It's All About Oil

Andrew links to this map, observing it's "one reason we're not leaving Iraq." Ezra remarks that it "helps explain, for one thing, why the Middle East always dominates the foreign policy agenda." It is, however, worth being precise about this. One dove's "it's all about the oil" complaint is another hawk's "we need to keep invading these countries because our economy depends on it."

One observation is that the high concentration of oil in the Middle East makes the region unusually war-prone. Brazilians wouldn't really gain very much from having their government conquer Surinam. But Saddam Hussein or any other Iraqi dictator stood to gain a lot from controlling the Gulf States like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE where the population is low but the oil wealth is high. Meanwhile, a country like Iraq or Iran that has a sizable population plus a ton of oil is in a position to build a pretty large military establishment. Hence the Gulf War-era worry that if Saddam was allowed to conquer Kuwait, he'd move on into Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, thus putting together a country with truly enormous oil revenues and an enormous amount of market power. That's why we stepped in as leaders of an international coalition aimed at rolling back his conquest.

At the end of the day, though, helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries is a perfectly sound principle to uphold. It's true that we might well not have been so eager to save Kuwait had it not had the oil, but it's also unlikely that anyone would have wanted to conquer Kuwait had it not had the oil. Meanwhile, it's one thing to help small countries avoid conquest and thus try to prevent someone like Saddam from gaining hegemony over the whole region. It's another thing to say that we should start conquering countries in order to establish our own hegemony.

Comments

we should start conquering countries in order to establish our own hegemony.

Wow. There's a tradition that takes in more than the Middle East and extends back past your first birthday, Yglesias.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | December 13, 2007 10:33 AM

The western U.S. and all its resources were inconveniently "owned" by Native Americans or the nation of Mexico. We killed them all to take what was "ours". The resources of the Old South were a bit inconvenient to capitalize on without the benefit of cheap labor. We enslaved millions of Africans to accomplish that. Operating mines, railroads and other ventures proved difficult without cheap immigrant labor so in come the Chinese and others to do it all. Of course now we bitch about immigrants doing things we were perfectly happy to have them do 100 years ago. Its a new age and our M.O. hasn't changes all that much. Kill, oppress, torture, imprison or drive native inhabitants from their lands. Whatever works. The oil in the Middle East is ours, just as were the timber and gold in Nevada and California. Hand it over or die. That's the choice they must make.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 10:45 AM

wait, what about ~175 billion barrels of extractable crude in canada's tar sands. i know that getting crude out of the bitumen requires a lot of water and energy (so a barrel of crude from the tar sands is a lot more polluting than a barrel of crude from saudi arabia), but still ... that's a whole heck of a lot of crude. and the 175 billion barrels is based on older technology for extraction, so there is potential for significantly more to be extracted, although at a possibly higher cost.

that's why, even though we're totally un-american (single payer healthcare, gun laws, no separation of church and state yet more godless than you, et beaucoups de canadiens parlent francais) you still love us.

Posted by o! canada | December 13, 2007 10:46 AM

Sometimes the choice is hand it over and you're still going to die. The Mafia has more honor.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 10:47 AM

"we need to keep invading these countries because our economy depends on it."

Welcome to Imperial Japan!

(Trade is so passe!)

You know, whenever this kind of argument is made, I think it's worth pointing at the oil markets and the production levels from Iraq, pre- and post-invasion.

Our economy depends on lower production levels, higher prices and a deflated dollar, in addition to a trillion dollar cost of the military action?

Let's just say this is a counter-intuitive argument. From my perspective, our economy was doing a lot better before the invasion. The brown people sitting on the oil fields are going to be quite happy to sell it to us and don't require ultra-expensive military actions for this to happy.

The hawks' argument is clearly a solution in search of a problem.

Posted by Whispers | December 13, 2007 10:48 AM

Why do you think the Middle East is unusually war prone? How does the rate of war compare to Africa, Asia, or Central America? Hussein invaded two countries over three decades, and you start generalizing. Since you pick Brazil, I'll ask if ARGENTINA has invaded any neighbors... think carefully.

