Remora

Democracy, American amnesia

The great moral claim of the belligerent propagandists has been that the War will be fought to bring democracy to Iraq. It is, in fact, their only moral claim - otherwise, the war looks like an attack by an imperial power on a much smaller, and greatly weakened power that invaded a country on which it had a longstanding claim twelve years ago; was duly repulsed; and has since confined its attacks to the kind of factional squabbles that had consumed its separated, northern provinces for eight years. Furthermore, in the eighties, the imperial power in question actively encouraged the weaker power to invade a country on which it had no claim, Iran, and fight it with such weapons as were supplied by a network generously overseen by that imperial power.

So a moral claim, here, is evidently needed in order to counter the history of moral bankruptcy and sheer venality displayed by the imperial power.

Nick Cohen, who is the most coherent of the belligerent apologists, ticks off, and promptly disposes of, the reasons for opposing the war in his column in the Observer this week Cohen, of course, is advocating a war that he made up in his head - he never stoops to defend the war as actually planned by Blair and Bush. This makes defending the War so much more easy. But even for him, the cordon sanitaire between reality and delusion must have been a little shaken by the past week's bullying of Turkey. It gives us a nice preview of what the U.S. means by democracy in the Middle East.

Peter Beinart, in The New Republic, reviews some of the ancient history. Gulf I placed Turkey in the unenviable position of having to provide for a wave of refugees such as are regularly turned back - when they come from such subaltern hellholes as Haiti - by the United States. Turkey doesn't have the moral latitude that comes with 24,000 ballistic missiles, so they had to find someplace for them. In the heat of the moment in 1990, when the U.S. was going about like a horny schoolboy, promising anything in order to get to third base, Turkey was assured economic aid out the wazoo for the period after the war. Third base was achieved; in the detumescent afterwards, the promises we made to Turkey were conveniently forgotten.

But now, once again, the U.S. has a hard on. This time the Turkish government decided to play hard to get, and tried to bargain for some billions to compensate for the inevitable loss of further billions when Iraq is invaded. However, the Turkish government has to deal with the inconvenient fact that 90% of the population is opposed to the war. Well, the government made its deal, under intense U.S. pressure, but the Turkish parliament doesn't go along. Well, what happens next? Democracy be damned, if this is how Turkey is going to act, the U.S. will withdraw that aid - which is mostly in the form of loans, anyway, further indebting the place whose economy was basically a collateral casualty of the last war - while our warships ride outside the Turkish coast, apparently waiting for the Turkish military to squeeze the duly elected government. Even if the Turks cave and the U.S. gets to use Turkey as a vector into Iraq, don't bet on the U.S. keeping its word about that aid.

So, lets play with a scenario, shall we? The U.S. installs some exile Iraqi government into the niche once heated up by Saddam Hussein's bottom. The oil is still pumping, in this scenario. Here's the question: on the one hand, reconstruction costs in Iraq will probably engulf all the money created through the oil trade for the next five years - at least according to a Business Week article we've previously cited, and certainly according to those, like Nick Cohen, who justify the war in terms of Saddam Hussein's crimes and misrule. On the other hand, American taxpayers are now seeing that the war has cost around 80 billion dollars, and that occupying Iraq is going to cost another eighty billion dollars. Question: who gets that money?

Nick Cohen asks us to believe that the U.S., with one hundred thousand troops in the place, will not squeeze the Iraqi regime those troops put into office in order to take the political heat off of Bush.

LI thinks Cohen is fantasizing. The choice will come down to withdrawing the troops, or taking the money. Taking the money will, essentially, mean stealing from the starving. Would Bush do this to shore up his presidential chances? In a heartbeat. And that can only be accomplished by brute force. It is just the kind of spark that will start a guerilla war of the kind we see in Israel. Just as in Turkey, the US interest will trump democracy. But unlike in Turkey, or rather - like the Turkey that is periodically taken over by the military -- the factional struggle will have just begun. To pretend that one can squeeze past this scenario by sneering at the protesters as mere defenders of their insular prosperity is simply dishonest. The people on the streets of London February 15th, from whose pocketbooks Cohen basically expects to pay for an occupation that has every chance of devolving into another American supported despotism, are either to be considered by Cohen as a fact in his case for the war - in which case he will have to explain how the money is going to be extracted from them, or how the war's goals are going to be accomplished if the money isn't extracted from them. It is that simple.

No wonder the Ultra secret, in this war, is how much the Pentagon projects it will cost.