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While I’m in favor of military action in Iraq, I still want the anti-war crowd to come up with good arguments. Such things promote necessary debate. Discredited Leninist sloganeering, on the other hand, reduces the quality of debate to that of a shouting match. I cringed when watching Michael Moore go off on his rant at the Academy Awards. It only served to devalue the legitimate arguments of the anti-war camp; Adrian Brody was far more effective in his appeal for peace. Similarly, hearing about “street theater” and “puke-ins” makes me wonder how the protesters actually expect to persuade middle America.

Just a note on “no blood for oil” sloganeering: Iraq produces some 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. This may seem like a lot, but let’s do some math: Assume $25/barrel, which is a reasonable post-war price. This leads to $62.5M per day in oil revenue, which is about $22.8B per year. We should observe that the current estimates for this war will be around $80B for combat operations and minor reconstruction, with much more costs to follow. Compared to this, $23B doesn’t look like much. $23B is in fact less revenue that Wal-Mart turns over in six weeks. It’s in fact less than two quarters of gross profit at Wal-Mart. True, this speaks as much about Wal-Mart’s awesome size as it does about the relative smallness of Iraqi oil revenues compared to the US economy. The war isn’t for oil or colonization. Oil is one of the many reasons for this war, in the sense that oil undergrids the world economy, and prevents us from disengaging from the region. But it is not nearly the primary reason. The war is for national security, and even then this is national security in an abstract future. It’s good to debate security policy, but, please, don’t rely on the slogans of unreconstructed Marxists as your arguments.

Posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2003 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.