The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I have a bad feeling about where we are headed with this Iraq business.

I can subscribe to the basic idea that it is very bad for the welfare of the world for Mr. Saddam Hussein to possess nuclear bombs and bio-bombs, and that, as a last resort, someone really ought to disarm him (meaning by default the United States military, since the rest of the civilized world doesn't really want to get involved).

Here's what concerns me. Saddam may be a villain and he may be a fool, but he is capable of laying a trap for the US, and I believe he is doing it.

He is putting on a show of being as accommodating as possible to the UN arms inspection team. As far as the public knows, the UN inspectors have not turned up any significant evidence yet. It's possible that their findings are impeccably secure, but I'm skeptical. I believe that if they had uncovered something really egregious by this time the world would have found out about it. So my provisional conclusion is that they have not, in fact, discovered any "smoking gun" evidence yet. And I'm not sure that they ever will.

That shouldn't mean Saddam doesn't possess the weapons. It may just mean that he did an excellent job of moving them and hiding them. Well, shit, how hard would it be to conceal eleven cubic feet of bio-weaponry in a country the size of California? When you've got months, years, to prepare, and all the earth-moving and construction equipment necessary to do a crackerjack job.

It seems to me that the US is determined to go into Iraq whether or not the UN inspectors find anything. (And I reiterate that this might be necessary.)

Meanwhile, Saddam will have set up the situation perfectly so that, to the rest of the world, he looks like an innocent victim being bullied by the Great Satan. I don't have any doubt that this story will appeal wildly to many in the broad Islamic world, and that they will go absolutely apeshit when the US enters Iraq. I believe they will topple regimes (Saudi Arabia, Kuiwait), they will burn down our embassies, they will attempt to blow things up all over the world (and, of course, in the US), that the oil exporting nations will embargo the West, and, in short, that we will find ourselves in the midst of Jihad-o-rama. I believe that Saddam wants to go out as the Great Defender of Islam (whatever his qualifications or prior standing), and that the scores of millions of Jihadistas in this world are ready to follow anybody who stands up to the "Crusaders.".

Meanwhile, I am perhaps more persuaded now than before that the secondary US agenda of securing Iraqi oil reserves is at least as important strategically to the Bush administration as the weapons of mass destruction issue. And I will repeat, perhaps tendentiously, that I don't think it will be possible for us to secure this Iraqi oil infrastructure. As soon as hostilities begin, Saddam will blow up his oil rigs, his piplines, and all the other equipment necessary to extract and transport the oil there. And I do not believe that we would necessarily be able to rebuild that equipment or defend it there over the long haul. Even if we were to successfully occupy Baghdad and install a pliable government there, I don't believe we could secure the vast hinterlands of the nation. There are too many hostile peoples at every compass point.

All this indicates to me that we may very shortly be plunged into a sudden long-term oil crisis. The arrangements that we have depended on for twenty years are on the brink of unraveling, and I doubt that they can be stitched back together again. If we start a war with Iraq, it'll be a whole new world. There may be no way around it.