by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: April 25, 2009

The Primary Influence on Iraq Violence Since 2005 is Changes in the Price of Oil

Fluctuations in the oil price and Iraqi people's reaction to it seems to better explain decrease in violence during the "surge" as well as recent rise in bombings.

We had it drilled into our heads that correlation is not causation so why does everyone automatically think that a few thousand extra troops did the trick in Iraq? Lets dissect the surge of these 20,000 troops. They were prudently put into more spread out urban checkpoints instead of the previous strategy of being sitting ducks in bases or patrolling ducks in humvees. They also came at a time when ethnic cleansing in Baghdad has made neighborhoods more homogenous and thus better defended. Thus they arrived past the peak oil equivalent of ethnic cleansing when it became increasingly costlier and more energy intensive for Shiites and Sunni kidnappers to get at each other with electric drills. Whereas before, nationalist Moqtada Al Sadr could send out squads of people (and use the quantitative advantage of Shiites in Baghdad) to net maybe 50 bodies a day, now more planning and energy was required for same amount of kidnappers to kill say 30-40 a day. Nationalist Sunni insurgent leadership, faced a similar problem as they exploited a religious ally of Al-Qaeda to inflict damage on numerically superior neighbors (think of it as Bronx using suicide bombers to stop hordes from Queens from overtaking them). The economics of ethnic cleansing began to work against it and it began to fizzle out just like many American oil wells in the 50s and 60s. Al-Sadr seemed to have gained the upper hand however.

Lets not forget the maze of concrete walls that was finally erected to further defend the repartitioned parts of the capital. Iraqis did rather brazen things but they're still humans and cant walk through walls. Reinforced concrete barriers work as Israelis have been showing for a while. The spirit of Cold War Berlin has finally found rest in a new host. So did adding extra troops to reinforce the police city state modeled on Fallujah break the camel's back (sorry Arabs) of ethnic cleansing and insurgency?

They did contribute in speeding up reduction of inter-ethnic violence that was already occurring by providing additional barriers. However, that's like saying that Americans won WW1 by themselves. Bush administration was keen to point to incredible drop in troop deaths in Anbar province but the extra troops in Anbar were not a significant

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next Page >>