Posted by John DE | December 13, 2007 10:48 AM

The western U.S. and all its resources were inconveniently "owned" by Native Americans or the nation of Mexico. We killed them all to take what was "ours"...The oil in the Middle East is ours, just as were the timber and gold in Nevada and California.

Actually the Indian or Mexican populations were generally pretty low, and it's more like a huge wave of Anglo "illegal immigrants" just swamped and absorbed them.

For example, the figure I've seen is that the total Mexican population of California at the time of its conquest by the U.S. was well under 20,000, which isn't much more than some single urban city blocks.

Posted by RKU | December 13, 2007 10:55 AM

The brown people sitting on the oil fields are going to be quite happy to sell it to us and don't require ultra-expensive military actions for this to happy.

The hawks' argument is clearly a solution in search of a problem.

Posted by: Whispers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It isn't their current attitude toward selling it to us that is of concern. As poorer nations industrialize and modernize their need for increasingly depleted world oil supplies will crowd us out. That and supplier's choices of customers widens as China, India and others bid for more of their product (and bid UP their product). The U.S. either diversifies and alters its energy sources or remains ever more willing to employ coercion and violence to keep oil flowing our direction.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 10:58 AM

I feel like Dutch disease must be mentioned here. These countries have oil -- and nothing else. That does not lead to stability or anything good.

Posted by Martin | December 13, 2007 11:01 AM

Actually the Indian or Mexican populations were generally pretty low, and it's more like a huge wave of Anglo "illegal immigrants" just swamped and absorbed them.
Posted by RKU | December 13, 2007 10:55 AM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Descendents of Native Americans and professional historians
might take issue with characterizing what the U.S. military did to several tribes as "swamped and absorbed".

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 11:03 AM

I don't think you need to reach for the Native Americans to see that this isn't new. We have dicked around in South and Central America all of the time, in ways that include sending troops to enforce our interests. Note that this sort of behavior distinguishes us from exactly no one.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | December 13, 2007 11:19 AM

RKU: actually the Western hemisphere had a very healthy population before Eurasian diseases wiped most of it out. See the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

Think about the situation from the standpoint of population genetics and this conclusion is fairly obvious. Why would the Western hemisphere have been sparsely populated when there was so much rich land to cultivate? Answer: it wasn't.

Posted by RickD | December 13, 2007 11:24 AM

Why would the Western hemisphere have been sparsely populated when there was so much rich land to cultivate? Answer: it wasn't.

Posted by RickD |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
C'mon Rick, since Earth is only 6 thousand years old there couldn't have been that many people out West.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 11:29 AM

It wasn't just because of the oil that Iraq invaded Kuwait - and, in fact, just a glance at the remarks by Shiite leaders in Iraq at the present time shows that there is still considerable support for the idea that Kuwait is part of Iraq, and was unfairly chiseled out of the countries boundaries by the British, who otherwise used the boundaries of the Ottoman states to forge Iraq. Contrary to the usual American spin on that, there was nothing more unnatural about Iraq as a state then there is about, say, Italy as a state, or France, or the UK. Most nations include dubiously annexed territory - the U.S. took care of such things by eliminating the inhabitants of territories it took, like the Dakotas, or making the previous inhabitants into second class citizens, as happened to the Mexicans in Texas.

Posted by roger | December 13, 2007 11:32 AM

And just think how our economy and security might be if we had, instead of spending a trillion on Iraq, had instead spent it on alternative energy.

So the United States' midEast policy demonstrably has nothing to do with either security or the economy.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | December 13, 2007 11:35 AM

Population genetics?

Posted by ClarenceWilmot | December 13, 2007 11:44 AM

it is all about the export of weaponry and the technology to make weapons. It is quite an industry and explains a great deal of our recent GDP. Before you rightfully denigrate the neo-cons, look carefully towards your congressional districts and the defense companies -- a republic (not simply Republican) government run amok.

