Unqualified Offerings

FA Hayek’s central argument against economic central planning was that the distortions from one intervention become “necessity” for the next – government keeps expanding its control to try to fix the screw-ups its control has already caused. The Unqualified Offerings thesis has been, pretty much from the beginning of this blog, that military intervention abroad is just another kind of central planning subject to Hayek’s laws, whether you call it “interventionism,” “neo-colonialism,” “benevolent hegemony” or “preemptive war.” Today, Robin Wright reports in the Post that

“What is out there is concern among conservative Arab allies that there is a hegemonic Persian threat [running] through Damascus, through the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the Palestinians in Hamas,” said a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity because of sensitive diplomacy. “Regional leaders want to find a way to navigate unease on their streets and deal with the strategic threats to take down Hezbollah and Hamas, to come out of the crisis where they are not as ascendant.”

There is a “hegemonic Persian threat” because US intervention destroyed the main Arab counterweight to it: Baathist Iraq. Now we will “fix” the most obvious geostrategic problem that created by (optimistically) neutering Hezbollah. Neither the “senior U.S. official” nor anyone else Wright quotes anticipates any new problems flowing from that. Perhaps they just like surprises.

Don’t think of that last line as mere snark. There’s a sense in which “it’s all good” for the likes of the “senior U.S. official. Government can benefit from a sense of crisis, and US Republican Party government tends to benefit from a sense of foreign crisis. Crisis is an excuse to acquire and exercise more power. It also has novelty value. Who wants to discuss the daily grind of Moving Forward Together in Baghdad and its general lack of results? Now we and they have something else to talk about.