The Iraqi Permanent Fund
I was waiting in the doctor’s office yesterday and I happened to pick up an issue of Forbes from November of ‘06. It was a little outdated, but that didn’t stop me from finding a great editorial written by Steve Forbes himself. As I have said in the past, I am a strong supporter of dividing Iraq into autonomous states with seperate governments according to the religious lines in the country. However, the one major roadblock to this goal has been the uneven distribution of oil throughout the country. We have the Kurds in the North, the Sunnis in the middle, and the Shia in the South. The oil is deposited mostly in the North and South, leaving the proposed Sunni province with little black gold of its own. So once again, greed is the main factor preventing us from leaving Iraq.
How can we make everyone happy in this situation? Steve Forbes points us towards Alaska. How can Alaska help us to solve our Iraq problem? Most people will be surprised to know that there is a fund that is managed by investment experts hired by the government called the Permanent Fund. When the government pumps oil from the wells in Alaska, about one quarter of the profits are placed into this fund. Each year, every registered and eligible Alaskan recieves about $1,100 from the fund. Forbes argues that this would solve the oil distribution issue in Iraq, and I tend to agree. It would end the argument over where the oil wells are geographically and it would provide an incentive for unity. Each Iraqi would be compelled to provide an address if they wanted to recieve their money, effectively registering the location of every Iraqi citizen for the government. While the government may have a problem with relinquishing control of a portion of their oil profits, it might just be the spark that Iraq needs to begin to realize the potential benefits of cooperating with the new government.
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That’s an interesting idea. Being from Houston, there’s a lot of folks here who’ve worked in Alaska and I’ve known about that fund for a long time. Having a big family, I’ve joked at times about how we should move there and get a windfall. Of course, food prices (and everything else) must be astronomical, so it probably wouldn’t be nearly enough to cover the difference.
It’s obvious we need some better ideas for dealing with Iraq. I’ve been thinking for a long time, too, that it seems like things would be a lot easier if we could just slice up the country. The Kurds, for instance, are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own country, and they’ve been generally pretty cooperative, hoping they’ll somehow get one (in northern Iraq) before this is over.
I’ve been somewhat sympathetic to that, though stupid/outrageous things like the recent stoning of that teenage girl in Mosul (videos of which were put on the net) really don’t help their cause. The Turks have also been very against an independent Kurdistan, and this prospect was probably why they decided to not get involved back in 2003.
Of course, dividing up the oil revenues through such a fund would only work as long as you could make sure the oil revenues were paid into it. I”m not sure how you could ensure that each part paid its share. Regarding partition, I wonder if there’s just a general bias against having more countries to deal with in the Middle East, with each being a potential source of trouble. Perhaps a large Iraq is viewed as the only way to counter an already much larger Iran, which is by far the most populous non-ally in the region.
In any case it’s really quite suspicious how little talk has been permitted about use of the oil revenues. It’s been sort of dismissed out of hand, how these monies must be used to rebuild the oil and other infrastructure, etc., but I don’t buy it. I wrote before about how we’ve yet to have a real debate about the “war on terror”, and nearly two years later I’m tired of so many basic parts of the puzzle still being off-limits to discussion!
I think this would be a great idea. The UN or something similar would have to moniter the fund, until the Iraqi government demonstrated that they could self police the fund or better yet a committee made up of equal numbers of each group….
Clearly what we have going now is not working…..
Another great post!
The one important benefit about the fund plan that struck me was the incentive to register an address. By creating an accurate database of all Iraqis, we give their law enforement agencies and army a valuable tool to utilize. It would also help us, as I am sure the Iraqi government would give us access at this poitn in time. Crime would decrease because hiding would be much more difficult.
Thanks for the complements Susan