Posted by mike c | December 13, 2007 11:49 AM

Population genetics is the study of the allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four evolutionary forces: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes account of population subdivision and population structure in space. As such, it attempts to explain such phenomena as adaptation and speciation. Population genetics was a vital ingredient in the modern evolutionary synthesis, its primary founders were Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher, who also laid the foundations for the related discipline of quantitative genetics.

Source: Wikipedia

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 11:52 AM

steve duncan:

Well, it's certainly true that the Aztec and Incan Empires of Latin America had huge populations prior to the coming of Europeans (and their diseases). For example, I've always read that their capital cities had larger populations than that of Madrid, the Spanish capital.

But there seems very, very little evidence that the North American Indian tribes had anything even remotely like that population size or density. For example, there were no real cities. Having a huge population without any cities seems unlikely.

Incidentally, despite the very heavy impact of European diseases and the brutal behavior of their Spanish conquerors, the descendants of those same Aztecs and Incas are actually still around today. They're called "Latinos."

Posted by RKU | December 13, 2007 12:28 PM

RKU, I haven't advocated a figure for populations of Native North Americans previous to the invasion from the east. I don't see that it is germane to a discussion of any injustices involved. Nor is it germane to whomever possessed the land, mineral and water rights of conquered territories previous to hostilities. I think minor numbers of people shouldn't be deprived of property merely because they're not numerous enough to defend or cultivate everything they own. If a family of 5 in present day America owned 500,000 acres taking it from them by force just because you could wouldn't be reason enough to permit it. Native Americans spoke a different language, had no formal government as we recognized it, were scattered over vast territories, were unable to organize sufficient defenses and just generally led such an alien existence we felt we could do what we wanted with no consequences for our crimes. And so we did. Just as we'd like to do whatever we please in the Middle East. And so we shall.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 12:50 PM

Matthew,

You seem to have started to learn this lesson in other contexts, so it's sad to see you miss it here. For a whole host of reasons, our policy in the middle east has never been motivated by, and inherently can never be motivated by, the pretty sounding principle of "helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries." Going ANY LENGTH AT ALL down that path just ends up lending aid and comfort to the war criminals who control both major parties.

Posted by LarryM | December 13, 2007 1:07 PM

Actually the Indian or Mexican populations were generally pretty low, and it's more like a huge wave of Anglo "illegal immigrants" just swamped and absorbed them.

The funniest post (in a sick and morally depraved way, of course) that I've read in days.

The density of the native American and Mexican populations in the areas in question were, indeed, low. But to make the laughably absurd statement that "a huge wave of Anglo "illegal immigrants" just swamped and absorbed them" ignores a major war of aggression against Mexico, a bloody revolution in Texas against Mexico fomented by outsiders and recent immigrants (I wonder how many of the anti-immigration crazies realize that there is a precedent for some of their worst nightmares, except that the immigrants in question were heading south rather than north), and more than a century of genocidal warfare against the native Americans. I mean, I could go on for pages, but just here in my own neck of the woods there was a little incident called the Sand Creek massacre. Ring any bells? That was hardly an isolated incident.

The sad fact is that we are a nation at the same time ignorant of history and convinced of our own entitlement to take anything we want from anyone who has it. it's disgusting; if I lived in the middle east, I'd probably condemn Bin Laden as insufficiently radical.

Posted by don't know nothing bout history | December 13, 2007 1:19 PM

Bin Laden IS insufficiently radical. You don't have to live in the Middle East to think so.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 1:23 PM

Oh, and on the population density issue - as side issue, but still - densities varied significantly in pre-Columbian America. There is no doubt that population densities were higher before the coming of the Europeans, but for technological/lifestyle reason, I think it is fair to say that even then, in most of North America (central America was a different story), densities were low by European standards. But that obviously doesn't even begin justify what happened. Moreover, it isn't as if there were large empty areas just waiting for European settlers to occupy. Densities were low because the native hunter gatherer and low tech agricultural communities couldn't support as many people on a given amount of land as could more technologically advanced European agricultural societies. But the land was fully occupied and the Europeans still had to take the land by force.

Parenthetically, one of the reasons that I hold out little hope that our sick and depraved nation will ever be anything else other than a cancer on the rest of the world is that it is hard to imagine that a nation built on genocide and slavery can ever be redeemed, despite some reasonably attractive rhetoric in our founding documents.

