A LOST BATTLE
25 years later, Iran prevails in its war with Iraq while America loses at home
BY LEW ROCKWELL

Lew Rockwell is a paleolibertarian political commentator and economist in the United States. Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama and Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies. Other stories by Lew Rockwell

The United States invaded Iraq for many bad reasons, but the worst one given was purely ideology. We would bring them American-style freedom and teach them about democracy - or so we were told. How one goes about teaching about freedom and democracy with bombs, tanks, depleted uranium, destruction and martial law is a hard one to figure.

In any case, it is a moot point. Iraq is a country in a civil war. The only unifying political theme anyone can detect is hatred for America. Generally, it is hard to convert a state and people from enemy to friend through invasions. 

A few years ago, Americans thought of Iraq as the country that was forever being denounced by the Clinton administration. Why? Iraq, it seems, had some crazy notion that the United States might attempt an invasion at some point in the future, and thus thought it had better prepare by spending money on its military. Its weapons program, however, was quickly dismantled under pressure from the UN.

Doubtful that Iraq had really given up the idea of creating a viable national defense, America cobbled together extreme sanctions against the country, preventing it from trading with the world. The head of the U.S. State Department told a reporter on national television that even if U.S. sanctions had resulted in 500,000 child deaths, they were "worth it."

Jumping back earlier, America had waged another war on Iraq. Bush Senior saw it as the war to end all aggressions, in this case an aggression of Iraq against its neighbor called Kuwait. What was strange was how America had given the green light to Saddam to aggress against its neighbor, with the U.S. ambassador having told Saddam Hussein that America took no position on its long-running border dispute with its former province.

Now, if we jump back still further and consider the Reagan years, we would remember a long and boring but truly bloody conflict between Iraq and Iran. It lasted eight years, between 1980 and 1988. The United States favored Iraq in this war. Saddam was a friend of America, a man on the payroll. The weapons he used in this war on Iran were provided to him courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, as weapons inspectors in the 1990s were reminded when they went hunting for WMDs. There is a famous photo of one of Reagan's weapons emissaries, Donald Rumsfeld, smiling broadly as he shakes hands with Saddam.

The war did not fully wreck Iraq, though many of its sons died. The country was still secular and liberal by regional standards. There were private schools, symphonies, universities and a complex and developing economy. Women had rights. They could drive and have bank accounts. They wore Western clothing. You could get a drink at a bar or buy liquor and have it at home. Christians could worship as they pleased, and send their children to Christian schools. The electricity stayed on. You could buy gasoline. It was an old-fashioned dictatorship but it was, in regional terms, prosperous.

The war between Iran and Iraq was inconclusive. But today, Iraq is a wreck. The prevailing political influence today in Iraq is Iran's ruling Shiite political party, which hopes to add another country to those ruled by Islamic law. So, from the vantage point of 25 years, it appears that the winner has finally been decided in the great Iran-Iraq war. The side that the United States favored lost.

This is increasingly the pattern in the post-Cold War world. The United States spends money, invades countries, sheds blood, and becomes ever more powerful at home and unpopular abroad. In the end, no matter how powerful its weapons or how determined its leaders, it loses. It loses because people resist empire. It loses for the same reasons that socialism and its central plans always fail.

Large-scale attempts to force people into predetermined molds founder on the inability of the state to allocate resources rationally and to anticipate change, as well as the ubiquitous and pesky phenomenon called human volition. 

The market always outruns the planners for the same reason that guerrilla armies usually win over regular armies. Decentralized and spontaneous associations of dedicated individuals are smarter and wiser and more committed than centralized and planned bureaucrats who follow their rule books.

America has already lost the war on Iraq. It should pull out. Now. But when America leaves Iraq, a big cost will still be born by Americans. We have lost freedoms and rights. The military and spying sector has grown enormously. Big government abroad is incompatible with small government at home. Therefore, to the extent we cheer war, this war or any war, we are cheering domestic socialism and our own diminution as a civilization. LW