the pillaging of Iraq. While it is true that the oil industry has a chokehold on the Bush Administration and that they will do all they can (and they can do a lot!) to make sure that our foreign policy is ameneable to enriching their pockets, I do NOT think that profit is the primary force behind the invasion of Iraq. That said, I DO think that oil is still the driving force: Oil as a strategic imperative, not oil as a source of corporate profit.

Fact: the number one most important priority for American national security is our access to oil. This has been the core of American foreign policy since WWII. If we lose our access to oil, America as we know it will die, plain and simple. Why the Republicans won’t just say this is beyond me. Instead of making a clear argument about why America needs to become an imperial power in order to preserve everything from our big fat lazy asses to our role as military protector of the world, they whip up a bunch of stuff about WMDs, terrorist ‘links’, and liberation. All of that is just the surface of the real issue: America’s protection of, access to, and control over the world’s supply of oil - that is, the Middle East.

By the way, this policy is known as, guess what, the Carter Doctrine:

An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

- Jimmy Carter State of the Union, January 23 1980

We on the left are not so naive as to think that the Middle East isn’t critical to America’s security. We just don’t think that invading Iraq was a smart way to ensure that security.

-Cf

The reconstruction of Iraq is vital because we have more important, more lethal threats we should be dealing with, and this war in Iraq will be a drain on that for as long as it lasts.

But we should have never had to do this in the first place. Regime change is justifiable. So is reorganizing the government of a nation we defeated in a war to create a friendlier government.

What’s not justifiable is doing this when there is no reasonable evidence of a profound threat to our nation’s well-being. What’s not reasonable is making this a regular part of our foreign policy.

You might ask, don’t you love democracy? Don’t you want people to be free, of tyrants and threats to their civil liberties? The answer is yes. But I don’t see promoting democracy and freedom as simple thing. These are systems of thought, systems of attitudes that are not simple to create in people.

They are even harder to create when people regard us as their enemies. Even rational requests are denied by people when their blood is boiling. Try imposing a political system on them. Our successes in establishing democracies have mainly occured where we were not in a state of open war with our antagonist, such as the Axis powers after WWII, and Russia and Eastern Europe after the Cold War.

In each case, we had public opinion on our side, or at least muted collaboration. Here, we have active hostility, and constant sabotage of the infrastructure required to rebuild Iraq. It’s like we are trying to rebuild Germany while Eisenhower is stillp pushing through France. Worse, we’re committed now to this god-awful situation. Our only exits are failure and success, and success will be bought at a very dear price, I’m afraid.

Excellent Post. Excellent comment Christopher. And I agree with Matthew, but also see the good for example that Britian brought to India.

It is odd that my Indian friends both hate and love Britian. They feel the Brits looted India. ( The queen’s crown jewels were stolen from India I am reminded), but they embrace western culture in many ways.

I wholly agree with Max’s opinion about how we pulled out of Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew and the basic premise that if (when) we commit to state building, we should fully commit and follow through. He goes overboard in his general assessment with an odd pining for bygone days.

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen…

This kind of pompous attitude might be one of those parts of western encroachment that the terrorists are (supposedly) fighting against. Especially if you consider the political and economic motivations behind such a claim to “enlightenment.”

This lack of insight is as bad as his casual dismissal of our contributions to the creation of our enemies. Maybe he was trying to say that since neither our policy in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union nor our support of Saddam’s regime when pitted against Iran were state building, they are therefore object lessons in what happens when we lose sight of our “true” calling: creating states that will accept a liberalized economy and subsequently foreign investment and have a political body that is amenable to our longterm regional plans… excuse me, our enlightened longterm regional plans.

To me, I thought the object lesson of our history with Afghanistan and Iraq (not counting the recent invasions) was about the problems that can arise from covert foreign policy, but that’s neither here nor there for Max or Niall.

The Bush administration’s movable feast of justifications for immediate implementation of the preemptive war doctrine is also a good object lesson in why we must tread this path carefully. The administration’s lead up to invading Iraq did not set the best of precedents. I think if we are to accept this doctrine we should exactingly codify its prescriptions.

Overall, what I get out of our failures in state building is that we aren’t enlightened. We can’t implement this kind of policy without creating future enemies or exacerbating regional and cultural conflicts. It’s not a reason to withdraw but it is a reason to craft the terms of state building and preemptive war with precision and foresight. And then proceed carefully.

Niall is funny, he says our domestic entitlement programs are the real cause of our problems, not our military budget. We would so much better at imperialism if we would just drop such wasteful spending.

I think that is a fascinating problem, because it means American overstretch, to use Paul Kennedy’s term, is not about external imperial adventures. It’s about domestic programs, Medicare in particular. The operation itself—conquest of Iraq—is cheap. The defense budget is still going to come in comfortably under its Cold War average this year. I think a lot of Americans don’t quite see that—they assume this is costing a huge amount of money. In truth, the real financial problems lie at home.

This is based on an assumption that our average Cold War military budget and its longterm effects were reasonable and justifiable, which I think is arguable. If our country is to be a perpetual capital importer while our primary budget focus is exporting democracy then I think we will find ourselves financially and socially bankrupt before we get half way through the list of potential client states.

We would save plenty of money from cancelling all federal entitlement programs (which Niall might not be advocating, but since he doesn’t clarify, I’ll assume the worst) and with the extra money we might resolve our debts and we might begin to export capital (which the British Empire was able to do during its colonial days), but I worry about the state of the union after forty years of it. And I doubt our willingness to fully abandon these programs. Under a compromised arrangement, we would certainly become financially destitute after a few decades.

This also presumes that there will be no significant counterforce to our imperialist agenda, which, when combined with the economic vulnerabilities of the above scenario, seems unlikely.

And technically, the cost of the war is not cheap and does cost a lot of money. It is relatively cheap and the amount of money relative to our GDP and the budget itself is within reason. This is also based on the current cost of the war. Over the rest of the decade, if our withdraw goes according to plan, it is a relatively high cost war.

Also, he mentions North Korea, which I don’t think qualifies as nation building, per se, simply because it should be more about assimilating its political body into South Korea’s existing system.

All great powers eventually fail. We may not do so for a long time, but the question is, how fast, and how bad. I’m of the thinking that we should prepare, diplomatically, so when the inevitable occurs, it’s a soft landing and a shorter fall. The Neocons only think of trying to hold onto power indefinitely, keeping us masters of the planet for the forseeable future. Unfortunately things never work out that way. There are many ways in which we could lose our position as the pre-eminent military power, from economic concerns to a military defeat, to a political fiasco that undermines the stability of our government. It could be the next terrorist attack, it could be one fifty from now. We all must remember that once Brittania ruled the waves, All roads led to Rome, and Greece was the light of the civilized world. These powers have come and gone, and one day we will go.

I will not say that we are necessarily close to having that happen to us. It may take a generation, it may take a hundred years. But let us be clear: we cannot take our supremacy in the world for granted. Nor can we hold onto it forever. We will hold it for an even shorter time if Bush humiliates our military again in another quagmire of well-intended half-assed nation-buiding, and if the debts from all those wars mounts up high enough. No power in this world can be maintained without cost, and if we are unable to pay for it, our decline is assured.

The Neocons may hasten the demise of America as the only superpower faster than the internationalists, Ironically enough.