Posted by don't know nothing bout history | December 13, 2007 1:36 PM

Well, look---"Genocide??"...

First, consider America's 30M-odd Latino population, who are basically Indians (i.e. "Native Americans") who happen to speak Spanish (though a certain fraction still speak Maya or whatever, and most have a slice of European ancestry as well).

But even leaving them all aside, I think there's a very good chance that today's genetic population of North American Indians is actually considerably larger than it was prior to the coming of the Europeans and their diseases, if we count fractional-ancestry as we obviously should. Doesn't quite sound like "extermination" to me...

Now admittedly, you can say that for the Europeans to conquer the Indian tribes and seize most of their land wasn't "nice." But those various Indian tribes had generally gotten their land by seizing it from other, weaker tribes, and so forth. And all the different European groups were always fighting each other and seizing land in much the same way.

And even among American "Anglos", different groups were often fighting over land and stealing it from each other, like the cattle men, the sheep herders, and the homesteaders.

Now I'm hardly much of an expert on the American Frontier, but if you can locate and provide the numbers of the largest single two or three massacres of Indians by whites in North American history---maybe Wounded Knee or something---I strongly suspect that the body-counts will seem pitifully small by modern standards. Not quite what we call "genocide" these days...

And if I'm wrong about these things, I'll gladly stand corrected.

Posted by RKU | December 13, 2007 2:05 PM

Of course the statement - "At the end of the day, though, helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries is a perfectly sound principle to uphold." - has a big gaping Yugoslavia-sized hole in it. A small country acting in a morally questionable manner may well "need" a military response. One could argue that the more important principle is defending people not borders.

Posted by Brent | December 13, 2007 2:18 PM

Somehow I don't think being an apologist for (or dismissive of) what the U.S. military and civilian settlers did to Native Americans makes for a good career path.

Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 2:28 PM

Somehow I don't think being an apologist for (or dismissive of) what the U.S. military and civilian settlers did to Native Americans makes for a good career path.

Absolutely true...if you make your living selling yachts and mansions to the wealthy owners of gambling casinos...

But I'm in a different line of work.

Posted by RKU | December 13, 2007 2:48 PM

Whatever works. The oil in the Middle East is ours, just as were the timber and gold in Nevada and California. Hand it over or die. That's the choice they must make.
Posted by steve duncan | December 13, 2007 10:45 AM

If we are going to play the injustice game maybe the Christian World can ask the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to repay us for all the destruction they caused with their 700 years of Jihad. Let's see we would need reparations for the destruction of Christian Syria, Christian Palestine, Christian Egypt, North Africa, I'll consider the Spanish debt settled, the destruction of Byzantium, ..
I mean the Zoastrians and the Hindus have a damn good claim too. Were talking trillions of dollars here.
After all the injustices are repaid in full it will be our oil.

Posted by Northern Observer | December 13, 2007 3:01 PM

Parenthetically, one of the reasons that I hold out little hope that our sick and depraved nation will ever be anything else other than a cancer on the rest of the world is that it is hard to imagine that a nation built on genocide and slavery can ever be redeemed, despite some reasonably attractive rhetoric in our founding documents.
Posted by don't know nothing bout history | December 13, 2007 1:36 PM

The genealogy of humanity shows that ALL nations are built on injustice.
Haven't you read Beyond Good and Evil?

It is in defiance of our brutal origins that we build a just society.

Posted by Northern Observer | December 13, 2007 3:09 PM

And just think how our economy and security might be if we had, instead of spending a trillion on Iraq, had instead spent it on alternative energy.
So the United States' midEast policy demonstrably has nothing to do with either security or the economy.
Posted by Duncan Kinder

Just throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it. Since the early 70s, we have thrown 3 trillion into public schools over the constant dollar expense per student in the late 60s. We have gone from one of the top 10% advanced nations down to the bottom 20% of advanced nations despite that, and spend more per capita than all but 2-3 Euro nations per pupil.
Since the "War on poverty" started with 3.2 trillion since 1964, we have seen the creation of a permanent underclass.

