An Incentive-Based Plan to Pacify Baghdad
- From: "tonyp" <tonyp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 19:31:10 -0500
Folks,
Republicans are forever challenging Democrats
to present their "plan for victory" in Iraq. Republicans
define "victory" as an Iraqui government that can
"support, sustain, and defend itself". Essential to
"standing up" such a government, they tell us,
is calming the violence in Baghdad. By all accounts
most of that violence is sectarian -- Shia killing Sunni
and vice versa. So the first step to "victory", say
Republicans, is to get both sides to stop killing people.
Republicans are also forever touting the power of
"incentives". They argue, often rightly, that incentives
work better than "regulation" because people are selfish.
By definition, having an incentive to not kill people
means that, for your own selfish reasons, you don't
_want_ to kill people. No foreign soldier needs to
stand over you to enforce a regulation against doing
what you are disinclined to do anyway.
Let's put two and two together: how can we give
both sides an incentive to not kill people?
Here's a plausible way: reward their victims.
Hand out large wads of cash to the next of kin, on a
strictly non-sectarian basis. Ten Shia get blown up,
ten Shia families become instantly rich. Twenty Sunni
get shot, twenty Sunni families get a major windfall.
Where is the money for this program to come from?
Easy: from the oil revenues that are at the bottom
of the sectarian power struggle.
Imagine you're a Sunni. Do you want to make a Shia
family rich? With the very money you're ultimately
fighting over?? You're a Shia. Do you want some Sunni
family to get a big chunk of the oil money you consider
your own patrimony? If we believe that people respond
to incentives (or in this case, dis-incentives) we have to
believe that killing people of the opposite sect
will be discouraged by large rewards to the victims.
The politicians who make up the "unity" government
of Iraq would surely oppose such a plan. Like all
politicians, they want to designate the recipients of their
largesse by themselves. They would not want to give
"terrorists" the choice of who gets rich. But the whole
point of the exercise is that "terrorists" don't want to
make their victims rich either. Sectarian killing
_would_ go down if rewards to victims were large,
automatic, and widely publicized. A "unity" government
that was actually interested in stopping the killing
would provide the money, and politely ask the US Army
to serve as a heavily armed version of the old
Ed McMahon Prize Patrol. Especially if the US Army
threatened to withdraw, otherwise.
That a plan so obviously based on their own principles
has _not_ been proposed by Republicans makes one
wonder whether they doubt their own principles, or
whether they have a different definition of "victory"
than they proclaim.
-- TP
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