The inspiration for this entry comes from a post at Body and Soul. Jeanne d'Arc says:
The latter part of the show consisted of an interview with Tom Friedman, and the interesting thing there was not Oprah's fawning, but seeing what happens to Friedman's suggestion that war with Iraq will have to be followed by a twenty year occupation when it hits the real world. People who follow news religiously - and for the most part, that's not Oprah's audience - have heard the call to imperialism so many times we've become numb to the idea. But when the camera turned to the audience after Friedman's suggestion, you could see the shock on their faces. Mouths open. Shaking their heads. Friedman looked increasingly ridiculous saying that this twenty-year occupation is what Americans have to be prepared for, while (mostly) women looked at him as if he were out of his mind. One man in the audience, in fact, rose to tell him exactly that.One of the main arguments I've been making against war on Iraq is that the cost to the Iraqi people will be devastating, both those killed directly by our bombs and those killed indirectly through our destruction of the infrastructure. If we just walked away at that point, it would be morally abhorrent. It's good in that sense that the Bush Administration does seem to be planning a long stay in Iraq. But at the same time, there seems to be very little talk about what exactly this long stay would entail. How much money would it cost? Just how completely would the U.S. have to occupy Iraq to truly rebuild it? What will be necessary to bring Iraq's Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds together? How will we deal with Iraq's neighbors such as Iran and Syria? What about guerrilla and terrorist attacks on American forces? Are we prepared to bear that cost? This isn't a brief in-and-out adventure we're talking about. The war itself, maybe, but not rebuilding Iraq afterwards. To truly bring peace and democracy to Iraq, I think we would almost have to treat it as a fifty-first state. Build democratic institutions and traditions from the local level and the grass-roots up. Spend billions, perhaps even trillions eventually, in aid, reconstructing the country's infrastructure, restoring refugees to homes, and developing the economy. Anything less would leave Iraq a broken, de-stabilized country ripe for a radical or authoritarian regime and filled with hatred at the people who did so much damage to them: us. Are we truly prepared for the burden that we would have to bear? And if not, under what morality could we possibly justify devastating another country and then walking away? And, as I said, if we did that we've probably guaranteed a wave of anti-American hatred so great that we may look back at 9/11 and think it was nothing. I hope that those who support war will step up and provide their answers to these questions. For further reading, start with The Fifty-First State, a lenghtly essay from Atlantic Monthly. Next, check out The Iraq Bush Will Build to see what plans are currently in place and their cost and to think about whether that will be enough. Two opinion columns written with the aftermath in mind are The Road Better Not Taken and Iraq After Saddam: The Next Yugoslavia?. Finally, a few blogs looking at this issue are Matthew Yglesias, Path of the Paddle, and Kieran Healy.