Why the Iraqis don't "step up"

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tried gamely this morning to explain why U.S. troops should continue to patrol the streets of Iraq this summer while the Iraqi government goes on vacation.

Why, CBS News' Bob Schieffer wanted to know, with a surge of U.S. troops in place to give the Iraqi government an opportunity to work on political reconciliation, was the Iraqi parliament planning to go on vacation for the entire month of August?

"They're not," Hadley answered.

Then he tried to explain that while the Iraqi Council of Representatives, the parliament, was taking a break from the summer heat, the hard work of political reconciliation would be taking place from the "bottom up."

Perhaps this would be a good time to offer an explanation, again, for why the Iraqis have not "stepped up" to take control of security and government matters in the way the Bush administration anticipated and hoped they would.

The source of all the problems in Iraq--political, military and economic--is this: the government owns the oil, the oil industry, and all the major industries of the country.

The people who control the government control all the wealth of the country and all the jobs.

The only way an individual can survive in an economic system like that is to show unwavering loyalty to the leader of the group that will provide him with money and employment once the group gets enough power to tap into the stream of government money.

A group that is out of power can expect to starve to death. One way to avoid that outcome is to create violence and havoc and then offer to calm down in exchange for part of that stream of government money.

Government ownership of the economy is not a benevolent system of fairness, equity, and help for those in need. It is a recipe for an endless bloody fight for control of the government.

As an added bonus, there can be an endless bloody fight within each group for the leadership job. It's a pretty good life when you're the guy who hands out all the jobs and all the money, even if you do have to sleep in a different bed every night.

Whether the groups are divided along religious, ethnic, or political lines is not important to understanding why the violence is happening. The violence is caused by an economic system that rewards people not for innovation or hard work, but for blind loyalty and bloody revenge.

Only two things can stop the violence, and we overthrew and hanged one of them.

The other one is free-market capitalism.

We should see if we can persuade the Iraqis to try that.

If the state-owned enterprises in Iraq were fully privatized, Iraqis would be able to work for an array of private companies instead of only for the government. They would be able to buy or earn shares of their country's oil industry. Some people would get rich. Some people would get by. Some people would need help. But every Iraqi would have an independent path to economic survival, and it would no longer be necessary for them to line up with a cleric or a strongman who is trying to take control of the government.

It's a good thing Iraq's parliament has not passed that proposed oil law, because all it would do is entrench the conditions that are causing the violence in the first place. It would give a generous share of Iraq's oil revenue to the private, foreign oil companies that agree to come into the country to rebuild and run the industry, and the rest of the money would still belong to the Iraqi government. Individual Iraqis would not be able to buy shares of their state oil company. They would have to rely on the hand-outs from the Shiite, Kurd and Sunni leaders who would have the legal right to decide which of their supporters get how much of the money.

Think that might cause any hard feelings? Don King should be on a plane right now to try and get a piece of this.

The sad errors of the Iraq policy are about to be repeated in the Palestinian territories, where U.S. leaders speak of "empowering Mahmoud Abbas to provide services," in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who appeared on CNN's "The Situation Room" last week. The thinking seems to be that if the international community funnels vast amounts of cash to the least murderous Palestinian leader, he will hand it out in a way that will make the people of the Palestinian territories content and happy.

In reality, and in history, as long as the government controls all the wealth, there will exist a perfectly rational reason for an armed overthrow of the government. And then another one. And then another one.

In the United States, where the government receives taxes and lease payments from the oil industry but does not own it, nobody is blowing up pipelines no matter how angry they get at the Bush administration. Blowing up pipelines will not starve the Bush administration of revenue or help the opposition take the White House. And if your employer tells you to go and blow up a pipeline, you can call the authorities, because the authorities are not part of the same gang as your employer. And then you can go and find another job, because your employer is not the only employer in the country.

That's why capitalism is more peaceful than state-owned enterprise.

That's why the U.S. Constitution protects life, liberty and property. Private property is the foundation of freedom. You are not free if you are forced to depend on the government for economic survival.

The Iraqi people are not free.

And nothing but savage repression or free-market capitalism will make them peaceful.


Copyright 2007

Editor's note: You might be interested to read "The Motive for War: How to End the Violence in Iraq," as well as the 2004 essay, "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property." You might also be interested in the 2005 post, "Why the Iraq policy isn't working," and the 2006 post, "Playing chess in a burning building."



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