Is Intervention In The Gulf Still A Profitable Venture?  

Axis of Logic has a long, but interesting, analysis of American foreign policy, the middle east, oil and the US's number one export - the dollars that everyone else needs to buy Gulf oil. The question they ask is "Is US occupation of the middle east worth the costs involved ?".

In the process of exporting our currency, the American government has pursued a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy that has incited Arabs against Kurds and Iranians against Arabs. In Iraq, Shia and Sunni Muslims are now at each other’s throats. Despots like Saddam and the Shah have been nurtured and America now flirts with theocrats and fundamentalists in the ‘New Iraq’. As a direct result of our radical ‘petro-dollar’ policy, we have made lethal enemies where we should only have trading partners. Meanwhile, The Saudi royal family – perhaps the richest family in human history - gets richer while the whole region is pauperized.

Needless to say, The United States does not indulge in imperial projects simply because it has the power to establish and maintain off shore military bases. During the cold war, most military projects were directed at confronting real or perceived Soviet threats in Europe and Asia.

Until recently, direct military involvement in the Gulf was a relatively cost free enterprise and real benefits accrued to the American economy and the individual consumer. It was a nasty and bloody business with uncounted native victims – but it made money. In the last decade, it allowed us the incredible luxury of exporting three thousand billion dollars of currency. A good portion of that money was ‘repatriated’ in the form of Saudi and Kuwaiti investments in American capital markets. But a vast pool of so-called petro-dollars is still floating around the world – hoarded in the reserve accounts of foreign nations who know that the dollar is the only currency that can buy Gulf oil.

As things now stand, our governors continue to behave as if our imperial show of force in the Gulf continues to serve our national interests. From a strictly imperial point of view, they are simply wrong. Our tragic involvement in the Gulf might have been a profitable venture for the last seven decades – albeit at the expense of the native population. But now it is a lose-lose proposition.

A cost benefit analysis of the American imperial project in the Gulf should convince even the most jingoistic American that this is no longer a profitable project. While the ‘liberation’ of Kuwait was basically a cost free proposition, our current entanglement in the Iraq has already cost $ 200 billion. Add to that the cost of Homeland Security and the economic losses sustained from the 9/11 attacks. And what is the dollar value of an American or an Iraqi life ?