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March
28, 2003 11:45 a.m.
The
Curse of Oil
…and
what it means for Iraqi democracy.
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Judis has written a terrific cover
story for the New Republic on how oil wealth can be too much
of a good thing for a country. (The link's only good for digital subscribers.)
He argues that the presence of large amounts of oil gives the state too
many resources. The state can extract those resources from the ground
rather than depend on the enterprise of the people (in which case the
people would have a certain degree of leverage over the state). It can
use those resources to buy clients, to co-opt potential opponents, and
generally to prevent the emergence of an independent civil society. The
existence of such a civil society, Judis further claims, is a precondition
of democracy. Thus, he concludes, a democratic Iraq is unlikely to develop.
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It also seems to
be true that even where an oil-heavy economy has co-existed with some
form of democracy, the oil has weakened the democracy. Consider the example
of Venezuela (to go beyond Judis's article): There oil appears to have
encouraged an illiberal politics based on the economics of fantasy.
Judis writes: "Given
the political history of oil states, America's primary objective should
not be to immediately hold nominal elections but to gradually create a
social and economic infrastructure that can sustain elected governments
over the coming decades." In principle, I agree entirely. But there
will be substantial pressure for immediate elections, and that pressure
will, I suspect, be impossible to resist. Judis's argument is a bit like
saying that Iraq would benefit from a few years of mild and liberal authoritarianism.
This is undoubtedly true. But there are limits to Americans' capacity
to be good old-fashioned imperialists, whatever the theoretical merits
of their playing the role.
Similarly, there
is a case — following the logic of Judis's article — for keeping
Iraq's oil in the private sector. We have said many times that the oil
belongs to the Iraqi people; this implicit pledge could be made good by
distributing shares in oil companies to all Iraqis. But we are not going
to place ourselves in any position to insist on this arrangement.
But while Judis's
article does not make it clearer what to do in postwar Iraq, it does at
least help us dispel some conceptual fog. There has been a certain willful
obtuseness to discussions of Iraq's oil. I am referring not merely, or
even primarily, to the antiwar protesters' glib accusation that America
has gone to war out of greed for it. Supporters of the war (and opponents
of political paranoia, regardless of their position on the war) have been
so eager to discredit that accusation that they have claimed that the
war has nothing to do with oil.
And that's not true.
We wouldn't have worried so much about the possibility that the Iraqi
regime would invade (or use nuclear weapons to blackmail) its neighbors
if the neighborhood were not geopolitically important. And everyone knows
the principal reason that it is important. It is a vulgar error to suppose
that either the first or the second Gulf war concerned the price of oil;
but these wars have very much concerned the power of oil.
The power is, however,
tied to the price. We have all heard that we are "too dependent on
Mideast oil." Actually, we are too dependent on Mideast oil sold
at state-cartel prices. The tragedy of the Mideast is that it is dominated
by totalitarian and other illiberal regimes that are sustained by oil
sold at state-cartel prices. Anything that reduces those regimes' revenue
reduces their power — and their ability to fund evil. Whether or
not we declare it to be such, one of our war aims should be a freer international
market in energy. In contrast to an immediately liberal, democratic Iraq,
that is an outcome to this war that stands a fair chance of happening.
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