Okay, okay. Some of you need to calm down. Of course the attacks on 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq. But they were a backdrop, along with those nonexistent WMDs, for the invasion. So there is that nexus.
And O’Sullivan, now the Jeane Kirkpatrick professor of international affairs at Harvard, even finds some heretofore overlooked benefits from the fiasco. She writes that Iraq’s shaky progress toward establishing democracy may serve, despite obvious differences, as an example for other nations in the region now making transitions from decades of authoritarian rule and may “stabilize the region.”
Okay. Maybe that’s an overly large stretch. But, hey, it’s a lot better than Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld’s bizarrely comparing the insurgency in Iraq to the “werewolves” in Germany, the Nazi operation to harass advancing Allied troops.
O’Sullivan also posits that shared Iraq and U.S. experiences during the war created some bonding so that an “ongoing relationship” and cooperation are possible. The number of troops there “should come out of negotiations with the Iraqis,” she writes, “not as a fiat from Washington based on domestic politics.” We thought Washington has always reserved the right to decide these things.
But the “ most compelling” reason to keep an “ongoing U.S. military presence” in Iraq, O’Sullivan argues, is “the role that Iraq may play in averting a global energy crisis in the coming years,” by boosting its oil production.
The worldwide recession eased oil prices recently, she writes, but future global supply and demand trends look pretty grim. Iraq’s oil is critical. “Iraq is one of a very small number of countries that could bring oil online fast enough to help meet this growing demand at a reasonable price,” she writes.
Industry and international experts expect Iraqi oil production to nearly double in the next decade from 2.5 million barrels a day to almost 5 million barrels, she notes. So “if lessons from Iraq’s experience help stabilize the region” and Iraq remains “willing to cooperate with the United States publicly and privately” and its oil “help[s] the world avoid another energy crisis,” then “some may recalculate the strategic ledger on the U.S. intervention in Iraq.”
So Operation Iraqi Freedom was really about the oil after all? Who knew?
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