While I was thinking about Iraq, I ran across this Washington Post story headlined Power Grid In Iraq Far From Fixed and with the front-page lead-in “After two years and $1.2 billion, U.S. effort to resuscitate electrical system is wide of its mark”.
Given the $1.2 billion figure, there’s no need to read the rest of the article. The electricity grid here in South-East Queensland (pop 2.5 million as against Iraq’s 20 million) experienced some blackouts last year, and the distributor, Energex is planning to spend over $A3 billion (about US$2.4 billion) over the next five years to fix the problems[1]. That’s to upgrade a network which has suffered from some underinvestment, but nothing remotely comparable to the two wars and decade of sanctions Iraq has had to deal with. Put simply, $1.2 billion is chickenfeed, and could not be expected to do more than prevent further deterioration.
And electricity grids need generation as well as distribution. $US 1.2 billion spent here in Australia would buy one decent sized power station, say 1500 Megawatts generating capacity. That’s not even enough to replace the capacity that was wrecked, neglected to the point of collapse or comprehensively looted for parts during the war and its aftermath. And of course, construction in a war zone is many times dearer than in Australia.
In this piece, written shortly after the war, I concluded
If there is to be a reasonable chance of establishing a stable democratic government, it will be necessary to spend at least $US25 billion and probably $US50 billion. Australia’s share would probably be at least $A1 billion. This is a large sum of money, but Bush, Blair and Howard had no trouble finding the same amount to fight the war. Regardless of whether individual Australians supported or opposed the war, we are stuck with the obligations we have collectively assumed.
In fact, as far as I can tell, the amount of money that has actually been spent on reconstruction so far is around $5 billion, and the amount left over from the US appropriation of $18 billion, after overheads and diversions to security is between $5 billion and $10 billion. The World Bak Trust Fund, set up in 2003 with pledges of around $10 billion, mostly from Japan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, currently contains about $300 million.
fn1. Disclosure and disclaimer: I’m on the board of the Queensland Competition Authority which regulates Energex. I’m not expressing any opinions about Energex, apart from the generally accepted point that there was underinvestment in the past. I’m just using it as an example with which I’m familiar.
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2003/05/10/who-will-pay-for-rebuilding-iraq/
John Quiggin 
Two things.
One, we do not collectively assume any such responsibilities. People come to that sort of conclusion from a starting point that is more or less collectivist to begin with, without realising that that sort of absurd conclusion is in fact a reductio ad absurdum that shows the limitations of a collectivist approach. I may concur in various ad hoc group conveniences, but I never signed any damned blank cheque for anybody to act in my name. Not even “but this is a democracy” kind of blank cheques.
Seethe, seethe. Now, where was I? Oh, two: I doubt if that whole “grid” thinking is optimal for an unstable area anyway. What with the cheapness of petrol there once they don’t pay taxes on it, Iraqis – not, please note, Iraq – would probably be better off getting their own generators or using things like kerosene cookers, the way we did when I was growing up there. (As a two year old I drank some, attracted by the warning colours and mistaking it for Ribena. I had to be stomach pumped in a hosspital run by sect missionaries, Seventh Day Adventists I think.)
Anyhow, think of the social changes in things like switching to potatoes in Germany after the Thirty Years War. “Optimal” for a settled environment also means “fragile”. When the USA goes under some decade or some century, it will be compounded by the fragility of things. They have forgotten Gibbon’s comments on the fragility of the Roman Empire and how that was no longer present in the late eighteenth century. Well, it’s back again – but the Iraqis at least know it.
Kero’d be bit unsafe compared to a nice functioning electricity grid that you could even run your traffic lights off. The idea is that the place become stable. That I thought was the point of the invasion.
wbb,
Depends on your picture of stable. Australia was stable in the late 1800’s without a funtioning electricity grid. A nation can be stable without traffic lights. Iraq was also ‘stable’ under Saddam.
There will be lots of debate about what the point was, but I did not hear anyone saying we would invade Iraq to restore the electricity grid.
The trick is to jump on an unused justification when the sound of the bombs stop.
In the lead-up to GWII Bush Administration strategists assumed that they could loot Iraqi oil revenues to fund reconstruction of Iraq. This was perceived as the classic win/win situation in which American commuters could continue to power their Humvees through freeway traffic jams and Halliburton et al. could rebuild Iraq at vast profit resulting from no-bid contracts. Meantime ever-grateful Iraqis would bathe in endless supplies of clean water.
None of this has happened, of course. But to address PML’s complaint about collectivism and collective responsibility, I think it can be argued that if the Bush Administration had such plans and went to war on the baisis of such plans, then they took on some responsibility for reconstruction, and took it on in the name of the American people.
