On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 02:41 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
At 12:42 PM 4/10/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
1. Iraq has been a welfare state for essentially its entire lifetime. From the 1920s to the 1960s, a typical backwater royalist welfare state. Since the 1960s, a socialist/central planning/fascist state.
You could say much the same about the US...
since much of the population has no independent source of income, no factories producing stuff that the rest of the world wants to buy, the effects are obvious.
Nothing the world wants to buy? Forgotten about the oil?
What part of "no _factories_ producing stuff" was unclear? (Emphasis added. Oil is not something skilled workers produce...it is something that a very few produce, leaving most dependent on only what trickles down.)
It is sufficient for a country to sell raw materials, it does not have to process them, or make elaborate things to sell.
The peasants have their labor to sell, and the oil companies will buy it.
You clearly have not visited oil wells or refineries lately. Most of the drilling is done by specialized drilling companies, e.g., the French, German, British, Dutch, and U.S. drilling companies. They hire a small number of locals...probably they'll be hiring far fewer for upcoming projects, due to security measures. Refineries are built by the Bechtels and Parsons and their European and Japanese counterparts. Most are nearly fully-automated. Again, a comparatively tiny number of locals will be hired. --Tim May