Arabica Robusta's List: resource curse?

• It was a moment of remarkable contradictions.  Obama managed, for example, to warn against “mission creep” even as he was laying out what could only be described as mission creep.  Earlier that week, he had notified Congress that 275 troops would be sent to Iraq, largely to defend the vast U.S. embassy in Baghdad, once an almost three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar symbol of imperial hubris, now a white elephant of the first order.  A hundred more military personnel were to be moved into the region for backup.
• In tandem with the military moves, the president and his national security team, perhaps reflecting through a glass darkly the “democracy agenda” of the Bush era, also seemed to have dipped their fingers in purple ink.  They were reportedly pressuring Iraqi politicians to dump Prime Minister Maliki and appoint a “unity” government to fight the war they want.  (Adding to the farcical nature of the moment, one name raised for Maliki’s position was Ahmed Chalabi, once the darling of Bush-era officials and their choice for that same post.)
• There is, however, no way that an American intervention won’t be viewed as a move to back the Shia side in an incipient set of civil wars, as even retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus warned last week.
• Fortunately, sociologist Michael Schwartz, an old-time TomDispatch regular, is back after a long absence to remind us of The One Fact in Iraq, the one we should never forget. Tom
• Under the seething ocean of Sunni discontent lies a factor that is being ignored. The insurgents are not only in a struggle against what they see as oppression by a largely Shiite government in Baghdad and its security forces, but also over who will control and benefit from what Maliki -- speaking for most of his constituents -- told the Wall Street Journal is Iraq’s “national patrimony.”
• When, in 2009, the Obama administration first began withdrawing U.S. combat troops, Iraqis everywhere -- but especially in Sunni areas -- faced up to 60% unemployment, sporadic electrical service, poisoned water systems, episodic education, a dysfunctional medical system, and a lack of viable public or private transportation. Few Westerners remember that, in 2010, Maliki based his election campaign on a promise to remedy these problems by -- that figure again -- increasing oil production to six million barrels per day.
• none of this oil wealth trickled down to the grassroots, especially in Sunni areas of the country where signs of reconstruction, economic development, restored services, or jobs were hard to discern. Instead, the vast new revenues disappeared into the recesses of a government ranked by Transparency International as the seventh most corrupt on the planet.
• In a rare moment of ironic insight, Time magazine concluded its coverage of the F-16 purchase with this comment: “The good news is the deal will likely keep Lockheed’s F-16 plant in Fort Worth running perhaps a year longer. The bad news is that only 70% of Iraqis have access to clean water, and only 25% have clean sanitation.”
• With conditions worsening, Sunni communities only became more insistent, supplementing their petitions and demonstrations with sit-ins at government offices, road blockades, and Tahrir Square-type occupations of public spaces. Maliki’s responses also escalated to arresting the political messengers, dispersing demonstrations, and, in a key moment in 2013, “killing dozens” of protestors when his “security forces opened fire on a Sunni protest camp.” This repression and the continued frustration of local demands helped regenerate the insurgencies that had been the backbone of the Sunni resistance during the American occupation. Once lethal violence began to be applied by government forces, guerrilla attacks became common in the areas north and west of Baghdad that the U.S. occupiers had labeled “the Sunni triangle.”

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• In these circumstances, what is to be done? First, countries outside the United States need to recognize how dysfunctional the neoliberalized world economy has been made, and to decide which assumptions underlying the neoliberal model must be discarded. Its preferred tax and financial policies favor finance over industry and, hence, financial maneuvering and asset-price inflation over tangible capital formation. Its anti-labor austerity policies and un-taxing of real estate, stocks and bonds divert resources away from growth and rising living standards.

  • Two questions. Who is "countries"? And two, how does such recognition take place? The elite that head many countries outside of the United States went to the same schools and now go to the same meetings as those inside the United States.

• Two questions. Who is "countries"? And two, how does their recognition of U.S. disfunction take place? The elite that head many countries outside of the United States went to the same schools and now go to the same meetings as those inside the United States. - Arabica Robusta on 2008-12-16