Oil is certainly one of the major factors in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but obviously not the only one. Iraq as a political entity owes its composition--three disparate Ottoman provinces--to British oil interests after the First World War. The Afghan case is a lot more complicated, but I'd be willing to argue that what we're seeing in both places is an unravelling of the kinds of regional settlements and the regimes to keep them in place that were created in the aftermath of that war, re-established after the Second, and were maintained during the Cold War; Afghanistan as an example of Cold War "blowback" is in that sense a tribal precursor of what happened in Europe in 1989, but more than that--the ultimate failure of the victors' effort to exploit and control the old Ottoman Empire's remains. Oil has been a major consideration, but not the only one, since imperialist diplomacy had a broader horizon. Unfortunately, working out a longer view has been impeded by post-9/11 rhetoric, the demonization of Saddam Hussein, and "war of cultures" notions, although we're hearing references to nations cobbled together like the former Yugoslavia.
by William H. Leckie, Jr. on September 26, 2002 at 5:17 AM