Re: "Stay Behind" strategies in Iraq
(resent) At 10:51 PM 4/10/03 -0700, Tim May wrote:
On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 08:04 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Ok, the Iraqis will work in the 7-11s which serve the yankees. Some Iraqis will do better. They will inspire others. They will also be used by psyops to argue for "the american dream" for Iraqis. And although exploited by psyops, I think all humans want to improve their circumstance.
You're arguing for what you would like to see, whereas what I'm talking
about is that there is unlikely to be any surge in employment in this hand-out nation.
Not what I'd like to see; what the US will encourage. The US (or its puppets) will use .iq's oil money to pay for .iq reconstruction jobs, and then steady-state jobs. To think otherwise is to ignore the motivations and means of the USG.
There simply is no prospect that significantly more than the small fraction of Iraqis who now service the oil industry will be employed. Doubling oil production, which is essentially impossible, would only double a small number...or not quite double, as newer facilities will be even more automated.
So use oil money to create agricultural projects which use lots of labor. Iraq has water. (When we take Saudi Arabia we can build desalination plants..) I'm saying that if the problems you describe arise, the USG will try to reduce them, for the USG's benefit. I don't see how you can ignore the 800 lb gorilla with the A-10 backup. I don't see how observing this makes me socialist. Analyst, maybe, socialist, no.
Meanwhile, most of the nation's 20,000,000 will continue to rely on handouts. I said that no major ghetto/slum area, whether Calcutta or South-Central LA or Baghdad has ever, in memory, gone to nearly full employment. I'm a libertarian, not a do-gooder:
So am I. But I recognize the existance of non-libertarian agents like the USG and their ability to use resources (oil) for social placation. Social placation which favors USG interests. Shit, a lot of Americans will admit (if pressed) that USG domestic welfare is to prevent the South Centrals from rioting. And Iraq is not even burdened with those US pathologies or the US constitution.
Yes, the US could keep the Iraqis poor. But its not in the USG interest. The USG wants MTV in every Arab home. (Albeit this will piss off the Islamo Fundies, but they're already majorly pissed.)
You're showing your statist/idealist roots. It's not a matter of "the US could keep the Iraqis poor." No more so than the U.S. is keeping the
South-Central LA negroes poor, or the Calcutta natives poor.
You grossly misunderstand. The US now owns Iraq. The US can physically keep Iraqis poor if it wishes ---put them all in internment camps, feed them a meal at a time. (How is this statism? Its a statement of brutal fact, a consequence of who has the biggest guns.) The US can also give them all satellite TVs & trust funds if it wishes, using either your taxes or Iraq's oil sales money. Now my claim is that 1. the USG interest is in Americizing Iraq, and that 2. (having the guns) they will do so, whether the Iraqis want it or not. My claim is also that the oil is easier to spend than US tax dollars in the long run. I have yet to see you refute any of these. I also fail to see how this makes me statist. *Recognizing* state actions doesn't mean I endorse them. I suppose I'm also making a claim that the entire population there isn't permenantly, chronically South Central LA, i.e., that the US manipulation will work to some extent.
I suppose the U.S. could order Iraqi National Oil to hire tens of thousands of people to polish the pipes, wipe down the derricks, spoon up the spilled oil, and other make-work jobs. Still a drop in the bucket.
Basically, Iraq went through a standard Turd World birth boom, doubling
its population and then doubling it again in just a couple of generations. Look at the statistics on how many Iraqis are under 15.
Yep. But you realize that the high-youth populations of various arab nations are succeptible to Americanization, and that the USG knows this, right? And will exploit this for the USG's ends.
They dispersed handouts to the breeders, who now number 20 million, crowded into several major cities and a dozen smaller cities.
You are also aware of how, after a population gets Americanized, they start using birth control? Chicks wanting college, more money per family member the fewer there are, no need for agricultural labor. [Alas world-Americanization is happening too slowly and the population bomb is slowly detonating]
Modern refineries cannot afford to have people running around with wrenches and screwdrivers, tweaking and reading gauges. The plants either run with few people or they are doomed.
Ok. Perhaps I am wrong about the number of pipe-polishers and folks employed in satellite industries (incl. the Iraqis who repair Halliburton Mercedez). Then the USG will create labor-consuming 'reconstruction' projects then. Using your or Iraqi resources, it doesn't much matter if its not an election year. I'm stating future history, not what I personally want, Tim. I think I've stated clearly enough that this the USG acting (without serious opposition) in pure USG interest.
Finally, for now, a friend of mine for the past 28 years is the son of a former Chevron head of research and development (at the Bay Area refineries...also lightly staffed). This V.P., Dr. John Scott, told me many years ago just how few people it takes to run the crackers and distillation towers.
Ok, then only a few Texans will be over there. Smaller exposure. Fewer targets. Still, the USG will create native jobs out of USG interests.
It's good for Iraq that they have oil. Having oil is always better than
not having oil. But any notion that any expansion of the oil business is going to magically employ millions of Iraqis who are not now employed is silly. Do the math.
Every arabian kingdom with oil has little but oil money. That the monarchs of the region use it for welfare (and thus their own security) is no different from the USGs plan. Only folks it doesn't work on are the Fundies, as the Shah (et al) found out.
the US imposed 'interim' govt will tax this to fund things (like jobs, or even sinecures) that win favor. Why? Because the govt worries more about Iraqi/Arab backlash more than Halliburton's profits. For a while, anyway.
