Sen. Dennis Kucinich has introduced the “Oil for Iraq Liberation Act of 2008.” The bill generally would ban Americans from developing or buying Iraq oil resources.
What nonsense.
The biggest lie of the last six years has been that the invasion of Iraq was “Blood for Oil.” The truth was, the United States was going to be able to buy Iraqi oil, or benefit from its flow, whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. In fact, Saddam was begging the U.S. and the rest of the world to purchase Iraqi oil.
In early 2003, the more important truth about Iraq is that it was being abused by a fascist dictator, and that its dictator was violating U.N. terms of the 1991 cease-fire agreed to after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. One of those terms, spelled out in U.N. Resolution 688, was the end of repression in Iraq. After 12 years, Saddam hadn’t ended his repression. He also hadn’t complied with the other terms: ending support for terrorists, returning 600 Kuwaiti POWs, cooperating fully with U.N. arms inspections.
Elusive peace. Meanwhile, the obvious truth about the Middle East was that it would never have peace unless its nations were first free and democratic. The secretive, unaccountable dictatorships running every Muslim nation in that region (unless you count Turkey as in the Middle East) guaranteed that Israel would never be secure, that Lebanon’s democratic institutions could never take root, and that conflicts within and between nations had only violence as a solution.
Removing a totalitarian dictatorship isn’t easy. But it is preferable to subjecting millions of people to lifetimes of repression, and looking the other way while the dictator has hundreds of thousands of people murdered. In the case of Iraq, its repressed people also were suffering from the U.N. sanctions, which Ramsey Clark estimated cost the lives of 1.5 million Iraqis between 1991 and 1999. Clark probably was exaggerating, but certainly many Iraqis were dying of sickness and malnutrition while Saddam was diverting Oil for Food money to his palaces and payoffs.
With the liberation of Iraq, all that has changed. The Arab Muslim Middle East finally has a democracy where people actually are free to speak their minds and vote their consciences. With that victory of freedom, Iraq’s social and political system suddenly has advanced 100 years, and in some ways 1,000 years. Iraqis will be in the flow of global progress in the arts and sciences long before their oppressed neighbors in Saudi Arabia, Syria or even Iran. And for the first time ever, the Iraqi people own Iraq’s oil.
Power of freedom. In spite of the interference from Iran’s regime and other despotic neighbors, Iraq now can begin to serve as an example of a mostly Muslim nation in which decisions are made in the open, a nation in which decisions are subject to laws, a free press, free opposition political parties, a fairly independent court system, and free and regular elections.
For the United States and for anyone who loves freedom, this outcome is better than owning all of Iraq’s oil. First, it means 25 million more of our fellow humans are free. Second, it means a dictatorship has become a democracy, and because democracies almost never make wars with other democracies, the odds are reduced significantly that the U.S. will be called on to clean up another bloody mess involving Iraq. If Iraq’s model is adapted to neighboring nations, it also could improve the chances of a permanent peace between Arab nations and Israel.
That’s what we’ve been after all along: a real peace. And there is no real peace without freedom, and no better way to keep the peace than in freedom.
Oil conspiracies. Kucinich’s hapless followers claim America’s alleged oil grab dates to the “Carter Doctrine,” President Carter’s strong suggestion in 1980 that the Soviet Union refrain from blocking oil supplies shipped from the Middle East. But what was this “doctrine”? Carter simply was saying we shouldn’t allow the world’s most powerful totalitarian dictatorship to control or cut the Free World’s access to Middle East oil. Carter never advised that the U.S. steal the oil. It meant he wanted the U.S. to continue buying the oil on terms negotiated freely between buyers and sellers. Something wrong with that?
Is oil just so evil that we should never buy it? Do murderous totalitarians actually get happy points for interfering with oil sales? What is the theology behind this? It would have been illegal for the Soviets to seize oil or block oil shipments. Doesn’t international law supersede the oil-is-evil religion?
Kucinich’s proposal seems to follow the same illogic: We ousted Saddam, but because Iraq shouldn’t have been liberated and because oil is evil, we now must not buy Iraq’s oil. But wait. This isn’t what the “No Blood for Oil” demonstrators were saying in February 2003. They were lying then that the U.S. wanted to invade Iraq to steal Iraq’s oil, not to buy it.
Earlier mistake. There is a precedent for Kucinich’s plan. When President McKinley decided in 1899 the U.S. would guide the post-colonial Philippines to democracy in the face of an anti-democratic insurgency, a suspicious and anti-big-business U.S. Congress passed a law that practically banned U.S. investment in the Philippines.
Years later, a European commission visited the Philippines to evaluate the effect of the U.S. occupation. It found that the Americans had done well to educate the Filipinos for democracy, but it concluded it was a bad mistake to keep U.S. businesses out of that nation’s reform.
If the Philippines was to become self-sufficient and free, the commission said, it needed foreign trade and jobs.
Iraq, too.
Frank Warner
Just got back from the Philadelphia Phillies victory parade. Wow, was that place mobbed. I'm not sure which players I saw; I think the crowd was 200 deep at City Hall. I know I saw the Phillie Phanatic mascot. And what a good feeling in the air for our World Champions.
Recent Comments