Additionally, the Coalition of the Willing, of which Australia was a foundation member, signed up having made some commitments to the postwar phase.
The question is, what commitments did Australia make to the postwar phase? Were they ever negotiated with the United States and other Coalition members? Were they ever publicly enunciated? Were they ever debated in Parliament? Did the Labor Opposition ever attempt to force the Howard Government to be explicit on this point? The negative correct answers to these questions indicate just how incompetent was the entire process of engagement in this sorry exercise. Blame must be distributed widely.
Meanwhile, Iraqi groups and interests inclined to be supportive of US efforts at “reconstruction” might well study the fate of America’s “friends” in Vietnam, a subject of some interest still 30 years after the end of that catastrophe.
Yes, finding and distributing 5,000,0000 generators at an average cost of about US$1,000 is MUCH more practical than fixing the electricity grid.
Generators just add another problem: getting the fuel to the people. At the moment getting fuel is just as difficult as is fixing the grid.
Katz, the point is that Bush et al do not have that sort of corporate and collective identity. Sure, Bush is responsible – but that just makes most Americans into the first victims of the Uncle Sam ethos, not co-conspirators equally at fault. If that were so, it would be just to blame the Iraqis for anything – they never stopped those that oppressed them before, so it’s their fault now.
I’m just waiting to show Benno on another post where he’s building in his conclusions, starting a reply with “it is evident that…” He just has to get used to examining his assumptions, even if they turn out to either correct or good working approximations, and I don’t want to discourage him (I presume him – wouldn’t a female Benno be a Benna? Sorry, I couldn’t resist the alliteration).
Andrew Reynolds,
OK, so fixing the bombed electricity grid is an optional extra, agreed.
Shame that the lots of debate you forsee about why we invaded Iraq has not materialised as yet. Care to have a go?
PML, Citizens, especially citizens in a democracy, have a responsibility to make some expiation for the wrongs done in their name. Most times the wrong cannot be restored and many times the expiation will perforce be merely symbolic.
In the case of Bush the expiation may be impeachment and incarceration for commiting high crimes and misdemeanours in misleading Congress to support prosecuting an illegal war. This punishment would have no material impact on the daily lives of Iraqis but it may stand as a more substantial act of reconciliation than a dozen electricity generation plants.
This may serve as a national act of expiation by Americans for allowing their own constitution to be corrupted by the arrogance of the Executive.
There is a direct parallel to the collective responsibility embodied in this course of action in the customary operation of the judicial system. When one person kills another in a crime of passion, the collectivity called civil society owes it to itself to punish the perpetrator even though s/he is unlikely ever to offend again and despite the fact that it would be much cheaper simply to let the perpetrator walk free rather than to spend a lot of money locking him/her up in gaol.
Using your terminology, society (the collectivity) is the victim if the perpetrator remains unpunished, even though punishment is costly and inconvenient.
Katz, no. That’s like saying I have an obligation to make good on a cheque with my signature, forged or not. I only have a moral commitment to make good on my own promises, not on any of this “done in my name” nonsense.
Your “collectivity” is not only a fiction without body to kick or soul to damn, it is at best an ad hoc convenience and not anything with a claim of its own on anything. All I have been doing with this line of argument is to try to show that any sort of “the USA owes” or “Australia needs” eventually backs you into a reductio ad absurdum in which the people don’t matter, the collectivity does. There is simply no way to draw the line once you suppose the collectivity is a “moral person”. To me, this shows that those claiming to act in my name have lost it, not that it proves I somehow gave them permission without noticing.
Au fond, democracy is not a source but only a convenient means of transmission. To confuse the two is to elevate means above ends and to commit the error that the bible allegorically called the sin of idolatry.
PML, there are only two potential sources of sovereignty — God or the collectivity called the people. Both of them are problematic.
Democracy, that worst form of government, apart from all the others, is indeed a means and not an end. Trouble is transmission of democracy becomes problematic when the end (either the beginning or the end, or both) terminate in God.
I tend to think that you neglected to notice that I never used a construction along the lines of “the USA owes” or “Australia needs”. I agree with your implication which I am prepared to state openly: there is no value which inheres in “USAness” or in “Australianness”. Platonic ideal forms simply don’t exist.
To clarify my point made above, therefore, the Americans that I fantasised acting together to impeach and to incarcerate GWB would simply be a coalition of individuals who came to a common recognition that their enlightened interests in maintaining a democratic and civil society capable of pursuing sustainable interests in the wider world depended upon the removal and punishment of would be usurpers of constitutional processes.
