Should we really be surprised? Our local news broadcasts make our towns look like war zones the way they talk about murders …. why should the larger media outlets be any different. Negativity sells.

Hmmmmmm……

If true, this whole “what if” needs to be reconfigured.

Last night I challenged this post at The Agitator, in…

Radley, you have failed to consider the effect of your scenario on world oil markets and economies, other than to assert oil is fungible. That’s true, but oil-fields aren’t. They can be blown up, or ruined by neglect and mismanagement. Iraq’s infrastructure has been decaying since the 1970’s, and it will require massive investment to salvage the Iraqi oil industry.

Iraq and Iran had already savaged each other before Gulf War I, but that mattered relatively little in world oil markets because the Saudis outproduced their neighbors. If Saddam had tried to conquer Saudi Arabia, do you think Iran would have sat back and applauded? Not likely. A regional war involving all the Gulf powers was the nightmare scenario that forced the hand of Bush Sr.

The Soviet/Afghanistan and Iraq/Al-Qaeda examples are apples and oranges. Completely different enemies with completely different ways of going about attacking us. Not to sound like Bush but this is a new kind of war.

But if we allow it to run that course, is there any doubt that there will be repeated attacks on the US because we have what they do not? Because we don’t believe in what they do?

I don’t think we can afford to construct elaborate scenarios where if we just let the world go to hell in a handbasket they won’t bother us any more. It doesn’t work that way, and it never did.

If we hadn’t mucked about with the Mujaheddin, the Soviet Union probably would have collapsed anyway. With or without the expense of the war, the economic system was in trouble. Also, the political changes (Gorbachev, etc) which really made the collapse possible came long before the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Upon the Soviet collapse, Afghanistan would probably have become stably independent, just like all of its ex-Soviet neighbors like our buddy Uzbekistan.

Had we not supported the Islamist mujaheddin, that post-Soviet system in Afghanistan might have been stable. (We might have had to lean on Pakistan not to interfere on its own.)

So, ironically, our best policy with regards to Afghanistan would have been to support the Soviet invasion and to work to keep Pakistani Islamists from entering Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

Have you ever, then, read Niall Ferguson or Jeffrey Rogers Hummel? Or do you not think they’re good historians?

I have never been convinced that Sadaam was going to invade Saudi Arabia. However if he had invaded I think the most logical outcome is that the House of Saud is quickly toppled, but Sadaam is unable to gain real control of the country. He would then have to deal with a full scale Jihad from Usama and company. The country sinking into chaos would have been a real possibility.