Quote of the Day (Mike Royko, on an Earlier War Over an Oil-Rich Mideast Nation)

“In two or three years, Kuwait will be close to looking as it did before Iraq looted and plundered it. But I guarantee that the West Side of Chicago, much of the Bronx, and the slums of Newark, Gary, New Orleans, and other American cities will be the same mess they are now. That’s because Kuwait sits atop an ocean of liquid gold. It can hire the giant Bechtel corporation and other globe-hopping companies to perform a miraculous rehab job. Unfortunately, nobody is drilling gushers on the West Side of Chicago or in Detroit or the Bronx. And Bechtel doesn't take our IOUs.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997), “Kuwait’s Future Brighter Than Ours,” originally published in the Chicago Tribune, Mar. 12, 1991, reprinted in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko (1999)

Operation Desert Storm concluded 35 years ago this past Saturday. The outcome made a national hero of General Norman Schwarzkopf, briefly boosted President George H.W. Bush’s approval rating, and even now retains something of a retrospective glow: a conflict with comparatively few American casualties, with a limited objective—Saddam Hussein’s occupation forces thrust out of Kuwait.

But every war has unintended, often deleterious, consequences, and the 1990-91 Gulf War was no different. To ensure that Saddam would not threaten a key oil-rich ally, Bush stationed American forces in Saudi Arabia, which Osama bin Laden saw as an “infidel” offense against Islam’s holiest sites. He launched al Qaeda in an attempt to drive them out.

Right on the anniversary of that first Gulf War, another Mideast war of choice was launched. Already there are casualties, and sites have been hit not only in Iran, but elsewhere in the Mideast.

Even if the war concludes with an outcome that President Trump proclaims favorable, we won’t know for years—as also with the replacement of a prior leader with the Shah of Iran in 1953—whether this will be in long-term American interests.

The region has a long memory, and you can bet it’ll remember that Trump told The New York Times back in 2016 how his policy for fighting the Islamic States would differ from Barack Obama’s: “I’ve been saying it for years: Take the oil.” It’s impossible to ascribe good motives to a country that’s elected a leader who so unashamedly proclaims self-interest.

I wish Mike Royko were alive to comment on all this. Long ago, when Trump was only a tabloid fixture, the columnist, in a hilarious February 1990 piece, informed readers, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that Marla Maples was not the aspiring mogul’s mistress but, according to “a very high-ranking source in the Trump Organization,” his personal laundress:

“And that, pure and simple, is the reason Mr. Trump kept her nearby, in a hotel room one floor below his, and brought her to Aspen and took her on his yacht and had her accompany him to parties and other social events.”

But in this “Quote of the Day,” Royko got serious, pointing out what remain American problems: neglect at home while millions are spent on foreign conflicts. 

(Though progress has been made in some neighborhoods in the areas mentioned, too many remain symbols of urban decay. And before long, the pain spread beyond the inner city: from 1980 to 2016, the Great Lakes region lost ground economically, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and western Pennsylvania performing particularly badly, according to Indermit Gil’s 2019 analysis for the Brookings Institution.)

Much like “Make America Great Again,” the notion of “America First” was a chimera, a propaganda slogan conceived to create a scapegoat—aid going to foreign governments or, worse still, foreigners coming to this country—for this nation’s underinvestment in its own material and human resources.

Don’t imagine for a moment that this situation will be redressed in that den of scorpions, the Middle East. Even the quick takeover of Venezuela ended up costing $3 billion for its late August-to-early February military buildup, according to Becca Wasser, a military strategy expert at the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank.

The Iranian campaign is already longer than that, even beyond the walkover stage, courtesy of an administration equally lacking competence and conscience. We’d better hope that this conflict won’t devolve into the quagmire that the Second Gulf War became under George W. Bush.