« Illium and Olypos book review | Main | Valuing social networks »

August 5, 2008

Connected headlines

Much has been said of the costs of the Iraq war and very little about the costs of not waging the Iraq war. Which brings us to a piece in today's WSJ, My Bet With Francis Fukuyama.

I'll grant that Mr. Fukuyama had decided the war was a mistake -- if only in a whisper -- before it was begun. Where does that leave us now? Perhaps it's worth considering what we have gained now that Iraq looks like a winner.

Here's a partial list: Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel. He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.

Don't believe Mr. Stephens? Well how about this quote from today's NY Times article, High Oil Prices Giving Iraq Up to $79 Billion in Surplus Cash.

The soaring price of oil will leave the Iraqi government with a cumulative budget surplus of as much as $79 billion by year’s end an American federal oversight agency has concluded in an analysis released on Tuesday.

The unspent windfall, which covers surpluses from oil sales from 2005 through 2008, appears likely to put an uncomfortable new focus on the approximately $48 billion in American taxpayer money devoted to rebuilding Iraq since the American-led invasion.

Over all, the report from the Government Accountability Office estimates, Iraqi oil revenue from 2005 through the end of this year will amount to at least $156 billion.

Surely oil is a bit higher because of the Iraq war, but since Iraq's oil output is higher than before the war, that cannot be the full explanation. So given that Saddam would have sat atop a even larger fortune and still be pursuing his unique brand of terror and mischief, things would be bad in the counter factual as well. Perhaps it still would have been preferable in the cost of human life and economic waste to not have gone, but the naive assumption that Saddam could be properly contained with oil as expensive as it is will not do.

Posted by OneEyedMan at August 5, 2008 5:09 PM

Comments

You are neglecting the extremely important detail that Iran and Saddam-ruled Iraq were mortal enemies. In fact, one of the big reasons that we believed Saddam had WMD's was due to Saddam's own posturing in an effort to intimidate the Iranians, whom he viewed (fatally wrongly) as a more immediate threat than the US. Eliminating Saddam had the (unintended) side effect of eliminating Iran's biggest rival, making Iran the (mostly) undisputed dominant power of the Middle East, much to the consternation of Arab states, most of whom regard the increasing Persian influence in the region with disdain.

Posted by: REggert [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 5, 2008 8:02 PM

Could well be. But the counterfactual cuts both ways. It could very well be that Iraq and Iran would both be nuclear powers and well on their way to using them on each other without the second Iraq war. And as much as current international affairs and expensive gas sucks, that would be worse.

Posted by: TheOneEyedMan [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 11, 2008 5:31 PM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?