Good Fence and Good Neighbors

Good Fences and Good Neighbors…

It now appears the United States military is recognizing that the problems between Shiites and Sunnis stem from their close proximity to each other. In Azamiyah, a minority Sunni community surrounded on all sides by Shiite neighborhoods, the United States is constructing a three mile long barrier that will be as high as twelve feet in some areas. The community will be gated and Iraqi soldiers will police the traffic in and out of Azamiyah.

Apparently, the United States military is recognizing that the only way to keep groups united only by their mutual hatred from constantly being at each other's throats is to separate them altogether. It's a wonderful idea that may well bring on a sensible Iraq policy in which the existing country of Iraq is partitioned into three separate countries, with the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south while the Sunni take up their position in the eastern part of Iraq.

The problem with Iraq is that it is one country comprised of three distinct groups, each diametrically opposed to the other. Each of these groups wants autonomy to a degree and isn't receiving anything other than a forced democracy due to the experimental whims of the Western powers that currently occupy Iraq. Iraq's present democracy is a farce…for the people of Iraq do not choose their own destiny or the direction of their country. They get a slate of candidates and options vetted by the United States and its allies. If the Iraqi people were to vote on whether or not to begin the process of dividing the country, you can bet your last dollar that they would vote to split the country up along ethnic and religious lines.

However, the United States has no interest in seeing such an arrangement come to fruition. Why deal with three countries and their respective leaders over logistical and oil issues when you can deal with one country? True democracy in Iraq would complicate our mission in Iraq, which consists of getting nice fat contracts for American companies like Kellogg, Brown, and Root. In the meantime, American energy companies and interests have free and unfettered access to develop and manage Iraqi oilfields while upholding a cartel of oil producing countries known as OPEC…ensuring high prices for oil that are determined less by free market forces such as supply and demand and more by production controls and quotas set by the member countries of OPEC.

What would happen if Iraq were to break with OPEC and pursue its own interests? In the short term, Iraq could produce and sell as much oil as it desired. In the long term, a precedent would be set that decreed that every oil producing nation was in competition to produce the best product at the lowest possible price. Prices would likely go down. American petroleum companies would be faced with something other than record profits derived from the production quotas and corresponding high prices of desert monarchs.
American politicians and corporate leaders do a fine job of talking up free market economics while simultaneously engaging in an energy policy that defies notion of a free market altogether. Make no mistake about it; OPEC is in the price fixing business. However, so are the very energy companies that call America home. Good fences make good neighbors…and the barrier that most needs to be erected is one that would encourage member nations of OPEC to break from the quotas and produce oil according to demand rather than the overall desire of OPEC to fix the price of oil.

While Iraq desperately needs a new arrangement that would separate its warring religious and ethnic factions, the world needs an energy policy that would break OPEC apart once and for all. If and when OPEC ever is broken apart, the insidious power Islamic monarchies and governments possess to support terrorism will be greatly reduced. The world will be a safer place, and gasoline and other petroleum products will be vastly cheaper in a truly free market.

Iraq needs democracy. What it currently has is a limited democracy that is hopelessly incapable of providing the only real solution that would work: a divided Iraq that separates the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis once and for all while divvying up the energy resources in an equitable way between the groups. The reason for this is that Iraq's current democracy isn't concerned so much with providing a workable situation for Iraqis as it concerned with answering the desires and whims of the Western powers whose armies currently patrol the streets of Baghdad.

Iraq does not need three miles of concrete barriers...it needs real solutions that provide permanent stability and recognize the very real divisions between the various groups that reside within Iraq. Good fences may make good neighbors when the respective neighbors have a clear understanding of the property line, but when the property lines are in open dispute, fences do little if any good whatsoever. Indeed, they only provide another occasion for conflict. Iraqis do not need fences…they need property lines and new boundaries.