Iraq's Economy is Booming

[Sethomas]

I bring this up every few months, but I've had two of my more intelligent conservative acquaintances both explain the war on Iraq as the beginning of a total Coca-Colonization of the Middle East. I didn't want to argue with one because it would have been awkward, but I told the other than it would either fail and bankrupt the US, or it would work for a few years, collapse, and still bankrupt the US.

Hey college kids, remember back in 2003 when there was that official day of class walk-outs? Since I didn't even have a class that hour out of which to walk, I went and listened to some very good speakers. It kind of saddens me that I wasn't on the boards at that interval, because I should have posted everything that was said at the protest. Although she wasn't the most high-profile speaker, one of them was an Anglo-Saxon student who had spent a few years living in the heavily-sanctioned Iraq of Saddam. Her testimony had several points, and having written none of it down and drank much in the past four years, I don't remember it all. However, she was very insistent that the Iraqis comprise a remarkably frugal and productive culture. In an odd contrast to the reports of stockpiles of foreign aid material being found in abandoned warehouses, she spoke very highly of their ability to distribute humanitarian aid to one another. Stockpiles or not, she said that the only problem with people being left out was the post bello (of 1991) destruction of roads and such.

What this tells me, though, is that a booming economy in Iraq is absolutely nothing of which we can pat ourselves on the backs. You can't piss in someone's water for twelve years, then damn their rivers and blow up their wells, and then claim the moral high ground after selling them a bottle of Perrier.

Since I rarely post in Iraq topics, I'll just say now that I was heavily exposed to the Conservative Intelligentsia in their defense of attacking Iraq back when the whole thing was all speculation. I had a class taught personally by Jean Bethke-Elshtain, for fuck's sake. It was surreal for such convoluted logic to be used by such brilliant people, not because of their outright duplicity (claiming it was for the Iraqi's when it obviously wasn't) but because of the outright fiscal impossibility of the whole larger imperative behind Iraq.