Let's talk about Iraq

I am probably unique amongst the 43-posted-semi-political-bloggers in that this will be the first time I will mention Iraq.

One of the reasons I've taken this long is that I'm not actually against the Iraq war, which is something many people find shocking, but meh. BUT MEH!

This wannae always the case, in 2003 I was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war - indeed, I was even interviewed by the BBC whilst on my way to the pre-War anti-War protests, and I said to the reporter lady, "if anything I do here can save a single human live, then it'd be worth it". Search it on the BBC News website, it may still be there somewhere... But yeah, at some point after the (Iraqi) general election I started to change my mind. I started to seek information about pre-War Iraq, it turned out that Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was a genocidal bastard, and that he killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, but this campaign was stopped by the no-fly zones imposed by George Bush the Elder following the First Gulf War.

Ultimately I concluded that the Iraq War was a war intended to protect American hegemony. As, indeed, have many anti-War people. The difference is, I view this as a perfectly reasonable reason for war. Iraq, as it turns out, is (or rather, was), one of the most uniquely powerful states in the world. Iraq has one of the deciding votes on the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) Council, OPEC was designed to be a body that acted in tandem to secure its own power as the virtual monopoly of oil production, and so, its own OPEC Council was designed as a body to determine when, and how much oil, should be delivered to the oil-hungry nations of the West, (indeed, the disastorous economic slump of the 1970s was caused by the (primarily Arab) nations of the OPEC decided to withdraw oil supply to the West). Before 2003, Iraq was preparing to do something much more damaging, they were preparing a coalition within the OPEC nations to overthrough the US Dollar as the primary currency of exchange within the oil market: a brief explanation: perhaps some of you have heard the term 'petrodollar' - this is because according to global law (as set down by OPEC), oil can only be bought and sold in US Dollars, so, if any nation wants to buy any oil, it has to transfer its own currency into USD before it can do so, likewise, if a nation wants to sell oil, they can oil accept prices in USD.

This gives the USA a great deal of power, as every industrialised economy in the world has to buy up their currency if they want to maintain their oil-hungry wealth producers. Iraq, pre-2003, being a nation in contempt of US power saught to transfer the sole petro-currency from the USD to the new, and quite dynamic, Euro. The Euro is unique within post-WWII history as being the only currency to pose any economic challenge to the the USD.

America would face a complete economic collapse if OPEC (if convinced by Iraq et co.) had switched the global oil-exchanging currency from the USD to the Euro, as every nation in the world would suddenly seek to sell back their vast reserves of USD, instantly devaluing the US economy.

(Such a scenario would be, in the short term, a real advantage to the Eurozone nations, and, it is worth noting, that, aside from Spain (being dominated by a single, post-Fascist party at the time), all Eurozone nations decided to oppose the Iraq War.)

So ultimately, yes, Iraq is a war in defence of American hegemony, both military, yet, more importantly, economically - the post-War Iraqi government was one of the most vocal proponents of maintaining the USD as the international currency of oil exchange.

But, however, even after this acheivement, (which probably helped secure the dominance of Western economies into this new millenium), has lead to great loss of life, (and I won't deny for a second that it has). The question is, that had Saddam had had his way, and dethroned the USD, likely many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world would have faced starvation and destitution as their economies, so intricately pegged to America's, collapsed, and basics like food and clean water became utterly unaffordable.

In the West it is easy to see economic woes as an abstraction, as we, lucky as we are, are able to live in luxury through even the worst economic disaster. But for the nations that depend on us, this isn't the case.

Anyway... I gather I'm probably wandering to far into the abstract here. The facts on the ground are that Iraq seems to be facing a good year ahead of it in 2008, and honestly, I wish the best for the Iraqi people.