Minor detail. There is a very big difference between shutting off an inflow of oil than an outflow of oil, and they are in very different leagues. Thus, apparently a substantial amount of North Korea's oil is now being supplied by China through a few pipelines. It is very easy to shut them off, with devastating effects on the North Korean economy, although I fully agree that the ruling elite there does not feel those effects.
Trying to shut off an export flow is much harder, as in the case of Iraq. Certainly it can be drastically reduced, and it was in the case of Iraq. However, although reducing an outflow of oil can certainly hurt by reducing forex earnings, it has nowhere near the effect that shutting off an inflow does to an oil-import dependent country. Barkley Rosser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 10:20 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Wolfowitz Speaks Plainly: Oil Was The Prime Motivation (fwd)
>
> On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
> > Am I the only one who thinks this is being unfair to Wolfowitz? The way
> > I read it, he's saying North Korea, having no oil, will collapse of its
> > own weight, whereas Saddam's regime could have lived off its oil
> > forever, thus necessitating an invasion.
>
> I think you are completely right about the misconstrual of his words, and
> that what you grasped immediately, the transcript and retraction have
> since proven.
>
> But now that his argument has been understood correctly, there are still
> two enormous problems with it, one logical and factual, and the other
> moral.
>
> The logical and factual problem is that oil is the easiest export in the
> world to interdict. The entire Iraqi sanctions system was built on this
> fact. Every previous sanction system was notorious for its porousness.
> This one was unique for its effectiveness. Pipelines and tankers are not
> just easy to find, they are impossible to miss. Drugs and weapons, on the
> other hand, North Korea's main exports, have been the mainstays of
> smuggling since smuggling was invented.
>
> Which brings us to the moral reason. We could easily have turned off
> Iraq's oil exports completely. That's exactly what we did for the first
> two years. The reason we didn't keep it up was because threatened to
> cause mass starvation on a genocidal scale. Not that that bothered us,
> but it bothered other countries. So we were slowly forced to allow in an
> Oil For Food Program that rose from $1.6 billion to $5.5 billion in
> receipts annually. We essentially compromised. Rather than admitting the
> total sanctions idea had been tried and failed because it was flawed in
> its conception, we said let's try a slightly less extreme regime for a
> longer period and see if that works. I.e., let's kill a million Iraqis
> over a 10 year period and see if that works. And we ended up with the
> worst of both worlds. It outraged the rest of the world and it didn't
> work. And now, thanks to a decade-long a news blackout in the US and the
> moral blindness it makes possible, we can reap the worst of a third world:
> we'll can do it again thinking it was a great idea.
>
> Wolfowitz's statement is the intellectual and moral equivalent of saying
> we could have won Vietnam if only we had bombed the dikes. And then
> declaring that's what we're going to do this time.
>
> Furthermore, the experience of Iraq showed that such means don't work even
> when they were used at full strength, which they were for the first two
> years. There are at least three reasons for this. First, regime members
> are the last to be hurt by such sanctions. Secondly, it creates an
> external scapegoat for all shortages. (Iraqis blamed Saddam for a lot of
> things, but they didn't blame him for the sanctions.) And thirdly,
> people who are scrambling to survive don't rebel effectively. Even when
> they are aided from the outside. Again, Iraqi is a great example of a
> coup-free and uprising-free zone during this period despite our best
> efforts to foster them. And by what other means are economic
> sanctions supposed to bring down a regime?
>
> I suppose it would be panty-waisted to mention that this method of regime
> change is banned by the Geneva convention. Such a sanctions regime
> perfectly regime fits one of the definitions of what we quaintly used to
> call a war crime. It purposefully aims to inflict suffering on innnocent
> civilians in order to accomplish a political goal. Why, that almost
> sounds like terrorism. Except terrorism only does it retail.
>
> So what Wolfowitz is saying is that there are only two choices: war; and
> an alternative that is both ineffective and genocidal. And that the the
> latter is better.
>
> I don't know which part of that argument is more appalling.
>
> Beginner that I am, I don't see what's wrong with the pledge not to
> invade, economic aid, and the progressive opening of north-south contacts.
> Strangely, it seems to me that would lower the chance of war and improve
> the well-being of the people in the north. But clearly I haven't been
> initated into the higher wisdom. All I can say is it must be really deep.
> Because from the outside, it looks stupid and evil.
>
> The difference between Iraq and North Korea is not that oil is harder to
> indict. It's that people dying in North Korea aren't laid at our doorstep
> because we didn't invade 12 years ago.
>
> Michael
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