500 women and children buried alive by Islamic extremists

[Jack Rabbit]

63. It's time we realized that going to war vs. doing nothing is a false dichotomy

Is there something the US can do? That's the question we should be asking.

For anyone who says let's go to war and liberate Iraq, I will remind you that the US has already tried that and it didn't work out too well. In fact, the present situation was brought about by the blunders of the Frat Boy and the Big Dick. Leaving Saddam in power in 2002/03 wouldn't have been a pleasant choice, but it's looking better all the time.

Nothing significant has changed in the decision making apparatus in the US since Bush and Cheney seized power in 2000. They were there to do the bidding of the corporate oligarchy, and foreign policy makers are still serving the interests of the corporate oligarchy. The plain truth is that the US never had a chance of achieving its goals in Iraq for more than a short period. I'm not talking about the goals of democratizing Iraq; the idea idea that an administration that came to power through election fraud really wanted to democratize anything is pretty far fetched. No, I mean the other goal, the one that actually was achieved for a short time: putting Iraq's oil fields in the hands of western corporations. The Bushies liberated the Iraqi people, alright -- from their mineral rights.

Classic colonialism, although just as evil as the slave trade, worked much better than neocolonialism does. Under classic colonialism, a poor nation's natural resources are put in the hands of wealthy corporations headquartered in the parent country, the parent country's troops, which have already been used to violently put the poor country's natural resources in the hands of the parent country's corporations and to overthrow whatever native political authority existed, thus making the poor country a colony of the rich one, are put on permanent occupation duty to enforce the colonial social-economic order. Of course, there is a colonial administration headed by appointees of the government of the parent nation. Thus, classic colonialism features a nation saddled with foreign economic development, protected by foreign troops taking orders from a foreign government.

Neocolonialism works pretty much the same way, except the troops are native and so is the government, but they are still expected to protect the property rights of foreign developers, who are still collecting profits from the extraction, production and sale of the colony's natural resources. This is quite a bit less efficient than classic colonialism. For one thing, the native politicians running the government are of necessity a bunch of crooks. They may be natives, but they are expected to resolve problems in favor of the colonial interests, i.e., foreign corporations, just as were the foreign bureaucrats appointed to govern the colony by the government of the parent colonial power in the days of classic colonialism. Since these native governors must be chosen from not a broad segment of the population, but from a limited number of natives willing to sell their country down the river for cash in the form of "foreign aid" from which they take a piece of the action for themselves, the talent pool is also limited and thus the president of the country is often not only crooked but incompetent as well. That's when a military coup comes in handy. If you thought the colonial president was bad, wait until you see the junta in charge. He's not only corrupt and incompetent, but brutal as well. In order to keep the people in line and not setting up their government, kicking the foreign developers out and nationalizing natural resources, the junta will fire live rounds into a crowd now and then to remind them who's boss.

However, if the government has no support among the native people at all, then we have a power vacuum, and you know what they say: nature abhors a vacuum. The vacuum gets filled by whoever of whatever is available. In the worst cases, this may be a bunch of local warlords, each covering a small bit of territory. Take Somalia, for example. Or Gaza. Or China in the early 1920s.

The present chaos in Iraq is a result of not allowing the people to decide for themselves who shall govern them, but instead insisting on a government that is compliant with the desires and needs of another country's elite. I rather doubt that the Islamic State radicals will be able to enforce their will long before their brutality erodes their support. That may be the opportunity for which the US war party is waiting. And that history will repeat itself until the US and its oligarchs finally learn that they're part of the problem and can be no part of any positive solution.