Playing chess in a burning building

President Bush has just completed a week of consultations in search of a new military strategy for victory in Iraq. He had said he would reveal his plan in a speech to the nation before Christmas, but now he says the speech will take place in January.

He has good reason to procrastinate.

There is no mix of troops, no strategy of deployment, no combination or coalition or increase or decrease of military forces that will solve the problem in Iraq.

There is no military solution.

The problem is economic, and the solution is economic.

It is easy to become distracted by an analysis of the fine differences between Muslim sects, between tribal groups, and between regional leaders. But in the final analysis, the differences are not the cause of the fighting.

The money is the cause of the fighting.

The fighting in Iraq, like the fighting between the Palestinians of Hamas and the Palestinians of Fatah, like the fighting between the Crips and the Bloods, like the fighting between Tyson and Holyfield, is taking place because the winner gets the money.

Boxers fight for prize money. Gangs fight for drug money. Palestinians fight for control of government-owned accounts filled with international donations. Iraqis fight for control of a government that owns the oil, the oil industry, the agriculture industry, and state-owned enterprises controlling the country's manufacturing, communications, chemical, textile and financial industries.

The solution, the only solution, is the privatization of the state-owned enterprises. The people of Iraq must be permitted to earn or buy shares of the businesses in the country. They need secure, private bank accounts. They need a path to economic security as individual citizens, instead of what they have now, which is total reliance on the leaders of their group to provide them with the jobs and loot that come along with control of the government.

In their circumstances, you would act exactly the same way. You would show fierce loyalty to the boss and never say a word out loud against him, for fear that you would lose access to the means of economic survival. If you had a family, you might give your life to make sure they were economically secure and not cut off from the well-spring of money controlled by the leader of your group.

Think of it as a nationwide episode of "The Sopranos."

Think of it as a middle management job in a horrible company that happens to be the only place to work in the whole country.

Picture yourself with no options for employment unless you fight for and win control of the government.

If you can imagine that, you understand what it's like to live in a Soviet-style economy. Elections don't make a country free. Government-built schools and hospitals don't make a country free. Private property makes a country free.

It is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion that the President of the United States doesn't know that.


Copyright 2006

Editor's note: You might be interested to read "The Motive for War: How to Stop the Violence in Iraq" and "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq" at www.SusanShelley.com.

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