I suggest that a Spoils of War Renunciation Act of 2008 could unite the right and the left. After all, what honorable person could oppose it?
Since it looks like American troops may be staying in Iraq for a while, perhaps we need to focus on other ways, besides leaving, to soften the damage done to U.S. credibility by our continued presence there. Those ways will have to be ones that people on the right and the left can both accept.
Left-wing cynics have claimed from the beginning that the war was engineered to profit Halliburton and other Bush Administration cronies. Right-wing idealists are outraged at the very suggestion, and yet we barely even talk about ways we might demonstrate our good faith. As former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan says in his recently published memoir, "it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." A demonstration of our intentions could do much to mute war criticism at home, as well as improve world opinion poisoned by the suspicion of war profiteering.
The long-stalled Iraqi oil law is an opportunity for such a demonstration. Passage of the law is one of the important benchmarks that the Iraqi government has failed to meet. Left-wing conspiracy theorists believe that the law is stalled less by conflicting Iraqi interests than by U.S. insistence on getting a law that serves U.S. interests: one that privatizes the Iraqi oil industry and contains strong protections for foreign investors. Starry-eyed right-wingers are certain that it is just squabbling, foot-dragging Iraqi ineptitude that is keeping a reasonable law from passing.
Both wings should be happy to see the U.S. declare that it will never try to hold Iraq to an oil law passed under occupation, if Iraq wished to change it in the future. We should be able, then, to get general agreement on a bill declaring something like the following: The U.S. government will take no action – legal, diplomatic, military, or otherwise – to enforce contracts governed by any Iraqi law passed at a time when American troops were on Iraqi soil. This declaration is an optimistic anticipation of the day when the Iraqis stand on their own, and it says that we will defer to the Iraqi government of that future time: if they choose not to enforce the laws passed under our influence, American officials will not try to persuade, cajole, or coerce them.
Our consciousness of the Iraq war is dominated right now by the human drama: thousands of American soldiers killed, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives lost, millions of Iraqi refugees displaced. But we will eventually get past these losses, if the war is a tragedy or a necessary confrontation or even a mistake. What will keep alive the current rage and bitterness at home and contempt for America abroad, though, is if this war which began under false pretenses ends with the pretenders enjoying long-term oil contracts that the U.S. requires Iraq’s government to honor long after we're gone. If that happens, unforgotten incidents will fester: the Coalition Provisional Authority's efforts to turn Iraq into a free market investor's paradise, while the Iraqi people went without power or clean water; those long months after the elections when Iraq's parliament couldn't form a government and the U.S. doggedly resisted the Shiite majority's choice for prime minister holding out for Nouri al-Maliki instead, long months when an insurgency grew into a civil war.
A declaration that we will not demand spoils from this war – if the Iraqis balk at them – is a small gesture. It will not satisfy war critics, who will point out that it is an empty gesture if we continue to occupy and control Iraq long into the future, enjoying favorable oil contracts all along and protected by Iraqi laws we passed. But nothing will satisfy that concern as long as we are in Iraq. And even left-wing pessimists can see that something is better than nothing. Unable to force President Bush to end the war now, they might still prevent permanent ownership of Iraq’s oil industry by Bush cronies.
Supporters of the war will find this gesture unnecessary, but harmless. If the oil law that Iraq passes really does serve Iraq, then the day will never come when Iraq tries to weasel out of the contracts it will enter under that law. Right-wing dreamers, who know we are in Iraq to create a democracy that will be a beacon of hope to the Middle East, have nothing to fear from renouncing any intention of future payment for this service. So, a Spoils of War Renunciation Act should find support across the political spectrum, and might start a movement out of the current standoff.
Right?