The Almighty Dollar?

If the Geek were to be the totally trendy, completely contempo kind of guy which he isn't, this post would be on the scandal of the unaccounted for weapons provided by the US to various Iraqi security forces. After all, the GAO reports that nearly 200,000 weapons--mainly AK's and pistols--are "missing." That's a big deal, right?

If you believe the quacking, bloviating, and hyperventilating of the mainstream media and some of the big brains in Congress, well, then it is. A big deal, that is.

If, like the Geek, you are aware of the realities of military assistance provided by the US (and other countries) in the context of counterinsurgency, well, then it isn't a big deal. Using Vietnam as an example, far more than 200,000 rifles, carbines, machine pistols, mortars, and rocket launchers as well as heavier weapons furnished to the South Vietnamese went missing.

But, still, puff some, these weapons might end up in the hands of the insurgents!

You bet, the Geek agrees. So they might. In most insurgencies it is the status quo forces, the counterinsurgents, which are the source of weapons for the insurgents. Nothing new about that. In Iraq--and Afghanistan--it doesn't really matter if a few more guns get thrown into the insurgent pool. Both countries were neck deep in individual weapons before the Americans et al arrived.

In Afghanistan it was a matter of history, the long war against the Red Army and their host Afghans as well as the decade of internal war after the Russians left that assured weapons would be readily available to anyone and everyone who wanted one. In Iraq, a policy choice by Saddam coupled with the pathetically wrong American decision to fire the entire Iraqi Army assured that small arms (and not so small ones for that matter) would litter the landscape.

The bloviating alarmists need to get a grip. The unaccounted for weapons are neither a scandal nor an unacceptable increase in risk for our troops. The missing small arms is business as usual in the confused setting of counterinsurgency and create-a-state. The 200,000 more or less assault carbines and pistols are simply one small glob of spit in a very large ocean of hazards.

Done with a rant on behalf of sanity, the Geek proposes to plunge on with the real subject at hand. The power of economic sanctions: is it real or simply wishful self-delusion?

The perspicacious out there in the virtual universe (and that includes you by definition if, after stumbling on the Geek, you stay to read) undoubtedly noticed that the country of Panama was omitted from the brief list of nations where the US staged a regime change. The omission was intentional, since the Geek wanted to use Panama as example number one of the misplaced American faith in economic sanctions.

When the double agent, drug dealer Noriega finally became too obnoxious for the US to accept any longer, the first form of pressure we applied on Panama was a total trade embargo. This, of course, is the ultimate weapon in the economic sanction arsenal. It should have worked.

At the time the overwhelming majority of Panamanian trade was with the United States. The US dollar was the circulating medium in the country. Heck, economically it was so tied into the US that for all practical purposes it was the fifty-first state.

How well did the ultimate sanction of total financial and trade embargo work?

So well that the US had to send in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines as the world's largest SWAT team to apprehend the wanted criminal, Noriega, in Operation Just Cause.

After that overwhelming success, it is not surprising that the administration of George H. W. Bush sought to use economic sanctions applied through the United Nations to pressure the Iraqi military (it had to be the military since it alone had the guns and organisation necessary to do the job) into overthrowing Saddam and the Baathist regime.

These sanctions worked so well that not only did George W. Bush find it necessary and desirable to invade Iraq, but the overall effect of the economic warfare was to leave Iraq a hollow shell of a state filled with the festering and frustrating effects of wholesale corruption.

Sometimes economic sanctions are even less effective than they were in the cases of Panama and Iraq. The worst case outcome in US history was the attack on Pearl Harbor. Our rolling ramp-up of trade embargoes finally gave the Japanese government a stark choice: either a humiliating submission to US policy dictates or war.

Get a grip on this. You have to go back to the colonial non-importation agreement which came in response to the British Stamp Act to find an example of economic sanctions, trade embargoes and the like having a more or less clear cut successful outcome. But even then the outcome was mixed. The British repealed the obnoxious tax but at the same time restated their untrammeled right to impose whatever taxes deemed necessary.

Since the Stamp Act crises in 1766, the United States has tried economic sanctions of various sorts in support of any number of foreign policies. At no time has the relative success of 1766 been repeated. That's right, for a bit more than 250 years we've believed in the power of the almighty dollar. We've believed with a faith that surpasses understanding that all we have to do is deny trade, limit access to our finances or markets or services, and the target will crumble.

Get a grip! Economic sanctions don't work. Period. Best case they consolidate resistance within the target population because pressure consolidates political will. Worst case, the sanctions bring war in their wake.

So, what are we doing with respect to Iran and its noxious nuclear program?

That's right. Economic sanctions.

The Geek has to shake his head. The only people more wedded to economic determinism than Marxists are Americans.