Edward Luttwak wrote one of the best books I read in graduate school: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. In that book Luttwak not only clearly explained Roman foreign policy, but solved one of the most important puzzles of History, writ large: why the Roman Empire ultimately fell. In a nutshell, Rome fell because it stopped expanding. Roman power was based on superior organization. The Romans had a number of legions at their disposal, and could shuffle enough power to any one place, marching down carefully laid roads, overwhelm any threat. But peoples just across the borders of Roman control inevitably became more sophisticated and organized through cultural osmosis, and thus they became more of a threat. As long as Rome was expanding, neighboring peoples could be controlled by fear: behave, and we will eat you later. Once Rome stopped expanding, the fear was removed and the pressure along the borders steadily grew until the legions could no longer hold it. I suspect that this is only part of the solution to the puzzle, but it is a big part.
In a recent article for the British Prospect, Luttwak argues that the war in Iraq is a symptom of a general mistake: we think that the Middle East is important, but it's not. We need the oil beneath them, but they need oil revenue all the more. The nations of the Middle East cannot represent a military threat to any other region, because military power depends on a productive economy and soldiers willing to fight. The Middle East has neither. On the economic side:
We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia's 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran's exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
I would add that the societies and economies of that region are retarded largely because of oil. Why bother to build or invent anything when you can trade that black gold for cushy pensions and vacations in Europe. As for military power:
In 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army—again, the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-day, with a separate count of the "elite" Republican Guards, not to mention the "super-elite" Special Republican Guards—and it was feared that Iraq's bombproof aircraft shelters and deep bunkers would survive any air attack.
That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including 575,000 US troops, 43,000 British, 14,663 French and 4,500 Canadian, and which incidentally constituted the sacrilegious infidel presence on Arabian soil that set off Osama bin Laden on his quest for revenge. In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyse Saddam's entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point did the Iraqi air force try to fight, and all those tanks that were painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam's army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.
The Iraqis are clearly capable of producing deadly insurgents, but altogether incapable of fielding a real army. Luttwak's view is a contrarian one, but it is a good one and for that reason worth reading all the way through.
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