Thoughts on the war in Iraq, submitted by Tom Duncanson, Ph.D.

I've given what feels like hours every day, for at least eight
months, wracked in agony over this war hysteria, and I do not think it is
the oil. The Bush rationale is so stupendously unconvincing, I have even
heard war backers smugly say it is the oil. This not so secret unstated
motive has that much obviousness about it.

But I do not think Bush and his advisors are thinking and talking about
oil when they speak confidentially; and I do not think they are not
saying but really thinking about oil even within themselves, though Bush
and Cheney, as oil people, know how both war and no war present
opportunities for them to profit.

This is the thing: they can't just seize oil for a nation or a company.
Rights of property are the closest thing the Bush team has to true
religion, and supply and demand is their notion of a scientific law. Oil
does and will exist for a long time as a commodity on a market. Some
Iraqi oil is on the market now, remunerated at UN sanction prices that
have a relationship to prevailing market prices. More Iraqi oil on the
market brings down oil prices. (Go back to the famous April Glaspie
meeting with Saddam in July 1990-- she may have told him her bosses in
Washington privately prefer higher oil prices.) Iraqi withdrawal from
the oil market would, all other things being equal, raise prices. More
Iraqi oil exploration and development presents certain opportunities--
but postponing that development has rewards too. (Remember, Cheney's
Halliburton had a $73 million equipment and development contract with
Saddam from 1997-2000.) Bush and the oil industry count on Iraqis
behaving, as they always have, with relative economic rationality, and
know that whether or not Iraq's oil is burned in USAmerican cars, it is
still part and parcel of one global oil market / price system. Nowhere
in any of this is there anything like a rationale for the US to saddle
itself with a war, occupation, and the redevelopment of Iraq. Saddam in
power, living under UN sanctions, is an economic opportunity as plausible
as any other.

So here is what I think drives Bush, all amenable to explication in
Beckerian terms: his father's [tarnished] reputation, the capitalist
project to shift away all risks, and the American juvenilia of
symmetrical justice.

(1) The election of 1992 was absolutely humiliating to the Bushes. Hell,
having to wait their turn behind Reagan was humiliating to the Bushes.
Reagan, Clinton, these are their inferiors. That Old Bush could lose in
'92 after the historical triumph of the crumbling of the iron curtain and
the extraordinary global consensus (many of us weren't a part of that
consensus, were we?) and "easy" "victory" of the first Gulf War--
was shameful to the Bush team. The election of 2000 was to be not just a
political win, but a return to the true and larger pattern that would
define our historical epoch. The old man would be vindicated in the
son's performance where nothing would be left to chance and once and for
all they would set in place that "vision thing." Getting Iraq right, by
combat, is the completion of the unfinished project of the father. That
this new war might inadvertently cast blame on the father, is one of the
hundreds of ambivalences suppressed in the current American public
discourse. It is pretty straightforward for the Bushes: to go down in
history as the ones who saved the nation in times of great peril

(2) 11 September represents an unacceptable risk for the average American
and the American leadership class. Hence, the insane talk of Bush in the
weeks subsequent 9-11-01: that terrorists existed in over one hundred
nations, that we would root them all out by force, that if you weren't
with us you were against us, that our secret agents would be acting on
our behalf all over the world and we would never know and that sometimes
they would succeed and sometimes they would fail and we would never know,
that this would be operation INFINITE justice. And the USA Patriot Act.
There had been political violence on US soil before, but this was a
regular freak out. Here in the US we expect all the costs, all the
risks, of globalization to be shifted away from us. We expropriate the
resources, we out-source the unpleasant labor, we export the pollution,
and we assign to others the suppression or remediation of the cultural
dislocations. We expect to grease this system with armaments, high
technology communications, nuclear energy, etc.-- with no effect
whatsoever on ourselves. One tiny bit of this shifted risk shifted back.
Our leaders have gladly volunteered to do everything in their power, to
take on all of the necessary powers (Bourne: war is the health of the
state), to make the risks truly uni-directional and to re-disguise that
this is what is taking place. It is an awesome immortality project.

(3) Here in the university city of Champaign-Urbana, good radicals have
been out picketing against the inevitable war since the week after
9-11-01. We all knew that some people were going to be "paid back" 10 or
100 or 1000 fold for those towers coming down. You basically don't know
one thing about America, and need to hand in your social scientist badge,
if you ever doubted that this would be the outcome. George Bush and,
apparently, over half of all USAmericans think justice means to hit back.
If the hitting is clumsy, inaccurate, hurts the hitter-- too bad. Those
who need hit are enemies and need to be suspicioulsy watched and hit
again. If this is hopelessly childish, we are children and have no
intention of listening to your sermon.

So, no, I don't think it is the oil. It is vanity, perpetuity, and
howling vengeance. And it is not uniquely American, though the
particulars are all American. Any people would do it about the same way,
if they could.

Tom Duncanson

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