Time-wasting speculation

A little research I was doing yesterday brought me across some stuff on Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and it made me think about how different things could have been…

I have in the past expressed the opinion that the US should have taken the gloves off and gone after the real wellspring of (Wahabbi) terrorism. That’s right, the Kingdom of Saud, not Baathist Iraq.

What if, for example someone had done that for us back in 1990/1? At the time it looked like a bad idea, all that oil under the control of one nasty dictator. I’ll engage in a bit of blatant hindsight to show how that might have been the lesser of at least two evils.

Say Saddam Hussein had rolled right over the border into Saudi Arabia before G.H. Bush had lifted the bulk of the US Army into that sandy corner of arrested development; what’s the worst that would happen?

Well, the Saudi family would be dispossessed, all 25,000 of them. Crying shame really, but the effects on the world could be a lot more far-ranging than a few thousand dispossessed princelings. I suspect that Saddam’s secret police would sweep trough the place and uproot anything they thought might be a threat. This would naturally include any fundamentalist religious groups that could be a base of resistance to the Baathist New Order.

The financial underpinning of all those Wahabbi/Salafist madrassas would be removed, with a corresponding drop in the number of young men brainwashed into that particular cult of death. Osama bin-Laden would likely be strapped for cash, and al-Qaeda would be on a bit of a shoestring. I doubt it would stop them, but they wouldn’t have the resources they did as of 9/11/2001, and just maybe their attention would have been elsewhere…

As for that oil that we (presently) need so badly? Well, I’m sure that Saddam could be convinced to sell it to us, and a few US carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf could help those negotiations. Saddam could no more hold (now non-Saudi) Arabia against the Americans than he held Kuwait. From another angle, those CTFs could be there to keep the Iranians from getting any ideas after we cut a deal with “Greater Iraq”.

Yes, human rights would still be in the toilet in the Middle East, but how is that different from now? We would have removed the supposed root of bin-Laden’s hatred of the US by not having any US troops in the cradle of Islam, and avoided Operation Iraqi Freedom/Enduring Freedom (maybe). Iran could be contained (something we need to do now) and the US wouldn’t be bankrupting itself in major military operations.

At this point we have to take a good hard look at our interests. Sure, concentrating that large a proportion of the world’s proven oil reserves in the hands of one man wouldn’t be the best thing ever. But the spread of secularism, not democracy would have been accomplished, and I argue that this is much more in the West’s long-term interests in that region than democracy is.

Democracy is for countries that have fought and bled specifically for it, and it can’t be imposed on anyone who hasn’t. One of these days we’re going to have to get off our high horse and accept that there are things that liberalism can’t do to people who really don’t want it. I’m not holding my breath for that day.