To argue that people are incapable of arriving at an appreciation of their enlightened self interests is the ultimate debate breaker.
wbb,
I think Katz and PML are having a good go at the justifications, as have innumerable other threads on this and other blogs around the world. I have commented (no doubt ad nausem) on this on this blog and eslewhere – if you have missed them I suggest a visit to the archive.
On the matter of justifications for the Iraq fiasco, the following document has just been leaked.
Here is the smoking gun that proves that the Blair Cabinet and the Bush Administration as early as July 2002 entered into a conspiracy to concoct a pretext to invade Iraq.
This Cabinet memo of a briefing by John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, contains the following juicy observation:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable [by the Bush Administration]. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
In other words, the Chairman of the JIC informed the Blair Cabinet that the Bush Administration intended to lie their way into an invasion.
John Scarlett, a man of some experience and insight, foresaw the shortcomings of the Bush clique’s planning:
“There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”
Nevertheless, Blair decided to sign on. I wonder how much of this was known to Our Own Little Digger, John Howard. Was Howard a co-conspirator? Or was he, John Gorton-like in 1968, left outside the loop?
The full text can be found at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
Katz, just to check if we are in “furious agreement”, are you agreeing that while the US administration purported to act in the name of a collective US people, that doesn’t after all sheet home to any moral obligation on any US individual, apart of course from those who took it on board personally? What I was disputing was that I had an obligation, since – democracy or not – I never signed any damned blamk cheque.
For what it’s worth, at a philosophical level I am an anarchist, without denying there are cultural and traditional aspects that I cannot (and don’t want to) distance myself from, since they are internalised. But that means no more than (say) a Collingwood supporter can support his/her team and still not be liable for some hoonery that a Collingwood player might indulge in (hypothetically! I had to pick an example). At some level, my moral obligation is limited – otherwise blood guilt arguments are valid, and so on.
Furious agreement!
Your Collingwood example is an interesting one. While support for Collingwood carries heavy baggage and may be construed to express tacit support for the antisocial behaviour of too many Collingwood supporters, equally it could be argued that support for an organisation that not dedicated to an intrisically evil purpose (e.g., the Nazi Party) can only be improved by the involvement of intelligent and wise persons, to the benefit of everybody.
Alternative propositions about corporate identity and therefore responsibility tend to one or other untenable position: theocratic teleology, or perhaps even worse, Rousseauian formulations of “the General Will”.
The Nazi Party argument has two problems: the thermos problem (it keeps drinks hot or cold, but how does it know?) – pre 1936 or so it took someone of Chesterton’s calibre to know Hitler for what he was; and, the problem so well expressed by Homer Simpson to his daughter Lisa, “But if I join the mob, maybe I can guide it in wise directions” – i.e. who is using whom?
(I mention chesterton because we know that he wasn’t speaking from hindsight – he died in 1936. But he had the Catholic moral vices of his Catholic moral virtues.)
Yes, to judge the Nazi Party, or any other group as supportive of an intrinsic evil, one would have to apply a series of a priori judgements along the lines of: “any policy that proposes that one group of humans is inherently inferior to another group of human beings and deserve to be discriminated against on that basis is intrinsically evil.”
Perhaps the good folk of Germany who endorsed the Nazi Party before 1936 could be excused for not knowing just how far such a policy can be carried.
But now we know because historians have shown the world how ignorance kills.
Experience may thus reinforce the credibility of a priori, dispositional statements like the one enunciated above.
Experience also shows that men forget. For instance, today’s US activities show that they have forgotten how the Athenians, the Macedonians and the Romans each in turn used regime change as a technique of hegemony – and how each started with all sincerity.
I think it was Samuel Johnson who said that mankind does not need so much to be instructed as reminded.
Except that the USA hasn’t forgotten anything of course. Apart from the genpop which never knew very much at all. The whole invasion was well-planned and well executed. John Howard knew not much later than Blair. Remeber when he flew to London for some shindig or other – that was when he signed on – it’d have been in early 2002.
In fact I’ve now looked up the interview as he hopped on the plane:
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I’ll no doubt be talking to Mr Blair at some stage and I’ll no doubt have an opportunity of doing that and also with the Prime Ministers of other Commonwealth countries such as the Canadian Prime Minister and the New Zealand Prime Minister.
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says if the US acts against Iraq Australia couldn’t afford to support it.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well that is a completely hypothetical issue. There’s no proposal and I’m not going to answer a hypothetical question, particularly of such a sensitive kind as that.
So it was sensitive in April 2002. Sensitive as in on.
I was referring to the USA as a whole, not to the clique that speak for it. The clique can only get away with things to the extent that the rest don’t notice the slide – their immunisation has worn off through forgetting, so to speak.