A trillion into the technologically illiterate dreams of hard Left environmentalists for more "beautiful solar, exciting wind power except off our swank properties, and corn for ethanol (driving milk prices up higher than gasoline per ounce)? That guarantees absolutely nothing.

A half trillion into nuke plants with full recycling of the spent fuel would cut our coal use in half, up to 70% of our electricity would be "CO2-free" and eliminate long-lived transuranic elements like Plutonium - cutting storage time and space needed by 98%. 100 billion to replace and upgrade our decaying, energy squandering infrastructure. 100 billion for new economic bridges to transition to high energy conservation homes and businesses and transportation. 100 Billion to train and motivate jobless black underclass, build a fence, and deport 20 million alien energy users. 300 billion applied to the debt.
And the same environmentalists that preach conservation are ideologically committed to amnesty for illegals, more 3rd World family reunification, more refugees let in, more legal visas for jobs Americans can be trained to do. Every immigrant or descendent of unwanted immigrants or unskilled family members negates the conservation gains of 10 Americans cutting their energy use 10%.
Thus we use far more energy than we did in 1973, despite using less per capita, because we went from 215 million in 1973 to 300 million today. Now with Open Borders and high breeding rate illegals, we are getting US Census numbers showing America will have 363 million by 2030, 420 million by 2050.
We will need far more energy than today.

The other problem is technology and simple calculations. We know the energy potential of a source or substance we wish to exploit. The next thing is to calculate if we can get any usable energy out of it, if any given our present technology and experts best guess what new technology and what economics might exist 5-10 years down the road.

Steve Duncan - the more advanced and powerful people for almost all our history always took over from less advanced people.

Stop being a self-loathing white.

Whites did nothing that the Native Americans didn't do to exterminate and assimilate the survivors of weaker tribes. The Han Chinese arose on the Yellow river and exterminated dozens of minorities and forced several dozen others into small pockets or out of the country all together (Thai, Cambodians, Vietnamese, South Coast Malay, Tibetans, Uighur, Laotians. The Bantu and the Zulu exterminated or near-exterminated other African subraces in recent centuries as they expanded..

If a family of 5 in present day America owned 500,000 acres taking it from them by force just because you could wouldn't be reason enough to permit it

Sure it would, Duncan. See what happened in the French Revolution and in the Russian Revolution to those aristocrats and nobility and other landlords that owned vast swaths of land as you describe. Concentration of wealth breeds injustice, corrupts and subverts society, and must be limited.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 13, 2007 3:11 PM

So I don't really subscribe to the Native American as 'victim' narrative. These nations were no passive victims. They made alliances, fought wars, adapted new technologies and acted in their own best interests. Numbers, habitat destruction and infectious disease ended their domination of North America and yet the future is unwritten ...
A 2004 Government of Saskatchewan document projected that the aboriginal population of that province will reach 33 percent by 2045.¹ Soon after, a Government of Manitoba publication predicted that Manitoba’s Native population will be 19 percent by 2026.

Posted by Northern Observer | December 13, 2007 3:23 PM

Northern Observer merely confirms what I was saying above. We are nation filled with filthy, murderous animals like him.

If only there was a way to save the relatively few innocent people, and if only this crazy fuck of a nation didn't have enough nuclear bombs to destroy the planet, I would be all for the most extreme violence directed against the United States.

Posted by a decent human being | December 13, 2007 4:43 PM

Posted by a decent human being | December 13, 2007 4:43 PM
1) I love you too.
2) I would be all for the most extreme violence directed against the United States. Oh you are so certain in your good and evil aren't you, you just know it. Here's a personal tip because I'm feeling charitable;find some humility before you hurt someone. Try reading what Jesus said to the Pharisees.
3) I'm not an American or live in the troubled republic; sorry to disappoint your self righteous construction of the universe.

Posted by Northern Observer | December 13, 2007 5:34 PM

"At the end of the day, though, helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries is a perfectly sound principle to uphold."

