"Stay Behind" strategies in Iraq

[Ken Brown]

"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.