Great Game

by digby

Jim Henley and Kevin Drum outline how the occupation will likely play out.

Henley:

Most civil wars eventually end, so the Beltway Consensus intends to ride the Iraqi one out. Assuming it concludes, whoever’s in charge can declare victory, as if the whole point of invading Iraq was to eventually “end” the civil war that would break out as a result of the invasion…Which is to say, if we end up with a basing agreement after an eventual armistice, the real purpose of the war will have been served.

Drum adds:

while it’s true that all civil wars end eventually, “eventually” can be a very long time. If we’re lucky, this one will end when the ethnic cleansing is finished and every region in the country and every neighborhood in Baghdad is fully segregated. That might only take a couple more years. If we’re unlucky, the war will continue until the Sunni minority is obliterated and one of the Shiite factions has gotten a firm upper hand. That might take more like five or ten years.

The latter is more likely, but in any case the final resolution hardly depends on the U.S. presence. The Iraqis are going to do whatever the Iraqis are going to do. As Jim says, the only thing we get out of staying — aside from the certainty of increased instability and at least a decent chance of a wider regional war — is the possibility of owning two or three gigantic bases once the fighting stops.

Why permanent bases? I think the great sage and oracle Ann Coulter said it best:

“Liberals are always talking about why we shouldn’t go to war for oil, but why not go to war for oil? We need oil.”

That’s pretty much what we did and deep down we all know it. The usual dirty hippy conspiracy theories. Sure, there were other reasons. All the grown-ups had at least a few. Some may not have acknowledged this one, even in their own minds. But this was the fundamental reason, beyond “suck on this,” beyond Osama, certainly beyond “spreadin’ Demahcracy.” We know for a fact that if Iraq had been Liberia or Rwanda or Darfur or even Pakistan we wouldn’t have interfered. There are Saddams and Taylors and Liberias all over the world.

The world is running out of oil and the US government wanted to insure that they had a permanent beachhead in the biggest oil rich region in the world. (And what a good idea it was to turn it into an anarchic free fire zone in the process.) But, as Henley and Drum both point out, it will probably end eventually.

I wonder what would have happened if they’d spent the trillion or two (by the time it’s all done) on alternative energy instead.?

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