No, it isn't.

Not as a general principle, anyway. Although in this case, the UN was involved, which at least provided some legitimacy.

Basically, nobody gave a shit about Kuwait. Kuwait was allegedly at fault anyway for slant-drilling Saddam's oil and a case could be made that Kuwait was artificially split off from Iraq under colonialism anyway.

More importantly, the US green lighted the invasion via April Glaspie.

More importantly, who cares who runs Kuwait - a bunch of corrupt sheiks or a corrupt dictator?

Now, had Saddam started threatening Saudi Arabia, a much larger and wealthier state, there might have been a case for the UN coming in and saying, "Hold the phone here, Saddam. We aren't letting you run the WHOLE ME like you run Iraq. The risk to the global economy is too great."

But in the end, who knows? Having Saddam run Saudi Arabia might have been a good thing. Less kowtowing to Israel, maybe a breakup of OPEC and better oil prices (one theory about the Iraq invasion was to take Saddam's oil price meddling out of the picture - if he ran Saudi Arabia, that might have been better!).

Of course, had Saddam run Saudi Arabia, maybe there would have been a war with Israel at some point, which might have been bad - or not.

My point is that Kuwait wasn't worth fighting over and destabilizing the whole ME. That was a petty war between one uninteresting state and an even smaller and less interesting state.

And the result of that petty war was the concentration on Iraq which led directly to where we are now.

Of course, the primary element there was the oil. Just as it is with Iran (along, again, with hegemony for the US and Israel.)

The guns of war should be reserved for more serious matters.

And the US should NEVER make a move without UN authorization, absent a direct threat to the US.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 13, 2007 5:34 PM

Northern,

Oh, that's rich, coming from one of the "let's kill the bloody wogs and let God sort them all out" crowd.

But of course you are right in a way, I think we should, generally, be pretty humble in our foreign policy, which is why I favor a pretty modest, non-interventionist foreign policy. But there are, rarely, times when a nation behaves in such an obviously monstrous way that it is perfectly permissible for the world to seek its utter destruction. The United States is obviously such a nation, and hopefully the rest of the world will wake up and see that fact.

Oh, and why do I have the feeling that you don't offer the same counsel to the people who want to bomb the shit out of Iran?

Posted by decent human being | December 13, 2007 7:53 PM

Re: Why would the Western hemisphere have been sparsely populated when there was so much rich land to cultivate? Answer: it wasn't.

Agriculture was much more recent in the New World than in the Old, and large areas of both North and South America were still inhabited by hunter-gatherers in 1500. That includes all of North America north of Mexico (except for the Pueblo civilization of the Southwest)
and west of the Mississippi. However where agriculture did exist on a large scale, there were indeed large populations.

Re: the U.S. took care of such things by eliminating the inhabitants of territories it took, like the Dakotas, or making the previous inhabitants into second class citizens, as happened to the Mexicans in Texas.

Well, not quite always. Neither the Dutch in New York nor the Cajuns of Louisiana were treated in that manner. (There was some bigotry toward the latter because of their Catholicism, but for the most part they were accepted as full American citizens)

Re: But there seems very, very little evidence that the North American Indian tribes had anything even remotely like that population size or density.

In some parts of North America, they did. The Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri confluence region supported a flourishing proto-civilization around 1000 AD. Remnants of it survived just long enough to be described by Spanish explorers. Its fall however was not due to Europeans, but (perhaps) to a combination of the Lttle Ice Age and a catastrophic series of earthquakes produced by the dangerous New Madrid fault.

Re: For example, there were no real cities.

See the Mound Cities of the Mississippi valley. Cahokia appears to have rivaled any European city of the same era.

Re: ...a bloody revolution in Texas against Mexico fomented by outsiders and recent immigrants

You are also ignoring some history: the Santa Ana regime was widely hated by the Spanish residents of "El Norte" and the Texan and Californian revolutions had the support of most of the Spanish population (note that I use "Spanish" not "Mexican"; that is how most of those people still saw themselves, not as "Mexicans"). It's certainly true that the Spanish were betrayed and mistreated afterward, but they were not loyal subjects of Mexico City for the most part.

