Thomas Barnett has a great post up today about how the State Department is holding back progress in Iraq. State needs to get with the program, or get out of the way.
The story on our ag aid to Iraq is a microcosm of the whole sham that is the interagency process, and–quite frankly–what a disaster it is to have the State Department in charge of Iraq (you thought DoD was bad).
…
Class example starts the story: Commerce wants to end the food rationing in Iraq and move onto something more–CANYOUBELIEVEIT!–more marketized. State has a kitten and freaks out, believing the rationing was essential to continued social stability in Iraq (lots of that going around right now). I guarantee you this: leave State in charge long enough and Iraqis will be on food rations the rest of this century.
The story quotes “economics section†staffers at the embassy decrying the end-of-rations as this incredibly stupid idea that keeps resurfacing every twelve months. My God, we’re four years into this and we’re still keeping everyone on rations?!?!?
Here’s the kicker: almost all of the rations are imported.
Guess what that does to Iraqi agriculture.
Bremer’s crazy idea was “to cut off the rich and provide poor Iraqis with cash so they could buy the food they needed.â€
But why treat them like adults when we can suppress market development all these years and keep them in a welfare mentality?
The last poor happened this August. Listen to the craziness proposed by Commerce:
“The [public food distribution system] is wasteful and creates a disincentive to produce,†the document stated. Iraq’s government “should press forward with a program to transfer the supply and distribution to the private sector.â€
What kind of crazy talk is that? Don’t we realize that Iraqis never fed themselves until the Americans showed up in 2003? Do we want their ag and service sectors to recover when we could keep them showing up for their rations for many more years? Isn’t this how you rebuild an economy and society after war? Keeping them on rations ad infinitum.
Is this the same Thomas Barnett who uses his books to advocate permanent warfare as an American policy for peace? Whose method of “solving” Iraq was to magically convince NATO, Russia, and China to each contribute 40,000 troops to a war they never wanted? Who thinks the Balkans are a shining example of successful American nation-building?
Sadly, that is true. And like all military analysts, he harbors an instinctive disdain for the State Department—the same State Department that was defunded when it called the Pentagon’s war plans in both Iraq and Afghanistan “inadequate and poorly conceived” and, unlike the DoD, actually hires cultural experts, locals, and expats to advise on the countries we bomb.
Barnett also possesses an arrogance regarding the magic of the free market that can only be born of one who never trained in economics. A free market food system is clearly the most ideal form of food productions (even though there hasn’t been a free market agricultural sector in the US for well over a century).
Free markets, however, require political stability and the rule of law to function… unless you think Somalia’s version of the free market was more ideal than, say, ours. Without a functioning state to enforce contracts and prevent (or at the least punish) crimes like theft, forcing a freer market on a society with no social or political institutions to handle it will result in armed cartels fighting each other for market share and extorting people on the ground. Again, like Somalia.
Put differently, let’s tackle one problem at a time without throwing our hands up in despair and demanding we give the Peace Corps automatic weapons.