When the United States forms its foreign policy, we hope that we frame it around various just causes: freedom, human rights and economic opportunity. Our adventure in Iraq is currently framed around the cause of freeing a people from an autocratic regime.
This is undeniably a just goal. But it does not come freely. Our political leaders would have us believe that reduced taxes, a prosperous economy, and a clean, surgical war are all possible at the same time. What nonsense.
The $1 billion that we spend weekly to support our military presence in Iraq is a theft from the poorest in our country and throughout the rest of the world. Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator. This point is not seriously disputed by anyone with a respectable amount of common sense. Freedom from such rulers is a basic human right. This is the freedom from fear that President Roosevelt spoke of half a century ago. However, freedom from hunger and disease are more basic rights. The mob at the gates that threatens the world's stability is not the specter of rogue regimes or terrorism but rather AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and unclean drinking water. When we budget half a trillion dollars to support a vast military yet fail to fulfill our financial promises to fight the world's diseases we are committing a theft in fulfillment of President Eisenhower's caution: Each F-16 launched signifies, in the final analysis, a theft from those that suffer from the world's curable diseases.
President Bush defined the essence of civilization as the duty of the strong to protect the weak. But we do not need to offer this protection at the point of a gun or the tip of a cruise missile. Instead of sending soldiers to Iraq we should be sending doctors to rural India and engineers to Africa. Removing Saddam was a just cause but it came at the expense of worthier ones.
If our political leadership saw the alleviation of human suffering as its calling, Iraq would not be our first stop. This justification only became popular among the administration after we realized how little of an international threat Saddam was. Now our leadership trumpets the spread of freedom and the preservation of human life as its crowning achievement. But this line of reasoning collapses when we realize just how many millions starve and how many millions die from diseases that have been obliterated from this country for a century.
Therefore, we come to the true motivation for invading Iraq: it suits our geopolitical position. We are not in Iraq because of altruistic impulses.
A compliant and malleable state in the Middle East provides us with a steady energy supply, freedom from OPEC and a secure base for our soldiers. This is not the stuff of conspiracy theories. Just as we supported Iraq against Iran, just as we supported Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende and just as we supported the mujaheddin against the Soviet Union, this is modern day realpolitik. Make no mistake. We are in Iraq to serve ourselves. The bases we build there are not for the short term. For some, this scenario is fine. The deaths of thousands mean little to some if gasoline is cheap and our economy booms. Grand larceny from the weakest on the globe means little to some if oil flows unimpeded into this country. Ignoring the globe's most serious problems means little to some if our national interest is served in the short term. What a mockery of justice.