Silliness. Prices are set by markets. No one is claiming that Halliburton will get the bulk of the oil profits. But Halliburton will not do its thing (drilling services, extinguishing fires, etc.) except at prices they find acceptable.
Of course, a company is rational, xor extinct. What I mean is, the new USIRAQ will "own" the oil, much like the Saudi kings do. They may let others pump it, refine it, move it (all those parties making a profit), but USIRAQ will use its take for Americanization.
You seem to have some kind of fantasy going on about Iraq's oil economy
somehow giving jobs to millions of Iraqis who have no skills, no work experience. Optimism has blinded you. Do the math.
Not optimism, mere modelling of agents and their means and motivations.
If you liquidate the towelhead kings of the region, you might find a lot of distributable wealth (I'm not a socialist, neither am I an admirer of monarchy.) which the US conquerers would distribute. A great way to curry favor with the populace. Libertarian ideals don't prescribe a way to distribute land-based wealth in the region, though I'd love to be corrected.
"Redistributing the oil wealth" will not do anything except lead to a further doubling and tripling of the population. The moral hazard of handing out free stuff is itself enough to derail real markets.
But it won't be *free*, the Iraqis will have to work for the dinars with George's face on them. A sinecure counts as work, geopolitically, as long as the oil is there to pay for it. (And the bricklayers and fibre-laying crews will be busy with real work at first.) For psyops-dignity control the jobs can't be *too* fake. Do not import street-sweeping machines if you need to employ lots of street-sweepers. A doubling takes more than a decade. You can do a lot of social manipulation in that time. Free birth control at the oil-paid-for clinics. TV time for agreeable clerics, jail for disagreeable ones. Odd to see you underestimate the capabililties of a blood & oil crazed US unencumbered by even shreds of a bill of rights. ... ...our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us." -- Winston Churchill, January 1914
"Major Variola (ret)" wrote: [...]
So use oil money to create agricultural projects which use lots of labor. Iraq has water. (When we take Saudi Arabia we can build desalination plants..)
Actually *Turkey* has the water (& to a much lesser extent Iran & even less than that Syria). They let what they don't use flow into the rivers and down to the sea. As they get richer - or as they get more annoyed with the Kurds - they may decide that they want to keep more and let less flow. They are setting up serious hydro power. Sa'udis can build their own desalination plants. They've got the money, they've got the energy (more oil and/or solar and/or wind than they can use). Iraq doesn't need desalination plants. Iraq needs to do deals with Turks or the Iranians. Presumably the first cut has to be Oil for water and/or electricity. Some people say that the draining of the marshes has messed up the water table in the south (like the ecological disasters in old Soviet Central Asia, though on a much smaller scale - no doubt similar boo-boos were made in the US, also on a much smaller scale, the Soviets were very good at not stopping digging how ever big the hole was - presumably because anyone who said that it had been a bad idea to dig the hole in the fisrt place was in risk of their life) Reflooding them might be popular with Greens, westerners with a sentimental attraction to old Arab ways of life, the Iranians, and the people of Basra (who get their water supply back). But unpopular with those who are growing crops on the reclaimed land (how long till runaway salination sets in?) and anyone with a magic-bullet heavy-metal engineering attitude to political problems. [...]
You grossly misunderstand. The US now owns Iraq. The US can physically keep Iraqis poor if it wishes ---put them all in internment camps, feed them a meal at a time. (How is this statism? Its a statement of brutal fact, a consequence of who has the biggest guns.)
The US can also give them all satellite TVs & trust funds if it wishes, using either your taxes or Iraq's oil sales money.
Now my claim is that 1. the USG interest is in Americizing Iraq, and that 2. (having the guns) they will do so, whether the Iraqis want it or not.
Put like that it is hard to deny. One big unknown is how much Balkanisation the US will allow (or encourage). Effectively all the oil is either round Kirkuk (which the US and the Turks are now trying to re-disposses the previous owners of) or Basra (way down south, on the other side of the marshes, and quite capable of being as nice little oil state on its own, depending on how Iraqi the folks their actually feel). The best agriculture is in the Shi'ite centre and after that the Kurdish hills. The Sunni west - that has been running Iraq for however many centuries, first on behalf of the Turks, then the British, then briefly for the Ba'athists - is dirt-poor. A Balkanised Iraq is one in which the previous top region suddenly has no economic basis for their way of life. USAnians can no doubt have fun contemplating what might happen to WDC (or Maryland, or Virginia) if the government became unable to collect 90% of the tax revenue. Baghdad is one of those cities that is where it is because of trade and government, not because it produces much. Not that that is an unstable reason for a city being where it is - Istanbul (for example), Beijing and London have been around a long time for the same reasons So the US needs to decide how much resource it is willing to use to keep Iraq together. And how much it wants to piss off Turkey. I suspect that in the medium-long term the only stable future of the Kurds in Iraq & perhaps in Turkey, is something along the lines of the Scots in Britain - their own laws and parliament, but so culturally assimilated it doesn't really matter to anyone else any more. Of course there may not be a stable future. [...]
You are also aware of how, after a population gets Americanized, they start using birth control? Chicks wanting college, more money per family member the fewer there are, no need for agricultural labor. [Alas world-Americanization is happening too slowly and the population bomb is slowly detonating]
That's already happening to Iraq to some extent. Girls do get to go to college, some of them. The wars and general shit of the last 20 years have slowed the process down.
participants (2)
-
Ken Brown -
Major Variola (ret)