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Jewish World Review April 11, 2003 / 9 Nisan, 5763

Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald
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Planning future of Iraq, world


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | That sure was fun.

Let the celebrating and looting begin. Saddam and his lovely boys - or their body parts - are still MIA. But Baghdad is ours.

You'll be able to read all about war's end next week. But as we await the appearance of Saddam paraphernalia on eBay, Time, Newsweek, Fortune and Business Week already are thinking about what comes next.

Everyone always said peace would be the tricky part of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Why, it'll take our foreign policy engineers in Washington at least a month or two to transform Saddam's totalitarian satrapy into a model democracy the whole angry Arab world can look up to and want to destroy.

Whoops. Make that a decade or two. The Marines haven't issued a parking ticket yet, and Time says already we've got a serious rift in the Bush administration, where Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell are fighting over control of the joystick of American foreign policy.

See, Time explains in "Clash of the Administration Titans," Rumsfeld the Hardliner is a "unilateralist," which essentially means he thinks America can and ought to do whatever the heck it wants in the world (e.g., Gulf War II).

And Powell the Moderate is an internationalist, which essentially means he thinks America should be part of a world that seeks stability and peace through interlocking alliances, multilateral entanglements and international organizations (e.g., NATO and the always popular United Nations).

Rumsfeld and Powell have always been as incompatible as hawks and doves. Now, as Saddam's statues are toppled, Rumsfeld and his raptors want the United States to run Iraq, which they think can be quickly turned over to a set of former Iraqi exiles.

Powell and his brood want to bring in the United Nations. But hardliners - who Time says would love to bop over to Iran or Syria for a little democracy transplanting - say the U.N. will only bring complications.

Don't worry. Our leaders will do the right thing. Meanwhile, what about the war's effect on our soporific economy? Fortune's optimistic March 31 cover package - written weeks ago - says the economy isn't really that bad and sees slow, stable growth and lower oil prices after we win the war.

Newsweek's Jane Bryant Quinn, meanwhile, is so gloomy about the present in her column she doesn't even think Iraq's oil will save us from oil shortages in the long run. And although Business Week's "How War Will Reshape the Economy" is more substantive, it's as gloomy.

War's not the engine of economic prosperity it once was thought to be, but Biz Week notes that the short-term upsides to Gulf War II will be a boost in defense spending and more jobs for homeland security.

In the more-important long run, however, war, instability and tighter government restrictions on the free movement of money, people and ideas around the world inevitably make things more expensive, smother innovation and result in lower standards of living for everyone.

Which is why Biz Week thinks the last victim of the war in Iraq and the global tensions it'll bring might be America's economy, whose 1990s boom was based on peace and a steadily decreasing role of government in the economy.

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JWR contributor Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Comment by clicking here.

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© 2002, Bill Steigerwald