Stardate 20021024.2132

(Captain's log): In response to my article about the reality of the negotiations in the UN regarding Iraq, more than one person has written about my contention that we'd repudiate Iraqi debt to France and Russia after the war. David's letter was typical:

I don't know why you (or anyone else) is so sure that the French and Russian debts will be repudiated and more than that, that the contracts for future oil deliveries will be nullified. In fact, I would have thought international law would keep those debts and contracts good over regime changes - otherwise all a country would have to do to get out from under the IMF or World Bank would be a 'regime change'. What's the basis of your belief?

Forget about "international law", first off. There are cases where this kind of thing is enforced by international agencies like the IMF, but that is a naked display of power and coercion, not "law", because it's always couched in terms of "If you don't honor that debt, we won't help you when you're in trouble."

It's not going to happen in this case, in part because the new government isn't going to be dealing with any such agency for a long time (so they won't have a lever), and in part because both the World Bank and the IMF will lay off if we tell them to.

It's been said that we should study the lessons of history.

There is in recent history a prominent example of a new national government after a war which was stuck paying off immense debts immediately upon its founding: Germany after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles stuck Germany with a huge reparations payment to France even though the German economy was in shambles after the war, and we all know where that led: hyperinflation and the collapse of the Weimar government. That was one of many, many wonderful things about the Treaty of Versailles, which must certainly be the most badly conceived treaty in history.

On the other hand, after World War II the opposite approach was used because George Marshall was a very smart man (and a Jacksonian). So far as I know, the new governments of Japan, Germany and Italy were not forced to acknowledge any prior debts or treaties, and indeed the US provided huge amounts of aid in rebuilding. The result was far more satisfactory.

Our plan for post-war Iraq is to rebuild it in a process analogous to what we did in Japan, to fix its infrastructure, try to eliminate pernicious cultural influences, and after a few years of military rule to work to establish something like a liberal democracy with a constitution guaranteeing minimum citizen rights (especially including for the women). One of the reasons for doing this is to try to make the citizens of Iraq more prosperous, more free and clearly more happy than the people living in the neighboring Arab nations, so as to demonstrate in a fashion which cannot be ignored or dismissed that our way is better than their way even for Arabs, and that Arabs who abandon their traditional cultural chauvinism and modernize can succeed. Saddling the new Iraqi nation with a huge debt would work heavily against the process of making them prosperous and successful, and the job will be hard enough as it is. We don't even know if we can do it. We have little choice but to try, for it's the only way we can win this war without a body count in the millions. But if we can pull that trick off, then we'll have won a massive strategic victory in the overall war we're fighting against Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, and it will begin the process of discrediting the extremists. In a sense, it means we'll be anti-Imperialist. Imperialists exploit a captured nation for the Imperialists' benefit; but it will be to our benefit to make the Iraqis themselves as successful as we can, because of the psychological effect that will have on the rest of the Arab world.

Under the circumstances, even if Iraq had a massive debt owed to us we'd probably have written most of it off.

Russian and French obstruction with regard to Iraq has been going on ever since the Gulf War. Both nations have been trading with Iraq during that time when "sanctions" were supposed to be applied to topple the government there without war, or at the very least to convince the government there to disarm. In part because of their trade with Saddam during that time, which helped keep him in power and helped convince him that there was no will in the west to stick with sanctions, we're now facing a situation where the only way we're going to be able to get rid of him is to sacrifice some of our men fighting a war we didn't want. If Russia and France had not been trading with Iraq during that time and had instead kept the faith with us, it would have been more likely that the sanctions would have worked. So why in hell should we reward Russia and France for that?

On a purely practical level, it is necessary now for us to punish both nations for their support of Saddam during the last ten years. Both must suffer, because we must establish the precedent that this kind of behavior can lead to ruin. If we were to honor those debts and retain those deals, then it would encourage them further, and others as well, to try to shaft us, secure in the knowledge that there's much to be gained and nothing to lose by doing so.

It would also mean that the French and Russian compani