Airstrip One

Back of the Class

Poor old Michael Gove. All that snazzy Scottish education and yet his geography and history seem all askew. His latest piece on why we have to go into Iraq has some strange ideas, from this:

He is a practised mass murderer with unassuaged territorial ambitions towards his neighbours. He is an unstable tyrant who aspires to hegemony over the Arab world by providing its most radical elements with political leadership and military support. Terrorists who menace Israel and have operated throughout the West have been trained, financed and armed by him.

he comes to this:

Possessed of suitable weaponry, Saddam would threaten Western democracies as no murderous tyrant has done since the Thirties.

First the history. Now I may have been asleep during the Cold War, but weren't we told that Stalin and his succesors were actually a rather large threat to us. After all they had oodles of "weapons of mass destruction", a respectable industrial and agricultural base, a world encompassing ideology, institutional continuity and willing and devoted helpers in every nook and cranny. Things that Saddam is rather short on, after all the fact that everyone's crossing their fingers in the hope of some internal "regime change" doesn't exactly suggest a second Suleyman the Magnificent sweeping to the West through the Balkans.

Not only that but the Warsaw Pact (where pray tell is Saddam's Warsaw Pact or Axis of Steel?) were a hell of a lot closer to us. Now we may note that Iraq, Israel and the rest of the Middle East - the three threats mentioned are hardly next door neighbours to us in the West. With the large exception of the Red Sea and the Suez canal no sea routes are threatened, and that remotely. So there should be another reason why we must go to war with Hitler Saddam.

So the missing link is this:

He would be able to destabilise the entire Middle East to the detriment of all its peoples and he could then place his boot on the world’s windpipe by threatening its oil supplies.

Let's not worry about detrimenting the peoples of the Middle East, they seem to be detrimented enough as it is and a mass invasion and its aftermath will detriment them as well. So what's this about threatening the oil supplies?

Well it seems that Mr Gove seems to have forgotten some elementary economics. What happens when the supply of a commodity, no matter how essential, goes down? Why the price increases. Encouraged by the price rise all the players in the market economy cut back on energy consumption, go to other energy sources or increase production of oil from other sources. Its called the price mechanism.

It happened in 1973, and we survived. Today we just happen to be a net oil exporter and so would probably do a lot better out of this, but can mainstream British Conservatives ever be accused of seriously thinking of the national interest. That's the British rather than the American national interest.