Posted by Jonf | December 13, 2007 9:42 PM

1. It is unquestionably true that "helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries is a perfectly sound principle to uphold." Whether or not it's worth doing in the real world depends on things like cost, practicality, and context (other factors involved beyond principle).

2. It is also unquestionably true that it's very important "to prevent someone like Saddam from gaining hegemony over the entire region", especially when "the entire region" represents the fulcrum of the world economy now and for some time to come. Such a regime in possession of such resources would have been far worse than the difficulties we are currently facing there.

3. To the best of my knowlege absolutely no one has said "we should start conquering countries in order to establish our own hegemony", nor are we doing anything of the sort.

4. If we want a world that's advanced somewhat over the one that perpetrated the assorted evils of colonialization, it would be useful to have a functional United Nations which can enforce its most important Resolutions. But the idea that the UN, even a reformed version, should have a veto over the legitimate foreign policy decisions of democratically elected governments is absurd, and about as likely as rule by space aliens.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 14, 2007 6:05 AM

"To the best of my knowlege absolutely no one has said 'we should start conquering countries in order to establish our own hegemony'"

Read the PNAC documents. They explicitly state that no nation other than the US is to be allowed to become even a REGIONAL power, let alone a global power.

How do you do that WITHOUT invading to establish a hegemony?

In any event, this is precisely what was done to Iraq - even though Iraq was a lame attempt to be a regional power - and is definitely at least part of the reasons for the intent to attack Iran (the other parts being oil and war profits and to benefit Israel - all of which tie in to hegemony.)

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 14, 2007 7:26 AM

Richard,

You're too easy on Mr. Powell, and you are wasting your time.

The fact is this: even when you strip away the more controverial claims that us non-interventionists make, the dimemsions of the United State's role in the world are hardly controversial. We may debate what to call it, we may debate its desirability, but there isn't much REAL dispute about what it IS. That doesn't stop people like Mr. Powell from sticking his head firming up his ... or, rather, in the sand. At this stage, even if he is educable, a brief blog comment isn't going to be enough to do the trick.

Posted by LarryM | December 14, 2007 9:21 AM

Posted by decent human being | December 13, 2007 7:53 PM
Oh, that's rich, coming from one of the "let's kill the bloody wogs and let God sort them all out" crowd.

That's not my position, I make no claims to superiority. Reread and think.
I also find it charming that you took my advice for personal humility in judging others as an approval to judge America as supremely arrogant.

The United States is obviously such a nation Oh really, relative to whom? That's my point. "decent human being"; what a beautiful mask you wear in your love of humanity behind which hides - a will to mass murder in the name of "justice". You're worthy of Lenin.

PS - Why bomb when you can talk? But tell me will we live in better, safer, nobler world when Theran has thermoneuclear weapons? Why? Because America will be "contained"? Don't pity Iran, cry for her neighbours.

Posted by Northern | December 14, 2007 9:45 AM

Posted by decent human being | December 13, 2007 7:53 PM
Oh, that's rich, coming from one of the "let's kill the bloody wogs and let God sort them all out" crowd.

That's not my position, I make no claims to superiority. Reread and think.
I also find it charming that you took my advice for personal humility in judging others as an approval to judge America as supremely arrogant.

The United States is obviously such a nation Oh really, relative to whom? That's my point. "decent human being"; what a beautiful mask you wear in your love of humanity behind which hides - a will to mass murder in the name of "justice". You're worthy of Lenin.

PS - Why bomb when you can talk? But tell me will we live in better, safer, nobler world when Theran has thermoneuclear weapons? Why? Because America will be "contained"? Don't pity Iran, cry for her neighbours.

Posted by Northern "Filthy" Observer | December 14, 2007 9:46 AM

The "PNAC documents" are not the policy of the United States, and aren't even particularly influential outside the fevered imagination of residents in the leftwingnut echo chamber. Such nonsense certainly won't "do the trick", but it is a remarkably accurate marker for utter futility in political terms.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 15, 2007 6:18 AM