Posted on 04/24/2003 12:01:49 PM PDT by Democratic_Machiavelli
I thought I was in the wrong century when I heard Sean Hannity babbling away on Fox News about who should get the contracts for Iraq's oil. "What happened to the idea that 'to the victor go the spoils'?" he asked. "Maybe if we get twenty years of royalties on Iraq's oil, it'll pay for the intervention that got them their freedom."
Yeah, right. The freedom to have us treat their oil as if it belonged to us.
There are only two ways to look on this vile proposal: Either we are establishing Iraq as a colony of a new imperial America, or we're demanding the oil revenues as reparations.
Either way would convert the cleanest war ever fought into something dirty after all.
"To the victor go the spoils" was a motto for a different kind of war. When it's a war of liberation, there are no spoils.
If this war was about anything, it was to make the Iraqi people the sovereign rulers of their own country. The only restriction we can or should place on their free government, once it's established, is that they can't have weapons of mass destruction or support terrorism.
Didn't we say, over and over, that the oil reserves of Iraq belong to the Iraqi people?
Not to us! Not to American companies!
Let French and German and Russian companies have the oil contracts. Indeed, the interim government should insist on honoring Saddam's contracts, with the stipulation that those contracts will be valid until a new, elected government comes to power. Then let the Iraqis decide whether they like the deals Saddam struck with the French and Germans and Russians.
Just as we should let the new Iraqi government decide whether to honor the debts Saddam ran up with other countries. Let it be the French and Russians and Germans demanding that the new democratic Iraq pony up and pay them Saddam's blood money.
Keep us out of it. All that matters to us is that a credible, legitimate, elected government take over the burden of leading, protecting, and rebuilding the unified nation of Iraq.
What just kills me about these suggestions of grabbing control of Iraq's resources is that they come from conservatives -- from people who claim to believe in the free market.
Well, as Gomer Pyle used to say, Surprise surprise surprise! Scratch some of these free marketeers, and you find the old imperialism just under the surface.
I say, let France and Germany and Russia be the imperialist exploiters -- they want the role so desperately, let them have it and face the consequences.
We did not enter this war for money, and shame on us if we profit from it financially in any way. It would cheapen the memory of those who died on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan -- and in the World Trade Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at ornery.org ...
We entered the war for our own security, which is a more basic good than money. This doesn't mean that during the inevitable reconstruction we should give the contracts to others. We're not that stupid!
He comes across as rather conservative, thats cool :)
OSC is not discussing rebuilding contracts in the section I posted. He's talking about contracts Iraq made with Russia, France, etc. before this war started. Later in the article, he recommends that the U.S. give the immediate rebuilding contracts to U.S. firms who have worked with the military. This is best for the Iraqis because it speeds up the rebuilding process.
Click on the link and read the rest of the article to see what I mean.
The new Iraqi government can state (as the Americans did after the Revolution) that they will not pay the debt since those contracts were not entered into by a government sanctioned by the Iraqi people. They aren't helpless in this.
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