Tammany on the Tigris
Some snark in parallel quotations . . .
Michael R. Gordon, this week:
The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East warned the prime minister of Iraq in a closed-door conversation that Baghdad must make tangible political progress by next month to counter the growing tide of opposition to the war in Congress.
In a Sunday afternoon discussion that mixed gentle coaxing with a sober appraisal of politics in Baghdad and Washington, the commander, Admiral William Fallon, told Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that the Iraqi government should aim to complete a law on the division of oil proceeds by next month. . . .
In the meeting, [US Admiral] Fallon focused on Iraq’s oil law, assuming it was closest to completion. “Is it reasonable to expect it to be completed in July?” he asked. “We have to show some progress in July for the upcoming report.”
Maliki said that the Kurds had raised concerns about revenue-sharing arrangements, but he indicated some progress on the oil law would be made. Crocker pointed out that it was important that progress include the resolution of that thorny issue.
Major General Smedley Butler, in 1933:
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Comment by Hesiod —
June 13, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
Here’a th part od Butler’s quote you didn’t highlight:
“It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
Sounds like a liberal to me.
Comment by ajay —
June 14, 2007 @ 4:02 am
Yes, a lot of those Marine Corps generals tend to be liberals.
Hesiod! Be less dumb!
Comment by fnook —
June 14, 2007 @ 7:17 am
Uh, Ajay, you’d might be surprised. Think Jim Webb.
Comment by Thoreau —
June 14, 2007 @ 7:20 am
Capitalism comes in many flavors, not all of them of the free market variety.
The brand that requires the Marines to beat a foreign land into submission is generally not the free market variety.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 14, 2007 @ 7:28 am
Which is why, regardless of his actual politics late in life – for all I know Butler was a socialist by then – libertarians are so comfortable with what he had to say.
And Hes, I think it’s an evidence of your blinkered thinking that the first notion that comes into your head is to assign a partisan allegiance to Butler along familiar lines. It’s a big reason why the netroots keeps getting played for chumps by the actual existing Democratic Party.
Comment by Ryan —
June 14, 2007 @ 8:13 am
Uh, Ajay, you’d might be surprised. Think Jim Webb.
Uh, fnook, you might be disingenuous. First: Webb’s only recently a Democrat, and only arguably a liberal. Second: Who else you got?
Comment by Ryan —
June 14, 2007 @ 8:19 am
Oh, and I can’t find the rank Webb retired at but I don’t believe he made it near general.
Comment by wade —
June 14, 2007 @ 8:28 am
is there an actual example somewhere of a country that has practiced genuine free-market capitalism, without beating resource providing nations into submission at the point of a gun?
The only places that occur to me are countries whose history i don’t know well enough to to be sure they didn’t. Maybe genuine free-market capitalism is as unattainable as properly functioning communism.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 14, 2007 @ 8:39 am
wade, it may be.
Comment by ajay —
June 14, 2007 @ 10:34 am
wade: there are a few European countries without a history of resource imperialism. Norway, for example. Denmark. Ireland. Sweden. Finland. Switzerland.
Not sure whether you class those as “free market capitalist”. I think, if you take a firm enough definition, no country anywhere has practiced free market capitalism (there’s always been some government intervention), imperial or not.
Comment by jamie —
June 14, 2007 @ 10:59 am
AFAIK, Butler was asked to do something in support of the Spanish Republicans a few years later but refused, on the same non-interventionist grounds. You can’t infer much from that other than consistency but it does seem to indicate a general small c conservative orientation. I guess he’d be fairly chummy with the antiwar.com crowd if he were around now.
Comment by matthew hogan —
June 14, 2007 @ 11:11 am
“is there an actual example somewhere of a country that has practiced genuine free-market capitalism, without beating resource providing nations into submission at the point of a gun?”
Possibly Switzerland, though the guards in the Vatican may have helped themselves to holy water; and the Red Cross was known for its oil extortion.
Maybe Canada despite the health care and Indians thing.
Or Sweden post-gustavus adolphus or Denmark, or luxembourg perhaps.
Comment by Dave W. —
June 14, 2007 @ 11:26 am
There are a couple of differences between the wars Butler cites and The Iraq War.
One difference is that people knew what was up with those wars. A nation could be honest about its imperialism in the early 20th century, so there wasn’t a large group of people strenuously denying that those small wars were about imperialism (with possible exception of the Spanish American War).
Another difference is that the wealthy class paid for warmaking back then, not the middle class and not the class under the middle class.
Comment by Jackmormon —
June 14, 2007 @ 11:48 am
Switzerland has always had very, very limited immigration policies, which would seem to disqualify it from total free-market capitalism, no?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 14, 2007 @ 12:30 pm
Dave, the early 20th century US was as dishonest about its imperialist adventures as the US government is today — the current Iraq war seems like as much like an exact replay of the Phillipine-American war as history is capable of providing.
Comment by b-psycho —
June 14, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
Kinda hard to have free-market “capitalism” when the capitalists themselves don’t want a free-market…
Comment by ajay —
June 15, 2007 @ 9:08 am
14: Well, quite. And if all your main trading partners are imperialists, you’re probably doing quite well as a result of their imperialism, even if you aren’t doing any yourself…